At Night We Walk in Circles (21 page)

“Who is Nelson?” her mother asked.

“I knew immediately I'd made a mistake,” Noelia told me later. She turned back to her mother, attempted a smile, but it was too late.

“Who's Nelson?” the old woman said again. “Why did you call Rogelio that?”

Noelia knelt before her mother. Mrs. Anabel was breathing heavily, looking pale and worried. Her voice trembled. “You said Nelson.”

“I know, Mama. I made a mistake.”

“Who is that?”

“It's no one. Now calm down. Everything is going to be all right.” Noelia held her mother's hands. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Anabel whispered.

Noelia put a hand to her mother's cheek, and held it there for a moment, until Mrs. Anabel had closed her eyes. “Stay,” she said, then got to her feet and went into the room where Nelson had been sleeping these last three weeks. She didn't knock, just pushed the door open, and found him sitting on the cot with his back against the wall. He had his legs stretched out, resting on top of his already packed bag.

“What's going on?” Noelia said.

Nelson didn't answer. He offered her a space on the cot, but she shook her head and stood with her arms crossed, unsmiling, unmoved.

“You know what's going on. I want to go home. That's all. I told her I was leaving.” His voice was full of exhaustion. “I told her I had to go see Jaime. She asked me what it was about, and I said money.”

“Why would you confuse her like that!”

Nelson turned very serious. “I never broke character.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm not the one who just called me Nelson.”

“He was right,” Noelia told me later. “And I'm not angry with him. Not really. I was then, but I'm not now. It's just that I'd hoped things would work out differently.”

“Different how?” I asked her.

She thought for a moment. “I wanted things to go smoothly. I wanted it all to glide to the end. Most of all, I didn't want my mother getting upset.”

Just then, they heard a voice—Mrs. Anabel—calling out for Noelia.

“Yes, Mama?”

Then to Nelson: “You can't just leave like that. You have to give her warning. You have to prepare her. It isn't fair.”

Again, Mrs. Anabel called for her.

“I'm coming, Mama.”

Nelson stood. “Of course it's fair.”

Just then there was a shout.

Nelson and Noelia ran to the courtyard. Mrs. Anabel hadn't gotten very far from her seat, only a few steps, in fact. She lay on the ground, face pressed against the stone path. She wasn't moving.

“Mama!” Noelia shouted.

Nelson reacted quicker; he ran to her side, saw that she was breathing. He helped her turn over. She looked ashen. There was a cut just below her hairline, and a knot forming on her forehead. A tiny rivulet of blood ran down her temple. “Why did you leave me all alone?” she said.

Nelson held her gently. “We didn't. We were here all the time.”

Mrs. Anabel shook her head. “I don't know you.”

Noelia had stood back, but she hurried over now.

“Rogelio,” she said. “Go across the street and get Mrs. Hilda. She's a nurse.”

Noelia held her mother. Nelson hesitated for an instant.

“Go now,” Noelia said.

He did as he was told.

I was the one who answered the door.

I HAD ARRIVED
on the bus from San Jacinto that morning. So began my direct involvement in all this. I had no firm plans for my visit: stay a few weeks, perhaps, not longer, spend time with my parents, help my old man repair the roof of their house. I'd brought along a couple of books to read, the long ones I never seemed to find time for in the city, and was determined to enjoy myself. As far as the roof, I was frankly enthusiastic about the task, a fact that surprised even me. The prospect of working with my hands, as my father had done for his entire life, as his father had done before him, seemed appealing. In the days before I left for my hometown, I must have been feeling something akin to what Nelson had, just before embarking on the tour: the heady anticipation of change, the desire to shake up my life, if only slightly, only temporarily. I'd been laid off and I was bored. My friends bored me, my routines. The block I lived on, with its drab storefronts and constant noise. The implacably gray city sky bored me infinitely, and every morning when I stepped out into the streets, I imagined squatting on the roof of my parents' home in T—— after a few hours of work (the details of which I had a hard time conjuring), looking out over the valley, the hills, the cartoonishly blue sky, and feeling good about myself. Proud. I hadn't felt that way in many months.

That day when Nelson arrived, part of me couldn't believe I was in T—— again. I hadn't been back in five or six years. Everything was the same, and yet not at all as I remembered, as if every item from my childhood home had been replaced by a smaller, and less impressive, version of itself. My old hiding place, for instance, the tree in the courtyard—from that spot, I'd spent many hours spying on my parents. I saw them argue on occasion, but on one family visit back to T—— I also saw them kiss. I must have been eight or nine years old, and no gesture could've been more shocking. All displays of affection were scrupulously hidden from us, the children, and to see them touching so unself-consciously had dazzled me. My recollections of that moment are vivid, even filmic, but the tree, I realized now, couldn't possibly have kept me hidden; it was thin and weak, with narrow knotty branches and a few scraggly leaves, suitable for hiding a cat but not a boy, and I was forced to consider the real possibility that my parents had kissed in the full knowledge that I was watching them.

This is what I was thinking when Nelson arrived. There was a knock, and my mother called from the kitchen that I should answer it. I went to the door. He was slight, with wavy dark brown hair, a little overgrown, and narrowed eyes that betrayed real worry. He was young, about my age, which might not have been important in any other context, but certainly was in a place like T——. It's likely that on the day we met, Nelson and I were the only two men in our twenties in the entire town. Eric, the mayor's deputy, was our closest contemporary, and he was still in high school. So we stared, neither quite believing in the presence of the other. If there was no complicity, there was, at the very least, curiosity.

But all he said was, “There's trouble next door.” Then he asked for my mother. Noelia needed her, he said. Without quite understanding, I called for her. Though I offered, he wouldn't come in; because I had nothing to say, I told him my name. The stranger nodded and introduced himself as Rogelio.

It was habit, I suppose. I don't recall if we shook hands.

“Mrs. Anabel fell and hit her head,” he said to my mother when she came to the door, and a few moments later we'd crossed the street, the three of us, and were standing in the courtyard. This is what I remember: Mrs. Anabel sat on the ground, in the sun, looking very small, very frail. She had let herself sink into Noelia's arms, and at first, didn't appear to be in any pain, but such a flurry of words poured out of her—names, half sentences, questions—that it was clear she was not well. Noelia was trying to calm her down, and had cleaned her up as best she could with her shirtsleeve, which was stained pink with blood. There was an alarming bump on the old woman's forehead, and she kept touching it gingerly, before pulling her hand away.

“Don't touch it,” Noelia said again and again. “Leave it alone. You're going to be fine.”

I wasn't so sure.

My mother rushed over, and Noelia's expression was of relief. I watched my mother in action. She asked Mrs. Anabel to explain what had happened. Then to follow her finger with her eyes. “Can you get up?” my mother asked. “Can you move your toes?”

Mrs. Anabel never answered any of the questions directly. She followed my mother's finger as it drifted left, and then she stayed there, holding her gaze on the empty space in front of her.

I heard my mother sigh.

Together, my mother and Noelia helped the fragile old woman to her feet. I offered to help, but my mother waved me away. They held her steady. They brushed her off. Mrs. Anabel had a cut on her elbow too, and she held it up for inspection. I watched my mother brush the dirt from the wound, and pick out a few tiny pebbles that had stuck to the broken skin.

Then they all but carried her to her bedroom.

Mrs. Anabel wasn't dying, or at least it didn't seem that way to me—but she was on the border of something. That sounds inexact, I know, and perhaps it does lack a certain medical precision, but what I mean is that even then, in the first moments after her fall, Mrs. Anabel appeared to be drifting between two states of consciousness. Her voice would accelerate and then fall off, then pick up again; and neither my mother nor Noelia, and least of all Mrs. Anabel herself, could control it. I watched her move across the courtyard, held up by Noelia and my mother, and it seemed almost as if she were floating, her feet barely touching the ground. She kept up a steady stream of words, calling for friends and relatives, calling for Rogelio, for Jaime, for her husband, quite clearly beginning to panic.

We made eye contact as she passed me. “Where is everyone?” she asked, but I didn't respond.

Noelia and my mother took the old woman inside, and Nelson and I pressed in too. After a few moments, my mother announced that she was afraid Mrs. Anabel might have suffered a concussion. We'd have to observe her carefully over the next few hours. The danger was swelling, and since no one had seen her fall, we had no way of knowing how bad it really was.

I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to hear any of this. Watching her loosed something within me; like I was a young boy, suddenly aware of nakedness, unprepared for it, and ashamed. I shouldn't be here, I thought, and somehow this emotion felt selfless at the time, though I see now that it was just the opposite. I wasn't respecting Mrs. Anabel's privacy; I was protecting myself from something I feared instinctively. This too was clear: the young man standing beside me felt much the same way. Outside, the earth glowed beneath a miraculous Andean sky, but from the corner of her room, the shrinking Mrs. Anabel exuded only darkness. It was like standing at the mouth of a deep cave and being chilled by its cool breath.

My mother and Mrs. Anabel whispered together for a moment, the old woman shaking her head again and again. Then, in a surprisingly loud voice, she asked for Rogelio. I turned to Nelson (though that was not yet his name to me), who stood with downcast eyes, his fidgeting hands momentarily still, jammed in the pockets of his jeans. He rocked back and forth on his feet, very slowly, and then, without a word, turned and left the room. Even now, this gesture seems very cruel, and I looked to Mrs. Anabel, then to my mother, then to Noelia, who shrugged. There was nothing for me to do there, so I followed him.

I found Nelson pacing the yard, looking alternately at his feet and then up at the sky. I sat by the wall, relieved to be out of doors, and watched this fitful stranger, whose theatrical display of anxiety relieved me of the necessity of displaying my own. There was something very genuine to it, and at the same time, exaggerated. I asked him what had happened, and Nelson frowned.

“My name isn't Rogelio,” he said.

“So what is it?”

“Nelson,” he answered, then apologized for having misled me.

I told him it didn't matter.

“You live here?” he asked. “I haven't seen you.”

“I'm visiting. My mom lives across the street. But you knew that.”

“That's my room,” he said, gesturing with a half-raised arm toward the bedroom where he slept. “I've been here three weeks. Almost.” He shook his head then, as if the very thought of these past three weeks made him tense.

“You're from the city?” I asked, though I could tell the answer just by looking at him.

“Yeah.”

And then, for some reason, I asked him how he liked our town.

He smiled wanly, then shrugged. “It's very pretty,” he said, which I would've expected him to say. Then he went on: “What I can't figure out is what people do for fun here.”

It was an odd remark. As odd and misplaced as my question, perhaps. The wounded Mrs. Anabel was raving just a few steps from us, and suddenly Nelson wore an amused look, as if the idea of fun had only just now occurred to him, as if
that
were his complaint—the lack of fun—and not the terrible scene unfolding in the other room.

“That's what you can't figure out?”

He laughed nervously. For this, I liked him. “Among other things.”

“What are you doing here?”

Nelson shrugged. “You know what? I can't remember.”

“She's your grandmother?” I asked.

I honestly had no idea what their connection might have been.

He shook his head, but didn't explain.

My sense of him, in those first moments we spent together, was of someone who'd lost his way. He was tentative, unsure of himself. He showed not the slightest interest in my presence. I could've been anyone. The sun was in my eyes, and when I looked at Nelson now, it was almost as if he were being swallowed by the light.

“Do your people know you're here?” I asked.

“Ixta does,” he said.

“Who?”

“My girl.”

The name stood out. I'd never met anyone by that name. Never even heard that name before, in fact.

It was then that Noelia ducked her head out of the room where Mrs. Anabel was languishing. She wore a look of worry. “Go to the store,” she said. “Ask Segura for hydrogen peroxide and aspirin and bandages.”

Nelson nodded, but made no move toward the door.

“And try Jaime. Segura has the number.” Noelia frowned at me, at my unnecessary presence. We hadn't even exchanged a greeting. “You go with him.” We were two young men being shooed away from a crisis. Sent on an errand, like children. I was happy to be dismissed.

Except for the walk to my parents' house that morning, this outing with Nelson was my first in many years through the streets of T——. I was always misremembering the place. The stunted tree in the courtyard was just one symptom of a broader condition. In my mind, the shuttered church had always been open; the dusty, neglected plaza had always been neat and tidy. It was a town where people did not die so much as disappear very slowly, like a photograph fading over time. And here I was again.

The bus I'd come in on that morning was still parked in the plaza, preparing to make its return trip to San Jacinto. A few locals hovered around its open door. They loaded the bags, rearranged them, made space, and jammed in some more. Buses like this one were never full. They left half-empty, and picked up passengers along the way, as many as could fit. Nelson glanced in the direction of the bus. I must have said something about T—— not being as I remembered it. I'd been having versions of this very ordinary realization all morning.

“What was it like?” Nelson asked, with something like genuine curiosity.

“Bigger,” I said, though that word was not exactly correct. I thought back to my childhood, in the shadow of these mountains, beneath this sky, and it was the only word that came to mind.

“Everyone's childhood seems bigger from a distance,” Nelson said.

Segura greeted us both warmly, even me, though he probably hadn't seen me in years. Nelson was all business: peroxide, aspirin, and bandages. Segura shook his head sadly. “Bandages, I have,” he said. “And the aspirin. How many do you need?”

Nelson held up an open hand, and Segura uncapped a dusty bottle, and carefully tipped five pills into a small envelope. “Anything else?”

“I have to make a call.”

Segura took the phone out from under the counter. Nelson wrote a number down in the storeowner's red notebook, while the old man spent a long moment and considerable energies untangling the cord. When this task was complete, he bent over the machine and lifted the handset, pressing it carefully to his ear.

“Good connection today.”

Nelson nodded. “Clear weather, I suppose.”

“God bless,” answered Segura. He squinted at the paper, then at the keypad, before pecking deliberately at the numbers, as if selecting which were his favorites.

And meanwhile, I had time to look around: time enough to see the dust motes floating in a bar of sunlight, to test my weight on different sections of the warped and creaky wooden floor, to notice the empty store shelves, featuring one of each item—a single bar of soap, a single box of pasta, a single bottle of Coca-Cola—as if these artifacts were not to be sold but maintained as visual reminders of a lost way of life.

“It's ringing!” announced the old shopkeeper in a bright voice that seemed out of place in his dreary store.

I stepped outside and sat on the curb, closing my eyes against the early-afternoon sun. I could hear Nelson talking from inside the store, just the rising and falling murmur of his voice, and I made no effort to parse the words themselves. In any case, I didn't understand much of what was happening, and felt only dimly that it had any connection to me at all. There was a frail and wounded old woman, a neighbor of my parents, that much I knew; and this stranger, whose foreignness in T—— made him recognizable. Beyond that, there was nothing, just the ordinary confusion a young man feels when confronted with the place of his birth. My parents were nearing old age, and if they'd come home to be comfortable, part of me knew that they'd also come home to die. Not now, not soon, perhaps, but eventually. Mrs. Anabel's sallow skin and bloodshot eyes had made that clear to me. The way my mother had rushed to her side only confirmed it. I would have preferred not to think about all this, and so when I felt a pat on the head, I welcomed the interruption. It was Segura, who smiled at me and, not without some effort, lowered himself down to the curb, placing a hand on my shoulder to steady himself through the process. When he was seated and comfortable, he spread his short legs out in front of him, pointing his toes at the sky, and let out a long, satisfied breath. Then he lifted the brim of his cap and let the sun hit his face.