At Night We Walk in Circles (19 page)

“Of course,” said Segura, and he nodded deferentially.

Nelson stretched out his hand. “So nice to see you again. It's great to be home.”

Jaime bought a couple of sodas, then told Nelson to wait outside while he made a phone call. Segura motioned for Nelson to join him. “It came today,” he said, waving his newspaper in the air proudly. “The bus driver gave it to me. Look.”

The front page carried the story of the accident between the mango truck and passenger van. Twelve people had died. There were photos.

Nelson had gone many weeks without much interest or curiosity in something as abstract as “the news.” It was a concept that had no relevance on tour but which suddenly seemed necessary. Not because of these deaths, but because of everything else. Another world existed, and he felt suddenly reminded of it. Now that leaving T—— was temporarily out of the question, Nelson felt a very keen desire to know what was happening. It was something he hadn't realized until he saw the newspaper.

Nelson opened the front page. He looked for news from the city, politics, sports. National news was relegated to an inner section, a few poorly written items that read like dispatches from a distant planet. A senator had proposed a law against drunk driving. (Bar owners were opposed.) A police dog had been wounded in a fire, and would have to be put down. (Animal rights groups were opposed.) A building in the colonial center had partially collapsed, and would have to be demolished. (Preservation groups were opposed.) Nelson scanned the paper, then the empty plaza, and failed to see any connection at all.

Just then Jaime stepped out. He saw Nelson and frowned. “Let's go.”

“Just a second.”

“We're leaving,” Jaime said. “Segura, I understand my sister owes you some money.”

The man nodded.

Jaime reached into his pocket and pulled out a few bills, which the storeowner accepted with his head bowed. Then Jaime turned, and began to walk off. Nelson closed the paper, and hurried after him. He saw then—and it was strange that he hadn't realized it earlier—how physically impressive Jaime was. It was somehow more apparent at this distance: he wasn't tall, he was wide. His shoulders were broad and strong, and now that Nelson saw his shape, Jaime's swift attack on Henry was even more surprising.

“I'm coming,” Nelson called out.

“Rogelio doesn't read,” Jaime said when Nelson had caught up. “Not the newspaper, not anything. I told you that.”

Nelson apologized.

They walked on, across the plaza, toward the northeast district, over a footbridge, and then up the steep hill that rose to the east of town. A few blocks on and the houses petered out, giving way to terraced fields and irrigation ditches carved expertly into the earth. By whom? Nelson wondered. Where were the people? He wanted to ask, but was afraid to.

“Do you know San Jacinto?” Jaime asked when they were above the town. He didn't wait for an answer. Below them, lay T——, its red-roofed and white-walled houses, its narrow, picturesque streets. “San Jacinto is a terrible place. Nothing like this. Hideous. But it's where the work is.” He cleared his throat. “What did you earn on this little tour you did?”

“You mean money?”

He always meant money.

One page of Nelson's journal was dedicated to a rough accounting of what he'd made and spent on the tour. The figures were a jumble, but the basic arithmetic was clear enough: he'd broken even. Nelson knew that, and he'd had no opinion on this information until that very moment. One didn't join Diciembre for the wages, after all. But now, the idea of breaking even seemed suddenly disappointing. He glanced at Jaime and saw opportunity. He made up a number,
an outrageous, ambitious number
, he wrote that evening, to which Jaime laughed.

“That's it?” he said.

Nelson blushed.

“I'll give you twice that. Now start thinking like Rogelio.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means don't say silly things like ‘It's great to be home.' If it was great, you would've come home ten years ago.”

“Okay,” Nelson said.

Jaime sighed. “You know what I think, when I see this?”

“No.”

“I think, How lovely. Thank God I don't live here. Now, do you have your wallet? Good. Take it out. Give me your ID card.”

Through it all, Nelson was still thinking of money, the possibility it implied. He could pay a few months' rent. Or take Ixta on a trip. Buy his mother something nice. Not all of those things could be done, but some of them could. In particular, this phrase stood out: “twice that.” He did as he was told. Jaime squinted at the picture on the ID card, smiling. He held it up and compared it to the young man standing before him. Then he put it in his pocket.

“I'll be back in a week,” he said to Nelson. “In the meantime, be nice to your blameless mother.”

IT'S DIFFICULT TO WRITE
about these days in T——, about this lull in the action (for that is precisely what it is) without succumbing to the pace. Such is the languorous nature of small-town life. I know it well enough. Thought slows, the need for conversation vanishes. You are prone to introspection, never a productive habit, and one which city life, for example, quite rightly suppresses in the name of efficiency. On the third day of any visit to T——, I give in to a specific kind of melancholy that is part depression, part boredom. The normal stimuli one associates with human activity begins to seem aberrant, even unnecessary. Throughout my childhood and early adolescence, arriving in T—— was like stepping outside time, just as it might have been, I suppose, for Nelson, had he not had the length of the tour itself to adjust, at least in part, to the rhythms of provincial life. Perhaps this is why the appearance of a newspaper was so striking to him that first morning. It reminded him just how far away he was.

For the most part he spent his days listening to Mrs. Anabel; keeping her company. At night, he and Noelia swapped stories, and with her, he could be Nelson again, something they both seemed to welcome. “He was very funny,” she told me later, “and I hadn't had anyone to talk to in so long. He told me about his mother, about his brother. He told me about Ixta, and even said he was going to be a father.”

“When was that?” I asked.

She thought for a moment. “It must have been at the end of the first week. We were expecting my brother back any day, and Nelson had even packed his things. He was glad to be going home, he said, so he could see her.” She paused here, offering a bemused smile. “But then Jaime didn't come, so he unpacked his things and stayed.”

Nelson was getting anxious.

On the ninth day, they got a note delivered by the man who drove the bus to San Jacinto. It was from Jaime:

Something's come up,
it said.
I'll be there in a week to settle up.

“See?” said Noelia. “He hasn't forgotten about you!”

At least the work was manageable. They'd settled into routines, and the old woman seemed quite happy about that. She peppered him with questions, but they were mostly variations on the ones she'd had at the beginning, and Nelson felt enough confidence to shift his answers—just slightly—to suit his mood. One day, to his surprise, he didn't make movie sets when Mrs. Anabel asked; instead, he fixed boats in the harbor. He wasn't sure why he said it. The old woman clapped with delight. “Where did you learn boats?” she asked, as if boats were a language one studied in school.

“In the city, Mama. When Jaime sent me to the city.”

She nodded very seriously. “And when was that?”

“Oh, you know how Jaime is. Always bossing me around. Sending me here, sending me there.”

“That Jaime!”

To keep things interesting, Nelson invented an accent, a variation on the sort of voice he imagined might result from two decades living in California, among Mexicans and Salvadorans and Guatemalans. It didn't take. He shed it, almost without thinking, a few days later, and she didn't seem to mind. What was the point of this invented vernacular anyway? Had she even noticed this dash of authenticity?

I'm not going to try so hard anymore,
he wrote that evening.
If all goes well, I'll be home in a week.

•   •   •

WHILE NELSON
WAS
in this state of suspended animation, playing Rogelio for his very small audience, his life was going on without him. And by life, I'm referring to
his real life
, his life in the city. This is not urban chauvinism or elitism or discrimination against the provinces; only fact: Nelson's rural exile did nothing for the problems waiting for him back in the capital.

Ixta was never far from his mind. If Nelson was able to expel his private troubles from his thoughts during his first days alone in T——, once the routines of his new life were settled, he could no longer manage it. By the end of the first week and the beginning of the second, his journal entries are less and less about the details of his days with Mrs. Anabel, and more meditations, or even speculations, on parenthood. Try as he might, he simply could not accept Ixta's assertion that the child was not his. He drew a chart tracking the instances when he and Ixta had made love since their reconciliation the previous winter: where they'd been, how long it had lasted, and how careful they'd remembered to be. He scoured his memory for details, filling pages with clinical accounts of the final weeks of their affair that read more like legal briefs than erotica. He argues for paternity and presents the evidence. He notes clues and small gestures that might give him some hope, for if one reads the journals, this much is clear: hope was what he needed and wanted most. Accepting he was not the child's father would have meant relinquishing his claim on Ixta. It would've meant letting her go for good.

Meanwhile, in the city, Ixta's belly kept growing each day, and with it, she confessed to me, her anxiety. Nelson's late morning walks took him, more often than not, to Mr. Segura's store, where he ignored Jaime's admonition and read the newspaper whenever it was available; and where, on no fewer than seven occasions, he managed to reach Ixta by phone. These mostly unwelcome incidents served only to deepen her unease. She knew what she knew about her baby, and still he tried to convince her that it was his. It had to be. “That was all he wanted to talk about,” Ixta said when we spoke. “He was obsessed. It wasn't that the child
couldn't
have been his. But she wasn't. That's all.”

She occasionally succeeded in steering the conversation elsewhere; the truth was she enjoyed talking to him, and didn't have the heart to hang up.

“I should have, I know, but I just couldn't.”

As uncomfortable as those conversations could be, Ixta needed to hear Nelson's voice; apart from being her lover, he had also been her friend. She was tormented by the usual set of questions: whether she was too young or too selfish to handle the responsibility of motherhood; whether she'd be a good parent, or even an adequate one; whether the maternal bond would be felt right away. Though it seems cruel to mention them now, given the events to come, Ixta had even begun to have doubts about Mindo, her partner, the father of her child, a man I never had the opportunity to meet. But this was all in the future: while Nelson was in T——, Ixta's misgivings were only just taking shape. She'd begun to find Mindo rather unresponsive, insensitive to the idiosyncrasies of her pregnancy (which were not idiosyncratic but absolutely normal), and, in a broad sense, “unimpressive.” This last, unkind word was the very one she used, albeit reluctantly and only because I pressed her.

“I don't like to talk about him, not anymore,” she said, but then she went on: it was all part of a slow realization she'd had over the course of her second trimester, when her ankles began to swell and the night sweats interrupted her sleep. “A man should cause an impression,” she said. “He should leave you with something to think about. Without that, there's no magic.”

“Was there magic with Nelson?” I asked. “Was he impressive?”

I knew the answer. It took her a moment.

“Once you knew him, he was. Very much so. And I knew him well.”

The changes in her body were some compensation for her melancholy: it was an aspect of the pregnancy she found dramatic and wondrous, confirmation that there was, undoubtedly, some sort of miracle taking place, even if that miracle sometimes made her recoil with fear. But there was a problem: while she'd never felt more beautiful in her life, this man of hers wouldn't lay a finger on her. Her breasts had grown, her hips—she finally had the curves she'd always wanted—and Mindo scarcely seemed to notice. She found this simply unforgivable. He came home late, something he'd always done; smelling like the Argentine steak house where he worked long hours, just as he always had; only now she found it all intolerable. The odor of grilled beef was repellant. One evening in May, when she was four months pregnant, she asked him to shower before getting in bed. He agreed, with a frown. The next night, she asked him to do the same, and to her great surprise, she woke up the following morning at dawn, alone. It was a chilly early-winter day: she padded out into the living room in her socks, and found her unimpressive, unwashed man on the couch. He was asleep with his mouth open, still in his work clothes, still smelling of steak, his feet hanging off the edge.

How else was she to interpret this except as an insult?

Perhaps, I suggested, he was simply frightened. First-time fathers often are.

“Maybe you're right,” she said. “It doesn't really matter anymore.”

I didn't argue this point. “Did you think much about Nelson in those days?”

She nodded. “Sure. Whenever he called, I thought about him. I was angry, I was hurt, but I thought about him. Sometimes fondly. Sometimes not. I missed him. I felt very alone.”

“And when he called—did you feel less alone then?”

“No,” she said. Her eyes closed very briefly, just an instant. “I resented the phone calls, but I looked forward to them too. The connection from that shit town of his, wherever he was, it was terrible. I couldn't understand what he was doing.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wanted to talk to him, to tell him things, but he wouldn't listen. He would never listen. That was always his problem.”

•   •   •

MINDO,
the putative
father of Ixta's child, Nelson's rival, was an artist, a painter—and not a bad one, by all accounts. He was thirty-one years old that year, and worked as a waiter.

It's true he was not cut out for fatherhood. When I suggested to Ixta that he might have been afraid, I was merely repeating what many of his friends told me. To a person, they hated Ixta, and a few even blamed themselves for not helping Mindo escape her clutches sooner. I understood their anger, but their vision of Ixta was at odds with everything I knew about her. Still, I listened mostly, didn't interrupt as they spoke.

Mindo came from a working-class district of the capital known as the Thousands, and that's where his artistic education began. He began painting murals when he was very young, only twelve, memorials to friends who'd passed away. Given the circumstances of the neighborhood (known colloquially as Gaza), this was steady work. Mindo was featured in
Crónica
, one of the city's main newspapers, when he was only sixteen, a back-page feature under the headline “Teenage Artist Paints War Memorial.” In the photo he stands before one of his murals, a painted wall along Cahuide, one of the main arteries of his district. He has a heavy build, and looks much older than his age. He has stubble on his chin, and dark, piercing eyes. Like Nelson, Mindo has curly hair, but beyond that there is no similarity.

Ixta and Mindo met in August 2000, when he opened a show at one of the newer galleries in the Old City. He was no longer painting murals but very detailed, stylized portraits of his old neighborhood friends, some of whom had been dead now for fifteen years. Mindo painted them as adults, as if they'd survived their troubled teenage years and skated past the dangers that had prematurely ended their lives: the drugs, the street battles, the allure of crime. It was speculative biography, in images. Some gained weight. Some lost their hair. Some wore suits and ties, or aprons, or soccer uniforms. Some went shirtless, showing off intricate tattoos. Some held diplomas and smiled proudly. It was simple, affecting work; in Mindo's paintings, all these tough young men had lived, and by living had earned the right to be ordinary. Beneath each image was a brief text noting the age at which they'd died and the circumstances of their passing.

The opening was very well received, most of all by Ixta, who spent the evening drinking glass after glass of wine and trying to get the artist to smile. It wasn't easy, she told me: the ghosts of Mindo's violent adolescence were on every wall in the gallery. But she persisted. And we know that in mid-September, Ixta gathered her things and moved in with him. We know Nelson was shaken by the news, and that many of Mindo's friends expressed their concern. Who is this woman? What do you know about her?

It was never a good match. Mindo was handsome and charming and troubled. He'd never been in a serious relationship before. It couldn't have worked out, though it seems petty to assign blame for this now. Ixta, for her part, accepts much of the responsibility herself, while noting the ways in which he let her down after she got pregnant. Mindo was jealous and frightened by the responsibility that fatherhood entailed. We know he suspected that Nelson was still part of Ixta's life. Though Mindo never had proof of the affair, he certainly had his doubts, and it seems he was relieved when Nelson joined Diciembre on tour.

“Maybe he'll stay gone,” he commented bitterly to a friend. That was in mid-June, when Nelson was newly arrived in T——, and things with Ixta were beginning to unravel.

“Perhaps,” his friend said.

They even toasted to the idea.

Everyone agrees he didn't deserve what happened to him when Nelson came back.

•   •   •

MEANWHILE,
Mónica would have loved to have been in touch with her son, to have received those phone calls from T——, but she didn't. She knew nothing of what was happening because her son didn't call her even once. In fact, besides Ixta (who claimed to be uninterested), no one knew much about Nelson's whereabouts, because neither Henry nor Patalarga shared the story. They expected him home in ten days at most, so there was really no point.

Faced with this silence, Mónica daydreamed of her son on ad hoc, rural stages, images which inspired a mix of pride and anguish. In her mind, it was all a continuation of the tour he'd described from San Jacinto, a tour she felt might never end. And in a sense, it never did. Mónica didn't compare Nelson's adventures to Francisco's, at least not consciously, though she found herself approaching both absences the same way. She'd acquired, over the years, a certain skill for projecting herself into the lives of her children, a talent all mothers have—it's what allows them to intuit a child's hunger, his frustration, his fear—but Mónica had honed it, by necessity. With Francisco, she'd managed to create memories where there were none, build an elaborate, and mostly factual, time line of his travels. She'd formulated opinions about all the major events of her son's life, and of the friends he'd acquired and discarded along the way. She kept a catalog of certain details, and, having committed these facts to memory, felt reassured about herself as a mother: she knew, for example, where her elder son had spent each of his birthdays since he'd left her side in 1992, even though she hadn't been present at a single one of these celebrations. It didn't matter. She'd
imagined
herself there. In her mind, she'd eaten cake and helped blow out the candles (whether there had been cake or candles being entirely beside the point). The fact that she and Francisco were still close was something she felt proud of, an achievement not to be minimized. This isn't as obvious or as simple as it might seem; every bond, even that of a mother and child, is breakable.