At Night We Walk in Circles (24 page)

Now they went for a slow walk, heading west into the dull residential sections of the district, where all the houses appeared to be identical, distinguished only by the varying colors of their exterior walls. There are few monuments in the Monument District, and almost nothing to see. An earlier, now ousted and forgotten, government had intended to make the area its showplace, but those plans never came to pass. History intervened. The war happened. The district was colonized, not by museums or libraries or statues as its name implied but by private citizens, a guarded, rather anonymous group of upper middle class who lived quietly and traveled exclusively by car. Ixta and Nelson were the only people on the street. They walked side by side (“but not together,” she pointed out), struggling to have a conversation. Nelson was careful, asking as politely and obliquely as he could about the state of her pregnancy. His voice was low, and at times Ixta had to strain to hear him.

She remembers being disappointed: This was what he'd come for? To mumble at her?

They walked for ten minutes, coming to a small, greenish park with a few concrete benches, and it was here that they decided to sit. The blank gray clouds showed no signs of relenting; not today, perhaps not ever. Nelson would've preferred a café or a restaurant, a place where he could have performed any number of chivalric gestures (pulling Ixta's chair out for her, taking her coat), but it seems they'd walked in the wrong direction, away from everything, and into a warren of residential streets from which there was no visible escape. Perhaps she'd planned it that way. Perhaps she wanted no gestures. I've seen the park myself, and it's true: in winter, it's desolate and empty and feels not like the city but like an outpost of it. Nelson quietly despaired.

In the half hour that followed, he and Ixta touched on the following subjects: Ixta's mother's health; the latest film offerings; a near stampede at a local soccer stadium the previous Sunday, which Ixta's younger brother had narrowly survived; the untimely death of a much-loved professor they both knew from the Conservatory; an article which had critiqued—quite harshly—a mutual friend's latest gallery show, and the content of the paintings themselves (which Nelson hadn't seen) but which Ixta described “as if a mad Botero had decided to reinterpret the oeuvre of Georgia O'Keeffe.”

She played that line as if it were hers, and both of them laughed.

In fact, that observation came from the critique, which, coincidentally, I had written, just before leaving the city for T——.

While Nelson was waiting for his courage to appear, Ixta observed the man she'd once imagined to be hers, and felt many things—heartache, nostalgia, even pity, but not romantic love; and the desolate streets of the Monument District provided an appropriate backdrop to these realizations. He kept up a nervous, steady stream of questions—about her work, her friends, her family—but for many minutes made no declarative statements and offered no confessions. Then she placed a hand on his shoulder—“To see if he were real,” she explained to me—and Nelson tensed like a child about to receive an injection.

“I'm sorry,” he said then. It was as if he'd been jolted to life. “I've been thinking I should tell you that.”

He paused, and turned sideways on the bench in order to face her. Ixta kept looking straight ahead.

“That's what you've been thinking? That you're sorry?”

He nodded, a gesture she didn't see but sensed, the tiniest vibration in the winter air. She'd locked her eyes on the edge of the park, on a wall painted with a once colorful mural, now faded and scissored with cracks. It helped her remain steady, she confessed later, and in the anxious few moments that followed, she studied the turns and pivots of those cracks, as if attempting to memorize them.

It felt almost cruel to ask, “What is it you're sorry for?”

“I should have treated you better.”

Ixta nodded. “Yes, I think we can agree on that.”

“That's the first thing I wanted to say. There's more.” He took a deep breath, and continued, his voice markedly different now. Strong, clear. “I thought about you every day in T——. Do you understand? I thought about you and me and the baby. I want to be someone you could love again. I'm sorry. I've wasted so much time. Do you hear me?”

She heard him.

“Look at me,” Nelson said, and she turned to face him. He reached out his hands. “I'm serious.”

“I know you are,” she answered.

Years before, a few weeks after they'd first met, Nelson and Ixta had gone south for a few days and camped along the beach. They were part of a large, boisterous group, and brought more alcohol than food. They'd made a bonfire and drank vast quantities. Nelson and Ixta spent the first night in a single sleeping bag that quickly became coated with a fine layer of sand. They hardly slept, but pressed against each other, the coarse sand between them, so that they emerged the next morning red-skinned and bleary-eyed. The day that followed and the next night and the day after—they all blurred, and when the sun rose behind them on the third morning, they watched in wonder as the surface of the ocean slowly distinguished itself from the horizon, like one of those old instant photos developing before their eyes. First, a thin, almost imperceptible line, a dark wall splitting in two; then the texture of the waves appeared, or was hinted at; and then, almost miraculously, there were gulls, floating lazily against a still-dark, purple sky. Finally—and this was most surprising of all, because their infatuation with each other had led them to believe they were alone in the world—they could make out the fishing trawlers bobbing in the distance, like the toys of a child. Nelson hadn't said it at the time, because then as now he was afraid, but that morning, as dawn became day at the beach, he'd realized that he loved her.

He told her now. And when she didn't answer, he asked:

“Do you remember that beach? Do you remember what it was called?”

Ixta said she didn't know.

“I felt like he was talking about someone else,” she told me. “About things that had never happened to me.”

Nelson didn't give up. He described a life, their life. He reminded her how much they'd laughed. “A lifetime of that!” he said, and she almost smiled.

It didn't matter where, as long as they were together.

“I'll do anything to make you believe in me again.”

To which she responded simply, “I don't love you anymore.”

She was crying because it was mostly true.

“You don't stop loving someone like Nelson,” she told me later. “You just give up.”

Ixta turned now to face him, just in time to see Nelson's eyes press closed. Neither one of them said anything for a half minute or more.

“I'm sorry,” Ixta added.

“That's all right.” There was something dogged and resolute in Nelson's voice. He'd steadied himself. You could say he was acting. “There's time.”

Ixta shook her head warily. “There is?”

Jaime had already sent someone after him. Ixta's heart had already closed to him. Even that morning, on that park bench in the Monument District, Nelson's bleak future was tumbling toward him.

Still:

“There is,” he assured her.

He walked her back to her office, heart pounding in his chest, looking any and everywhere for a flower to pick for her along the way. There was nothing. He left her with a chaste kiss on the cheek, a whispered good-bye, and headed toward the Olympic, following a version of the route he'd taken that morning. Ixta sat glumly at her desk and did the crossword. Hours passed and the phone didn't ring. The filmmaker saw her this way, in such a state, and felt pity for her. He decided not to tell her that Mindo had phoned and, seeing her troubled countenance, profoundly regretted what he'd done.

“If I could take it back, I would,” he said to me later. He'd told Mindo that Ixta had gone out for a walk with a young man named Nelson.

“Nelson?” Mindo said. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Then the painter hung up.

“Yes,” the filmmaker told me, “yes, he sounded very angry.”

As for Nelson, he was in no rush. Midday streets are very different from early-morning streets—different in character, different in sound. There are more people, but they're less harried somehow; they're the late risers, the men and women escaping from work, not racing toward it. Nelson didn't want to think much about what had just happened, what it meant. He paused to read the alarming newspaper headlines at a kiosk on the corner of San José and University, front pages announcing disturbances in mining camps, power outages in the suburbs, and the details of an astonishing daylight bank robbery, among other noteworthy events. Nothing could be as alarming as what Ixta had just told him. His head hurt from the effort of not thinking about it. He waited at bus stops, but let the buses pass; he walked some more, and stood before a half-finished building on Angamos and considered its emerging shape, watching the workers move about the steel beams like dancers, never pausing, and never, ever looking down.

For this, Nelson admired them. Later that afternoon, he'd tell Patalarga about these agile, fearless men, and wonder aloud how they managed it.

In the likeliest scenario, Nelson was, by this point, already being followed.

•   •   •

MÓNICA SPENT THE DAY
at home in a state of high anxiety. She waited for her son to appear, and considered the possibility that he might not. She spent an hour dusting every surface of Nelson's room, hoping that this task might take her mind off things, but when she'd finished, she stood in the doorway, observing her work, unsatisfied. It was awful, Mónica decided, perverse, to have made this space so clean and antiseptic; it no longer looked like her son's room but more like a stage set. What she wanted was for the bed to be unmade, for Nelson's things to be scattered about in no particular order. She wanted his chest of drawers open; and his books facedown on the floor, their covers open and spines cracked. She wanted his unfolded clothes draped over the chair in the corner, and a half-empty glass of water leaving a ring on the wooden nightstand. She wanted signs of life.

Suddenly exhausted, she lay down on Nelson's bed.

She woke a few hours later when the phone rang. It was Francisco calling from California, asking about his brother. It seems Astrid had written him an e-mail, detailing (and quite possibly exaggerating) Ramiro's brief encounter with Nelson. Naturally, Francisco was concerned. He wanted to know what his mother thought. Mónica, still shaking off sleep, heard the worry in her elder son's voice, surveyed her youngest son's empty, lifeless room, and felt she had nothing to say. She didn't know what she thought.

This much was true: Nelson was surely home again. In this city, somewhere. Ramiro was an honest man, known to fib about his weight and his income, or perhaps embellish the modest achievements of his children, but in something like this, he would not bend the truth. Nelson was here, in the capital. Surely.

Mónica could think of no good reason why he hadn't called, and speculating about this matter was, for someone like her, a dangerous game. Members of her generation needed little help conjuring awful scenarios to explain otherwise ordinary situations. It was a skill they'd perfected over the course of a lifetime: reading the newspapers; serving as unwilling participant-observers in a stupid war; voting in one meaningless election after another; watching the currency collapse, stabilize, and collapse again; seeing their contemporaries succumb to stress-induced heart attacks and cancer and depression. It's a wonder any of them have teeth left. Or hair. Or legs to hold them up. Mónica's imagination had gone dark, and she could think of only one word: trouble.

“Be calm,” Francisco counseled her from afar. He knew his mother.

“I'm trying,” Mónica whispered into the phone.

The tour she'd imagined didn't end this way, with her son hiding out in the city, unable or unwilling to come home again. She began to consider the possibility that he'd never left, that it had all been a ruse, that he was living another life, in another district, and had invented the tour as a cover for his planned reinvention.

“Did he say anything to you?” she asked Francisco.

There was silence on the other end.

“When?”

“I don't know. Whenever you talked to him.”

There was a long silence.

“We haven't spoken in months,” Francisco said finally. “You know that.”

Sometimes, when she was at her most pessimistic, she wondered if her two boys would ever have reason to speak to each other, after she was gone and buried.

“I'm sorry. What should I do?”

“Find the actors,” Francisco said. “What else?”

•   •   •

THAT'S WHAT MINDO
was doing. That afternoon he made appearances at many of the usual places young actors congregate in this city. The bars, the plazas, the playhouses. Mindo paid a visit to the Conservatory, and asked for Nelson there, but no one had seen or heard of him since he'd gone away. The general consensus was,
That was ages ago
. They were immediatists, like all actors. They barely remembered their classmate, their friend. Everyone seemed surprised by the news that Nelson had returned, and Mindo's frustration only grew.

We can suppose he was driven by jealousy, and suppose too that his own jealousy caught him unawares. He found the emotion unsettling, just as he'd found it unsettling to wake each of the previous five mornings on the couch in the living room of the apartment which had been, until not so long ago, his and his alone. From what I've been able to piece together, Ixta's reading of the state of the relationship was essentially accurate: she and Mindo were two perfectly nice but thoroughly incompatible young people who'd managed, quite by accident, to bind themselves to each other. The unbinding would have happened one way or another, given time; and even under the best of circumstances, the child they'd made together, Nadia, would have been raised at a certain distance from her father. Many people in their respective circles understood this fact intuitively, and, in all likelihood, had things gone differently, Mindo and Ixta would have both found a way to live with this natural and necessary estrangement, as adults often do.