Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

“You wanted to talk to your brother, didn’t you?” Segura said, and without waiting for an answer, he reached below the counter. “Take a look at this.” It was a drying, crinkled newspaper from the previous week. “Go ahead, you can take it. If I had to guess, I’d say your brother is busy these days.”

Nelson thanked the shopkeeper and left.

Months later, I found this paper folded into Nelson’s journals. By then it was yellowed and fading, but entirely legible, a copy of San Jacinto’s local tabloid, dated June 21, 2001. On the cover was a photo of a truck surrounded by policemen. The headline read busted, and the accompanying text recounted the seizure of eighteen kilos of processed cocaine at a checkpoint just fourteen miles outside San Jacinto, on the road to the coast. It was the largest seizure in the area in more than three years. There was another fact, mentioned only in passing, but which Nelson, or perhaps Segura, had underlined: the seized truck was registered to Jaime’s company, but had been reported stolen three months prior. Police were investigating. The driver, a young man surnamed Rabassa, was being held in the local jail. The paper said his transfer to another facility was imminent.

THAT NIGHT,Nelson dreamed of the play. In the dream, he and Henry and Patalarga switched roles at random and constantly, even within a scene. It was dizzying and frenetic, but they couldn’t stop. The feeling was terrifying: to be onstage and not be in control. Nelson tried to apologize to the audience, but he couldn’t; nor was it necessary. Far from being put off by these sudden and confusing shifts, the crowd seemed to be loving them. Peals of laughter rose from the dark theater. Bursts of applause. Each time the actors changed characters, the spectators roared wildly, as if the members of Diciembre were acrobats on a wire, improbably cheating death. Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson barreled along. Nelson might begin a line as the president, and finish it as the servant, then shift immediately to Alejo, all without the consent or agency of the actor himself. In the midst of all this chaos, Nelson realized the stage was familiar to him: it was the Olympic, only now the theater was filled with miners and farmers and half-starved children with windburned cheeks, the people he’d been performing for up in the mountains. His head hurt. It was like running on a speeding treadmill, and he couldn’t keep up. He didn’t want to. Meanwhile, Henry had given in to it: the playwright flashed a manic, energized smile, nodding toward the audience with each new round of applause. At a certain point, Nelson realized they were saying “Olé!” as if it were a bullfight; as is often the case in dreams, the metaphor seemed right for an instant, and then fell apart. Who exactly was the bull? Who was the matador?

In the audience, Nelson caught sight of Ixta. ( How? he wrote in his journal. Wasn’t the theater dark? It was, and yet, I could see her .) And just like that, he was free of the play. Volume dropped off. Henry and Patalarga went on without him, while Nelson tiptoed to the edge of the stage, and peered out into the dark (which was not so dark, in fact). It was her. It had to be. He could see her clearly: Ixta’s hands rested gently on her very pregnant belly, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was frowning. She was the only person in the theater who appeared not to be enjoying the play at all.

She and Nelson himself, that is. Ixta didn’t call his name or wave or offer any gesture to acknowledge him. She just sat and watched.

Nelson woke with the disturbing sense that many years now separated him from the heady days of his past. From the tour, his life before, and the optimism he’d once had. It was still early, an hour before dawn, the time of day when one’s doubts are most devastating; they hang heavy on your bones. The room was very cold: if there’d been light enough, Nelson might have been able to see his breath. He didn’t understand why he felt the way he did, but there was no denying it. That morning, he was afraid of becoming old, and it was a very specific kind of old age he feared, one which has nothing to do with the number of years since your birth. He feared the premature old age of missed opportunities. He turned on the bedside lamp, but the bulb flashed and burned out all at once. In that brief instant of light, Nelson was able to make out the contours of the messy sculpture with which he shared this icy space. A monster, he thought, and forced his eyes closed. He felt very alone.

He forced himself to sleep again, and this time he did not dream.

Morning came, as it always did, and Nelson readied himself for the day’s performance. He wrote down the dream in his journal and gathered his thoughts. This was what he must have expected of the hours to come: a few quiet moments sitting in the sun with Mrs. Anabel; a sputtering conversation, reminiscent in rhythm and tone of the squeaky up and down of an old children’s teeter-totter. A day like all the others, spinning in place. At some point, he would go for a walk, moving through the streets like a ghost. No one would speak to him unless he spoke first. No one would approach him, or ask where he was from. He’d been introducing himself as Rogelio, and no one in T— questioned him. Some people shrugged, as if they knew already; others nodded without skepticism. A few even smiled. Not complicit, knowing smiles, but ordinary, guileless expressions of approval, of satisfaction: Of course you’re Rogelio, they seemed to be saying. Who else would you be?

When Nelson emerged from his room, Mrs. Anabel was up already, sitting in her usual place in the courtyard. One of the cats, the gray and black tabby, had curled up at her feet in a patch of sunlight. At the sight of Nelson, the cat yawned and stretched, then retreated into the tall weeds. Mrs. Anabel, on the other hand, smiled at him, a hopeful, contented smile, just as she had each of the previous twenty days. But this morning was different. Nelson didn’t smile back, not right away.

“What’s wrong?” Mrs. Anabel asked when he sat.

“Nothing, Mama,” he responded.

Noelia watched from the kitchen window as she cleaned up after breakfast. She saw Nelson sit by Mrs. Anabel’s side and rub the back of his neck. He sat for a long time without talking. She was in and out of the kitchen that first hour, her usual flurry of morning activity; scrubbing, cleaning. As soon as she was finished, she started right in on lunch. Nelson hadn’t mentioned leaving again, not for two days, and she had come to hope he might stay, just awhile longer. She’d miss him when he was gone. At around ten-thirty, she went to the market for some vegetables, leaving her mother and Nelson alone. “They had their heads bowed and were whispering. I even saw my mother smiling, heard her laugh, and I thought everything was fine.”

But when she returned an hour later, things were not fine. Mrs. Anabel’s face was full of worry and her eyes rimmed with red. Nelson wasn’t there.

“Is everything all right?” Noelia asked. “Where’s Rogelio?”

“He’s packing,” Mrs. Anabel said, despairing.

“He’s what?”

“He said he’s leaving. He said he has to go.” The old woman shook her head, then shuffled her feet, as if to stand. “I’d like to talk to your father. Is he out in the fields?”

When she recounted the events of that day, Noelia paused here. There were, she said, some things I should know about her mother. Mrs. Anabel’s deterioration had come slowly, over the course of many years, a process so subtle that at times you wondered if it was happening at all. And even now, when that deterioration was an indisputable fact, her mind was always shifting: there were days when the old woman seemed completely lost, unable or unwilling to connect; and then, just when you’d begun to lose all hope, she’d recover. Like a fog lifting. There might be a spell of three days or more when she was something like her old self. Nelson’s stay in T— had coincided with a relatively consistent period. While Mrs. Anabel was not exactly sharp, she was not lost in the muddle, something Noelia attributed to Nelson’s steadying presence. This was the context, part of what made Mrs. Anabel’s remark about her husband all the more disconcerting. She had scarcely mentioned him in the previous days, and when she had, he’d always been dead.