At Night We Walk in Circles

20

A WEEK LATER, on a frigid mid-July afternoon in the city, there was a knocking at the gates of the Olympic. The bell hadn’t worked in nearly a month, and Patalarga was accustomed to long stretches without interruption; so for many minutes, he went on about his business, scarcely noticing the sound at all.

What was his business?

Since returning from the tour, it was no longer clear. The scale of the task before him, the restoration of the Olympic, seemed crushing; nor was the theater all that needed restoring. He’d always been prone to bouts of sadness, but the sharpness of this feeling was entirely new.

When Patalarga finally went to the gate, he found Nelson, shivering. Winter had arrived on the coast with its usual cruelty; the colorless sky, the damp sea air, and it was all reflected in the tightly pressed eyes of the people on the sidewalk, who walked past the two reunited friends as if pushing against an impossible weight. Whatever a welcome feels like, the city streets offered up just the opposite; and Nelson seemed in every way unprepared to be home again. Physically, he was a wreck. He wore the same clothes he’d been wearing the moment he stepped on the bus in T—. And this too was clear: spiritually, he was elsewhere. You could see it in his eyes.

“He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a month,” Patalarga said. “As if he hadn’t slept since we’d left him.”

Or perhaps: as if he’d walked from the bus station, halfway across the city. Or even more exactly: as if he’d traveled for a week with only the little money he’d had in his pocket that afternoon in T—; as if he’d survived days and covered many hundreds of kilometers by haggling or begging for rides in small towns across the provinces, journeying in silence, suffering cold and dizziness at high altitudes; as if, in that spell, he’d become accustomed to both external silence and interior turmoil. Fear. As if he’d tired of explaining himself to strangers, and started doing all that he could in those days to become invisible. As if all his money had been spent halfway through the voyage, and since then he’d eaten only what he was proffered by one kind family or another that happened to take pity on him: a can of cashews and a cup of juice one day, half a mango and a Coca-Cola the next. Evidence of those meals could be found on his T-shirt, which he hadn’t had a chance to wash. He wore no jacket, and hadn’t shaved. His hair was overgrown, and more unruly than normal. And even so, there was something manic in his exhaustion, something Patalarga recognized immediately: Nelson wasn’t happy, or free from worry, or even optimistic — but he seemed liberated.

“I asked him how he’d gotten here, and he laughed.”

“The long way,” he said.

Once inside the theater, Patalarga dealt with Nelson’s most immediate necessities. He lent him a clean shirt and a sweater, made him something to eat, and set a pot of water to boil. A few minutes later the two of them were sitting in the orchestra, drinking tea, and considering the empty stage where they’d first met, not many months before.

While Nelson ate, Patalarga did most of the talking. He didn’t mind. He’d felt very alone since the tour’s abrupt end, and the transition home had been more difficult than he’d expected. Turns out he liked being on the road. Turns out his wife Diana didn’t mind spending long days without him. Turns out she’d decided, while he was gone, that she wanted children, after all. This last point was at the center of every disagreement now: if they bickered about the dishes or the laundry or the bills or the car or his family or her job or which movie to see or what to make for dinner, Patalarga understood that they were in fact arguing about this other, more vexing issue. It was exhausting. Her life had become disappointing to her, and by extension, Patalarga had as well. “If you die, I’ll have nothing,” she’d said to him one evening, and he’d made the mistake of responding, “You’ll have the Olympic.” That night, by mutual agreement, he’d left the house and been sleeping at the theater ever since. Six nights now. Patalarga felt ashamed. He missed her. It was only his pride that kept him from going home, something he understood quite clearly. But a man is helpless before his own pride.

“Didn’t you tell me a child is always good news?” Nelson asked.

“In the abstract.”

“You don’t want one?”

“Where would we put it?” Patalarga said with a shrug.

Nelson ate his simple snack (a couple of rolls, each adorned with a bit of avocado and a slice of cheese); he sipped his tea and listened to his friend without judgment. Or without the appearance of judgment, which is just as important. Patalarga kept talking, and sometimes Nelson would close his eyes as if in deep concentration. Mostly he was quiet. Thinking. Processing. According to Patalarga, he looked “like a man floating inside a dream.”

When Nelson had put away the last bite, he stood, left his empty plate balancing on the armrest, and walked toward the stage. Halfway down the aisle, he stopped, with his hands on his hips, gaze shifting stage left, stage right, then back again. This is the image Patalarga remembers most vividly from that day: Nelson, arms akimbo, his thin silhouette framed by the curtains of the dilapidated theater.

“I asked him what was on my mind, the only question I could think of,” Patalarga told me later.

Which was this: “Are you in trouble?”

Nelson’s voice carried well. “Yes. I believe I am.”

Patalarga joined his friend. They made their way down to the front of the theater, where Nelson climbed to the stage and sat, just as Henry had on that day of the first rehearsal: in precisely the same spot, in fact, with his feet dangling off the edge just as Henry’s had. Nelson, unlike Henry, let them swing, almost playfully, banging the hollow wooden stage a couple of times with the backs of his heels. The sound boomed in the empty theater like a giant bass drum.

“So what happened?” Patalarga asked.

Nelson shook his head. “That’s the thing. I don’t really know. The old woman had a fall. That last day, just before I left, she fell and hit her head.”

“And?”

Nelson shrugged. “It didn’t seem so serious at first. But then it did. She was sort of coming apart.”

“And you left?”

“Yes,” he said, color rushing to his cheeks. “That was a week ago.”

Now he was in a rush. Every day counted. Ixta was moving on. A week in T— hadn’t seemed bad, twelve days was doable, but the longer it stretched on, the worse it got. He began to describe the endless hours in T—, its dreary routines. There was something essentially sad about the place, he said. The challenge was not the acting; it was staying focused. Fighting boredom. Beating back the melancholy, which was almost chemical. It was floating in the air. In the morning, you could smell it.

“That’s woodsmoke,” said Patalarga.

Nelson shook his head. “It was a prison.”

“Ask Henry what he thinks about that. What about Jaime?”

“He promised to come back, with my money, but he never did.” Nelson sighed. “How long was I supposed to wait?”

“And what did you think when he told you all this?” I asked Patalarga.

This was months later, during our final interview. We sat in the Olympic, which, even in its ruinous condition, maintained a stately beauty; we exchanged stories about Nelson, a young man with whom I’d spent no more than an hour but who had almost come to feel like a version of myself. By that point, no one thought our relationship strange anymore. Not even me.

“I understood why he’d left, but I imagined my own mother, falling like that. He shouldn’t have left like that, and I told him so. He should’ve waited to see if she was all right.”

That’s what we all felt in T—. As it happened, I was the one who had to explain what he’d done. First, Noelia and my mother; then everyone wanted to know: What did he say before he boarded the bus? How did he seem? Was he upset, hopeful, angry? After Mrs. Anabel died, the stories began: That he stole from the old woman. That he killed her. That Noelia had fallen in love with him. In the weeks after Nelson’s disappearance, I — of all people! — was asked to confirm or deny these theories. How many times did I say I barely knew him? That I’d just met him? Even Jaime, when he finally arrived in town, dragged me in to bark a few questions at me.

None of that mattered to Nelson. “I came for Ixta,” he explained to Patalarga that first night in the Olympic. Needless to say, this answer wouldn’t have satisfied anyone back in T—.

“So what are you going to do?” Patalarga asked.

He didn’t have a plan, only an urgent feeling in his chest that he could hardly bear. He’d spent days moving away from the town, retracing Diciembre’s haphazard route toward the coast, and his goal the entire time had been to release himself of this pressure in his heart. “I need to see her,” he told Patalarga.

“What if she doesn’t want to see you?” Patalarga asked. He was thinking of his own wife, darkly.

Nelson frowned. “But she does.”

Of Nelson’s week on the road, we do know this: a few days into his journey, he managed to speak with Ixta from a small town called La Merced. It’s even possible (though unconfirmed) that he spent the very last of his money paying for this frustrating, three-minute conversation. She doesn’t recall much about it (“At this point, does it really matter?” she said when I asked her about it), except that Nelson reiterated those things he’d said to her from Segura’s store on his last day in T—. That he was coming to see her. That she should wait for him. Again, that hopeful, anxious tone of voice. Pleading, you could call it. And if Ixta gave him the impression that she wanted to see him, “Well, I didn’t mean to,” she told me. “I shouldn’t have. But he was very persistent. And yes, it was flattering. I was lonely, you understand.”

“Just knock on her door,” Patalarga said. “Just like that?”

Nelson nodded.

Patalarga didn’t disagree; what’s more, he thought it was likely the only way to resolve things. But having heard the story of Nelson’s departure, he had another, slightly different, concern:

“What if the old woman didn’t make it? How do you think Jaime’s going to react?”

Nelson was silent.

“He’ll send someone after you, won’t he?”

“He has my address. He took my ID. That’s why I’d rather stay here. If that’s okay.”

That first night they slept on the stage of the Olympic, and so high did the ceiling seem to them, it was as if they were camping beneath a dark and infinite sky. They were safe here, they reasoned. They batted around a few ill-considered but pleasing metaphors: the theater was an old galleon adrift on the seas, or a cave hidden deep inside the earth, or a bunker housing two old, grizzled warriors, the last of a once great army, now contemplating certain defeat. They laughed a good deal. They solved the conundrum of Patalarga’s faltering marriage. They remembered Henry in tones usually reserved for a man who’d passed. Nelson couldn’t believe that his two friends weren’t talking. He’d thought of them as an indivisible unit.

Patalarga had too. “He’ll come around,” he said, without really believing it, and Nelson nodded politely.

They talked for hours. Nelson described the terrible morning of Mrs. Anabel’s fall, which, he argued, was the logical end to his time in T—. He didn’t feel guilty, just relieved to be gone.

“Another week there and I might have tripped the old lady myself.”

They both laughed, then fell silent for a spell, until Nelson said, “I never should have gone on tour, you know?”

“That’s what Henry said on the bus ride back.”

“If I’d never left the city, I’d be with Ixta now.”

“I told him that you could never know these things.” Patalarga sighed. “People believe what they want to believe.”

This is a fact.

When Patalarga woke up the next day, Nelson was already gone.

THAT MORNING, in the quiet, empty theater, Patalarga made yet another attempt to reach out to Henry. He told himself then (as he had on every occasion) that he was doing it for his old friend, persisting out of a sense of loyalty, but he later admitted that his motives were more selfish than that. Patalarga wasn’t doing well either. He was only forty, estranged from his wife, sleeping on the stage of an abandoned theater. The starkness of his own situation made it clear that he couldn’t afford to give up on friends like Henry.

Their handful of conversations in the few weeks since the end of the tour had been short and unsatisfying. This occasion would be no different. The phone rang for what seemed like an endless stretch, and Patalarga simply let it. A minute, and then another. He had no real expectations. When Henry finally answered, his “Hello” was forced, just above a whisper; then he apologized, cleared his throat, and tried again. Better this time. Patalarga laughed to himself. Henry was acting. He wouldn’t answer questions, only complete the declarative sentences that Patalarga began for him:

“And you’re doing …?”

“Well.”

“Staying busy with …?”

“Work.”

“Feeling more or less …?”

“At peace.”

They spoke in this manner for no longer than three minutes, during which time Patalarga informed Henry of the news that pertained to them both, that Nelson had come home.

“And this news strikes you as …?”

“Good,” said Henry.

Patalarga sighed. “We’re at the Olympic if you want to come see us.”

Henry said neither yes nor no; and the conversation, as Patalarga recalls, didn’t end so much as slip away: a tiny balloon on a string, sliding through the fingers of a child. In his mind’s eye, Patalarga watched it float up to the sky and vanish. “At a certain point, I realized I wasn’t talking to anyone. I sort of laughed to myself and hung up.”

And afterward, he sat in the dark theater for a moment, trying to will himself to call his wife, to apologize.

AS FOR NELSON, he’d woken before dawn, showered, shaved, and left the Olympic full of hope. He’d slept very little, but once on the streets, felt nothing but energy. The morning traffic was just humming to life, the city’s stubborn refusal to capitulate in the face of another dismal winter’s day. And Nelson — he too would not give up. He too would fight. That pressure in his chest, what he’d been feeling for a week or more, was still there; he’d come to think of it as part of him. He walked in the direction of Ixta’s office, and at around seven, not yet halfway there, stepped into a crowded café. He wasn’t hungry; he only wanted to see up close the men and women who had gathered there. They were, to a person, loud, brash, and rude; and it was precisely their rudeness that reminded him of what he’d missed about the city. He loved them, loved the sound of their laughter, the way they heckled one another. They told vulgar jokes while sipping espresso, shook folded newspapers furiously to underline the validity of their complaints. They cursed politicians, mocked celebrities, grumbled about their families. The place was so busy that no one approached to take Nelson’s order, and so he stood in one corner, content to watch the proceedings in silence. When it became too much, he closed his eyes and just smelled the place: the sharp scent of coffee and steamed milk, fresh bread and sausage. He opened his eyes once more and noted the length of the long wooden bar; the shine of the polished metal banister that led to the upstairs dining room; and the oil paintings on the walls, heroic canvasses composed by artists who’d been dead since his father was just a boy in short pants.

We know Nelson stopped here because it so happened that an uncle of his, Ramiro, married to Mónica’s sister Astrid for two decades, spotted him. He’d been a regular at this particular restaurant since 1984, and by now his morning coffee was the very highlight of his day. He hadn’t seen his nephew in over a year, and the young man was so changed that Ramiro didn’t even recognize him at first. As soon as he did, he made his way over, moved in part by curiosity, in part by familial obligation (Ramiro was nothing if not correct), and gave Nelson an enthusiastic hug. Their brief conversation went as follows:

UNCLE RAMIRO: Nephew!

NELSON: …

UNCLE RAMIRO: What are you doing here? When did you get back?

NELSON: …

UNCLE RAMIRO: How was the tour?

NELSON: …

And so on, for an interminable few minutes. Nelson answered all questions with a blank stare, except one. Ramiro asked, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to be a father,” Nelson said.

Ramiro smiled generously, with a hint of condescension, as if such a thing were inconceivable.

“That’s wonderful.”

The conversation was over; Nelson’s steadfast gaze made him nervous.

An hour later, Ramiro was on the phone, reporting to his wife that Nelson must be on drugs. He omitted any mention of his nephew’s impending paternity, which he’d simply chosen not to believe. Astrid dutifully passed along Ramiro’s message of concern to her sister, who took the news relatively well. She knew her son wasn’t on drugs, but couldn’t help being concerned nonetheless. Why hadn’t he called to tell her he was home? By midmorning, Mónica had all but given up on the workday. She told her colleagues she didn’t feel well, which was true, and went straight home to wait for her son.

She crossed the city in a cab, thinking of Nelson.

She paid the driver with two bills from her purse, and forgot the change, thinking of Nelson.

She unlocked the door to her empty house, thinking of Nelson.

BY THE TIME Mónica heard from her sister, her son was standing in front of Ixta, in the reception area of a documentary filmmaker’s small but not unpleasant offices, a converted guesthouse attached to his palatial home in the Monument District. Though Ixta doesn’t specifically remember telling Nelson about her job, she assumes she must have. There’s no other way he could’ve found the office, which was hidden on a side street she herself had never heard of until she started working there. This was a new job, just as everything about her life in those days was new: her body, her home, her sense of the future. When I asked Ixta to describe the work, she screwed her face up into a frown.

“It was paid idleness,” she said. “That’s all.”

She worked for a man whose vanity and self-image demanded the employment of a secretary. In absolute terms, there was very little to do: the occasional ringing phone to answer, now and then an appointment to jot down. Her employer, the filmmaker, had won an international award eight or nine years prior for a documentary denouncing the coerced sterilization program the government had run during the war. It was, like many award-winning documentaries, rewarded for its grim and outrageous subject matter, and not for the film itself, which was mediocre. The director could not understand why his career had stalled ever since. His reputation, such as it was, depended on that award, which was fast losing its luster; and as a result, everything this man did (and by extension, everything Ixta did) was designed to stave off his impending and inevitable professional oblivion. There was a problem: No one cared about human rights anymore, not at home or abroad. They cared about growth — hoped for and celebrated in all the newspapers, invoked by zealous bureaucrats in every self-serving television interview. On this matter, the filmmaker was agnostic — he came from money, and couldn’t see the urgency. Like many of his ilk, he sometimes confused poverty (which must be eradicated!) with folklore (which must be preserved!), but it was a genuine confusion, without a hint of ill intention, which only made it more infuriating. He kept a shaggy beard in honor of his lost, rebellious youth, and employed a booming voice whenever he suspected someone might be listening. In the 1980s, he’d moved in the same circles as Henry and Patalarga, though he’d never been close to them, and, when pressed, admitted to me that he’d deliberately stayed away after Henry’s “unfortunate arrest.” He wore colorful woven bracelets around his unnaturally thin wrists, and had, quite predictably, fallen in love with Ixta. She’d come well recommended by a professor at the Conservatory, and now the filmmaker hovered around her desk for hours at a time, making conversation, telling bad jokes, and ensuring that neither of them could have accomplished anything, had there, in fact, been anything to accomplish. She found him charming, even handsome from certain angles, at certain times of the day; and his awkward, boastful flirting was a welcome distraction from her troubles at home, with Mindo, which had unfortunately continued to fester.

On some days, she even permitted herself to complain about the father of her child, whom the filmmaker would never meet.

As it happened, Nelson’s arrival in the city coincided with a terrible realization for Ixta: that she and Mindo were not meant to be together. She’d known it since the previous spring, but now things were approaching a boiling point. Or not — the metaphor was perfectly imprecise: it was the lack of heat she feared, the lack of heat that made her tremble. She imagined the barren months to come, then the years, the decades, and felt something approximating terror. She and Mindo didn’t fight; that would have required some essential spark they’d already lost. They floated in parallel spaces, all their conversations reduced to the necessary minimum, stripped of whimsy or invention or humor. They talked about the baby as if preparing for an exam, and though they paid the rent together, that did not make their apartment a home. She bored him; and the feeling was mutual. He’d gone too long without touching her, and she could think of nothing worse. Sometimes in the shower she found herself weeping. At moments like these, Ixta placed a hand on her beautiful, swollen belly to remind herself she was not alone in this world. Not entirely, at least.

That morning when Nelson appeared at the office door, this is where Ixta’s left hand went instinctively. And that’s where she kept it, for a long moment, taking in the sight of her former lover, her former partner, her friend. He’d told her by phone to wait for her, and now, days later, he was here. His very presence took her breath away. He looked young, younger than she remembered him, and this fascinated her: Who lives through a tour like that and comes out looking younger? He’d shaved that morning in the backstage bathroom of the Olympic, and had that fresh, scoured look of a recent graduate prepping for a job interview (though Nelson had never gone on one of those). He offered her a tentative smile. She nodded back. There was nothing she wanted to say, she told me later. She didn’t stand to greet him. She waited for him to make the first move.

Meanwhile, her employer was in the kitchenette, preparing coffee, carrying on his part of a one-sided conversation with Ixta. (No one remembers the topic.) Twice Nelson began to say something to the woman he loved, only to be interrupted by this oblivious voice from the other room. When it happened a third time, both he and Ixta laughed. His laughter was tinged with nervousness; hers was involuntary, and it was the sound of this combined laughter that made the filmmaker step out into the hallway to see that his lovely, pregnant, and much desired assistant was not alone.

“I assumed at first that he was the father of the child,” the filmmaker told me later. “The painter. From the pictures I’d seen, they looked similar, I suppose. The same kind of person. I was nice enough. Polite, at least. Did she say anything? He seemed callow, insubstantial, but that’s probably not very charitable. It’s a pity what happened. I haven’t spoken to her since that day, you know? She never even came to pick up her last check.”

Nelson introduced himself (“My friend,” Ixta added solemnly), hands were shaken, and the first awkward moments the two former lovers spent together were in the company of this filmmaker, who attempted to mask his jealousy with a too-strong dose of bonhomie.

“Congratulations,” he said.

“He’s not the father,” Ixta clarified.

“Thank you,” Nelson added.

The filmmaker blushed. Then he clapped Nelson on the back, asked a few impertinent, vaguely sexual questions, filling the room with his grand and exaggerated laughter. Then he disappeared to his office, where he shut the door softly, and fired off a few strongly worded memos to colleagues. He’d have Ixta type them up later, and hoped she’d read in his tone the depth of feeling he had for her.

(She would not.)

The filmmaker’s conversation with Nelson took five minutes, not more, and through it all, Ixta had sat, as still as she could manage, breathing slowly, talking very little, with her left hand resting on her belly. She didn’t hear much of what was said, willfully blurring the words because she knew they had almost nothing to do with her. She wished for silence. Now that she and Nelson were alone, she began to pay attention again. The light in the room was dim, almost cloudy, and Ixta felt for a moment she had to strain to see him, though he was only a few steps away.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I didn’t think I’d see you,” she said, which was a lie. In fact, in her bones, she’d been expecting him, only she didn’t know how she would feel when he arrived.

Nelson proposed they go out somewhere, just as she had assumed he would. Ixta began to protest that she couldn’t, that she had to work, but then she stopped herself. “I realized that would have been cruel. And it wouldn’t have been true. I wanted to see him. I wanted to talk to him. He was right there, right in front of me.”

She stood for the first time, and noticed Nelson’s eyes opening wide to take in the sight of her. Nelson, admiring her figure. Nelson, accepting and appreciating the possibility she represented. She loved being pregnant for moments like these. Pregnancy is always mythic; it can be medicalized and quantified, carved into trimesters or weeks, but nothing can subvert its essential mystery. Ixta had a strange kind of power over men; and though their desire manifested in different ways now, it was still desire. For a moment, she let herself revel in it.

“You look very beautiful,” Nelson managed, which was the only sensible thing he could’ve said.

Ixta nodded regally.

“Are you sure you can walk?”

“Of course I can walk,” she said quickly, and Nelson blushed.

The truth was, she’d been waiting for some last, desperate gesture on Nelson’s part ever since the day of his phone call from the road. “I’ve always had a sense for these kinds of things,” she told me. Life’s big events, those moments of real, even unbearable emotion — if you were paying attention, they tended to announce themselves, as the ocean swells in anticipation of a wave. Ixta’s childhood and adolescence were littered with these instances of premonition: the tearful day her father left the family for good, the day of her first period, the day her cousin Rigoberto was killed in a car accident.

And when Nelson ended their relationship, in July of the previous year; she’d felt it acutely then. Ixta could have mouthed his words as he uttered them. What he said that day was somehow not surprising to her; in fact, it was the utter predictability of his words she found shocking. She watched him break her heart, marveling at how thoroughly he believed in phrases she knew to be untrue. No, Ixta thought to herself: No, she was not keeping him from his dreams. She was not shutting him out of the world. She was doing none of those things. If they were happening, he was doing them to himself.

But Ixta didn’t argue with Nelson that day. His complaints were banal and selfish, and she anticipated all of them. He would regret it — she’d known this even then, had known it in her gut — but she felt no pride or comfort in this knowledge. It would not heal her.

Now they went for a slow walk, heading west into the dull residential sections of the district, where all the houses appeared to be identical, distinguished only by the varying colors of their exterior walls. There are few monuments in the Monument District, and almost nothing to see. An earlier, now ousted and forgotten, government had intended to make the area its showplace, but those plans never came to pass. History intervened. The war happened. The district was colonized, not by museums or libraries or statues as its name implied but by private citizens, a guarded, rather anonymous group of upper middle class who lived quietly and traveled exclusively by car. Ixta and Nelson were the only people on the street. They walked side by side (“but not together,” she pointed out), struggling to have a conversation. Nelson was careful, asking as politely and obliquely as he could about the state of her pregnancy. His voice was low, and at times Ixta had to strain to hear him.

She remembers being disappointed: This was what he’d come for? To mumble at her?

They walked for ten minutes, coming to a small, greenish park with a few concrete benches, and it was here that they decided to sit. The blank gray clouds showed no signs of relenting; not today, perhaps not ever. Nelson would’ve preferred a café or a restaurant, a place where he could have performed any number of chivalric gestures (pulling Ixta’s chair out for her, taking her coat), but it seems they’d walked in the wrong direction, away from everything, and into a warren of residential streets from which there was no visible escape. Perhaps she’d planned it that way. Perhaps she wanted no gestures. I’ve seen the park myself, and it’s true: in winter, it’s desolate and empty and feels not like the city but like an outpost of it. Nelson quietly despaired.

In the half hour that followed, he and Ixta touched on the following subjects: Ixta’s mother’s health; the latest film offerings; a near stampede at a local soccer stadium the previous Sunday, which Ixta’s younger brother had narrowly survived; the untimely death of a much-loved professor they both knew from the Conservatory; an article which had critiqued — quite harshly — a mutual friend’s latest gallery show, and the content of the paintings themselves (which Nelson hadn’t seen) but which Ixta described “as if a mad Botero had decided to reinterpret the oeuvre of Georgia O’Keeffe.”

She played that line as if it were hers, and both of them laughed.

In fact, that observation came from the critique, which, coincidentally, I had written, just before leaving the city for T—.

While Nelson was waiting for his courage to appear, Ixta observed the man she’d once imagined to be hers, and felt many things — heartache, nostalgia, even pity, but not romantic love; and the desolate streets of the Monument District provided an appropriate backdrop to these realizations. He kept up a nervous, steady stream of questions — about her work, her friends, her family — but for many minutes made no declarative statements and offered no confessions. Then she placed a hand on his shoulder—“To see if he were real,” she explained to me — and Nelson tensed like a child about to receive an injection.

“I’m sorry,” he said then. It was as if he’d been jolted to life. “I’ve been thinking I should tell you that.”

He paused, and turned sideways on the bench in order to face her. Ixta kept looking straight ahead.

“That’s what you’ve been thinking? That you’re sorry?”

He nodded, a gesture she didn’t see but sensed, the tiniest vibration in the winter air. She’d locked her eyes on the edge of the park, on a wall painted with a once colorful mural, now faded and scissored with cracks. It helped her remain steady, she confessed later, and in the anxious few moments that followed, she studied the turns and pivots of those cracks, as if attempting to memorize them.

It felt almost cruel to ask, “What is it you’re sorry for?”

“I should have treated you better.”

Ixta nodded. “Yes, I think we can agree on that.”

“That’s the first thing I wanted to say. There’s more.” He took a deep breath, and continued, his voice markedly different now. Strong, clear. “I thought about you every day in T—. Do you understand? I thought about you and me and the baby. I want to be someone you could love again. I’m sorry. I’ve wasted so much time. Do you hear me?”

She heard him.

“Look at me,” Nelson said, and she turned to face him. He reached out his hands. “I’m serious.”

“I know you are,” she answered.

Years before, a few weeks after they’d first met, Nelson and Ixta had gone south for a few days and camped along the beach. They were part of a large, boisterous group, and brought more alcohol than food. They’d made a bonfire and drank vast quantities. Nelson and Ixta spent the first night in a single sleeping bag that quickly became coated with a fine layer of sand. They hardly slept, but pressed against each other, the coarse sand between them, so that they emerged the next morning red-skinned and bleary-eyed. The day that followed and the next night and the day after — they all blurred, and when the sun rose behind them on the third morning, they watched in wonder as the surface of the ocean slowly distinguished itself from the horizon, like one of those old instant photos developing before their eyes. First, a thin, almost imperceptible line, a dark wall splitting in two; then the texture of the waves appeared, or was hinted at; and then, almost miraculously, there were gulls, floating lazily against a still-dark, purple sky. Finally — and this was most surprising of all, because their infatuation with each other had led them to believe they were alone in the world — they could make out the fishing trawlers bobbing in the distance, like the toys of a child. Nelson hadn’t said it at the time, because then as now he was afraid, but that morning, as dawn became day at the beach, he’d realized that he loved her.

He told her now. And when she didn’t answer, he asked:

“Do you remember that beach? Do you remember what it was called?”

Ixta said she didn’t know.

“I felt like he was talking about someone else,” she told me. “About things that had never happened to me.”

Nelson didn’t give up. He described a life, their life. He reminded her how much they’d laughed. “A lifetime of that!” he said, and she almost smiled.

It didn’t matter where, as long as they were together.

“I’ll do anything to make you believe in me again.”

To which she responded simply, “I don’t love you anymore.”

She was crying because it was mostly true.

“You don’t stop loving someone like Nelson,” she told me later. “You just give up.”

Ixta turned now to face him, just in time to see Nelson’s eyes press closed. Neither one of them said anything for a half minute or more.

“I’m sorry,” Ixta added.

“That’s all right.” There was something dogged and resolute in Nelson’s voice. He’d steadied himself. You could say he was acting. “There’s time.”

Ixta shook her head warily. “There is?”

Jaime had already sent someone after him. Ixta’s heart had already closed to him. Even that morning, on that park bench in the Monument District, Nelson’s bleak future was tumbling toward him.

Still:

“There is,” he assured her.

He walked her back to her office, heart pounding in his chest, looking any and everywhere for a flower to pick for her along the way. There was nothing. He left her with a chaste kiss on the cheek, a whispered good-bye, and headed toward the Olympic, following a version of the route he’d taken that morning. Ixta sat glumly at her desk and did the crossword. Hours passed and the phone didn’t ring. The filmmaker saw her this way, in such a state, and felt pity for her. He decided not to tell her that Mindo had phoned and, seeing her troubled countenance, profoundly regretted what he’d done.

“If I could take it back, I would,” he said to me later. He’d told Mindo that Ixta had gone out for a walk with a young man named Nelson.

“Nelson?” Mindo said. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Then the painter hung up.

“Yes,” the filmmaker told me, “yes, he sounded very angry.”

As for Nelson, he was in no rush. Midday streets are very different from early-morning streets — different in character, different in sound. There are more people, but they’re less harried somehow; they’re the late risers, the men and women escaping from work, not racing toward it. Nelson didn’t want to think much about what had just happened, what it meant. He paused to read the alarming newspaper headlines at a kiosk on the corner of San José and University, front pages announcing disturbances in mining camps, power outages in the suburbs, and the details of an astonishing daylight bank robbery, among other noteworthy events. Nothing could be as alarming as what Ixta had just told him. His head hurt from the effort of not thinking about it. He waited at bus stops, but let the buses pass; he walked some more, and stood before a half-finished building on Angamos and considered its emerging shape, watching the workers move about the steel beams like dancers, never pausing, and never, ever looking down.

For this, Nelson admired them. Later that afternoon, he’d tell Patalarga about these agile, fearless men, and wonder aloud how they managed it.

In the likeliest scenario, Nelson was, by this point, already being followed.

MÓNICA SPENT THE DAY at home in a state of high anxiety. She waited for her son to appear, and considered the possibility that he might not. She spent an hour dusting every surface of Nelson’s room, hoping that this task might take her mind off things, but when she’d finished, she stood in the doorway, observing her work, unsatisfied. It was awful, Mónica decided, perverse, to have made this space so clean and antiseptic; it no longer looked like her son’s room but more like a stage set. What she wanted was for the bed to be unmade, for Nelson’s things to be scattered about in no particular order. She wanted his chest of drawers open; and his books facedown on the floor, their covers open and spines cracked. She wanted his unfolded clothes draped over the chair in the corner, and a half-empty glass of water leaving a ring on the wooden nightstand. She wanted signs of life.

Suddenly exhausted, she lay down on Nelson’s bed.

She woke a few hours later when the phone rang. It was Francisco calling from California, asking about his brother. It seems Astrid had written him an e-mail, detailing (and quite possibly exaggerating) Ramiro’s brief encounter with Nelson. Naturally, Francisco was concerned. He wanted to know what his mother thought. Mónica, still shaking off sleep, heard the worry in her elder son’s voice, surveyed her youngest son’s empty, lifeless room, and felt she had nothing to say. She didn’t know what she thought.

This much was true: Nelson was surely home again. In this city, somewhere. Ramiro was an honest man, known to fib about his weight and his income, or perhaps embellish the modest achievements of his children, but in something like this, he would not bend the truth. Nelson was here, in the capital. Surely.

Mónica could think of no good reason why he hadn’t called, and speculating about this matter was, for someone like her, a dangerous game. Members of her generation needed little help conjuring awful scenarios to explain otherwise ordinary situations. It was a skill they’d perfected over the course of a lifetime: reading the newspapers; serving as unwilling participant-observers in a stupid war; voting in one meaningless election after another; watching the currency collapse, stabilize, and collapse again; seeing their contemporaries succumb to stress-induced heart attacks and cancer and depression. It’s a wonder any of them have teeth left. Or hair. Or legs to hold them up. Mónica’s imagination had gone dark, and she could think of only one word: trouble.

“Be calm,” Francisco counseled her from afar. He knew his mother.

“I’m trying,” Mónica whispered into the phone.

The tour she’d imagined didn’t end this way, with her son hiding out in the city, unable or unwilling to come home again. She began to consider the possibility that he’d never left, that it had all been a ruse, that he was living another life, in another district, and had invented the tour as a cover for his planned reinvention.

“Did he say anything to you?” she asked Francisco.

There was silence on the other end.

“When?”

“I don’t know. Whenever you talked to him.”

There was a long silence.

“We haven’t spoken in months,” Francisco said finally. “You know that.”

Sometimes, when she was at her most pessimistic, she wondered if her two boys would ever have reason to speak to each other, after she was gone and buried.

“I’m sorry. What should I do?”

“Find the actors,” Francisco said. “What else?”

THAT’S WHAT MINDO was doing. That afternoon he made appearances at many of the usual places young actors congregate in this city. The bars, the plazas, the playhouses. Mindo paid a visit to the Conservatory, and asked for Nelson there, but no one had seen or heard of him since he’d gone away. The general consensus was, That was ages ago. They were immediatists, like all actors. They barely remembered their classmate, their friend. Everyone seemed surprised by the news that Nelson had returned, and Mindo’s frustration only grew.

We can suppose he was driven by jealousy, and suppose too that his own jealousy caught him unawares. He found the emotion unsettling, just as he’d found it unsettling to wake each of the previous five mornings on the couch in the living room of the apartment which had been, until not so long ago, his and his alone. From what I’ve been able to piece together, Ixta’s reading of the state of the relationship was essentially accurate: she and Mindo were two perfectly nice but thoroughly incompatible young people who’d managed, quite by accident, to bind themselves to each other. The unbinding would have happened one way or another, given time; and even under the best of circumstances, the child they’d made together, Nadia, would have been raised at a certain distance from her father. Many people in their respective circles understood this fact intuitively, and, in all likelihood, had things gone differently, Mindo and Ixta would have both found a way to live with this natural and necessary estrangement, as adults often do.

But that afternoon, after learning that Ixta had been with Nelson, Mindo was furious. He’d never liked the man he’d replaced, never liked the suggestion of him. He didn’t like the look in Ixta’s eyes when Nelson was mentioned, or the way she avoided saying his name when recounting anecdotes that self-evidently starred her former lover. She’d replace “Nelson” with anodyne phrases like “an old friend” or “someone I used to know,” a tic she’d never noticed until Mindo pointed it out to her. If Mindo had any suspicions about Ixta’s liaisons with Nelson, he didn’t bring them up with her. It may have been a matter of pride, or perhaps he preferred not to know. It doesn’t matter: now Mindo only wanted to find his rival.

Instead of Nelson, however, Mindo found Elías, who happened to be at the Conservatory that day, visiting old friends. Mindo knew he and Nelson were close. After the standard and truthful denials (“No, I haven’t seen him. No, I didn’t know he was back”), Elías, a little disconcerted by Mindo’s aggressive posture, suggested he check the old theater, the one at the edge of the Old City.

“Which one?”

Elías was being deliberately vague.

“The Olympic,” he said finally.

He felt as if he’d given up a secret, he told me months later, though in truth, he was only guessing, only thinking aloud.

“The porn spot?” Mindo said, then thanked him gruffly, and left.

“I don’t think we’d ever really talked before,” Elías told me. “I knew who he was, but not much more than that. And of course I never spoke to him again.”

“Did you ask why he was looking for Nelson? Did you wonder?”

Elías folded his hands together primly. “I wondered, yes. But I didn’t ask. He sounded like he was in a rush. He looked upset, and the truth is …” He paused here, as if ashamed to admit this: “I prefer not to speak to people when they’re like that.”

Mindo made his first appearance at the Olympic about a half hour before Nelson arrived there himself. There was knocking, pounding, fruitless bell ringing, shouting. Eventually, Patalarga heard the commotion, and went to the gate.

“I thought he was someone Jaime had sent,” Patalarga told me. “I just assumed that. I mean, who else would it have been?”

There were many plausible tactics available to him. Patalarga chose obfuscation. “Nelson’s not here,” he told the stranger.

“When will he be back?”

“Back?” He was careful to keep the gate closed, and not show his face. “Is he in the city?”

Mindo left without saying another word.

According to Patalarga, that afternoon Nelson was quiet, pensive, and answered every question in a way that seemed deliberately vague. He didn’t say, for example, why he’d left so early, where he’d been, or whom he’d seen; and soon enough Patalarga decided to let it go. The two of them ate an austere lunch, in the best tradition of their tour, and over this meal, Patalarga told Nelson the news: someone had come to the theater looking for him.

“Who?” Nelson asked.

Patalarga didn’t know. He told him about his brief interaction with the stranger, and they could come to only one conclusion: This man must be from T— or San Jacinto.

“Does anyone know you’re here?”

By that time, Mindo was drinking at a bar near the Conservatory, executing fine illustrations of clenched fists in his sketch pad. He would stay in the bar until well past nightfall, after it had swelled with a cast of regulars whom he mostly ignored (while ignoring Ixta’s increasingly urgent phone calls as well) before heading back to the theater just past midnight. He paid his bill but left no gratuity. His sketch pad would be found early that morning, tossed on the sidewalk a few blocks from the Olympic, next to his lifeless body.

21

MRS. ANABEL HAD DIED earlier that week, leaving the town in a state of shock. The funeral was held a few days before Nelson arrived in the city, a beautiful, lugubrious affair, full of black-clad mourners, their faces twisted with sadness. Seeing them was more moving than the ceremony itself, than the death of this woman I barely knew: more than half of the town’s remaining residents gathered in the plaza, the stooped men and wrinkled women of my parents’ generation, the survivors. The principal brought the entire school too, fifty or sixty excitable children with no apparent understanding of what had happened or why they were there. They teased each other, giggling at all the wrong moments. It was refreshing. My father wore his dark suit, my mother her black shawl. A brass band struck up a warbling melody, and then the funeral party marched toward the cemetery, so slowly even Mrs. Anabel could’ve kept up. The people of T— never gathered this way anymore, except to say good-bye to one of their own; the event became something like a reunion. Jaime gave his eulogy at the grave site. “Everything I’ve accomplished is because of her,” he said, and the town nodded respectfully because they knew what that meant. He’d accomplished a lot; he was rich, wasn’t he?

Then the casket was lowered, and we all went home.

I spent the days after with my old man, pulling the rotted clay tiles off the roof. Oddly, the town had felt most alive at the funeral, but now it was as if we were the only people left in all of T—. Our work was done mostly in silence — this had always been my father’s way — but occasionally he’d pause and ask me to tell him again what I was doing back in the city, and what I hoped to do in the future. I liked these moments. It wasn’t a conversation I minded. I didn’t feel put upon, or pressured; I heard no disappointment in his voice, only a genuine curiosity about my life and my plans. The fact that I had no good answers felt less like a stressor and more like an opportunity. Each day, I offered a new hypothetical — going back to school, working in television, starting a restaurant — all fanciful, but not impossible, as if I were performing a kind of optimism I didn’t really have. My father seemed to appreciate it.

One morning, a few days after the funeral, we heard my mother calling up to us from the courtyard. She was with Noelia, and they stood side by side, necks craned in our direction, each with a curved hand shielding their eyes from the sun. Both wore long burgundy skirts and white blouses, with dark shawls draped over their shoulders, and for a moment, I thought they looked almost like sisters.

“Come down,” my mother said. “Noelia wants to speak with you.”

It was a bright, silent day, and the air was still. I love the way the human voice sounds on days like this — clear, warm, like it could carry all the way across a valley. I looked down at my mother, not realizing at first that she meant me, not my father. My old man shrugged, and pulled the brim of his cap down over his eyes. With that, I’d been dismissed.

I climbed down. Noelia smiled politely, not saying much. She kept her eyes narrowed against the sun, and she looked well, all things considered. The loss of her mother, the chaotic days after — she looked recovered, I thought, or perhaps I was only comparing her to my idea of what this kind of suffering should look like, how it would show on her face, in her eyes, in the tilt of her shoulders.

“I have something to show you,” she said.

My mother nodded.

Noelia went on. “Something I want you to see.”

We crossed the street, to her sunlit courtyard, overgrown and wild. The cats slept in the tall grass, and we ignored them, just as they ignored us. Jaime had gone back to San Jacinto, and for the first time in Noelia’s life, the house was all hers. She didn’t like the idea. Not one bit.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She pursed her lips. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

Like most grown-ups in my hometown, Noelia was familiar, in a very broad sense; she had a look of stoicism that I associated with every adult from T—. I remembered her, even if I knew almost nothing about her beyond the fact that she lived across the street from the house where I was born.

I lied: “Of course I do.”

“It’s fine. Really.”

“I do.”

“I was there when you were born. I’ve known you since you were a flea.” She smiled now. “And look at you! You’re all grown.”

Noelia asked me to wait while she went to the room where her mother had died. I sat in the courtyard with my back against one of the walls, resting in the shade. It was another perfect day. She came back with the journals. They were handed over with some ceremony, these three ordinary notebooks tied together with a piece of string, covering most of the previous six months. They had no decoration, no stickers or markings on the outside, nothing, in fact, to identify them, beyond the normal wear. Now Noelia untied the string for me, flipped through them idly. The last of them, the most recent, was on top, a quarter of it still empty.

“They’re Rogelio’s.”

“Nelson’s?” I asked.

“If you prefer.”

“What should I do with them?”

“You should take them when you go home, to the city. You can give them back to him.”

It must have been clear by my expression that I was less than eager to take this on.

“But mostly, I think I should get them out of this house.” She leaned in: “My brother wants to find Nelson. He sent someone to the capital to look for him.”

“To look for him? Why?”

She offered me a careful smile. “You don’t know?”

I assured her I didn’t.

“My brother is very proud. He feels disrespected.” Noelia sighed. “It’s best for everyone if we forget all this. My brother especially. So take them. Don’t make too much of it. Just take them.”

She nodded, and I found myself nodding too. I could have said no, I suppose, but no good reason to refuse came to mind; Noelia stood before me, with her simple, pleading smile; I froze. She wanted me to have them.

I took the notebooks, reading relief on her face as she handed them over. I carried them back across the street, where I wrapped them in an old paper bag, and left them untouched at the foot of my bed. My father and I returned to our work, to our panoramic views of T—, the empty town below us, and our steady, plodding conversation about my future.

Eventually I went back to the city, and in truth, I almost left the journals behind. I happened to see them as I was packing, thought back to my conversation with Noelia, and decided to take them along.

Still I didn’t read them. This is the truth: I had no interest. Not for many months, not until I heard what had happened.

HENRY APPEARED at the Olympic just before six in the evening. In truth, he hadn’t intended to come at all, but driving his cab after school he’d chanced to drop off a fare not far from the theater. As he made note of this coincidence, a parking spot opened up before him. He shuddered, then eased the car to the curb, shut off the engine, and sat for a moment. He listened to the news on the radio, waiting for a signal.

See him: his severe expression, his keen sense of victimization. He likely sat for a quarter of an hour, listening for something only he would recognize, wearing what his ex-wife described to me as “his pre-crucifixion face”: furrowed brow, unfocused eyes gazing at the middle distance, pursed lips, and his chin pulled back toward his chest, like a turtle trying but unable to get back in its shell. “A fake stoicism,” she called it, for Henry, in her view, was anything but stoic. “He could play stoic,” she clarified, but that was different. Still, she knew this pose well, for it was this face, she admitted, that had seduced her “back when we were young and beautiful.” She laughed then, not to dismiss what she’d just said, or make light of it, but as if to perform it: in laughter, Henry’s ex-wife was transformed before my eyes and became, in spite of the years, young and indeed very beautiful.

Eventually Henry tired of waiting, got out of the car, and walked toward the theater. He used his keys on the gate, surprised that they still worked, and found his two friends on their knees in the lobby of the Olympic, with hammers in their hands, talking wildly about a man who’d come to the city to murder Nelson. They were pulling up rotten wooden floorboards, a repair Patalarga had been talking about for months.

“It was startling to say the least,” Henry told me later.

The supposed murderer, the one Nelson and Patalarga had conjured out of an initial bout of genuine concern, had been replaced by another, less frightening villain, a blend of various comic-book bad guys and assorted ruffians they’d met on tour. Men with potbellies and bad teeth, men who swore in ornate neologisms and kept shiny rings on every finger. Nelson and Patalarga felt better in the company of these invented scoundrels, who needless to say had nothing in common with Mindo.

Nelson and Patalarga were laughing, working at a furious pace, and obviously enjoying themselves. Months later, when I first visited the Olympic, I’d come across this very same pile, those slats of rotting wood that Nelson and Patalarga pulled up that day. They were lying in the middle of the space, like kindling for a bonfire. Patalarga and I strolled past them, without comment.

“I had a hard time joining in,” Henry said to me. He asked them to back up and explain, and they did, partially. He gathered the basics: Something had gone very wrong back in T—, and Nelson was in danger. Rogelio’s mother might have died, and though it wasn’t Nelson’s fault, it was possible that Jaime was holding him responsible. He’d escaped.

Henry frowned. “And the girl?”

Nelson shrugged. It was the part of the story he didn’t want to tell. So he didn’t.

“When did you come home?” Henry asked instead.

“Yesterday.”

Henry nodded. “You don’t look well.”

“Neither do you.”

It was true. He’d seemed healthier, more alive on the tour; now Henry’s age showed. These late middle years offended his vanity. He was looking forward to being old, when he would no longer be tormented by memories of youth.

“I suppose you’re right,” he said.

Patalarga offered Henry a hammer, but the playwright demurred. He did so wordlessly, gripping his right shoulder with his left hand and grimacing, as if he were nursing some terrible injury. Patalarga set the hammer down, and the two old friends looked at each other warily. Besides the odd conversation here and there, they hadn’t spoken since Jaime shipped them back to the city. Each of them considered the other to be somehow at fault for this.

Henry sighed. “So this bad guy, this villain. Are we afraid of him?”

He asked in a tone very specific to the world they inhabited: it was the way an actor inquired about his character.

Patalarga nodded. “We are.”

“No,” Nelson said, suddenly buoyant. “We aren’t.”

Patalarga laughed, but qualified his friend’s denial. “We aren’t terrified. We’re concerned.”

“Nelson smiled in a way that put me at ease,” Henry told me. “And understand that I had no context for any of this. If he was calm, why shouldn’t I be?”

If it wasn’t quite old times, it was a passable facsimile. They abandoned the work and moved into the theater itself, spreading out on the stage where Nelson and Patalarga had slept the night before. They laughed a little, and filled each other in on recent developments. Henry was appalled to learn that Patalarga was having trouble with Diana, and urged him to reconcile. There was a surprising insistence to his tone.

“Immediately,” he said. “Right away.”

Nelson agreed, and Patalarga could hardly argue. They were right, but this sort of thing was easy to say, and not so easy to do. He played along, even stood up and took out his phone. “You know what?” he said. “You’re right, and I’m going to call her.” His friends applauded.

He went backstage (“for some privacy”), and there, among the variegated junk that crowded the hallways and dressing rooms, he once more lost his nerve. He held the phone in his hands, could hear Diana’s sweet voice in his head, but the in-between steps seemed impossible.

“I wanted to call,” he told me later. “I just couldn’t.”

So he waited a moment beneath the single fluorescent light that illuminated the hallway, breathing the stale air. Fifty years of theater. Longer. When enough time had passed, he returned to his friends, to the stage, and announced: “She still loves me!”

He had a bottle of rum handy, and brought it out now. “To celebrate,” he said. It was all made up (“And they knew it, I assume”), but he did feel like celebrating. “It made me happy to see Nelson and Henry again, to be together, even if it was just one night.” They drank and laughed some more, and at a certain point, they reenacted a scene from the play, rewriting it on the fly to suit their mood and their circumstances. Patalarga’s servant had been kicked out of the house by his wife; Nelson’s Alejo had murdered an old woman in the provinces; Henry’s idiot president was losing his mind to loneliness. This improvised scene was so satisfying and felt so real that it was a surprise to look out on the empty theater and realize they were alone.

Only they weren’t.

It was past midnight then, and Mindo was at the gate, calling Nelson’s name.

THROUGHOUT THAT AFTERNOON and into the evening, Mónica looked for her son without success. She didn’t know where to begin, and the process made her aware of just how little she knew about his life, or at least about his life now. Nelson’s friends, the ones she remembered, were from middle and high school. They appeared in her mind’s eye, effortlessly, a row of adolescent boys standing on a sidewalk in their gray and white school uniforms, performing a world-weariness they could scarcely have understood. She smiled at the memory, could see their dark eyes, their slumped shoulders, their vanity beginning to manifest itself in surprising ways (the carefully maintained shadow of a mustache, or the sneakers whose wear and tear was as curated as any gallery exhibit). Fifteen, sixteen, almost men but not quite — this was not the age she most loved, but it was the one she recalled most clearly, in part because she’d had Sebastián by her side to help record it. Those were the years they talked most of all; the happiest years of their marriage: they were alone in the house with a somber teenage madman whom they loved, two hostages who admired and feared for their captor. They discussed Nelson’s moods the way farmers analyze the weather, looking for some logic in it, some reason. They worried over his choice of friends, worried most of all because it was something they could not control: Santiago, Marco, Diego, Sandro, Fausto, Luis. She remembered their faces, but not their surnames. They were good kids, but not good enough, boys with easily identifiable weaknesses, talents they hadn’t yet discovered; and more worrying than their lack of maturity was their lack of curiosity. On this count, Mónica and Sebastián saw a clear difference between their son and the others. The boys came to the house, and spent hours in a locked bedroom. She could not, at the time, conceive of what made these children laugh. The years passed, she and Sebastián watched them grow; and then Nelson entered the Conservatory, and these boys simply faded from view, to be replaced by others. These others — now that she needed them, Mónica realized she had only the vaguest idea who they were. She looked among her papers and found programs to various plays Nelson had been in. She scanned the names of the cast members, and not one of them jogged anything in her memory. She searched for Ixta’s number, and couldn’t find it. She even called the Conservatory, and spoke to a secretary, but found it impossible to explain what she wanted: for this woman, this stranger, to tell her who her son’s friends were.

After dinner, Mónica decided to go see her sister, who lived only ten blocks away. She went by car for it was dark out, and one never knew. She found the family — Astrid, Ramiro, and their two teenage daughters, Ashley and Miriam — gathered in front of the television, as if for warmth, a portrait of togetherness that made Mónica long for another kind of life. Perhaps if I’d had girls, she thought idly. For her extended family, she offered a broad smile, and they made room for her on the couch. Not long after, Mónica was breathing at their rhythm, laughing when they laughed. Soon, she’d almost forgotten why she’d come at all, and looked down to discover, with some surprise, that her shoes had slipped off her feet. She wiggled her toes in her socks, a childish gesture that made her smile. She was comfortable, and hadn’t even noticed.

When the program ended, the adults left the television to the girls. Ramiro disappeared into the garden for a cigarette, while Astrid and Mónica prepared the hot water, set the table, brought out fruit and cheese and olives and bread. Mónica liked the routine, and looked forward to not eating alone. A year after Sebastián died, Astrid had suggested that she move in, but at the time Mónica had been offended by the proposal, so offended it had never been mentioned again. And still, ever since, the house looked very different to Mónica. Whenever she visited, she imagined herself living there, growing old there, and to her surprise, the notion didn’t bother her as much as it had then. Years later, it had begun to make sense, more so now that Nelson was gone.

When we spoke in early 2002, she was still mulling it over. “I believe less and less in autonomy,” she told me. “I don’t know what it means anymore, at my age. I can only tell you it seems less desirable each day.”

Ramiro returned, tea was served, and he recounted for his sister-in-law all the relevant details from that morning’s conversation with Nelson, including his odd comment about becoming a father. Astrid and Ramiro found it troubling; Mónica did not, and she couldn’t say why. She puzzled over it. Part of her hoped it was true. It would be nice to have a grandchild, even if she had to travel to the provinces to visit.

Mónica’s questions were basic: Was her son skinny? Did he look healthy? How was he dressed? Did he appear unhappy?

With each query, Ramiro became more and more uncomfortable. He had excuses, and he employed them: he’d been rushed, he’d been caught off guard and hadn’t paid attention to the details. Mónica continued to press him, and finally, Ramiro raised his hands in exasperation.

“Do you want to know the truth?” he asked Mónica.

She stared at him intently. It was a ridiculous thing to ask.

“I’ve never understood your son.” Ramiro paused, and took a sip from his teacup. “I’ve always found him to be … inscrutable.”

Mónica slumped back in her seat. As if on cue, her nieces laughed along with the television, along with each other; two lovely, well-adjusted girls whom this mediocre man had no trouble understanding. She glared at her sister’s husband. He responded with an insipid smile.

“Well,” she said, and for a long moment this was all she could manage. “That’s not very helpful.”

Astrid reached a hand across the table. “What he means is—”

“Your boy is complicated, that’s all,” Ramiro said. “And no, he did not seem well. He hasn’t seemed well to me in years. Not since …”

He paused here, and now they all fell silent, for he had gone too far. Sebastián’s absence shifted the air in the room.

“I’m sorry,” Ramiro said, but it was too late. Mónica had already closed her eyes, which had begun to tear. She went home soon after, and hardly slept all night, wondering if what her brother-in-law had said was true.

THE FACTORS THAT LED Mindo to the theater that night are plain enough — jealousy, a general frustration with his circumstances, compounded by an afternoon and evening of heavy drinking. What’s just as clear is that they needn’t have. Any number of small shifts might have led him away from danger, instead of toward it. He might have answered one of Ixta’s half dozen calls to his cell phone, for example, rushed home, and made peace with her. He might have run into a friend, who would’ve helped steer him back to his apartment. He was, according to the accounts of the waiters who served him, so staggeringly drunk that it’s a small miracle he was even able to find the Olympic in the dim labyrinthine streets of the Old City. But he did find it. And when he arrived, he fulfilled the role the script required of him: he pounded his fist on the gate, he shouted for the man he now realized was his rival.

“We heard him yelling, and we were scared,” Patalarga later admitted. “Concerned. It was a howl, almost like something from a horror film.”

They froze, fell silent, and let the sound of that distant, haunting voice float through the theater.

They put down their props, and sat on the stage. Perhaps, the three of them thought, he would simply tire and leave, but many minutes passed, and the voice showed no signs of flagging.

“Open the door!” Mindo called, the vowels stretched long. “Open up!”

Henry described it to me as eerie: the lonely, pained, singsong voice of a jealous man, now weary, now menacing, filling the old theater like a dirge. “It was nice, in a way,” he said. “I think that’s what I remember most about it. How disconcertingly beautiful it sounded.”

Meanwhile, Nelson wore a look of deep concentration. Finally he said, “I know that voice.”

“We assumed,” Patalarga told me, “that he meant that he knew the voice from back in the mountains. I asked him who it was, and he shook his head.”

“I’ve heard it before, that’s all.”

Then Nelson stood.

“Where are you going?” Patalarga asked.

“To see who it is.”

Patalarga was horrified, but it was exactly as Ixta said: Nelson never listened. He strode through the theater, through the lobby, and out to the gate, his two concerned, disbelieving friends trailing behind him. He was still safe, on his own side of the metal barrier that separated the Olympic from the street, when he called out, “Who is it?”

“I know that voice,” Nelson said again, in a whisper this time.

Much later, Ixta would run down for me the very limited contact the two men in her life had chanced to have. There was the time Mindo picked up her cell phone when she was in the shower. They spoke for a few minutes, Nelson pretending to be a cousin who was in town visiting from the United States.

“A bad lie,” Ixta told me darkly. “A very bad and unnecessary lie. Ninety-nine out of one hundred people would have simply hung up. But he was an actor, and he told me it would’ve been unsporting.”

Unsporting or not, it would have been wiser. The only stroke of good fortune was that Nelson had called from a pay phone. For a few days afterward, Mindo asked again and again about this phantom cousin.

When will we meet him?

What does he do?

How exactly is he related?

Mindo asked with such persistence that Ixta was inevitably drawn into the lie.

“And in spite of what you might think,” she said to me, “I hated doing that to Mindo.”

They each knew about the other, perhaps more than they would’ve cared to know. Nelson had asked around about Mindo, taking some care to steer clear of him. On several occasions, Mindo quizzed Ixta about Nelson, all the while feigning a lack of interest.

The two men had acquaintances, but not friends, in common, so perhaps it was inevitable that they’d cross paths eventually. One afternoon, in November of the previous year, not long after Nelson and Ixta’s affair got under way, Nelson ran into the couple at a bar in La Julieta. If it was awkward, it was also mercifully brief — a grimaced exchange of pleasantries, a handshake, and little else. Ixta watched, her heart racing, as her two lovers shared a few words. She laughed now and again to paper over prickly silences, and breathed a heavy sigh when Nelson excused himself. Later that evening, when she and Mindo were alone, he confessed that he’d recognized Nelson immediately, not because they’d ever met before, but because he’d opened Ixta’s old photo albums one day while she was at work, just to have a look.

“Why would you do that?” she asked.

“They were poking out of a box. I got curious. And also, because I barely know you.”

His tone, Ixta reported to me, was neither accusatory nor grim, only resigned. Then he smiled, as if he were afraid he’d said something wrong. He hadn’t. They’d rushed into it. Ixta was, by then, moved in; and yet their life was under construction. In some ways, it never really got much farther.

That night at the Olympic, the three members of Diciembre stood on the safe side of the metal barrier, listening. The closer you got to the sound of Mindo’s voice, the less frightening it was. Still, both Henry and Patalarga were surprised when Nelson announced that he was letting the man in.

“What if he has a weapon?” Patalarga remembers asking.

“He doesn’t,” Nelson answered. His eyes were bright, as if he’d just solved a puzzle. “It’s Ixta’s boyfriend.”

And he opened the gate. Just like that.

Months later, when Patalarga described this moment to me, he was still shaking his head. There was very little time to prepare. “I imagined a raging jealous lunatic. I imagined an animal.”

Instead they got Mindo. Asked to describe him, both Henry and Patalarga began with the same word: “drunk.” The toxicology report concurs. This should not necessarily imply that Mindo was a drinker; in fact, by all accounts he drank only occasionally. But given the circumstances, one understands why he was in that state. “It must have been a terrible shock,” Ixta told me. “He must have thought something was happening between me and Nelson.”

I pressed her on this — I mean, something was happening, something had been happening, right?

She blushed. “You know what I mean. I’d turned him down.”

“And you meant it?”

She frowned.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “What do you want?”

What Ixta did confirm was that Mindo had a remarkable tolerance, and could keep himself upright long past the point when lesser men would have succumbed. One imagines an alternative version of this evening, in which Mindo passes out at the bar, his drawings of clenched fists scattered beside him, and is woken a few hours before dawn, heartsick, disappointed, but alive. He would have no such luck. As it happened, Mindo appeared before the suddenly open gate of the Olympic with drunkenness painted on him like a carnival mask. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and his features had a blurred, unsettled quality. His eyes sagged, his lips drooped. His olive green jacket appeared ready to slip off his shoulder at any moment. He glanced left and right, and then down at his feet, as if to confirm that he was actually standing there, at the rusted gate of the Olympic.

Night had brought with it a blanket of wet, heavy fog, and the streetlights above flowered in hazy yellow bursts.

“You’re Mindo,” Nelson said.

They didn’t shake hands, but there was no violence. The threat evaporated the moment they saw each other.

Patalarga still didn’t know what to make of this. He hadn’t dismissed the idea of a deranged killer coming from T— to snuff out Nelson. He desperately wanted them all to move inside the theater, “where we’d be safer, and dry,” he said, but Mindo was nailed to the ground. He wouldn’t budge.

“I had the sense that anything could happen,” Patalarga told me later.

Not anything. This:

“Come with me,” Mindo says to Nelson. He slurs his words, but there’s no menace in them, just the quiet authority of a jilted man. “We have to talk.”

“We do,” Nelson says, nodding gravely, like a child who knows he’s done wrong. Mindo never crosses the threshold, and Nelson simply floats out of the gate, as if being pulled by something irresistible, something magnetic.

That’s all.

Ixta’s lovers walk off into the dark, lightly drizzling night; Henry and Patalarga stand side by side, like worried parents, watching them go. A half block on, and they’ve disappeared into the murk. Only one of them comes back.

22

IXTA SPENT that evening at the apartment, reading old magazines and waiting for Mindo. He had the night off from the restaurant, and she assumed he was at his studio, painting, though it was just as likely he was doing the same as she was — sitting around, reading idly, staving off boredom by daydreaming of a more creative life. If they’d been in a better place, they might have done that sort of thing together. They might have even enjoyed it. She considered surprising him with a visit, but it was cold out, and besides, he might not welcome the interruption.

She didn’t mind calling though: Ixta tried Mindo’s cell phone several times, beginning just after seven, calling every hour or so until around eleven-thirty. She left no messages, and at about midnight she went to sleep. “I wasn’t worried,” she told me later. “I was annoyed. We usually talked at some point in the day. This was it, you understand? I was bored. I was thinking to myself: what an asshole. I was thinking: this is my life now. I stay at home with the baby, he comes home when he pleases. He makes art. My breasts swell, my nipples turn black. It felt very dark, you see? I wasn’t even thinking about Nelson. He didn’t cross my mind. I’m telling you, just like I told the police.”

This is what we know: the two young men left the theater headed in the direction of the plaza. A fine drizzle hung in the air, and the sidewalks were slippery. Mindo was very drunk, and they walked carefully so as not to fall, one empty city block and then another, shuffling as best they could through the curtain of fog. For a long time, they didn’t speak.

“Do you love her?” Mindo finally asked. They were five or six blocks from the theater by then.

“Yes,” Nelson said. And then: “But she doesn’t love me back.”

Mindo nodded. “So at least we have that in common.”

We know they made it to the plaza, that they walked diagonally across it and sought refuge at the Wembley. This was Nelson’s suggestion. It was a slow night, and one of the white-haired bartenders sat behind the counter, doing a crossword puzzle. He remembers when they came in, about a quarter to one in the morning. For every crossword, he wrote down his start and end times, so he was able to provide the police with a fairly accurate estimate. He told them he knew Nelson, recognized him: he’d served drinks to Sebastián back when Nelson was still a boy, and he’d seen him a few times after rehearsals. The other one, Mindo, he’d never seen before.

“The tall one was drunk, which was none of my business. I shook hands with the kid. I hadn’t seen him in a few months.”

They chatted for a few moments, and then Nelson ordered a liter of beer and two glasses. Mindo watched the exchange, unimpressed.

“My old man used to bring me here,” Nelson said when they’d sat.

“Your dad,” Mindo mused. “Did he mess with other men’s women too?”

They locked eyes. The evening could still go any which way, and Nelson knew it. He hadn’t decided what would happen. What he wanted to happen. He took a deep breath.

“My old man was a prince.”

Mindo sucked his teeth. “Skips a generation.”

“I guess it must,” Nelson said.

Just then the old bartender appeared, all smiles. He had the beer and a couple of glasses. Patalarga had lent Nelson some cash, and he paid right away. Mindo didn’t protest, only watched suspiciously, examining the transaction as if attempting to decipher a magic trick.

“Are you all right?” Nelson asked.

“Of course I’m all right.”

“Because you don’t look all right.”

The bartender, when we spoke, offered much the same assessment. He stood over them for a moment, observing. “The taller one, he looked like hell.”

“I’m fine,” said Mindo. He looked up at the bartender. “And you, old man, why are you still here?”

The bartender frowned and went back to his crossword puzzle.

“What were you doing with Ixta?” Mindo asked once the beer had been poured.

Nelson considered his rival. In this bar, beneath this warm light, any hint of menace was gone. He was hurt; that was all.

“Just talking,” Nelson said.

“Yeah? What about?”

“Not much.” Nelson turned away. The content of that morning’s conversation was so disappointing he could scarcely bring himself to think of it. “I was surprised at how little we had to say.”

“Not what you’d planned.”

Nelson shook his head. “It wasn’t what I’d hoped.” He paused, and looked up at Mindo. It was merciless to push forward, with more courage than he’d had that morning with Ixta, when he’d most needed it.

“I wanted to talk about us. Me and her.”

He enunciated these last three words carefully, clearly.

Mindo laughed. “You don’t have an us to talk about. There is no us.”

“There was once. There might be.”

For a few moments they didn’t say much, each drank their beer, never breaking eye contact. Mindo processed the brazenness of it, shaking his head. He set his beer down.

“But we’re the ones having a baby! You get that, right? She and I. Me and her.”

Nelson shook his head. “How do you know it’s yours?”

With that, the bar’s quiet evening was shattered.

When questioned (by me, by police) the Wembley’s old bartender recalled this moment very clearly. Mindo stood abruptly, lunging at Nelson and tipping the table over. Beer was spilled, one of the glasses shattered, and in an instant a few of the tables nearby were at the ready; the men, who a moment before had been drinking peacefully, were standing now, alert and prepared to intervene or defend themselves. When they saw it was just these two, everyone stepped back, giving Nelson and Mindo the room they required. They tussled for a while, neither very skilled but neither relenting, until they were on the ground, the both of them. It fell to the old bartender to break things up. Men like him are devoted to their service. Perhaps this was for the best; regarding barroom scuffles, he might have been the most experienced server in the city.

“Boys! Please!” he shouted, because they were all boys to him. “Stop!”

Nelson and Mindo stopped. Boys always did.

“Get off the floor!”

They stood.

He had them now. He told me later that he was sure of it. If they couldn’t be civilized, he said, they’d have to leave. Did they really want to leave?

In case they didn’t believe him, the bartender added, “Look at it out there!”

The drizzle was heavy now; they could see it swirling in the light just outside the window. He went on: “Outside, it’s cold; outside, it’s wet. Inside, it’s warm, and inside there’s beer. But inside, there is no fighting. Do you understand?”

He’d given this speech before.

Nelson and Mindo both nodded gravely; then they shook themselves off, gathered their things, and went outside.

NELSON ARRIVED at the Olympic past two, opening the gate with the key Patalarga had given him. He was soaked and out of breath. Henry and Patalarga had all but finished the bottle of rum, and were lying about the stage, now covered with cushions and blankets, like a pasha’s den.

“You’re back!” Henry said.

“You’re alive!” Patalarga shouted.

He was only joking, but then Nelson stepped into the light. He was bruised and scraped. He peeled off his wet coat, ripped at the sleeve. He slumped onto the stage, gesturing for the rum, and Henry quickly poured him a glass.

“What happened?”

Nelson downed a shot.

The story he told his friends that night is the same as the one he’d later tell police.

He and Mindo stepped out of the Wembley. There was no plan. “We just knew, I guess, that we weren’t done fighting.” They stood for a while beneath the streetlamp just outside the door of the bar, breathing the damp air. From inside the bar, faces pressed up against the window, as if expecting a show.

Mindo swayed. “You’re fucking her?”

Nelson didn’t respond. He didn’t have to.

“I knew it.” Then: “I’m going to kill you.”

According to the old bartender, everyone heard it. “The drunk boy looked very upset.”

Nelson wasn’t rattled. He held his hands out, palms up.

“No you’re not.”

There was no aggression in his voice, no defiance. It was just a statement of fact. He went on: “I shouldn’t have said what I said. I’m sorry.” Nelson gestured toward the Wembley. “They’re all watching. Are you really going to kill me in front of all these people?”

Mindo cupped a hand over his eyes and turned toward the windows of the bar.

“Fine,” he said.

They walked toward the plaza, and at this point there are no other witnesses besides Nelson. The plaza was empty except for a few stray taxis, and the occasional drunk stumbling out of one of the underground bars. The night was cold and uninviting, and they walked as fast as they could manage on the slippery streets. A few blocks on, Mindo started to talk. According to Nelson: “He was upset, but he seemed fatalistic about it all. I wasn’t his rival. He said he knew that. Only Ixta had answers. She’d loved him once, and now she didn’t. I didn’t know what to tell him.”

“It’s the baby I worry about,” Mindo said.

Nelson knew the streets of the Old City. He knew, for example, that at certain hours of night, on the narrower streets, you don’t use the sidewalks. This is common sense. You walk straight down the very center of the road, eyes sharp, scanning for the thief that might pounce from the shadow of a recessed doorway. He and every student at the Conservatory had been robbed at least once. For most, once was all it took; then you learned. Nelson didn’t have to think about it. This was instinct.

They were walking down the center of a narrow street called Garza when their conversation was interrupted by the light tap of a horn. They moved to the sidewalk, still talking, and barely registered the station wagon that rolled by. It pulled over just ahead of them, and two young men got out. A moment later, it took off, disappearing into the fog. Still Nelson and Mindo thought nothing of it. Just ahead, the two men dawdled, and, according to Nelson, “When we passed them, one of them pushed me hard against the wall.” That’s how it began.

Both assailants were young, both snarling, and it wasn’t a holdup — it was an attack. A beat down. Everything happened very fast: Mindo and Nelson and these two violent strangers. No conversation. No demands. No negotiation. Nelson never saw their faces. It was fight or flight.

At the first opportunity, he flew.

“What about Mindo?” Patalarga asked, just as the police would later. “Why didn’t you help Mindo?”

“I don’t know.”

Nelson ran as fast as he could. “I should’ve gone toward the plaza, but at the time I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to get away.”

One of the attackers was chasing, but Nelson didn’t look back. He ran for three blocks, turned one corner and then another, sprinting until his lungs burned. When he finally stopped he was six or seven blocks from the scene of the attack, standing at the edge of a park he’d never seen before, in a tumbledown section of the Old City known as El Anclado. He saw no one in the deserted streets: not his attackers, not Mindo, not a single person he could ask for help.

“So what did you do?” Patalarga asked.

“I sat for a moment to catch my breath. I figured out where I was, roughly, and then I headed back.”

His destination was the Olympic, where he would be safe, but first he wanted to see about Mindo. He walked quickly, almost frantically. The fog was heavier than before, heavier than he’d ever seen it. When he got to the corner of Garza and Franklin, he peered down the street, to the spot where they’d been jumped.

He saw nothing, and breathed a sigh of relief.

“I was frightened,” he said to Patalarga and Henry. “I didn’t go any closer. I just assumed Mindo had done what I did. I assumed he’d gotten away.”

In fact, he hadn’t. Mindo had crawled into one of the recessed doorways, where he was almost completely hidden. That’s where a passerby found him the next morning, with five knife wounds to his stomach and chest.

23

THE FOLLOWING MORNING Henry offered to give Nelson a ride to the Monument District. It was understood that Nelson had to see Ixta, to make sure Mindo was all right, and to apologize for any trouble he might have caused between them. Traffic was unusually light, and though the two friends didn’t talk much, both found it comforting not to ride alone. Neither had slept more than a few hours. They listened to the news on the radio and, in particular, to the tenor of the announcers, which fluctuated unexpectedly between horror and amusement. It was frankly confusing, and perhaps this was the point: bad news was almost indistinguishable from good, or perhaps there was simply no such thing as good news anymore.

“You don’t drive like I thought you would,” Nelson said when they were near their destination. “I somehow expected you’d be more erratic.”

To Henry, this sounded about right. He did almost everything erratically, but behind the wheel, he’d always been possessed with a certain calm. The congested streets of the capital disturbed most drivers, but not him. He had a surprisingly high tolerance for traffic jams. When he was in Collectors, he told Nelson now, he sometimes sat in bed, looking up at the ceiling, and imagined himself behind the wheel of a car, any car, on any city street. He and Rogelio shared this love, in fact: the tranquillity that came only from being alone, at the wheel, that sense of autonomy. He’d first conceived of The Idiot President while driving a tan 1976 Opel hatchback to visit a friend who lived outside the city. In an alternate life, if he’d been a criminal, Henry mused, he would have made a decent wheelman.

“Do you drive?” he asked Nelson now.

The young actor shook his head. He’d never learned. Henry smiled and offered to teach him. After all, Nelson would need to know, if he were to go through with his plans to travel to the United States.

At the mention of this, Nelson frowned.

“I was trying to be positive,” Henry told me.

Nelson confessed that he was spooked by what had happened the night before. Hopefully that had been the worst of it. Nelson held his hands up, as if to offer proof of his nerves. “Look,” he said, “they’re shaking!”

They were in the Monument District now, with its quiet, smoothly paved streets, its sleek houses shielded by high walls. Nelson turned his attention to the roads, pointing out a few turns ahead. “It’s a tricky part of town.”

“This,” Henry told me when we spoke, “was when I began to notice the station wagon behind us.”

“Did you mention it to the police?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I told the police everything. And they believed nothing. Then again, let’s say a car was following us. What does that prove?”

It was a light blue station wagon, and it had been behind them for a long while now. Henry recalls thinking how strange it was, that he was likely imagining it — a low-speed chase along an otherwise deserted street. They took a turn, and the station wagon followed, just a few car lengths behind.

“Did you see the driver?” I asked.

He didn’t. He couldn’t.

In any case, Henry didn’t mention his suspicion to Nelson, who had enough on his mind; later he saw this as a mistake. Instead he slowed the car to a stop, and kept his eyes on the rearview mirror. The blue station wagon slowed too, and then, almost reluctantly, drove on, past them and off into the neighborhood beyond. Henry and Nelson heard a hot blast of cumbia as the car rolled by.

“Why’d you stop?” Nelson asked.

“That car needed to pass.”

They drove a little farther on, and pulled up in front of the filmmaker’s house. Nelson got out to ring the bell, just as he had the previous morning, and Henry watched. “I saw him rocking back and forth on his feet, looking nervous and pale. Then the door opened. He leaned in, talking to someone I couldn’t see.”

That someone was the filmmaker, who, by his own admission, “was not having a good morning.” Ixta hadn’t come to work, nor had she called. She wasn’t answering her phone, and he was annoyed. When he opened the door, he was expecting to find her, not Nelson.

“I shooed him away,” the filmmaker told me. “I didn’t want him around. He looked terrible. And I didn’t like the way he looked at me. She didn’t come in today, that’s all I told him. He tried to peer past me, as if he thought I might be lying, and at that point … well, I just shut the door in his face.”

Nelson rang the doorbell again, and the scene was repeated, with a little more vehemence. Again the door was shut. This time Nelson ambled back to the car, a little dazed, and told Henry what had happened.

“So what do we do?” Henry asked. He glanced at his watch involuntarily as he asked. It was already past ten. On this particular day, he had his first class in an hour. He needed to get moving. What Henry meant by his question was: Where can I leave you?

“I’ll walk from here,” Nelson said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Nelson didn’t say where he intended to walk. Back to the theater, Henry assumed, though Nelson went to Ixta’s instead. The two friends embraced.

“The next time I saw him,” Henry told me, “was that night on the television news.”

IXTA HAD BEEN WOKEN at around five in the morning by a ringing doorbell. It was a policeman. He took a look at her belly, blanched, and asked her to sit. She was still rubbing sleep from her eyes. They sat. The policeman’s voice trembled as he spoke.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” the officer said, then asked if she knew a man named Mindo.

But for a few stray details, her memory of the morning ends there. Mindo, dead. She was already beginning to lose herself to the hysterics that would take over for the next six hours.

The officer meted out in small doses what information he had: the exact location where Mindo’s body was found (four and a half blocks to the west of the Olympic, slumped in a recessed doorway on Garza); the cause of death (bleeding from multiple knife wounds). No wallet, telephone, or identification had been found, so they were treating this death as a robbery and homicide. They’d found her name beneath a drawing Mindo had made in his notebook.

“Did Mindo have any enemies?” the policeman asked. He’d already pulled out a small reporter’s notebook.

“I just remember that nothing he was saying made any sense,” Ixta told me.

“Enemies?” she asked. “Enemies?”

She cursed the policeman and called him a coward, while he tried in vain to calm her down. A neighbor heard the commotion and knocked on the door to find out what was going on. At one point, Ixta passed out. Her mother was summoned. Her brother. A medic. And just like that, the small apartment she’d shared with Mindo was full: more family; cousins; friends of hers; friends of Mindo; and eventually, another policeman, a woman this time. Their shoes piled at the door; a dozen mourners and cops standing around in their socks.

It should be noted that a similar scene was unfolding on the other side of the city, where Mindo’s parents sat before a somber officer, having their lives politely shattered. Mindo’s father, who was almost seventy, didn’t speak for three days afterward. He never recovered from the shock.

One friend of the family put it to me this way: “If their son had died violently at age eighteen, that they might have understood. But to die now? When he’d already escaped?”

Mindo had painted three quarters of the neighborhood’s death murals, which you can still see along the streets that surround his childhood home in the Thousands — bright, colorful, expansive portraits of young men laughing at death. Ignorant of death.

Now he has his own.

According to the reports, Nelson left Ixta’s work in the Monument District, and crossed his city one last time on foot. He went north on the boulevard known colloquially as Huanca (though on most maps it appears under a different name), turned right just past the cathedral, zigzagged through the neighborhoods on the south side of Marina, crossed that broad avenue, then went east, along Brazil, where the cheap, poorly built high-rises were just beginning to go up. He didn’t talk to anyone, or stop anywhere. Some press reports would imply that he was hoping to escape, but wanted to try once more to convince Ixta to come with him. We know this isn’t true. If he were fleeing, would he have walked right into an apartment filled with police?

He arrived just before eleven in the morning and stepped into a horror show. Ixta was in a terrible state, and Nelson’s arrival didn’t make things any better. By then Mindo’s sister had arrived, an emissary from that other world of pain. There was no solidarity. She yelled at Ixta, cursed her, and once she figured out who Nelson was, spat her vitriol at him as well. When Ixta admitted she’d seen Nelson the day before, Mindo’s sister all but demanded they both be arrested. There was even a moment when it appeared this might happen, but in the end no officer wanted to arrest the pregnant woman.

That left Nelson, and nothing could’ve been more convenient. In a city with hundreds of unsolved and frankly unsolvable crimes, the police could hardly believe their luck: a suspect had strolled right in. He looked guilty; his motive was clear.

“Do you know a man named Mindo?” they asked him.

“Sure I do,” Nelson said. “I was with him last night.”

They had their killer.

There would be no mention of the events of T—; none of Rogelio nor Jaime; no attention paid to the possible motives of a provincial thug avenging the death of his mother. All the dots were lying out in the open, waiting to be connected. For the police, and then the prosecutors, and then the judge, it was simply irresistible.

“Call my mother,” Nelson shouted to Ixta as he was taken away. “Please call my mother.”

“I did that, at least,” Ixta told me. “I don’t know how, but I did it.”

Mónica confirmed this. “A call no mother should ever receive,” she said when I asked. Her eyes were closed tightly. “I didn’t see him for another three days.”

And when she did, it was in Collectors.