At Night We Walk in Circles (25 page)

But that afternoon, after learning that Ixta had been with Nelson, Mindo was furious. He'd never liked the man he'd replaced, never liked the suggestion of him. He didn't like the look in Ixta's eyes when Nelson was mentioned, or the way she avoided saying his name when recounting anecdotes that self-evidently starred her former lover. She'd replace “Nelson” with anodyne phrases like “an old friend” or “someone I used to know,” a tic she'd never noticed until Mindo pointed it out to her. If Mindo had any suspicions about Ixta's liaisons with Nelson, he didn't bring them up with her. It may have been a matter of pride, or perhaps he preferred not to know. It doesn't matter: now Mindo only wanted to find his rival.

Instead of Nelson, however, Mindo found Elías, who happened to be at the Conservatory that day, visiting old friends. Mindo knew he and Nelson were close. After the standard and truthful denials (“No, I haven't seen him. No, I didn't know he was back”), Elías, a little disconcerted by Mindo's aggressive posture, suggested he check the old theater, the one at the edge of the Old City.

“Which one?”

Elías was being deliberately vague.

“The Olympic,” he said finally.

He felt as if he'd given up a secret, he told me months later, though in truth, he was only guessing, only thinking aloud.

“The porn spot?” Mindo said, then thanked him gruffly, and left.

“I don't think we'd ever really talked before,” Elías told me. “I knew who he was, but not much more than that. And of course I never spoke to him again.”

“Did you ask why he was looking for Nelson? Did you wonder?”

Elías folded his hands together primly. “I wondered, yes. But I didn't ask. He sounded like he was in a rush. He looked upset, and the truth is . . .” He paused here, as if ashamed to admit this: “I prefer not to speak to people when they're like that.”

Mindo made his first appearance at the Olympic about a half hour before Nelson arrived there himself. There was knocking, pounding, fruitless bell ringing, shouting. Eventually, Patalarga heard the commotion, and went to the gate.

“I thought he was someone Jaime had sent,” Patalarga told me. “I just assumed that. I mean, who else would it have been?”

There were many plausible tactics available to him. Patalarga chose obfuscation. “Nelson's not here,” he told the stranger.

“When will he be back?”

“Back?” He was careful to keep the gate closed, and not show his face. “Is he in the city?”

Mindo left without saying another word.

According to Patalarga, that afternoon Nelson was quiet, pensive, and answered every question in a way that seemed deliberately vague. He didn't say, for example, why he'd left so early, where he'd been, or whom he'd seen; and soon enough Patalarga decided to let it go. The two of them ate an austere lunch, in the best tradition of their tour, and over this meal, Patalarga told Nelson the news: someone had come to the theater looking for him.

“Who?” Nelson asked.

Patalarga didn't know. He told him about his brief interaction with the stranger, and they could come to only one conclusion: This man must be from T—— or San Jacinto.

“Does anyone know you're here?”

By that time, Mindo was drinking at a bar near the Conservatory, executing fine illustrations of clenched fists in his sketch pad. He would stay in the bar until well past nightfall, after it had swelled with a cast of regulars whom he mostly ignored (while ignoring Ixta's increasingly urgent phone calls as well) before heading back to the theater just past midnight. He paid his bill but left no gratuity. His sketch pad would be found early that morning, tossed on the sidewalk a few blocks from the Olympic, next to his lifeless body.

MRS. ANABEL HAD DIED
earlier that week, leaving the town in a state of shock. The funeral was held a few days before Nelson arrived in the city, a beautiful, lugubrious affair, full of black-clad mourners, their faces twisted with sadness. Seeing them was more moving than the ceremony itself, than the death of this woman I barely knew: more than half of the town's remaining residents gathered in the plaza, the stooped men and wrinkled women of my parents' generation, the survivors. The principal brought the entire school too, fifty or sixty excitable children with no apparent understanding of what had happened or why they were there. They teased each other, giggling at all the wrong moments. It was refreshing. My father wore his dark suit, my mother her black shawl. A brass band struck up a warbling melody, and then the funeral party marched toward the cemetery, so slowly even Mrs. Anabel could've kept up. The people of T—— never gathered this way anymore, except to say good-bye to one of their own; the event became something like a reunion. Jaime gave his eulogy at the grave site. “Everything I've accomplished is because of her,” he said, and the town nodded respectfully because they knew what that meant. He'd accomplished a lot; he was rich, wasn't he?

Then the casket was lowered, and we all went home.

I spent the days after with my old man, pulling the rotted clay tiles off the roof. Oddly, the town had felt most alive at the funeral, but now it was as if we were the only people left in all of T——. Our work was done mostly in silence—this had always been my father's way—but occasionally he'd pause and ask me to tell him again what I was doing back in the city, and what I hoped to do in the future. I liked these moments. It wasn't a conversation I minded. I didn't feel put upon, or pressured; I heard no disappointment in his voice, only a genuine curiosity about my life and my plans. The fact that I had no good answers felt less like a stressor and more like an opportunity. Each day, I offered a new hypothetical—going back to school, working in television, starting a restaurant—all fanciful, but not impossible, as if I were performing a kind of optimism I didn't really have. My father seemed to appreciate it.

One morning, a few days after the funeral, we heard my mother calling up to us from the courtyard. She was with Noelia, and they stood side by side, necks craned in our direction, each with a curved hand shielding their eyes from the sun. Both wore long burgundy skirts and white blouses, with dark shawls draped over their shoulders, and for a moment, I thought they looked almost like sisters.

“Come down,” my mother said. “Noelia wants to speak with you.”

It was a bright, silent day, and the air was still. I love the way the human voice sounds on days like this—clear, warm, like it could carry all the way across a valley. I looked down at my mother, not realizing at first that she meant me, not my father. My old man shrugged, and pulled the brim of his cap down over his eyes. With that, I'd been dismissed.

I climbed down. Noelia smiled politely, not saying much. She kept her eyes narrowed against the sun, and she looked well, all things considered. The loss of her mother, the chaotic days after—she looked recovered, I thought, or perhaps I was only comparing her to my idea of what this kind of suffering should look like, how it would show on her face, in her eyes, in the tilt of her shoulders.

“I have something to show you,” she said.

My mother nodded.

Noelia went on. “Something I want you to see.”

We crossed the street, to her sunlit courtyard, overgrown and wild. The cats slept in the tall grass, and we ignored them, just as they ignored us. Jaime had gone back to San Jacinto, and for the first time in Noelia's life, the house was all hers. She didn't like the idea. Not one bit.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

She pursed her lips. “You don't remember me, do you?”

Like most grown-ups in my hometown, Noelia was familiar, in a very broad sense; she had a look of stoicism that I associated with every adult from T——. I remembered her, even if I knew almost nothing about her beyond the fact that she lived across the street from the house where I was born.

I lied: “Of course I do.”

“It's fine. Really.”

“I do.”

“I was there when you were born. I've known you since you were a flea.” She smiled now. “And look at you! You're all grown.”

Noelia asked me to wait while she went to the room where her mother had died. I sat in the courtyard with my back against one of the walls, resting in the shade. It was another perfect day. She came back with the journals. They were handed over with some ceremony, these three ordinary notebooks tied together with a piece of string, covering most of the previous six months. They had no decoration, no stickers or markings on the outside, nothing, in fact, to identify them, beyond the normal wear. Now Noelia untied the string for me, flipped through them idly. The last of them, the most recent, was on top, a quarter of it still empty.

“They're Rogelio's.”

“Nelson's?” I asked.

“If you prefer.”

“What should I do with them?”

“You should take them when you go home, to the city. You can give them back to him.”

It must have been clear by my expression that I was less than eager to take this on.

“But mostly, I think I should get them out of this house.” She leaned in: “My brother wants to find Nelson. He sent someone to the capital to look for him.”

“To look for him? Why?”

She offered me a careful smile. “You don't know?”

I assured her I didn't.

“My brother is very proud. He feels disrespected.” Noelia sighed. “It's best for everyone if we forget all this. My brother especially. So take them. Don't make too much of it. Just take them.”

She nodded, and I found myself nodding too. I could have said no, I suppose, but no good reason to refuse came to mind; Noelia stood before me, with her simple, pleading smile; I froze. She wanted me to have them.

I took the notebooks, reading relief on her face as she handed them over. I carried them back across the street, where I wrapped them in an old paper bag, and left them untouched at the foot of my bed. My father and I returned to our work, to our panoramic views of T——, the empty town below us, and our steady, plodding conversation about my future.

Eventually I went back to the city, and in truth, I almost left the journals behind. I happened to see them as I was packing, thought back to my conversation with Noelia, and decided to take them along.

Still I didn't read them. This is the truth: I had no interest. Not for many months, not until I heard what had happened.

•   •   •

HENRY APPEARED
at
the Olympic just before six in the evening. In truth, he hadn't intended to come at all, but driving his cab after school he'd chanced to drop off a fare not far from the theater. As he made note of this coincidence, a parking spot opened up before him. He shuddered, then eased the car to the curb, shut off the engine, and sat for a moment. He listened to the news on the radio, waiting for a signal.

See him: his severe expression, his keen sense of victimization. He likely sat for a quarter of an hour, listening for something only he would recognize, wearing what his ex-wife described to me as “his pre-crucifixion face”: furrowed brow, unfocused eyes gazing at the middle distance, pursed lips, and his chin pulled back toward his chest, like a turtle trying but unable to get back in its shell. “A fake stoicism,” she called it, for Henry, in her view, was anything but stoic. “He could play stoic,” she clarified, but that was different. Still, she knew this pose well, for it was this face, she admitted, that had seduced her “back when we were young and beautiful.” She laughed then, not to dismiss what she'd just said, or make light of it, but as if to perform it: in laughter, Henry's ex-wife was transformed before my eyes and became, in spite of the years, young and indeed very beautiful.

Eventually Henry tired of waiting, got out of the car, and walked toward the theater. He used his keys on the gate, surprised that they still worked, and found his two friends on their knees in the lobby of the Olympic, with hammers in their hands, talking wildly about a man who'd come to the city to murder Nelson. They were pulling up rotten wooden floorboards, a repair Patalarga had been talking about for months.

“It was startling to say the least,” Henry told me later.

The supposed murderer, the one Nelson and Patalarga had conjured out of an initial bout of genuine concern, had been replaced by another, less frightening villain, a blend of various comic-book bad guys and assorted ruffians they'd met on tour. Men with potbellies and bad teeth, men who swore in ornate neologisms and kept shiny rings on every finger. Nelson and Patalarga felt better in the company of these invented scoundrels, who needless to say had nothing in common with Mindo.

Nelson and Patalarga were laughing, working at a furious pace, and obviously enjoying themselves. Months later, when I first visited the Olympic, I'd come across this very same pile, those slats of rotting wood that Nelson and Patalarga pulled up that day. They were lying in the middle of the space, like kindling for a bonfire. Patalarga and I strolled past them, without comment.

“I had a hard time joining in,” Henry said to me. He asked them to back up and explain, and they did, partially. He gathered the basics: Something had gone very wrong back in T——, and Nelson was in danger. Rogelio's mother might have died, and though it wasn't Nelson's fault, it was possible that Jaime was holding him responsible. He'd escaped.

Henry frowned. “And the girl?”

Nelson shrugged. It was the part of the story he didn't want to tell. So he didn't.

“When did you come home?” Henry asked instead.

“Yesterday.”

Henry nodded. “You don't look well.”

“Neither do you.”

It was true. He'd seemed healthier, more alive on the tour; now Henry's age showed. These late middle years offended his vanity. He was looking forward to being old, when he would no longer be tormented by memories of youth.

“I suppose you're right,” he said.

Patalarga offered Henry a hammer, but the playwright demurred. He did so wordlessly, gripping his right shoulder with his left hand and grimacing, as if he were nursing some terrible injury. Patalarga set the hammer down, and the two old friends looked at each other warily. Besides the odd conversation here and there, they hadn't spoken since Jaime shipped them back to the city. Each of them considered the other to be somehow at fault for this.

Henry sighed. “So this bad guy, this villain. Are we afraid of him?”

He asked in a tone very specific to the world they inhabited: it was the way an actor inquired about his character.

Patalarga nodded. “We are.”

“No,” Nelson said, suddenly buoyant. “We aren't.”

Patalarga laughed, but qualified his friend's denial. “We aren't terrified. We're concerned.”

“Nelson smiled in a way that put me at ease,” Henry told me. “And understand that I had no context for any of this. If he was calm, why shouldn't I be?”

If it wasn't quite old times, it was a passable facsimile. They abandoned the work and moved into the theater itself, spreading out on the stage where Nelson and Patalarga had slept the night before. They laughed a little, and filled each other in on recent developments. Henry was appalled to learn that Patalarga was having trouble with Diana, and urged him to reconcile. There was a surprising insistence to his tone.

“Immediately,” he said. “Right away.”

Nelson agreed, and Patalarga could hardly argue. They were right, but this sort of thing was easy to say, and not so easy to do. He played along, even stood up and took out his phone. “You know what?” he said. “You're right, and I'm going to call her.” His friends applauded.

He went backstage (“for some privacy”), and there, among the variegated junk that crowded the hallways and dressing rooms, he once more lost his nerve. He held the phone in his hands, could hear Diana's sweet voice in his head, but the in-between steps seemed impossible.

“I wanted to call,” he told me later. “I just couldn't.”

So he waited a moment beneath the single fluorescent light that illuminated the hallway, breathing the stale air. Fifty years of theater. Longer. When enough time had passed, he returned to his friends, to the stage, and announced: “She still loves me!”

He had a bottle of rum handy, and brought it out now. “To celebrate,” he said. It was all made up (“And they knew it, I assume”), but he did feel like celebrating. “It made me happy to see Nelson and Henry again, to be together, even if it was just one night.” They drank and laughed some more, and at a certain point, they reenacted a scene from the play, rewriting it on the fly to suit their mood and their circumstances. Patalarga's servant had been kicked out of the house by his wife; Nelson's Alejo had murdered an old woman in the provinces; Henry's idiot president was losing his mind to loneliness. This improvised scene was so satisfying and felt so real that it was a surprise to look out on the empty theater and realize they were alone.

Only they weren't.

It was past midnight then, and Mindo was at the gate, calling Nelson's name.

•   •   •

THROUGHOUT THAT AFTERNOON
and into the evening, Mónica looked for her son without success. She didn't know where to begin, and the process made her aware of just how little she knew about his life, or at least about his life now. Nelson's friends, the ones she remembered, were from middle and high school. They appeared in her mind's eye, effortlessly, a row of adolescent boys standing on a sidewalk in their gray and white school uniforms, performing a world-weariness they could scarcely have understood. She smiled at the memory, could see their dark eyes, their slumped shoulders, their vanity beginning to manifest itself in surprising ways (the carefully maintained shadow of a mustache, or the sneakers whose wear and tear was as curated as any gallery exhibit). Fifteen, sixteen, almost men but not quite—this was not the age she most loved, but it was the one she recalled most clearly, in part because she'd had Sebastián by her side to help record it. Those were the years they talked most of all; the happiest years of their marriage: they were alone in the house with a somber teenage madman whom they loved, two hostages who admired and feared for their captor. They discussed Nelson's moods the way farmers analyze the weather, looking for some logic in it, some reason. They worried over his choice of friends, worried most of all because it was something they could not control: Santiago, Marco, Diego, Sandro, Fausto, Luis. She remembered their faces, but not their surnames. They were good kids, but not good enough, boys with easily identifiable weaknesses, talents they hadn't yet discovered; and more worrying than their lack of maturity was their lack of curiosity. On this count, Mónica and Sebastián saw a clear difference between their son and the others. The boys came to the house, and spent hours in a locked bedroom. She could not, at the time, conceive of what made these children laugh. The years passed, she and Sebastián watched them grow; and then Nelson entered the Conservatory, and these boys simply faded from view, to be replaced by others. These others—now that she needed them, Mónica realized she had only the vaguest idea who they were. She looked among her papers and found programs to various plays Nelson had been in. She scanned the names of the cast members, and not one of them jogged anything in her memory. She searched for Ixta's number, and couldn't find it. She even called the Conservatory, and spoke to a secretary, but found it impossible to explain what she wanted: for this woman, this stranger, to tell her who her son's friends were.