I thought I’d lost him. I shook my head. “I’m not a cop,” I said in a slow, very calm voice. But at the time, even I wasn’t sure what I was doing.
“Nelson and I, we’re almost like family,” I said.
Henry’s brow furrowed. “He never mentioned you.”
Silence.
“The play,” I said, after a moment. “Was it easy to get inmates to volunteer for the play?”
Henry sighed. That, it turned out, was easy, and he had a theory as to why:
Everyone wanted to be the president, because the president was the boss.
Everyone wanted to be the servant, because like them, the servant dreamed of murdering the boss.
Everyone wanted to be the son, because it was the son who got to do the killing. And it was this character, Alejo, whose name was changed. He became Espejo.
And indeed, the project sold itself. A week of talking to his peers, and then the delicate process of auditions. Henry had to write in extra parts to avoid disappointing some of the would-be actors. It was for his own safety — some of these men didn’t take rejection very well. He added a chorus of citizens, to comment on the action. Ghosts of servants past to stalk across the stage in a fury, wearing costumes fashioned from old bed sheets. He even wrote a few lines for the president’s wife, Nora, played with verve by Carmen, the block’s most fashionable transvestite. Things were going well. Someone from Diciembre alerted the press (how had this happened? Neither Henry nor Patalarga could recall), and after he’d done an interview or two, there was no turning back. Espejo even joined the enthusiasm. It would be good for their image, he was heard to say.
Rogelio wanted to audition too, but there was a problem.
“I can’t read,” he confessed to Henry. He was ashamed. “How can I learn the script?”
At this point in our interview, Henry fell silent once more. He scratched the left side of his head with his right hand, such that his arm reached across his face, hiding his eyes. It was a deliberate and evasive gesture; I was reminded of children who close their eyes when they don’t want anyone to see them. We sat in Henry’s apartment, where he’d lived since separating from Ana’s mother more than four years before. There was a couch, two plastic lawn chairs that looked out of place indoors, and a simple wooden table. One might have thought he’d just moved in.
“Rogelio was my best friend, you know?”
“I know,” I said.
“At a time when I needed a friend more than I ever had before. I loved him.”
“I know.”
“And even so — before we went on tour again, just now, I hadn’t thought about him in years. I find this a little shameful, you know? Do you see how awful it is?”
I nodded for him to go on, but he didn’t. “It’s not your fault,” I said. “You didn’t destroy the prison. You didn’t send the soldiers in.”
“You’re right,” Henry said.
“You taught him to read.”
“But I didn’t save him.”
“You couldn’t have.”
“Precisely.”
We decided to break. It was time. I excused myself, wandered back to the bathroom at the end of the hallway and splashed cold water on my face. When I returned, Henry was standing on the narrow balcony of his apartment, wearing the same look of exhaustion, of worry. In the tiny park in front of his building, some children were drawing on the sidewalk.
“My daughter draws much better,” he said.
When we went back inside, I asked him what he’d expected from the tour, what his hopes were. He began to speak, then stopped, pausing to think. “If the text of a play constructs a world,” Henry said finally, “then a tour is a journey into that world. That’s what we were preparing for. That’s what I wanted. To enter the world of the play, and escape my life. I wanted to leave the city and enter a universe where we were all someone different.” He sighed. “I forbade Nelson to call home.”
“Why?”
“I wanted him to help me build this illusion. I needed his help. This sounds grandiose, and dramatic, I know, but …”
I told him not to worry about how it sounded. “Did you have any misgivings about it?”
It was a poorly phrased question. What he’d been trying to tell me was this: his misgivings in those days were all encompassing, generalized, profound. He could push them away for hours at a time, but with only great effort. And they returned. Always.
“To be quite honest, it wasn’t the tour I was afraid of,” Henry said. “It was everything.”
AT MY REQUEST, Ana’s mother took a look at the notebook, spending a few moments with the pages, smiling occasionally as her eye alighted on a particular phrase or observation. She read a couple lines aloud, letting out a short, bitter laugh now and then. When she was finished, she shook her head.
“He gave you these?” Henry’s ex-wife asked, wide-eyed.
I told her he had.
“Henry’s the moody type,” she said, “nothing new. An artist. Always was. But he could enter these spirals of unpleasantness, just like what you describe. Only he wouldn’t write it down, not like this. In eight years — was it that long? Jesus—in eight years, I never saw him write down anything that wasn’t for the classes at that school where he taught. Teaches. Whatever. But he’d talk this way sometimes, stream of consciousness, chatter. At night mostly. Imagine living with this!”
She threw two hands in the air, and the notebook tumbled to the floor.
“I can’t believe I’m going to tell you this,” she said, “but listen. Toward the end, he was never home, God bless. He’d go to school, and then drive the cab till ten. He’d come home, climb into bed, and say: Baby, I fucked a passenger today, on the way to the airport. Wonderful, I’d say, half-asleep, but you still have to fuck me. I’m your wife. It was a game, see? And at first he would. Four times a week. Then three. Then once. But then, he wouldn’t — sleep with me, I mean. Not at all. He’d sleep beside me, but I’d be awake, waiting. He’d snore, and I’d want to kill him. I’d put my hand on his cock. Nothing. Like touching a corpse. He would talk in his sleep, nonsense like this stuff here.” She picked up the fallen notebook, shaking the pages at me. “And then one day, I realized that it wasn’t just stories, it was true: he actually was fucking his passengers. I said, Henry, I’m leaving. Do you know how he responded? Did he tell you this?”
I shook my head.
“He said, ‘Oh, no, the turtle’s getting away! Hurry!’ I thought he was drunk. On drugs. I slapped him. Do you hate me? I asked. I was hurt, you understand. Angry. Do you hate me, I said. Is that it? Do you hate our life? Are you trying to break my heart?”
“How did he respond?”
“He collapsed, sobbing, and told me no. That he hated himself, that he had for years.” She laughed drily. “That his unhappiness was a monument! Like a statue in the Old City. One of those nameless heroes covered in bird shit, riding a stone horse. I told him not to try his poetry now. That it was too late. He begged me to stay.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Of course not. I left him, like any reasonable, self-respecting woman would’ve done. He’d slept with half the city, but it wasn’t his fault because he was depressed? If I’d stayed a moment longer, I would’ve put a steak knife through his neck. Or through my own. So I took Ana, and we went to my mother’s house.”
“Did you ever meet Nelson?”
As it turns out she had, during the last week of rehearsals before they left the city. One afternoon she dropped their daughter off at the Olympic. (“What a dump, and how sad to see it that way! I don’t know why Patalarga would’ve wasted a cent on that place.”) She got to see some of the play. It was the last week of rehearsals.