At Night We Walk in Circles (23 page)

And afterward, he sat in the dark theater for a moment, trying to will himself to call his wife, to apologize.

•   •   •

AS FOR
NELSON,
he'd woken before dawn, showered, shaved, and left the Olympic full of hope. He'd slept very little, but once on the streets, felt nothing but energy. The morning traffic was just humming to life, the city's stubborn refusal to capitulate in the face of another dismal winter's day. And Nelson—he too would not give up. He too would fight. That pressure in his chest, what he'd been feeling for a week or more, was still there; he'd come to think of it as part of him. He walked in the direction of Ixta's office, and at around seven, not yet halfway there, stepped into a crowded café. He wasn't hungry; he only wanted to see up close the men and women who had gathered there. They were, to a person, loud, brash, and rude; and it was precisely their rudeness that reminded him of what he'd missed about the city. He loved them, loved the sound of their laughter, the way they heckled one another. They told vulgar jokes while sipping espresso, shook folded newspapers furiously to underline the validity of their complaints. They cursed politicians, mocked celebrities, grumbled about their families. The place was so busy that no one approached to take Nelson's order, and so he stood in one corner, content to watch the proceedings in silence. When it became too much, he closed his eyes and just smelled the place: the sharp scent of coffee and steamed milk, fresh bread and sausage. He opened his eyes once more and noted the length of the long wooden bar; the shine of the polished metal banister that led to the upstairs dining room; and the oil paintings on the walls, heroic canvasses composed by artists who'd been dead since his father was just a boy in short pants.

We know Nelson stopped here because it so happened that an uncle of his, Ramiro, married to Mónica's sister Astrid for two decades, spotted him. He'd been a regular at this particular restaurant since 1984, and by now his morning coffee was the very highlight of his day. He hadn't seen his nephew in over a year, and the young man was so changed that Ramiro didn't even recognize him at first. As soon as he did, he made his way over, moved in part by curiosity, in part by familial obligation (Ramiro was nothing if not correct), and gave Nelson an enthusiastic hug. Their brief conversation went as follows:

UNCLE RAMIRO
:
Nephew!

NELSON:
 . . .

UNCLE RAMIRO:
What are you doing here? When did you get back?

NELSON:
 . . .

UNCLE RAMIRO:
How was the tour?

NELSON:
 . . .

And so on, for an interminable few minutes. Nelson answered all questions with a blank stare, except one. Ramiro asked, “Where are you going?”

“I'm going to be a father,” Nelson said.

Ramiro smiled generously, with a hint of condescension, as if such a thing were inconceivable.

“That's wonderful.”

The conversation was over; Nelson's steadfast gaze made him nervous.

An hour later, Ramiro was on the phone, reporting to his wife that Nelson must be on drugs. He omitted any mention of his nephew's impending paternity, which he'd simply chosen not to believe. Astrid dutifully passed along Ramiro's message of concern to her sister, who took the news relatively well. She knew her son wasn't on drugs, but couldn't help being concerned nonetheless. Why hadn't he called to tell her he was home? By midmorning, Mónica had all but given up on the workday. She told her colleagues she didn't feel well, which was true, and went straight home to wait for her son.

She crossed the city in a cab, thinking of Nelson.

She paid the driver with two bills from her purse, and forgot the change, thinking of Nelson.

She unlocked the door to her empty house, thinking of Nelson.

•   •   •

BY THE TIME
Mónica heard from her sister, her son was standing in front of Ixta, in the reception area of a documentary filmmaker's small but not unpleasant offices, a converted guesthouse attached to his palatial home in the Monument District. Though Ixta doesn't specifically remember telling Nelson about her job, she assumes she must have. There's no other way he could've found the office, which was hidden on a side street she herself had never heard of until she started working there. This was a new job, just as everything about her life in those days was new: her body, her home, her sense of the future. When I asked Ixta to describe the work, she screwed her face up into a frown.

“It was paid idleness,” she said. “That's all.”

She worked for a man whose vanity and self-image demanded the employment of a secretary. In absolute terms, there was very little to do: the occasional ringing phone to answer, now and then an appointment to jot down. Her employer, the filmmaker, had won an international award eight or nine years prior for a documentary denouncing the coerced sterilization program the government had run during the war. It was, like many award-winning documentaries, rewarded for its grim and outrageous subject matter, and not for the film itself, which was mediocre. The director could not understand why his career had stalled ever since. His reputation, such as it was, depended on that award, which was fast losing its luster; and as a result, everything this man did (and by extension, everything Ixta did) was designed to stave off his impending and inevitable professional oblivion. There was a problem: No one cared about human rights anymore, not at home or abroad. They cared about growth—hoped for and celebrated in all the newspapers, invoked by zealous bureaucrats in every self-serving television interview. On this matter, the filmmaker was agnostic—he came from money, and couldn't see the urgency. Like many of his ilk, he sometimes confused poverty (which must be eradicated!) with folklore (which must be preserved!), but it was a genuine confusion, without a hint of ill intention, which only made it more infuriating. He kept a shaggy beard in honor of his lost, rebellious youth, and employed a booming voice whenever he suspected someone might be listening. In the 1980s, he'd moved in the same circles as Henry and Patalarga, though he'd never been close to them, and, when pressed, admitted to me that he'd deliberately stayed away after Henry's “unfortunate arrest.” He wore colorful woven bracelets around his unnaturally thin wrists, and had, quite predictably, fallen in love with Ixta. She'd come well recommended by a professor at the Conservatory, and now the filmmaker hovered around her desk for hours at a time, making conversation, telling bad jokes, and ensuring that neither of them could have accomplished anything, had there, in fact, been anything to accomplish. She found him charming, even handsome from certain angles, at certain times of the day; and his awkward, boastful flirting was a welcome distraction from her troubles at home, with Mindo, which had unfortunately continued to fester.

On some days, she even permitted herself to complain about the father of her child, whom the filmmaker would never meet.

As it happened, Nelson's arrival in the city coincided with a terrible realization for Ixta: that she and Mindo were not meant to be together. She'd known it since the previous spring, but now things were approaching a boiling point. Or not—the metaphor was perfectly imprecise: it was the lack of heat she feared, the lack of heat that made her tremble. She imagined the barren months to come, then the years, the decades, and felt something approximating terror. She and Mindo didn't fight; that would have required some essential spark they'd already lost. They floated in parallel spaces, all their conversations reduced to the necessary minimum, stripped of whimsy or invention or humor. They talked about the baby as if preparing for an exam, and though they paid the rent together, that did not make their apartment a home. She bored him; and the feeling was mutual. He'd gone too long without touching her, and she could think of nothing worse. Sometimes in the shower she found herself weeping. At moments like these, Ixta placed a hand on her beautiful, swollen belly to remind herself she was not alone in this world. Not entirely, at least.

That morning when Nelson appeared at the office door, this is where Ixta's left hand went instinctively. And that's where she kept it, for a long moment, taking in the sight of her former lover, her former partner, her friend. He'd told her by phone to wait for her, and now, days later, he was here. His very presence took her breath away. He looked young, younger than she remembered him, and this fascinated her: Who lives through a tour like that and comes out looking younger? He'd shaved that morning in the backstage bathroom of the Olympic, and had that fresh, scoured look of a recent graduate prepping for a job interview (though Nelson had never gone on one of those). He offered her a tentative smile. She nodded back. There was nothing she wanted to say, she told me later. She didn't stand to greet him. She waited for him to make the first move.

Meanwhile, her employer was in the kitchenette, preparing coffee, carrying on his part of a one-sided conversation with Ixta. (No one remembers the topic.) Twice Nelson began to say something to the woman he loved, only to be interrupted by this oblivious voice from the other room. When it happened a third time, both he and Ixta laughed. His laughter was tinged with nervousness; hers was involuntary, and it was the sound of this combined laughter that made the filmmaker step out into the hallway to see that his lovely, pregnant, and much desired assistant was not alone.

“I assumed at first that he was the father of the child,” the filmmaker told me later. “The painter. From the pictures I'd seen, they looked similar, I suppose. The same kind of person. I was nice enough. Polite, at least. Did she say anything? He seemed callow, insubstantial, but that's probably not very charitable. It's a pity what happened. I haven't spoken to her since that day, you know? She never even came to pick up her last check.”

Nelson introduced himself (“My friend,” Ixta added solemnly), hands were shaken, and the first awkward moments the two former lovers spent together were in the company of this filmmaker, who attempted to mask his jealousy with a too-strong dose of bonhomie.

“Congratulations,” he said.

“He's not the father,” Ixta clarified.

“Thank you,” Nelson added.

The filmmaker blushed. Then he clapped Nelson on the back, asked a few impertinent, vaguely sexual questions, filling the room with his grand and exaggerated laughter. Then he disappeared to his office, where he shut the door softly, and fired off a few strongly worded memos to colleagues. He'd have Ixta type them up later, and hoped she'd read in his tone the depth of feeling he had for her.

(She would not.)

The filmmaker's conversation with Nelson took five minutes, not more, and through it all, Ixta had sat, as still as she could manage, breathing slowly, talking very little, with her left hand resting on her belly. She didn't hear much of what was said, willfully blurring the words because she knew they had almost nothing to do with her. She wished for silence. Now that she and Nelson were alone, she began to pay attention again. The light in the room was dim, almost cloudy, and Ixta felt for a moment she had to strain to see him, though he was only a few steps away.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I didn't think I'd see you,” she said, which was a lie. In fact, in her bones, she'd been expecting him, only she didn't know how she would feel when he arrived.

Nelson proposed they go out somewhere, just as she had assumed he would. Ixta began to protest that she couldn't, that she had to work, but then she stopped herself. “I realized that would have been cruel. And it wouldn't have been true. I wanted to see him. I wanted to talk to him. He was right there, right in front of me.”

She stood for the first time, and noticed Nelson's eyes opening wide to take in the sight of her. Nelson, admiring her figure. Nelson, accepting and appreciating the possibility she represented. She loved being pregnant for moments like these. Pregnancy is always mythic; it can be medicalized and quantified, carved into trimesters or weeks, but nothing can subvert its essential mystery. Ixta had a strange kind of power over men; and though their desire manifested in different ways now, it was still desire. For a moment, she let herself revel in it.

“You look very beautiful,” Nelson managed, which was the only sensible thing he could've said.

Ixta nodded regally.

“Are you sure you can walk?”

“Of course I can walk,” she said quickly, and Nelson blushed.

The truth was, she'd been waiting for some last, desperate gesture on Nelson's part ever since the day of his phone call from the road. “I've always had a sense for these kinds of things,” she told me. Life's big events, those moments of real, even unbearable emotion—if you were paying attention, they tended to announce themselves, as the ocean swells in anticipation of a wave. Ixta's childhood and adolescence were littered with these instances of premonition: the tearful day her father left the family for good, the day of her first period, the day her cousin Rigoberto was killed in a car accident.

And when Nelson ended their relationship, in July of the previous year; she'd felt it acutely then. Ixta could have mouthed his words as he uttered them. What he said that day was somehow not surprising to her; in fact, it was the utter predictability of his words she found shocking. She watched him break her heart, marveling at how thoroughly he believed in phrases she knew to be untrue. No, Ixta thought to herself: No, she was not keeping him from his dreams. She was not shutting him out of the world. She was doing none of those things. If they were happening, he was doing them to himself.

But Ixta didn't argue with Nelson that day. His complaints were banal and selfish, and she anticipated all of them. He would regret it—she'd known this even then, had known it in her gut—but she felt no pride or comfort in this knowledge. It would not heal her.