Daniel Alarcón: At Night We Walk in Circles

They found a restaurant along this renovated stretch of gaudy storefronts, a loud, brightly lit creole place, whose waiters hurried through the tables in period dress, evoking not so much a bygone historical era but the very contemporary tone of an amateurish theater production. Everyone is acting, Nelson thought, my brother and I too — and the idea saddened him. They ordered beers, and Francisco noted that they’d never had a drink together in their lives. They clinked bottles, forced smiles, but there was nothing to celebrate.

Francisco knew Nelson’s plans had changed, but he thought it was worth discussing. He was only desperate to recover something of that optimism, that closeness he’d felt with Nelson as recently as a month before. He found it hard to believe it could disappear so quickly, and so completely.

Nelson didn’t accept the premise. When Francisco asked, Nelson’s face screwed into a frown. “I don’t have plans anymore.”

“You don’t have plans? No, what you mean is—”

“You’ve seen her. You’ve seen how she is. I’m supposed to leave now?”

“I’m not saying now . Not immediate plans.”

Nelson rolled a bottle cap between his fingers, as if distracted. He wasn’t. “When will it be okay, do you think, to abandon my mother?”

Francisco sat back.

“I mean, let’s just estimate,” Nelson said. “Three months? Six months? A year?”

He fixed his gaze on his brother now.

“That’s not fair,” Francisco protested.

“Isn’t it?”

“Dad wouldn’t want you to …”

There was something steely and cold in Nelson’s eyes that kept Francisco from finishing that sentence. He never should’ve begun it, of course, but perhaps the damage was already done. Perhaps the damage had been done earlier, in 1992, when he left the country and his brother behind. Perhaps there was no way to repair it now. The two of them were silent for a while, which didn’t seem to bother Nelson at all. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself. He drank his beer unhurriedly, with an amused nonchalance, as if daring his older brother to speak.

A few days later, Francisco was on a flight back to California. Neither the future, in the general sense, or Nelson’s plans in particular, were mentioned again.

THE THEATER SAT AT THE EDGEof the Old City, in a rough, lawless neighborhood of decrepit houses, narrow streets, and metal gates held closed by rusting padlocks. It had once been known as the Olympic, the city’s premier stage for many years, though its glory days were long past. Nelson’s parents had taken in a show there once, when they were dating, an evening notable because it was the first time Sebastián ran his fingers along the inside of his future wife’s thigh. That night, Mónica sat almost perfectly still through the performance, widening her legs just enough to let him know she approved. 1965: the theater was in its prime; Sebastián and Mónica were too. Onstage, there was a comedy, but Nelson’s father paid no attention to the actors, imagining only the skin of his Mónica’s magnificent thighs, remembering to laugh only because those around him did.

The Olympic’s brightly lit marquee had once meant something; “A palace of dreams,” one of the founding members of Diciembre called it, remarking on the pride they felt the first time they performed there as a troupe, in 1984, two years before Henry’s arrest. But for Nelson and actors of his generation, it was simply a second-rate porn theater, frequented by old men, sad drunks, and prostitutes. Together, the worn-out members of these various tribes gathered to watch grainy films of blow jobs and acrobatic threesomes, projected out of focus on the yellow screen, sometimes without sound. Nelson didn’t know his parents’ story, but he had his own. Before this rehearsal, he’d been to the Olympic exactly twice: the first time, at age thirteen, with a few friends, when we’d pretended to be horrified and uninterested. A couple of months later, he returned, alone. That day he sat, as his father once had, thinking of flesh. Unlike his father, Nelson jerked off furiously and violently; one might even say ecstatically. (One assumes his father would have done the same, only after , in private.) To Nelson’s credit, he had enough presence of mind to avoid staining the pants of his school uniform, a fact noted with pride in his journal, entry dated September 2, 1991. He emerged from the darkened theater with a feeling of accomplishment.

In a sense, the Olympic had been a palace of dreams for Nelson as well.

Then, in 1993, there was a small fire, which caused just enough damage to shut down the porn operation. The Olympic was abandoned. Five years later, Patalarga took the money he’d made from his leather business and bought it from the city for a song. His wife was opposed to the purchase, but he insisted. The Olympic sat, mostly unused, for three years while Patalarga figured out what to do with it.

It was this man, the owner, who opened the door when Nelson arrived for the first rehearsal. He was short; dark-skinned; neither heavy nor thin, but stout; with full cheeks and wide, green eyes. His black hair was cut short and combed forward, and he wore a cell phone the size of a woman’s pocketbook clipped to his belt.

They shook hands; they introduced themselves.

“Patalarga?” Nelson asked, just to be certain he’d heard correctly.

This man had another name, a long, multisyllabic given name, known only to a handful of close friends, and which no one used regularly anymore but his elderly mother. When Patalarga was a child, his mother had used that birth name in a variety of ways, with different intentions, intonations, and gravity, depending on her mood, or the weather: to curse her absent husband, for example, to remind Patalarga of his heritage, or to evoke the passing of the years. In his hometown, or what remained of it, that name still had resonance, and there were those who could read his past and predict his future by the mere sound of it. Of course, that’s precisely why Patalarga had left that town and why he stayed away. When he was older, in the city, he’d shed that name as a snake sheds its skin, and felt nothing but relief.

“That’s right,” he said now. “Just Patalarga.”

The two men stood for a moment, something unspoken floating between them. The wood floor was dusty and cracked; the theater’s ticket booth, which had once represented so much possibility for Nelson and his father, was covered with a slab of pressboard. Nelson looked up at the ceiling of the ruined lobby: even the chandeliers seemed poised to fall at any moment.

“We’ve never met before?” Patalarga asked.

“At the audition.”

“Besides that.”

“No.”

Patalarga stepped closer. He could sense the young man’s doubts. Nelson was half a head taller, but still Patalarga managed to throw an arm around the actor, and dropped his voice to a low rumble. “Have you been here before?”

“No,” Nelson lied.

“Do you know Diciembre? Do you know what we do?”

Nelson said he did.

Patalarga shook his head. “You think you do.”

“I know this is where you put on The Idiot President . I’ve read Mr. Nuñez’s work.”

Patalarga smiled. “Good. Make sure you tell him how much you like it. He’s not well these days.”

Then he led Nelson into the theater, through the foyer (strong smell of bleach, threadbare carpet worn to a shine), and past the doors, to the orchestra. The brass-plated seat numbers had mostly been stolen, pried off, sold for scrap at some secondhand market on the outskirts of the capital. Some rows had seats gone as well, recalling for Nelson the proud, gap-toothed grin of a child. He searched involuntarily for the spot where he’d sat that second time—“my triumph over shame,” he’d written in his journal — as if one could remember that sort of thing. The carpet had been pulled up in certain places, and the cement floor below was adorned with overlapping oil stains, evidence of some carelessly attempted, and casually abandoned, repair.