At Night We Walk in Circles (9 page)

“Everyone stared at me,” he reported. “They stopped me, and asked where I'd come from. It was wonderful.”

This time, there were more people around, the market was louder and more alive. Melissa borrowed a bullhorn from another vendor, and announced Henry to the crowd.

“Ladies and gentlemen: the president!”

With the people's attention, Henry once more clambered atop a stool and spoke of Diciembre, the play, its surprising change of venue. There was a buzz this time—who is that oddly dressed man, and what exactly is he talking about?—and when he finished, Henry bowed, taking care not to lose his balance, and received the tour's very first round of applause.

According to Patalarga, Nelson was both nervous and determined not to appear so. He was not a complete novice; after all he'd performed in a few of the capital's more storied theaters. But this was undoubtedly different, Patalarga told me. “The intimacy of it, the nearness of these strangers, the way they look at you. It couldn't have been easy for him.”

Did Nelson flub his first lines?

He did.

Did he miss his cue for the fight scene?

He did.

Did he see the faces of his audience, feel them close, smell their presence in the room, and long for the trappings of those theaters he knew back home?

He did.

But he pushed through all that, and by the time the mayor appeared, midway through the first act, Nelson had mostly recovered. Things were humming along. The mayor, full of bluster and pique, seemed unimpressed. He made his way to the corner opposite the door, and stood against the wall with his arms crossed, frowning.

Nelson had no idea who this man was, and later claimed it was mere coincidence that his line “But Father, you must be careful! Evil lurks everywhere!” was delivered with eyes locked on the latecomer.

Everyone noticed, and Cayetano laughed nervously; soon the entire room was laughing along with him. Everyone but the mayor.

“This is what Nelson had to learn,” Patalarga told me. “That the play is different every time. That it doesn't matter if you mess up. There's no such thing as a mistake.”

The mayor stormed out well before the climactic murder scene.

It was just as well. There was more humor at his expense once he'd gone. A gentle rain began moments later, just as Patalarga's character was stabbed. It tapped pleasantly on the roof. When the play was finished, the applause and the rain seemed to blend into one, each augmenting the other. There'd been no theater in town for as long as anyone could remember. No one wanted to leave. Nelson, immersed in the chatter, felt warm. Then a bottle appeared, and the volume was raised, and the dancing soon began. Nelson stood against the wall, shy, but Cayetano and Patalarga sent Melissa across the room to pull him onto the floor. He took his first tentative steps to the beat, and Henry yelled, “The city boy!” his voice somehow carrying over the music and the rain.

Everyone cheered, and this is when the tour finally seemed real to Nelson.

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED,
Diciembre played in small towns and villages up and down the region, subject to weather like nothing Nelson had ever experienced. Some mornings it was as if the sun never rose, the skies swirling with blue and purple clouds until late afternoon, when they finally broke into a downpour. Other days, it wasn't the rain but the winds one had to contend with: they blew fierce and merciless through the valley, leaving Nelson's cheeks red and his body chilled. Then, quite unexpectedly, the cloud cover would vanish, and the sun would appear. Everything glistened, even the mountains, and he'd think: this is the most beautiful landscape I've ever seen. It never lasted; after an hour the clouds would return. Nelson lost weight in those first days, and woke up many mornings with a terrible headache. For breakfast he drank coca tea, ate cold bread and cheese. For lunch: fried trout, some eight days in a row. Ten days. Fourteen. Occasionally, guinea pig, a welcome change, but which too often involved the unpleasant ritual of having to choose your lunch from among a pen of furry little animals. (“The fat one,” said Henry, every time, without deigning to bend his head over the beasts.) They rode from one town to the next on a bus, if one was available; if not, and if there was no rain yet, the bed of a truck would do. They lay among piles of potatoes, gazing out across the valleys, the fields, the scattered, lonely houses, and the turbid sky that pressed down heavily on all of it. The higher they went, the more dangerous the roads became, at times barely wide enough for a horse cart; and Nelson would often peer over the edge of a crumbling mountain, and force himself to think of something other than death. His life back home came to mind, but Henry's instructions—to give in completely to the world of the play, to forget everything else—seemed particularly apt since his last, disappointing conversation with Ixta. He strained to put her out of his mind.

In spite of these physical and psychological hardships, the tour had its pleasures: they were greeted warmly in each town, with a certain ceremony and solicitousness Nelson found charming; almost every night the audiences gave them a standing ovation that made all their efforts seem worthwhile. Even if the community had never heard of Diciembre, they were often grateful for the visit. The village elder or mayor would insist on hosting them himself; and being welcomed into these humble homes was, for Nelson, an astonishing privilege. He'd try to catch Henry's eye or Patalarga's, just to make sure they felt it too: the significance of these people's unexpected, unearned trust. A party would be hastily organized, or spring up spontaneously after a performance. The villages might be just a handful of houses amid endless yellow-gray fields, but in many cases, these were the best audiences of all: no more than a dozen people altogether, with little education or experience with theater, a few farmers with ruddy faces, their long-suffering wives, and undernourished children, who'd approach Henry after the play, never looking directly at him, and say respectfully, “Thank you, Mr. President.”

There was the show in Corongo, where Patalarga's elderly aunts and uncles lined up in the front row, his mother, beaming with pride, in the very center, an hour before the show was to begin. They sat quietly and very still, gazing upward as if posing for a photograph. When the performance began, their eyes narrowed in concentration, and when it was finished they stood to applaud. Afterward, they all ate potato and onion soup in the dining room of Patalarga's childhood home, pressed together at a long narrow wooden table that creaked one way and then another, depending on whose elbow happened to be raised. The room was dark and musty, and all the windows and doors had been thrown open to air it out, letting in the nighttime chill, which no one but Nelson seemed to mind. Everyone was happy, proud, but they were tight-lipped and circumspect, as if contentment were an emotion to be guarded like a secret. Unlike the rest of the family, Patalarga's mother was concerned. “I have a question,” she said to her son, as the meal was ending. “Oh, and please don't take this the wrong way . . . but if you're the one with the money, why must you play the servant?”

To which Henry responded, “The role comes so naturally to him. It would be a crime to use his talents in any other way.”

There was the night in the roadside community of Sihuas at three thousand two hundred meters above sea level, where they were given a corner of a bar called El Astral to perform; they waited and waited for an audience—anyone would do—but no one arrived. It was after ten in the evening, and besides the mustachioed bartender, and the manager at the hostel, they hadn't seen another living soul anywhere in the vicinity. Henry and Patalarga each drank a beer in silence, unconcerned, or pretending to be, but Nelson was impatient. “They're not coming,” he said, wishing only to rest. “No one's coming!” But the bartender pulled at the edges of his mustache. “Believe me, young fellow, you just wait. You'll do your show!”

A while later, he looked at his watch. “Go on. Go out there, you'll see.”

Night had fallen; the sky was dark. Sihuas was set in a narrow slip of the valley, and Nelson saw nothing in the town's empty streets, but when he got to the corner and looked up, there they were: strings of tiny, bobbing lamplights, hundreds of them, rushing down the trails. They were gold miners, descending the mountains all at once. A half hour later, in a clamor of shouting and noise, they arrived, and instantly, El Astral was overrun. The men were small and lean, with reddish, windburned cheeks, inky black eyes, and a feverish desire to drink. Some were scarred, or missing fingers from dynamite accidents, but they didn't seem to care. They smelled of metal, and paid for their drinks with tiny bits of gold that glinted beneath the bar's neon lights. They sang songs, and packed the place so tightly that Nelson, Patalarga, and Henry found themselves pushed together into a tight huddle. Their stage had disappeared beneath the crush of men. A half hour later, a bus full of prostitutes appeared—how? where had it come from?—and suddenly El Astral smelled of sex, or the possibility of sex, this thick cloud of painted women pushing into the bar as if borne by a strong and lurid wind.

There was no chance of doing the show now.

“No wonder the hostel manager wanted us all in a single,” Nelson said. He'd never been to a brothel before (though he'd imagined the setting enough to write a play about it), and now, quite improbably, the brothel had come to him. It was an impressive spectacle. Within the hour, there were couples having sex in the bathrooms, behind the remains of Diciembre's makeshift stage, on the steps of the bus that had carried the women there. Henry settled their bill, suddenly embarrassed, apologizing for being unable to pay in gold, but the bartender was nothing if not understanding.

“Next time,” he said.

They walked the few blocks to the hostel together, the unlit streets of Sihuas alive with grunts and moans and women's laughter.

And there was the night in Belén when they met the town's much-aged former police chief, who, after a few drinks, agreed to share the story of how he'd briefly arrested some members of Diciembre nearly twenty years before. The old man had a chubby face and mottled skin, but his eyes shone at the memory: it was like he was watching a movie of the scene, admiring the version of himself played by a young and handsome actor. He'd made the papers in the capital, he recalled, something he'd never managed again. He told the story without reserve or shame, addressing Nelson directly, perhaps because he mistakenly believed that Henry and Patalarga were among the group that had been arrested. It was all right to laugh now, he said, but back then things were different. “We'd heard of the terrorists, but we had no idea what to look for. There were awful reports from the city, but no solid information. You probably don't believe me, but we were frightened.”

Henry and Patalarga knew people in every town: old collaborators or antagonists from the early days of Diciembre, the men and women with whom they'd shared their youth. These acquaintances had lived most of their lives in the provinces, at a different rhythm. They told funny stories masquerading as tragedies, and sad stories purporting to be comedies; they drank heavily, and seemed not to notice those things most concerning to Nelson: the abject poverty of their surroundings, the terrible condition of the roads, the relentless rains and the bitter cold. He admired this too: their ability to preserve joy at any cost, the way prehistoric man might have preserved fire. Nelson had learned to chew coca leaves, had come to enjoy the numbness as it spread over his face, down his neck, and into his chest; a small pleasure that muted the harshness of the rainy season and smoothed over the effects of the altitude. And they were at the edge of a different region now: the lower valleys, where the forests began. If they went farther, another day or two or three, the cold would give way completely, and they'd be at the edge of the jungle, free to breathe again, almost normally. Now they sat around a rectangular wooden table in a cramped restaurant, listening to the old police chief tell this funny little war story about arresting actors. A fluorescent light buzzed; the television was on, but no one watched. Behind them stood a second line of men, anxious to listen in—if the table were the stage, they were the balcony, so to speak. Workers, all of them, men with rough hands jammed deep in their pockets, men who laughed when it was time to laugh, who fell silent when it was time for quiet. They were the chorus, carefully following the police chief's cues. If a glass of beer was offered, they accepted; if it wasn't, they didn't complain. They were indifferent to cold, didn't mind standing, and followed the conversation in the bar as closely as they'd followed the play itself.

The old man went on: “So then these kids, these ruffians, show up on the back of a pickup truck, wearing bandanas and smelling bad. They set up a tent in the plaza, without even asking. They play rock music from a boom box. You must think we're primitives here, but this is how it happened. My deputy—God bless him, he's abroad now—he says to me,
That's them!
That's who? I ask.
The terrorists!
But how do you know? I say, and this one, he was always reading the papers. He had an answer for everything:
Look how dirty they are!
What did we know? We'd never seen one. The ladies, they smoked cigarettes, they had patches on their jeans. The boys looked sickly, with stringy hair and thin mustaches. Look at them! Even now they look shifty! Was I wrong to worry? Tell me, son, was I wrong?”

The old man laughed with his entire body, the chorus too. Henry and Patalarga didn't, but no one seemed to notice.

“I'd arrest them now!” Nelson called out.

“But what would I charge them with?” the police chief said in an exaggerated whisper.

“I'm sure you could come up with something,” Patalarga said.

“Anything will do,” Henry added. “The courts aren't very picky, you know.”

No one had anything to say to that. The police chief smiled politely, and the chorus held its breath for a moment. Nelson sensed the discomfort too, and when it had gone on just a second too long, he changed the subject, and brought up the rains; the police chief smiled, deferring to the chorus, who were the laborers, the ones who tilled the earth. They'd come into town for the show, but what they really knew was the land.

“How are things out there?” the old police chief asked. “What's happening over in the provinces?”

The provinces—this was another thing Nelson had come to understand. No matter where you went, no matter how far you traveled into the far-flung countryside, the provinces were always farther out. It was impossible to arrive there. Not here—
never here
—always just down the road.

One of the men said his fields might be washed away. Two straight weeks of rain this late in the season; it wasn't normal. The rivers are swollen, said another, the bridges could collapse. And then, a third man, with a broad face and black hair that fell limply just above his eyes, said, “Heard from my cousin that it's getting so bad in the lowlands that the planes can't even fly!”

At this, everyone fell silent.

“Planes?” Nelson asked.

He hadn't heard of any planes. He hadn't seen them, or even imagined them. Though he'd never flown, air travel was his; it belonged to that other world, the one he'd left behind.

The former police chief's face was stern. He glared for a moment at the offending chorus member, who'd broken the rules by speaking out of turn and mentioning the lower valley's most important and fastest growing industry, the drug trade.

“Perhaps you could arrest him for
that
,” said Henry, a comment that did nothing to lighten the suddenly oppressive mood.

After that night, and after Henry had explained, Nelson looked to the skies when they traveled. He noted it in his journal, welcoming this new way to pass the time, to distract himself from the precariousness of the roads or the raw winds. He never saw a plane. They spent four days in that area, descending toward the heat, before Henry decided they should turn back toward the highlands.

“I feel more comfortable when there's less oxygen,” he said. “The play makes more sense that way. Don't you agree?”

And because he was the president, Diciembre returned to the highlands.

Then there was the night in San Felipe, when, after a particularly energetic performance, Nelson nearly fainted. Patalarga's murder took a lot out of him that evening, and he sat afterward, slumped in a chair, unable to catch his breath. Inhaling was like swallowing knives, and his head felt as if it might separate from his neck and float away. Eventually he recovered, and they were all invited to a party in a one-room adobe house on the outskirts of town. He was rushed inside, where the strangers paid special attention to feeding him and getting him drunk. Surprisingly, the liquor helped, and it felt nice to be doted on. When Nelson began to turn blue, the owner of the home, a gray-haired man named Aparicio, asked if he wanted a jacket. Nelson nodded enthusiastically, and his host rose and walked to the refrigerator, standing before its open door, as if contemplating a snack. Nelson thought, He's making fun of me. He watched Aparicio open the vegetable drawer and take out a pair of wool socks. He tossed them to Nelson, and when the door opened a bit more, Nelson saw the refrigerator was, in fact, being used as a wardrobe. The bottom shelves remained, but all the rest had been removed. There were mittens in the butter tray, sweaters and jackets hanging from a wooden bar nailed to the inside walls. Only then did he notice the few perishables sitting on the counter. In this cold, they were in no danger of spoiling.