At Night We Walk in Circles (26 page)

After dinner, Mónica decided to go see her sister, who lived only ten blocks away. She went by car for it was dark out, and one never knew. She found the family—Astrid, Ramiro, and their two teenage daughters, Ashley and Miriam—gathered in front of the television, as if for warmth, a portrait of togetherness that made Mónica long for another kind of life. Perhaps if I'd had girls, she thought idly. For her extended family, she offered a broad smile, and they made room for her on the couch. Not long after, Mónica was breathing at their rhythm, laughing when they laughed. Soon, she'd almost forgotten why she'd come at all, and looked down to discover, with some surprise, that her shoes had slipped off her feet. She wiggled her toes in her socks, a childish gesture that made her smile. She was comfortable, and hadn't even noticed.

When the program ended, the adults left the television to the girls. Ramiro disappeared into the garden for a cigarette, while Astrid and Mónica prepared the hot water, set the table, brought out fruit and cheese and olives and bread. Mónica liked the routine, and looked forward to not eating alone. A year after Sebastián died, Astrid had suggested that she move in, but at the time Mónica had been offended by the proposal, so offended it had never been mentioned again. And still, ever since, the house looked very different to Mónica. Whenever she visited, she imagined herself living there, growing old there, and to her surprise, the notion didn't bother her as much as it had then. Years later, it had begun to make sense, more so now that Nelson was gone.

When we spoke in early 2002, she was still mulling it over. “I believe less and less in autonomy,” she told me. “I don't know what it means anymore, at my age. I can only tell you it seems less desirable each day.”

Ramiro returned, tea was served, and he recounted for his sister-in-law all the relevant details from that morning's conversation with Nelson, including his odd comment about becoming a father. Astrid and Ramiro found it troubling; Mónica did not, and she couldn't say why. She puzzled over it. Part of her hoped it was true. It would be nice to have a grandchild, even if she had to travel to the provinces to visit.

Mónica's questions were basic: Was her son skinny? Did he look healthy? How was he dressed? Did he appear unhappy?

With each query, Ramiro became more and more uncomfortable. He had excuses, and he employed them: he'd been rushed, he'd been caught off guard and hadn't paid attention to the details. Mónica continued to press him, and finally, Ramiro raised his hands in exasperation.

“Do you want to know the truth?” he asked Mónica.

She stared at him intently. It was a ridiculous thing to ask.

“I've never understood your son.” Ramiro paused, and took a sip from his teacup. “I've always found him to be . . . inscrutable.”

Mónica slumped back in her seat. As if on cue, her nieces laughed along with the television, along with each other; two lovely, well-adjusted girls whom this mediocre man had no trouble understanding. She glared at her sister's husband. He responded with an insipid smile.

“Well,” she said, and for a long moment this was all she could manage. “That's not very helpful.”

Astrid reached a hand across the table. “What he means is—”

“Your boy is complicated, that's all,” Ramiro said. “And no, he did not seem well. He hasn't seemed well to me in years. Not since . . .”

He paused here, and now they all fell silent, for he had gone too far. Sebastián's absence shifted the air in the room.

“I'm sorry,” Ramiro said, but it was too late. Mónica had already closed her eyes, which had begun to tear. She went home soon after, and hardly slept all night, wondering if what her brother-in-law had said was true.

•   •   •

THE FACTORS THAT LED
Mindo to the theater that night are plain enough—jealousy, a general frustration with his circumstances, compounded by an afternoon and evening of heavy drinking. What's just as clear is that they needn't have. Any number of small shifts might have led him away from danger, instead of toward it. He might have answered one of Ixta's half dozen calls to his cell phone, for example, rushed home, and made peace with her. He might have run into a friend, who would've helped steer him back to his apartment. He was, according to the accounts of the waiters who served him, so staggeringly drunk that it's a small miracle he was even able to find the Olympic in the dim labyrinthine streets of the Old City. But he did find it. And when he arrived, he fulfilled the role the script required of him: he pounded his fist on the gate, he shouted for the man he now realized was his rival.

“We heard him yelling, and we were scared,” Patalarga later admitted. “Concerned. It was a howl, almost like something from a horror film.”

They froze, fell silent, and let the sound of that distant, haunting voice float through the theater.

They put down their props, and sat on the stage. Perhaps, the three of them thought, he would simply tire and leave, but many minutes passed, and the voice showed no signs of flagging.

“Open the door!” Mindo called, the vowels stretched long. “Open up!”

Henry described it to me as eerie: the lonely, pained, singsong voice of a jealous man, now weary, now menacing, filling the old theater like a dirge. “It was nice, in a way,” he said. “I think that's what I remember most about it. How disconcertingly beautiful it sounded.”

Meanwhile, Nelson wore a look of deep concentration. Finally he said, “I know that voice.”

“We assumed,” Patalarga told me, “that he meant that he knew the voice from back in the mountains. I asked him who it was, and he shook his head.”

“I've heard it before, that's all.”

Then Nelson stood.

“Where are you going?” Patalarga asked.

“To see who it is.”

Patalarga was horrified, but it was exactly as Ixta said: Nelson never listened. He strode through the theater, through the lobby, and out to the gate, his two concerned, disbelieving friends trailing behind him. He was still safe, on his own side of the metal barrier that separated the Olympic from the street, when he called out, “Who is it?”

“I know that voice,” Nelson said again, in a whisper this time.

Much later, Ixta would run down for me the very limited contact the two men in her life had chanced to have. There was the time Mindo picked up her cell phone when she was in the shower. They spoke for a few minutes, Nelson pretending to be a cousin who was in town visiting from the United States.

“A bad lie,” Ixta told me darkly. “A very bad and unnecessary lie. Ninety-nine out of one hundred people would have simply hung up. But he was an actor, and he told me it would've been unsporting.”

Unsporting or not, it would have been wiser. The only stroke of good fortune was that Nelson had called from a pay phone. For a few days afterward, Mindo asked again and again about this phantom cousin.

When will we meet him?

What does he do?

How exactly is he related?

Mindo asked with such persistence that Ixta was inevitably drawn into the lie.

“And in spite of what you might think,” she said to me, “I hated doing that to Mindo.”

They each knew about the other, perhaps more than they would've cared to know. Nelson had asked around about Mindo, taking some care to steer clear of him. On several occasions, Mindo quizzed Ixta about Nelson, all the while feigning a lack of interest.

The two men had acquaintances, but not friends, in common, so perhaps it was inevitable that they'd cross paths eventually. One afternoon, in November of the previous year, not long after Nelson and Ixta's affair got under way, Nelson ran into the couple at a bar in La Julieta. If it was awkward, it was also mercifully brief—a grimaced exchange of pleasantries, a handshake, and little else. Ixta watched, her heart racing, as her two lovers shared a few words. She laughed now and again to paper over prickly silences, and breathed a heavy sigh when Nelson excused himself. Later that evening, when she and Mindo were alone, he confessed that he'd recognized Nelson immediately, not because they'd ever met before, but because he'd opened Ixta's old photo albums one day while she was at work, just to have a look.

“Why would you do that?” she asked.

“They were poking out of a box. I got curious. And also, because I barely know you.”

His tone, Ixta reported to me, was neither accusatory nor grim, only resigned. Then he smiled, as if he were afraid he'd said something wrong. He hadn't. They'd rushed into it. Ixta was, by then, moved in; and yet their life was under construction. In some ways, it never really got much farther.

That night at the Olympic, the three members of Diciembre stood on the safe side of the metal barrier, listening. The closer you got to the sound of Mindo's voice, the less frightening it was. Still, both Henry and Patalarga were surprised when Nelson announced that he was letting the man in.

“What if he has a weapon?” Patalarga remembers asking.

“He doesn't,” Nelson answered. His eyes were bright, as if he'd just solved a puzzle. “It's Ixta's boyfriend.”

And he opened the gate. Just like that.

Months later, when Patalarga described this moment to me, he was still shaking his head. There was very little time to prepare. “I imagined a raging jealous lunatic. I imagined an animal.”

Instead they got Mindo. Asked to describe him, both Henry and Patalarga began with the same word: “drunk.” The toxicology report concurs. This should not necessarily imply that Mindo was a drinker; in fact, by all accounts he drank only occasionally. But given the circumstances, one understands why he was in that state. “It must have been a terrible shock,” Ixta told me. “He must have thought something was happening between me and Nelson.”

I pressed her on this—I mean, something
was
happening, something
had been
happening, right?

She blushed. “You know what I mean. I'd turned him down.”

“And you meant it?”

She frowned.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “What do you want?”

What Ixta did confirm was that Mindo had a remarkable tolerance, and could keep himself upright long past the point when lesser men would have succumbed. One imagines an alternative version of this evening, in which Mindo passes out at the bar, his drawings of clenched fists scattered beside him, and is woken a few hours before dawn, heartsick, disappointed, but alive. He would have no such luck. As it happened, Mindo appeared before the suddenly open gate of the Olympic with drunkenness painted on him like a carnival mask. He hadn't shaved that morning, and his features had a blurred, unsettled quality. His eyes sagged, his lips drooped. His olive green jacket appeared ready to slip off his shoulder at any moment. He glanced left and right, and then down at his feet, as if to confirm that he was actually standing there, at the rusted gate of the Olympic.

Night had brought with it a blanket of wet, heavy fog, and the streetlights above flowered in hazy yellow bursts.

“You're Mindo,” Nelson said.

They didn't shake hands, but there was no violence. The threat evaporated the moment they saw each other.

Patalarga still didn't know what to make of this. He hadn't dismissed the idea of a deranged killer coming from T—— to snuff out Nelson. He desperately wanted them all to move inside the theater, “where we'd be safer, and dry,” he said, but Mindo was nailed to the ground. He wouldn't budge.

“I had the sense that anything could happen,” Patalarga told me later.

Not anything. This:

“Come with me,” Mindo says to Nelson. He slurs his words, but there's no menace in them, just the quiet authority of a jilted man. “We have to talk.”

“We do,” Nelson says, nodding gravely, like a child who knows he's done wrong. Mindo never crosses the threshold, and Nelson simply floats out of the gate, as if being pulled by something irresistible, something magnetic.

That's all.

Ixta's lovers walk off into the dark, lightly drizzling night; Henry and Patalarga stand side by side, like worried parents, watching them go. A half block on, and they've disappeared into the murk. Only one of them comes back.

IXTA SPENT
that evening at the apartment, reading old magazines and waiting for Mindo. He had the night off from the restaurant, and she assumed he was at his studio, painting, though it was just as likely he was doing the same as she was—sitting around, reading idly, staving off boredom by daydreaming of a more creative life. If they'd been in a better place, they might have done that sort of thing together. They might have even enjoyed it. She considered surprising him with a visit, but it was cold out, and besides, he might not welcome the interruption.

She didn't mind calling though: Ixta tried Mindo's cell phone several times, beginning just after seven, calling every hour or so until around eleven-thirty. She left no messages, and at about midnight she went to sleep. “I wasn't worried,” she told me later. “I was annoyed. We usually talked at some point in the day. This was it, you understand? I was bored. I was thinking to myself: what an asshole. I was thinking: this is my life now. I stay at home with the baby, he comes home when he pleases. He makes art. My breasts swell, my nipples turn black. It felt very dark, you see? I wasn't even thinking about Nelson. He didn't cross my mind. I'm telling you, just like I told the police.”

This is what we know: the two young men left the theater headed in the direction of the plaza. A fine drizzle hung in the air, and the sidewalks were slippery. Mindo was very drunk, and they walked carefully so as not to fall, one empty city block and then another, shuffling as best they could through the curtain of fog. For a long time, they didn't speak.

“Do you love her?” Mindo finally asked. They were five or six blocks from the theater by then.

“Yes,” Nelson said. And then: “But she doesn't love me back.”

Mindo nodded. “So at least we have that in common.”

We know they made it to the plaza, that they walked diagonally across it and sought refuge at the Wembley. This was Nelson's suggestion. It was a slow night, and one of the white-haired bartenders sat behind the counter, doing a crossword puzzle. He remembers when they came in, about a quarter to one in the morning. For every crossword, he wrote down his start and end times, so he was able to provide the police with a fairly accurate estimate. He told them he knew Nelson, recognized him: he'd served drinks to Sebastián back when Nelson was still a boy, and he'd seen him a few times after rehearsals. The other one, Mindo, he'd never seen before.

“The tall one was drunk, which was none of my business. I shook hands with the kid. I hadn't seen him in a few months.”

They chatted for a few moments, and then Nelson ordered a liter of beer and two glasses. Mindo watched the exchange, unimpressed.

“My old man used to bring me here,” Nelson said when they'd sat.

“Your dad,” Mindo mused. “Did he mess with other men's women too?”

They locked eyes. The evening could still go any which way, and Nelson knew it. He hadn't decided what would happen. What he wanted to happen. He took a deep breath.

“My old man was a prince.”

Mindo sucked his teeth. “Skips a generation.”

“I guess it must,” Nelson said.

Just then the old bartender appeared, all smiles. He had the beer and a couple of glasses. Patalarga had lent Nelson some cash, and he paid right away. Mindo didn't protest, only watched suspiciously, examining the transaction as if attempting to decipher a magic trick.

“Are you all right?” Nelson asked.

“Of course I'm all right.”

“Because you don't look all right.”

The bartender, when we spoke, offered much the same assessment. He stood over them for a moment, observing. “The taller one, he looked like hell.”

“I'm fine,” said Mindo. He looked up at the bartender. “And you, old man, why are you still here?”

The bartender frowned and went back to his crossword puzzle.

“What were you doing with Ixta?” Mindo asked once the beer had been poured.

Nelson considered his rival. In this bar, beneath this warm light, any hint of menace was gone. He was hurt; that was all.

“Just talking,” Nelson said.

“Yeah? What about?”

“Not much.” Nelson turned away. The content of that morning's conversation was so disappointing he could scarcely bring himself to think of it. “I was surprised at how little we had to say.”

“Not what you'd planned.”

Nelson shook his head. “It wasn't what I'd
hoped
.” He paused, and looked up at Mindo. It was merciless to push forward, with more courage than he'd had that morning with Ixta, when he'd most needed it.

“I wanted to talk about us. Me and her.”

He enunciated these last three words carefully, clearly.

Mindo laughed. “You don't have an
us
to talk about. There is no
us
.”

“There was once. There might be.”

For a few moments they didn't say much, each drank their beer, never breaking eye contact. Mindo processed the brazenness of it, shaking his head. He set his beer down.

“But we're the ones having a baby! You get that, right? She and I. Me and her.”

Nelson shook his head. “How do you know it's yours?”

With that, the bar's quiet evening was shattered.

When questioned (by me, by police) the Wembley's old bartender recalled this moment very clearly. Mindo stood abruptly, lunging at Nelson and tipping the table over. Beer was spilled, one of the glasses shattered, and in an instant a few of the tables nearby were at the ready; the men, who a moment before had been drinking peacefully, were standing now, alert and prepared to intervene or defend themselves. When they saw it was just these two, everyone stepped back, giving Nelson and Mindo the room they required. They tussled for a while, neither very skilled but neither relenting, until they were on the ground, the both of them. It fell to the old bartender to break things up. Men like him are devoted to their service. Perhaps this was for the best; regarding barroom scuffles, he might have been the most experienced server in the city.

“Boys! Please!” he shouted, because they were all boys to him. “Stop!”

Nelson and Mindo stopped. Boys always did.

“Get off the floor!”

They stood.

He had them now. He told me later that he was sure of it. If they couldn't be civilized, he said, they'd have to leave. Did they really want to leave?

In case they didn't believe him, the bartender added, “Look at it out there!”

The drizzle was heavy now; they could see it swirling in the light just outside the window. He went on: “Outside, it's cold; outside, it's wet. Inside, it's warm, and inside there's beer. But inside, there is no fighting. Do you understand?”

He'd given this speech before.

Nelson and Mindo both nodded gravely; then they shook themselves off, gathered their things, and went outside.

•   •   •

NELSON ARRIVED
at the Olympic past two, opening the gate with the key Patalarga had given him. He was soaked and out of breath. Henry and Patalarga had all but finished the bottle of rum, and were lying about the stage, now covered with cushions and blankets, like a pasha's den.

“You're back!” Henry said.

“You're alive!” Patalarga shouted.

He was only joking, but then Nelson stepped into the light. He was bruised and scraped. He peeled off his wet coat, ripped at the sleeve. He slumped onto the stage, gesturing for the rum, and Henry quickly poured him a glass.

“What happened?”

Nelson downed a shot.

The story he told his friends that night is the same as the one he'd later tell police.

He and Mindo stepped out of the Wembley. There was no plan. “We just knew, I guess, that we weren't done fighting.” They stood for a while beneath the streetlamp just outside the door of the bar, breathing the damp air. From inside the bar, faces pressed up against the window, as if expecting a show.

Mindo swayed. “You're fucking her?”

Nelson didn't respond. He didn't have to.

“I knew it.” Then: “I'm going to kill you.”

According to the old bartender, everyone heard it. “The drunk boy looked very upset.”

Nelson wasn't rattled. He held his hands out, palms up.

“No you're not.”

There was no aggression in his voice, no defiance. It was just a statement of fact. He went on: “I shouldn't have said what I said. I'm sorry.” Nelson gestured toward the Wembley. “They're all watching. Are you really going to kill me in front of all these people?”

Mindo cupped a hand over his eyes and turned toward the windows of the bar.

“Fine,” he said.

They walked toward the plaza, and at this point there are no other witnesses besides Nelson. The plaza was empty except for a few stray taxis, and the occasional drunk stumbling out of one of the underground bars. The night was cold and uninviting, and they walked as fast as they could manage on the slippery streets. A few blocks on, Mindo started to talk. According to Nelson: “He was upset, but he seemed fatalistic about it all. I wasn't his rival. He said he knew that. Only Ixta had answers. She'd loved him once, and now she didn't. I didn't know what to tell him.”

“It's the baby I worry about,” Mindo said.

Nelson knew the streets of the Old City. He knew, for example, that at certain hours of night, on the narrower streets, you don't use the sidewalks. This is common sense. You walk straight down the very center of the road, eyes sharp, scanning for the thief that might pounce from the shadow of a recessed doorway. He and every student at the Conservatory had been robbed at least once. For most, once was all it took; then you learned. Nelson didn't have to think about it. This was instinct.

They were walking down the center of a narrow street called Garza when their conversation was interrupted by the light tap of a horn. They moved to the sidewalk, still talking, and barely registered the station wagon that rolled by. It pulled over just ahead of them, and two young men got out. A moment later, it took off, disappearing into the fog. Still Nelson and Mindo thought nothing of it. Just ahead, the two men dawdled, and, according to Nelson, “When we passed them, one of them pushed me hard against the wall.” That's how it began.

Both assailants were young, both snarling, and it wasn't a holdup—it was an attack. A beat down. Everything happened very fast: Mindo and Nelson and these two violent strangers. No conversation. No demands. No negotiation. Nelson never saw their faces. It was fight or flight.

At the first opportunity, he flew.

“What about Mindo?” Patalarga asked, just as the police would later. “Why didn't you help Mindo?”

“I don't know.”

Nelson ran as fast as he could. “I should've gone toward the plaza, but at the time I wasn't thinking. I just wanted to get away.”

One of the attackers was chasing, but Nelson didn't look back. He ran for three blocks, turned one corner and then another, sprinting until his lungs burned. When he finally stopped he was six or seven blocks from the scene of the attack, standing at the edge of a park he'd never seen before, in a tumbledown section of the Old City known as El Anclado. He saw no one in the deserted streets: not his attackers, not Mindo, not a single person he could ask for help.

“So what did you do?” Patalarga asked.

“I sat for a moment to catch my breath. I figured out where I was, roughly, and then I headed back.”

His destination was the Olympic, where he would be safe, but first he wanted to see about Mindo. He walked quickly, almost frantically. The fog was heavier than before, heavier than he'd ever seen it. When he got to the corner of Garza and Franklin, he peered down the street, to the spot where they'd been jumped.

He saw nothing, and breathed a sigh of relief.

“I was frightened,” he said to Patalarga and Henry. “I didn't go any closer. I just assumed Mindo had done what I did. I assumed he'd gotten away.”

In fact, he hadn't. Mindo had crawled into one of the recessed doorways, where he was almost completely hidden. That's where a passerby found him the next morning, with five knife wounds to his stomach and chest.