Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

He paused here, and now they all fell silent, for he had gone too far. Sebastián’s absence shifted the air in the room.

“I’m sorry,” Ramiro said, but it was too late. Mónica had already closed her eyes, which had begun to tear. She went home soon after, and hardly slept all night, wondering if what her brother-in-law had said was true.

THE FACTORS THAT LEDMindo to the theater that night are plain enough — jealousy, a general frustration with his circumstances, compounded by an afternoon and evening of heavy drinking. What’s just as clear is that they needn’t have. Any number of small shifts might have led him away from danger, instead of toward it. He might have answered one of Ixta’s half dozen calls to his cell phone, for example, rushed home, and made peace with her. He might have run into a friend, who would’ve helped steer him back to his apartment. He was, according to the accounts of the waiters who served him, so staggeringly drunk that it’s a small miracle he was even able to find the Olympic in the dim labyrinthine streets of the Old City. But he did find it. And when he arrived, he fulfilled the role the script required of him: he pounded his fist on the gate, he shouted for the man he now realized was his rival.

“We heard him yelling, and we were scared,” Patalarga later admitted. “Concerned. It was a howl, almost like something from a horror film.”

They froze, fell silent, and let the sound of that distant, haunting voice float through the theater.

They put down their props, and sat on the stage. Perhaps, the three of them thought, he would simply tire and leave, but many minutes passed, and the voice showed no signs of flagging.

“Open the door!” Mindo called, the vowels stretched long. “Open up!”

Henry described it to me as eerie: the lonely, pained, singsong voice of a jealous man, now weary, now menacing, filling the old theater like a dirge. “It was nice, in a way,” he said. “I think that’s what I remember most about it. How disconcertingly beautiful it sounded.”

Meanwhile, Nelson wore a look of deep concentration. Finally he said, “I know that voice.”

“We assumed,” Patalarga told me, “that he meant that he knew the voice from back in the mountains. I asked him who it was, and he shook his head.”

“I’ve heard it before, that’s all.”

Then Nelson stood.

“Where are you going?” Patalarga asked.

“To see who it is.”

Patalarga was horrified, but it was exactly as Ixta said: Nelson never listened. He strode through the theater, through the lobby, and out to the gate, his two concerned, disbelieving friends trailing behind him. He was still safe, on his own side of the metal barrier that separated the Olympic from the street, when he called out, “Who is it?”

“I know that voice,” Nelson said again, in a whisper this time.

Much later, Ixta would run down for me the very limited contact the two men in her life had chanced to have. There was the time Mindo picked up her cell phone when she was in the shower. They spoke for a few minutes, Nelson pretending to be a cousin who was in town visiting from the United States.

“A bad lie,” Ixta told me darkly. “A very bad and unnecessary lie. Ninety-nine out of one hundred people would have simply hung up. But he was an actor, and he told me it would’ve been unsporting.”

Unsporting or not, it would have been wiser. The only stroke of good fortune was that Nelson had called from a pay phone. For a few days afterward, Mindo asked again and again about this phantom cousin.

When will we meet him?

What does he do?

How exactly is he related?

Mindo asked with such persistence that Ixta was inevitably drawn into the lie.

“And in spite of what you might think,” she said to me, “I hated doing that to Mindo.”

They each knew about the other, perhaps more than they would’ve cared to know. Nelson had asked around about Mindo, taking some care to steer clear of him. On several occasions, Mindo quizzed Ixta about Nelson, all the while feigning a lack of interest.

The two men had acquaintances, but not friends, in common, so perhaps it was inevitable that they’d cross paths eventually. One afternoon, in November of the previous year, not long after Nelson and Ixta’s affair got under way, Nelson ran into the couple at a bar in La Julieta. If it was awkward, it was also mercifully brief — a grimaced exchange of pleasantries, a handshake, and little else. Ixta watched, her heart racing, as her two lovers shared a few words. She laughed now and again to paper over prickly silences, and breathed a heavy sigh when Nelson excused himself. Later that evening, when she and Mindo were alone, he confessed that he’d recognized Nelson immediately, not because they’d ever met before, but because he’d opened Ixta’s old photo albums one day while she was at work, just to have a look.

“Why would you do that?” she asked.

“They were poking out of a box. I got curious. And also, because I barely know you.”

His tone, Ixta reported to me, was neither accusatory nor grim, only resigned. Then he smiled, as if he were afraid he’d said something wrong. He hadn’t. They’d rushed into it. Ixta was, by then, moved in; and yet their life was under construction. In some ways, it never really got much farther.

That night at the Olympic, the three members of Diciembre stood on the safe side of the metal barrier, listening. The closer you got to the sound of Mindo’s voice, the less frightening it was. Still, both Henry and Patalarga were surprised when Nelson announced that he was letting the man in.

“What if he has a weapon?” Patalarga remembers asking.

“He doesn’t,” Nelson answered. His eyes were bright, as if he’d just solved a puzzle. “It’s Ixta’s boyfriend.”

And he opened the gate. Just like that.

Months later, when Patalarga described this moment to me, he was still shaking his head. There was very little time to prepare. “I imagined a raging jealous lunatic. I imagined an animal.”

Instead they got Mindo. Asked to describe him, both Henry and Patalarga began with the same word: “drunk.” The toxicology report concurs. This should not necessarily imply that Mindo was a drinker; in fact, by all accounts he drank only occasionally. But given the circumstances, one understands why he was in that state. “It must have been a terrible shock,” Ixta told me. “He must have thought something was happening between me and Nelson.”

I pressed her on this — I mean, something was happening, something had been happening, right?

She blushed. “You know what I mean. I’d turned him down.”

“And you meant it?”

She frowned.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “What do you want?”

What Ixta did confirm was that Mindo had a remarkable tolerance, and could keep himself upright long past the point when lesser men would have succumbed. One imagines an alternative version of this evening, in which Mindo passes out at the bar, his drawings of clenched fists scattered beside him, and is woken a few hours before dawn, heartsick, disappointed, but alive. He would have no such luck. As it happened, Mindo appeared before the suddenly open gate of the Olympic with drunkenness painted on him like a carnival mask. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and his features had a blurred, unsettled quality. His eyes sagged, his lips drooped. His olive green jacket appeared ready to slip off his shoulder at any moment. He glanced left and right, and then down at his feet, as if to confirm that he was actually standing there, at the rusted gate of the Olympic.

Night had brought with it a blanket of wet, heavy fog, and the streetlights above flowered in hazy yellow bursts.