Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles

The playwright sat at the foot of the stage, a script in his lap, his legs dangling off the edge. He seemed rather small, even childlike, the domed roof of the theater rising high above him. He didn’t look up when Nelson appeared, but instead kept on reading inaudibly to himself. It was his own script, naturally; and as he read, he marveled, not at its quality (which in truth he found suspect) but at its mere survival. His own.

Patalarga was right; Henry was not well. The playwright explained it to me this way: that week, and in all the weeks since that first rereading of his old script, even his daughter’s artwork had been unable to shake him from this melancholy. He’d begun to think very deeply and with some clarity about his time in prison. Who he was before, whom he’d become after, and how — or even if — those two men were related. There were many things he’d forgotten, others he’d attempted to forget; but the day he was sent to Collectors, Henry told me, was the loneliest of his life. He realized that day that nothing he’d ever learned previously had any relevance anymore, and each step he took away from the gate and toward his new home was like walking into a tunnel, away from the light. He was led through the prison complex, a vision of hell in those days, full of half-dead men baring the scarred chests to the world, impervious to the cold. He’d never been more scared in his life. One man promised to kill him at the first opportunity, that evening perhaps, if it could be arranged. Another, to fuck him. A third looked at him with the anxious eyes of a man hiding some terrible secret. Two guards led Henry through the complex, men whom he’d previously thought of as his tormentors, but who now felt like his protectors, all that stood between him and this anarchy. Halfway to the block, he realized they were as nervous as he was, that they, like him, were doing all they could to avoid eye contact with the inmates that surrounded them. At the door to the block, the guards unlocked Henry’s handcuffs, and turned to leave.

The playwright looked at them helplessly. “Won’t you stay?” he asked, as if he were inviting them in for a drink.

The two guards wore expressions of surprise.

“We can’t,” one of them said in a low voice. He was embarrassed.

Henry realized then that he was alone, that these two guards were the only men in uniform he’d seen since they’d left the gate. They turned and hurried back to the entrance.

An inmate led Henry inside the block, where men milled about with no order or discipline. He remembers thinking, I’m going to die here, something all new inmates contemplated upon first entering the prison. Some of them, of course, were right. Henry was taken to his cell, and didn’t emerge for many days.

He had mourned when the prison was razed, had even roused himself enough to participate in a few protests in front of the Ministry of Justice (though he’d declined to speak when someone handed him the bullhorn), but in truth, the tragedy had both broken him and simultaneously spared him the need to ever think about his incarceration again. No one who’d lived through it with him had survived. There was no one to visit, no one with whom to reminisce, no one to meet on the day of their release, and drive home, feigning optimism. In the many years since, there were times when he’d almost managed to forget about the prison completely. Whenever he felt guilty (which was not infrequently, all things considered), Henry told himself there was nothing wrong in forgetting; after all, he never really belonged there to begin with.

Ana’s mother, now his ex-wife, had heard the stories (some of them), but that was years before, and she was no longer capable of feeling sympathy or solidarity toward the man who had betrayed her. Besides Patalarga, few people were, at least not by the time I became involved. Henry’s colleagues at the school where he taught were jealous because the director had granted him leave for the tour. If they’d known his controversial past, they likely would have used it as an excuse to be rid of him forever. His old friends from Diciembre were no better — their constant refrain after his release was that Henry should write a play about Collectors, something revolutionary, a denunciation, an homage to the dead, but he had no stomach for the project, had never been able to figure out how or where to begin.

“It will be therapeutic,” these friends of his argued.

To which Henry could only respond: “For whom?”

Now that it was all coming back to him, he had no one to talk to. For years, he’d been losing friends and family at an alarming pace, in a process he felt helpless to reverse. He said offensive things at parties, he hit on his friend’s wives, he forgot to return phone calls. He stormed out of bad plays, scraping his chair loudly against the concrete floors so that all could turn and see the once famous playwright petulantly expressing his displeasure. (Later he felt guilty: “As if I never wrote a bad play!”) Sometime in the previous year he’d even offended his beloved sister, Marta, and now they weren’t talking. Worst of all, he couldn’t even remember what he’d done.

Patalarga interrupted this reverie. “Henry,” he said. “This is Nelson.”

The playwright set aside his old, imperfect script, and looked up, squinting at the actor: the young man’s features, his dumb grin, his unkempt hair, his pants in need of a hem. Of the audition Henry could recall very little. The handshake, yes. And that this boy had read the part of Alejo, the idiot president’s idiot son, with a preternatural ease.

“You’re perfect,” Henry said now. “You’re, what? Eighteen, nineteen?”

“Almost twenty-three,” said Nelson.

Henry nodded. “Well, I’m the president.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The idiot president,” Patalarga added.

THEY WENT TO A BARto celebrate; it felt good to drink in the middle of an afternoon. They got a table in the back, far from the windows, where it was almost dark. The heat faded after the first pitcher. Someone sang a song; a couple quarreled — but what did it matter? “Soon we’ll be off, into the countryside!” Henry proclaimed, glass held high, his head light and his spirit charged. He felt better than he had in weeks. Optimistic. Patalarga seconded the notion, with similar enthusiasm; and the two old friends reminisced aloud for Nelson’s benefit: past tours, past shows, small Andean towns where they’d amazed audiences and romanced local women. Epic, week-long drunks. Fights with police, escaping along mountain roads toward safety. Everything got stranger once you rose beyond an altitude of four thousand meters, that supernatural threshold after which all life becomes theater, and all theater Beckettian. The thin air is magical. Everything you do is a riddle.

“I’ve never been off the coast,” Nelson admitted.

They pressed him: “Never?”

“Never,” Nelson repeated, his face reddening. It was shameful, in fact, now that he thought about it, though he’d never had occasion to feel ashamed of it before. His family’s few trips out of the city had always had the same unfortunate destination: Sebastián’s coastal hometown, a cheerless stop along the highway south of the capital. He felt something like anger now when he thought of it: He’d seen nothing of the world! Not even his own miserable country!

Henry said, “Ah, life in the mountains! Patalarga can tell you all about it.”

“Pack your oxygen tank,” warned Patalarga. “We’ll be going there in a few weeks.”

Henry whistled. “Four thousand one hundred meters above sea level! Can you imagine the trauma? His brain has never recovered.”

“What was it like?”

Patalarga shrugged. “Bleak,” he said. “And beautiful.”