CLOSING THE CIRCLE

"Afternoon.  Remember me?"

The man interfering with Colonel Iribarren's walk was short, dark-complexioned, curly-haired, dressed in an aviator's jacket, canvas pants, and leather boots.

"No," Iribarren said.  "Should I?"

"I think so."  He took a cigarette out of his inside jacket pocket, and it looked to Iribarren as if he lit it with some kind of magical pass of the same hand.  "You killed me."

Iribarren stopped.  Twilight was passing into night.  He looked up at the clearing sky and the moon rising between the buildings along the avenue.  "Ah, yes.  I don't remember you in particular, but I killed several like you.  They don't usually come back to complain.  Are you sure it was me?"

"You that killed me, or you that gave the order?"

"Either one," Iribarren said casually.  Dealing with a pathological liar didn't seem much worse than some of the other tough situations he'd been in during his long life.

"Maybe you'd remember if I told you my name."

"I doubt it," Iribarren said, losing patience.

"In life I was Comandante Sampedro."

Iribarren took a step to the side, intending to walk around him and not waste any more time.  Considering the weirdness of the situation, he thought he'd handled himself well, not giving in to his usual hostility or cynicism.  So when this so-called Comandante Sampedro mirrored him and again blocked his way, he'd had enough.

"Excuse me.  Alive or dead, you are holding me up.  My family is waiting for me.  I don't know you and I had nothing to do with your death, so I will ask you, politely, to get out of my way."

"Get out of my way" came out an octave higher than the rest of the sentence.  At that moment, the streetlights of the Reconciliation National Park all came on at once.  It was like a lightning bolt that refused to fade away.

Iribarren flinched, and Sampedro smiled.  Behind Sampedro he could now see a multitude of men and women, children and old people, their faces somber and tense.

"Pick one, Colonel.  If you didn't kill me, I'm sure that you killed some of these people, maybe quite a few of them--though one, just as an example, should suffice, don't you think?"

Iribarren's face, pale as the moon, showed that this time Sampedro had gotten through to him.  This crowd was calling him to account, him in particular.  Dead or alive, there they were.  Real or not, there they were.  He would not, however, make the obvious excuse that he was only following orders.  True to his style, he counterattacked.

"I remember one or two.  Somebody named Bernal?  Rosa Naranjo, Bernardo Zelinsky, and a boy they used to call Metralla, Marcelo Cardoso.  Are they somewhere in there?"  He waved his hand at them.  "Is that enough for you?"

"They are," Sampedro said with great seriousness.  "Yes, it's enough."

Four figures moved out of the crowd to stand on either side of Sampedro.  The woman held a little girl by the hand.  Zelinsky was a decrepit old man and Metralla and Bernal were barely adolescents.

"Are you the ones I named?" Iribarren said.  "I don't remember your faces."

"Selective memory," Sampedro said.  "It's better to forget some things--especially the faces of the people you kill."

Iribarren was unmoved.  "And now?  You want revenge?"

The five looked at each other, and finally the woman, Rosa, spoke.  "Do you think we wouldn't do it?  We would tear you to pieces without shame or regret.  But we can't.  The dead can't kill."

"Ah," Iribarren said.  "The dead can't kill."

"You're not afraid?" Bernal asked.  Now he seemed to be a calm and ordinary man, not a boy, much less the sort of hallucination that you could squash like a cockroach.

"Afraid of a nightmare?"  Iribarren nearly smiled.

"So that's it," Sampedro said.  "You think you're dreaming."  He bit his lip; Iribarren guessed he hadn't counted on having to prove his own existence.

"I'm either dreaming or hallucinating," Iribarren insisted.  "It must have started when you crossed my path, though I don't seem to remember what happened before that.  My memories are quite clear up to a point, then there's an abyss.  But there's one thing I'm certain of, and that's that you are all a creation of my mind.  You don't exist."

"Of your injured mind?  Of your sick mind?"  Sampedro was lashing out in attempt to get his momentum back, but Iribarren knew himself to be hard, very hard.  A phantom of a dead man had no power over him.

"Of my mind." 

"What are you trying to say?"  Zelinsky took a step forward and extended one arm.  He had enormous hands and could have strangled Iribarren with just one of them.  "Do you think you can get out of this by pleading insanity?"

"I don't believe in ghosts," Iribarren said.  "Nor do I believe in guilt, nor in myths, nor in grief.  The one thing I believe in, a little, is death."

"And that's why you think you're dreaming," Sampedro said.

Iribarren shrugged.  "There's no other explanation.  I only have to try and I'll wake up.  I've done it before."  He squeezed his eyelids shut, making lines like a musical staff across his forehead, with two or three warts and a scar composing a melody there.  But when he opened his eyes again, the scene had not changed.  For the first time he felt a little disoriented.

"Distorted or not," Sampedro said, "the vision persists.  So what other explanation is there?  What's left?  Maybe something of the abyss, of the black night?"

"I don't understand what you're saying.  Maybe I've fallen into a drug-induced trance.  That's possible.  Somebody gave me a drug to force me to live through this experience.  But it can't last forever.  It will pass."

Comandante Sampedro snorted.  "It's much worse than you think.  No, Colonel, what we've built for you is not a nightmare, it's more like a prison, and you'll stay there forever.  We've made sure there's no escape for you."

"I will escape," Iribarren said calmly.  "Don't be stupid.  I'll wake up."  He paused to take out a cigarette.  He didn't know any magic tricks, so he lit it with a match.  He blew out a mouthful of smoke and pointed to Sampedro with the cigarette.  It shook a little.  "I will tell you that I've about had it with this dream.  You are all dead, and well dead, my men and I made sure of that.  So I'm going to charge right through you, and you will all disappear like the smoke from this cigarette."

"What if we're not made of fog?" Zelinsky said.  "Then you're in real trouble, aren't you?"

Iribarren saw that what the dead man said was true; he had to charge into the wall to see what it was made of.

"Why don't you just accept your fate quietly?" Sampedro said.  "Did it never occur to you that you would have to pay for what you did?"

Iribarren did not resist the wave of laughter that rose up within him.  "Punishment?  Do you think that we did what we did to spend the rest of our lives waiting to be punished?  For the very will that gave strength to our hands?  We know how to recognize when God is moving through our veins, mixed with our blood.  Maybe you didn't have the will to kill us?"

The frozen scene, with the dead and the killer facing each other like pieces on a chessboard, suddenly came to life.  The Reconciliation National Park turned into a barren wasteland of a battlefield.  One single throat--the multitude united--howled a pure and piercing scream and Iribarren could not keep himself from shivering.

"No, we didn't lack the will," Sampedro said.

"And we don't lack it now," said Zelinsky, shaking his fist centimeters from Iribarren's nose.

Iribarren snapped his eyes open and the dead retreated.

"You're nothing," he said.  "Smoke, fog, vapor, a condensation of my own doubts.  But I will not let myself feel guilty for what I did, for what we did."

"We're evenly matched, Iribarren," said Sampedro, moving back to his former position.  "But we have held back a small advantage, microscopic.  Do you play chess?"

"Where did that come from?  Yes, I play, what of it?"

"You will know, then, that a good player is able to see the moves that will lead him to victory even in the heart of the most frozen stalemate.  Symmetry and balance."

"Leave me in peace!  Is this your vengeance, keeping me here against my will, tormenting me with riddles and veiled threats?"

Sampedro laughed, and some of the others joined in, without much conviction.  "You buy for nothing and want to sell for a fortune.  No, Iribarren, it would be too dull for us to settle for having you live through this as no more than a nightmare."

"It is a nightmare, damn you!  I'm going to wake up and all of you will melt into nothing."

"It's not a nightmare, Colonel," said Rosa.

"It's not a nightmare," echoed Bernal.

"Are you going to repeat it a thousand times, 'it's not a nightmare, it's not a nightmare,' do you think that'll be enough?"  A cynical look stained Iribarren's face.  "On top of being dead, you're all imbeciles.  You can't act this way.  I'm a professional, I know what I did was right.  I'd do it again.  Do you think you're the only ones with ideals, with values?"

"A minute ago you said you didn't believe in guilt, or in grief, which made me think you don't believe in much of anything," Sampedro said.  "Except, a little, in death.  You said that yourself, not me.  Now you talk about ideals, values..."

"Don't try to beat me in a battle of dialectics, Sampedro.  You've made a bad choice of prey.  You should go after a jerk like General Pozzi, or Colonel Estevez.  You could play with them until you're sick of them.  But not with me.  I read, I study.  My war against you is not just about defending economic interests.  It's a crusade, Sampedro, and you'll never beat me this way."

Sampedro watched his companions and gave them a gesture of approval.  But the one who spoke was Zelinsky.

"Be careful what you wish for."

Iribarren speared Zelinsky with a look.  "I hope to wake up and get this over with, that's what I hope, that you disappear from my horizon.  I hope to cross this damned park and get home to my family, to eat dinner, to read a little before bed.  Do you envy that?  I have it, you lost it.  I won.  I won, dammit!"

Iribarren twisted his head from side to side; the crack of his spine was audible in the calm, warm night.

"No, Colonel," Sampedro said, "the game continues.  And the prospects are good for us to force your position."

Iribarren, without warning, charged the first row of the dead, though he failed to surprise them.  They moved aside, and Iribarren stumbled and fell inelegantly into the undergrowth.  Laughter echoed and then died out.

"Don't try to prove that we're ghosts," Zelinsky said.  "That's not the question, Iribarren."

Iribarren got up with dignity, and started toward his house without a backward glance.  He told himself that nothing remained behind him but a few threadbare wisps of delirium, and that he would not give those low-life dead people the pleasure of seeing him look back.

#

The closer Iribarren got to his house, the more insubstantial it all seemed.  He knew that a little normalcy, finding everything in its familiar place, would sweep away the last vestiges of the hallucination.  It had to have been a hallucination.

He knew what waited for him, and the knowledge tucked around him like a cloak.  He recalled each detail with precision, and the inventory gave him psychic strength.  The garden, the dog, the grill where he cooked his sausages and steaks, the orange tree, his gun cabinet--they all brought him back to reality.  He was sure now that it had been a nightmare, or the ill effects of something that he'd now shaken off.

He thought of Lucia, maybe a little irritated by the delay, going back to warming the food; of Martita, rubbing her eyes, stubbornly resisting the tidal waves of sleep; and of Gonzalo, impatient but disciplined, obedient to his father's command that he not go out without exchanging a few words.  Strong habits are hard to break, they said.

A single shiver went through him from head to foot when the house came into view.  The lights were out, as if there were nobody home.  It was deeply wrong, somehow.  Between his previous life and the eternal and superior life that would surely follow, there had been nothing but fundamental, foreseeable events; he had worked hard to make it that way.

He blinked, and the lights came on--with a flash, like the ones in the park.  Was there an incompetent cameraman moving in the shadows of the willows, a clumsy pawn who was distracted by the slightest thing and forgot to put the necessary elements in the scene?

Iribarren recovered and walked the last few meters to the front gate.  The barking of Bismark, his Dalmation, who had caught his scent from afar, closed the circle of invisible signs.  He let the dog jump on him like a brazen acrobat as he opened the gate, then finally pushed him aside with a slap of the hand.  He slid the key into the lock of the massive wooden door and, unable to contain himself, cried out, "Lucia, I'm home!"

In response he heard a strange kind of silence, composed of minute particles of noise.  Noises that folded into themselves, noises of toys rolling over a pile of sand, noises tossed across a room by a clumsy hand, odd, obtuse noises.  The noise that actors made, he suddenly realized, changing costumes between one act and the next.

He sensed the whisper of dull and murky thoughts, and their names knotted up in his throat.  Lucia, Martita, Gonzalo.  He wanted to speak them aloud and couldn't.

"Here I am," said a gruff voice.  The shadows of the kitchen spat out a woman.  She was drying her hands, dragging her feet, snorting.  She was Rosa Naranjo.

"What are you doing in my house?" said Iribarren, or almost said it, because the words dried up in his mouth.  But the woman knew how to interpret his grunt.

"What am I doing in my house?  Cooking for the señor, who'll be home any minute."

"Where's Lucia?"

"Who's Lucia?"

"The children, where are they?"

"Here I am," said the child that Rosa had held by the hand in the park.  Iribarren looked at the child for the first time.  She was dark, with bulging eyes, and she looking nothing at all like Martita.  But she wouldn't leave him in peace.  "Marcelo won't let me play with his toys."

Marcelo.  Toys.  It wasn't possible.  How could this have happened?  Where was his real family?  Lucia.  Martita.  Gonzalo.

"Your father's here," the woman said to Iribarren.  "With no warning, as usual."

"My father?"  Iribarren turned to look at the walls, not understanding how his father could be part of the conspiracy.

"He's in the den, playing chess with Marcelo."

Iribirren had had enough.  It was time to skip the maneuvering.  He threw himself against the door to the den, and the force of it knocked over the chessboard and chessmen.  It was Zelinsky and Metralla.

"What are you so nervous about?" said the old man.  "Something wrong?"

"Wrong?"  Iribarraen stared dumbfounded at the four knights, which by chance had landed together on the white rug.  "You sons of bitches!  Trash!"

"Jorge, what's going on with you?" said Zelinsky.  "You're scaring me.  Marcelo, your father is--"

"Crazy?"  Marcelo shook his head.  "He's not crazy.  He's just a little upset by something that happened in the park.  Isn't that right, Papa?"

"Nothing happened to me in the park.  What could have happened?"  Iribarren suddenly snapped his hands out like whips, and was shocked when his fingers touched the old man's throat and managed to close around it in a steel grip.  Outside, Bismark barked.

"What ... are you doing?" stammered the old man.  Marcelo pulled Iribarren's arms apart easily; all the confusion had sapped Iribarren's will.  The solidity of the old man's flesh.  The texture of the vertebrae, the prickly hair at the nape of his neck.  The freezing tentacle of a nightmare that had gone on too long.

"What did you do with them?" Iribarren said.

"With who?" Marcelo said calmly.  He was a few years older than Gonzalo, fatter, and cold.  It would not have taken much for him to kill Iribarren's son.

"Are we going to eat tonight or what?" came the coarse voice of Rosa Naranjo.  "The baby is dying of hunger."

"You don't exist," Iribarren said again.  But once the words were out, he lowered his arms, defeated.

"Okay," he said.  "You win.  You want me to say it?  Okay, I'll say it.  I'm a bastard, a killer.  I humbly beg your pardon for everything I've done, for what I made you suffer, and for having killed you.  Is that enough?  Now give me back my family."

He knew he didn't sound credible, but he was out of ideas.  His guns were out of reach, and he was sure they wouldn't do any good.  It was too late for any of that.

The imposters, the substitutes, the frauds, the fakes, moved as if they had learned to dance in an elevator, with tight little steps.

"So we don't exist?" Zelinsky said.  "How much more proof do you need before you accept reality--the reality that is not what you want it to be?  Family?  We are your family, your only possible family.  You'll learn to live with us, don't worry."

"You're not real," Iribarren sobbed.  "I killed you.   I killed Bernal with a full clip.  All of you.  Do you need me to put it in writing?  Do you want me to go to the newspapers, the TV networks?  Fine, I will.  What more can I do?"

"Again with the show of guilt?"  Rosa waved her hand in annoyance.  "Once a week now, soon every day."

"What's the matter with Papa, Mommy?" said the little girl, who was not Martita.

Iribarren raised his eyes and got some strength back.  "Very clever.  Very shrewd.  So you are the only family that I deserve.  I never thought you could be so ingenious."

"Are we ever going to eat?" Rosa asked, impatient.

"No, I'm not going to eat," Iribarren said.  "I have things to do."

"Now what?"

"Carry on with your game, since you're having so much fun."  Iribarren turned his back on them and left the room, left the house.  Nobody tried to stop him from taking out the car, or got in his way as he drove to the barracks.  It was late, he knew, but he had no other choice.

He drove like a man possessed.  He drove though all the red lights and got there in ten minutes.  His tires skidded on the gravel as he pulled up in front of the barracks.  He left the engine running and the car door open.  Taking the three steps in a single leap, he burst into General Pozzi's office gasping and shaking.

"What's wrong, Colonel?  Are you sick?"  Sampedro took a cigarette out of his jacket and lit it with the same hand, in a gesture that Iribarren found neither magical nor natural.  He looked into the eyes of the man behind the desk, with his dark complexion and curly hair, his aviator's jacket, canvas pants, and leather boots, and knew that the circle had now completely closed, and there was no force in the universe strong enough to break it and set him free.

 

 

Original title: El círculo se cierra

Translated from the Spanish by Lewis Shiner