Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

Rogelio’s family, like mine, was from the southwest, a detail meaningless to all but a handful of elderly still living, and maybe a few thousand former residents of the town. It meant something to my father, but in spite of his best efforts he was unable to pass this sentiment on to his children. This is what I learned about the southwest when I finally asked him: it was a district of large families and relatively modest homes. As a rule, the men did not own land to farm, but were sometimes hired to tend the fields of those who lived in the northwest, just seven or eight blocks away, but a world apart. The others were carpenters or stonemasons, later mechanics and drivers. The women of the district sewed curtains and hemmed clothes, earning small sums which they gave to their husbands for safekeeping. They were (the stereotype says) prone to gossip; specialists in spreading it; and, as a group, unashamed to be the protagonists of the local whispered hearsay. When their men went off in search of work, the women of the southwest district were rumored to receive male visitors late in the evening, after the children had been put to bed. If a marriage on the north side broke up, a woman from the southwest was assumed to be at fault. If something was stolen, the town’s single, part-time policeman visited the southwest, gathering the boys en masse to lecture them about property rights.

As for T—’s children, they all went to the same school, and they might even be friends for a time, but by age nine or ten they’d fully internalized these petty district rivalries. Occasionally the boys fought, but it rarely got serious. As soon as the young men from the southwest understood their position, there were no more problems. They learned, as their fathers had before them, to bow their heads at the appropriate times.

Nowadays, the lines between the districts tend to blur, so that, at this late date, a quasi-outsider like me finds it almost impossible to tell the difference. Every part of T— has been hollowed out, suffered almost equally from the neglect. At its height, the town was home to perhaps seven thousand residents — smaller, that is, than the total current population of Collectors — but when Diciembre arrived a little more than a thousand remained. My parents were the first new residents in more than three years, not counting the occasional highlander paid to look after a property during the rainy season. Rogelio’s older brother, Jaime, had moved a few hours away to San Jacinto when Rogelio was just thirteen, and had eventually become quite wealthy, though he spent very little of that money in T—.

Rogelio’s mother, known to all as Mrs. Anabel, had stayed, along with her daughter, Noelia, who took care of her. The afternoon Henry arrived, after he’d had his brief interaction with my mother and finally gathered the courage to knock on the door — it was Noelia who received him.

“He was polite,” she told me later, “a bit odd, surely, but most of all polite. At least at first. He asked to speak to my mother, said he was a friend of Rogelio’s, and of course I let him in. That’s what we do here. I thought he might have some news.”

Henry walked in, marveling at the disrepair. Even an act as simple as closing the door, he noticed, required a delicate maneuver: lifting as you pushed it shut, then wiggling the warped and swollen wood into place. When it would seem to go no farther, Noelia gently shouldered the door, once, twice, three times, and it was only then that she was able to pull the lock. Henry found it astonishing. One day, he thought, she’ll find herself trapped inside.

The house was just a handful of rooms surrounding a hopelessly overgrown garden. Noelia led him to the living room and asked him to wait. There was a brief, confusing moment when Henry thought Noelia was Rogelio’s mother, but she clarified with a laugh.

“Heavens no!” she said. “He’s my little brother!”

Noelia explained that Mrs. Anabel was just getting up from her nap. “She sleeps quite a lot these days. She isn’t well, you know.”

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry to hear that. If it’s inconvenient, I can …”

Noelia smiled. “No, no. Stay. We don’t get many visitors. I’ll bring her out in a moment.”

Henry thanked her, and was left alone. There were a few wooden chairs, a bench along one wall, and a long narrow dining table adorned with a festive tablecloth, covered in thick clear plastic, and stacked with old newspapers. In the far corner sat a chest topped with a few family photographs in dusty frames, and at the sight of them, Henry froze. He took a step toward the chest, stopped again, and took a step back.

When he described this moment during our interview, Henry felt it necessary to demonstrate his tentative dance for my benefit. He stood and stepped forward, back, forward, back. He wanted nothing more than to see the pictures, to examine them, one by one; to identify Rogelio as an infant, as a boy, as an adolescent, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. It had been more than a decade since he’d seen his old lover, and he had no real images with which to compare his memories. They’d never taken a picture together. Some of the wealthier inmates had their portraits painted, but neither Henry nor Rogelio had the money for that sort of thing. Meanwhile, this man had been coming to him in dreams since Diciembre left the city on tour. They rode together in Henry’s taxi, sipped coffee down by the boardwalk. In one of these dreams, Rogelio appeared as a student at Henry’s school, sitting uncomfortably at the tiny desk, frowning at an open book. As is often the case in dreams, it was the ordinariness of the images that made them so disconcerting, as if there were another life out there somewhere, one in which the two men lived side by side. This was what Henry was attempting to explain, and somehow, as he moved forward and back before me, I got a sense of his confusion. His uncertainty.

He couldn’t stand to compare his memories or his dreams to the photos. What if he’d remembered incorrectly? What if his memory had tricked him?

So he sat on the bench instead, as far from the photographs as he could manage, facing in the opposite direction.

When Rogelio’s mother finally came, or rather, when she was brought to him, he marveled at how small she was. He recalled that Rogelio had described her as a commanding presence, a woman with an exacting character and booming voice capable of frightening men; but time had faded all that, and what remained was something lighter, gentler. Her fair skin was nearly translucent and intricately wrinkled, like the texture of a piece of aluminum foil, crumpled, and then flattened again by hand. Her thin hair had gone completely white, and she was cloaked in what seemed like dozens of layers, a shawl atop a sweater atop a long-sleeve blouse atop another sweater. She wore knee-high wool socks pulled over a pair of sweatpants, and over that, a blue skirt that fell to the middle of her calves. She belonged to a culture and a generation that respected the cold above all else, a culture that did not trust warmth, but saw it as an occasional and temporary illusion. Cold is permanent, eternal, reliable. The day begins and ends with it.

I know this about her because my grandmother was the same way.

Mrs. Anabel greeted Henry formally, though in a feeble voice: “So you’ve seen my little Rogelio?”

Henry nodded.

“That’s nice.”

Noelia smiled. “Let’s sit in the sun, shall we, Mama?”

The two women turned and went out into the bright afternoon. Noelia steered her mother through the garden with subtle, almost imperceptible movements. They covered the short distance slowly, pausing for a moment to admire one of the cats hiding in the brush. “Kitty, kitty, kitty,” Mrs. Anabel said, and laughed girlishly to herself. Henry watched the two of them from the doorway, admiring their progress, until they were both seated in a pair of low wooden chairs set near an outdoor woodstove. He was so impressed by the delicacy of the maneuver — how carefully Noelia helped her mother into the seat — that he forgot to offer a hand. And they were so used to being ignored, so accustomed to doing it all themselves, that they hardly noticed his oversight. Belatedly, he stepped out to join them, and took the seat facing Mrs. Anabel, their knees almost touching. Noelia sat to his right, the unlit stove serving as the fourth side of their square.