Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

But that afternoon, after learning that Ixta had been with Nelson, Mindo was furious. He’d never liked the man he’d replaced, never liked the suggestion of him. He didn’t like the look in Ixta’s eyes when Nelson was mentioned, or the way she avoided saying his name when recounting anecdotes that self-evidently starred her former lover. She’d replace “Nelson” with anodyne phrases like “an old friend” or “someone I used to know,” a tic she’d never noticed until Mindo pointed it out to her. If Mindo had any suspicions about Ixta’s liaisons with Nelson, he didn’t bring them up with her. It may have been a matter of pride, or perhaps he preferred not to know. It doesn’t matter: now Mindo only wanted to find his rival.

Instead of Nelson, however, Mindo found Elías, who happened to be at the Conservatory that day, visiting old friends. Mindo knew he and Nelson were close. After the standard and truthful denials (“No, I haven’t seen him. No, I didn’t know he was back”), Elías, a little disconcerted by Mindo’s aggressive posture, suggested he check the old theater, the one at the edge of the Old City.

“Which one?”

Elías was being deliberately vague.

“The Olympic,” he said finally.

He felt as if he’d given up a secret, he told me months later, though in truth, he was only guessing, only thinking aloud.

“The porn spot?” Mindo said, then thanked him gruffly, and left.

“I don’t think we’d ever really talked before,” Elías told me. “I knew who he was, but not much more than that. And of course I never spoke to him again.”

“Did you ask why he was looking for Nelson? Did you wonder?”

Elías folded his hands together primly. “I wondered, yes. But I didn’t ask. He sounded like he was in a rush. He looked upset, and the truth is …” He paused here, as if ashamed to admit this: “I prefer not to speak to people when they’re like that.”

Mindo made his first appearance at the Olympic about a half hour before Nelson arrived there himself. There was knocking, pounding, fruitless bell ringing, shouting. Eventually, Patalarga heard the commotion, and went to the gate.

“I thought he was someone Jaime had sent,” Patalarga told me. “I just assumed that. I mean, who else would it have been?”

There were many plausible tactics available to him. Patalarga chose obfuscation. “Nelson’s not here,” he told the stranger.

“When will he be back?”

“Back?” He was careful to keep the gate closed, and not show his face. “Is he in the city?”

Mindo left without saying another word.

According to Patalarga, that afternoon Nelson was quiet, pensive, and answered every question in a way that seemed deliberately vague. He didn’t say, for example, why he’d left so early, where he’d been, or whom he’d seen; and soon enough Patalarga decided to let it go. The two of them ate an austere lunch, in the best tradition of their tour, and over this meal, Patalarga told Nelson the news: someone had come to the theater looking for him.

“Who?” Nelson asked.

Patalarga didn’t know. He told him about his brief interaction with the stranger, and they could come to only one conclusion: This man must be from T— or San Jacinto.

“Does anyone know you’re here?”

By that time, Mindo was drinking at a bar near the Conservatory, executing fine illustrations of clenched fists in his sketch pad. He would stay in the bar until well past nightfall, after it had swelled with a cast of regulars whom he mostly ignored (while ignoring Ixta’s increasingly urgent phone calls as well) before heading back to the theater just past midnight. He paid his bill but left no gratuity. His sketch pad would be found early that morning, tossed on the sidewalk a few blocks from the Olympic, next to his lifeless body.

MRS. ANABEL HAD DIEDearlier that week, leaving the town in a state of shock. The funeral was held a few days before Nelson arrived in the city, a beautiful, lugubrious affair, full of black-clad mourners, their faces twisted with sadness. Seeing them was more moving than the ceremony itself, than the death of this woman I barely knew: more than half of the town’s remaining residents gathered in the plaza, the stooped men and wrinkled women of my parents’ generation, the survivors. The principal brought the entire school too, fifty or sixty excitable children with no apparent understanding of what had happened or why they were there. They teased each other, giggling at all the wrong moments. It was refreshing. My father wore his dark suit, my mother her black shawl. A brass band struck up a warbling melody, and then the funeral party marched toward the cemetery, so slowly even Mrs. Anabel could’ve kept up. The people of T— never gathered this way anymore, except to say good-bye to one of their own; the event became something like a reunion. Jaime gave his eulogy at the grave site. “Everything I’ve accomplished is because of her,” he said, and the town nodded respectfully because they knew what that meant. He’d accomplished a lot; he was rich, wasn’t he?

Then the casket was lowered, and we all went home.

I spent the days after with my old man, pulling the rotted clay tiles off the roof. Oddly, the town had felt most alive at the funeral, but now it was as if we were the only people left in all of T—. Our work was done mostly in silence — this had always been my father’s way — but occasionally he’d pause and ask me to tell him again what I was doing back in the city, and what I hoped to do in the future. I liked these moments. It wasn’t a conversation I minded. I didn’t feel put upon, or pressured; I heard no disappointment in his voice, only a genuine curiosity about my life and my plans. The fact that I had no good answers felt less like a stressor and more like an opportunity. Each day, I offered a new hypothetical — going back to school, working in television, starting a restaurant — all fanciful, but not impossible, as if I were performing a kind of optimism I didn’t really have. My father seemed to appreciate it.

One morning, a few days after the funeral, we heard my mother calling up to us from the courtyard. She was with Noelia, and they stood side by side, necks craned in our direction, each with a curved hand shielding their eyes from the sun. Both wore long burgundy skirts and white blouses, with dark shawls draped over their shoulders, and for a moment, I thought they looked almost like sisters.

“Come down,” my mother said. “Noelia wants to speak with you.”

It was a bright, silent day, and the air was still. I love the way the human voice sounds on days like this — clear, warm, like it could carry all the way across a valley. I looked down at my mother, not realizing at first that she meant me, not my father. My old man shrugged, and pulled the brim of his cap down over his eyes. With that, I’d been dismissed.

I climbed down. Noelia smiled politely, not saying much. She kept her eyes narrowed against the sun, and she looked well, all things considered. The loss of her mother, the chaotic days after — she looked recovered, I thought, or perhaps I was only comparing her to my idea of what this kind of suffering should look like, how it would show on her face, in her eyes, in the tilt of her shoulders.

“I have something to show you,” she said.

My mother nodded.

Noelia went on. “Something I want you to see.”

We crossed the street, to her sunlit courtyard, overgrown and wild. The cats slept in the tall grass, and we ignored them, just as they ignored us. Jaime had gone back to San Jacinto, and for the first time in Noelia’s life, the house was all hers. She didn’t like the idea. Not one bit.