Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

Ixta was never far from his mind. If Nelson was able to expel his private troubles from his thoughts during his first days alone in T—, once the routines of his new life were settled, he could no longer manage it. By the end of the first week and the beginning of the second, his journal entries are less and less about the details of his days with Mrs. Anabel, and more meditations, or even speculations, on parenthood. Try as he might, he simply could not accept Ixta’s assertion that the child was not his. He drew a chart tracking the instances when he and Ixta had made love since their reconciliation the previous winter: where they’d been, how long it had lasted, and how careful they’d remembered to be. He scoured his memory for details, filling pages with clinical accounts of the final weeks of their affair that read more like legal briefs than erotica. He argues for paternity and presents the evidence. He notes clues and small gestures that might give him some hope, for if one reads the journals, this much is clear: hope was what he needed and wanted most. Accepting he was not the child’s father would have meant relinquishing his claim on Ixta. It would’ve meant letting her go for good.

Meanwhile, in the city, Ixta’s belly kept growing each day, and with it, she confessed to me, her anxiety. Nelson’s late morning walks took him, more often than not, to Mr. Segura’s store, where he ignored Jaime’s admonition and read the newspaper whenever it was available; and where, on no fewer than seven occasions, he managed to reach Ixta by phone. These mostly unwelcome incidents served only to deepen her unease. She knew what she knew about her baby, and still he tried to convince her that it was his. It had to be. “That was all he wanted to talk about,” Ixta said when we spoke. “He was obsessed. It wasn’t that the child couldn’t have been his. But she wasn’t. That’s all.”

She occasionally succeeded in steering the conversation elsewhere; the truth was she enjoyed talking to him, and didn’t have the heart to hang up.

“I should have, I know, but I just couldn’t.”

As uncomfortable as those conversations could be, Ixta needed to hear Nelson’s voice; apart from being her lover, he had also been her friend. She was tormented by the usual set of questions: whether she was too young or too selfish to handle the responsibility of motherhood; whether she’d be a good parent, or even an adequate one; whether the maternal bond would be felt right away. Though it seems cruel to mention them now, given the events to come, Ixta had even begun to have doubts about Mindo, her partner, the father of her child, a man I never had the opportunity to meet. But this was all in the future: while Nelson was in T—, Ixta’s misgivings were only just taking shape. She’d begun to find Mindo rather unresponsive, insensitive to the idiosyncrasies of her pregnancy (which were not idiosyncratic but absolutely normal), and, in a broad sense, “unimpressive.” This last, unkind word was the very one she used, albeit reluctantly and only because I pressed her.

“I don’t like to talk about him, not anymore,” she said, but then she went on: it was all part of a slow realization she’d had over the course of her second trimester, when her ankles began to swell and the night sweats interrupted her sleep. “A man should cause an impression,” she said. “He should leave you with something to think about. Without that, there’s no magic.”

“Was there magic with Nelson?” I asked. “Was he impressive?”

I knew the answer. It took her a moment.

“Once you knew him, he was. Very much so. And I knew him well.”

The changes in her body were some compensation for her melancholy: it was an aspect of the pregnancy she found dramatic and wondrous, confirmation that there was, undoubtedly, some sort of miracle taking place, even if that miracle sometimes made her recoil with fear. But there was a problem: while she’d never felt more beautiful in her life, this man of hers wouldn’t lay a finger on her. Her breasts had grown, her hips — she finally had the curves she’d always wanted — and Mindo scarcely seemed to notice. She found this simply unforgivable. He came home late, something he’d always done; smelling like the Argentine steak house where he worked long hours, just as he always had; only now she found it all intolerable. The odor of grilled beef was repellant. One evening in May, when she was four months pregnant, she asked him to shower before getting in bed. He agreed, with a frown. The next night, she asked him to do the same, and to her great surprise, she woke up the following morning at dawn, alone. It was a chilly early-winter day: she padded out into the living room in her socks, and found her unimpressive, unwashed man on the couch. He was asleep with his mouth open, still in his work clothes, still smelling of steak, his feet hanging off the edge.

How else was she to interpret this except as an insult?

Perhaps, I suggested, he was simply frightened. First-time fathers often are.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “It doesn’t really matter anymore.”

I didn’t argue this point. “Did you think much about Nelson in those days?”

She nodded. “Sure. Whenever he called, I thought about him. I was angry, I was hurt, but I thought about him. Sometimes fondly. Sometimes not. I missed him. I felt very alone.”

“And when he called — did you feel less alone then?”

“No,” she said. Her eyes closed very briefly, just an instant. “I resented the phone calls, but I looked forward to them too. The connection from that shit town of his, wherever he was, it was terrible. I couldn’t understand what he was doing.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wanted to talk to him, to tell him things, but he wouldn’t listen. He would never listen. That was always his problem.”

MINDO,the putative father of Ixta’s child, Nelson’s rival, was an artist, a painter — and not a bad one, by all accounts. He was thirty-one years old that year, and worked as a waiter.

It’s true he was not cut out for fatherhood. When I suggested to Ixta that he might have been afraid, I was merely repeating what many of his friends told me. To a person, they hated Ixta, and a few even blamed themselves for not helping Mindo escape her clutches sooner. I understood their anger, but their vision of Ixta was at odds with everything I knew about her. Still, I listened mostly, didn’t interrupt as they spoke.

Mindo came from a working-class district of the capital known as the Thousands, and that’s where his artistic education began. He began painting murals when he was very young, only twelve, memorials to friends who’d passed away. Given the circumstances of the neighborhood (known colloquially as Gaza), this was steady work. Mindo was featured in Crónica , one of the city’s main newspapers, when he was only sixteen, a back-page feature under the headline “Teenage Artist Paints War Memorial.” In the photo he stands before one of his murals, a painted wall along Cahuide, one of the main arteries of his district. He has a heavy build, and looks much older than his age. He has stubble on his chin, and dark, piercing eyes. Like Nelson, Mindo has curly hair, but beyond that there is no similarity.

Ixta and Mindo met in August 2000, when he opened a show at one of the newer galleries in the Old City. He was no longer painting murals but very detailed, stylized portraits of his old neighborhood friends, some of whom had been dead now for fifteen years. Mindo painted them as adults, as if they’d survived their troubled teenage years and skated past the dangers that had prematurely ended their lives: the drugs, the street battles, the allure of crime. It was speculative biography, in images. Some gained weight. Some lost their hair. Some wore suits and ties, or aprons, or soccer uniforms. Some went shirtless, showing off intricate tattoos. Some held diplomas and smiled proudly. It was simple, affecting work; in Mindo’s paintings, all these tough young men had lived, and by living had earned the right to be ordinary. Beneath each image was a brief text noting the age at which they’d died and the circumstances of their passing.