Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She pursed her lips. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

Like most grown-ups in my hometown, Noelia was familiar, in a very broad sense; she had a look of stoicism that I associated with every adult from T—. I remembered her, even if I knew almost nothing about her beyond the fact that she lived across the street from the house where I was born.

I lied: “Of course I do.”

“It’s fine. Really.”

“I do.”

“I was there when you were born. I’ve known you since you were a flea.” She smiled now. “And look at you! You’re all grown.”

Noelia asked me to wait while she went to the room where her mother had died. I sat in the courtyard with my back against one of the walls, resting in the shade. It was another perfect day. She came back with the journals. They were handed over with some ceremony, these three ordinary notebooks tied together with a piece of string, covering most of the previous six months. They had no decoration, no stickers or markings on the outside, nothing, in fact, to identify them, beyond the normal wear. Now Noelia untied the string for me, flipped through them idly. The last of them, the most recent, was on top, a quarter of it still empty.

“They’re Rogelio’s.”

“Nelson’s?” I asked.

“If you prefer.”

“What should I do with them?”

“You should take them when you go home, to the city. You can give them back to him.”

It must have been clear by my expression that I was less than eager to take this on.

“But mostly, I think I should get them out of this house.” She leaned in: “My brother wants to find Nelson. He sent someone to the capital to look for him.”

“To look for him? Why?”

She offered me a careful smile. “You don’t know?”

I assured her I didn’t.

“My brother is very proud. He feels disrespected.” Noelia sighed. “It’s best for everyone if we forget all this. My brother especially. So take them. Don’t make too much of it. Just take them.”

She nodded, and I found myself nodding too. I could have said no, I suppose, but no good reason to refuse came to mind; Noelia stood before me, with her simple, pleading smile; I froze. She wanted me to have them.

I took the notebooks, reading relief on her face as she handed them over. I carried them back across the street, where I wrapped them in an old paper bag, and left them untouched at the foot of my bed. My father and I returned to our work, to our panoramic views of T—, the empty town below us, and our steady, plodding conversation about my future.

Eventually I went back to the city, and in truth, I almost left the journals behind. I happened to see them as I was packing, thought back to my conversation with Noelia, and decided to take them along.

Still I didn’t read them. This is the truth: I had no interest. Not for many months, not until I heard what had happened.

HENRY APPEAREDat the Olympic just before six in the evening. In truth, he hadn’t intended to come at all, but driving his cab after school he’d chanced to drop off a fare not far from the theater. As he made note of this coincidence, a parking spot opened up before him. He shuddered, then eased the car to the curb, shut off the engine, and sat for a moment. He listened to the news on the radio, waiting for a signal.

See him: his severe expression, his keen sense of victimization. He likely sat for a quarter of an hour, listening for something only he would recognize, wearing what his ex-wife described to me as “his pre-crucifixion face”: furrowed brow, unfocused eyes gazing at the middle distance, pursed lips, and his chin pulled back toward his chest, like a turtle trying but unable to get back in its shell. “A fake stoicism,” she called it, for Henry, in her view, was anything but stoic. “He could play stoic,” she clarified, but that was different. Still, she knew this pose well, for it was this face, she admitted, that had seduced her “back when we were young and beautiful.” She laughed then, not to dismiss what she’d just said, or make light of it, but as if to perform it: in laughter, Henry’s ex-wife was transformed before my eyes and became, in spite of the years, young and indeed very beautiful.

Eventually Henry tired of waiting, got out of the car, and walked toward the theater. He used his keys on the gate, surprised that they still worked, and found his two friends on their knees in the lobby of the Olympic, with hammers in their hands, talking wildly about a man who’d come to the city to murder Nelson. They were pulling up rotten wooden floorboards, a repair Patalarga had been talking about for months.

“It was startling to say the least,” Henry told me later.

The supposed murderer, the one Nelson and Patalarga had conjured out of an initial bout of genuine concern, had been replaced by another, less frightening villain, a blend of various comic-book bad guys and assorted ruffians they’d met on tour. Men with potbellies and bad teeth, men who swore in ornate neologisms and kept shiny rings on every finger. Nelson and Patalarga felt better in the company of these invented scoundrels, who needless to say had nothing in common with Mindo.

Nelson and Patalarga were laughing, working at a furious pace, and obviously enjoying themselves. Months later, when I first visited the Olympic, I’d come across this very same pile, those slats of rotting wood that Nelson and Patalarga pulled up that day. They were lying in the middle of the space, like kindling for a bonfire. Patalarga and I strolled past them, without comment.

“I had a hard time joining in,” Henry said to me. He asked them to back up and explain, and they did, partially. He gathered the basics: Something had gone very wrong back in T—, and Nelson was in danger. Rogelio’s mother might have died, and though it wasn’t Nelson’s fault, it was possible that Jaime was holding him responsible. He’d escaped.

Henry frowned. “And the girl?”

Nelson shrugged. It was the part of the story he didn’t want to tell. So he didn’t.

“When did you come home?” Henry asked instead.

“Yesterday.”

Henry nodded. “You don’t look well.”

“Neither do you.”

It was true. He’d seemed healthier, more alive on the tour; now Henry’s age showed. These late middle years offended his vanity. He was looking forward to being old, when he would no longer be tormented by memories of youth.

“I suppose you’re right,” he said.

Patalarga offered Henry a hammer, but the playwright demurred. He did so wordlessly, gripping his right shoulder with his left hand and grimacing, as if he were nursing some terrible injury. Patalarga set the hammer down, and the two old friends looked at each other warily. Besides the odd conversation here and there, they hadn’t spoken since Jaime shipped them back to the city. Each of them considered the other to be somehow at fault for this.

Henry sighed. “So this bad guy, this villain. Are we afraid of him?”

He asked in a tone very specific to the world they inhabited: it was the way an actor inquired about his character.

Patalarga nodded. “We are.”

“No,” Nelson said, suddenly buoyant. “We aren’t.”

Patalarga laughed, but qualified his friend’s denial. “We aren’t terrified. We’re concerned.”

“Nelson smiled in a way that put me at ease,” Henry told me. “And understand that I had no context for any of this. If he was calm, why shouldn’t I be?”

If it wasn’t quite old times, it was a passable facsimile. They abandoned the work and moved into the theater itself, spreading out on the stage where Nelson and Patalarga had slept the night before. They laughed a little, and filled each other in on recent developments. Henry was appalled to learn that Patalarga was having trouble with Diana, and urged him to reconcile. There was a surprising insistence to his tone.