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A Novel
by Daniel Alarcon
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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 long-hairs, 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 wrote out the dialogues he imagined they would have one day, he and this waifish, perfectly ordinary girl whom he loved. He had never 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 six, 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 entitled "The Idiot President," Diciembre's lead actor and playwright was arrested for incitement, and left to languish at the prison in Collectors for the better part of a year. His name was Henry Nuñez, and his freedom was, for a brief time, a cause célèbre. Letters were written on his behalf in a handful of foreign countries, by mostly well-meaning people who'd never heard of him before, and who had no opinion about his work. Somewhere in the archives of one or another of the national radio stations lurks the audio of a jailhouse interview: this serious young man, liberally seasoning his statements with citations of Camus and Ionesco, describing a prison production of "The Idiot President," with inmates in the starring roles. "Criminals and delinquents have an intuitive understanding of a play about national politics," Henry said in a firm, uncowed voice. Nelson, age nine, chanced to hear this interview. His father, Sebastián, stood at the kitchen counter preparing coffee, with a look of concern.
"Dad," young Nelson asked. "What's a playwright?"
Sebastián thought for a moment. He'd wanted to be a writer when he was his son's age. "A storyteller. A playwright is someone who makes up stories."
The boy was intrigued but not satisfied with this definition.
That evening, he brought it up with his brother Francisco, who responded the way he always did to almost anything Nelson said aloud: with a look of puzzlement and annoyance. As if there were a set of normal things that all younger brothers knew instinctively to do in the presence of their elders, but which Nelson had never learned. Francisco fiddled with the radio. Sighed.
"Playwrights make up conversation. They call them scripts. That crap you write about your little fake girlfriend, for example."
Excerpted from At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcon. Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Alarcon. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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