Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

“They’re about the tour,” I said. “Up until the morning he left to come home.”

She nodded gravely. “Should I read them?”

“Yes,” I said. “They might help.”

By the time I left it was nearly ten o’clock. I gave her the journals (which had always belonged to her, which had never been mine) and promised to visit again.

November passed, the New Year came, and I went to see Mónica again. This time we spoke for many hours. I recorded that conversation. She’d read my magazine. “It isn’t bad,” she said. I told her I was going to write about Nelson’s case, and she gave me her blessing. We looked through the old photo albums, and when I left that day, she lent me some of his journals. We made a list of the people I should talk to; old classmates mostly, a few kids from the neighborhood, but also a couple of names from the Conservatory, classmates who’d come to visit her since the news had broken.

“But I don’t really know who his friends were,” she confessed with a sigh.

“At a certain age, that’s normal.”

She smiled. “Is it? I’m not so sure.” She gave me Francisco’s number in California, and I promised to call him. “And have you spoken with the actors? The gentlemen from Diciembre?”

I’d already planned a visit to the Olympic, and chatted briefly by phone with Henry.

“Good,” Mónica said. “But you should start with Ixta.”

I had tried her twice already and been rejected — but after seeing Mónica, I insisted. The third time I rang her door, Ixta let me in, scowling.

“Again?” she asked. “For the love of God, what’s wrong with you?”

IN APRIL 2002,while the court proceedings were being held up, I went back to T—, following the path that Diciembre had taken the previous year. I spoke with as many people as I could, taking notes, making recordings, and helping them make sense of their memories. I spoke with Cayetano and Melissa, with Tania, and attempted to find the bar in Sihuas where they’d seen all the gold miners, but the authorities had shut it down. I spoke with people who’d seen Diciembre’s performances, and heard a few phrases again and again: “He was such a nice boy!” and “What a show!” In my hometown I managed, with some coaxing, to draw a few people out of their reticence. Nothing having to do with Jaime was ever openly discussed. Whenever anyone asked, I said I was writing a piece for a magazine, and they’d look at me suspiciously. A newspaper, that they would’ve accepted; even a book would’ve made sense. But a magazine?

Who did I think I was?

I went to see Jaime in San Jacinto, intending to pose all the questions I could safely ask. I would not say, for example, “Why did you let your brother take the fall for your drug shipment?” or “Did you send someone to kill Nelson?” or “Who was driving that station wagon the night Mindo was killed?” I had a list of other questions, more innocent-sounding ones, but in the end, it didn’t matter, because he refused to see me at all.

In August 2002, Nelson’s trial got under way, and I attended as many days as I could. I often saw Henry or Patalarga there, sitting in the back, whispering among themselves, and during breaks we’d discuss the proceedings like fans at a sporting event. Our team was losing; that much was clear. I was there when the judge refused to allow the notebooks to be entered into evidence, and decreed that no theory relating Mindo’s death to events in T— was admissible. “Hearsay,” he called it, and Nelson was sunk. I was in the courtroom the day Mindo’s sister called Ixta “a dirty slut” from the witness stand; Mónica sat in the third row with her sister, Astrid, weeping. She appeared in a few of the papers the next morning, under headlines about “a mother’s sadness.”

One day, at the courthouse, Nelson’s uncle Ramiro turned around in his seat, and eyed me, frowning. Then his expression softened.

“It’s like you’re always here,” he said, in a tone of amazement. “Don’t you have something else to do?”

I sometimes wondered the same thing. My colleagues at the magazine, the ones who’d encouraged me at first — they wondered too. “Where’s your article?” Lizzy asked me from time to time, and I’d put her off. Eventually she stopped asking.

I was at Nelson’s sentencing in February 2003, a full two years after the auditions that had changed his life. Mindo’s father had passed away by then, but his mother was there, stoic, and unblinking. She barely reacted at all when the judge announced a sentence of fifteen years. The term felt like an eternity to all of us who sided with Nelson, who believed he was incapable of murder, but I could tell that to Mindo’s mother it felt like an insult.

Only fifteen years.

In the gallery’s front row Mónica collapsed into her sister’s arms, and Nelson was taken away again, back to Collectors, with a look on his face of utter bewilderment. He’d lost weight and had an unhealthy pallor. I don’t think he ever understood that this was actually happening, that this was his life now.

IN THE MONTHSthat followed, he wrote letters to his mother, which she showed me, very beautiful letters that described his friends, his surroundings, and detailed his concerns. He’d been placed among inmates from the northern districts, as far from the Thousands as possible, for his own safety. There was a very real possibility that someone from Mindo’s old neighborhood might seek to avenge the painter’s death. He described the power structure of the prison, the fearsome men who ran it, who hailed from districts of the city Nelson had never set foot in, but which he now knew intimately. He knew the way these men spoke, what worried them, what motivated them. They were men who demanded respect, and who were prepared to go to war over any perceived insult, no matter how slight. Nelson described the cramped quarters, his melancholy cell mate (whom he called “roommate,” because it sounded “less institutional”); and how quickly a placid day inside could shift and become spectacularly violent. He told his mother about the roving bands of homeless inmates who camped in the rocky field outside his block, and he expressed wonder at their plight. What surprised him the most was that everyone else accepted the situation of these people as normal. There was nowhere to house them, no one wanted them, and so there they were: three hundred shirtless, shoeless men, hungry, drug-addled, dying slowly en masse. The year before Nelson’s arrival, one young addict had climbed up the radio tower (which hadn’t worked in two decades) and hung himself with a gray scarf. When they brought his body down, they left the scarf, and it had stayed there, the prison’s new and unofficial flag. Nelson never knew the man, but could understand him, he said in a letter, not to his mother but to Patalarga — he kept the worst details from her, so as not to add to her worry. He talked about the view from the roof of his block, the open sky, the hillsides dotted every day with new homes. He watched the women carrying water up the hill in plastic buckets, watched them pause to wipe the sweat from their brows. They were very poor, but he envied them.

“By the time I come out, the hillside will be covered,” he wrote to his mother, “and I won’t have anywhere to live.” Sometimes, he confessed to Patalarga, he lost track of who he was. “I stopped playing Rogelio a long time ago, and yet here I am.”

This was the point that most troubled Henry. Some six months after the verdict, he called and asked if I could come see him. Like all former inmates accused of terrorism, he was barred from visiting, and was anxious to know how Nelson was holding up. He and Patalarga had had another falling out since the end of the trial; so that left me.