At Night We Walk in Circles

1

DURING THE WAR—which Nelson’s father called the anxious years—a few radical students at the Conservatory founded a theater company. They read the French surrealists, and improvised adaptations of Quechua myths; they smoked cheap tobacco, and sang protest songs with vulgar lyrics. They laughed in public as if it were a political act, baring their teeth and frightening children. Their ranks were drawn, broadly speaking, from the following overlapping circles of youth: the longhairs, the working class, the sex-crazed, the poseurs, the provincials, the alcoholics, the emotionally needy, the rabble-rousers, the opportunists, the punks, the hangers-on, and the obsessed. Nelson was just a boy then: moody, thoughtful, growing up in a suburb of the capital with his head bent over a book. He was secretly in love with a slight, brown-haired girl from school, with whom he’d exchanged actual words on only a handful of occasions. At night, Nelson imagined the dialogues they would have one day, he and this waifish, perfectly ordinary girl whom he loved. Sometimes he would act these out for his brother, Francisco. Neither had ever been to the theater.

The company, named Diciembre, coalesced around the work of a few strident, though novice, playwrights, and quickly became known for their daring trips into the conflict zone, where they lived out their slogan — Theater for the People! — at no small risk to the physical safety of the actors. Such was the tenor of the era that while sacrifices of this sort were applauded by certain sectors of the public, many others condemned them, even equated them with terrorism. In 1983, when Nelson was only five, a few of Diciembre’s members were harassed by police in the town of Belén; a relatively minor affair, which nonetheless made the papers, prelude to a more serious case in Las Velas, where members of the local defense committee briefly held three actors captive, even roughed them up a bit, believing them to be Cuban agents. The trio had adapted a short story by Alejo Carpentier, quite convincingly by all accounts.

Nor were they entirely safe in the city: in early April 1986, after two performances of a piece titled The Idiot President, Diciembre’s lead actor and playwright was arrested for incitement, and left to languish for the better part of a year at a prison known as Collectors. His name was Henry Nuñez, and his freedom was, for a brief time, a cause célèbre. Letters were written on his behalf in a handful of foreign countries, by mostly well-meaning people who’d never heard of him before and who had no opinion about his work. Somewhere in the archives of one or another of the national radio stations lurks the audio of a jailhouse interview: this serious young man, liberally seasoning his statements with citations of Camus and Ionesco, describing a prison production of The Idiot President, with inmates in the starring roles. “Criminals and delinquents have an intuitive understanding of a play about national politics,” Henry said in a firm, uncowed voice. Nelson, a month shy of his eighth birthday, chanced to hear this interview. His father, Sebastián, stood at the kitchen counter preparing coffee, with a look of concern.

“Dad,” young Nelson asked, “what’s a playwright?”

Sebastián thought for a moment. He’d wanted to be a writer when he was his son’s age. “A storyteller. A playwright is someone who makes up stories.”

The boy was intrigued but not satisfied with this definition.

That evening, he brought it up with his brother, Francisco, who responded the way he always did to almost anything Nelson said aloud: with a look of puzzlement and annoyance. As if there were a set of normal things that all younger brothers knew instinctively to do in the presence of their elders but which Nelson had never learned. Francisco fiddled with the radio. Sighed.

“Playwrights make up conversation. They call them scripts. That crap you make up about your little fake girlfriend, for example.”

Francisco was twelve, an age at which all is forgiven. Eventually he would leave for the United States, but long before his departure, he was already living as if he were gone. As if this family of his — mother, father, brother — mattered hardly at all. He knew exactly how to end conversations.

No recordings of the aforementioned prison performance of The Idiot President have been found.

By the time of his release, in November of that same year, Henry was much thinner and older. He no longer spoke with that firm voice; in fact, he hardly spoke at all. He gave no interviews. In January, in response to an uprising by inmates, two of the more volatile sections of Collectors were razed, bombed, and burned by the army; and the men who’d made up the cast of The Idiot President died in the assault. They were shot in the head or killed by shrapnel; some had the misfortune to be crushed beneath falling concrete walls. In all, three hundred forty-three inmates died, vanished; and though Henry wasn’t there, part of him died that day too. The incident garnered international attention, a few letters of protest from European capitals, and then it was forgotten. Henry lost Rogelio, his best friend and cell mate, his lover, though he wouldn’t have used that word at the time, not even to himself. He did not take the stage again for nearly fifteen years.

But a troupe must be bigger than a single personality. Diciembre responded to the curfew, the bombings, and the widespread fear with a program of drama-based bacchanals, “so drunk on youth and art” (according to Henry, a notion echoed by others), “they might as well have been living in another universe.” Gunshots were deliberately misheard, interpreted as celebratory fireworks, and used as a pretext to praise the local joie de vivre; blackouts put them in the mood for romance. In its glory days at the end of the 1980s, Diciembre felt less like a theater collective and more like a movement: they staged marathon, all-night shows in the newly abandoned buildings and warehouses at the edges of the Old City. When there was no electricity — which was often — they rigged up lights from car batteries, or set candles about the stage; barring that, they performed in the dark, the spectral voices of the actors emerging from the limitless black. They became known for their pop reworkings of García Lorca, their stentorian readings of Brazilian soap opera scripts, their poetry nights that mocked the very idea of poetry. They celebrated on principle anything that kept audiences awake and laughing through what might have otherwise been the long, lonely hours of curfew. These shows were mythologized by theater students of Nelson’s generation; and, if one searched (as Nelson had) through the stands of used books and magazines clogging the side streets of the Old City, it was possible to find mimeographed copies of Diciembre’s programs, wrinkled and faded but bearing that unmistakable whiff of history, the kind one wishes to have been a part of.

By the time Nelson entered the Conservatory in 1995, the war had been over for a few years, but it was still a fresh memory. Much of the capital was being rebuilt. Perhaps it is more correct to say that the capital was being reimagined—as a version of itself where all that unpleasant recent history had never occurred. There were no statues to the dead, no streets renamed in their honor, no museum of historical memory. Rubble was cleared away, avenues widened, trees planted, new neighborhoods erected atop the ashes of those leveled in the conflict. Shopping malls were planned for every district of the capital, and the Old City — never an area with exact boundaries, but a commonly employed shorthand referring to the neglected and ruined center of town — was restored, block by block, with an optimistic eye toward a UNESCO World Heritage designation. Traffic was rerouted to make it more walkable, dreary facades given a dash of color, and the local pickpockets sent to work the outskirts by a suddenly vigilant police force. Tourists began to return, and the government, at least, was happy.

Meanwhile, Diciembre’s legend had only grown. Many of Nelson’s classmates at the Conservatory claimed to have been present at one or another of those historic performances as children. They said their parents had taken them; that they had witnessed unspeakable acts of depravity, an unholy union between recital and insurrection, sex and barbarism; that they remained, however many years later, unsettled, scarred, and even inspired by the memory. They were all liars. They were, in fact, studying to be liars. One imagines that students at the Conservatory these days speak of other things. That they are too young to remember how ordinary fear was during the anxious years. Perhaps they find it difficult to imagine a time when theater was improvised in response to terrifying headlines, when a line of dialogue delivered with a chilling sense of dread did not even require acting. But then, such are the narcotic effects of peace, and certainly no one wants to go backward.

Nearly a decade after the war’s nominal end, Diciembre still functioned as a loose grouping of actors who occasionally even put on a show, often in a private home, to which the audience came by invitation only. Paradoxically, now that travel outside the city was relatively safe, they hardly ever went to the interior. Was this laziness, a reasonable response to the end of hostilities, or simply middle age blunting the sharp edge of youthful radicalism? Henry Nuñez, once the star playwright of the troupe, all but withdrew from it, attributing the decision not to his time in prison but to the birth of his daughter. After his prison home was razed, almost in spite of himself, he fell in love, married, and had a daughter named Ana. And then: life, domesticity, responsibilities. Before Diciembre consumed him, he’d studied biology, enough to qualify for a teaching position at a supposedly progressive elementary school in the Cantonment. The work appealed to his ego — he could talk for hours about almost anything that came to mind and his students would not complain — and in his hands biology was less a science than an obsessive branch of the humanities. The world could, in fact, be explained, and he found it miraculous that the students listened. For extra money he drove a taxi every other weekend, crossing the city end to end in a serviceable old Chevrolet he’d inherited from his father. Though he hadn’t been inside a church since the mid-1980s, he put a bright red “Jesus Loves You” sticker in the front window to make potential passengers feel at ease. It was therapeutic, the mindlessness of driving, and the blank, sometimes dreary streets were so familiar they could not surprise him. On good days he could avoid thinking about his life.

Henry kept a giant plush teddy bear in the trunk, bringing it out for his daughter to sit with whenever he picked her up from her mother’s house. The bigger she grew, Henry told me, the more his ambition dulled. Not that he blamed her — quite the contrary. Ana, he explained, had saved him from a mediocre sort of life his old friends had suffered to attain: painters, actors, photographers, poets — collectively, they are known as artists, just as those men and women who train in spaceflight are known as astronauts, whether or not they have been to space. He preferred not to play the part, he said. He was done pretending, a conclusion he’d come to in the aftermath of his imprisonment, after his friends had been killed.

But in late 2000, some veterans of Diciembre decided it was important to commemorate the founding of the troupe. A series of shows was planned in the city, and a Diciembre veteran named Patalarga even suggested a tour. Naturally, they called on Henry, who, with some reluctance, agreed to participate, but only if a new actor could be found to join. Auditions for a touring version of The Idiot President were announced for February 2001, and Nelson, a year out of the Conservatory at the time, signed up eagerly. He and dozens of young actors just like him, more notable for their enthusiasm than for their talent, gathered in a damp school gymnasium in the district of Legon, reading lines that no one had said aloud in more than a decade. It was like stepping back in time, Henry thought, and this had been precisely his concern when the proposal was first floated. He sighed, perhaps too loudly; he felt old. Since his divorce, he saw eleven-year-old Ana on alternate weekends. His students were his daughter’s age; they completed science “experiments” where nothing at all was in play, where no possible outcome could surprise. Lately this depressed him profoundly, and he didn’t know why. Whenever Ana came to stay, she brought with her a bundle of drawings tied with a string, all the work she’d done since they’d last seen each other, which she turned over to her father with great ceremony, for critique. Unlike his old friends, unlike himself, his daughter was not pretending: she was an artist, in that honest way only children can be, and this fact filled Henry with immense pride. They would sit on his couch and discuss in detail her works of crayon and pencil and pastel. Color, composition, stroke, theme. Henry would put on his most elegant, most highfalutin accent, and describe her work with big words she didn’t understand but found delightful, funny, and very grown-up—poststructuralist, antediluvian, protosurrealist, aphasic. She’d smile; he’d rejoice. The anthropomorphic strain running through your oeuvre is simply remarkable! More often than not, hidden within his daughter’s artwork, Henry found a terse note from Ana’s mother, which was, in content and tone, the exact opposite of Ana’s lighthearted drawings: a list of things to do, reminders about Ana’s school fees, activities, appointments. Words free of warmth or affect or any trace of the life they had once attempted to make together. The playfulness would cease for a moment as Henry read.

“What does it say, Daddy?” Ana would ask.

“Your mother. She says she misses me.”

Henry and his daughter would dissolve into fits of deep-throated laughter. For a girl her age, Ana understood divorce quite well.

The revival of Henry’s most famous play was timed to coincide with the fifteenth anniversary of its truncated debut and the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the company. When he told Ana’s mother the idea, she congratulated him. “Maybe you can get locked up again,” his ex-wife said. “Perhaps it will resurrect your career.”

A similar notion had crossed his mind too, of course, but for the sake of his pride, Henry pretended to take offense.

Now, at the auditions, his career felt farther away than ever. Whatever this was — whether a vice, an obsession, a malady — it most certainly was not “a career.” Still, this dialogue, these lines he’d written so many years before, even when recited by these inexpert actors, provoked in Henry an unexpected rush of sentiment: memories of hope, anger, and righteousness. The high drama of those days, the sense of vertigo; he pressed his eyes closed. In prison, Rogelio had taught him how to place a metal coil in the carved-out grooves of a brick, and how to use this contraption to warm up his meals. Before that simple lesson everything Henry ate had been cold. The prison was a frightful place, the most terrifying he’d ever been. He’d tried his hardest to forget it, but if there was anything about those times that had the ability to make him shudder still, it was the cold: his stay in prison, the fear, his despair, reduced to a temperature. Cold food. Cold hands. Cold cement floors. He remembered now how these coils had glowed bright and red, how Rogelio’s smile did too, and was surprised that these images still moved him so.

For their part, the actors were mostly too nervous or excited to notice Henry’s troubled, uneasy countenance; or if they did, they assumed it was in response to their own performances.

Some, it should be noted, had no idea who he was.

But Nelson did recognize Henry. He’d heard him on the radio that day, and not long after, decided to become a playwright. All these years later, and in many ways, it remained his dream. What did he say to Henry?

Something like: “Mr. Nuñez, it’s an honor.”

Or: “I never thought I’d have the chance to meet you, sir.”

The words themselves aren’t that important; that he insisted on approaching the table where Henry sat, absorbed in dark memories, was enough. Picture it: Nelson reaching for his hero’s hand, his eyes brimming with admiration. A connection between the two men, the mentor and his protégé.

When we spoke, Henry dismissed the idea.

I insisted: Did the playwright see something of himself in the young man? Something of his own past?

“No,” Henry responded. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, I was never, ever that young. Not even when I was a boy.”

No matter. On a Monday in March 2001, Nelson was summoned to rehearsals at a theater in the Old City, a block off the traffic circle near the National Library, where his father had once worked. After a dismal year — a breakup, a protracted tenure at an uninteresting job, the disappointing aftermath of a graduation both longed for and feared — Nelson was simply delighted by the news. Henry was right: Nelson, almost twenty-three, had a backpack full of scripts, a notebook jammed with handwritten stories, a head of unruly curls, and seemed much, much younger. Perhaps this is why he got the part — his youth. His ignorance. His malleability. His ambition. The tour would begin in a month. And that is when the trouble began.

2

NORMALLY, Nelson would have shared news of this sort with Ixta. Now he doubted himself. She’d been his girlfriend until the previous July, and they’d parted ways, not amicably, on a day that Nelson considered to be the dead heart of winter. Ghoulish clouds, a fine, gray mist. It was entirely his doing — he wanted freedom, he said. She scoffed, “What am I, your jailer?” and in response, selfish but authentic tears bubbled in his eyes. He was going to the United States and couldn’t be beholden to her or anyone in pursuit of his future. They didn’t speak for three months, during which time he made no plans and took no steps toward this supposedly brave and life-changing move.

In early October, Nelson and Ixta met for a coffee, a tense affair which led, nonetheless, to another meeting, a few weeks later. Quite unexpectedly, midway through this second encounter, he found himself laughing. And Ixta laughing too. It wasn’t tentative, or self-conscious, or polite. And this shook him, the realization that, had he more nerve, he could reach across the narrow table that separated them, and — in front of all these strangers — casually lay his hand upon hers. No one would notice or think it odd. They might even smile at the sight, or say to themselves something like:

Oh, what a handsome young couple!

He didn’t, of course — not that day — but he did make some progress. Slowly. Patiently. At the steady rate of an ant gathering food, or a bird building a nest. And it paid off: by the start of the Christmas season, they were sleeping together again. It happened almost by accident at first, but the second time filled him with hope. They began meeting every two weeks or so, more if Mindo, Ixta’s new boyfriend, was working nights. These encounters were the source of both happiness and torment for Nelson, but he was, in any case, unable or unwilling to push things any further. In their nakedness, they talked about everything except what they were doing together, the future, and somehow the vagueness of their new relationship was why it felt so very adult. Ixta never asked if he still intended to leave for the United States, nor did he mention it. He would — someday soon, he felt certain — tell her he loved her, that he missed her, that he was sorry for everything, and that they should be together, if not forever, then at least for now. Afterward, things would be clearer. He hadn’t written the scene out — he didn’t do that sort of thing anymore — but he had projected himself into it, rehearsed a speech or two in his head. As it turns out, Ixta was expecting this as well. She didn’t know how she’d respond, but she was waiting. There was only the small issue of his not having said anything.

In March, when he heard the news about Diciembre, Nelson considered all they’d been through, what surely lay ahead, and decided it was correct to call her first. Her place in line was a nod to their past, to their imagined future. The phone rang twice, a curt hello. Ixta let him talk, and congratulated him, drily. He listened: it was the voice she used when Mindo was in the room.

Nelson and Ixta were both actors, though, so this fact hardly precluded conversation; in fact, it was more important than ever to behave naturally. Just two friends talking. The subterfuge was part of the attraction, one imagines. Ixta played her part: the news was grand, she told him. “How long will you be gone?”

“A couple of months, maybe three.”

There was a certain sadism to his announcement. “I felt abandoned,” Ixta said to me later. “Again.”

She kept this confession to herself, and instead offered: “You always did want to travel.”

“It could even go for longer, if we’re well received.”

“One hopes.”

Nelson waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. She’d gifted him these two words, but they were impossible to interpret. One hopes for what?

In the background: “Who’s that, baby?”

Nelson flinched, but refused to back down. Later, he’d wonder if he’d been reckless. But really: what if they were caught? Shouldn’t he want that to happen?

“Shall we celebrate?” he asked.

In his mind, the fact that they were lovers — and only lovers, for now — was a relief to Ixta. He imagined her grateful that he placed no pressure on their future, did not demand a label for this new iteration of their relationship. He imagined her impressed by his maturity, by his willingness to share her with another man. But this formulation was partial. It did not take into account the fact that she’d loved him, or that he’d broken her heart. It did not consider that her heart might be broken still, or that every time they slept together, it broke a little more.

“I don’t know,” Ixta said. “I’m busy this week.”

“I thought you’d be happy for me,” Nelson said, and immediately regretted it. He sounded so plaintive, so self-involved. There were certain traits he’d been careful not to manifest since their reconciliation, but here they were, slipping out into the open, naked. He wanted to be a better person; and if that were not possible, at least to seem like one.

“I am happy for you,” she said. “Thrilled.”

He doubled down: “I’d like to see you.”

Ixta sighed: talking to herself now, in a rapid clip that tumbled the conversation to a close. “Sure. Yeah. Okay. Great. Talk soon.” He could almost hear the man lying next to her, eyes half-closed, wrapping Ixta’s brown hair casually around his finger.

Nelson held the phone a little while longer, for no good reason.

THE SECOND PERSON to hear the good news was his mother, Mónica, who’d been widowed three years prior, and whose capacity for joy had been greatly diminished ever since. That phrase is hers: “capacity for joy,” she said to me, as one might describe the potential speed of a four-cylinder engine, or the memory inside a new computer. When this was brought to her attention, Mónica laughed. “Too many years as a bureaucrat,” she said. “Imagine the life I could have had!”

But the truth is she’d liked her life just fine until her husband died. The house she and her younger son shared was strange to them now; and both spent as little time there as possible. The first year, Nelson often heard his mother crying very late at night. Francisco would sometimes call from California, and stay on the phone with her for long spells. The melancholy chatter emerging from the other room lulled him to sleep. He slept quite a bit in those days. Mónica was better now. She still kept her husband’s pajamas under his old pillow, and respected the notion that one side of the bed was his. It was only right she feel her husband’s absence like a wound.

Mónica went to the movies a great deal, American mostly. She’d developed a taste for action films and thrillers. The more explosions and special effects, the better; if the movie involved aliens or submarines, she privately rejoiced. She even tried to explain this new interest to her sons, separately, with varying results. Predictably, Nelson (for whom the storytelling aesthetic was not a matter of taste but a deeply held conviction) was less than supportive. Francisco, on the other hand, regarded it as comical, and somehow in keeping with his mother’s other eccentricities; she made origami swans from tea bag wrappers, flocks of them appearing in the house’s odd corners: in a little-used kitchen cupboard, behind the fine china; in the dining room, seated at the head of the table; or perched on windowsills, facing the street. She never threw away a magazine without cutting a pretty picture or two out of it first, their refrigerator door becoming the de facto gallery space for these images, a collage of faces which had made Nelson and Francisco feel, as children, that they were part of an eclectic and impossibly large family. And since Sebastián had passed, Mónica had picked up one of his old habits: writing letters to the newspapers, for example, complaining about potholes, traffic jams, rising crime, the lack of green space. These she wrote in Sebastián’s name, under his signature, faithful to her husband’s acid and erudite style. Whenever one was published, Mónica felt a pang, a sense of accomplishment, a confirmation of her solitude. She’d save the clippings in a folder, and sometimes read them before bed, as Sebastián had often done when he was alive.

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 of a magic carpet, the possibility of escape implicit among its powers, somehow always present in conversations between the brothers. It was expected that Francisco would emigrate as soon as was feasible, and bring his younger brother with him at the first opportunity. Francisco finished school, studied for the TOEFL, and as the date of his eventual departure drew near, lorded this good luck over his increasingly frightened younger brother. Nelson did Francisco’s laundry, made his bed, fetched things for him from the store — an endless number of petty errands, all under threat of a withheld visa. “What a shame,” Francisco might say, shaking his head sadly as he observed a messy stack of poorly folded clothes. “I’d hate to have to leave you here.”

(Remarkably, this scene, recounted to me by a shamefaced Francisco in January 2002, also appears in Nelson’s journals. In that version, Francisco’s quote is slightly, albeit crucially, different: “I’d hate to have to leave you here to die.”)

Whatever the exact words, regrettable episodes like these were forever imprinted on Nelson’s consciousness, the threat of being left behind reiterated so often and with so many harrowing overtones that it began to sound like a ghost story, or a horror film, in which he, Nelson, was the victim. At the time Francisco had no understanding of what he was putting his brother through. Whatever cruelties he committed in those years were a function of his impatience and immaturity. His ignorance. He was eager for his own life to begin far from the crumbling, violent city where he lived. Though he never admitted it, not to his younger brother or to anyone, Francisco was also afraid: that it was all a dream, that he too would be condemned to stay; that someone at the airport in Miami or New York or Los Angeles would take a look at him, at his passport, and laugh. “Where’d you get this?” they’d ask, chuckling, and he’d be too startled to answer. He knew nothing, after all, about being American. He was hungry for experience of the kind he could only have far from his family and their expectations. Land of the free, etc. In this regard, Francisco was an ordinary boy, with ordinary ambitions.

In spite of it all, the two brothers were close, until January 1992, when Francisco, age eighteen, boarded a plane and disappeared into the wilds of the southern United States to live with some friends of the family. In the months and years that followed, he wrote letters and called from time to time, but began nonetheless to drift from Nelson’s memory and consciousness. Nelson entered a kind of holding pattern: an American visa would soon arrive, or so he’d been told, to whisk him away toward a new beginning. His early adolescence coincided with the hard bleak years of the war, when life was strangled by violence, when families went about their routines in a state of constant apprehension. Things were at their worst that year Francisco left; and Nelson, like the rest of his traumatized generation, spent a lot of time indoors. (As did I, for example.) Instead of venturing out into the unsafe streets, Nelson read a great deal, and watched television with a kind of studiousness his mother found alarming, a rigor occasionally rewarded with a glimpse of topless dancing women, or a lewd joke worth repeating at school, or the sight of a normally stoic reporter buckling before the weight of some new and terrifying announcement.

The news in the late 1980s and early 1990s never failed to supply a somber, cautionary anecdote starring families just like one’s own, now mired in unspeakable tragedy. Men and women disappeared, police were shot, the apparatus of the state teetered. This last phrase was heard so often, whether in adult conversation or on the radio, that Nelson began to take it literally. He would imagine an elegant but precariously built tower, swaying in a rising wind. Would it fall? Of course it would. The only question serious people asked was who would be crushed beneath it.

For Nelson, for his family, for most of the city’s alarmed residents, the calculus was fairly simple: those who could leave, would. If Nelson, the boy, grew fond of escapism, he was merely a product of his time; if he found little use for homework, for education as it is traditionally and narrowly defined, it was because he reasoned it was of little use — he’d soon be starting over anyway; if he daydreamed of a life in the United States, he did so at first with a whimsical ignorance, his imagined USA requiring little detail or nuance to serve its comforting spiritual purpose. As for his current reality, Nelson chose to think of himself as passing through; and this allowed him to withstand a great deal, content in the notion that all his troubles were temporary. For a while, it wasn’t a bad way to live.

I’ll go on, though everyone knows I’m writing about a country so different now, so utterly transformed that even we who lived through this period have a hard time remembering what it was like. The worse the situation at home, the more comfort Nelson took in his eventual emigration; each May he expected to celebrate his birthday with his brother in the United States, but unfortunately, each year it was postponed. Francisco did not complete the required paperwork. He did not submit to the interview. He did not petition for his little brother to join him in the United States when he had that responsibility and that right; when he could have done so as soon as 1994. For this negligence, Francisco blames his youth, though he is self-aware enough to be a little embarrassed by his lack of consideration. In his defense: he was discovering his new country, attempting to become what his blue passport had always said he was — an American. He didn’t have the time or the inclination to consider what his equivocating might mean to Nelson, how it might affect his life and worldview. It’s really quite simple, when one considers it: Francisco didn’t want to be in charge of his young brother. He was only twenty years old, enjoying himself, working odd jobs, and moving often. He didn’t want the responsibility. Sebastián and Mónica nagged and pestered their older son, even shamed him, but it would be years before Nelson’s paperwork finally went through.

Meanwhile, Nelson’s obsession with the United States animated his teen years. With the help of his father’s library access, he learned a more than passable English (though his accent was described by a former teacher with whom I spoke as “simply horrific”), and even a basic familiarity with American history. He studied the geography, and followed his brother’s itinerant journey across the country, placing himself alongside Francisco in each and every one of these towns: unglamorous places like Birmingham, Alabama; St. Louis, Missouri; Denton, Texas; Carson City, Nevada. He’d read his brother’s letters, and begun to engage in a kind of magical thinking.

At first, filled with hope, he thought: That could be me.

Then, with a hint of bitterness: That should be me.

Sometimes, just before sleeping: That is me.

In interviews, an interesting portrait emerges: Nelson telling friends his residency papers would soon come, that he’d soon be off, even bragging about it, his imminent departure a matter of pride. One wonders how much of this he believed, and how much of it was posturing.

“He could be a little smug, honestly,” said Juan Carlos, a young man who claimed to have been Nelson’s best friend from 1993 until 1995. “At the end of every school year, he’d say good-bye, letting it slip that he probably wouldn’t be back the following term. He’d shrug about it, feigning indifference, as if it were all out of his hands. He was going to study theater in New York, that’s what he always said, but the next year, he’d be back, and if you ever asked him about it, he’d just ignore the question. He had this skill. He was very good at changing the subject. It was something we all admired.”

The much-promised and much-delayed travel document finally arrived at the American embassy in January 1998, three, or even four years late. The war was over, and the country was beginning to emerge from its depression. Nelson sprang into action. He was entering his third year at the Conservatory, and began to study his options with a seriousness his parents found impressive: as a playwright and actor, New York was naturally his preferred destination, but he would also consider Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco. His brother was living across the Bay in a city called Oakland, tending bar and working alongside a kind older gentleman named Hassan who owned a clothing store. (All of which was a great disappointment to Mónica and Sebastián, though mostly to Sebastián, who’d wanted Francisco to have a different sort of career.) In those months, the two brothers spoke often and enthusiastically about Nelson’s plans, discussing the future with an excitement and optimism Nelson would later think of as naive. Francisco went along, even going so far as to visit a few local drama schools in the Bay Area, asking of the admissions officers the precise questions that Nelson had dictated to him over the phone: What percentage of students continue to further study? Who are your most successful alumni? Who is your typical alum? What percentage of the incoming class has read Eugene O’Neill? What percentage has read Beckett?

When Sebastián died suddenly in September 1998, these plans, those conversations, and that intimacy vanished.

No one had to tell Nelson that he could no longer leave. It was never discussed. He understood it very clearly the instant he saw his mother for the first time, in the hospital, immediately after Sebastián’s stroke. He found her facing the window at the end of the hall; she was backlit, but even in silhouette, Nelson could tell she was shattered. The hallways of the clinic smelled like formaldehyde, and as he walked, Nelson could feel his feet sticking to the floor. Mónica’s neck was tilted in defeat, her shoulders slumped. When he reached out to touch her, she startled.

“It’s me,” he said, somehow expecting, or perhaps only hoping, this might calm her down. It didn’t. Mónica collapsed into his chest.

Nelson thought: She’s mine now, she’s my responsibility.

And he was right.

Francisco returned in time for the funeral, dismayed to find his mother so broken and his brother so distant. He felt tremendously guilty (even tearing up when he recalled it to me), and Nelson, being Nelson, opted not to make things easier. Perhaps that’s uncharitable; perhaps Nelson simply couldn’t have made it easier for his remorseful brother. Perhaps he didn’t know how. They hadn’t seen each other in more than five years, and hardly knew how to be in the same room anymore. Nelson didn’t cry in his brother’s presence, something Francisco found disconcerting, since his every inclination in those first days home was to weep. He’d never wanted to come back like this; now he hated himself for having postponed a visit home for so long.

Mónica’s two sons spent most of their time sitting on either side of their mother, receiving guests. The condolences were torturous. Francisco and Nelson both cursed this tradition. When they found themselves alone, they spoke in hushed tones about their concern for their mother, but not about their own feelings. (“Numb,” Francisco told me. “That’s what I felt. Numb.”) There were some unpleasant postmortem details to handle — closing certain accounts, going through their father’s desk in the basement of the National Library, etc. — tasks which they performed together.

After much insistence from Francisco, they finally went out one night, just the two of them. Mónica’s sister Astrid had offered to keep their mother company. Nelson drove his father’s old car, which still smelled of Sebastián, a fact which was obvious to him, but not to Francisco, who’d been gone too long to remember something as important as how their father had smelled. The evening was cold and damp, but Francisco had scarcely left his mother’s side in the week he’d been home, and the very idea of being out in the streets of the city filled him with wonder. He asked Nelson to drive slowly; he wanted to see it all. It had been only six years, but nothing was as he remembered — it was like visiting the place for the very first time. He marveled at the brightly lit casinos lining Marina Avenue, neon castles built as if from the scavenged ruins of foreign amusement parks. There was a miniature Statue of Liberty, slightly more voluptuous than the original, smiling coquettishly and wearing sunglasses; there was a replica Eiffel Tower, its metal spire glowing amid klieg lights. A few blocks down, a semifunctional windmill presided over a bingo parlor called Don Quixote’s. On a windy day, Nelson explained, this attraction might even rotate, albeit very slowly. It was not uncommon to see young couples posing for pictures with the windmill, turning its blades by hand and laughing. Sometimes they wore wedding clothes. It was impossible to say when, how, or why this place had become a landmark, but it had.

Francisco noted each as they passed. “How long has this one been there?” he’d ask, and Nelson would shrug, because he had no answers and little interest. He found his brother’s curiosity unseemly. He’d long ago decided not to pay attention, because it was impossible to keep up with anyway. Maps of this city are outdated the moment they leave the printers. The avenue they drove along, for example: its commercial area had been cratered by a bomb in the late eighties — both Nelson and Francisco had clear memories of the incident — and the frightened residents had done what they could to move elsewhere, to safer, or seemingly safer, districts. Its sidewalks had once been choked with informal vendors, but these were run off by police in the early nineties, and had reconvened in a market built especially for them in an abandoned lot at the corner of University Avenue. Now the area was showing signs of life again: a new mall had been inaugurated, and some weekends it was glutted with shoppers who had money to spend, a development everyone, even the shoppers themselves, found surprising.

They found a restaurant along this renovated stretch of gaudy storefronts, a loud, brightly lit creole place, whose waiters hurried through the tables in period dress, evoking not so much a bygone historical era but the very contemporary tone of an amateurish theater production. Everyone is acting, Nelson thought, my brother and I too — and the idea saddened him. They ordered beers, and Francisco noted that they’d never had a drink together in their lives. They clinked bottles, forced smiles, but there was nothing to celebrate.

Francisco knew Nelson’s plans had changed, but he thought it was worth discussing. He was only desperate to recover something of that optimism, that closeness he’d felt with Nelson as recently as a month before. He found it hard to believe it could disappear so quickly, and so completely.

Nelson didn’t accept the premise. When Francisco asked, Nelson’s face screwed into a frown. “I don’t have plans anymore.”

“You don’t have plans? No, what you mean is—”

“You’ve seen her. You’ve seen how she is. I’m supposed to leave now?”

“I’m not saying now. Not immediate plans.”

Nelson rolled a bottle cap between his fingers, as if distracted. He wasn’t. “When will it be okay, do you think, to abandon my mother?”

Francisco sat back.

“I mean, let’s just estimate,” Nelson said. “Three months? Six months? A year?”

He fixed his gaze on his brother now.

“That’s not fair,” Francisco protested.

“Isn’t it?”

“Dad wouldn’t want you to …”

There was something steely and cold in Nelson’s eyes that kept Francisco from finishing that sentence. He never should’ve begun it, of course, but perhaps the damage was already done. Perhaps the damage had been done earlier, in 1992, when he left the country and his brother behind. Perhaps there was no way to repair it now. The two of them were silent for a while, which didn’t seem to bother Nelson at all. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself. He drank his beer unhurriedly, with an amused nonchalance, as if daring his older brother to speak.

A few days later, Francisco was on a flight back to California. Neither the future, in the general sense, or Nelson’s plans in particular, were mentioned again.

3

THE THEATER SAT AT THE EDGE of the Old City, in a rough, lawless neighborhood of decrepit houses, narrow streets, and metal gates held closed by rusting padlocks. It had once been known as the Olympic, the city’s premier stage for many years, though its glory days were long past. Nelson’s parents had taken in a show there once, when they were dating, an evening notable because it was the first time Sebastián ran his fingers along the inside of his future wife’s thigh. That night, Mónica 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 inmate led Henry inside the block, where men milled about with no order or discipline. He remembers thinking, I’m going to die here, something all new inmates contemplated upon first entering the prison. Some of them, of course, were right. Henry was taken to his cell, and didn’t emerge for many days.

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 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, pocketing the man’s wallet, his watch, his rings, and the play ends with him shouting toward the room where the president is sleeping.

“Another one, Father! We’ll need another one for tomorrow!”

If one recalls the times, it’s easy enough to understand why The Idiot President was so controversial during the war. The play debuted a few months after the inauguration of a new head of state, a young, charismatic but humorless man acutely lacking in confidence. Though Henry maintained during his interrogation that the piece was written with no specific president in mind, this new president was simply too self-involved to accept such a possibility. It’s as if he thought he was the only president in the world. Henry’s protests mattered not at all: he was sent to prison; his release seven months later was as arbitrary as his initial arrest. Meanwhile the country was speeding toward a precipice. The fall began in earnest soon after.

Other topics covered that first evening at the Wembley: Henry’s daughter and her artistic gifts; Patalarga’s opinionated and talented wife, Diana, who’d played the role of Alejo in the first production of The Idiot President (“That’s how we met,” said Patalarga), but who’d wanted nothing to do with the revival, and had gladly made way for the new member of the troupe; Patalarga’s first cousin Cayetano, whom they’d meet on tour, and who’d spent many nights at the Wembley carving poetry into the scarred wooden tabletops with his penknife; and finally, the delicate negotiation a man makes with his ego in order to teach elementary school science when he is actually a playwright.

On this last point, Nelson found he had a bit to say. Henry, according to Nelson, should not be working in an elementary school. Or driving a cab, even if he claimed to enjoy it. If Henry taught at all, it should be at the Conservatory. But in fact, if the world were fair, he would be abroad, in Paris or New York or Madrid, where his work could be appreciated. He should be overseeing the translations of his plays, winning awards, attending festivals, giving lectures, etc.

In the entire country there was probably no one who admired Henry’s work as much as Nelson. He might have gone on, but noticed his friends shaking their heads sadly. Nelson stopped, and watched them watching him.

“Oh, the feeble, colonized mind,” said Henry.

“We thought you were different,” Patalarga said.

“More enlightened.”

“It’s just pitiful.”

Henry and Patalarga, he would discover, often fell into these rhythms, one of them finishing the other’s thought. Nelson wasn’t the only one who found this tendency off-putting. Now, as Patalarga called for a new and final (or so he promised) pitcher, Henry explained their objection. In their day, there was an illness—“Would you call it that, my dear assistant director?” and Patalarga nodded lugubriously — yes, a syndrome, endemic to his generation. Young people were led to believe that success had to come in the form of approval from abroad. Cultural colonialism — that’s what it was called back then.

“I thought,” declared Patalarga, “that we had rid ourselves of this.”

They had drunk a good deal, perhaps too much, or perhaps only too much for Nelson. He didn’t know what to say. He began to explain. His point had simply been that Henry’s work deserved wider recognition; his mind was neither colonized nor feeble. If anything, he was more skeptical of the United States than the rest of his generation. Why wouldn’t he be? His older brother had all but abandoned the family to make his life there.

Francisco would not have agreed with this point, but let’s limit ourselves, for the moment, to Nelson: he’d been employing his older brother as a straw man for years, to suit whatever narrative purpose his life required at any given moment. A hero, a lifeline, an enemy, or a traitor. Now, when a villain was called for, Francisco once again obliged.

“Really?” Henry asked.

“There was a time when I idolized him. When I would have given anything to go. But then … I don’t know what happened.”

“It passed?” Patalarga said.

“You outgrew it,” said Henry.

Nelson nodded. He raised the glass of beer to his lips, as if signaling an end to his confessions. Just like that, he’d updated his story for this new audience, something closer to the truth. His friends from the Conservatory would have been surprised.

It was early, not yet nine, when they left, but they’d been drinking for what seemed like an eternity. The long summer day slid toward night, the sky shaded pink and red and gold; a sunset made to order, splashed across the horizon. Patalarga sprang for a cab, and the three of them headed south from the Old City. Henry rode up front, declaring it a relief to be in the passenger seat for once. He chatted with the uninterested driver, suggesting a scenic route. “It’ll cost more,” said the driver.

“What is money? We have to see it all,” Henry answered. “We’re leaving soon, and heading into exile!”

He shouted this last word, as if it were a destination, not a concept.

They drove past the National Library, past the diminished edge of downtown, through the scarred and ominous industrial flats, past trails of workers in hard hats trudging the avenue’s gravel-lined shoulder; then along the eastern boundary of Regent Park, where the vendors packed away their wares, bagging up old magazines and books, sweeping away the remains of cut flowers and discarded banana leaves, stacking boxes of stolen electronics into the beds of rusty pickup trucks. Nelson sat by the window and watched his city, as if bidding farewell. It wasn’t an unpleasant drive: at this speed, along these roads, beside these fallen monuments, the capital presented its most attractive face: that of a hardworking, dignified metropolis, settled by outcasts and opportunists; redeemed each day by their cheerless toil and barely sublimated willingness to throw everything away for a moment’s pleasure.

“Isn’t it lovely?” Henry asked from the front seat.

Patalarga had fallen asleep; Nelson was lost in thought. The city was lovely. There could be no place in the world to which he belonged so completely.

That was why he’d always dreamed of leaving, and why he’d always been so afraid to go.

4

IN EARLY 1998, Mónica secured funds to pay for a public health theater troupe in the city. She would hire a group of actors to perform plays about unwanted pregnancy, teenage depression, sexual health, et cetera, before audiences of local public school students. Nelson had just finished his third year at the Conservatory, and it briefly occurred to him that he might get a job within this farsighted (and therefore doomed) government program, but Mónica wouldn’t even consider it. “Nepotism is the lowest and least imaginative form of corruption,” she told him, as if her objection were purely a matter of aesthetics. Nelson must have given her an odd look, because she added, rather half-heartedly, “Not that you aren’t qualified.”

He let the issue drop, and a few weeks later she asked him to help oversee the auditions, as an unpaid adviser. This was how he met Ixta.

The troupe was to be modeled on a similar program based in Brazil. Each week the Brazilians sent Mónica a package containing proposals, planning documents, full-color graphs charting the rise and fall of the teen suicide rate in the infinite slums of Rio de Janeiro. Except for the reports to European and American donors, which were in English, these materials were all in Portuguese, including the scripts, which would eventually prove to be something of an inconvenience. Mónica’s supervisor — a natural-born bureaucrat, if ever one existed — was ambivalent about the whole enterprise, and for weeks he dithered, neglecting to approve the cost of translation in time for the auditions. He claimed it was a mistake; insults were traded, but in the end, Mónica had no choice but to make the best of it.

The day of the auditions arrived, muggy and warm, and they gathered in a conference room on the third floor of the Ministry of Health. Because of an architectural defect, the windows would not open, and the temperature in the room rose slowly but relentlessly, so that by lunchtime, both mother and son were sweating profusely. One after another the actors came in, took a look at them, at the script, and then scratched their heads. At first it was all very funny: Mónica apologized; the actors apologized. They squinted at the pages, then read phonetically, and everyone laughed. Some of the actors translated as best they could, Mónica and Nelson listening with some amusement as the Portuguese was rendered haltingly into stiff and lifeless Spanish. If there was any acting happening, it was hard to tell.

Nelson took notes, but as the heat intensified, as the monologues became increasingly predictable and maudlin, his mind drifted. The soporific heat, the grating sound of broken Portuguese, and these disappointing actors — his friends, many of them — it was all too much. More than a few gave up and walked out. They blamed the heat; they blamed the script; they blamed the Ministry of Health and the entire hapless government.

Ixta was different. They’d already been at it for three and a half hours when she walked in. She wasn’t pretty but had what one might call “presence”: the set of her jaw, perhaps, or her pale, powdered skin, or the bangs that fell precisely before her eyes, so it was difficult to guess what she was thinking or what she was looking at. And she’d dressed the part, wearing a schoolgirl’s uniform, right down to the white knee-high socks and shapeless gray skirt. With a few quick steps she carved out a space that became hers, transforming the carpet into a stage. She took the pages they’d given her, and flipped through them very quickly, nodding. She handed the pages back to Mónica, and promptly crumpled to the floor. It happened very fast.

“Is everything all right?” Mónica asked.

Ixta looked up for a moment, and shook her head. It was a hideous, pitiful face: battered and young and streaked with tears.

“How can everything be all right?” she muttered. “How can it?”

Mónica looked on with a raised eyebrow.

“What happened?” Nelson asked, playing along.

“The girls at school. You know the ones. They say things.”

Ixta sat up, rolled her head around, so that her bangs fell back, and Nelson caught, briefly, a glimpse of her red, swollen eyes. Then she stood slowly, unlocking each of her joints one by one. When she was on her feet, she slouched and crossed her legs, scratching her face and mumbling a few words neither Mónica nor Nelson could make out. Something about the cliques that ran the school and a boy she’d liked.

“He said he wanted to kiss me,” Ixta whispered, “but then he didn’t.”

Mónica remembers the audition well: “The girl exuded so much vulnerability it felt indecent just to watch her.” After a while, she asked Ixta to stop. They still had six or seven actors waiting, she explained; and Ixta nodded, as if she understood, then all but ran from the room into the hall. She hadn’t even given them her contact information.

“Go on,” Mónica said, turning to her son. “Go after her.”

Nelson found Ixta sitting by the elevators, legs crossed, head drifting into her chest, back against the wall. The rest of the actors eyed her with a mixture of curiosity and dread.

He knelt beside her. “You all right?”

Ixta nodded. “It’s hot in there.”

“You did very well.”

She bit her lip, looking straight ahead at the elevator door, as if she could see through it, into the shaft and farther, into the metal cage that rumbled invisibly through the old ministry building. “I suppose you’re going to ask me out now.”

“I was going to ask you for your information, actually,” Nelson said. “For the play. In case we need a callback.”

“Sure,” she said, unconvinced. “For the play.”

He gave her a piece of paper, and Ixta wrote down her full name and telephone number. Her letters were rounded and bubbly. It was the handwriting of a teenage girl. She was still in character.

“Don’t call after ten,” she remembers saying. “My father doesn’t like that.”

So Nelson called her the very next night, at precisely nine-thirty.

Their first days were, by all accounts, magical. I find even this simple declarative statement difficult to write without feeling a small pang of jealousy. Friends describe Nelson as smitten, Ixta light as air. That summer and into the fall, neither of them made it anywhere on time, not to work nor to class nor to rehearsal. They were seen at the hothouse parties in the Old City, dancing like lunatics, or at one of the local theaters, registering their distaste by leaving loudly in the middle of the first act (a petulant gesture in the finest spirit of Henry Nuñez). They spent many nights in Nelson’s room, with the door closed, talking and laughing, making love and then talking some more, so perfectly entwined in spirit, mind, and body that Sebastián and Mónica tiptoed around their own house, afraid to disturb the young couple.

Ixta, Nelson told his father one night, was like a riddle he felt compelled to solve.

Sebastián nodded. Though the metaphor concerned him, he kept his reservations to himself. Nothing is more deserving of one’s respect, he told Mónica that night, as they lay in bed, than two young people who’ve found each other.

Nelson was as charming as he was clumsy, and Ixta liked this about him. Sometimes he read her his plays, texts he’d never shared with anyone. They were very good, she tells me, experimental, odd. One piece, a political parody clearly influenced by the work of Henry Nuñez, was set in the stomach of an earthworm: the cabinet of an ungovernable nation convenes to discuss the country’s future, their conversation periodically interrupted by giant waves of dirt and shit passing through the digestive system of their host. First, the bureaucrats’ professionalism fails them, then their courage. The stage fills with shit, and over the course of the play they slide gradually into despair. How exactly something like this might be staged was unclear, and in fact, when Ixta asked, it was obvious that Nelson hadn’t thought too much about it.

“Isn’t that what producers, directors, and stage managers worry about?” he asked.

Ixta remembers telling him to do animations instead. She laughed at the memory, because he didn’t appear to understand that she was joking. He just stared at her, confused. “He asked me if I was making fun of him,” she told me. “He couldn’t draw more than stick figures.”

In any case, Nelson had other plays that were perhaps less challenging logistically: a comedy dramatizing the story of Sancho Panza’s birth, for example. Or a murder mystery set in a futuristic brothel, where male robot-human hybrids paid extra to sleep with that increasingly rare species, the pure human female. He’d intended the piece to be a comment on technology, but also erotic.

Nelson worked two mornings a week at a copy shop in the Old City, spending his afternoons at the Conservatory. Ixta was three years older, and set to graduate that year. She took every opportunity to make light of his youth. She liked to pretend she was abusing him. He was game. They went to hotels that rented by the hour, places in the seedy backstreets of the Monument District, creating elaborate scenarios drawn from plays they both admired. She was Stella and he was Stanley. She was Desdemona and he was Othello. They pounded these scripts into whatever shape their romance required, laughing all the while. Both found it surprising they’d never crossed paths before, a fact that made their love seem fated.

Initially, when Ixta and I spoke, she was reticent, loath to recall these early days with Nelson. I can understand, of course.

“What’s the use?” she said. “It isn’t easy, you know?”

I could tell by looking at her that she was telling the truth: it wasn’t easy. But I insisted; and once she warmed to the task, the stories flowed. A couple of times she laughed so hard she even asked me to stop the recording. I didn’t, only pretended to. “He was sweet,” Ixta said. “And in the early days, he adored me. I’m not making this up — he told me all the time. I fell for him, completely.”

“Did you discuss the possibility that he might leave?”

“Some, but only in the vaguest way. I knew all about the visa. About Francisco. He bragged to others that he was leaving soon, but I never took it very seriously. His papers came not long after we’d started seeing each other, and I didn’t feel threatened. He got really excited, and I did too. We even talked about going together, to New York or Los Angeles, or somewhere. I was working with his mother all this time, you know, and she supported the idea. It was only after Sebastián died that things changed.”

“Is that when you broke up?”

“No,” Ixta said. “I’d met him maybe eight months before. And we stayed together for another two years, almost. But yeah, something shifted then. It was the end of our honeymoon. He loved his father. I did too. Sebastián was a wonderful man. Nelson didn’t talk about leaving anymore. And neither did I.”

She didn’t want to say much about the breakup, so I asked instead about Diciembre. She chortled. “Nelson was obsessed. He loved them, their history, and his admiration for Henry Nuñez was really something. You’ve got to understand, this is not a universally recognized playwright or anything. Diciembre has some cachet at the Conservatory, but really, this was a private obsession. I read some of the old plays, you know. Nelson made me photocopies. He’d be so eager to hear my opinion, it was like he’d written them himself.”

“And?” I said.

Ixta smiled politely. “I’ll admit I never understood what the big deal was.”

HENRY CAME to rehearsal one Thursday afternoon with a stack of his daughter’s drawings, which he dropped in Nelson’s lap, without explanation. He stood, arms akimbo, while Nelson flipped casually through the pictures, not sensing the urgency in his director’s pose. They were drawings of boats and rainbows and horses.

“Thank you,” Nelson said. “They’re lovely.” Only then did he notice Henry’s expression.

Because of the slope of the floor, Henry wasn’t much higher than eye level, and the stage behind him seemed immense. They were in the old Olympic, which in just a few weeks had come to feel 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 he hadn’t realized until now was that it was also a painful statement about family.

There was a scene toward the end of the first act, when Henry is having his boots laced up by the servant. Patalarga is on his knees before the president. It’s an oddly intimate moment. “Rub my calves,” Henry’s character says, then confesses, “I’m sore from kicking my boy.”

The startled servant says nothing — the president is famously cruel, and he assumes this statement to be true. With downcast eyes, he kneads the president’s calves, while Henry exhales, relishing this impromptu massage. “In truth, I only dream of it,” the president says, and then pulls his leg away and kicks the servant in the chest. “But oh, how I dream!”

In early rehearsals (and in the original 1986 performances at the Olympic) this moment happened with Alejo offstage; in later versions, Henry wanted Nelson’s character there, hidden just a few steps behind the action, eavesdropping as his father daydreams about kicking him. This small change was, in part, a recognition of the realities of the tour that awaited: more likely than not, there would be no backstage (real or metaphorical) out in the hinterlands, when they were on the road. Still, it altered something, shifted the chemistry of the performance. They ran through it again and again one afternoon, and even set up mirrors so Henry could see Nelson’s reaction. Three, four, five times, he kicked poor Patalarga, all the while locking eyes with Nelson.

“Remember, I’m not kicking him, I’m kicking you!” Henry shouted.

On the sixth run-through, he missed Patalarga’s hands, and nearly took off the servant’s head. Patalarga threw himself out of harm’s way just in time. Everyone stopped. The theater was silent. Patalarga was splayed out on the stage, breathing hard.

“Okay,” he said, “that’s enough.”

Henry had gone pale. He apologized and helped Patalarga to his feet, almost falling down himself in the process. “I didn’t mean to, I …”

“It’s all right,” Patalarga said.

But Nelson couldn’t help thinking: if he’s kicking Alejo the whole time, why isn’t he apologizing to me?

For a moment the three of them stood, observing their reflections in the mirror, not quite sure what had just happened. Henry looked as if he might be sick; Patalarga, like a man who’d been kicked in the chest five times; Nelson, like a heartbroken child.

“Are you all right?” Henry said toward the mirror.

It was unclear whom he was asking.

5

IN THE FINAL WEEKS before they left the city, Henry began to jot down a few ideas. Notes. Dictums. Data points. Pages of them, from a man who had all but abandoned writing since his unexpected release from Collectors fourteen years before. Later, when we spoke, he shared these folios with me, apologetic, even embarrassed, as if they proved something about the ill-fated tour, or his state of mind in the days prior. I was unconvinced, but I scanned the pages anyway, trying to make sense of them.

A sampling:

Bus was twelve minutes late today, read a line scrawled on a page dated March 16, 2001. Reasons unknown and unknowable. Mystery. Could have driven.

Two days later: Woke to a serviceable erection at 7:00 a.m. Sat up in bed, turned on the light, to observe it. Watched it wilt, like time-lapse photography. My very own nature special. I should have been on television when I was young, before I was ugly. Slept awhile longer. Three eggs for breakfast. No coffee. Pants feeling tight in the thighs. A woman got in the cab today, black hair, asked if I would—

The following week: For seven months, I hardly talked about life outside. Except with Rogelio. Because he asked.

March 27: A play for Rogelio. Finally. A love story. A man learning to read in a rented jail cell. Being taught to read, in exchange for sex. A plainly capitalist transaction, between two men pretending to be in love. Perhaps they are. Awkward moments. Butter as lubricant, stolen from the commissary and warmed between their palms. Between their thumbs and two fingers. Strange that such a simple gesture could be so arousing. A woman got in my cab today, black hair, ruby lips. Asked if I would climb in the back and make love to her—

Then pages of lists: Dead things I’ve seen — telephones, lightbulbs, street corners, nightclubs. Also: pigs, painters, passengers, plays, presidents, prisoners …

On and on like this.

Was Henry losing it?

I don’t think so.

Or — perhaps.

Far worse things have been published as poetry and won awards; which is what I told him, in so many words, as I tried to hand the journal back. He wanted me to keep it. Correction: he insisted I keep it — as if the pages contained something toxic he wanted desperately to be rid of — and I obliged. The important thing for us to understand is this: Henry thought he was losing it, and it worried him. He entered the prison every night in his dreams, walked its dark hallways, inhaled its fetid air. He’d forgotten so many details about his time inside that it terrified him: the color of Rogelio’s eyes, for example. The number of the cell they shared on Block Seven. The meal they shared on the last night before his release.

But every afternoon, at every rehearsal, something struck him, some bit of the past emerging with surprising clarity. Henry began to remember, began to piece things together. This particular play, of the dozen or so he’d written, had special characteristics: it was the last one he’d finished, the one that had brought his career (such as it was) to a premature close. It had last been performed by men who’d died only a few months later, dead men who’d begun to appear in his dreams. Perhaps the script itself was cursed. These men, these ghosts, hovered about the stage at every rehearsal, sat in the ragged seats of the Olympic to critique every line of dialogue. They booed each poorly rehearsed scene, whispered their doubts in his ears. It was impossible not to feel unsteady when confronted with this text. After all, the man who wrote it had lived another life, and that life was gone. That’s what Henry was dealing with. Nelson, unfortunately, and through no fault of his own, had to watch this up close. It wasn’t pretty.

The kicking incident, for example, which Patalarga described so vividly — Henry recalled it too, answering all of my questions politely and without hesitation. He had experienced it this way: a feeling of looseness, a momentary disorientation. Anger. Impotence. Then, an image: in August 1986 he’d seen a man be kicked to death, or nearly to death, by a mob that formed unexpectedly at the door to Block Twelve. He and Rogelio had stood by, at first horrified, then simply frightened. Then, almost instantaneously, they’d accepted the logic of the attack: every victim was guilty of something. The chatter: What did he do? Who did he cross? The men watching felt safer. Less helpless. A crowd had formed around the victim, but no one moved. Henry took Rogelio’s hand. Squeezed.

“Do you see what I mean?” Henry asked me.

I said that I did, but I could tell he didn’t believe me.

Not every memory was poisonous. For example: one day, Henry gathered up his courage, and went to see Espejo, the boss, about doing The Idiot President in Block Seven; surely this was one of his fondest memories. Espejo was a small but well-built man whose lazy grin belied a long history of violence, a man who’d risen far enough from the streets to relax, and now controlled the block through sheer force of reputation. He was languorous and content, occasionally dispensing pointed but very persuasive doses of rage should any inmate question his authority. Mostly though, he protected them — there were less than two hundred men in their block, and after nightfall they were in constant danger of being overrun by one of the larger, more ferocious sections of the prison. Espejo directed a small army of warriors tasked with keeping those potential invaders at bay.

Henry was afraid of this man, but he had to remind himself: me and Espejo, we’re Block Seven, we’re on the same side.

Espejo’s cell reminded him of a small but comfortable student apartment, with a squat refrigerator, a black-and-white television, and a coffeemaker plugged into a naked outlet. Espejo kept a photo of himself from his younger days framed above his bed, an image Henry had never been able to shake in all the years hence. He described it to me: in the picture, Espejo is shirtless, astride a white horse, riding the majestic animal up the steps of a swimming pool, toward the camera. He is handsome and powerful. A few delighted women stand behind him, long-legged, bronzed, and gleaming in the bright sun. Everything is colorful, saturated with tropical light. A child — Espejo’s son, one might guess — sits at the edge of the diving board, watching the horse maneuver its way out of the water. On the boy’s face is an expression of admiration and wonder, but it’s more than that: he’s concentrating; he’s watching the scene, watching his father, trying to learn.

Henry would’ve liked to be left alone with the photograph, to study it, to ask how and when it had been taken and what had happened to each of the people in the background. To the boy most of all. He might have fled the country, or he might be dead, or he might be living in a cell much like this one in another of the city’s prisons. There was no way of knowing without asking directly, and that was not an option. The photo, like the lives of the men with whom Henry now lived, was both real and startlingly unreal, like a framed still from Espejo’s dreams. What did Espejo think about when he looked at it? Did it make him happy to recall better times, or did the memory of them simply hurt?

Rogelio had warned him not to stare, so he didn’t.

“A play?” Espejo said when Henry told him his idea.

Henry nodded.

Espejo lay back on his bed, his shoeless feet stretched toward the playwright. His head and his toes shook left to right, in unison. “That’s what we get for taking terrorists,” Espejo said, laughing. “We don’t do theater here.”

“I’m not a terrorist,” Henry said.

A long silence followed this clarification, Espejo’s laughter replaced by a glare so intense and penetrating that Henry began to doubt himself — perhaps he was a terrorist after all. Perhaps he always had been. That’s what the authorities were accusing him of being, and outside, in the real world, there were people arguing both sides of this very question. His freedom hung in the balance. His future. Henry had to look away, down at the floor of the cell, which Espejo had redone with blue and white linoleum squares, in honor of his favorite soccer club, Alianza. One of Espejo’s deputies, a thick-chested brute named Aimar, coughed into his fist, and it was only this that seemed to break the tension.

“Did you write it?”

Henry nodded.

“So name a character after me,” Espejo said.

Henry began to protest.

Espejo frowned. “You think I have no culture? You think I’ve never read a book?”

“No, I …” Henry stopped. It was useless to continue. Already he’d ruined himself.

They were quiet for a moment.

“Go on. If you can convince these savages,” Espejo said finally, waving an uninterested hand in the direction of the yard, “I have no objection.”

Henry thanked Espejo and left — quickly, before the boss could change his mind.

“I told Rogelio the news, and we celebrated,” Henry said to me.

“How?”

Henry blushed. “We made love.”

“Was that the first time?”

“Yes.” His voice was very soft.

Then: “I don’t remember.”

Then: “No.”

I told Henry we could stop for a moment, if he wanted. He sat with his head at an angle, eyes turned toward a corner of the room. He laughed. “It’s not because we were in prison together, you know. You’re making it sound cliché.”

“I didn’t say that. I’m not making it sound like anything. I’m not judging you.”

“You were thinking it.”

“I wasn’t,” I said.

He frowned. “Are you a cop? Is that what this is?”

I thought I’d lost him. I shook my head. “I’m not a cop,” I said in a slow, very calm voice. But at the time, even I wasn’t sure what I was doing.

“Nelson and I, we’re almost like family,” I said.

Henry’s brow furrowed. “He never mentioned you.”

Silence.

“The play,” I said, after a moment. “Was it easy to get inmates to volunteer for the play?”

Henry sighed. That, it turned out, was easy, and he had a theory as to why:

Everyone wanted to be the president, because the president was the boss.

Everyone wanted to be the servant, because like them, the servant dreamed of murdering the boss.

Everyone wanted to be the son, because it was the son who got to do the killing. And it was this character, Alejo, whose name was changed. He became Espejo.

And indeed, the project sold itself. A week of talking to his peers, and then the delicate process of auditions. Henry had to write in extra parts to avoid disappointing some of the would-be actors. It was for his own safety — some of these men didn’t take rejection very well. He added a chorus of citizens, to comment on the action. Ghosts of servants past to stalk across the stage in a fury, wearing costumes fashioned from old bed sheets. He even wrote a few lines for the president’s wife, Nora, played with verve by Carmen, the block’s most fashionable transvestite. Things were going well. Someone from Diciembre alerted the press (how had this happened? Neither Henry nor Patalarga could recall), and after he’d done an interview or two, there was no turning back. Espejo even joined the enthusiasm. It would be good for their image, he was heard to say.

Rogelio wanted to audition too, but there was a problem.

“I can’t read,” he confessed to Henry. He was ashamed. “How can I learn the script?”

At this point in our interview, Henry fell silent once more. He scratched the left side of his head with his right hand, such that his arm reached across his face, hiding his eyes. It was a deliberate and evasive gesture; I was reminded of children who close their eyes when they don’t want anyone to see them. We sat in Henry’s apartment, where he’d lived since separating from Ana’s mother more than four years before. There was a couch, two plastic lawn chairs that looked out of place indoors, and a simple wooden table. One might have thought he’d just moved in.

“Rogelio was my best friend, you know?”

“I know,” I said.

“At a time when I needed a friend more than I ever had before. I loved him.”

“I know.”

“And even so — before we went on tour again, just now, I hadn’t thought about him in years. I find this a little shameful, you know? Do you see how awful it is?”

I nodded for him to go on, but he didn’t. “It’s not your fault,” I said. “You didn’t destroy the prison. You didn’t send the soldiers in.”

“You’re right,” Henry said.

“You taught him to read.”

“But I didn’t save him.”

“You couldn’t have.”

“Precisely.”

We decided to break. It was time. I excused myself, wandered back to the bathroom at the end of the hallway and splashed cold water on my face. When I returned, Henry was standing on the narrow balcony of his apartment, wearing the same look of exhaustion, of worry. In the tiny park in front of his building, some children were drawing on the sidewalk.

“My daughter draws much better,” he said.

When we went back inside, I asked him what he’d expected from the tour, what his hopes were. He began to speak, then stopped, pausing to think. “If the text of a play constructs a world,” Henry said finally, “then a tour is a journey into that world. That’s what we were preparing for. That’s what I wanted. To enter the world of the play, and escape my life. I wanted to leave the city and enter a universe where we were all someone different.” He sighed. “I forbade Nelson to call home.”

“Why?”

“I wanted him to help me build this illusion. I needed his help. This sounds grandiose, and dramatic, I know, but …”

I told him not to worry about how it sounded. “Did you have any misgivings about it?”

It was a poorly phrased question. What he’d been trying to tell me was this: his misgivings in those days were all encompassing, generalized, profound. He could push them away for hours at a time, but with only great effort. And they returned. Always.

“To be quite honest, it wasn’t the tour I was afraid of,” Henry said. “It was everything.”

AT MY REQUEST, Ana’s mother took a look at the notebook, spending a few moments with the pages, smiling occasionally as her eye alighted on a particular phrase or observation. She read a couple lines aloud, letting out a short, bitter laugh now and then. When she was finished, she shook her head.

“He gave you these?” Henry’s ex-wife asked, wide-eyed.

I told her he had.

“Henry’s the moody type,” she said, “nothing new. An artist. Always was. But he could enter these spirals of unpleasantness, just like what you describe. Only he wouldn’t write it down, not like this. In eight years — was it that long? Jesus—in eight years, I never saw him write down anything that wasn’t for the classes at that school where he taught. Teaches. Whatever. But he’d talk this way sometimes, stream of consciousness, chatter. At night mostly. Imagine living with this!”

She threw two hands in the air, and the notebook tumbled to the floor.

“I can’t believe I’m going to tell you this,” she said, “but listen. Toward the end, he was never home, God bless. He’d go to school, and then drive the cab till ten. He’d come home, climb into bed, and say: Baby, I fucked a passenger today, on the way to the airport. Wonderful, I’d say, half-asleep, but you still have to fuck me. I’m your wife. It was a game, see? And at first he would. Four times a week. Then three. Then once. But then, he wouldn’t — sleep with me, I mean. Not at all. He’d sleep beside me, but I’d be awake, waiting. He’d snore, and I’d want to kill him. I’d put my hand on his cock. Nothing. Like touching a corpse. He would talk in his sleep, nonsense like this stuff here.” She picked up the fallen notebook, shaking the pages at me. “And then one day, I realized that it wasn’t just stories, it was true: he actually was fucking his passengers. I said, Henry, I’m leaving. Do you know how he responded? Did he tell you this?”

I shook my head.

“He said, ‘Oh, no, the turtle’s getting away! Hurry!’ I thought he was drunk. On drugs. I slapped him. Do you hate me? I asked. I was hurt, you understand. Angry. Do you hate me, I said. Is that it? Do you hate our life? Are you trying to break my heart?”

“How did he respond?”

“He collapsed, sobbing, and told me no. That he hated himself, that he had for years.” She laughed drily. “That his unhappiness was a monument! Like a statue in the Old City. One of those nameless heroes covered in bird shit, riding a stone horse. I told him not to try his poetry now. That it was too late. He begged me to stay.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Of course not. I left him, like any reasonable, self-respecting woman would’ve done. He’d slept with half the city, but it wasn’t his fault because he was depressed? If I’d stayed a moment longer, I would’ve put a steak knife through his neck. Or through my own. So I took Ana, and we went to my mother’s house.”

“Did you ever meet Nelson?”

As it turns out she had, during the last week of rehearsals before they left the city. One afternoon she dropped their daughter off at the Olympic. (“What a dump, and how sad to see it that way! I don’t know why Patalarga would’ve wasted a cent on that place.”) She got to see some of the play. It was the last week of rehearsals.

What did she think?

“About the play, or about Nelson?”

“Both.”

She frowned. Nelson admired Henry without reservation — that much was clear to her. She saw about half a rehearsal, enough to get a sense of the dynamic between them: Henry was hard on Nelson. Interrupted him, chastised him, explained a scene, a beat, once and again; and all the while, Nelson listened carefully to everything, suppressing the frustration he surely must have felt. And he was good. Intense. Very professional. You’d think they were preparing to tour the great halls of Europe, and not a bunch of frostbitten Andean villages.

“And the play?”

Ana’s mother responded with a question: Did I watch much theater? I told her I did, my fair share.

“You know what? I’d remembered it being funny. Fifteen years ago, Henry had a sense of humor. I didn’t remember it being so fucking dark. It was always there, in the script, I suppose, but he was emphasizing it now. What can I say? Life does that to a man. Patalarga was trying. He’d add a note of slapstick, but it just wasn’t … I mean, it had its moments. I’ll tell you this much, which I’m not sure Henry even knows. My daughter, Ana — she fell asleep. She’s no critic, but there it is. She slept. Soundly.”

When our interview was over, Henry’s ex-wife excused herself for having spoken so crudely. “I don’t hate him, I just wouldn’t say Henry brought out the best in me. We’re better off apart.” She paused. “Or at least I am, which really is what matters. To me, I mean.”

I told her that I appreciated her honesty.

She asked that her name not be printed. It’s been years, but I’m honoring that request.

6

HENRY, PATALARGA, AND NELSON set out on April 16, 2001, on a night bus to the interior. That evening, in the bus station waiting room, the television news reported that a famous Andean folksinger had been killed by her manager. Groups of young men huddled together, sharing their titillating theories behind the murder, who had slept with whom, how the killer might have succumbed to the terrible logic of jealousy. Entire families sat glumly, staring in shock at the television, as if they’d lost a loved one — and they had, Nelson supposed.

The bus would leave in an hour. He drank a soda, ate plain crackers. It was practice for the austerity to come, for the rigors of life on the road, the cold, the rain. Patalarga and Henry had spent much of the last days painting vivid portraits of the misery that awaited, and each horrifying description seemed to fill them with glee. “City boy,” they'd said to Nelson, “how will you ever survive life in the provinces?”

Now, at the station, the television spat out the latest news, confirmed and unconfirmed: the accused killer was on suicide watch. An accomplice was being sought. Tearful fans were already gathering in front of the deceased’s home, laying flowers, holding candles, comforting one another. The singer had been dead for all of three hours.

“How do they know where she lives?” asked Henry. “Who told them?”

“Lived,” said Patalarga.

Nelson had only a vague notion of who this dead singer was. In this bus station, on this night, among these fellow travelers, admitting such a thing would be like declaring oneself a foreigner. He’d always been taught it was two different countries: the city, and everything else. Some lamented the stark division, some celebrated it, but no one questioned it. Tonight, their bus would leave the city, and tomorrow when they woke, they’d be in the provinces. In truth, here at the bus station, where everyone was in mourning, it was as if they were already there.

“Did you say your good-byes?” Henry asked, interrupting his daydreams.

“I did.”

Henry furrowed his brow, very serious. “Because we’re entering the world of the play now, Alejo, its constructed universe. Give in to it.”

“I’m giving in.”

“Once we leave, none of this exists.”

Nelson glanced about the crowded and dilapidated bus station. A few yards from them, a child slept on an uneven pile of luggage.

“It’s so hard to say good-bye.”

Henry threw a gentle arm around Nelson. “I know it is, Alejo. I know.”

They were called to board just before midnight. The waiting room of the bus station came to life as everyone shook off their drowsiness and stepped out into the warm night. The bus idled loudly. The passengers lined up to force their overstuffed bags into the hold. There were smiles on most of the faces, Nelson noticed; no one was immune to the allure of travel. Even a night bus has some glamour, if only you let yourself see it.

Just before the bus pulled out, a thin boy in a baseball cap came aboard. He was chewing gum, and held a small video camera in his right hand. The boy moved slowly down the aisle, panning left to right and back again, stopping for a second or two on each passenger. Some smiled, some waved, some blew kisses. Henry flashed an enthusiastic two thumbs-up. When the camera came to Nelson, he stared dumbly into the lens, not quite understanding.

Henry whispered in his ear. “Smile. In case we plunge off a cliff and die, this is how your mother will remember you.”

Nelson forced a smile.

When I went to the bus company to ask for this video, I was all but laughed at. “Are you serious?” the man asked.

I told him I was. I had the date, destination, and time of departure.

“If no one dies,” he said, “we just record over it.”

The ride out of the city was slow, but after an hour they came to the capital’s eastern limits. Nelson didn’t sleep but looked out the window instead, hoping to see something that might catch his eye. There was only darkness. A movie came on the bus’s television — the kind his mother would have liked — but he tuned it out, and went over the script instead, replaying The Idiot President in his mind: its rhythms, its atmosphere, its famous gloom, which, contrary to what he’d been told, was in fact completely describable.

Henry hadn’t known at the station how right he was, exactly how hard Nelson’s good-byes had been. He’d arranged to see Ixta that afternoon, at a park in La Julieta. As they strolled, talking about nothing in particular, Nelson, with his heart thrumming in his chest, held a parallel conversation with himself: Should he, or shouldn’t he? Was now the time to tell her? It was a warm day by the sea, and the vastness of the ocean was always remarkable to him. The boardwalk was full of joggers and skateboarders, and the sun shone through a scrim of early-autumn clouds hovering at the edge of the horizon. The longer they walked, the quieter they became, until Nelson couldn’t bear his uneasiness. They’d come to another seaside park, this one with an unused lighthouse surrounded by a low wooden fence, so short you could step over it. Many had — they’d written their names, pairs of them, mostly, along the lighthouse’s curving base of white brick.

“If they really wanted to protect it,” Ixta said, “they’d make the fence higher.”

Nelson considered the fence, as if it might yield a great secret.

“I love you,” he said.

It just came out that way. He’d said it to the fence, to the lighthouse, to the wind. He’d done it, in other words, all wrong. He began to apologize, but it wasn’t clear what for.

Ixta didn’t respond. She told me later that she wasn’t surprised, or overcome with emotion; she felt something different, something simpler. Relief. Weeks had become months, and Ixta had begun to fear she was inventing it all. She hadn’t thought of herself as having an affair, but from the outside, that’s exactly what it would have appeared to be. She’d fully understood this only a few days before. They’d entered the mirrored lobby of a cheap hotel on the side streets of the Metropole, and she’d happened to catch a glimpse of herself, arm in arm, with Nelson. Ixta never really thought much about their age difference, but suddenly, at that moment, it was noticeable — not her age; but rather, his youth. Nelson had the greedy, callow look of a boy about to get what he wants.

Why, she thought then, should I give it to him?

And: Don’t I want things that he won’t give me?

She was a woman sleeping with someone who was not her partner. It was an affair, and perhaps that’s all it was. If he claimed to love her, did that make it different?

“Well?” Nelson asked. He still hadn’t mustered the courage to look at her.

Ixta told me later: “It was like he felt the world owed him an award, just because he’d managed to say what was on his mind. It was about him, not me. I told him I didn’t trust him anymore. That it had all dragged on for too long. That I was sorry.”

“Is that all?”

“And I wished him a safe trip.”

Ixta paused here, looked up, and bit her lip. Perhaps she expected me to interrupt, but I didn’t.

“You know the truth? I almost felt bad. I felt regret — just for a moment. And I half expected that he’d call my name, but he didn’t. He just let me walk away. I left him at the lighthouse, and I remember thinking, he’ll probably write our names on the bricks, or something similarly helpless. He always liked those sorts of gestures. The useless kind.”

She broke off, shut her eyes.

Both Patalarga and Henry report that Nelson seemed “not himself” on the evening of their departure. “Pensive” was the word Patalarga used; Henry went a bit further, calling him “dour.” While they discussed with some curiosity the particulars of the singer and her murderer, Nelson offered no opinion on the matter. Once on the bus, they report, he pulled out his notebook and began to write.

Nelson could have chosen to share the story of his afternoon, or the content of his conversation with Ixta, but he didn’t. In fact, he’d mentioned her only a couple of times, never by name, keeping her and a lot of things about himself private from his collaborators during those first weeks of the tour. He didn’t tell them about Sebastián’s passing, for example, or much more about Francisco beyond the vagaries he’d shared that first afternoon. He never showed them his plays, though he did admit, after some questioning, that he wrote.

That neither of the Diciembre veterans asked why he was upset should not, in my opinion, be interpreted as a lack of empathy on their part but rather as an indication of who exactly these three men were in relation to one another at the beginning of the tour. While Patalarga and Henry were old friends, they were also, in very important ways, strangers, two middle-aged men getting to know each other again after many years. They were working together for the first time since Henry had been imprisoned. And as for Nelson, the fact that they liked him, that they’d chosen him from among the dozens of actors who’d auditioned for the role of Alejo, does not imply any intimacy.

So, a snapshot of Diciembre as the tour begins: Nelson, troubled, fills the pages of his journal with words about Ixta and his heartbreak, before finally dozing off some three hours from the capital; Henry, beside him, attempting little or no conversation, dons a satin eye mask from the play’s wardrobe, and promptly falls into a dream about the prison, about Rogelio; and Patalarga, who hasn’t been to a movie theater in five or six years, sits across the aisle from his companions, engrossed by the action film blinking on the bus’s tiny television.

IXTA WALKED HOME that afternoon a little dazed, trying to fix the details of her conversation with Nelson within the trajectory of their relationship. It had once seemed that the world would defer politely to their whims, but the disappointing last eight months had been a slow unraveling of all that optimism, a break and a period of mourning, a faltering attempt to recapture what had been lost. Doom. Starting over. Now this, whatever it was.

Mindo was not home, and Ixta was glad for this: a small mercy that she celebrated with a cigarette (she almost never smoked anymore) and a few hours of television. She burrowed deep into the couch, clutching the cushions as if they were life vests. On the other side of the pulled curtains, day turned to dusk. Like Nelson at the bus station, Ixta took in the news of the dead singer, marveling at the scandal the press seemed determined to create. Unlike Nelson, she did know who the singer was. The newscasters played old videos, showed soft-focus stills of the singer’s early days playing dusty fields at the edge of the city. Night fell, and the fans gathered in front of the murdered star’s home; with candles and bloodshot eyes, they performed their sadness flamboyantly, pushing the very limits of realism. This is what Ixta thought to herself, and then: that phrase, it sounds like something Nelson would say. She put the television on mute, and watched for a minute, in silence, to verify that it was true. It was. Yes, she could hear his voice. Yes, it was still there: ironic, wry, curious. Ixta turned off the television, and sat very quietly, listening to the room hum, and waiting for Nelson’s voice to fade from her consciousness.

One day, when they were just starting out, they’d blown off a class on the theory of representation and gone to eat at the Central Market. It was Ixta’s idea, and Nelson wasn’t opposed. The crowds got denser as they approached, and the lovers held hands casually, letting themselves be jostled by the passersby. The shoppers and pickpockets and stray dogs and maids and businessmen and lonely hearts. A teenage boy pushed through the masses, hoisting above him a wooden broomstick strung with cartoon piñatas. Ixta and Nelson followed him, past the vegetable stands, the dozens of varieties of potatoes, the fishmongers huddled over ice chests; past the boys tending to anxious lizards, those golden-eyed marvels destined to die behind glass for the amusement of the city’s children. An old man sold shakes, made with frogs, boiled and skinned, blended with water and egg yolk. The savage little creatures crawled about in their aquariums, blissfully unaware of their fate. “For potency! For love!” the man shouted as Ixta and Nelson passed. He had the desperate voice of a faith healer, as if his primary concern were not commerce but their conjugal happiness.

They ate ceviche served in a paper bowl, while looking up at the market’s old steel girders and the light leaking in through the high windows. There was something lovely about it, but they couldn’t decide what exactly. When they finished, they headed straight east from the market, though it was the long way, into the sleepy, run-down neighborhoods on the edge of the Old City, until they were on a narrow side street, far enough from the tumult of the market to feel almost provincial. A woman in a bathrobe sat on her balcony, elbows on the railing, watching them pass.

And Ixta was watching Nelson. All day she’d felt it, a hazy sense of expectation, only she wasn’t sure what she was waiting for. She slowed, and then stopped. She made Nelson stop too.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

He bit his lip, and she did too, unconsciously, so that for a moment they stood on the sidewalk, mirror images of each other.

I’d like to explain very carefully what happened next, as carefully as Ixta explained it to me: with his right hand, Nelson scratched his temple, and at that moment she felt a sudden itch on her temple as well. He covered his face, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands, and immediately Ixta’s eyes too felt a desire to be massaged. He licked his lips, and hers felt dry. With every gesture he identified a need her own body was slow to register on its own. He blinked many times, and her eyes opened and closed of their own volition. He repeated his question—“Are you all right?”—but there was no point in answering it anymore.

I’m falling in love, she thought. That must be what’s happening.

Years later, on the evening Nelson and Diciembre left the city, Ixta tried to get Nelson’s voice out of her head. And failed. That night and the next, and for a week after, Ixta was not the same person everyone expected her to be. Or the person she herself wanted to be. It was odd, she said when we spoke. A sense of drifting. A fondness for quiet. The city seemed alien to her, and she found herself daydreaming about going on a trip herself. For the past few months she’d been looking for new work, but set that search aside for a moment. Though she was loath to admit it, Nelson’s absence affected her, at least at first.

She even thought of writing him a letter, she told me, only there was nowhere to send it.

7

THE BUS ARRIVED in San Luis at dawn, stopping at the town’s central plaza, where they were met by Patalarga’s cousin Cayetano. It was far too cold out to be chatty, and while they waited for the bags to appear from the storage compartment beneath the bus, Nelson observed his new surroundings in silence. The light was gray and thin, mist still clinging to the hillsides, but there were small houses dotting the slopes and footpaths snaking between them. Those must be the suburbs, he thought. On the western side of the valley, the terraced hills were dark with recently tilled earth and he could make out a few human shapes — farmers — moving about in the half-light. It had rained overnight and the streets were rutted and pooled with water. At the far end of the plaza, a woman in traditional dress swept her front steps with a broom that seemed taller than she was. From a distance, it was impossible to tell if the broom was overlarge or if she was very small.

Cayetano announced that he was taking them to the market first. They needed to eat something; if not, the altitude would get to them. Everyone agreed. Cayetano wore a long, padded brown coat and reminded Nelson of a chess piece. A rook, perhaps.

They thought about waiting for a moto taxi, but decided against it: standing still in the cold wasn’t such a good idea. “And anyway, it isn’t far,” Cayetano said. “It only seems that way.”

The three actors ambled behind their host through the town’s mostly empty streets, Nelson and Patalarga each carrying one strap of a green duffel bag the length of a corpse, or a small canoe. It swung between them as they walked. Inside were their supplies, their costumes, the president’s long boots, his white gloves, the smock, the colorful pants, and the rubber sandals Patalarga would wear every evening (and many days) for the next two months. There was even a set of modified tent poles, and a blue tarp, which they could use as a canopy if they were called upon to perform in a light rain. Needless to say, the bag was heavy. Henry, who had fully assumed the role of president from the moment he boarded the bus, carried only his backpack, with a few books and pens, and walked a few steps ahead of the other two, gazing idly at the buildings. He wore the white eye mask raised to his hairline, like a headband. Now and then he made a comment—“What large windows!” or “Look at the workmanship on that wooden door!”—to which no one felt the need to respond.

Everything in San Luis was wet — the gravel streets, the walls of the houses, the hills, even the stray dogs. The puddles on the empty, shadowed streets seemed bottomless.

“It’s been pouring every night,” Cayetano said. The rainy season had started late that year, but now it had come with a vengeance.

“Oh, the rain!” said Henry.

They walked for much longer than seemed possible, until Nelson began to doubt — in his bones, in his gut — the very existence of a market. But it was there, in fact, at the edge of town: a squat concrete building painted blue, topped with a corrugated metal roof. The market was just opening, and it was a smaller but still inspired replica of that city market near where Ixta had realized she was in love: here, vendors unpacked boxes, sliced meat, unloaded vegetables from wooden crates; and Cayetano led the visitors through the corridors, until they stopped before a clean white-tiled counter stacked with elaborate pyramids of fruit. The woman working there greeted Patalarga with a shout, and came around the counter to welcome him properly. She wore her hair in a long braid and had a bright silver pendant around her neck. It was Cayetano’s wife, Melissa. She embraced Patalarga, greeted Henry with similar enthusiasm, and offered Nelson a somewhat formal handshake. There was a baby in a basinet, a little girl named Yadira, asleep in the corner of the market stall. His other two children were at home, he said, preparing the house for their arrival.

While Melissa made juice, they discussed their plans. Henry noted that he hadn’t seen any posters announcing the performance. Not on their walk, or at the market, which he found puzzling. A bus ride into the tour and already he’d acquired the arrogance of a president. Nelson was impressed.

Cayetano’s lips stretched into a thin smile. He unzipped his heavy brown coat, and sighed. “The mayor, you see … He wanted to speak with you first, before we planned the performance. Just to be sure it was appropriate.”

Henry scowled.

“Appropriate how?” Patalarga said, his voice rising. “No dancing girls? No blood?”

“So it hasn’t been planned,” Henry said.

Cayetano shook his head. “Not yet. Not exactly. But we’ll talk to him. He’s eager to talk. He loves to talk. This afternoon. Everything will be fine.”

Melissa served them more of the local breakfast cocktail. Henry and Patalarga muttered between themselves.

“We’ll talk to him now,” Henry said. “The mayor — where can we find him?”

Cayetano looked down at his watch. “But it’s only seven.”

“The people’s work begins early.”

“Why don’t you have rest first? Look at the boy.”

“I’m fine,” Nelson said.

“We’ll take him to the house.”

“I’m fine,” Nelson insisted.

Patalarga nodded reluctantly. Henry, however, shook his head. He patted Nelson on the shoulder, as if to show he understood, then climbed upon the stool where he’d been sitting. No one had a chance to stop him. He began shouting for everyone’s attention. He clapped his hands, asked for a moment. The market workers, along with the shoppers who’d wandered in, slowed now and looked up.

“Dear residents of San Luis! My two colleagues and I — stand up, Nelson! Stand up, Patalarga!”

He waited for them to climb upon their stools before continuing.

“Together,” Henry announced, shouting, “we are Diciembre. You may have heard of us — we are a theater company! From the capital! We would be honored to perform for you this evening, at six p.m. in the plaza, weather permitting. Please come and bring your families! Thank you.”

Then he sat down.

Nelson stayed up for just a moment longer, surveying the market. From this vantage point, he was able to register with great clarity the muted reaction to Henry’s announcement. There was no romance associated with the name Diciembre — there would be elsewhere, in towns all across the mountain regions, but not here. Instead, there was a pause, a collective head-scratching, and then a quick return to the normal rhythms of the market. Vendors resumed their various tasks, the handful of early-morning customers went back to their shopping. Nelson quickly became invisible.

Eventually, Patalarga helped him down. He and Cayetano received the young actor into their arms, and Melissa gave him tea.

“Why does no one believe me?” said Nelson. “I’m fine!”

“Good,” Henry said, without smiling. “We have a show tonight.”

WHEN MAPPING OUT their itinerary, Henry and Patalarga had selected San Luis for three reasons. First, a matter of nostalgia: Diciembre had played a show there, nineteen years prior, on their very first tour into the interior. They had fond memories of the place: its placid river; the few cobblestone streets remaining in the center of town; and an old, pretty church with a leaky roof. Compared to the dreary mining camps they’d visit later, San Luis was positively picturesque, and therefore a good place to begin. Second: it was well located, just off the recently repaved central highway, a smooth six-hour ride from the capital. Third: the presence of Cayetano, who’d been loosely associated with Diciembre in the early days — though more as a drinking partner than as an actor. He wasn’t just Patalarga’s cousin, he was an old friend, with a rich understanding of Diciembre and its history. The years had been kind to him: he had a family now, had inherited his father’s land, and money enough to become a prominent member of the community. The war had ended, and the new highway allowed his produce to arrive in the city overnight. Cayetano had risen to the position of deputy mayor of San Luis, something unthinkable to those who remembered the bearded, poorly dressed young poet known for staggering through the predawn streets of the capital back in the early eighties.

“But then, no one thought I’d be a science teacher,” Henry said during our interview. “And no one thought you’d be …” He frowned and looked me over with his ungenerous eye. “Well, you aren’t anything yet.”

I let this go.

Whatever the case, they’d counted on Cayetano to make things run smoothly. They expected to be on the road for six weeks or more; it was important to get a good start. They left Nelson at the house to rest, and the elders of Diciembre went off to speak with Cayetano’s boss and patron, the mayor.

The mayor opened by saying he wasn’t “hostile to art, per se”; from there, things only got worse. He smiled often, but never warmly, tapping his long, slender fingers on his desk as he spoke. He described a number of killings that had taken place in the area since Diciembre’s last visit in 1982, with a tone that implied the first event was somehow related to the others.

Patalarga later admitted that his mind wandered throughout the speech, that he found himself looking out the window, at the church with the leaky roof, and above, at the sky, only then beginning to clear. It was midmorning. His wife, Diana, was surely awake, but perhaps still in bed, enjoying the silence of an empty house. The Olympic was locked up and empty, costing him money every minute of every day. For no good reason, he remembered his childhood in the mountains, on the whole, happy memories, and his early schooling, during which he’d been subjected to long-winded harangues not unlike this one. He’d had a teacher who was a communist. Another who was a reactionary. Both were living abroad now, in Europe. In a week he’d see his mother, and as always, the thought filled him with ambivalence. He’d pressured Henry into this tour, presenting it as something his old friend had to do for himself, for his art; but as the mayor prattled, Patalarga realized that, in fact, he was the one who’d wanted it. Who’d wanted it badly. It was a way to be young again; to escape the city for a spell and relive times which, though difficult, constituted the central experiences of his otherwise uneventful life.

“The war years,” he told me when we spoke. “It’s not that I miss them, not at all. But I remember them. Every last detail. It worries me, but sometimes I feel like everything else is a blur. Does that make any sense?”

I shook my head. Honestly, I didn’t understand.

“I was just a boy.”

We were silent awhile.

In San Luis, the mayor’s concern was the title of the piece.

“Idiot,” he said. “If, at school, my son were to call another student an idiot, the teacher would send a letter home and the child would be punished. Would he not?”

Cayetano furrowed his brow. “Your son is twenty-two years old.”

The mayor glared. “As usual, my esteemed Cayetano, you are missing my point.” He turned to Henry. “Are you a father, Mr. Nuñez?”

“I am.”

“And would you not punish your child if he—”

“She.”

The mayor paused, as if having a daughter had never occurred to him. “If she said something like that to a classmate?”

Henry thought of Ana, who was too smart to toss around insults thoughtlessly. If his daughter were to call someone an idiot, it would mean they were an idiot.

He opted not to say this. “But Mr. Mayor, is a play subject to the same codes of behavior as a child?”

The mayor frowned, paused, and wrapped his long fingers around a glass of water. “I don’t know the answer to that.” If he was an imbecile, at least he was honest. He took a sip of water.

Henry felt he’d scored a point, and opted to forge ahead: after all, he was the president, and it was his role to defend his play, his partners, their art form. He intended to be respectful, to negotiate this fine balance between the ego of a small-town mayor and the needs of a theater collective like Diciembre. What, Henry argued, is a play without an audience? Isn’t a script simply potential energy until that magical moment when it becomes something more? Isn’t alchemy like that only possible when the words are made real, when the actors step out from behind the curtain (or the tarp, in this case) and perform? Henry could feel himself gaining momentum as he spoke. Every audience is different, and every audience is a gift which can never be overlooked or taken for granted; as for Diciembre, here they were—“Here we are!” Henry said, perhaps a bit too loudly — and they’d come to San Luis for an audience. To transform the virtual into the actual. They had hoped to use the recently remodeled school auditorium, but they would perform this piece one way or another; in the plaza, in the market, in the street beneath the pouring rain. They’d do it in Cayetano’s home if they had to!

The mayor smiled.

“Perfect. Do it at Cayetano’s house.” He stood. “Gentlemen, have a wonderful day. I wish you much success.”

TO PREPARE for the show, Patalarga, Cayetano, and Nelson spent part of the afternoon carrying furniture outside, and covering it with Diciembre’s tarp, in case of rain. They cleared as much space as possible in the house, making room for an audience that would sit on the floor. While they worked, Cayetano apologized for what had happened. Their play, he explained, had fallen victim to a rivalry that had emerged in recent years between him and the mayor. A dispute about land. These things are common in small towns. He began to go into the details, but stopped himself.

“You know what? It’s not interesting, even to me.”

Meanwhile, Henry put on the presidential riding pants, the ruffled shirt and long coat, the leather boots, the white gloves and sash, and went down to the market once more.

“Everyone stared at me,” he reported. “They stopped me, and asked where I’d come from. It was wonderful.”

This time, there were more people around, the market was louder and more alive. Melissa borrowed a bullhorn from another vendor, and announced Henry to the crowd.

“Ladies and gentlemen: the president!”

With the people’s attention, Henry once more clambered atop a stool and spoke of Diciembre, the play, its surprising change of venue. There was a buzz this time — who is that oddly dressed man, and what exactly is he talking about? — and when he finished, Henry bowed, taking care not to lose his balance, and received the tour’s very first round of applause.

According to Patalarga, Nelson was both nervous and determined not to appear so. He was not a complete novice; after all he’d performed in a few of the capital’s more storied theaters. But this was undoubtedly different, Patalarga told me. “The intimacy of it, the nearness of these strangers, the way they look at you. It couldn’t have been easy for him.”

Did Nelson flub his first lines?

He did.

Did he miss his cue for the fight scene?

He did.

Did he see the faces of his audience, feel them close, smell their presence in the room, and long for the trappings of those theaters he knew back home?

He did.

But he pushed through all that, and by the time the mayor appeared, midway through the first act, Nelson had mostly recovered. Things were humming along. The mayor, full of bluster and pique, seemed unimpressed. He made his way to the corner opposite the door, and stood against the wall with his arms crossed, frowning.

Nelson had no idea who this man was, and later claimed it was mere coincidence that his line “But Father, you must be careful! Evil lurks everywhere!” was delivered with eyes locked on the latecomer.

Everyone noticed, and Cayetano laughed nervously; soon the entire room was laughing along with him. Everyone but the mayor.

“This is what Nelson had to learn,” Patalarga told me. “That the play is different every time. That it doesn’t matter if you mess up. There’s no such thing as a mistake.”

The mayor stormed out well before the climactic murder scene.

It was just as well. There was more humor at his expense once he’d gone. A gentle rain began moments later, just as Patalarga’s character was stabbed. It tapped pleasantly on the roof. When the play was finished, the applause and the rain seemed to blend into one, each augmenting the other. There’d been no theater in town for as long as anyone could remember. No one wanted to leave. Nelson, immersed in the chatter, felt warm. Then a bottle appeared, and the volume was raised, and the dancing soon began. Nelson stood against the wall, shy, but Cayetano and Patalarga sent Melissa across the room to pull him onto the floor. He took his first tentative steps to the beat, and Henry yelled, “The city boy!” his voice somehow carrying over the music and the rain.

Everyone cheered, and this is when the tour finally seemed real to Nelson.

8

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, Diciembre played in small towns and villages up and down the region, subject to weather like nothing Nelson had ever experienced. Some mornings it was as if the sun never rose, the skies swirling with blue and purple clouds until late afternoon, when they finally broke into a downpour. Other days, it wasn’t the rain but the winds one had to contend with: they blew fierce and merciless through the valley, leaving Nelson’s cheeks red and his body chilled. Then, quite unexpectedly, the cloud cover would vanish, and the sun would appear. Everything glistened, even the mountains, and he’d think: this is the most beautiful landscape I’ve ever seen. It never lasted; after an hour the clouds would return. Nelson lost weight in those first days, and woke up many mornings with a terrible headache. For breakfast he drank coca tea, ate cold bread and cheese. For lunch: fried trout, some eight days in a row. Ten days. Fourteen. Occasionally, guinea pig, a welcome change, but which too often involved the unpleasant ritual of having to choose your lunch from among a pen of furry little animals. (“The fat one,” said Henry, every time, without deigning to bend his head over the beasts.) They rode from one town to the next on a bus, if one was available; if not, and if there was no rain yet, the bed of a truck would do. They lay among piles of potatoes, gazing out across the valleys, the fields, the scattered, lonely houses, and the turbid sky that pressed down heavily on all of it. The higher they went, the more dangerous the roads became, at times barely wide enough for a horse cart; and Nelson would often peer over the edge of a crumbling mountain, and force himself to think of something other than death. His life back home came to mind, but Henry’s instructions — to give in completely to the world of the play, to forget everything else — seemed particularly apt since his last, disappointing conversation with Ixta. He strained to put her out of his mind.

In spite of these physical and psychological hardships, the tour had its pleasures: they were greeted warmly in each town, with a certain ceremony and solicitousness Nelson found charming; almost every night the audiences gave them a standing ovation that made all their efforts seem worthwhile. Even if the community had never heard of Diciembre, they were often grateful for the visit. The village elder or mayor would insist on hosting them himself; and being welcomed into these humble homes was, for Nelson, an astonishing privilege. He’d try to catch Henry’s eye or Patalarga’s, just to make sure they felt it too: the significance of these people’s unexpected, unearned trust. A party would be hastily organized, or spring up spontaneously after a performance. The villages might be just a handful of houses amid endless yellow-gray fields, but in many cases, these were the best audiences of all: no more than a dozen people altogether, with little education or experience with theater, a few farmers with ruddy faces, their long-suffering wives, and undernourished children, who’d approach Henry after the play, never looking directly at him, and say respectfully, “Thank you, Mr. President.”

There was the show in Corongo, where Patalarga’s elderly aunts and uncles lined up in the front row, his mother, beaming with pride, in the very center, an hour before the show was to begin. They sat quietly and very still, gazing upward as if posing for a photograph. When the performance began, their eyes narrowed in concentration, and when it was finished they stood to applaud. Afterward, they all ate potato and onion soup in the dining room of Patalarga’s childhood home, pressed together at a long narrow wooden table that creaked one way and then another, depending on whose elbow happened to be raised. The room was dark and musty, and all the windows and doors had been thrown open to air it out, letting in the nighttime chill, which no one but Nelson seemed to mind. Everyone was happy, proud, but they were tight-lipped and circumspect, as if contentment were an emotion to be guarded like a secret. Unlike the rest of the family, Patalarga’s mother was concerned. “I have a question,” she said to her son, as the meal was ending. “Oh, and please don’t take this the wrong way … but if you’re the one with the money, why must you play the servant?”

To which Henry responded, “The role comes so naturally to him. It would be a crime to use his talents in any other way.”

There was the night in the roadside community of Sihuas at three thousand two hundred meters above sea level, where they were given a corner of a bar called El Astral to perform; they waited and waited for an audience — anyone would do — but no one arrived. It was after ten in the evening, and besides the mustachioed bartender, and the manager at the hostel, they hadn’t seen another living soul anywhere in the vicinity. Henry and Patalarga each drank a beer in silence, unconcerned, or pretending to be, but Nelson was impatient. “They’re not coming,” he said, wishing only to rest. “No one’s coming!” But the bartender pulled at the edges of his mustache. “Believe me, young fellow, you just wait. You’ll do your show!”

A while later, he looked at his watch. “Go on. Go out there, you’ll see.”

Night had fallen; the sky was dark. Sihuas was set in a narrow slip of the valley, and Nelson saw nothing in the town’s empty streets, but when he got to the corner and looked up, there they were: strings of tiny, bobbing lamplights, hundreds of them, rushing down the trails. They were gold miners, descending the mountains all at once. A half hour later, in a clamor of shouting and noise, they arrived, and instantly, El Astral was overrun. The men were small and lean, with reddish, windburned cheeks, inky black eyes, and a feverish desire to drink. Some were scarred, or missing fingers from dynamite accidents, but they didn’t seem to care. They smelled of metal, and paid for their drinks with tiny bits of gold that glinted beneath the bar’s neon lights. They sang songs, and packed the place so tightly that Nelson, Patalarga, and Henry found themselves pushed together into a tight huddle. Their stage had disappeared beneath the crush of men. A half hour later, a bus full of prostitutes appeared — how? where had it come from? — and suddenly El Astral smelled of sex, or the possibility of sex, this thick cloud of painted women pushing into the bar as if borne by a strong and lurid wind.

There was no chance of doing the show now.

“No wonder the hostel manager wanted us all in a single,” Nelson said. He’d never been to a brothel before (though he’d imagined the setting enough to write a play about it), and now, quite improbably, the brothel had come to him. It was an impressive spectacle. Within the hour, there were couples having sex in the bathrooms, behind the remains of Diciembre’s makeshift stage, on the steps of the bus that had carried the women there. Henry settled their bill, suddenly embarrassed, apologizing for being unable to pay in gold, but the bartender was nothing if not understanding.

“Next time,” he said.

They walked the few blocks to the hostel together, the unlit streets of Sihuas alive with grunts and moans and women’s laughter.

And there was the night in Belén when they met the town’s much-aged former police chief, who, after a few drinks, agreed to share the story of how he’d briefly arrested some members of Diciembre nearly twenty years before. The old man had a chubby face and mottled skin, but his eyes shone at the memory: it was like he was watching a movie of the scene, admiring the version of himself played by a young and handsome actor. He’d made the papers in the capital, he recalled, something he’d never managed again. He told the story without reserve or shame, addressing Nelson directly, perhaps because he mistakenly believed that Henry and Patalarga were among the group that had been arrested. It was all right to laugh now, he said, but back then things were different. “We’d heard of the terrorists, but we had no idea what to look for. There were awful reports from the city, but no solid information. You probably don’t believe me, but we were frightened.”

Henry and Patalarga knew people in every town: old collaborators or antagonists from the early days of Diciembre, the men and women with whom they’d shared their youth. These acquaintances had lived most of their lives in the provinces, at a different rhythm. They told funny stories masquerading as tragedies, and sad stories purporting to be comedies; they drank heavily, and seemed not to notice those things most concerning to Nelson: the abject poverty of their surroundings, the terrible condition of the roads, the relentless rains and the bitter cold. He admired this too: their ability to preserve joy at any cost, the way prehistoric man might have preserved fire. Nelson had learned to chew coca leaves, had come to enjoy the numbness as it spread over his face, down his neck, and into his chest; a small pleasure that muted the harshness of the rainy season and smoothed over the effects of the altitude. And they were at the edge of a different region now: the lower valleys, where the forests began. If they went farther, another day or two or three, the cold would give way completely, and they’d be at the edge of the jungle, free to breathe again, almost normally. Now they sat around a rectangular wooden table in a cramped restaurant, listening to the old police chief tell this funny little war story about arresting actors. A fluorescent light buzzed; the television was on, but no one watched. Behind them stood a second line of men, anxious to listen in — if the table were the stage, they were the balcony, so to speak. Workers, all of them, men with rough hands jammed deep in their pockets, men who laughed when it was time to laugh, who fell silent when it was time for quiet. They were the chorus, carefully following the police chief’s cues. If a glass of beer was offered, they accepted; if it wasn’t, they didn’t complain. They were indifferent to cold, didn’t mind standing, and followed the conversation in the bar as closely as they’d followed the play itself.

The old man went on: “So then these kids, these ruffians, show up on the back of a pickup truck, wearing bandanas and smelling bad. They set up a tent in the plaza, without even asking. They play rock music from a boom box. You must think we’re primitives here, but this is how it happened. My deputy — God bless him, he’s abroad now — he says to me, That’s them! That’s who? I ask. The terrorists! But how do you know? I say, and this one, he was always reading the papers. He had an answer for everything: Look how dirty they are! What did we know? We’d never seen one. The ladies, they smoked cigarettes, they had patches on their jeans. The boys looked sickly, with stringy hair and thin mustaches. Look at them! Even now they look shifty! Was I wrong to worry? Tell me, son, was I wrong?”

The old man laughed with his entire body, the chorus too. Henry and Patalarga didn’t, but no one seemed to notice.

“I’d arrest them now!” Nelson called out.

“But what would I charge them with?” the police chief said in an exaggerated whisper.

“I’m sure you could come up with something,” Patalarga said.

“Anything will do,” Henry added. “The courts aren’t very picky, you know.”

No one had anything to say to that. The police chief smiled politely, and the chorus held its breath for a moment. Nelson sensed the discomfort too, and when it had gone on just a second too long, he changed the subject, and brought up the rains; the police chief smiled, deferring to the chorus, who were the laborers, the ones who tilled the earth. They’d come into town for the show, but what they really knew was the land.

“How are things out there?” the old police chief asked. “What’s happening over in the provinces?”

The provinces — this was another thing Nelson had come to understand. No matter where you went, no matter how far you traveled into the far-flung countryside, the provinces were always farther out. It was impossible to arrive there. Not here—never here—always just down the road.

One of the men said his fields might be washed away. Two straight weeks of rain this late in the season; it wasn’t normal. The rivers are swollen, said another, the bridges could collapse. And then, a third man, with a broad face and black hair that fell limply just above his eyes, said, “Heard from my cousin that it’s getting so bad in the lowlands that the planes can’t even fly!”

At this, everyone fell silent.

“Planes?” Nelson asked.

He hadn’t heard of any planes. He hadn’t seen them, or even imagined them. Though he’d never flown, air travel was his; it belonged to that other world, the one he’d left behind.

The former police chief’s face was stern. He glared for a moment at the offending chorus member, who’d broken the rules by speaking out of turn and mentioning the lower valley’s most important and fastest growing industry, the drug trade.

“Perhaps you could arrest him for that,” said Henry, a comment that did nothing to lighten the suddenly oppressive mood.

After that night, and after Henry had explained, Nelson looked to the skies when they traveled. He noted it in his journal, welcoming this new way to pass the time, to distract himself from the precariousness of the roads or the raw winds. He never saw a plane. They spent four days in that area, descending toward the heat, before Henry decided they should turn back toward the highlands.

“I feel more comfortable when there’s less oxygen,” he said. “The play makes more sense that way. Don’t you agree?”

And because he was the president, Diciembre returned to the highlands.

Then there was the night in San Felipe, when, after a particularly energetic performance, Nelson nearly fainted. Patalarga’s murder took a lot out of him that evening, and he sat afterward, slumped in a chair, unable to catch his breath. Inhaling was like swallowing knives, and his head felt as if it might separate from his neck and float away. Eventually he recovered, and they were all invited to a party in a one-room adobe house on the outskirts of town. He was rushed inside, where the strangers paid special attention to feeding him and getting him drunk. Surprisingly, the liquor helped, and it felt nice to be doted on. When Nelson began to turn blue, the owner of the home, a gray-haired man named Aparicio, asked if he wanted a jacket. Nelson nodded enthusiastically, and his host rose and walked to the refrigerator, standing before its open door, as if contemplating a snack. Nelson thought, He’s making fun of me. He watched Aparicio open the vegetable drawer and take out a pair of wool socks. He tossed them to Nelson, and when the door opened a bit more, Nelson saw the refrigerator was, in fact, being used as a wardrobe. The bottom shelves remained, but all the rest had been removed. There were mittens in the butter tray, sweaters and jackets hanging from a wooden bar nailed to the inside walls. Only then did he notice the few perishables sitting on the counter. In this cold, they were in no danger of spoiling.

The gathered men and women told sad stories about the war and laughed at their own suffering in ways Nelson found incomprehensible. Sometimes they would speak in Quechua, and then the laughter became much more intense, and also much sadder, or at least that’s how it seemed to Nelson. Later, a woman arrived, Tania, and everyone stood. She had long black hair, which she wore in a single braid, and an orange and yellow shawl draped over her shoulders. She was beautiful, and very small, but somehow gave the impression of great strength. She circled the room shaking everyone’s hand — except Henry’s, who instead received a floating kiss in the air just beside his right ear.

“Are you still acting,” Tania asked when she got to Nelson, “or are you actually that sick?”

He didn’t know how to respond, so when someone shouted, “He’s drunk!” Nelson felt relieved. The room roared with laughter, and then everyone sat.

The drinking began in earnest now, and a guitar soon appeared from a hidden corner of the room. It was passed from person to person, making a few laps around the circle before Tania finally kept it. Everyone cheered. She strummed a few chords, then cleared her throat, welcoming the visitors, thanking them all for listening. She sang in Quechua, picking a complex accompaniment, her agile fingers unrestrained by the cold. Nelson turned to Henry and asked him in a low voice what the song was about.

“About love,” he whispered, without taking his eyes off her. It seems they had briefly been involved two decades before. Seeing her, he told me later, unnerved him, filling him at once with regret and optimism. He felt then that he’d entered a gray period of his life, from which there was no easy escape. One could not enter the world of a play. One could not escape one’s life. Your bad choices clung to you. And even if such a thing were possible, it would require a strength of will he lacked, or a stroke of good fortune he didn’t deserve.

As for Nelson, the night wore on and he found himself appreciating Tania’s beauty with greater and greater clarity. Hours passed, and when he was finally succumbing to the cold and the liquor, Tania offered to lead him back to the hostel where they were staying. This was noted by the attendees with feigned alarm, but she ignored them. Outside in the frigid night, her eyes glowed like black stars. The town was small, and there was no possibility of getting lost. They trudged drunkenly through its streets, both wrapped in a blanket Aparicio had lent them.

“You sing beautifully,” Nelson said. “What was it about?”

“Just old songs.”

“Henry told me you were singing about love.”

She had a beautiful laugh: clear and unpretentious, like moonlight. “He doesn’t speak Quechua. Must have been a lucky guess.”

When they got to the door of the hostel, she asked Nelson if he was happy. She was curious, she said, because his face was so hard to read.

“Hard to read — is that a compliment?” Nelson asked.

“If you want.”

“Did you see the play?”

Tania nodded.

“And did you like it?”

“Yes,” she said. “Very much.”

“Then I’m happy.”

He moved to kiss her, but she dodged him, surprisingly alert, as if she were an athlete specially trained in dodging kisses. She patted him on the head, and they stood there awkwardly for a moment, until she smiled.

“It’s fine,” Tania said. “You’re sweet. You remind me of my son. Now, drink lots of water, and get as much rest as you can.”

Then she walked back to the party. Nelson watched her go; and though he was hundreds of kilometers away from home — in a place as different from the boardwalk of La Julieta as it might be from the surface of a distant planet — he recalled Ixta, who had stopped believing in his love, and had walked away from him. Every day Nelson waged a pitched battle against the memory of their conversation at the lighthouse, a brutal war, in which he was both victor and vanquished. In his mind he tried to change the outcome of this moment, like a magician attempting to bend a spoon through sheer concentration. No matter what he tried, it never worked. He recalled his silence now, that he’d let her go, and felt ashamed.

“Tania!” he shouted.

She turned, but said nothing. She was waiting.

“I love you!”

She laughed elatedly, as if it was the most wonderful joke she’d ever heard.

“He was a handsome boy,” Tania told me later. “If he were just a bit older, I would have taken him home with me.”

It was more than a month and a half into the tour by then; six weeks separated from his life, from his friends, from his dreams. Nelson had turned twenty-three the first week of May, without sharing the news with anyone. He was on his own. Henry had asked them all not to call home, not to write letters, but to immerse themselves in the moment. Now it was worth asking: What good was that advice, really? What did it achieve if the present was not new or different at all, but fundamentally the same: the usual traumas, only now set on a cold mountaintop, on a pitch-black night? Inside the hostel, the owner gave Nelson a large rubber bladder, swollen with boiling water, and as he prepared for bed, alone now, he held it in his hands. It was like holding a human heart, his own perhaps. He felt what remained of his contentment evaporating. He tried to go over his day: what had happened, or what, to his chagrin, had not. The cold made coherent thought nearly impossible, so Nelson lay down with the bladder pressed against his belly, curling himself around it like a snail. His eyes began to close. Was it worth it, he wondered: the travel, and the cold, and the distance, which felt, at times, like that exile Henry had clamored for that first day in the cab? What did it all amount to if he’d already ruined his life by letting Ixta walk away? Was he ruining his life even now?

He willed himself to rise, went down once more, where he woke the owner of the hostel, apologizing. Would it be possible to make a phone call, he asked her, to the capital?

The woman stood in her nightgown, observing the young actor through narrow, half-closed eyes. “There’s no telephone,” she said, suddenly upset. “You and your people always want a telephone, but I keep telling you!”

ONE AFTERNOON, Henry brought up the story of his imprisonment. He was talking to Nelson ostensibly, but naturally he was also talking to himself. In 1986, he was thirty-one years old, and the night of his arrest, his first concern had been for the play itself. His work was all that mattered. He didn’t notice the two men in dark suits hanging around after the show. They stood apart, talking to no one, leaning against the mildewed walls of the Olympic which, by hosting an experimental theater company like Diciembre, had officially entered a new, nearly terminal, stage in its long decline. (“We were there just before it went porno,” Patalarga told me.) The theater had emptied, the audience dispersed, and the actors were alone. One of the two men in dark suits approached. “You’re Henry Nuñez,” he said, as Henry made his way from behind the stage. It wasn’t a question. Henry wore a leather bag thrown over his shoulder, nothing inside but some smelly clothes and a few annotated scripts. He’d splashed water in his face, and argued with his cast of two, Patalarga and Diana, who weren’t even dating then. (“You must understand, my dear Alejito, this was back when Patalarga was still a virgin. Don’t laugh, he was barely twenty-five years old.”) The performance had been disappointing, and he’d told them so, in an angry tirade adorned with profanities. The small crew had gone. Diana had cursed him, called him “insensitive and tyrannical” before she fled as well. The theater was empty by then, just Henry and Patalarga, who was, at that moment, still backstage.

“Do you remember?” Henry said to his old friend, and Patalarga nodded.

Henry’s dissatisfaction turned to annoyance at the presence of these two strangers, who asked inane questions, when the entire theater universe of the capital knew he was Henry Nuñez. Who else, exactly, would he be?

When it became clear Henry wasn’t going to respond, one of the men said, “You’ll have to come with us.” He spoke formally, very deliberately; Henry frowned, and the other man repeated the drab, rather passionless command, this time emphasizing the words “have to.”

Patalarga emerged from behind the stage just then, quickly understood the situation (according to him), and tried to intercede; but by then a couple other men had materialized from the shadows of the Olympic; tough, unsmiling men, the sort who love settling arguments. They placed their giant hands on Henry. A few more words were spoken, some shouted, but in the end, this wasn’t a negotiation. They were taking the playwright, and that was that. When Patalarga wouldn’t shut up, they knocked him out and locked him in the ticket booth, where he would be found the following day by the custodian.

Henry was held without human contact in a mercifully clean, though still unpleasant, cell. It took him a few days to understand the severity of the situation. He was questioned about the people he knew, the plays he wrote, his travels around the country, and his motives; but it was all strangely lethargic, inefficient, as if the police were too bored by it all to decide his fate. He wasn’t beaten or tortured; he surely would’ve confessed to anything at the mere threat of such treatment. On the third day, still thinking, breathing, and living in the mode of a playwright, he asked for a pen and some paper in order to jot down notes about his tedious imprisonment, things to remember should he ever need to write about his experiences. He was denied, but even then, in his naiveté, he still wasn’t worried. Not truly concerned. Disappointed, yes, disturbed; but if he’d been asked, Henry would’ve said he expected to be released any day, at any moment. His captivity was so ridiculous to him, he could hardly conceive of it. He just couldn’t understand why they were so upset — had they seen The Idiot President? It wasn’t even any good!

Just when he was beginning to despair, he was allowed to receive a visitor. This must have been the fifth or sixth day. By then a story had been concocted: the authorities categorically denied Patalarga’s version of the arrest, saying they found Henry hours later, drunk, wandering the streets of the Old City. They claimed to have held him for his own safety.

And why had they denied that Henry was in their custody for five days?

A bureaucratic mix-up. A record-keeping error.

And why were they still holding him?

It was under investigation. Henry was the prime suspect in the beating and false imprisonment of Patalarga. “Most likely a lover’s quarrel,” the police spokesman said, with a slyly raised eyebrow, “though I would prefer not to speculate.”

The docile press, however, speculated.

Henry’s older sister, Marta, appeared that fifth or sixth afternoon, representing the entire living world outside the small cell which held him — his family, his friends, Diciembre and its supporters. Everyone. It was a burden that showed clearly on her face. Her eyes were ringed with dark bluish circles, and her skin was sallow. She hadn’t eaten, Marta reported; in fact, no one in the family had stopped to eat or rest for five days, and they were doing everything they could to get him out. He imagined them all — his large, bickering extended family — coming together to complete this task: it would be easier to put them on shifts and have them dig a tunnel beneath the jail. The image made him smile. Marta was happy to see Henry hadn’t been abused, and they passed much of the hour talking about plans for after his release. She had two children, a daughter and a son, ages six and four, who’d both drawn him get-well cards, because they’d been told their uncle was at the hospital. Henry found this amusing; the fact that the cards had been confiscated at the door of the jail, he found maddening. Everyone assured the family not to worry, that they’d remember this little anecdote later, and laugh.

“Why wait?” Henry said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” his sister answered, but already she was suppressing a grin.

He was referring to a game they’d developed as children: forced, spontaneous, and meaningless laughter. They’d used it to get out of chores, dismissed from church. With hard work and diligence, they’d developed and perfected this skill: rolling around, cackling, rubbing their bellies like lunatics, before doctor’s appointments, or family trips, or on the morning of a school exam for which they had not prepared. Neither recalled the game’s origins, but they’d been punished for it together on many occasions, always feigning innocence. We can’t help it, they’d both say, laughing still, tears pressing from the corners of their eyes, until their protests landed them in weekly brother-sister sessions with a child psychologist. Even these many years later, both were proud that they’d never betrayed the other. In their prime, when they were as close as two human beings can be (Henry, age ten, Marta a couple of years older), the two of them could manufacture laughter instantly, hysterical fits that lasted for a quarter of an hour, or longer. Henry considered it his first accomplished dramatic work.

He insisted. “Why not?”

They’d been whispering until then, but now they took deep breaths, like divers preparing for a descent. The cell, it turned out, had good acoustics. The laughter was tentative at first, building slowly, but soon it was ringing through the jail. Unstoppable, joyful, cathartic. At the end of the block, the guards who heard it had quite a different interpretation: it was demonic, even frightening. No one had ever laughed in this jail, not like this. They felt panic. One of them rushed to see what was happening, and was surprised to find brother and sister laughing heartily, holding hands, their cheeks glistening.

The hour had passed.

Leaving the jail that afternoon, Marta gave a brief statement to the press, which was shown on the television news that evening. Her brother was completely innocent, she said; he was an artist, the finest playwright of his generation, and the authorities had interrupted him and his actors in the legitimate pursuit of their art. Those responsible should be ashamed of what they’d done.

The following day the charges of assault and false imprisonment were dropped, and replaced by other, more serious accusations. Henry was now being held for incitement and apology for terrorism. A new investigation was under way. He was given the news that morning by the same guard who’d come upon him and Marta laughing, who thankfully refrained from making the obvious statement about who might be laughing now, a small mercy which Henry nonetheless appreciated.

He was driven from the jail in the back of a windowless military van, with nothing to look at but the unsmiling face of a soldier, a stern man of about forty, who did not speak. Henry closed his eyes, and tried to follow the van’s twisting path through the city he’d called home since age fourteen. “We’re going to Collectors, aren’t we?” he asked the soldier, who answered with a nod.

On the morning of April 8, 1986, Henry entered the country’s most infamous prison. He wouldn’t leave until mid-November.

9

NELSON LIKED HEARING these stories; it was as if they filled in gaps in his knowledge he hadn’t known were there. He asked again and again: why haven’t you written about this? — but it was a question Henry never really answered convincingly. Every night in Collectors, friends paired off and walked circles around the prison yard, commiserating, confessing, doing all they could to imagine they were somewhere else. How do you set a play in a world that denies your characters any agency? Where do you begin? “Begin there!” Nelson would respond. “Or there! Or there!” (“Young writers believe everything constitutes a beginning,” Henry told me later, in a stern, professorial voice.) Undeterred, Nelson even offered to help: he would transcribe the scenes, or they could talk them out together. He could sketch the arc of each moment, write character treatments — they could collaborate. (“I never liked that word, to be quite honest,” Henry told me, noting its unfortunate political connotations.) Still, he pretended to be intrigued by the idea, that it was something worth considering, though he never committed to it. Perhaps, he told the eager young actor, when they returned.

Patalarga, who has the clearest memories of those days of the tour, says he sensed Nelson’s admiration for Henry becoming more nuanced: no longer the blind respect of a young artist, or the ambitious striving of a protégé who wants recognition, it had become something more like the appreciation of a son who’s come to understand his father as a man, with all the complexity that implies.

In other words: they were becoming friends.

Meanwhile, the rainy season was ending. By that point, they’d spent some eight weeks on the road; had gone from the coast to the highlands to the lowlands and back up again; passing through a succession of villages that seemed from a distance to bleed together in kaleidoscopic intensity. The country, which for Nelson had always been a mystery, was real to him now, a series of stark tableaux come to life: from mining settlements like Sihuas to lazy riverside towns in the lowlands to clusters of tiny houses spread atop a high mesa, homes to modest families of cattle grazers. This area fascinated Nelson most of all, these people who’d settled in ever-widening concentric circles around a massive slaughterhouse, smelling of offal and rot, a mean, dark place which was nonetheless the center of the region’s economic, social, and cultural life, and which had even become, for one brief but magical evening, a theater.

They were mostly inured to the austere beauty of the landscape by then; it was right in front of them, so commonplace and overwhelming they could no longer see it. In Nelson’s journals his descriptions of the highland terrain are hampered by his own maddening ignorance, that of a lifelong city dweller who has no idea what he’s looking at: mountains are described with simplistic variations of “large,” “medium,” or “small,” as if he were ordering a soda from a fast-food restaurant. Trees and plants and birds, and even the color of the sky, are given much the same treatment. Greater attention is paid to the people: pages upon pages devoted to Cayetano, Tania, and others (descriptions which I’ve drawn from to prepare this manuscript), as well as a vast assortment of miners, laborers, farmers, money changers, and truck drivers whom they’d met along the way. They appear, unique and alive, often nameless, and then are gone.

On the morning of June 11, 2001, Diciembre arrived in the small city of San Jacinto, which felt, relative to all the previous stops on the tour, like a version of Paris or New York or London. It was the largest town on their itinerary, and they were due to perform a couple nights at a local English language institute named after Franklin D. Roosevelt. How Patalarga had programmed this particular show, no one knew; but once in San Jacinto, Henry and Nelson thanked him for it. Suddenly dropped into the town’s delightful chaos, they became aware of the sensory deprivation they’d endured those long eight weeks. They walked casually through the city, taking in the movement with an appreciative mix of panic and wonder. San Jacinto’s sixty thousand or so residents lived atop a flat, dry plain, trading anything and everything according to rules only they understood. One noisy street was overrun with musicians for hire. “All the hits!” shouted a saleswoman with manic streaks of red in her hair. “Pay for eleven hours, and the twelfth hour is free!” Another was filled with the cheerful, drunken employees of a trucking company, christening six new vehicles in the middle of an intersection, blocking traffic in all directions. The trucks shone brightly with wax, as if smiling in the sun, and were decorated with bunting fastened to the tops of the cabs. Men dashed about, tossing confetti in the air, spraying the chassis with champagne. It was like a wedding, only it wasn’t clear who was marrying these giant, gleaming machines, or if they were marrying each other. Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson stayed to observe the confusing ceremony, and then, when the noise became too great, followed the railroad tracks away from the center, hoping for some quiet. For many blocks, they could hear the horn blasts, now fading, but still frantic and celebratory.

They came to a small plaza where dozens of men stood among large chalkboards placed in rows that zigzagged from one end of the space to the other. It wasn’t at all clear what the men were after. A heavyset woman sat at one end of the chalkboards with a pen and clipboard in her lap; now and again, she would hand a piece of paper to an adolescent girl, who would then climb a small stepladder and begin copying the words out in colored chalk. The men would gather around, with severe expressions on their wind-bitten faces, scrutinizing her work. Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson watched from the edges of the crowd, waiting for the right moment to get a better look. For once Henry didn’t pretend he knew everything, but took in the scene with the same puzzlement as the rest. He sent Nelson, finally, to investigate.

“You’re an actor,” Henry said, “you’ll blend.”

Nelson returned moments later. He had not blended, but been met instead with dozens of distrustful eyes.

They were job postings, he reported. Classified ads, performed live.

Henry rejoiced. “Theater for the people!” he said, as if the idea had been his all along.

That evening, they ate at a chicken restaurant near the center of town, its tables wrapped in thick plastic. They’d done well the previous night, recouping enough in donations to treat themselves to a real sit-down dinner. Lunch had passed without their even noticing it: confronted with the sights and sounds of San Jacinto, they’d simply forgotten to eat. Now a liter bottle of soda stood before them, but no one drank.

But Nelson had something on his mind; he had for days, since the night in San Felipe. He asked Henry about it now. He felt he was owed some clarification. “Have you been calling home?”

The playwright smiled, saying nothing at first, but finally, he nodded.

“I thought we weren’t doing that,” Nelson said.

Patalarga laughed.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Because I’ve been calling too.”

The food came.

As it turned out, the only one of the three protecting the integrity of “the play’s constructed universe” was Nelson. He lost his appetite. Henry and Patalarga found this very funny; Nelson, less so. They chided their friend playfully, trying to pull him from his bad mood, which they found entirely unreasonable. And perhaps they were right. How could he have been so literal? they asked, but he had no answers. The commitment Nelson had shown the project — something he’d been proud of only a moment before — was now a sign of gullibility.

Patalarga attempted to explain away Nelson’s complaints: Henry had lied, yes, in the strictest sense, but this is what great directors do. They challenge their actors, prod them, force them against their will into a place of discomfort, in this way extracting some extra dose of magic for the performance. Isolated, mournful, longing for home — this was Nelson, the actor, at his best.

“Imagine a happy, well-balanced Alejo,” said Patalarga. “That would never do. I should tell you one day how he treated my wife, when she had your role.”

Henry agreed. “Diana still won’t talk to me.”

“This was what you wanted?” Nelson asked. “To make me unhappy?”

“Sure it was. We needed you to be. For the play.” With that, he thrust a piece of chicken into his mouth.

“But—”

Henry’s face was covered in grease, and he chewed for a long, luxurious minute. He loved these moments, loved Nelson’s disappointment, in fact. Mentorship, such as he understood it, consisted primarily of didactic exercises like this one: transforming frustration into the building blocks of knowledge.

“Please, my dear Alejito: did you really expect me not to talk to my daughter?” Henry said finally. “Or for the servant not to call his wife?”

“I guess not.”

“Who did you want to call?” Patalarga asked.

Nelson rolled his eyes. “Now you want to know?”

“We do,” said Henry, softening. “We really do.”

Henry, later: “I loved Nelson. Of course I wanted to know.” After a pause: “I’m so sorry for what happened.”

What did Nelson tell them?

Concretely: about Ixta. How she’d walked away, how he’d let her. How his world was poorer without her. Blank. What he told them that night at the Wembley wasn’t true: he’d always wanted to leave, and he hated his brother for keeping him here. He even wanted to go now, and take Ixta with him. To start again. To try. This was what he’d realized on the tour. What he’d learned. He told them much more, Patalarga said to me later, many things which seemed to combine into a large, cosmic sort of complaint: a sadness pouring out of Nelson that began with losing Ixta, perhaps forever, but went much further. He was being condemned to a life he didn’t want. It scared him.

“Naturally,” Henry told me, “this was a feeling I knew firsthand.”

“Did you offer to cut the tour short?” I asked.

The playwright shook his head. “That wouldn’t have solved anything.”

“So what did you do?”

“We told him to call her — what else? He loved her, and he knew he’d made a mistake. Talking to us about it wasn’t going to help. We left the restaurant, and walked until we found a call center. It was across the street from a park, so we found a bench and said we’d wait for him there. When Nelson came out, he looked dazed.”

I told Ixta about this later: I thought she might want to hear that description, might find it illuminating to know the impact their conversation had on Nelson. It was the complement to what she’d been feeling at the beginning of the tour. That everything he’d said on the phone to her that night was true: he did miss her fiercely. He had found time to think. He did have a plan now, however vague, and it did include them both. A future existed, and it could be theirs. He loved her.

She nodded as I spoke, betraying little curiosity at first, until a moment when I thought I saw a tear gathering in the corner of her eye. It didn’t last long. She was nothing if not composed, and an instant later, she’d brushed the tear away with the back of her hand. She cleared her throat and cut me off.

“You don’t have to tell me this. I know.”

She remembered Nelson’s phone call very well, in fact: though the connection from San Jacinto was snowy with static, his voice was clear enough. He was at a call center, he told her, and the town was coming to life for the evening. It was around nine, and the streets were thick with people. Lovers. Thieves. There were moto taxis whirring by, and packs of little boys huffing glue in the nighttime chill.

“It sounds lovely,” Ixta said. “Did you call to tell me about San Jacinto?”

Silence for a moment. Then: “No.”

“I should have stopped him,” she told me. “I shouldn’t have let him say anything. I already knew it didn’t matter.”

But she couldn’t help it; she let him talk. It was painful to hear, Ixta admitted, and she was not unmoved.

When he’d finished, she told him her news.

“Do you think that had anything to do with what happened next?” I asked.

Ixta gave me a blank look. She was very careful with her words: “I think Mr. Nuñez and his associate are the ones who should answer that. I wasn’t there.”

I bent my head, pretending to look over my notes, but all the while, I could feel Ixta staring at me.

“You know,” she added, “I don’t see why any of this matters now.”

“It still matters to me,” I said, though if she’d asked me why I’m not sure how I would have responded.

Just then her baby called out from the other room. Ixta excused herself to attend to the child, and I sat in her living room, wondering if I should gather my things and go. I didn’t. She came back a few minutes later with her little girl, wrapped in a pale yellow blanket.

“What’s her name?”

“Nadia,” Ixta said, and at the sound of her mother’s voice, the infant’s round green eyes popped open. “I’m here, baby,” Ixta purred, and Nadia breathed again, sleepy. She spread her mouth into a cavernous yawn, as if trying to swallow the world, and then her eyes closed again; her face became small and peaceful.

“She’s beautiful,” I said.

Ixta nodded. “You can see for yourself she looks nothing like him.”

10

NELSON’S MOTHER ALSO RECEIVED a phone call that night, but whether it was before or after the conversation with Ixta is not known. Mónica doesn’t remember hearing anguish or heartbreak in his voice, but then again, she reminded me, her younger son was an actor, a boy who’d kept more than his share of secrets over the years. There’s another possibility: that she was so surprised and happy to have Nelson on the line, she simply overlooked any hints about his emotional state. In any case, Mónica is certain he didn’t mention Ixta — in fact, he hadn’t mentioned her for many months. It was as if this girl disappeared from his life. Mónica had liked Ixta well enough, and even felt responsible, indirectly, for the pairing, but Nelson was young, and these things happen. The heart mends. Life is long. When I told Mónica that they were still seeing each other, more or less, up until the date of Nelson’s departure, she was surprised.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Really?”

That night, Nelson and his mother spoke in very broad terms about the tour, about how he was getting along with his fellow actors. Nelson claimed to have learned a lot about his craft, and assured her he was enjoying being away. (Perhaps he had called his mother first.) He said he’d been thinking about his future.

“What have you been thinking?” Mónica asked her son.

He sighed. “That I should go, finally.”

Nelson’s mother didn’t need this to be explained. She knew what “go” meant, understood the implicit destination. Nor did she disagree, really. “The tour was giving him perspective,” she told me, “and that was a good thing. Sebastián and I pushed him to leave for years, but after my husband died, all that was put on hold. I wondered if it was my fault, but Nelson never said anything. I should have kept pushing him, but the truth is, I was too tired. It was selfish, but I needed him.”

“What did you tell him that night?” I asked.

“That I supported him, no matter what he wanted to do. You know, the original plan was New York or California, but even San Jacinto was a step. For years, he’d never left the city. After Sebastián passed, he stayed by my side. His friends went on vacation, they piled in cars and went on camping trips down the coast. And he hardly ever went with them. And yes, maybe he resented me for it. So now, in a way, I was happy to hear him say he wanted to leave. I’d been waiting for it.”

About the tour, Nelson told his mother the play was “a hit”—though he qualified this by saying that the word meant something different out there in the provinces. He laughed then, and Mónica recalls how beautiful her son’s laughter sounded to her. Nelson explained that successful shows might be performed before fifteen or twenty spectators, in ad hoc venues where the very concept of “a full house” didn’t apply. How, for example, does one “sell out” a windswept field at the edge of town? If every known resident is there, huddled together for warmth in the limitless space? If the tickets themselves cost nothing, does it even matter? If a few of the audience members raise their hands to ask questions in the middle of a performance — is this a good thing? And if you pause in the middle of a scene to answer these questions (as Henry had one strange night, “a presidential press conference,” he called it) is that really winning theater?

“Yes,” Mónica recalls saying. She was enthusiastic: “It is!”

She was not an old woman, not yet, but the last two months hadn’t been easy. She spent hours each day “tidying up”—this was the phrase she used, though it sounded more to me like a kind of archaeology, or an intensely personal subspecialty of that discipline: exploring one’s own solitude, as if it were a dark cave. She might sit reading a paperback Sebastián had given her in 1981, the handwritten inscription no longer legible, the letters fuzzy and blurred, but special all the same. How and why had he given it to her? What had he been trying to tell her? Had he imagined that she’d be reading the inscription twenty years later, when he was dead and she was alone? A weekend afternoon might find her refolding a dresser drawer full of Francisco’s old clothes, items she’d saved these many years for no reason she could recall, and then going to the old photo albums to verify that her elder son had actually worn them. It was as if she were fact-checking her own life. A full day could pass like this. She didn’t enter Nelson’s room, not yet, but felt certain that each night, as she slept, his things spread around the house of their own accord, to new and unexpected hiding places. Scripts appeared behind sofa cushions, a pair of laceless sneakers materialized in the pantry behind a bag of rice. Someone, she was sure, was moving the family pictures.

Now she stood in the kitchen, holding the receiver with both hands.

“How was your birthday?” Mónica asked.

“Great.”

“When will you be back?”

From San Jacinto, Nelson rattled off the names of a few towns they hoped to visit in the coming weeks. It seems the word about Diciembre and its tour had spread, and many municipalities were interested in hosting them. The rains were ending, the festival season would soon be under way, and Henry had decided Diciembre would take advantage of these potentially large and boisterous audiences. Why wouldn’t they? Was there any hurry to come home?

“Of course there isn’t,” Mónica said. “As long as you’re happy, that’s what matters.”

“Are you doing all right, Mom?”

She told Nelson she was fine.

To me, she confessed: “I’d already had two months to begin imagining my life without him.”

HENRY AND PATALARGA AGREE: When Nelson stepped out of the call center, he seemed a little stricken. They made room for him on the bench, but he opted to stand before them instead, hands buried in his pockets, chin to his chest.

“What happened?” Henry asked, but Nelson didn’t answer, so they watched him, swaying left to right, looking down at his feet. A minute passed like this.

“Are you going to say anything?” Henry asked.

“Are you cold?” Patalarga said. “Should we go to the hotel?”

“She’s pregnant,” Nelson answered, still looking down. His voice was soft, almost inaudible over the humming noise of the park where they sat. He looked up then, and they saw his helpless eyes, the puffy skin beneath them. He pursed his lips: he had the bewildered expression of a student trying to solve a problem he doesn’t quite understand.

“The baby isn’t mine. That’s what she told me. I asked her how she knew, and she said she just did. I asked her if she’d taken a test, and she said that was none of my business.”

“Women know these things,” Henry said.

“I’m sorry,” Patalarga added.

“She’s going to marry that other guy.”

(Ixta is adamant that she never said this: “Nelson invented that. I’m sure he believed it, but Mindo and I never had plans to be married.” She found the idea laughable.)

Henry stood and embraced his protégé.

“Did he cry?” I asked.

Henry frowned at the question in a way that suddenly embarrassed me. “No, I don’t think so, though I’m not sure why it matters.”

So either Nelson cried or he didn’t. They spent the next few hours walking the streets of San Jacinto, rather directionless, trying to raise Nelson’s spirits. It wasn’t easy. Henry says he offered to cancel the next day’s show, but Nelson wouldn’t hear of it. The show must go on, et cetera, et cetera. Patalarga suggested they get drunk, an easy option, and cheap, considering the altitude; but Nelson shrugged off the idea. “He wasn’t into it,” Patalarga told me. “Everything we offered, he turned down. I think he just wanted us to keep him company.”

“Did he say much?”

“He asked if anything like this had ever happened to either of us.”

In response, Henry explained that heartbreak is like shattered glass: while it’s impossible that two pieces could splinter in precisely the same pattern, in the end, it doesn’t matter, because the effect is identical.

“I suppose so,” said Nelson.

To further prove the point, Henry told of his infidelities, from which he claimed to have derived no pleasure, none whatsoever, and his subsequent divorce. He did not mention Rogelio, not yet — though his old lover would be making an appearance, indirectly, that very same night. One could call it serendipity or coincidence or luck (which comes in two, often linked, varieties); one could also just call it life.

Patalarga took up the argument, and told of his move at age seventeen from his hometown in the mountains to the city; and the girl he’d left behind.

“What was her name?” Nelson asked.

As it happens, I asked the same thing.

Her name was Mercedes — Mechis — and they were madly in love. She wanted to believe he’d come back for her, and Patalarga was afraid to let her think any different. So they conspired to never speak of it, both assuming the other believed this fiction. In fact, neither of them actually did. Once in the city, Patalarga changed his name, changed his life. They wrote letters for a time, but these fizzled out. He was embarrassed to tell her about his new friends. He never forgot her, but something shifted: he’d be riding the bus to the university, and realize, suddenly, that he hadn’t thought of her in months. The longer this went on, the more ashamed he was. He didn’t go home for three years, by which time he was a different person entirely. When they saw each other the first time, he expected she’d yell at him, curse him, beat him with small, closed fists and ask him why. He was prepared for this, but what actually happened was much worse.

“What happened?” asked Nelson.

Nothing. Mechis had married another man. She had a child, a little boy, who must have been eighteen months old, standing wobbly but on his own two feet, and clinging tightly to his father’s pant leg. Mechis’s husband was friendly, and shook Patalarga’s hand with an appalling lack of jealousy. And Mechis? She was entirely indifferent to Patalarga, as if she didn’t even recognize him.

“That night, I cried like a baby.”

“That’s awful.”

“You know, it was probably just the altitude,” Henry offered, which only managed to draw a weak smile out of Nelson.

Eventually, they ended up in the main plaza, the one section of San Jacinto that can conceivably be described as pleasant. There was a giant stone cathedral lit dramatically with floodlights, and glowing like an apparition; at the other end, a recently built hotel fronted with greenish mirrored glass; hideous, but also startling, as if an alien spacecraft had landed in the center of town. Somehow the contrast was less troubling than intriguing. A troubadour sang before a sparse audience of foreigners and elderly, the colonial-era fountain bubbling behind him. There were no moto taxis, which gave the few blocks around this plaza a kind of solemnity banished from the rest of the bustling city. Henry, Patalarga, and Nelson strolled along the sidewalks, and happened by a shuttered tourist office. Its broad window featured a few posters of local attractions, and they paused before it, their attention drawn not by those images but by a very large and detailed regional map. The villages and towns were noted with black dots, the routes between them marked in red. As if by common agreement, the three actors stopped, all of them curious to find themselves on this map, trace their circuitous path through the mountains, the lowlands, and back. They placed their fingers to the window, laughing as the name of one village or another brought up some outlandish memory. Here we killed! Here we bombed! Here we triumphed over the elements! Henry would later tell me how happy it made him to see Nelson laughing along with them. They’d been through a lot together: eight weeks and a few days of movement, the only constant being the play they performed every evening. Different audiences in different towns, each with its own history and character, with its own unique interpretation of the play, and of the actors themselves. In one village, at the conclusion of the show, the local elder stood before the audience and, with great ceremony, gave them each a strip of long, rubbery material, as a gift. Something like leather, but different. To chew? To smoke? It turned out to be the desiccated tongue of a bull. No one knew what to do with it. Henry thanked the elder, the man’s wrinkled face contorting into a pleasant smile, then a boy stood and tied the bands around each of Diciembre’s wrists. Tightly.

Everyone clapped.

And the map seemed to contain it all. It was as if it had been made for them.

“Is this where you first saw the name of Rogelio’s village?” I asked Henry during our first interview, many months later.

He nodded gravely. “It is.”

“And what was your reaction?”

“It was just one of those things.” He paused, and took a deep breath. “One of the many details I’d forgotten. Rogelio had told me where he was from — he’d told me everything — but if you’d asked me just a moment before what the name of that village was, I never would have remembered it.”

“But when you saw it …”

“I knew.”

“Did you tell Nelson and Patalarga right away?”

Henry did more than that: he placed his index finger on the dot next to this town’s name, and upon realizing it wasn’t far, a couple of hours at most from San Jacinto, he shuddered. He fell silent. He’d begun — dimly — to comprehend the possibility this town represented. A way to close off the past, to make peace with it.

Had he forgotten Nelson’s heartbreak? Was he succumbing once again to his habitual selfishness?

“No,” Henry told me. “I thought we’d all benefit.”

He said the name to himself and felt its power, his finger pressed against the window, holding fast to the point floating on the map. To me, he explained: it might as well have been a flashing light, or a star.

“Gentlemen, there’s been a change in plans,” Henry said. “This is where we’re going next.”