At Night We Walk in Circles
Set in an unnamed South American country, a narrator we know little about pieces together the story – from journals, interviews, gossip, second-hand reports – of a young man called Nelson who travels through the mountains with a playwright and a motley collection of actors, performing a play that years earlier upset the authorities and had the playwright imprisoned. Nelson regrets leaving Ixta his girlfriend, who has since become pregnant with another man, the consequences of which will in the end overwhelm Nelson.The travelling troupe eventually come to T______, home to the senile mother of the male lover of the playwright, who has since perished in prison. When Nelson, out of sympathy, impersonates the mother’s dead son, chaos ensues as the two strands of the story are bound together.
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Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2013
First published in the United States by Riverhead Books in 2013
Copyright © Daniel Alarcón 2013
Daniel Alarcón asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Some of this work has been previously published in The New Yorker, in slightly different form, as ‘The Idiot President’.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007517398
Ebook Edition © October 2013 ISBN: 9780007517428
Version: 2015-05-22
FOR CAROLINA, LEÓN, AND ELISEO
The spectacle’s externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual’s own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere.
—GUY DEBORD, The Society of the Spectacle
BÉRENGER: [who also stops feeling the invisible walls, greatly surprised] Why, what do you mean?
[The ARCHITECT returns to his files.]
In any case, I’m glad my memory is real and I can feel it with my fingers. I’m as young as I was a hundred years ago. I can fall in love again … [Calling to the wings on the right:] Mademoiselle, oh, Mademoiselle, will you marry me?
—EUGÈNE IONESCO, The Killer
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Three
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part Four
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part Five
Chapter 24
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Daniel Alarcón
About the Publisher
DURING THE WAR—which Nelson’s father called the anxious years—a few radical students at the Conservatory founded a theater company. They read the French surrealists, and improvised adaptations of Quechua myths; they smoked cheap tobacco, and sang protest songs with vulgar lyrics. They laughed in public as if it were a political act, baring their teeth and frightening children. Their ranks were drawn, broadly speaking, from the following overlapping circles of youth: the longhairs, the working class, the sex-crazed, the poseurs, the provincials, the alcoholics, the emotionally needy, the rabble-rousers, the opportunists, the punks, the hangers-on, and the obsessed. Nelson was just a boy then: moody, thoughtful, growing up in a suburb of the capital with his head bent over a book. He was secretly in love with a slight, brown-haired girl from school, with whom he’d exchanged actual words on only a handful of occasions. At night, Nelson imagined the dialogues they would have one day, he and this waifish, perfectly ordinary girl whom he loved. Sometimes he would act these out for his brother, Francisco. Neither had ever been to the theater.
The company, named Diciembre, coalesced around the work of a few strident, though novice, playwrights, and quickly became known for their daring trips into the conflict zone, where they lived out their slogan—Theater for the People!—at no small risk to the physical safety of the actors. Such was the tenor of the era that while sacrifices of this sort were applauded by certain sectors of the public, many others condemned them, even equated them with terrorism. In 1983, when Nelson was only five, a few of Diciembre’s members were harassed by police in the town of Belén; a relatively minor affair, which nonetheless made the papers, prelude to a more serious case in Las Velas, where members of the local defense committee briefly held three actors captive, even roughed them up a bit, believing them to be Cuban agents. The trio had adapted a short story by Alejo Carpentier, quite convincingly by all accounts.
Nor were they entirely safe in the city: in early April 1986, after two performances of a piece titled
