At Night We Walk in Circles. Daniel Alarcon

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СКАЧАТЬ sat almost perfectly still through the performance, widening her legs just enough to let him know she approved. 1965: the theater was in its prime; Sebastián and Mónica were too. Onstage, there was a comedy, but Nelson’s father paid no attention to the actors, imagining only the skin of his Mónica’s magnificent thighs, remembering to laugh only because those around him did.

      The Olympic’s brightly lit marquee had once meant something; “A palace of dreams,” one of the founding members of Diciembre called it, remarking on the pride they felt the first time they performed there as a troupe, in 1984, two years before Henry’s arrest. But for Nelson and actors of his generation, it was simply a second-rate porn theater, frequented by old men, sad drunks, and prostitutes. Together, the worn-out members of these various tribes gathered to watch grainy films of blow jobs and acrobatic threesomes, projected out of focus on the yellow screen, sometimes without sound. Nelson didn’t know his parents’ story, but he had his own. Before this rehearsal, he’d been to the Olympic exactly twice: the first time, at age thirteen, with a few friends, when we’d pretended to be horrified and uninterested. A couple of months later, he returned, alone. That day he sat, as his father once had, thinking of flesh. Unlike his father, Nelson jerked off furiously and violently; one might even say ecstatically. (One assumes his father would have done the same, only after, in private.) To Nelson’s credit, he had enough presence of mind to avoid staining the pants of his school uniform, a fact noted with pride in his journal, entry dated September 2, 1991. He emerged from the darkened theater with a feeling of accomplishment.

      In a sense, the Olympic had been a palace of dreams for Nelson as well.

      Then, in 1993, there was a small fire, which caused just enough damage to shut down the porn operation. The Olympic was abandoned. Five years later, Patalarga took the money he’d made from his leather business and bought it from the city for a song. His wife was opposed to the purchase, but he insisted. The Olympic sat, mostly unused, for three years while Patalarga figured out what to do with it.

      It was this man, the owner, who opened the door when Nelson arrived for the first rehearsal. He was short; dark-skinned; neither heavy nor thin, but stout; with full cheeks and wide, green eyes. His black hair was cut short and combed forward, and he wore a cell phone the size of a woman’s pocketbook clipped to his belt.

      They shook hands; they introduced themselves.

      “Patalarga?” Nelson asked, just to be certain he’d heard correctly.

      This man had another name, a long, multisyllabic given name, known only to a handful of close friends, and which no one used regularly anymore but his elderly mother. When Patalarga was a child, his mother had used that birth name in a variety of ways, with different intentions, intonations, and gravity, depending on her mood, or the weather: to curse her absent husband, for example, to remind Patalarga of his heritage, or to evoke the passing of the years. In his hometown, or what remained of it, that name still had resonance, and there were those who could read his past and predict his future by the mere sound of it. Of course, that’s precisely why Patalarga had left that town and why he stayed away. When he was older, in the city, he’d shed that name as a snake sheds its skin, and felt nothing but relief.

      “That’s right,” he said now. “Just Patalarga.”

      The two men stood for a moment, something unspoken floating between them. The wood floor was dusty and cracked; the theater’s ticket booth, which had once represented so much possibility for Nelson and his father, was covered with a slab of pressboard. Nelson looked up at the ceiling of the ruined lobby: even the chandeliers seemed poised to fall at any moment.

      “We’ve never met before?” Patalarga asked.

      “At the audition.”

      “Besides that.”

      “No.”

      Patalarga stepped closer. He could sense the young man’s doubts. Nelson was half a head taller, but still Patalarga managed to throw an arm around the actor, and dropped his voice to a low rumble. “Have you been here before?”

      “No,” Nelson lied.

      “Do you know Diciembre? Do you know what we do?”

      Nelson said he did.

      Patalarga shook his head. “You think you do.”

      “I know this is where you put on The Idiot President. I’ve read Mr. Nuñez’s work.”

      Patalarga smiled. “Good. Make sure you tell him how much you like it. He’s not well these days.”

      Then he led Nelson into the theater, through the foyer (strong smell of bleach, threadbare carpet worn to a shine), and past the doors, to the orchestra. The brass-plated seat numbers had mostly been stolen, pried off, sold for scrap at some secondhand market on the outskirts of the capital. Some rows had seats gone as well, recalling for Nelson the proud, gap-toothed grin of a child. He searched involuntarily for the spot where he’d sat that second time—“my triumph over shame,” he’d written in his journal—as if one could remember that sort of thing. The carpet had been pulled up in certain places, and the cement floor below was adorned with overlapping oil stains, evidence of some carelessly attempted, and casually abandoned, repair.

      The playwright sat at the foot of the stage, a script in his lap, his legs dangling off the edge. He seemed rather small, even childlike, the domed roof of the theater rising high above him. He didn’t look up when Nelson appeared, but instead kept on reading inaudibly to himself. It was his own script, naturally; and as he read, he marveled, not at its quality (which in truth he found suspect) but at its mere survival. His own.

      Patalarga was right; Henry was not well. The playwright explained it to me this way: that week, and in all the weeks since that first rereading of his old script, even his daughter’s artwork had been unable to shake him from this melancholy. He’d begun to think very deeply and with some clarity about his time in prison. Who he was before, whom he’d become after, and how—or even if—those two men were related. There were many things he’d forgotten, others he’d attempted to forget; but the day he was sent to Collectors, Henry told me, was the loneliest of his life. He realized that day that nothing he’d ever learned previously had any relevance anymore, and each step he took away from the gate and toward his new home was like walking into a tunnel, away from the light. He was led through the prison complex, a vision of hell in those days, full of half-dead men baring the scarred chests to the world, impervious to the cold. He’d never been more scared in his life. One man promised to kill him at the first opportunity, that evening perhaps, if it could be arranged. Another, to fuck him. A third looked at him with the anxious eyes of a man hiding some terrible secret. Two guards led Henry through the complex, men whom he’d previously thought of as his tormentors, but who now felt like his protectors, all that stood between him and this anarchy. Halfway to the block, he realized they were as nervous as he was, that they, like him, were doing all they could to avoid eye contact with the inmates that surrounded them. At the door to the block, the guards unlocked Henry’s handcuffs, and turned to leave.

      The playwright looked at them helplessly. “Won’t you stay?” he asked, as if he were inviting them in for a drink.

      The two guards wore expressions of surprise.

      “We can’t,” one of them said in a low voice. He was embarrassed.

      Henry realized then that he was alone, that these two guards were the only men in uniform he’d seen since they’d left the gate. They turned and hurried back to the entrance.

      An СКАЧАТЬ