At Night We Walk in Circles. Daniel Alarcon

      

       Copyright

      Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.4thestate.co.uk

      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

       Dedication

       FOR CAROLINA, LEÓN, AND ELISEO

       Epigraph

      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

       Cover

       Title Page

      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

PART ONE

       1

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

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

      Nor