Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

As if we were accomplices, Henry thought.

Visiting days weren’t so bad at first. His family and friends took turns coming to see him, the ones who could tolerate the filth, the overcrowding, the looks from the junkies. They left depleted and afraid; and most didn’t come back. Patalarga did. He visited twice during the first month, and twice the next month, one of only a handful of Diciembre sympathizers who risked it. The others sent messages of support, empty-sounding phrases that Patalarga dutifully relayed, but which made Henry feel even more alone. The idea of the prison performance of The Idiot President was likely hatched on one of these visits, though neither could recall exactly when.

Patalarga had no memory of ever meeting Rogelio. His enduring image of these moments in Collectors involves Henry looking down at his feet, nodding, but not listening. “I wanted him to know we were with him, that we hadn’t forgotten him. But I don’t think he understood what was going on. What we were doing for him.” In truth, only one thing stood out. The smell of the place, Patalarga told me; that was what he remembered. “You could close your eyes and not see, cover your ears and not hear; but that smell, it was always there.”

Henry agreed: Collectors was fetid and unsanitary, and when you ceased to recognize the odor, it was because you were losing part of yourself to your environment. “Three weeks inside,” he told me, “and I didn’t even notice it.”

But the hours immediately after the visitors had gone were the most difficult of the week. The prison never felt lonelier. It required a great collective energy to welcome so many outsiders, to put the best face on what was clearly a terrible situation. Collectors was falling apart, anyone could see that. The damp winters had eaten away at the bricks, and the walls were covered with mold. Every day new men were brought in. They were unchained and set free inside, made to fight for a place to sleep in the already overcrowded hell of Collectors. The terrorists just over the high fence from Block Seven sang without pause, and many men complained that their families were afraid to come. Family day, when women were allowed in, came on alternate Wednesdays, and these were brutal. By the end of the afternoon, everyone was worn out from smiling, from reassuring their wives and children and mothers that they were all right. (Fathers, as a rule, did not visit; most of Henry’s fellow inmates did not have fathers.) It wasn’t uncommon for there to be fights on those evenings. So long as no one was killed, it was fine, just something to relieve the tension.

Nine weeks in, and Henry felt almost abandoned. Only Patalarga came. On family day, he was alone, as alone as Rogelio. Espejo rented out their cell, and in the evening, as each man lay on his bunk, Henry could still feel the warmth of those phantom bodies. Their perfumed scent. It was the only time the smell of the prison dissipated, though, in some ways, this other scent was worse. It reminded you of everything you were missing. Henry had been unable to convince any of the women he used to see to come visit him, and he didn’t blame them. He’d had nothing special with any of them, though at times his despair was so great that he could concentrate on any one of their faces and convince himself he’d been in love. As for Rogelio, he was far from home, and hadn’t had a visitor, male or female, in months.

Jaime had come once, and would come once more before Rogelio died.

There wasn’t much to say now, so the two men let themselves dream.

“Did you see her?” asked Henry one evening after the visitors had all gone, and because Rogelio hadn’t, he began to describe the woman who’d made love on the low bunk that very day. She’d come to see an inmate named Jarol, a thief with a sharp sense of humor and arms like tense coils of rope. Henry talked about the woman’s ample curves, how delicious she looked in her dress — not tight, but tight enough. She had long black hair, doe eyes, and fingernails painted pink. She was perfect, he said, because she was: not because of her body or her lips, but because of the way she smiled at her husband, with the hungry look of a woman who wants something and is not ashamed. A man could live on a look like that.

Henry said, “She didn’t care who saw.”

He could hear Rogelio breathing. They were quiet for a moment.

“What would you have done to her?” Rogelio asked. His voice was very low, tentative.

This was how it began, Henry told me: speculating aloud about how he might spend a few minutes alone with a woman in this degrading, stifling space. He had no difficulty imagining the scene, and he could think of no good reason not to share it. How different was it? Just because there was another man in the room with him — why should it be different?

He would have torn off that dress, Henry said, and bent her against the wall, with her palms flat against that stupid map of San Jacinto. He would have pressed his hard cock against her pussy, teased her until she begged him to come in. From the bottom bunk, Rogelio laughed. He would have made her howl, Henry said, made her scream. Cupped her breasts in his hands and squeezed. Is this why you came, woman? Tell me it is! Already Henry was disappearing into his own words. He had his eyes closed. The walls had begun to vibrate.

“What else?” said Rogelio, his voice stronger now. “Go on. What else would you do?”

When they finished, each on his own bunk that first time, both men laughed. They hadn’t touched, or even made eye contact, but somehow what they’d done was more intimate than that. For one moment, the pleasure of each had belonged to the other, and now everything looked different as a result. Something dark and joyless had been banished.

Years later in T—, Henry told the story, and even allowed himself a smile.

HENRY, PATALARGA, AND NELSONarrived at the door of Mrs. Anabel’s house the next morning, at precisely nine. They hadn’t slept well, and it showed. Henry’s right eye had swollen nearly shut, his ribs still hurt, and he described his walk along the cobblestone streets of T— as a kind of teetering shuffle. “I was stumbling like an old man,” he said, and admitted that he might have toppled over but for Nelson, who steadied him all the way. The beating felt more severe that morning, and it wasn’t just Henry who noticed it. Nelson and Patalarga felt it too, an achy kind of hangover, as if they’d all been attacked.

Noelia met the three men at the door, and observed them warily. She hadn’t expected them all to come, she said.

“Is there a problem?” Patalarga asked.

She crossed her arms. “I just don’t see why you all need to be here. She’s very old, you know.”

Nelson was the one who answered, steady, firm, and respectful. He held his hands clasped behind his back, and leaned forward slightly, as if sharing a secret.

“Madam, after last night, we really can’t let our friend go in there alone. I do hope you understand.”

She considered them for a moment. Nelson, especially. She liked him, she told me later, from the first. From the moment she’d seen him onstage the night before.

“My mother is waiting,” Noelia said finally, and led them out into the courtyard, where Jaime sat with Mrs. Anabel, talking in whispers. Both looked up when the members of Diciembre stepped out of the dark passage and into the light. Nelson was the first to emerge. The morning sun shone directly into his eyes.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Rogelio!” said Mrs. Anabel. Her face lit up. “We were just talking about you, son. Come, come, boy! Have a seat.”

IF I WEREa different sort of writer, I might have discussed Mrs. Anabel’s dementia with an expert or two, tried to make some medical sense of what was happening to her mind. But I didn’t, in part because I suspect no psychiatrist could convincingly explain the abrupt twists and turns in her cognitive understanding. There was no logic. What I know about her unpredictable reactions I’ve learned from Noelia, who’d lived with her mother and her moods for years, attempting to decipher a pattern. By the time of these events, she’d given up.