Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

The opening was very well received, most of all by Ixta, who spent the evening drinking glass after glass of wine and trying to get the artist to smile. It wasn’t easy, she told me: the ghosts of Mindo’s violent adolescence were on every wall in the gallery. But she persisted. And we know that in mid-September, Ixta gathered her things and moved in with him. We know Nelson was shaken by the news, and that many of Mindo’s friends expressed their concern. Who is this woman? What do you know about her?

It was never a good match. Mindo was handsome and charming and troubled. He’d never been in a serious relationship before. It couldn’t have worked out, though it seems petty to assign blame for this now. Ixta, for her part, accepts much of the responsibility herself, while noting the ways in which he let her down after she got pregnant. Mindo was jealous and frightened by the responsibility that fatherhood entailed. We know he suspected that Nelson was still part of Ixta’s life. Though Mindo never had proof of the affair, he certainly had his doubts, and it seems he was relieved when Nelson joined Diciembre on tour.

“Maybe he’ll stay gone,” he commented bitterly to a friend. That was in mid-June, when Nelson was newly arrived in T—, and things with Ixta were beginning to unravel.

“Perhaps,” his friend said.

They even toasted to the idea.

Everyone agrees he didn’t deserve what happened to him when Nelson came back.

MEANWHILE,Mónica would have loved to have been in touch with her son, to have received those phone calls from T—, but she didn’t. She knew nothing of what was happening because her son didn’t call her even once. In fact, besides Ixta (who claimed to be uninterested), no one knew much about Nelson’s whereabouts, because neither Henry nor Patalarga shared the story. They expected him home in ten days at most, so there was really no point.

Faced with this silence, Mónica daydreamed of her son on ad hoc, rural stages, images which inspired a mix of pride and anguish. In her mind, it was all a continuation of the tour he’d described from San Jacinto, a tour she felt might never end. And in a sense, it never did. Mónica didn’t compare Nelson’s adventures to Francisco’s, at least not consciously, though she found herself approaching both absences the same way. She’d acquired, over the years, a certain skill for projecting herself into the lives of her children, a talent all mothers have — it’s what allows them to intuit a child’s hunger, his frustration, his fear — but Mónica had honed it, by necessity. With Francisco, she’d managed to create memories where there were none, build an elaborate, and mostly factual, time line of his travels. She’d formulated opinions about all the major events of her son’s life, and of the friends he’d acquired and discarded along the way. She kept a catalog of certain details, and, having committed these facts to memory, felt reassured about herself as a mother: she knew, for example, where her elder son had spent each of his birthdays since he’d left her side in 1992, even though she hadn’t been present at a single one of these celebrations. It didn’t matter. She’d imagined herself there. In her mind, she’d eaten cake and helped blow out the candles (whether there had been cake or candles being entirely beside the point). The fact that she and Francisco were still close was something she felt proud of, an achievement not to be minimized. This isn’t as obvious or as simple as it might seem; every bond, even that of a mother and child, is breakable.

If Mónica and Ixta had been in touch during those final weeks of Nelson’s absence, they might have had a lot to talk about.

So now, with only the clue of Nelson’s last phone call from San Jacinto to guide her, Mónica began to consider the scope of Diciembre’s travels, and do what she’d always done, perhaps what she did best: fill in details where there were few to be had. Her younger son, her Nelson; he’d been gone about two months by then, longer than he’d ever been apart from her. Too long — though she felt guilty for begrudging him this adventure he’d surely earned. There was, it seemed, nowhere in the country that he couldn’t have seen on this journey. Were there any villages left to explore? Any hamlets? Any rural roads he hadn’t yet taken? And if there weren’t, why didn’t he come home already? It was June, the dry season, a healthy time to be in the mountains. On the coast, the cold had begun in earnest. The heavy sea air clung to the shoreline, enveloped the city. She prayed that her son was enjoying himself, that he’d learned what he needed to learn on this trip, grown in the ways that he’d expected, and in others that would surprise him. She hoped most of all that he would come home soon, though she wrestled with this notion, and wondered if it was selfishness, if a better mother wouldn’t prefer that her son wander and live every adventure he desired. Mónica imagined young village girls falling in love with her son; she found it easiest of all to picture this, since she was in love with him too: with his bright brown eyes and crooked smile, with his curls and the way the edges of his mouth dropped into a frown when he was deep in thought. He looked like a young Sebastián; everyone remarked on the resemblance. She hoped he was careful, at least, if there happened to be an affair in the offing, and that no hearts were broken unnecessarily along the way — especially not Nelson’s. In truth, his was the only heart she cared about. Never mind the girls.

In the city, her days went on without him; not in a blur, but yes, actually, in something of a blur. There was little to distinguish one from the next. Mónica hoped for news, but didn’t expect any. She fell asleep every night, certain that there was no greater torture than an empty house, than this empty house. When she told me this, she gestured with a delicately waving hand, palm up, pointing to the lifeless rooms that surrounded her. I asked if all her careful imagining had been useful at all; if, in all that conjuring, she’d managed to have a sense of what Nelson was going through. Not the details — she couldn’t have had an idea of the details — but a sense.

She thought about it. I think she wanted to say that she had, but found it dishonest, given what came after. That mother’s intuition — she was forced to admit that perhaps it had failed her.

“Maybe I didn’t want to think of him in any real trouble.”

“It wasn’t trouble,” I said. “Not exactly.”

She shook her head. “But it was close enough.”

CERTAINLY THERE WAS NO ONEwho missed Nelson more intensely than Mónica. Other people in his circle admitted that his absence in those months was noted, but not often. He was missed — but only in the most abstract sort of way. It was as if in the process of becoming Rogelio, he’d completed some mystical erasure: Nelson almost ceased to exist, temporarily, though it would eventually be seen as a prelude to a more serious kind of erasure. Again and again, I heard versions of the same sentiment: Nelson was well liked, but hard to know. The role they’d all wanted, to form part of Diciembre’s historic reunion tour, had gone to him, their talented, arrogant friend; and now he was off in the provinces, becoming a new, if not improved, version of himself. There was a hint of jealousy to all this, but little curiosity about the specifics of the tour; and in truth, what curiosity there might have been was soon eclipsed by the news of Ixta’s pregnancy. The world over, people are the same. They love to gossip. They love scandal. People asked the usual questions: If Nelson knew, if he was heartbroken, if he was the father, the jilted ex-boyfriend, or both. If he had regrets. If it was true love, or just sex. Any hint of squalor made ears perk up — it was what they lived for. Old girlfriends offered theories and shared indiscreet stories. Those who’d been friends of the erstwhile couple chose sides; and most, it should be said, chose the proud but ultimately likable Ixta over the absent Nelson. No one knew for certain that Ixta and Nelson had been sleeping together until just before he left — their discretion had been absolute — but taken as a group, the students and alumni of the Conservatory were a rather promiscuous bunch, so many suspected it. The conversation among this particular generation of Conservatory alumni played out along the sordid lines of a television talk show, the kind where couples proudly displayed their dysfunction in front of enthusiastic audiences who pretended to disapprove. More than a few of Nelson and Ixta’s friends had played roles on those shows, as drug dealers or teenage mothers, as no-good boyfriends or lying girlfriends, so they understood the tropes well. Betrayal and infidelity had been normalized long ago. They were actors, after all.