Название: At Night We Walk in Circles
Автор: Daniel Alarcon
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780007517428
isbn:
He had mourned when the prison was razed, had even roused himself enough to participate in a few protests in front of the Ministry of Justice (though he’d declined to speak when someone handed him the bullhorn), but in truth, the tragedy had both broken him and simultaneously spared him the need to ever think about his incarceration again. No one who’d lived through it with him had survived. There was no one to visit, no one with whom to reminisce, no one to meet on the day of their release, and drive home, feigning optimism. In the many years since, there were times when he’d almost managed to forget about the prison completely. Whenever he felt guilty (which was not infrequently, all things considered), Henry told himself there was nothing wrong in forgetting; after all, he never really belonged there to begin with.
Ana’s mother, now his ex-wife, had heard the stories (some of them), but that was years before, and she was no longer capable of feeling sympathy or solidarity toward the man who had betrayed her. Besides Patalarga, few people were, at least not by the time I became involved. Henry’s colleagues at the school where he taught were jealous because the director had granted him leave for the tour. If they’d known his controversial past, they likely would have used it as an excuse to be rid of him forever. His old friends from Diciembre were no better—their constant refrain after his release was that Henry should write a play about Collectors, something revolutionary, a denunciation, an homage to the dead, but he had no stomach for the project, had never been able to figure out how or where to begin.
“It will be therapeutic,” these friends of his argued.
To which Henry could only respond: “For whom?”
Now that it was all coming back to him, he had no one to talk to. For years, he’d been losing friends and family at an alarming pace, in a process he felt helpless to reverse. He said offensive things at parties, he hit on his friend’s wives, he forgot to return phone calls. He stormed out of bad plays, scraping his chair loudly against the concrete floors so that all could turn and see the once famous playwright petulantly expressing his displeasure. (Later he felt guilty: “As if I never wrote a bad play!”) Sometime in the previous year he’d even offended his beloved sister, Marta, and now they weren’t talking. Worst of all, he couldn’t even remember what he’d done.
Patalarga interrupted this reverie. “Henry,” he said. “This is Nelson.”
The playwright set aside his old, imperfect script, and looked up, squinting at the actor: the young man’s features, his dumb grin, his unkempt hair, his pants in need of a hem. Of the audition Henry could recall very little. The handshake, yes. And that this boy had read the part of Alejo, the idiot president’s idiot son, with a preternatural ease.
“You’re perfect,” Henry said now. “You’re, what? Eighteen, nineteen?”
“Almost twenty-three,” said Nelson.
Henry nodded. “Well, I’m the president.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The idiot president,” Patalarga added.
THEY WENT TO A BAR to celebrate; it felt good to drink in the middle of an afternoon. They got a table in the back, far from the windows, where it was almost dark. The heat faded after the first pitcher. Someone sang a song; a couple quarreled—but what did it matter? “Soon we’ll be off, into the countryside!” Henry proclaimed, glass held high, his head light and his spirit charged. He felt better than he had in weeks. Optimistic. Patalarga seconded the notion, with similar enthusiasm; and the two old friends reminisced aloud for Nelson’s benefit: past tours, past shows, small Andean towns where they’d amazed audiences and romanced local women. Epic, week-long drunks. Fights with police, escaping along mountain roads toward safety. Everything got stranger once you rose beyond an altitude of four thousand meters, that supernatural threshold after which all life becomes theater, and all theater Beckettian. The thin air is magical. Everything you do is a riddle.
“I’ve never been off the coast,” Nelson admitted.
They pressed him: “Never?”
“Never,” Nelson repeated, his face reddening. It was shameful, in fact, now that he thought about it, though he’d never had occasion to feel ashamed of it before. His family’s few trips out of the city had always had the same unfortunate destination: Sebastián’s coastal hometown, a cheerless stop along the highway south of the capital. He felt something like anger now when he thought of it: He’d seen nothing of the world! Not even his own miserable country!
Henry said, “Ah, life in the mountains! Patalarga can tell you all about it.”
“Pack your oxygen tank,” warned Patalarga. “We’ll be going there in a few weeks.”
Henry whistled. “Four thousand one hundred meters above sea level! Can you imagine the trauma? His brain has never recovered.”
“What was it like?”
Patalarga shrugged. “Bleak,” he said. “And beautiful.”
They refilled their glasses from the pitcher, and called for another. Nelson wanted to know about the play. He still hadn’t seen a full script, had never found one in any anthology, though he’d checked them all, even the most obscure volumes his father had dug up in the National Library. Of course he remembered the controversy, he said, everyone did (a gross exaggeration), and Nelson even told them the improbable tale of how he’d heard Henry on the radio, interviewed from prison. “You sounded so strong,” Nelson said.
Henry frowned. “I must have been acting.” He didn’t remember the interview. “In fact, if you want to know the truth, I don’t even remember writing the play.”
Nelson did not believe him.
The only solid proof of his authorship, Henry said, was that he’d been imprisoned for it. “The state made no mistakes during the war—surely you must have learned that in school.”
Patalarga laughed.
“I didn’t do well in school,” Nelson muttered, and dropped his chin. He’d drunk more than he realized. Suddenly his head was swimming.
Patalarga allowed himself a moment of vanity: “I was assistant director,” he said, though it wasn’t clear to whom he was talking.
Henry’s eyes were bright and enthusiastic now, but Nelson could see behind them a deep tiredness, a distance. Deep creases formed around his mouth when he smiled. When they’d met an hour ago, at the Olympic, he’d seemed about to cry. Henry continued: “Patalarga would have liked to have been arrested too. He’s always been a little jealous of my fame, you understand. Perhaps if he finishes that pitcher, he’ll be drunk enough to admit that what I’m saying is true.”
Patalarga glared at Henry, then poured what remained of the pitcher into his glass. He drank it down greedily, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. “Henry hasn’t been the same since he left the prison. Still, he’s my friend. We tried to help, tried to get him out.”
“They did help,” said Henry matter-of-factly. “They did get me out. I’m here, aren’t I?”
He pinched himself, as if to further underline the point.
“Yes,” Patalarga said, nodding. “That’s what I’ve been telling you for years.”
They’d СКАЧАТЬ