Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

“Call my mother,” Nelson shouted to Ixta as he was taken away. “Please call my mother.”

“I did that, at least,” Ixta told me. “I don’t know how, but I did it.”

Mónica confirmed this. “A call no mother should ever receive,” she said when I asked. Her eyes were closed tightly. “I didn’t see him for another three days.”

And when she did, it was in Collectors.

THE NEWS NEVER MADE ITto our town, though I suspect Jaime must have heard. I imagine it concerned him; I don’t believe he intended for anyone to die, and, if he did, that person was certainly not Mindo. But these things happen, and Jaime was well acquainted with unexpected outcomes. His work had taught him about the occasional necessity of violence and the randomness of the law. When he learned of Nelson’s arrest and the accusation against him, one imagines he might even have smiled. Setting aside for a moment Mindo’s unfortunate demise, from the point of view of Mrs. Anabel’s grieving son, justice had been done.

I left T— in late August, but heard nothing of Nelson’s predicament until a few months later. I wouldn’t say that I’d forgotten him, only that my life went on. I was lucky enough to find work at a magazine that had launched while I was away, a publication that quite miraculously still survives, and where I work even now. There were four of us on staff then (today we are twelve), and at the beginning we did everything: the writing and editing, the layout and design. We were the accountants, which explains why bankruptcy loomed each month; and we were the custodial staff, which explains why the office was in a state of constant disarray. The owners, the impatient but enthusiastic Jara brothers, would come by the office once a month; we’d all pile into their battered old van, and deliver the magazines ourselves. We ended these days at our favorite bar, just a few blocks from the office. I liked the Jaras, liked my coworkers, and this was something I’d never experienced before. We were paid laughable wages, but in exchange were allowed to write whatever we wanted, more or less. Every month we got letters from readers, which we passed around the office like love notes.

On one of these nights after having delivered an issue, the managing editor, Lizzy, brought up the many local scandals I’d missed on “my Andean sabbatical.” That was what she called my time in T—, a phrase made charming by the playful manner in which she offered it to the group. It had become a running joke: when I interviewed for the job I’d only been back in the city a few days, and must have seemed a little out of sorts. Still, I was hired, and often entertained my new friends with the folkloric details of provincial life; they, in turn, pretended to be amazed. I let this playacting go on, because it was obvious to me that we all came from similar backgrounds, that we all had similarly tense relationships with our families, with our cultural inheritance.

“That hometown of yours,” Lizzy or one of the others might say. “What year is it out there?”

Everyone would laugh, including me. Time, we all knew, was a very relative concept.

That evening — it was late October 2001—among the scandals mentioned was the story of a young theater actor who’d murdered his rival in a fit of jealous rage. “The sort of thing that never happens where you’re from,” Lizzy said, waving an open hand to signify the provinces. She went on, others joined in, and together my new friends told the story. They cycled through what details they could remember: the disputed paternity, the actor and painter dueling on a late-night street in the Old City. Some particulars had vanished: my friends had a hard time remembering the name of the theater where the killer had been hiding out, or the plays he’d been in before his arrest. But the pregnant girl, the woman at the center of all this; they remembered her. She was an actress, like her lover; very striking, though she never smiled in photos. She’d appeared in the papers under a number of unflattering captions: “The Ice Woman Cometh” or “Blood Wedding.”

And they recalled her name. It was unforgettable, a name rarely heard in these parts.

“Ixta,” they said as one.

Ixta, I repeated to myself.

Our bar — we considered it ours — was and remains one of the places I feel most at home in the world. There are no surprises and not a thing is out of place. But when I heard the name Ixta, I felt a kind of vertigo. This comfortable setting looked suddenly strange to me. My friends too. What they were saying struck me as so dismaying, so arbitrary, that I wondered for a moment if they were having fun at my expense.

Finally I asked, “Was the actor named Nelson?”

“That’s it,” Lizzy said, grinning. “Nelson!”

That is what sent me on this path. I told them about T—, about my interaction with the murderer, and they didn’t believe me. I insisted, and that evening we decided I should write it all down. I even had his journals! We thought it would become a piece for the magazine, maybe even a cover story. It would’ve been my first.

I went back and looked at the press from the days immediately after Mindo’s death, and saw that it was all true: Nelson’s name and photo had been splashed across the front pages of all the local papers. It was unsettling to see him, this man I’d met so briefly, back in July. I spent many days gathering clippings, making lists of places to visit, people I might want to see. The Olympic appeared in a few television reports I managed to find, described as if it were some sort of criminal hangout; this, I later learned, is what finally drove Patalarga to reunite with his wife, moving home in the dead of night, in the hopes of avoiding any further attentions from the media. In the papers I saw many of the people who would later become my informants. Some, like Mónica or Ixta, did all they could to avoid the cameras; others, like Elías and a few of Nelson’s other friends, took the opposite approach, speaking all too freely, as if they were auditioning for a role.

I FINALLY READNelson’s journals, the ones Noelia had given me, and after a good deal of encouragement from my colleagues at the magazine, decided to visit Mónica. At the time I had no real sense of Nelson’s guilt or innocence. Just curiosity. It wasn’t difficult to find her, and one evening in November, I knocked on her door. Until that point, I’d been another kind of journalist; she appeared behind her gate, watching me, and I became someone else. She was a slight, tired-looking woman with short hair and a pair of reading glasses twirling in one hand. I was so nervous I could barely explain who I was, or what I wanted.

“I know Nelson,” I blathered finally, and this seemed to get her attention. At the sound of her son’s name, she narrowed her eyes at me, and opened the gate.

We sat in the living room, and while I told her my story, Mónica focused her attention on an origami swan she was making from the tea bag wrapper. When she was done, she placed it on the coffee table with the others, a flock of six or seven, all of them looking in different directions.

“So you met my son in T—,” she said. “Is that all?”

Then I showed her the notebooks, and she almost broke down. She held them for a moment, flipping through the pages quickly, inhaling the scent. After a moment, she shook her head and set them beside her on the sofa.

“What do they say?”

I considered lying, just telling her I hadn’t read them. She gave me a searching look, and I realized the only option was to tell the truth. Of course I’d read them; that’s why I was there.