At Night We Walk in Circles (4 page)

Francisco noted each as they passed. “How long has this one been there?” he'd ask, and Nelson would shrug, because he had no answers and little interest. He found his brother's curiosity unseemly. He'd long ago decided not to pay attention, because it was impossible to keep up with anyway. Maps of this city are outdated the moment they leave the printers. The avenue they drove along, for example: its commercial area had been cratered by a bomb in the late eighties—both Nelson and Francisco had clear memories of the incident—and the frightened residents had done what they could to move elsewhere, to safer, or seemingly safer, districts. Its sidewalks had once been choked with informal vendors, but these were run off by police in the early nineties, and had reconvened in a market built especially for them in an abandoned lot at the corner of University Avenue. Now the area was showing signs of life again: a new mall had been inaugurated, and some weekends it was glutted with shoppers who had money to spend, a development everyone, even the shoppers themselves, found surprising.

They found a restaurant along this renovated stretch of gaudy storefronts, a loud, brightly lit creole place, whose waiters hurried through the tables in period dress, evoking not so much a bygone historical era but the very contemporary tone of an amateurish theater production. Everyone is acting, Nelson thought, my brother and I too—and the idea saddened him. They ordered beers, and Francisco noted that they'd never had a drink together in their lives. They clinked bottles, forced smiles, but there was nothing to celebrate.

Francisco knew Nelson's plans had changed, but he thought it was worth discussing. He was only desperate to recover something of that optimism, that closeness he'd felt with Nelson as recently as a month before. He found it hard to believe it could disappear so quickly, and so completely.

Nelson didn't accept the premise. When Francisco asked, Nelson's face screwed into a frown. “I don't have plans anymore.”

“You don't have plans? No, what you mean is—”

“You've seen her. You've seen how she is. I'm supposed to leave now?”

“I'm not saying
now
. Not immediate plans.”

Nelson rolled a bottle cap between his fingers, as if distracted. He wasn't. “When will it be okay, do you think, to abandon my mother?”

Francisco sat back.

“I mean, let's just estimate,” Nelson said. “Three months? Six months? A year?”

He fixed his gaze on his brother now.

“That's not fair,” Francisco protested.

“Isn't it?”

“Dad wouldn't want you to . . .”

There was something steely and cold in Nelson's eyes that kept Francisco from finishing that sentence. He never should've begun it, of course, but perhaps the damage was already done. Perhaps the damage had been done earlier, in 1992, when he left the country and his brother behind. Perhaps there was no way to repair it now. The two of them were silent for a while, which didn't seem to bother Nelson at all. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself. He drank his beer unhurriedly, with an amused nonchalance, as if daring his older brother to speak.

A few days later, Francisco was on a flight back to California. Neither the future, in the general sense, or Nelson's plans in particular, were mentioned again.

THE
THEATER SAT AT THE EDGE
of the Old City, in a rough, lawless neighborhood of decrepit houses, narrow streets, and metal gates held closed by rusting padlocks. It had once been known as the Olympic, the city's premier stage for many years, though its glory days were long past. Nelson's parents had taken in a show there once, when they were dating, an evening notable because it was the first time Sebastián ran his fingers along the inside of his future wife's thigh. That night, Mónica sat almost perfectly still through the performance, widening her legs just enough to let him know she approved. 1965: the theater was in its prime; Sebastián and Mónica were too. Onstage, there was a comedy, but Nelson's father paid no attention to the actors, imagining only the skin of his Mónica's magnificent thighs, remembering to laugh only because those around him did.

The Olympic's brightly lit marquee had once meant something; “A palace of dreams,” one of the founding members of Diciembre called it, remarking on the pride they felt the first time they performed there as a troupe, in 1984, two years before Henry's arrest. But for Nelson and actors of his generation, it was simply a second-rate porn theater, frequented by old men, sad drunks, and prostitutes. Together, the worn-out members of these various tribes gathered to watch grainy films of blow jobs and acrobatic threesomes, projected out of focus on the yellow screen, sometimes without sound. Nelson didn't know his parents' story, but he had his own. Before this rehearsal, he'd been to the Olympic exactly twice: the first time, at age thirteen, with a few friends, when we'd pretended to be horrified and uninterested. A couple of months later, he returned, alone. That day he sat, as his father once had, thinking of flesh. Unlike his father, Nelson jerked off furiously and violently; one might even say ecstatically. (One assumes his father would have done the same, only
after
, in private.) To Nelson's credit, he had enough presence of mind to avoid staining the pants of his school uniform, a fact noted with pride in his journal, entry dated September 2, 1991. He emerged from the darkened theater with a feeling of accomplishment.

In a sense, the Olympic had been a palace of dreams for Nelson as well.

Then, in 1993, there was a small fire, which caused just enough damage to shut down the porn operation. The Olympic was abandoned. Five years later, Patalarga took the money he'd made from his leather business and bought it from the city for a song. His wife was opposed to the purchase, but he insisted. The Olympic sat, mostly unused, for three years while Patalarga figured out what to do with it.

It was this man, the owner, who opened the door when Nelson arrived for the first rehearsal. He was short; dark-skinned; neither heavy nor thin, but stout; with full cheeks and wide, green eyes. His black hair was cut short and combed forward, and he wore a cell phone the size of a woman's pocketbook clipped to his belt.

They shook hands; they introduced themselves.

“Patalarga?” Nelson asked, just to be certain he'd heard correctly.

This man had another name, a long, multisyllabic given name, known only to a handful of close friends, and which no one used regularly anymore but his elderly mother. When Patalarga was a child, his mother had used that birth name in a variety of ways, with different intentions, intonations, and gravity, depending on her mood, or the weather: to curse her absent husband, for example, to remind Patalarga of his heritage, or to evoke the passing of the years. In his hometown, or what remained of it, that name still had resonance, and there were those who could read his past and predict his future by the mere sound of it. Of course, that's precisely why Patalarga had left that town and why he stayed away. When he was older, in the city, he'd shed that name as a snake sheds its skin, and felt nothing but relief.

“That's right,” he said now. “Just Patalarga.”

The two men stood for a moment, something unspoken floating between them. The wood floor was dusty and cracked; the theater's ticket booth, which had once represented so much possibility for Nelson and his father, was covered with a slab of pressboard. Nelson looked up at the ceiling of the ruined lobby: even the chandeliers seemed poised to fall at any moment.

“We've never met before?” Patalarga asked.

“At the audition.”

“Besides that.”

“No.”

Patalarga stepped closer. He could sense the young man's doubts. Nelson was half a head taller, but still Patalarga managed to throw an arm around the actor, and dropped his voice to a low rumble. “Have you been here before?”

“No,” Nelson lied.

“Do you know Diciembre? Do you know what we do?”

Nelson said he did.

Patalarga shook his head. “You think you do.”

“I know this is where you put on
The Idiot President
. I've read Mr. Nuñez's work.”

Patalarga smiled. “Good. Make sure you tell him how much you like it. He's not well these days.”

Then he led Nelson into the theater, through the foyer (strong smell of bleach, threadbare carpet worn to a shine), and past the doors, to the orchestra. The brass-plated seat numbers had mostly been stolen, pried off, sold for scrap at some secondhand market on the outskirts of the capital. Some rows had seats gone as well, recalling for Nelson the proud, gap-toothed grin of a child. He searched involuntarily for the spot where he'd sat that second time—“my triumph over shame,” he'd written in his journal—as if one could remember that sort of thing. The carpet had been pulled up in certain places, and the cement floor below was adorned with overlapping oil stains, evidence of some carelessly attempted, and casually abandoned, repair.

The playwright sat at the foot of the stage, a script in his lap, his legs dangling off the edge. He seemed rather small, even childlike, the domed roof of the theater rising high above him. He didn't look up when Nelson appeared, but instead kept on reading inaudibly to himself. It was his own script, naturally; and as he read, he marveled, not at its quality (which in truth he found suspect) but at its mere survival. His own.

Patalarga was right; Henry was not well. The playwright explained it to me this way: that week, and in all the weeks since that first rereading of his old script, even his daughter's artwork had been unable to shake him from this melancholy. He'd begun to think very deeply and with some clarity about his time in prison. Who he was before, whom he'd become after, and how—or even if—those two men were related. There were many things he'd forgotten, others he'd attempted to forget; but the day he was sent to Collectors, Henry told me, was the loneliest of his life. He realized that day that nothing he'd ever learned previously had any relevance anymore, and each step he took away from the gate and toward his new home was like walking into a tunnel, away from the light. He was led through the prison complex, a vision of hell in those days, full of half-dead men baring the scarred chests to the world, impervious to the cold. He'd never been more scared in his life. One man promised to kill him at the first opportunity, that evening perhaps, if it could be arranged. Another, to fuck him. A third looked at him with the anxious eyes of a man hiding some terrible secret. Two guards led Henry through the complex, men whom he'd previously thought of as his tormentors, but who now felt like his protectors, all that stood between him and this anarchy. Halfway to the block, he realized they were as nervous as he was, that they, like him, were doing all they could to avoid eye contact with the inmates that surrounded them. At the door to the block, the guards unlocked Henry's handcuffs, and turned to leave.

The playwright looked at them helplessly. “Won't you stay?” he asked, as if he were inviting them in for a drink.

The two guards wore expressions of surprise.

“We can't,” one of them said in a low voice. He was embarrassed.

Henry realized then that he was alone, that these two guards were the only men in uniform he'd seen since they'd left the gate. They turned and hurried back to the entrance.

An inmate led Henry inside the block, where men milled about with no order or discipline. He remembers thinking, I'm going to die here, something all new inmates contemplated upon first entering the prison. Some of them, of course, were right. Henry was taken to his cell, and didn't emerge for many days.

He had mourned when the prison was razed, had even roused himself enough to participate in a few protests in front of the Ministry of Justice (though he'd declined to speak when someone handed him the bullhorn), but in truth, the tragedy had both broken him and simultaneously spared him the need to ever think about his incarceration again. No one who'd lived through it with him had survived. There was no one to visit, no one with whom to reminisce, no one to meet on the day of their release, and drive home, feigning optimism. In the many years since, there were times when he'd almost managed to forget about the prison completely. Whenever he felt guilty (which was not infrequently, all things considered), Henry told himself there was nothing wrong in forgetting; after all, he never really belonged there to begin with.

Ana's mother, now his ex-wife, had heard the stories (some of them), but that was years before, and she was no longer capable of feeling sympathy or solidarity toward the man who had betrayed her. Besides Patalarga, few people were, at least not by the time I became involved. Henry's colleagues at the school where he taught were jealous because the director had granted him leave for the tour. If they'd known his controversial past, they likely would have used it as an excuse to be rid of him forever. His old friends from Diciembre were no better—their constant refrain after his release was that Henry should write a play about Collectors, something revolutionary, a denunciation, an homage to the dead, but he had no stomach for the project, had never been able to figure out how or where to begin.

“It will be therapeutic,” these friends of his argued.

To which Henry could only respond: “For whom?”

Now that it was all coming back to him, he had no one to talk to. For years, he'd been losing friends and family at an alarming pace, in a process he felt helpless to reverse. He said offensive things at parties, he hit on his friend's wives, he forgot to return phone calls. He stormed out of bad plays, scraping his chair loudly against the concrete floors so that all could turn and see the once famous playwright petulantly expressing his displeasure. (Later he felt guilty: “As if I never wrote a bad play!”) Sometime in the previous year he'd even offended his beloved sister, Marta, and now they weren't talking. Worst of all, he couldn't even remember what he'd done.

Patalarga interrupted this reverie. “Henry,” he said. “This is Nelson.”

The playwright set aside his old, imperfect script, and looked up, squinting at the actor: the young man's features, his dumb grin, his unkempt hair, his pants in need of a hem. Of the audition Henry could recall very little. The handshake, yes. And that this boy had read the part of Alejo, the idiot president's idiot son, with a preternatural ease.

“You're perfect,” Henry said now. “You're, what? Eighteen, nineteen?”

“Almost twenty-three,” said Nelson.

Henry nodded. “Well, I'm the president.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The idiot president,” Patalarga added.

•   •   •

THEY WENT TO A BAR
to celebrate; it felt good to drink in the middle of an afternoon. They got a table in the back, far from the windows, where it was almost dark. The heat faded after the first pitcher. Someone sang a song; a couple quarreled—but what did it matter? “Soon we'll be off, into the countryside!” Henry proclaimed, glass held high, his head light and his spirit charged. He felt better than he had in weeks. Optimistic. Patalarga seconded the notion, with similar enthusiasm; and the two old friends reminisced aloud for Nelson's benefit: past tours, past shows, small Andean towns where they'd amazed audiences and romanced local women. Epic, week-long drunks. Fights with police, escaping along mountain roads toward safety. Everything got stranger once you rose beyond an altitude of four thousand meters, that supernatural threshold after which all life becomes theater, and all theater Beckettian. The thin air is magical. Everything you do is a riddle.

“I've never been off the coast,” Nelson admitted.

They pressed him: “Never?”

“Never,” Nelson repeated, his face reddening. It was shameful, in fact, now that he thought about it, though he'd never had occasion to feel ashamed of it before. His family's few trips out of the city had always had the same unfortunate destination: Sebastián's coastal hometown, a cheerless stop along the highway south of the capital. He felt something like anger now when he thought of it: He'd seen nothing of the world! Not even his own miserable country!

Henry said, “Ah, life in the mountains! Patalarga can tell you all about it.”

“Pack your oxygen tank,” warned Patalarga. “We'll be going there in a few weeks.”

Henry whistled. “Four thousand one hundred meters above sea level! Can you imagine the trauma? His brain has never recovered.”

“What was it like?”

Patalarga shrugged. “Bleak,” he said. “And beautiful.”

They refilled their glasses from the pitcher, and called for another. Nelson wanted to know about the play. He still hadn't seen a full script, had never found one in any anthology, though he'd checked them all, even the most obscure volumes his father had dug up in the National Library. Of course he remembered the controversy, he said, everyone did (a gross exaggeration), and Nelson even told them the improbable tale of how he'd heard Henry on the radio, interviewed from prison. “You sounded so strong,” Nelson said.

Henry frowned. “I must have been acting.” He didn't remember the interview. “In fact, if you want to know the truth, I don't even remember writing the play.”