Daniel Alarcón: At Night We Walk in Circles

Meanwhile, Nelson’s obsession with the United States animated his teen years. With the help of his father’s library access, he learned a more than passable English (though his accent was described by a former teacher with whom I spoke as “simply horrific”), and even a basic familiarity with American history. He studied the geography, and followed his brother’s itinerant journey across the country, placing himself alongside Francisco in each and every one of these towns: unglamorous places like Birmingham, Alabama; St. Louis, Missouri; Denton, Texas; Carson City, Nevada. He’d read his brother’s letters, and begun to engage in a kind of magical thinking.

At first, filled with hope, he thought: That could be me.

Then, with a hint of bitterness: That should be me.

Sometimes, just before sleeping: That is me.

In interviews, an interesting portrait emerges: Nelson telling friends his residency papers would soon come, that he’d soon be off, even bragging about it, his imminent departure a matter of pride. One wonders how much of this he believed, and how much of it was posturing.

“He could be a little smug, honestly,” said Juan Carlos, a young man who claimed to have been Nelson’s best friend from 1993 until 1995. “At the end of every school year, he’d say good-bye, letting it slip that he probably wouldn’t be back the following term. He’d shrug about it, feigning indifference, as if it were all out of his hands. He was going to study theater in New York, that’s what he always said, but the next year, he’d be back, and if you ever asked him about it, he’d just ignore the question. He had this skill. He was very good at changing the subject. It was something we all admired.”

The much-promised and much-delayed travel document finally arrived at the American embassy in January 1998, three, or even four years late. The war was over, and the country was beginning to emerge from its depression. Nelson sprang into action. He was entering his third year at the Conservatory, and began to study his options with a seriousness his parents found impressive: as a playwright and actor, New York was naturally his preferred destination, but he would also consider Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco. His brother was living across the Bay in a city called Oakland, tending bar and working alongside a kind older gentleman named Hassan who owned a clothing store. (All of which was a great disappointment to Mónica and Sebastián, though mostly to Sebastián, who’d wanted Francisco to have a different sort of career.) In those months, the two brothers spoke often and enthusiastically about Nelson’s plans, discussing the future with an excitement and optimism Nelson would later think of as naive. Francisco went along, even going so far as to visit a few local drama schools in the Bay Area, asking of the admissions officers the precise questions that Nelson had dictated to him over the phone: What percentage of students continue to further study? Who are your most successful alumni? Who is your typical alum? What percentage of the incoming class has read Eugene O’Neill? What percentage has read Beckett?

When Sebastián died suddenly in September 1998, these plans, those conversations, and that intimacy vanished.

No one had to tell Nelson that he could no longer leave. It was never discussed. He understood it very clearly the instant he saw his mother for the first time, in the hospital, immediately after Sebastián’s stroke. He found her facing the window at the end of the hall; she was backlit, but even in silhouette, Nelson could tell she was shattered. The hallways of the clinic smelled like formaldehyde, and as he walked, Nelson could feel his feet sticking to the floor. Mónica’s neck was tilted in defeat, her shoulders slumped. When he reached out to touch her, she startled.

“It’s me,” he said, somehow expecting, or perhaps only hoping, this might calm her down. It didn’t. Mónica collapsed into his chest.

Nelson thought: She’s mine now, she’s my responsibility.

And he was right.

Francisco returned in time for the funeral, dismayed to find his mother so broken and his brother so distant. He felt tremendously guilty (even tearing up when he recalled it to me), and Nelson, being Nelson, opted not to make things easier. Perhaps that’s uncharitable; perhaps Nelson simply couldn’t have made it easier for his remorseful brother. Perhaps he didn’t know how. They hadn’t seen each other in more than five years, and hardly knew how to be in the same room anymore. Nelson didn’t cry in his brother’s presence, something Francisco found disconcerting, since his every inclination in those first days home was to weep. He’d never wanted to come back like this; now he hated himself for having postponed a visit home for so long.

Mónica’s two sons spent most of their time sitting on either side of their mother, receiving guests. The condolences were torturous. Francisco and Nelson both cursed this tradition. When they found themselves alone, they spoke in hushed tones about their concern for their mother, but not about their own feelings. (“Numb,” Francisco told me. “That’s what I felt. Numb.”) There were some unpleasant postmortem details to handle — closing certain accounts, going through their father’s desk in the basement of the National Library, etc. — tasks which they performed together.

After much insistence from Francisco, they finally went out one night, just the two of them. Mónica’s sister Astrid had offered to keep their mother company. Nelson drove his father’s old car, which still smelled of Sebastián, a fact which was obvious to him, but not to Francisco, who’d been gone too long to remember something as important as how their father had smelled. The evening was cold and damp, but Francisco had scarcely left his mother’s side in the week he’d been home, and the very idea of being out in the streets of the city filled him with wonder. He asked Nelson to drive slowly; he wanted to see it all. It had been only six years, but nothing was as he remembered — it was like visiting the place for the very first time. He marveled at the brightly lit casinos lining Marina Avenue, neon castles built as if from the scavenged ruins of foreign amusement parks. There was a miniature Statue of Liberty, slightly more voluptuous than the original, smiling coquettishly and wearing sunglasses; there was a replica Eiffel Tower, its metal spire glowing amid klieg lights. A few blocks down, a semifunctional windmill presided over a bingo parlor called Don Quixote’s. On a windy day, Nelson explained, this attraction might even rotate, albeit very slowly. It was not uncommon to see young couples posing for pictures with the windmill, turning its blades by hand and laughing. Sometimes they wore wedding clothes. It was impossible to say when, how, or why this place had become a landmark, but it had.

Francisco noted each as they passed. “How long has this one been there?” he’d ask, and Nelson would shrug, because he had no answers and little interest. He found his brother’s curiosity unseemly. He’d long ago decided not to pay attention, because it was impossible to keep up with anyway. Maps of this city are outdated the moment they leave the printers. The avenue they drove along, for example: its commercial area had been cratered by a bomb in the late eighties — both Nelson and Francisco had clear memories of the incident — and the frightened residents had done what they could to move elsewhere, to safer, or seemingly safer, districts. Its sidewalks had once been choked with informal vendors, but these were run off by police in the early nineties, and had reconvened in a market built especially for them in an abandoned lot at the corner of University Avenue. Now the area was showing signs of life again: a new mall had been inaugurated, and some weekends it was glutted with shoppers who had money to spend, a development everyone, even the shoppers themselves, found surprising.