At Night We Walk in Circles. Daniel Alarcon

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Nelson would meet his father at the National Library, and then they’d come to this bar together. It never changed. There were then and are now black-and-white photos of garlanded racehorses and women in wide, billowing dresses carrying parasols, men in dark suits and dark glasses who do not smile, and behind them, the barren hills that were once the frontiers of this city. The streets in the pictures are hardly recognizable, but if you look closely you can make out the vague outlines of the place the city has become. The people from the photos are rarely seen now, but every so often, they stroll into the Wembley as if they have just come from the racetrack, or stepped off a steamer ship, or attended a baptism at the cathedral around the corner. Sebastián might have been one of these men had he chosen something more lucrative to do, something besides library science, but even so, he would have joined them just as their power and relevance were waning. The wealthiest left during the war for reasons of security, the most daring thinkers faded into a protective invisibility, and the once large middle class is poor now: having once owned the city, indeed the country itself, all that remained of their vast holdings were bars like the Wembley, thick with the musty air of a rarely visited provincial museum. In the old days, if a gentleman happened to run out of cash, he could leave his jacket at the coat check, and receive credit based on the quality of the fabric, the workmanship of the tailor. It was simply assumed that a man wearing a suit had money to spare. Those times were long since extinguished, and still, Nelson’s father had loved the place. He’d eat a hard-boiled egg, drink one tall glass of beer, and quiz his son on what he’d learned in school that day. When he was finished, they’d catch the bus home.

      So when Henry ordered a hard-boiled egg to go along with his glass of beer, Nelson felt a shock, something within him shifting. He watched Henry eat, his smacking jaws and lively eyes, and compared this new face to the one he remembered as a boy: his father, who spent the war years smuggling dangerous books out of the library before the censors could destroy them. Here, at this very bar, Nelson’s old man had revealed his secret treasures: pulling from his briefcase Trotsky’s theories on armed insurrection, or a hand-printed booklet containing eulogies for Patrice Lumumba, or a chapbook of Gramsci’s outlandish poetry. And the years aged him: his gray hair thinning to a dramatic widow’s peak, a system of minute wrinkles adorning his face. The last time Nelson saw him, at the hospital, he’d looked like a fine pencil drawing of himself. Nelson wondered if he would look like that too, when he was old.

      “What?” Henry asked now, because the boy was staring. “Shall I order you an egg?”

      They spent the rest of the afternoon discussing the play itself: its rhythms, its meaning, its wordplay. Nelson jotted down notes as Henry and Patalarga spoke, considering the script’s inflection points, the breaks in the action, and the malaise that ran deep beneath the text, a gloom which Henry described as “indescribable.”

      Indescribable, wrote Nelson.

      “Why are you writing this down?” Patalarga asked. It wasn’t an antagonistic question; he was only curious.

      Nelson shrugged. “Is something the matter?”

      “We never wrote things down.”

      “Didn’t we?” Henry asked, because the truth was he didn’t remember.

      The plot of The Idiot President centered on an arrogant, self-absorbed head of state and his manservant. Each day, the president’s servant was replaced; the idea being that eventually every citizen of the country would have the honor of attending to the needs of the leader. These included helping him dress, combing his hair, reading his mail, etc. The president was fastidious and required everything follow a rather idiosyncratic protocol, so the better part of each day was spent teaching the new servant how things should be done. Hilarity ensued. Alejo, the president’s son, was a boastful lout and a petty thief, who remained a great source of pride for his father, in spite of his self-evident shortcomings. The climactic scene involved a heart-to-heart between the servant, played by Patalarga, and Nelson’s character, after the president has gone to sleep, wherein Alejo lets his guard down and admits that he has often thought of killing his father but is too frightened to go through with it. The servant is intrigued; after all, he lives in the ruined country, subject to the president’s disastrous whims, and furthermore has spent the entire day being humiliated by him. The president, whose power seems infinite from a distance, has been revealed to the servant as he really is, as the play’s title suggests. The servant probes Alejo’s doubts, and he opens up, voicing concerns about freedom, about the rule of law, about the suffering of the people, until the servant finally allows that, yes, perhaps such a thing could be done. Though it would be daring, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea. For the sake of the country, you understand. Alejo pretends to mull it over, and then kills the startled manservant himself, as punishment for treason. He picks the corpse clean, pocketing the man’s wallet, his watch, his rings, and the play ends with him shouting toward the room where the president is sleeping.

      “Another one, Father! We’ll need another one for tomorrow!”

      If one recalls the times, it’s easy enough to understand why The Idiot President was so controversial during the war. The play debuted a few months after the inauguration of a new head of state, a young, charismatic but humorless man acutely lacking in confidence. Though Henry maintained during his interrogation that the piece was written with no specific president in mind, this new president was simply too self-involved to accept such a possibility. It’s as if he thought he was the only president in the world. Henry’s protests mattered not at all: he was sent to prison; his release seven months later was as arbitrary as his initial arrest. Meanwhile the country was speeding toward a precipice. The fall began in earnest soon after.

      Other topics covered that first evening at the Wembley: Henry’s daughter and her artistic gifts; Patalarga’s opinionated and talented wife, Diana, who’d played the role of Alejo in the first production of The Idiot President (“That’s how we met,” said Patalarga), but who’d wanted nothing to do with the revival, and had gladly made way for the new member of the troupe; Patalarga’s first cousin Cayetano, whom they’d meet on tour, and who’d spent many nights at the Wembley carving poetry into the scarred wooden tabletops with his penknife; and finally, the delicate negotiation a man makes with his ego in order to teach elementary school science when he is actually a playwright.

      On this last point, Nelson found he had a bit to say. Henry, according to Nelson, should not be working in an elementary school. Or driving a cab, even if he claimed to enjoy it. If Henry taught at all, it should be at the Conservatory. But in fact, if the world were fair, he would be abroad, in Paris or New York or Madrid, where his work could be appreciated. He should be overseeing the translations of his plays, winning awards, attending festivals, giving lectures, etc.

      In the entire country there was probably no one who admired Henry’s work as much as Nelson. He might have gone on, but noticed his friends shaking their heads sadly. Nelson stopped, and watched them watching him.

      “Oh, the feeble, colonized mind,” said Henry.

      “We thought you were different,” Patalarga said.

      “More enlightened.”

      “It’s just pitiful.”

      Henry and Patalarga, he would discover, often fell into these rhythms, one of them finishing the other’s thought. Nelson wasn’t the only one who found this tendency off-putting. Now, as Patalarga called for a new and final (or so he promised) pitcher, Henry explained their objection. In their day, there was an illness—“Would you call it that, my dear assistant director?” and Patalarga nodded lugubriously—yes, a syndrome, endemic to his generation. Young people were led to believe that success had to come in the form of approval from abroad. Cultural colonialism—that’s what it was called back then.

      “I СКАЧАТЬ