Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

“You look very beautiful,” Nelson managed, which was the only sensible thing he could’ve said.

Ixta nodded regally.

“Are you sure you can walk?”

“Of course I can walk,” she said quickly, and Nelson blushed.

The truth was, she’d been waiting for some last, desperate gesture on Nelson’s part ever since the day of his phone call from the road. “I’ve always had a sense for these kinds of things,” she told me. Life’s big events, those moments of real, even unbearable emotion — if you were paying attention, they tended to announce themselves, as the ocean swells in anticipation of a wave. Ixta’s childhood and adolescence were littered with these instances of premonition: the tearful day her father left the family for good, the day of her first period, the day her cousin Rigoberto was killed in a car accident.

And when Nelson ended their relationship, in July of the previous year; she’d felt it acutely then. Ixta could have mouthed his words as he uttered them. What he said that day was somehow not surprising to her; in fact, it was the utter predictability of his words she found shocking. She watched him break her heart, marveling at how thoroughly he believed in phrases she knew to be untrue. No, Ixta thought to herself: No, she was not keeping him from his dreams. She was not shutting him out of the world. She was doing none of those things. If they were happening, he was doing them to himself.

But Ixta didn’t argue with Nelson that day. His complaints were banal and selfish, and she anticipated all of them. He would regret it — she’d known this even then, had known it in her gut — but she felt no pride or comfort in this knowledge. It would not heal her.

Now they went for a slow walk, heading west into the dull residential sections of the district, where all the houses appeared to be identical, distinguished only by the varying colors of their exterior walls. There are few monuments in the Monument District, and almost nothing to see. An earlier, now ousted and forgotten, government had intended to make the area its showplace, but those plans never came to pass. History intervened. The war happened. The district was colonized, not by museums or libraries or statues as its name implied but by private citizens, a guarded, rather anonymous group of upper middle class who lived quietly and traveled exclusively by car. Ixta and Nelson were the only people on the street. They walked side by side (“but not together,” she pointed out), struggling to have a conversation. Nelson was careful, asking as politely and obliquely as he could about the state of her pregnancy. His voice was low, and at times Ixta had to strain to hear him.

She remembers being disappointed: This was what he’d come for? To mumble at her?

They walked for ten minutes, coming to a small, greenish park with a few concrete benches, and it was here that they decided to sit. The blank gray clouds showed no signs of relenting; not today, perhaps not ever. Nelson would’ve preferred a café or a restaurant, a place where he could have performed any number of chivalric gestures (pulling Ixta’s chair out for her, taking her coat), but it seems they’d walked in the wrong direction, away from everything, and into a warren of residential streets from which there was no visible escape. Perhaps she’d planned it that way. Perhaps she wanted no gestures. I’ve seen the park myself, and it’s true: in winter, it’s desolate and empty and feels not like the city but like an outpost of it. Nelson quietly despaired.

In the half hour that followed, he and Ixta touched on the following subjects: Ixta’s mother’s health; the latest film offerings; a near stampede at a local soccer stadium the previous Sunday, which Ixta’s younger brother had narrowly survived; the untimely death of a much-loved professor they both knew from the Conservatory; an article which had critiqued — quite harshly — a mutual friend’s latest gallery show, and the content of the paintings themselves (which Nelson hadn’t seen) but which Ixta described “as if a mad Botero had decided to reinterpret the oeuvre of Georgia O’Keeffe.”

She played that line as if it were hers, and both of them laughed.

In fact, that observation came from the critique, which, coincidentally, I had written, just before leaving the city for T—.

While Nelson was waiting for his courage to appear, Ixta observed the man she’d once imagined to be hers, and felt many things — heartache, nostalgia, even pity, but not romantic love; and the desolate streets of the Monument District provided an appropriate backdrop to these realizations. He kept up a nervous, steady stream of questions — about her work, her friends, her family — but for many minutes made no declarative statements and offered no confessions. Then she placed a hand on his shoulder—“To see if he were real,” she explained to me — and Nelson tensed like a child about to receive an injection.

“I’m sorry,” he said then. It was as if he’d been jolted to life. “I’ve been thinking I should tell you that.”

He paused, and turned sideways on the bench in order to face her. Ixta kept looking straight ahead.

“That’s what you’ve been thinking? That you’re sorry?”

He nodded, a gesture she didn’t see but sensed, the tiniest vibration in the winter air. She’d locked her eyes on the edge of the park, on a wall painted with a once colorful mural, now faded and scissored with cracks. It helped her remain steady, she confessed later, and in the anxious few moments that followed, she studied the turns and pivots of those cracks, as if attempting to memorize them.

It felt almost cruel to ask, “What is it you’re sorry for?”

“I should have treated you better.”

Ixta nodded. “Yes, I think we can agree on that.”

“That’s the first thing I wanted to say. There’s more.” He took a deep breath, and continued, his voice markedly different now. Strong, clear. “I thought about you every day in T—. Do you understand? I thought about you and me and the baby. I want to be someone you could love again. I’m sorry. I’ve wasted so much time. Do you hear me?”

She heard him.

“Look at me,” Nelson said, and she turned to face him. He reached out his hands. “I’m serious.”

“I know you are,” she answered.

Years before, a few weeks after they’d first met, Nelson and Ixta had gone south for a few days and camped along the beach. They were part of a large, boisterous group, and brought more alcohol than food. They’d made a bonfire and drank vast quantities. Nelson and Ixta spent the first night in a single sleeping bag that quickly became coated with a fine layer of sand. They hardly slept, but pressed against each other, the coarse sand between them, so that they emerged the next morning red-skinned and bleary-eyed. The day that followed and the next night and the day after — they all blurred, and when the sun rose behind them on the third morning, they watched in wonder as the surface of the ocean slowly distinguished itself from the horizon, like one of those old instant photos developing before their eyes. First, a thin, almost imperceptible line, a dark wall splitting in two; then the texture of the waves appeared, or was hinted at; and then, almost miraculously, there were gulls, floating lazily against a still-dark, purple sky. Finally — and this was most surprising of all, because their infatuation with each other had led them to believe they were alone in the world — they could make out the fishing trawlers bobbing in the distance, like the toys of a child. Nelson hadn’t said it at the time, because then as now he was afraid, but that morning, as dawn became day at the beach, he’d realized that he loved her.

He told her now. And when she didn’t answer, he asked: