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.
What did she think?
“About the play, or about Nelson?”
“Both.”
She frowned. Nelson admired Henry without reservation—that much was clear to her. She saw about half a rehearsal, enough to get a sense of the dynamic between them: Henry was hard on Nelson. Interrupted him, chastised him, explained a scene, a beat, once and again; and all the while, Nelson listened carefully to everything, suppressing the frustration he surely must have felt. And he was good. Intense. Very professional. You’d think they were preparing to tour the great halls of Europe, and not a bunch of frostbitten Andean villages.
“And the play?”
Ana’s mother responded with a question: Did I watch much theater? I told her I did, my fair share.
“You know what? I’d remembered it being funny. Fifteen years ago, Henry had a sense of humor. I didn’t remember it being so fucking dark. It was always there, in the script, I suppose, but he was emphasizing it now. What can I say? Life does that to a man. Patalarga was trying. He’d add a note of slapstick, but it just wasn’t … I mean, it had its moments. I’ll tell you this much, which I’m not sure Henry even knows. My daughter, Ana—she fell asleep. She’s no critic, but there it is. She slept. Soundly.”
When our interview was over, Henry’s ex-wife excused herself for having spoken so crudely. “I don’t hate him, I just wouldn’t say Henry brought out the best in me. We’re better off apart.” She paused. “Or at least I am, which really is what matters. To me, I mean.”
I told her that I appreciated her honesty.
She asked that her name not be printed. It’s been years, but I’m honoring that request.
HENRY, PATALARGA, AND NELSON set out on April 16, 2001, on a night bus to the interior. That evening, in the bus station waiting room, the television news reported that a famous Andean folksinger had been killed by her manager. Groups of young men huddled together, sharing their titillating theories behind the murder, who had slept with whom, how the killer might have succumbed to the terrible logic of jealousy. Entire families sat glumly, staring in shock at the television, as if they’d lost a loved one—and they had, Nelson supposed.
The bus would leave in an hour. He drank a soda, ate plain crackers. It was practice for the austerity to come, for the rigors of life on the road, the cold, the rain. Patalarga and Henry had spent much of the last days painting vivid portraits of the misery that awaited, and each horrifying description seemed to fill them with glee. “City boy,” they'd said to Nelson, “how will you ever survive life in the provinces?”
Now,