Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

“Bigger,” I said, though that word was not exactly correct. I thought back to my childhood, in the shadow of these mountains, beneath this sky, and it was the only word that came to mind.

“Everyone’s childhood seems bigger from a distance,” Nelson said.

Segura greeted us both warmly, even me, though he probably hadn’t seen me in years. Nelson was all business: peroxide, aspirin, and bandages. Segura shook his head sadly. “Bandages, I have,” he said. “And the aspirin. How many do you need?”

Nelson held up an open hand, and Segura uncapped a dusty bottle, and carefully tipped five pills into a small envelope. “Anything else?”

“I have to make a call.”

Segura took the phone out from under the counter. Nelson wrote a number down in the storeowner’s red notebook, while the old man spent a long moment and considerable energies untangling the cord. When this task was complete, he bent over the machine and lifted the handset, pressing it carefully to his ear.

“Good connection today.”

Nelson nodded. “Clear weather, I suppose.”

“God bless,” answered Segura. He squinted at the paper, then at the keypad, before pecking deliberately at the numbers, as if selecting which were his favorites.

And meanwhile, I had time to look around: time enough to see the dust motes floating in a bar of sunlight, to test my weight on different sections of the warped and creaky wooden floor, to notice the empty store shelves, featuring one of each item — a single bar of soap, a single box of pasta, a single bottle of Coca-Cola — as if these artifacts were not to be sold but maintained as visual reminders of a lost way of life.

“It’s ringing!” announced the old shopkeeper in a bright voice that seemed out of place in his dreary store.

I stepped outside and sat on the curb, closing my eyes against the early-afternoon sun. I could hear Nelson talking from inside the store, just the rising and falling murmur of his voice, and I made no effort to parse the words themselves. In any case, I didn’t understand much of what was happening, and felt only dimly that it had any connection to me at all. There was a frail and wounded old woman, a neighbor of my parents, that much I knew; and this stranger, whose foreignness in T— made him recognizable. Beyond that, there was nothing, just the ordinary confusion a young man feels when confronted with the place of his birth. My parents were nearing old age, and if they’d come home to be comfortable, part of me knew that they’d also come home to die. Not now, not soon, perhaps, but eventually. Mrs. Anabel’s sallow skin and bloodshot eyes had made that clear to me. The way my mother had rushed to her side only confirmed it. I would have preferred not to think about all this, and so when I felt a pat on the head, I welcomed the interruption. It was Segura, who smiled at me and, not without some effort, lowered himself down to the curb, placing a hand on my shoulder to steady himself through the process. When he was seated and comfortable, he spread his short legs out in front of him, pointing his toes at the sky, and let out a long, satisfied breath. Then he lifted the brim of his cap and let the sun hit his face.

“I like to give my customers some privacy,” he said with a wink.

I nodded, not because I agreed, or thought it was funny or even understood, really; I nodded because I’d been trained my entire life to agree with my elders. If I sometimes forgot this when I was in the city, it came back to me instantly in T—.

The shopkeeper didn’t wait for my answer. “You’re the Solis boy, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Here to help your old man with the roof, I guess?”

I nodded, not at all surprised that he knew my business.

“You’re a good boy.” He paused. “Rogelio, he’s your friend in there?”

And again, out of a sense of respect, I agreed. “My neighbor,” I said, noting briefly that the stranger’s name had shifted yet again.

“He’s always in here, always calling. His brother is going to have a big bill to pay when he comes home.”

Then Segura clapped his hands together at the prospect, a gesture that was not so much greedy as anxious. That money, that windfall, I quickly realized, had already been spent. Lest I misunderstand, the old man began to explain all the ways business had slowed since I’d last come to visit. I listened respectfully, and when the moment was right, told him that Anabel wasn’t well. The bandages, the aspirin — they were for her.

“She hasn’t been well for many years.”

“This is different. She fell.”

Segura shook his head. “At her age that can be very bad.”

Just then Nelson stepped out of the shop. He stood in the doorway, squinting against the sun. The shopkeeper and I turned to face him.

“I couldn’t get through,” he announced.

Segura eyed him quizzically. “That’s odd.”

“Happens.”

“Would you like me to dial again?”

Nelson shook his head.

“Just the bandages and the aspirin, then?”

“Sure,” Nelson said. “Write it down.”

The movement around the bus had all but subsided now, the last few passengers making their way aboard. A light breeze scattered a few leaves across the plaza, and the driver honked his horn twice to announce his imminent departure. It rang across the town like a shot. A few heads ducked out of windows; a sleeping dog sat up with a start, and stared in the direction of the bus.

Nelson did as well. His back and shoulders were straight, and from where I sat, he appeared almost statuesque. The bus clicked into gear, and slowly rounded the plaza in our direction. Without a word, Nelson stepped into the street, and blocked its path. It all happened very slowly. There was something robotic in his movements, as if he were being pulled by some force he could not resist. He held an open palm before him, and the bus slowed to a stop. The door opened. Nelson looked in my direction one last time, then stepped aboard.

A WEEK LATER,on a frigid mid-July afternoon in the city, there was a knocking at the gates of the Olympic. The bell hadn’t worked in nearly a month, and Patalarga was accustomed to long stretches without interruption; so for many minutes, he went on about his business, scarcely noticing the sound at all.

What was his business ?

Since returning from the tour, it was no longer clear. The scale of the task before him, the restoration of the Olympic, seemed crushing; nor was the theater all that needed restoring. He’d always been prone to bouts of sadness, but the sharpness of this feeling was entirely new.

When Patalarga finally went to the gate, he found Nelson, shivering. Winter had arrived on the coast with its usual cruelty; the colorless sky, the damp sea air, and it was all reflected in the tightly pressed eyes of the people on the sidewalk, who walked past the two reunited friends as if pushing against an impossible weight. Whatever a welcome feels like, the city streets offered up just the opposite; and Nelson seemed in every way unprepared to be home again. Physically, he was a wreck. He wore the same clothes he’d been wearing the moment he stepped on the bus in T—. And this too was clear: spiritually, he was elsewhere. You could see it in his eyes.

“He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a month,” Patalarga said. “As if he hadn’t slept since we’d left him.”

Or perhaps: as if he’d walked from the bus station, halfway across the city. Or even more exactly: as if he’d traveled for a week with only the little money he’d had in his pocket that afternoon in T—; as if he’d survived days and covered many hundreds of kilometers by haggling or begging for rides in small towns across the provinces, journeying in silence, suffering cold and dizziness at high altitudes; as if, in that spell, he’d become accustomed to both external silence and interior turmoil. Fear. As if he’d tired of explaining himself to strangers, and started doing all that he could in those days to become invisible. As if all his money had been spent halfway through the voyage, and since then he’d eaten only what he was proffered by one kind family or another that happened to take pity on him: a can of cashews and a cup of juice one day, half a mango and a Coca-Cola the next. Evidence of those meals could be found on his T-shirt, which he hadn’t had a chance to wash. He wore no jacket, and hadn’t shaved. His hair was overgrown, and more unruly than normal. And even so, there was something manic in his exhaustion, something Patalarga recognized immediately: Nelson wasn’t happy, or free from worry, or even optimistic — but he seemed liberated.