At Night We Walk in Circles. Daniel Alarcon

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      About the movies, Mónica felt neither of her sons understood. It wasn’t the stories she liked but the atmosphere that came with them. She’d find herself in line in front of the theater, surrounded by mad swarms of teenage boys, behaving as teenage boys do: badly. They were manic, poorly dressed, unnecessarily loud. I accompanied her to one of these films, and saw firsthand her unmistakable joy. The worse the film was, the more mindless, the happier Mónica became: her new peers talked back to the screen and cheered every explosion, creating a cacophony nearly equal to that of the film itself. It was a surprise to her too, she told me, but in their company, she felt peace. Comfort. A reminder that she wasn’t dead yet.

      The night Nelson received the news about Diciembre, it so happened that both mother and son were home at dinnertime and that neither had eaten. He’d intended to mention it in a slapdash, toss-away sort of comment that might require a quick hug and little else, but that’s not how things turned out.

      “Do you remember the audition?” he asked, “from last week?” And without waiting for an answer, he blurted it out: He’d gotten the part. He’d be going on tour.

      Mónica was a small, proud woman; both smaller and prouder, in fact, in the years since Sebastián had died. Now, though she tried to hide it, Mónica began to cry.

      Nelson protested: “Mom.”

      “I’m happy for you,” she said. “That’s wonderful!”

      Her voice cracked. She asked for details, but had to sit to hear them. Her legs felt weak. He told her what he knew: They would leave the capital in April, head up into the mountains. As many shows as they could manage, perhaps six or seven a week. In most every town, they’d begin with a negotiation, for a space, for a time. They had contacts, and Diciembre was respected and fairly well known, even now. If the town was big enough, they’d stay awhile, until everyone had seen them perform. The circuit was sketched out, but subject to improvisation.

      “Of course,” Mónica said.

      He went on. Roughly: San Luis (where one of the traveling members of Diciembre had a cousin), a week and a half in the highlands above and around Corongo (where the same man was born, and where his mother still lived), Canteras (where Henry Nuñez himself had lived from age nine until he ran away to the capital at age fourteen), Concepción, then over the ridge to Belén, and into the valleys below. Posadas, El Arroyo, Surco Chico, up toward San Germán, and then the coast. A dozen smaller villages in between. An undeniably ambitious itinerary. The heart of the heart of the country. It was the tour Diciembre had intended to do, fifteen years earlier, until Henry’s arrest scuttled those plans.

      By this point, Mónica was sobbing.

      “What a beautiful trip,” she said, “just beautiful.” And though she meant these words, perhaps it’s worth noting that she’d never heard of most of the towns her son listed, and could hardly connect an image to their names. She confessed it to me: They weren’t, in her mind, specific places but ideas of places. Notions. Echoes. The fact that one could even go to the interior still amazed her: during the war much of the country had been off-limits, far too dangerous for travel—but now her son would board a night bus and think nothing of it. It was astonishing. In 1971, on their honeymoon, she and Sebastián drove her father’s car out of the city, into the fertile valleys that tilted toward the jungle, to picturesque riverside towns with cobblestone streets and thatched-roof adobe houses. Complex, unpronounceable names, which ten years later, during the war, would be synonymous with fear. But not then. If some of the names had been forgotten, everything else she recalled vividly: the bright, clean water; the thick, humid air; the magical feeling of levity; and this man—her husband—all to herself. Her body ached at the memory.

      “What’s the matter?” Nelson asked, sitting beside his mother as she wept. “It’s only a couple of months.”

      Mónica couldn’t explain, or preferred not to. Where to begin?

      “I haven’t eaten, I’m just a little light-headed,” she said, and tried to remember the last time she’d cried. Like this? Weeks—no, months! Later she told me: “I was frightened. I’d be left alone, completely alone. I was certain I’d lose him. I don’t know how, but I just knew.”

      THE ONE PERSON Nelson didn’t share his good news with was his brother, Francisco. They weren’t talking much in those days. Francisco’s occasional e-mails went unanswered (Nelson didn’t take this form of communication seriously and thought of it as a fad); and whenever he called from the United States, it seemed his younger brother had just stepped out. In all, they spoke perhaps three times a year, never for longer than ten minutes. The crushing, but entirely logical, result of so much distance was this: the less they spoke, the less they had to talk about.

      Nelson’s childhood can be divided roughly into two parts: before Francisco left for the United States and after. Until age thirteen, Nelson lived with Francisco, sharing a room, all manner of confidences, and a certain conspiratorial tension. To be sure, there was a hierarchy: when Francisco bullied Nelson, Nelson admired his brother’s strength; when Francisco made fun of him, Nelson marveled at his brother’s wit; when Francisco tricked him, Nelson appreciated his brother’s cleverness. It would be unfair to say they didn’t get along—though they argued a good deal and even fought on occasion, that’s only part of the story. It’s more accurate to say Nelson looked up to his brother without reservation; that he—like younger brothers throughout the world, since hominids organized into families—was born into a cult. That Francisco was, until he left, and for a good while afterward, the model of everything Nelson wanted to be.

      Mónica and Sebastián moved together to Baltimore in 1972, to study. They’d married the year before, and once in the United States decided it was time to start a family. Sebastián, when he was alive, explained the decision this way: having an American baby was like putting money in the bank. Francisco was born in 1974. Mónica worked toward her public health degree at Johns Hopkins, Sebastián for his master’s in library science. While his parents studied, Francisco observed the interior of their small apartment in the company of a talkative American nanny. So talkative, in fact, that in the interview, Mónica and Sebastián had hardly been able to get a word in. They hoped some of this woman’s English would stay lodged in their son’s brain, where it might be useful later.

      Francisco’s linguistic education was cut short, however, when the government back home was ousted three months before his second birthday. The news was spotty, but Sebastián and Mónica soon gathered a few salient facts. The most important: the new leaders were not on friendly terms with the Americans. The response came soon enough: the family’s visas would not be renewed. Appeals, they were told, could be filed only from the home country. The university hospital wrote a letter on Mónica’s behalf, but this well-meaning document vanished into some bureaucrat’s file cabinet in suburban Virginia, and it soon became clear that there was nothing to be done. Rather than risk the undignified prospect of a deportation (or more unthinkable, staying on, and living in the shadow of legality) Sebastián and Mónica chose to pack their things and go; just like that, their American adventure came to a premature end. Still, the accident of his place of birth gave Francisco an important practical and psychological advantage, something which shaped his personality in the years to come: a U.S. passport, and all that it represented.

      Nelson was born in 1978, when Francisco was four. The armed conflict began two years later, in a faraway province to the south of the capital, a place so remote the war was almost three years old before anyone took it seriously. Five before many people knew enough to be afraid. By 1986 though, everything was clear enough, even to Sebastián and Mónica’s two young boys. Throughout their childhood, as the war tightened its grip on the city, as the economy began to wobble, Francisco taunted Nelson with his remarkable travel document. It was the equivalent СКАЧАТЬ