At Night We Walk in Circles. Daniel Alarcon

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СКАЧАТЬ like a home to them, its unique patterns of decay becoming familiar, even comforting. They were rehearsing every Monday and Wednesday night, Thursday afternoons, and all day Saturday. Sometimes other members of Diciembre came to watch, offer advice, but mostly Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson were alone. Once on tour, they would play in churches, garages, fields, plazas, fairgrounds, and workshops. One show would be performed beneath the blinking fluorescent lights of a nearly frozen municipal auditorium; another on the hosed-down killing floor of a slaughterhouse—but none in a proper theater, if a place like the fire-damaged Olympic could still be called as much. Henry and Patalarga were aware of this. Neither thought to tell Nelson; both assumed he just knew.

      Now, it appeared the playwright had something on his mind.

      “You want me,” Henry said (bellowed, according to Patalarga), “to spend a month or two away from this delicate, budding artist, this daughter I adore, the only person I love in this world, so I can accompany you while you fuck up my play? Is that what you’re saying?”

      Nelson had not, to his knowledge, been saying that. He’d thought things had been going well. He stammered a defense, but Henry cut him off.

      From across the theater, Patalarga watched. He told me later that he’d been expecting a scene like this for at least a few days before it happened. Nelson was not, in Patalarga’s words, “fully submitting to the world of the idiot.” There was only one way to satisfy Henry, and that was total immersion. Patalarga recalled an experimental piece from the early 1980s, a play about an imaginary slum built atop the remains of an indigenous graveyard. It was a dark, caustic three-act piece full of ghosts, and in the lead-up to opening night, Henry had a dozen doll-sized caskets built for his cast. He asked every actor to sleep with one of these tiny coffins beside him in bed, so they might better understand the emotion sustaining the work.

      So, upon seeing Henry descend on Nelson this way, Patalarga chose to keep his distance “out of respect for the artistic process.”

      Nelson, after an initial moment of protest, fell silent, staring back at his tormentor, bewildered. He was not unaccustomed to this sort of treatment, in fact. His face went flat, expressionless, calm. It was a trick Nelson knew from childhood, from waging battles with his brother that he knew he couldn’t win. It wasn’t stoicism or deference or indifference; it was all those things.

      Nelson deflected Henry’s vitriol with a few phrases from his past. They came forth with surprising ease: “I’m sorry you feel that way.” “What can I do to make you more comfortable?” “Is it something I’ve done?” “What would you like to get out of this conversation?”

      It wasn’t long before Henry’s energy petered out. He gave up, slumping into a seat a few rows behind Nelson, spent. A few long minutes of silence passed, not a sound in the theater but those that emerged from the neighborhood outside: a revving motor, a distant horn, a few bars of music from a passing street vendor.

      “You remind me of my ex-wife,” Henry said finally. “I’ll be needing a drink now.”

      “I’m sorry, but—”

      “It’s fine. I shouldn’t have yelled. Come here.”

      Nelson stood, and walked a few rows back. What hadn’t he done for the play? What wasn’t he willing to do?

      “I don’t know what’s going on with me,” Henry said. He’d been having these swells of anger, righteousness, he explained, explosive moments that were catching him increasingly unawares.

      “It’s just part of the process,” Nelson offered, unknowingly echoing Patalarga’s interpretation.

      Henry didn’t buy it. “I haven’t done this in more than ten years. I don’t have a process.”

      Nelson shrugged, and handed over Ana’s drawings. On top: a pastoral scene done in finger paint, a family of thumbprints adorned with dots for eyes and wide smiles, bounding about a prairie, or perhaps a city park. It was difficult to say. The sky was smeared across the top of the page in its traditional blue—here, in a city that suffers beneath thick gray clouds for ten months out of the year. Why do local children insist on coloring it this way? Is it simplicity? Wishful thinking? Nelson felt certain he’d done the same when he was Ana’s age. Did the sky-blue sky reflect a lack of imagination, or an excess of the same?

      Henry took the pictures without comment, and leaned down to put them in his shoulder bag. “Sit,” he said to Nelson, gesturing to the seat beside him. His voice was calm now. “Look at that stage. Imagine this theater full of people. They don’t know you or me or a thing about the play. Maybe they’ve never been to a play before. They aren’t your friends. They’ve come to be entertained. Edified. Comforted. Distracted. Can you see it?”

      “Yes.”

      “The lights dim. The curtain opens. Who comes out first?”

      “Patalarga,” Nelson said.

      “The servant.”

      “Right.”

      “And what does he say?”

      “He says, ‘The time has come, like I told them it would.’”

      “And what does he feel?”

      “He feels uneasy. A little afraid. Angry. Oddly, a hint of pride.”

      “Good,” Henry said. “And where are you?”

      “Backstage.”

      Henry shook his head gravely. “There’s no such thing as backstage. The play begins, and there’s only the world it dramatizes. Now, where are you?”

      “With my father, the president. In his chambers.”

      “Right. With me. Your father. And now—this is important—do you love me?”

      Nelson considered this; or rather, Nelson, as Alejo, considered this.

      “Yes,” he said after a moment. “I do.”

      “Good. Remember that. In every scene—even when you hate me, you also love me. That’s why it hurts. Got it?”

      Nelson said that he did.

      “Are you sure?”

      “Yes.”

      “Good. Because it does hurt,” Henry said. “Don’t forget that. It’s supposed to. Always.”

      IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Henry recited his usual lines with a little more bite, berated Alejo with a little more vigor. It was hard not to take it personally, and even when the rehearsals ended, something of this bad feeling lingered. The president and Alejo were two members of a troubled family, with a complicated, tense history; Nelson and Henry were two actors who barely knew each other. Patalarga tried to run interference, but it wasn’t easy. He suggested drinks at the Wembley one evening after rehearsal, but Nelson begged off. He proposed lunch the following day, but Henry arrived late. He organized a dinner of old Diciembre veterans, and the two actors spent the evening at opposite ends of the room, never interacting. And still: they were getting it, scene by scene; getting at the dark truth of it. The Idiot President could be an acidly funny farce about power, trickery, and violence, Patalarga told me. That much anyone knew. What СКАЧАТЬ