Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

Mónica and Sebastián moved together to Baltimore in 1972, to study. They’d married the year before, and once in the United States decided it was time to start a family. Sebastián, when he was alive, explained the decision this way: having an American baby was like putting money in the bank. Francisco was born in 1974. Mónica worked toward her public health degree at Johns Hopkins, Sebastián for his master’s in library science. While his parents studied, Francisco observed the interior of their small apartment in the company of a talkative American nanny. So talkative, in fact, that in the interview, Mónica and Sebastián had hardly been able to get a word in. They hoped some of this woman’s English would stay lodged in their son’s brain, where it might be useful later.

Francisco’s linguistic education was cut short, however, when the government back home was ousted three months before his second birthday. The news was spotty, but Sebastián and Mónica soon gathered a few salient facts. The most important: the new leaders were not on friendly terms with the Americans. The response came soon enough: the family’s visas would not be renewed. Appeals, they were told, could be filed only from the home country. The university hospital wrote a letter on Mónica’s behalf, but this well-meaning document vanished into some bureaucrat’s file cabinet in suburban Virginia, and it soon became clear that there was nothing to be done. Rather than risk the undignified prospect of a deportation (or more unthinkable, staying on, and living in the shadow of legality) Sebastián and Mónica chose to pack their things and go; just like that, their American adventure came to a premature end. Still, the accident of his place of birth gave Francisco an important practical and psychological advantage, something which shaped his personality in the years to come: a U.S. passport, and all that it represented.

Nelson was born in 1978, when Francisco was four. The armed conflict began two years later, in a faraway province to the south of the capital, a place so remote the war was almost three years old before anyone took it seriously. Five before many people knew enough to be afraid. By 1986 though, everything was clear enough, even to Sebastián and Mónica’s two young boys. Throughout their childhood, as the war tightened its grip on the city, as the economy began to wobble, Francisco taunted Nelson with his remarkable travel document. It was the equivalent of a magic carpet, the possibility of escape implicit among its powers, somehow always present in conversations between the brothers. It was expected that Francisco would emigrate as soon as was feasible, and bring his younger brother with him at the first opportunity. Francisco finished school, studied for the TOEFL, and as the date of his eventual departure drew near, lorded this good luck over his increasingly frightened younger brother. Nelson did Francisco’s laundry, made his bed, fetched things for him from the store — an endless number of petty errands, all under threat of a withheld visa. “What a shame,” Francisco might say, shaking his head sadly as he observed a messy stack of poorly folded clothes. “I’d hate to have to leave you here.”

(Remarkably, this scene, recounted to me by a shamefaced Francisco in January 2002, also appears in Nelson’s journals. In that version, Francisco’s quote is slightly, albeit crucially, different: “I’d hate to have to leave you here to die .”)

Whatever the exact words, regrettable episodes like these were forever imprinted on Nelson’s consciousness, the threat of being left behind reiterated so often and with so many harrowing overtones that it began to sound like a ghost story, or a horror film, in which he, Nelson, was the victim. At the time Francisco had no understanding of what he was putting his brother through. Whatever cruelties he committed in those years were a function of his impatience and immaturity. His ignorance. He was eager for his own life to begin far from the crumbling, violent city where he lived. Though he never admitted it, not to his younger brother or to anyone, Francisco was also afraid: that it was all a dream, that he too would be condemned to stay; that someone at the airport in Miami or New York or Los Angeles would take a look at him, at his passport, and laugh. “Where’d you get this?” they’d ask, chuckling, and he’d be too startled to answer. He knew nothing, after all, about being American. He was hungry for experience of the kind he could only have far from his family and their expectations. Land of the free, etc. In this regard, Francisco was an ordinary boy, with ordinary ambitions.

In spite of it all, the two brothers were close, until January 1992, when Francisco, age eighteen, boarded a plane and disappeared into the wilds of the southern United States to live with some friends of the family. In the months and years that followed, he wrote letters and called from time to time, but began nonetheless to drift from Nelson’s memory and consciousness. Nelson entered a kind of holding pattern: an American visa would soon arrive, or so he’d been told, to whisk him away toward a new beginning. His early adolescence coincided with the hard bleak years of the war, when life was strangled by violence, when families went about their routines in a state of constant apprehension. Things were at their worst that year Francisco left; and Nelson, like the rest of his traumatized generation, spent a lot of time indoors. (As did I, for example.) Instead of venturing out into the unsafe streets, Nelson read a great deal, and watched television with a kind of studiousness his mother found alarming, a rigor occasionally rewarded with a glimpse of topless dancing women, or a lewd joke worth repeating at school, or the sight of a normally stoic reporter buckling before the weight of some new and terrifying announcement.

The news in the late 1980s and early 1990s never failed to supply a somber, cautionary anecdote starring families just like one’s own, now mired in unspeakable tragedy. Men and women disappeared, police were shot, the apparatus of the state teetered. This last phrase was heard so often, whether in adult conversation or on the radio, that Nelson began to take it literally. He would imagine an elegant but precariously built tower, swaying in a rising wind. Would it fall? Of course it would. The only question serious people asked was who would be crushed beneath it.

For Nelson, for his family, for most of the city’s alarmed residents, the calculus was fairly simple: those who could leave, would. If Nelson, the boy, grew fond of escapism, he was merely a product of his time; if he found little use for homework, for education as it is traditionally and narrowly defined, it was because he reasoned it was of little use — he’d soon be starting over anyway; if he daydreamed of a life in the United States, he did so at first with a whimsical ignorance, his imagined USA requiring little detail or nuance to serve its comforting spiritual purpose. As for his current reality, Nelson chose to think of himself as passing through; and this allowed him to withstand a great deal, content in the notion that all his troubles were temporary. For a while, it wasn’t a bad way to live.

I’ll go on, though everyone knows I’m writing about a country so different now, so utterly transformed that even we who lived through this period have a hard time remembering what it was like. The worse the situation at home, the more comfort Nelson took in his eventual emigration; each May he expected to celebrate his birthday with his brother in the United States, but unfortunately, each year it was postponed. Francisco did not complete the required paperwork. He did not submit to the interview. He did not petition for his little brother to join him in the United States when he had that responsibility and that right; when he could have done so as soon as 1994. For this negligence, Francisco blames his youth, though he is self-aware enough to be a little embarrassed by his lack of consideration. In his defense: he was discovering his new country, attempting to become what his blue passport had always said he was — an American. He didn’t have the time or the inclination to consider what his equivocating might mean to Nelson, how it might affect his life and worldview. It’s really quite simple, when one considers it: Francisco didn’t want to be in charge of his young brother. He was only twenty years old, enjoying himself, working odd jobs, and moving often. He didn’t want the responsibility. Sebastián and Mónica nagged and pestered their older son, even shamed him, but it would be years before Nelson’s paperwork finally went through.