At Night We Walk in Circles (22 page)

“I like to give my customers some privacy,” he said with a wink.

I nodded, not because I agreed, or thought it was funny or even understood, really; I nodded because I'd been trained my entire life to agree with my elders. If I sometimes forgot this when I was in the city, it came back to me instantly in T——.

The shopkeeper didn't wait for my answer. “You're the Solis boy, aren't you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Here to help your old man with the roof, I guess?”

I nodded, not at all surprised that he knew my business.

“You're a good boy.” He paused. “Rogelio, he's your friend in there?”

And again, out of a sense of respect, I agreed. “My neighbor,” I said, noting briefly that the stranger's name had shifted yet again.

“He's always in here, always calling. His brother is going to have a big bill to pay when he comes home.”

Then Segura clapped his hands together at the prospect, a gesture that was not so much greedy as anxious. That money, that windfall, I quickly realized, had already been spent. Lest I misunderstand, the old man began to explain all the ways business had slowed since I'd last come to visit. I listened respectfully, and when the moment was right, told him that Anabel wasn't well. The bandages, the aspirin—they were for her.

“She hasn't been well for many years.”

“This is different. She fell.”

Segura shook his head. “At her age that can be very bad.”

Just then Nelson stepped out of the shop. He stood in the doorway, squinting against the sun. The shopkeeper and I turned to face him.

“I couldn't get through,” he announced.

Segura eyed him quizzically. “That's odd.”

“Happens.”

“Would you like me to dial again?”

Nelson shook his head.

“Just the bandages and the aspirin, then?”

“Sure,” Nelson said. “Write it down.”

The movement around the bus had all but subsided now, the last few passengers making their way aboard. A light breeze scattered a few leaves across the plaza, and the driver honked his horn twice to announce his imminent departure. It rang across the town like a shot. A few heads ducked out of windows; a sleeping dog sat up with a start, and stared in the direction of the bus.

Nelson did as well. His back and shoulders were straight, and from where I sat, he appeared almost statuesque. The bus clicked into gear, and slowly rounded the plaza in our direction. Without a word, Nelson stepped into the street, and blocked its path. It all happened very slowly. There was something robotic in his movements, as if he were being pulled by some force he could not resist. He held an open palm before him, and the bus slowed to a stop. The door opened. Nelson looked in my direction one last time, then stepped aboard.

A WEEK LATER,
on a frigid mid-July afternoon in the city, there was a knocking at the gates of the Olympic. The bell hadn't worked in nearly a month, and Patalarga was accustomed to long stretches without interruption; so for many minutes, he went on about his business, scarcely noticing the sound at all.

What was
his business
?

Since returning from the tour, it was no longer clear. The scale of the task before him, the restoration of the Olympic, seemed crushing; nor was the theater all that needed restoring. He'd always been prone to bouts of sadness, but the sharpness of this feeling was entirely new.

When Patalarga finally went to the gate, he found Nelson, shivering. Winter had arrived on the coast with its usual cruelty; the colorless sky, the damp sea air, and it was all reflected in the tightly pressed eyes of the people on the sidewalk, who walked past the two reunited friends as if pushing against an impossible weight. Whatever a welcome feels like, the city streets offered up just the opposite; and Nelson seemed in every way unprepared to be home again. Physically, he was a wreck. He wore the same clothes he'd been wearing the moment he stepped on the bus in T——. And this too was clear: spiritually, he was elsewhere. You could see it in his eyes.

“He looked as if he hadn't slept in a month,” Patalarga said. “As if he hadn't slept since we'd left him.”

Or perhaps: as if he'd walked from the bus station, halfway across the city. Or even more exactly: as if he'd traveled for a week with only the little money he'd had in his pocket that afternoon in T——; as if he'd survived days and covered many hundreds of kilometers by haggling or begging for rides in small towns across the provinces, journeying in silence, suffering cold and dizziness at high altitudes; as if, in that spell, he'd become accustomed to both external silence and interior turmoil. Fear. As if he'd tired of explaining himself to strangers, and started doing all that he could in those days to become invisible. As if all his money had been spent halfway through the voyage, and since then he'd eaten only what he was proffered by one kind family or another that happened to take pity on him: a can of cashews and a cup of juice one day, half a mango and a Coca-Cola the next. Evidence of those meals could be found on his T-shirt, which he hadn't had a chance to wash. He wore no jacket, and hadn't shaved. His hair was overgrown, and more unruly than normal. And even so, there was something manic in his exhaustion, something Patalarga recognized immediately: Nelson wasn't happy, or free from worry, or even optimistic—but he seemed liberated.

“I asked him how he'd gotten here, and he laughed.”

“The long way,” he said.

Once inside the theater, Patalarga dealt with Nelson's most immediate necessities. He lent him a clean shirt and a sweater, made him something to eat, and set a pot of water to boil. A few minutes later the two of them were sitting in the orchestra, drinking tea, and considering the empty stage where they'd first met, not many months before.

While Nelson ate, Patalarga did most of the talking. He didn't mind. He'd felt very alone since the tour's abrupt end, and the transition home had been more difficult than he'd expected. Turns out he liked being on the road. Turns out his wife Diana didn't mind spending long days without him. Turns out she'd decided, while he was gone, that she wanted children, after all. This last point was at the center of every disagreement now: if they bickered about the dishes or the laundry or the bills or the car or his family or her job or which movie to see or what to make for dinner, Patalarga understood that they were in fact arguing about this other, more vexing issue. It was exhausting. Her life had become disappointing to her, and by extension, Patalarga had as well. “If you die, I'll have nothing,” she'd said to him one evening, and he'd made the mistake of responding, “You'll have the Olympic.” That night, by mutual agreement, he'd left the house and been sleeping at the theater ever since. Six nights now. Patalarga felt ashamed. He missed her. It was only his pride that kept him from going home, something he understood quite clearly. But a man is helpless before his own pride.

“Didn't you tell me a child is always good news?” Nelson asked.

“In the abstract.”

“You don't want one?”

“Where would we put it?” Patalarga said with a shrug.

Nelson ate his simple snack (a couple of rolls, each adorned with a bit of avocado and a slice of cheese); he sipped his tea and listened to his friend without judgment. Or without the appearance of judgment, which is just as important. Patalarga kept talking, and sometimes Nelson would close his eyes as if in deep concentration. Mostly he was quiet. Thinking. Processing. According to Patalarga, he looked “like a man floating inside a dream.”

When Nelson had put away the last bite, he stood, left his empty plate balancing on the armrest, and walked toward the stage. Halfway down the aisle, he stopped, with his hands on his hips, gaze shifting stage left, stage right, then back again. This is the image Patalarga remembers most vividly from that day: Nelson, arms akimbo, his thin silhouette framed by the curtains of the dilapidated theater.

“I asked him what was on my mind, the only question I could think of,” Patalarga told me later.

Which was this: “Are you in trouble?”

Nelson's voice carried well. “Yes. I believe I am.”

Patalarga joined his friend. They made their way down to the front of the theater, where Nelson climbed to the stage and sat, just as Henry had on that day of the first rehearsal: in precisely the same spot, in fact, with his feet dangling off the edge just as Henry's had. Nelson, unlike Henry, let them swing, almost playfully, banging the hollow wooden stage a couple of times with the backs of his heels. The sound boomed in the empty theater like a giant bass drum.

“So what happened?” Patalarga asked.

Nelson shook his head. “That's the thing. I don't really know. The old woman had a fall. That last day, just before I left, she fell and hit her head.”

“And?”

Nelson shrugged. “It didn't seem so serious at first. But then it did. She was sort of coming apart.”

“And you left?”

“Yes,” he said, color rushing to his cheeks. “That was a week ago.”

Now he was in a rush. Every day counted. Ixta was moving on. A week in T—— hadn't seemed bad, twelve days was doable, but the longer it stretched on, the worse it got. He began to describe the endless hours in T——, its dreary routines. There was something essentially sad about the place, he said. The challenge was not the acting; it was staying focused. Fighting boredom. Beating back the melancholy, which was almost chemical. It was floating in the air. In the morning, you could smell it.

“That's woodsmoke,” said Patalarga.

Nelson shook his head. “It was a prison.”

“Ask Henry what he thinks about that. What about Jaime?”

“He promised to come back, with my money, but he never did.” Nelson sighed. “How long was I supposed to wait?”

“And what did you think when he told you all this?” I asked Patalarga.

This was months later, during our final interview. We sat in the Olympic, which, even in its ruinous condition, maintained a stately beauty; we exchanged stories about Nelson, a young man with whom I'd spent no more than an hour but who had almost come to feel like a version of myself. By that point, no one thought our relationship strange anymore. Not even me.

“I understood why he'd left, but I imagined my own mother, falling like that. He shouldn't have left like that, and I told him so. He should've waited to see if she was all right.”

That's what we all felt in T——. As it happened, I was the one who had to explain what he'd done. First, Noelia and my mother; then everyone wanted to know: What did he say before he boarded the bus? How did he seem? Was he upset, hopeful, angry? After Mrs. Anabel died, the stories began: That he stole from the old woman. That he killed her. That Noelia had fallen in love with him. In the weeks after Nelson's disappearance, I—of all people!—was asked to confirm or deny these theories. How many times did I say I barely knew him? That I'd just met him? Even Jaime, when he finally arrived in town, dragged me in to bark a few questions at me.

None of that mattered to Nelson. “I came for Ixta,” he explained to Patalarga that first night in the Olympic. Needless to say, this answer wouldn't have satisfied anyone back in T——.

“So what are you going to do?” Patalarga asked.

He didn't have a plan, only an urgent feeling in his chest that he could hardly bear. He'd spent days moving away from the town, retracing Diciembre's haphazard route toward the coast, and his goal the entire time had been to release himself of this pressure in his heart. “I need to see her,” he told Patalarga.

“What if she doesn't want to see you?” Patalarga asked. He was thinking of his own wife, darkly.

Nelson frowned. “But she does.”

Of Nelson's week on the road, we do know this: a few days into his journey, he managed to speak with Ixta from a small town called La Merced. It's even possible (though unconfirmed) that he spent the very last of his money paying for this frustrating, three-minute conversation. She doesn't recall much about it (“At this point, does it really matter?” she said when I asked her about it), except that Nelson reiterated those things he'd said to her from Segura's store on his last day in T——. That he was coming to see her. That she should wait for him. Again, that hopeful, anxious tone of voice. Pleading, you could call it. And if Ixta gave him the impression that she wanted to see him, “Well, I didn't mean to,” she told me. “I shouldn't have. But he was very persistent. And yes, it was flattering. I was lonely, you understand.”

“Just knock on her door,” Patalarga said. “Just like that?”

Nelson nodded.

Patalarga didn't disagree; what's more, he thought it was likely the only way to resolve things. But having heard the story of Nelson's departure, he had another, slightly different, concern:

“What if the old woman didn't make it? How do you think Jaime's going to react?”

Nelson was silent.

“He'll send someone after you, won't he?”

“He has my address. He took my ID. That's why I'd rather stay here. If that's okay.”

That first night they slept on the stage of the Olympic, and so high did the ceiling seem to them, it was as if they were camping beneath a dark and infinite sky. They were safe here, they reasoned. They batted around a few ill-considered but pleasing metaphors: the theater was an old galleon adrift on the seas, or a cave hidden deep inside the earth, or a bunker housing two old, grizzled warriors, the last of a once great army, now contemplating certain defeat. They laughed a good deal. They solved the conundrum of Patalarga's faltering marriage. They remembered Henry in tones usually reserved for a man who'd passed. Nelson couldn't believe that his two friends weren't talking. He'd thought of them as an indivisible unit.

Patalarga had too. “He'll come around,” he said, without really believing it, and Nelson nodded politely.

They talked for hours. Nelson described the terrible morning of Mrs. Anabel's fall, which, he argued, was the logical end to his time in T——. He didn't feel guilty, just relieved to be gone.

“Another week there and I might have tripped the old lady myself.”

They both laughed, then fell silent for a spell, until Nelson said, “I never should have gone on tour, you know?”

“That's what Henry said on the bus ride back.”

“If I'd never left the city, I'd be with Ixta now.”

“I told him that you could never know these things.” Patalarga sighed. “People believe what they want to believe.”

This is a fact.

When Patalarga woke up the next day, Nelson was already gone.

•   •   •

THAT MORNING,
in
the quiet, empty theater, Patalarga made yet another attempt to reach out to Henry. He told himself then (as he had on every occasion) that he was doing it for his old friend, persisting out of a sense of loyalty, but he later admitted that his motives were more selfish than that. Patalarga wasn't doing well either. He was only forty, estranged from his wife, sleeping on the stage of an abandoned theater. The starkness of his own situation made it clear that he couldn't afford to give up on friends like Henry.

Their handful of conversations in the few weeks since the end of the tour had been short and unsatisfying. This occasion would be no different. The phone rang for what seemed like an endless stretch, and Patalarga simply let it. A minute, and then another. He had no real expectations. When Henry finally answered, his “Hello” was forced, just above a whisper; then he apologized, cleared his throat, and tried again. Better this time. Patalarga laughed to himself. Henry was acting. He wouldn't answer questions, only complete the declarative sentences that Patalarga began for him:

“And you're doing . . . ?”

“Well.”

“Staying busy with . . . ?”

“Work.”

“Feeling more or less . . . ?”

“At peace.”

They spoke in this manner for no longer than three minutes, during which time Patalarga informed Henry of the news that pertained to them both, that Nelson had come home.

“And this news strikes you as . . . ?”

“Good,” said Henry.

Patalarga sighed. “We're at the Olympic if you want to come see us.”

Henry said neither yes nor no; and the conversation, as Patalarga recalls, didn't end so much as slip away: a tiny balloon on a string, sliding through the fingers of a child. In his mind's eye, Patalarga watched it float up to the sky and vanish. “At a certain point, I realized I wasn't talking to anyone. I sort of laughed to myself and hung up.”