Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

Henry didn’t even face the girl, but turned instead toward the window.

“Hey,” she said, “over here,” but the playwright didn’t respond.

Patalarga shrugged an apology on behalf of his friend. “I’d never seen Henry like that,” he told me later.

After a few seconds the girl moved on, muttering complaints under her breath.

They hadn’t been on the road long before Henry turned to Patalarga. He wore an expression of worry, or even heartbreak.

“I guess that’s it,” Henry said to his friend, his voice low.

Patalarga had been on the verge of sleep. “Yeah?”

“The tour’s over.”

The two friends didn’t speak again until morning.

NELSON WAS GIVENwhat was simultaneously the largest and smallest room in Rogelio’s family home: the largest in terms of sheer physical space; the smallest because it had become, in recent years, a de facto storage locker. The rusty bunk bed where Jaime and Rogelio once slept now served as the essential infrastructure holding, but not containing, the family’s history in objects: bundled, precariously balanced, stacked from floor to ceiling, the remains of twenty-five years, thirty years, five decades of life in T—. In this house. Nelson spotted an old sewing machine, a teetering heap of newspapers from the seventies, a dead man’s mothballed clothes. There was an overstuffed cardboard box sitting on the lower bunk, with a dented teakettle and a few cracked wooden kitchen spoons peering out from the top. There were mismatched shoes beneath the bed; a couple of soccer balls, deflated and ripped open; bent wire hangers linked together like a makeshift cage; a box of marbles; and a child’s tricycle that appeared to have been taken apart violently. Nelson even saw a few of the old sculptures Rogelio had made out of wood.

Together, it was something to behold. Had it stood in a museum or an art gallery, the critics would have been unanimous in their praise.

Noelia must have noticed Nelson’s expression, or the sharp breath he drew at the sight of it all.

“We don’t throw anything away,” she said. “We just don’t. I’m not saying this is a good or a bad thing.”

Nor could Nelson decide.

Rather than attempt to make space on the lower bunk, Noelia had Jaime and Nelson bring in a cot, along with three heavy blankets that smelled powerfully, but not unpleasantly, of woodsmoke. She was eager to get her guest settled in. “Go ahead, give it a try,” she said, standing in the doorway, and watched as Nelson lowered himself carefully onto the cot. The fabric sank beneath his weight, like a hammock, but it held.

“Not bad,” he said.

“Lie down.”

Nelson flipped his legs onto the cot. His toes hung just off the edge. “It’s fine,” he said.

“I’m sorry, but it’s the best we can do for now.”

“It’s fine,” Nelson repeated. “Really.”

It was early evening, and Mrs. Anabel was resting. It had been a big day for her. The temperature was dropping, so Jaime, Noelia, and Nelson moved to the main visiting room, that dark and dusty place where Henry had first been received. The family photos were right where he’d said they’d be. Nelson glanced back at his hosts, as if for permission.

“Go ahead,” Jaime said.

Nelson nodded, and searched the menagerie of black-and-white images, the faces blurred, but recognizable. Young Jaime, young Noelia, and the youngest, Rogelio, he assumed. He examined that face most carefully of all, looking for some resemblance that might explain his own presence in this strange home, in this strange town. They looked nothing alike, which was both a relief and a disappointment. It felt unsettling to be suddenly so connected to a dead man. There were a few scenes from the plaza, from the days when T— had been alive. There was one photo of the family stepping out of the cathedral, dressed in their finest, Mrs. Anabel’s stern late husband with an arm around his wife, and a date scrawled in the corner of the image: May 1970. Nelson studied the old man’s face, an opaque, unreadable mask; it was the face of a man accustomed to suffering. Husband and wife both wore this expression, in fact; but the children clustered about them — two smiling, irrepressible boys, plus one prim and beautiful little girl — did not.

“What a lovely family,” Nelson said.

Noelia smiled. “Yes, we were. My mother thinks we still are.”

“We made a good team,” Noelia told me later. In spite of how it ended, she had fond memories of Nelson’s time in T—. “I told him everything I knew. Not just that night, but every day I added something, every day I remembered. He helped me, just by being there.”

Noelia began that evening by explaining Mrs. Anabel’s peculiar sense of time, the seven or eight key events which her mind played in a continuous and maddening loop, and the connective tissue between them. For example, it might be necessary to understand how the death of Rogelio’s father related to the 1968 earthquake. Noelia explained to Nelson (and later to me) that something in the chemistry of the soil changed after the quake, and the small plot he’d saved up years to purchase became suddenly infertile. The old man all but gave up hope after that. Though he didn’t die until a few years later, as far as Rogelio’s mother was concerned, he’d started to die at the moment of the earthquake.

“You would’ve been five in 1968,” Noelia told Nelson, like a schoolgirl slipping answers to her favorite classmate. “And almost eight when my father finally passed.”

She kept on, and Nelson took notes. Jaime was mostly quiet, nodding now and again, or correcting Noelia’s dates. Together, brother and sister conjured this memory: they’d last been together, all three of them, at a party in San Jacinto in the early 1980s. Neither could remember what they were celebrating, or why Noelia had been visiting the provincial capital. They remembered this: the sun setting, the three of them and perhaps a half dozen friends in a circle of plastic chairs on the unpaved street in front of Jaime’s house. It had rained the night before, and the chairs sunk and waddled in the soft earth. Music played from a handheld radio, they swapped stories, pulled bottles of beer from a bucket full of ice. Friends came by all through the night, and Rogelio was quiet—“He was always quiet,” Noelia said — until a certain song came on the radio, something bouncy and pop. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he stood up and started dancing.

“Everyone stopped to watch,” Noelia said, shaking her head at the image. “He was so shy back then.”

“It was a real sight,” Jaime said, and laughed to himself. It was the first time Nelson had seen him laugh.

They’re not talking to me now, Nelson thought. It’s like I’m not even here. He kept his eyes wide open, his ears perked, and did what he could to inhale this memory, to make it his, as if the truth of this emotional detail could make any difference at all to Mrs. Anabel.

“I was watching you today,” said Jaime finally.

“You were very nice,” added Noelia.

“That’s true. You did fine.”

“But?” Nelson said.

Jaime pressed his hands together, and held them against his chest. “But Rogelio had no schooling. He didn’t read plays or write books. He couldn’t read at all.”

“He was in Henry’s play, wasn’t he? In Collectors?”

“Just something to keep in mind.” He pointed at Nelson’s notebook. “Don’t let my mother see you writing, that’s all.”

“You have to remember who our brother was,” Noelia added.

Jaime frowned, and ran a hand through his hair. “And who my mother thinks he was.”