Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

Rogelio was small for his age, but tough, good with his hands and his fists. Unlike his older brother, he didn’t have a temper, but instead possessed an equanimity the entire family found almost disconcerting. He’d been shunned all his life, or that’s how he felt, and he’d grown accustomed to it. He loved his brother, looked up to him, and never worried whether Jaime loved him in return. He was trusting. He could follow instructions, had decent mechanical intuition, but he could not read. Jaime even tried to teach him, but soon gave up: the boy kept getting his letters backward. A decade later in Collectors, Henry would be the first person to tell him there was a condition called dyslexia.

“How about that?” Rogelio had said, but his face registered nothing — not regret or shame or even curiosity — as if he were unwilling to contemplate the ways his life might have been different if he’d had this information sooner.

For those first couple of years in San Jacinto, he worked on the broken-down trucks his brother bought on the cheap, and together they would cajole these heaps of rusting metal back to life. Each machine was different, requiring a complex and patient kind of surgery. Parts were swapped out, rescued, jerry-rigged. It was as much invention as it was repair. When a truck was reborn, they sold it, and reinvested the profits, which weren’t much at first, but the brothers were very careful with their money, and not ostentatious. Henry recalled a photograph he saw, one of the few that remained from that era, which Rogelio had tacked onto the wall by his bed: in it, Rogelio is lithe, wiry, sitting on a gigantic truck tire with his shirt off. He wears the blank expression of a child who asks no questions and makes no demands of the world. I never saw this photo — it was buried beneath the rubble of the prison — but I can imagine it: not a happy boy, but given his situation, perhaps a wise one.

Eventually Jaime bought his kid brother a motorbike, the kind outfitted with a flatbed of wooden planks in front. This machine became Rogelio’s source of income for the next few years; he drove it across town, from one market to another, carrying cans of paint, lashed-together bundles of metal pipes, chickens headed for slaughter, crammed in pens stacked so high he had to lean to one side in order to steer. San Jacinto was growing steadily, but not yet at the torrid pace that would later come to define it; Rogelio knew every corner of the city then, and years later, in Collectors, he’d drawn a map of it on the walls of the cell he shared with Henry. He used white chalk to trace the streets, the railroad tracks, and even labeled the old apartment he’d shared with his brother.

Henry asked him why he’d gone to the trouble.

“Because one day I’ll go back there,” Rogelio said.

(“See,” Henry added, when he told me this. He had a wry, almost pained smile. “I guess our love story would’ve ended anyway.”)

In 1980, the year Rogelio turned seventeen, his brother took him to a brothel near the center of town. It was the first of its kind, and had been built for the hoped-for wave of young, fearless men with money. There were rumors, even then, of gold in the hills, and the brothel’s fantastical anteroom paid tribute to those still-unconfirmed stories. The walls were painted gold, as was the bar, as were the wooden tables and chairs. In fact, that night even the three prostitutes on display for Rogelio’s choosing had followed the color scheme: one in a gold miniskirt, another in gold lace panties and bra, and a third in a gold negligee. Three little made-up trophies, all smiling coquettishly, hands on their hips. Jaime encouraged Rogelio to choose, but he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. The moment stretched on and on, far past what was comfortable, until the girls’ put-on smiles began to fade. And still the boy stood there, immobilized, amazed.

“Oh, fuck it,” Jaime said finally. He pulled a wad of bills from his pocket, and paid for all three.

It seems that Jaime had begun to sell more than just refurbished vehicles.

“He told you this?” Nelson asked Henry that night they sat by the school in T—, and the playwright shrugged.

“There was nothing to do inside but talk.”

When Rogelio was eighteen, he traded in his motorized cart for a small loading van, and shortly after, he traded that in for a truck he bought himself, and brought back to life with his own hands. The first time the reconstructed engine turned over was one of the proudest moments of Rogelio’s life. Each new vehicle expanded his world. Now he was a driver; he ferried a dozen laborers down to the lowlands, men who stood for hours without complaint as the truck bounced along the rutted and bumpy roads. Once there, Rogelio discovered a prickly kind of heat he’d never felt before. He began volunteering to drive that route whenever it was available. The following year, his brother sent him in the other direction, over the range to the west; and on that trip, Rogelio first saw the ocean. It was 1982; he was almost twenty years old. He remembered sitting along the edge of the boardwalk in La Julieta, along the bluffs overlooking the sea; not far, incidentally, from the spot where Nelson would let Ixta walk away and out of his life nineteen years later. The fancy people of the city strolled by, confident-looking men in blazers and women in bright dresses, boys he took to be his age, but who appeared to possess a variety of secrets that Rogelio could only guess at. None so much as glanced in his direction. He wondered if he looked out of place, if they could tell he was a stranger here, or if they could even see him at all. But when he considered the ocean, Rogelio realized how insignificant these concerns were. He was happy, he told Henry, and later, in Collectors, he liked to remember the hours he’d spent there, staring at the sea.

For the next few years, he drove the route to the coast, to the lowlands, and back again, carrying vegetables to the city, raw materials to the mountains, laborers to the jungle. He was a quiet young man, still a boy in some ways, but Jaime trusted him. He was dependable. He began to ferry other packages as well, small, tightly bundled bricks, which he kept under the seat or in a compartment hidden above the wheel well. One or two at first, then dozens. These were delivered separately, to other contacts. Rogelio never opened them to see what was inside (though he knew); he never touched the money (though he assumed the quantities in play were not insubstantial). He had no qualms about this work. He trusted his brother. He never considered the consequences, not because he was reckless, but because what he was doing was normal. Everyone was doing it. He was only dimly aware that it was not allowed.

Nelson found this hard to believe, as did I. In fact, Henry had too: How could Rogelio not have known?

Well, he knew; but he didn’t know .

On the last of these trips, Rogelio’s truck was searched at a checkpoint along the Central Highway, sixty-five kilometers east of the capital. The war was on, and the soldiers were searching for weapons and explosives, randomly stopping trucks from the mountains to have a look. Rogelio was very unlucky. Perhaps if he’d been more astute, he could have arranged to pay off the police, but he didn’t. Instead he waited by the side of the road while the men in uniform went through his vehicle with great care. Young Rogelio had time to consider what was happening, how his life was changing course before his very eyes. Not everyone has this privilege; most of us lose sight of the moment when our destiny shifts. He told Henry he felt a strange sort of calm. He might have run into the hills, but the soldiers would’ve shot him without thinking twice. So instead he admired his truck, which he’d had painted by hand, emerald and blue, with the phrase “My Beautiful T—” splashed across the top of the front windshield, in cursive lettering. At least that’s what they told him it said. He recalled thinking, What will happen to this truck? Will it be waiting for me when I get out? In any case, he had time enough to decide to keep his mouth shut. He’d never spent more than a few days at a time in the city, and besides the ocean, he had no real affection for the place. Now he’d be staying. The soldiers found the package, just as he’d expected they would, and to protect his brother, Rogelio said nothing about its origins. He played dumb, which wasn’t difficult. Everyone — from the soldiers who did the search to the policemen who came to arrest him, to his ferocious interrogators, to the lawyers charged with defending him — saw Rogelio as he assumed they would: a clueless, ignorant young man from the provinces. All these years, and nothing had changed: he was invisible, just as he’d always been.