Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

“I asked him how he’d gotten here, and he laughed.”

“The long way,” he said.

Once inside the theater, Patalarga dealt with Nelson’s most immediate necessities. He lent him a clean shirt and a sweater, made him something to eat, and set a pot of water to boil. A few minutes later the two of them were sitting in the orchestra, drinking tea, and considering the empty stage where they’d first met, not many months before.

While Nelson ate, Patalarga did most of the talking. He didn’t mind. He’d felt very alone since the tour’s abrupt end, and the transition home had been more difficult than he’d expected. Turns out he liked being on the road. Turns out his wife Diana didn’t mind spending long days without him. Turns out she’d decided, while he was gone, that she wanted children, after all. This last point was at the center of every disagreement now: if they bickered about the dishes or the laundry or the bills or the car or his family or her job or which movie to see or what to make for dinner, Patalarga understood that they were in fact arguing about this other, more vexing issue. It was exhausting. Her life had become disappointing to her, and by extension, Patalarga had as well. “If you die, I’ll have nothing,” she’d said to him one evening, and he’d made the mistake of responding, “You’ll have the Olympic.” That night, by mutual agreement, he’d left the house and been sleeping at the theater ever since. Six nights now. Patalarga felt ashamed. He missed her. It was only his pride that kept him from going home, something he understood quite clearly. But a man is helpless before his own pride.

“Didn’t you tell me a child is always good news?” Nelson asked.

“In the abstract.”

“You don’t want one?”

“Where would we put it?” Patalarga said with a shrug.

Nelson ate his simple snack (a couple of rolls, each adorned with a bit of avocado and a slice of cheese); he sipped his tea and listened to his friend without judgment. Or without the appearance of judgment, which is just as important. Patalarga kept talking, and sometimes Nelson would close his eyes as if in deep concentration. Mostly he was quiet. Thinking. Processing. According to Patalarga, he looked “like a man floating inside a dream.”

When Nelson had put away the last bite, he stood, left his empty plate balancing on the armrest, and walked toward the stage. Halfway down the aisle, he stopped, with his hands on his hips, gaze shifting stage left, stage right, then back again. This is the image Patalarga remembers most vividly from that day: Nelson, arms akimbo, his thin silhouette framed by the curtains of the dilapidated theater.

“I asked him what was on my mind, the only question I could think of,” Patalarga told me later.

Which was this: “Are you in trouble?”

Nelson’s voice carried well. “Yes. I believe I am.”

Patalarga joined his friend. They made their way down to the front of the theater, where Nelson climbed to the stage and sat, just as Henry had on that day of the first rehearsal: in precisely the same spot, in fact, with his feet dangling off the edge just as Henry’s had. Nelson, unlike Henry, let them swing, almost playfully, banging the hollow wooden stage a couple of times with the backs of his heels. The sound boomed in the empty theater like a giant bass drum.

“So what happened?” Patalarga asked.

Nelson shook his head. “That’s the thing. I don’t really know. The old woman had a fall. That last day, just before I left, she fell and hit her head.”

“And?”

Nelson shrugged. “It didn’t seem so serious at first. But then it did. She was sort of coming apart.”

“And you left?”

“Yes,” he said, color rushing to his cheeks. “That was a week ago.”

Now he was in a rush. Every day counted. Ixta was moving on. A week in T— hadn’t seemed bad, twelve days was doable, but the longer it stretched on, the worse it got. He began to describe the endless hours in T—, its dreary routines. There was something essentially sad about the place, he said. The challenge was not the acting; it was staying focused. Fighting boredom. Beating back the melancholy, which was almost chemical. It was floating in the air. In the morning, you could smell it.

“That’s woodsmoke,” said Patalarga.

Nelson shook his head. “It was a prison.”

“Ask Henry what he thinks about that. What about Jaime?”

“He promised to come back, with my money, but he never did.” Nelson sighed. “How long was I supposed to wait?”

“And what did you think when he told you all this?” I asked Patalarga.

This was months later, during our final interview. We sat in the Olympic, which, even in its ruinous condition, maintained a stately beauty; we exchanged stories about Nelson, a young man with whom I’d spent no more than an hour but who had almost come to feel like a version of myself. By that point, no one thought our relationship strange anymore. Not even me.

“I understood why he’d left, but I imagined my own mother, falling like that. He shouldn’t have left like that, and I told him so. He should’ve waited to see if she was all right.”

That’s what we all felt in T—. As it happened, I was the one who had to explain what he’d done. First, Noelia and my mother; then everyone wanted to know: What did he say before he boarded the bus? How did he seem? Was he upset, hopeful, angry? After Mrs. Anabel died, the stories began: That he stole from the old woman. That he killed her. That Noelia had fallen in love with him. In the weeks after Nelson’s disappearance, I — of all people! — was asked to confirm or deny these theories. How many times did I say I barely knew him? That I’d just met him? Even Jaime, when he finally arrived in town, dragged me in to bark a few questions at me.

None of that mattered to Nelson. “I came for Ixta,” he explained to Patalarga that first night in the Olympic. Needless to say, this answer wouldn’t have satisfied anyone back in T—.

“So what are you going to do?” Patalarga asked.

He didn’t have a plan, only an urgent feeling in his chest that he could hardly bear. He’d spent days moving away from the town, retracing Diciembre’s haphazard route toward the coast, and his goal the entire time had been to release himself of this pressure in his heart. “I need to see her,” he told Patalarga.

“What if she doesn’t want to see you?” Patalarga asked. He was thinking of his own wife, darkly.

Nelson frowned. “But she does.”

Of Nelson’s week on the road, we do know this: a few days into his journey, he managed to speak with Ixta from a small town called La Merced. It’s even possible (though unconfirmed) that he spent the very last of his money paying for this frustrating, three-minute conversation. She doesn’t recall much about it (“At this point, does it really matter?” she said when I asked her about it), except that Nelson reiterated those things he’d said to her from Segura’s store on his last day in T—. That he was coming to see her. That she should wait for him. Again, that hopeful, anxious tone of voice. Pleading, you could call it. And if Ixta gave him the impression that she wanted to see him, “Well, I didn’t mean to,” she told me. “I shouldn’t have. But he was very persistent. And yes, it was flattering. I was lonely, you understand.”

“Just knock on her door,” Patalarga said. “Just like that?”

Nelson nodded.

Patalarga didn’t disagree; what’s more, he thought it was likely the only way to resolve things. But having heard the story of Nelson’s departure, he had another, slightly different, concern:

“What if the old woman didn’t make it? How do you think Jaime’s going to react?”