They squinted at the pages, then read phonetically, and everyone laughed. Some of the actors translated as best they could, Mónica and Nelson listening with some amusement as the Portuguese was rendered haltingly into stiff and lifeless Spanish. If there was any acting happening, it was hard to tell.
Nelson took notes, but as the heat intensified, as the monologues became increasingly predictable and maudlin, his mind drifted. The soporific heat, the grating sound of broken Portuguese, and these disappointing actors—his friends, many of them—it was all too much. More than a few gave up and walked out. They blamed the heat; they blamed the script; they blamed the Ministry of Health and the entire hapless government.
Ixta was different. They’d already been at it for three and a half hours when she walked in. She wasn’t pretty but had what one might call “presence”: the set of her jaw, perhaps, or her pale, powdered skin, or the bangs that fell precisely before her eyes, so it was difficult to guess what she was thinking or what she was looking at. And she’d dressed the part, wearing a schoolgirl’s uniform, right down to the white knee-high socks and shapeless gray skirt. With a few quick steps she carved out a space that became hers, transforming the carpet into a stage. She took the pages they’d given her, and flipped through them very quickly, nodding. She handed the pages back to Mónica, and promptly crumpled to the floor. It happened very fast.
“Is everything all right?” Mónica asked.
Ixta looked up for a moment, and shook her head. It was a hideous, pitiful face: battered and young and streaked with tears.
“How can everything be all right?” she muttered. “How can it?”
Mónica looked on with a raised eyebrow.
“What happened?” Nelson asked, playing along.
“The girls at school. You know the ones. They say things.”
Ixta sat up, rolled her head around, so that her bangs fell back, and Nelson caught, briefly, a glimpse of her red, swollen eyes. Then she stood slowly, unlocking each of her joints one by one. When she was on her feet, she slouched and crossed her legs, scratching her face and mumbling a few words neither Mónica nor Nelson could make out. Something about the cliques that ran the school and a boy she’d liked.
“He said he wanted to kiss me,” Ixta whispered, “but then he didn’t.”
Mónica remembers the audition well: “The girl exuded so much vulnerability it felt indecent just to watch her.” After a while, she asked Ixta to stop. They still had six or seven actors waiting, she explained; and Ixta nodded, as if she understood, then all but ran from the room into the hall. She hadn’t even given them her contact information.
“Go on,” Mónica said, turning to her son. “Go after her.”
Nelson found Ixta sitting by the elevators, legs crossed, head drifting into her chest, back against the wall. The rest of the actors eyed her with a mixture of curiosity and dread.
He knelt beside her. “You all right?”
Ixta nodded. “It’s hot in there.”
“You did very well.”
She bit her lip, looking straight ahead at the elevator door, as if she could see through it, into the shaft and farther, into the metal cage that rumbled invisibly through the old ministry building. “I suppose you’re going to ask me out now.”
“I was going to ask you for your information, actually,” Nelson said. “For the play. In case we need a callback.”
“Sure,” she said, unconvinced. “For the play.”
He gave her a piece of paper, and Ixta wrote down her full name and telephone number. Her letters were rounded and bubbly. It was the handwriting of a teenage girl. She was still in character.
“Don’t call after ten,” she remembers saying. “My father doesn’t like that.”
So Nelson called her the very next night, at precisely nine-thirty.
Their first days were, by all accounts, magical. I find even this simple declarative statement difficult to write without feeling a small pang of jealousy. Friends describe Nelson as smitten, Ixta light as air. That summer and into the fall, neither of them made it anywhere on time, not to work nor to class nor to rehearsal. They were seen at the hothouse parties in the Old City, dancing like lunatics, or at one of the local theaters, registering their distaste by leaving loudly in the middle of the first act (a petulant gesture in the finest spirit of Henry Nuñez). They spent many nights in Nelson’s room, with the door closed, talking and laughing, making love and then talking some more, so perfectly entwined in spirit, mind, and body that Sebastián and Mónica tiptoed around their own house, afraid to disturb the young couple.
Ixta, Nelson told his father one night, was like a riddle he felt compelled to solve.
Sebastián nodded. Though the metaphor concerned him, he kept his reservations to himself. Nothing is more deserving of one’s respect, he told Mónica that night, as they lay in bed, than two young people who’ve found each other.
Nelson was as charming as he was clumsy, and Ixta liked this about him. Sometimes he read her his plays, texts he’d never shared with anyone. They were very good, she tells me, experimental, odd. One piece, a political parody clearly influenced by the work of Henry Nuñez, was set in the stomach of an earthworm: the cabinet of an ungovernable nation convenes to discuss the country’s future, their conversation periodically interrupted by giant waves of dirt and shit passing through the digestive system of their host. First, the bureaucrats’ professionalism fails them, then their courage. The stage fills with shit, and over the course of the play they slide gradually into despair. How exactly something like this might be staged was unclear, and in fact, when Ixta asked, it was obvious that Nelson hadn’t thought too much about it.
“Isn’t that what producers, directors, and stage managers worry about?” he asked.
Ixta remembers telling him to do animations instead. She laughed at the memory, because he didn’t appear to understand that she was joking. He just stared at her, confused. “He asked me if I was making fun of him,” she told me. “He couldn’t draw more than stick figures.”
In any case, Nelson had other plays that were perhaps less challenging logistically: a comedy dramatizing the story of Sancho Panza’s birth, for example. Or a murder mystery set in a futuristic brothel, where male robot-human hybrids paid extra to sleep with that increasingly rare species, the pure human female. He’d intended the piece to be a comment on technology, but also erotic.
Nelson worked two mornings a week at a copy shop in the Old City, spending his afternoons at the Conservatory. Ixta was three years older, and set to graduate that year. She took every opportunity to make light of his youth. She liked to pretend she was abusing him. He was game. They went to hotels that rented by the hour, places in the seedy backstreets of the Monument District, creating elaborate scenarios drawn from plays they both admired. She was Stella and he was Stanley. She was Desdemona and he was Othello. They pounded these scripts into whatever shape their romance required, laughing all the while. Both found it surprising they’d never crossed paths before, a fact that made their love seem fated.
Initially, when Ixta and I spoke, she was reticent, loath to recall these early days with Nelson. I can understand, of course.
“What’s the use?” she said. “It isn’t easy, you know?”
I could tell by looking at her that she was telling the truth: it wasn’t easy. But I insisted; and once she warmed to the task, the stories flowed. A couple of times she laughed so hard she even asked me to stop the recording. I didn’t, only pretended to. “He was sweet,” Ixta said. “And in the early days, he adored me. I’m not making this up—he told me all the time. I fell for him, completely.”
“Did you discuss the possibility that he might leave?”
“Some, but only in the vaguest way. I knew all about the visa. About Francisco. He bragged to others that he was leaving