Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

Around seven-fifteen, Eric appeared again. He poked his head behind the curtain and announced it was about time to begin.

“How many are out there?” asked Henry.

“Thirty or so,” the young man said. “Thirty-five, I’d guess.”

Henry shook his head. “Don’t guess. Go back and count them.”

Eric bowed his head, and returned a few moments later with downcast eyes. “Twenty-five. I’m sorry. But there may be more coming.”

Patalarga grinned, and thanked the boy. Eric’s disappointment was touching. He’d played for audiences far smaller. “We’ll begin in a minute.”

Eric nodded, and just as he was turning to go, Henry stopped him.

“Just one more question,” the playwright said. “Do you know everyone in this town?”

“Just about.”

“Good. So, is Noelia out there? Or her mother, Mrs. Anabel? Do you know who I’m talking about?”

The young man looked confused. “Yes. Why?”

“They’re old friends,” said Nelson. Until that moment, you wouldn’t have guessed he was listening at all. He and Henry locked eyes.

Eric nodded, as if he understood. “Well, Mrs. Anabel doesn’t really leave the house much.”

“So she’s not here?”

“I haven’t seen her. Not Noelia either.”

Henry thanked him, and the deputy disappeared on the other side of the curtain.

“Are you expecting them?” Patalarga asked. “Do you want them to come?”

“I don’t know.” Henry looked genuinely puzzled. “I really don’t know.”

A few moments later, the curtains parted, and the show began.

THE DRIVEfrom San Jacinto to T— is roughly four hours. You can shave a little off that, but not much. The road is narrow and the consequences of misjudging a turn in the high mountains are fatal. Still, Jaime made good time. Of the protagonists in these events, he’s one of the few that has refused to speak to me, but I can imagine what he was thinking as he drove along those narrow, twisting roads. He was thinking of his brother, Rogelio, and the facts of his death. Whether Rogelio was angry when he died, or scared. Whether Rogelio blamed him, or felt abandoned. He was thinking how often he’d made this trip, and how it never changed. The scale of the mountains. The smallness of everything else. He’d known about Rogelio’s death all along, and kept his younger brother’s imprisonment a secret, just as he kept the nature of his business a secret. This was easier than you might expect. In T—, the riot and subsequent massacre at Collectors had never made much of an impact.

Jaime arrived around the time Diciembre was coming out onstage. At this point, the story of that night moves along parallel tracks: Patalarga appears beneath the pallid yellow lights, before a small but expectant crowd. He opens with a monologue about loneliness, delivered on this particular night with greater feeling than ever. The mayor’s young deputy stands at the auditorium’s back wall, wearing a dark suit and watching the proceedings with relish. He reports that the crowd was entranced. (“We’d never had a theater company in town before,” he told me later.) At the same time, Jaime rushes to the home where he was raised, embraces his sister, and hurries behind her to their mother’s room. Brother and sister stand in the doorway and watch their mother sleep, listening for her shallow breaths. Without exchanging a word, they marvel at her fragility, the way one might contemplate a newborn. Jaime steps forward, to her bedside, and places a palm on his mother’s forehead. He strokes her hair.

“She was very upset?” he asks Noelia.

His sister answers with a nod.

By the time Henry steps out onto the stage, looking slightly less presidential than usual — by then, Jaime and his sister, Noelia, are sitting in the living room, going over the details of a very well-kept family secret. Not much is said about Rogelio’s unfortunate arrest. Collectors is described in shorthand — hell, Jaime says. And everything after that can be reduced to a single sentence. Their little brother was dead. He’d been dead so long now it felt almost dishonest to mourn him.

All afternoon, since Henry’s visit, Noelia had known it was true. She’d known it as she put her frantic mother to bed, as she raced across the plaza, as she waited for her brother to arrive. A stranger does not appear and announce a death by mistake. Very few people are cruel in this way, and Henry had not struck her as cruel. He’d looked at the photo of Rogelio and claimed not to know him — and it was this act of mercy which made her like him, in spite of everything. It was also the moment that had confirmed his story.

For an actor, this man was not a good liar.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked her brother, the one she still had left.

But Jaime didn’t answer. He wanted to know one thing. “Who told you? Who was this person?”

“He said his name was Henry,” Noelia answered.

“And where is he?”

“At the auditorium. They told me in town he was in a play tonight.”

“A play?” Jaime frowned. There was a moment of silence, and then: “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill that faggot motherfucker.”

Noelia looked up. There was hatred in his eyes. She understood then that her brother knew this stranger, this Henry. And it frightened her. She began to cry. Her brother watched her without speaking. He didn’t reach out to her, and Noelia attempted to cry quietly, so as not to disturb him.

They spent many minutes like this, but by a quarter to eight, Jaime was unclenching his jaw, drawing his creaky wooden chair closer to his sister, and telling her he was sorry. These were not words he said every day. She bowed her head, wiped her tears, and accepted his apology.

“What will we tell mother?” she said.

“Nothing,” Jaime answered. “We won’t be telling her a goddamn thing.”

They left shortly after, closing the door carefully so as not to wake Mrs. Anabel. It was a cold night, and the quarter moon was just beginning to rise above the edge of the mountains. By the time they passed through the doors of the municipal auditorium, Diciembre had come to my favorite scene in The Idiot President . In it, the president is having his correspondence read aloud. The letters come from the country’s citizens, and they all begin with a long list of fairly standard honorifics: Your Highness, Your Honor, Your Benevolence. The president listens (or pretends to listen) to the appeals — pleas for work, for relief, for mercy, for land, for refuge — but he is unmoved. His posture is regal, his bearing severe. “Statuesque,” says the note in the script. Alejo, Nelson’s character, the idiot son, and Patalarga’s, the servant, take turns reading one letter each, while the president files his nails and brushes his hair. Over the course of the scene, a kind of competition arises between the son and the servant. Who can read better? Who can make this routine act more pleasing and more interesting to the president? Henry’s character, naturally, doesn’t notice at all, or pretends not to notice, but we do: the idiot son and the servant shoot each other angry, jealous looks and begin to read over each other, interrupting. The lists of honorifics preceding each letter becomes longer, and more ridiculous, until it’s clear that Alejo and the servant are simply making them up. Their voices grow louder, and the increasingly bizarre titles are delivered rapid-fire—

“To our dear leader, personification of the nation’s purest desires!

To the bright sun of liberty, most high and most alarming!

To the most chaste and supreme one, munificent, magnificent, and beneficent!”

— words tumbling out and overlapping, until it’s just a jumble, no longer discernible words but only noise.