At Night We Walk in Circles. Daniel Alarcon
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 chosen a place well known to Nelson, a bar called the Wembley. At least once a week, after school, 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,