Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

And so, by the early afternoon of his first day in T—, Henry had come to the place he never imagined he’d be: standing beneath the midday sun, on an empty, unpaved street, prepared to knock on the door of the house where his long-dead lover had been raised.

And though I was still in the city on that day, my life begins to intersect with Nelson’s here, at this precise moment. My mother reports that she saw Henry just then. She remembers him for two reasons: one, because he was a stranger, and there are no strangers in T—; and two, because he looked nervous. (“What is there to be nervous about in a town like ours?”) She happened to be walking out of our house at the precise moment of Henry’s arrival, and this anxious stranger cleared his throat when he saw her.

“Is this Mrs. Anabel’s house?” he asked.

“And you know,” my mother admitted later, “I almost said it wasn’t, just because I didn’t like the looks of him.”

But my mother is incapable of lying. Perhaps that’s why she never got used to life in the city.

“Yes, dear, it certainly is,” she said. Then she hurried off to the plaza, already blushing.

MEANWHILE,Patalarga and Nelson were engaged in a search of their own. They were looking for a place to perform. The kind but cautious man who ran the Imperial had demurred, though his underused balcony restaurant would have made a fine stage, indeed. He’d seemed so flummoxed by their inquiry that neither Patalarga nor Nelson pressed him. And anyway, there were other options, better ones: the municipal auditorium, though padlocked at the moment, wasn’t booked until September. Surely the mayor would open it up for a night, if they asked. At this hour, they’d be likely to find him in his fields, on the north side, just past the school. And as long as they were headed that way, the school itself could work too. There was a nice courtyard, suitable for an afternoon show, before the sun went down; the manager of the Imperial even gave them the name of the principal, a nice man, he said, who would be happy to talk, though they should speak loudly, since his hearing was basically shot.

Nelson and Patalarga thanked him and walked north from the plaza in the direction of the school, over a decaying wooden structure which the locals called the New Bridge, and farther, out into the open valley.

When I spoke with Patalarga, I was curious how Nelson seemed to him; after all, he’d heard the news from Ixta only the night before.

“All right,” Patalarga said. “In surprisingly good spirits, in fact. We really had no idea why we’d come to this town, and the newness of it gave him something to focus on.”

But it wasn’t new, exactly; in fact, in terms of Diciembre’s tour, it represented a return to normal. They’d spent the last eight weeks in ramshackle towns just like T—; out-of-the-way places accustomed to long, uneventful days. The anomalous San Jacinto interlude, with its crude nod to urbanism, couldn’t have seemed farther away now. The streets of T— were either hard-packed dirt or cracked cobblestone, but somehow the houses, even the empty ones, had a permanence to them that San Jacinto lacked. A city built almost from scratch in a decade is not likely to have much to recommend it (architecturally, culturally), whereas Rogelio’s hometown, my hometown, even in its worn-down state, seemed destined to last.

Nelson was quiet as they walked, his eyes on the hills, on the sky, on this preposterously scenic valley. Streams of snowmelt bubbled down from the higher elevations, flowing into the creeks and then into the hand-carved canals that fed the surrounding fields. A boy in a red sweater hurried past, pulling a goat by a long rope; Patalarga and Nelson watched the child bound along the path toward the school.

“Charming,” was how Patalarga described it. As striking as any place they’d been on the tour; tumbledown and imperfect, surely a difficult place to live, but lacking the malice of, say, a mining encampment. Or the primitiveness of a logging town. Or the squalor of a smuggling depot. And he was right: T— was different. There was no economic activity to speak of besides farming and the twice-yearly festivals, which brought the town back to life, or to a kind of life. The rest of the year was quiet, and it was this calm that Patalarga and Nelson now breathed in as if it were mountain air itself. The long rainy season had finally ended, and there were no clouds marring the blue sky. In the midday sun, you could feel comfortable in short sleeves.

“It’s beautiful,” Nelson said.

They were the first words Patalarga had heard from him since they’d started their walk. Then he added: “I forgot to say congratulations, you know?”

“I’m sorry?”

Nelson shook his head. “When she told me she was pregnant, I didn’t say congratulations.” He slowed now, head bent toward the ground. “That’s what you’re supposed to say, right?”

They were almost at the school, and could hear a group of children getting ready for recess — the bubbling of their laughter, their impatience. Nelson stopped. “Maybe Ixta’s pregnancy is good news.”

“A baby is always good news,” said Patalarga.

Nelson shook his head. “I mean good news for me.”

His plans for life with Ixta — no matter how whimsical or undefined — might still be relevant. They could move in together, raise the child together. He told Patalarga that he’d woken that morning with the strangest feeling. He could see it now, the shape of another life. It could be his. She might still be his.

For Patalarga, it was a balancing act between offering hope and realism. “So what are you doing here?” he said. “Why don’t you go back?”

“I will. Soon. I have to.” Now he turned the question back on Patalarga: “What do you think I should do?”

Nelson’s eyes blinked back the sun; he really wanted to know.

“What did you tell him?” I asked.

I met with Patalarga three times in the city. We ate meals together, and went over the history of Diciembre with old, yellowed programs in hand, laughing and marveling at the naive ambition of it all. We toured the shabby Olympic, imagining its past and future glory, drank beers at the Wembley as he recounted this story to me, and much more — details and anecdotes and confessions which haven’t made their way into the manuscript. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say we established a kind of rapport. He’s someone I could call up, even today, and expect a friendly conversation, perhaps even an invitation to drinks or dinner.

But of all the questions I asked, for some reason, this was the one that made him most uncomfortable.

His initial, unsatisfying answer was: “A lot of things. You have to remember I couldn’t have known what would happen.”

“Sure,” I said, and let him sit with that.

He rubbed his chin.

“I told Nelson he had every option before him. I told him he could go home and fight for her. That he might win, or might lose, but that there was honor in both.”

“And what did Nelson say?”

“That he wasn’t a fighter, he never had been, and that scared him. And I said that was bullshit. Of course he was a fighter. He was more than that. He was a murderer, wasn’t he? Didn’t he kill me every night onstage?”

At this Nelson laughed; Patalarga too.

“That’s right,” Nelson said. “I’m a killer. Everyone be careful. Everyone watch out.”

BEFORE THE MIGRATIONS BEGAN,back when the place was still lively, T— was divided into four districts. The river cut the town into east and west, while the area north of the plaza was considered distinct in culture and class from the blocks south of it. Though T— was small, the lines dividing the districts from one another were sharp and not to be contested.