According to Paolo, Walter said, “This manuscript is more important than I am.” I understand. My circus is more important than I am. Paolo is very handsome! He is only twenty-five, but already a scholar. I may conscript him into circus. He tells me that Walter could be cruel, ruthlessly dropping friends when he tired of them, or when they interfered with his work. I understand. When I am deep in circus preparations, all I can think is trapeze, ring, elephant, tiger, bauble, wire hawser, crossbar, midget, monkey, flame. I cannot think “friend.” I can only consider the passages that link slumber to circus. Each night I need ten hours of unconsciousness. Paolo provides tranquillizing draughts.
Moira Orfei
On Mechanical Street, I lie in bed, and fail to recover. Dr. Crick visits daily. Tanaquil takes dictation. I translate Moira Orfei’s nearly daily letters. She writes on handmade paper, neatly folded, her tiny penmanship difficult to decipher. Her Italian is ornate, archaic. I consult an Italian-English dictionary, extrapolate meaning from context. Between bouts of translation, intervals of stupor, I study my score of Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto, hoping to undo the Carpentras memory lapse. Rereading Moira Orfei’s letters and postcards, reciting their translations to Tanaquil, I picture Moira Orfei, in Portbou, in Aigues-Mortes, sleeping in her hotel and then rising and walking onto the balcony to watch a small white sailboat cross the Mediterranean. I know that she is falling in love with Paolo, as is her wont, and I am glad. If only I could stretch the Aigues-Mortes notebook page into a movie screen and project onto it the complete films of Moira Orfei . . .
Theo,
Infidel, I left Portbou, bringing Paolo with me. I write to you from Nice, after visiting the Israelite cemetery. A stone marks the spot where soap made from the fat of Jews was buried.
I went to a psychic near the Hotel Negresco. She told me that in my heart I am a Jew from Spain. Perhaps that is what the Portbou psychic meant, when she said that I was on the verge of contemplating a religious vocation. I have asked Chloe for corroboration. She agrees with the Portbou psychic: the early Orfeis, orphic and wandering, were Sephardic Jews. Mother’s deathbed mumblings lead to this conclusion.
In the Israelite cemetery, in Nice, I saw familiar names: Derida, Aline, Klein, Picard. These are women and men I have loved and entertained with circus feats.
Chloe finds Paolo simpatico, for now.
Moira Orfei
Theo,
In Nice, at a street fair this morning I bought Hugo’s “Hernani” and poèmes by A. de Musset. Did you know that Nice (Nizza), until one hundred years ago, was Italian property? So much of Europe has been stolen! She robbed herself and others, as I, in circus, have stolen from earlier circuses, from Erich Hagenbeck and his sea lions, from the Medrano sisters and their rosin-backs, their Percherons.
Fish don’t have sphincters, Chloe told me today, as we sat in the lobby of the Hotel de Anza, watching tropical fish swim languidly in their aquarium. The Egyptian mouthbrooder and the pink-tailed chalceus may be dying.
Walking along the Promenade des Anglais, I realized that I am a victim of my own excesses. But to be in error is simply to be in circus.
Reading my letters, you enter my ring. As Bertha Burleigh, writer, artiste, know-it-all, who coached me in circus trickery, used to say, “Moira, let the act begin! Stop hesitating!”
Moira Orfei
Theo,
I remain in Nice, uncanny city. A woman selling socca at the marche des fleurs looked exactly like me! I introduced myself. Her name was Therese. She refreshed her makeup between arrivals of batches of socca, wheeled in, on a cart, by a handsome man (I think he was her son); each time she put on a fresh coat of makeup, she looked more like me.
Near Therese, I found a small booth selling spices and healing spirits. I bought a bottle of eau de bluet, which, Chloe tells me, has medicinal properties: it clears vision. This evening, preparing for reunion, I applied the salve to my eyelids. Paolo looked twice-born, refashioned, in hotel-room mood-light.
This afternoon Paolo and I wandered again through the Israelite cemetery, looking for Orfeis, finding none. Tomorrow I’ll try again.
Your letters have been forwarded to me at the Hotel de Anza in Nice. I am glad that, in your sickness, you have had the strength to concentrate on me, to focus on my invisibility, my mourning.
Do you remember, once you recited a poem by Mayakovsky, as we ate pomegranates? Yesterday, when a pomegranate stared at me from a table in a Matisse painting, I thought of our conversation. Sometimes the objects inspiring a painting are more inspiring than the painting itself.
Moira Orfei
Theo,
In Aigues-Mortes. I have made the resolution to devote myself full-time, without reservation, to pursuing my ancestors. Paolo and Chloe concur.
Have you discovered the meaning of Aigues-Mortes? The moon remains half-empty, half-full, over the Tour de Constance.
Moira Orfei
Theo,
In Aigues-Mortes. Chloe departed this morning for Montecatini, Paolo slept in, and, I, alone, went on a tour of a salt-making plant. I will incorporate, in the Aigues-Mortes performance, a sequence of acrobatic movements devoted to the secret history of salt, a mineral substance that leads to profane ecstasy as surely as it leads to the Lord.
As a circus child, I never had time for Sunday school. Religious education was subordinated to excess; Father and Mother delighted in overtaxing my body and imagination, for the good of the ring. Thus I understand Sodom. Some magnetic, wicked cities you must turn your back on; other, blessed cities you must travel to—places of anesthesia, amputation, correction.
Playing Fauré in Aigues-Mortes, as you will soon do, cannot lead us down the staircase, in Portbou, into the ocean, but it can lead us back up the staircase, to the level ground, the earth on which the Hotel de Anza, recently built in Portbou, reigns.
Don’t worry about the unpopularity of piano recitals. Yours, imaginatively augmented by a circus artiste, will be a treat.
I trust that you have not destroyed my postcards, but that you are keeping them in a safe and permanent place. I fear their disappearance, as I fear the evaporation of the meanings of Aigues-Mortes, residing in me today, as I rest in the hotel, waiting for Paolo to awake.
Moira Orfei
P.S. I do not wish you to be humiliated when you enter my ring and play your pieces, but do not fear disaster! When you appear this year in Aigues-Mortes you will be the strangest artiste in the festival. I have prepared carefully, as have you, and we need not be cautious about reunion. Consider the performance a rest cure, a vacation. DO NOT POSTPONE AIGUES-MORTES.
I would like to write Moira Orfei a truthful letter, but I am afraid to disappoint her. I have not asked Tanaquil to transcribe my recent missives to Moira Orfei, because they deceitfully avoid mentioning my physical state.
“Moira Orfei, I am in no shape to travel,” the honest letter would begin; it would describe my sickness. Certainly she would forgive fatigue? Here I lie, in East Kill, in Alma’s bed; she is away on tour, and would not mind that, in her absence, I occupy her room, large and quiet enough for convalescence. I have brought into her bedroom Gertrude’s Venetian candelabra, and placed it on the armoire. Alma is in Buenos Aires. She called last night. I used the speaker phone. She said that she is happy, being lauded. Her voice had a new simplicity, after decades of complications. Her career, she said, will last for many more years. Contentment, or a stasis that misrecognizes itself as happiness, filled her Mechanical Street bedroom, where I lie in indeterminate convalescence, translating Moira Orfei’s daily letters, and seeing them transcribed, with Tanaquil’s assistance, in the Aigues-Mortes notebooks. Tanaquil asked permission to marry Jon Nile, who still lives in our guest cottage. I wonder if he has proposed, or if Tanaquil is exaggerating their bond. In any case, I gave Tanaquil my blessing. Jon stays in the barn, and doesn’t bother me in my decline. Matilda has stopped telephoning. My sickness frightens her. She, too, will die; someone, not me, will read her obi
tuary in a Boston newspaper, and will notice that she is described as the sister of Alma Guadalquivar Mangrove.
Dear Theo,
I write to you from the Hotel Constance, in Aigues-Mortes. The town is ready for you. Everything is in place: my ostrich feather costume, the Liberty Horses, the bears on their bicycles, the hanging iron hoops for the upside-down tango, the cobra and its fakir. You and I have worked together so carefully in the past, that I am confident we can proceed, after your arrival, without rehearsal; we can skip preliminary steps, and speed directly into the white heat of performance.
Last night as I was wandering the arcades, a dog (a greyhound, Paolo guesses) bit me lightly on the leg. No infection.
Moira Orfei
The house on Mechanical Street will be Tanaquil’s. Much of my “butter” money will go to Tanaquil. The conservatoire will get nothing. Anita will continue to receive alimony until she remarries. The Aigues-Mortes notebooks, the health and sickness notebooks, the divorce notebooks, the Portbou notebooks, and all the other notebooks go to the Moira Orfei Living Museum, which doesn’t yet exist. Some of the “butter” money goes to the Moira Orfei Living Museum, as a seed fund, hoping to attract other investors.
Theo,
That you are not yet here is an absence that fills me with sadness, as does your recent silence. Your disappearance disturbs Paolo, too, though he has never met you. I can only wonder about your health, whether you have been faithfully seeing your doctor and following his regimen. You and I have spoken about the pleasure of rejecting doctors. But there is also solace in obeying.
Is the blankness you feel, waiting to depart for Aigues-Mortes, equal to the absence I feel, waiting for you to arrive? Have you forgotten that we’d planned to meet? I keep before me, on the hotel bureau, your many letters, attesting to your fidelity, your bankable truth, the certainty of your imminent arrival.
The idea for our reunion was mine. I extended to you an open invitation: a late spring co-performance in Aigues-Mortes, the town best suited to host our reminiscences. Alfonso Reyes tendered the invitation, never mentioning me. I came into the picture later, unforeshadowed. You wrote to me. You wrote to me again. I took my time responding. And then I answered in floods. You and I spent months communicating, preparing separately. We did not fail to coordinate our visions. Wanda Osiris, mistress of variety spectacle (you are too young to remember her prime), always told Father that the most haunting part of a performance is the moment before.
My serious friend, together we create a circle: in circles, circus secrets dwell. Enjoying circuitousness, I peacefully dwell in the dead center of a ring of special effects; around me, particles circulate, like a flock of white doves, and I remain motionless. My job is not to imitate a bird but to greet, domesticate, and pacify the birds: to turn the birds into cloudy image, a froth of feathers.
I may have given you the impression that circus was forced on me, as a child. Perhaps I was unwilling, at the start. But by the time that Father was locked in the madhouse, and Mother had died, I was committed to circus—a life of commemorating Mother, patient and credulous, watching me. She never saw me perform with you, and yet to her I will dedicate Aigues-Mortes, as I dedicate every circus. My mother is buried in Montecatini, but she is also buried in Aigues-Mortes; she is entombed wherever I travel to commemorate her delight in seeing me perform, even if, at the time of that first, death-dealing spectacular, I was only half-willing to be watched.
That your health is fragile has never been a secret from me. That we wait together, for departure and flight, is no secret from the men and women who watch our act, nervous that we will fall from our unwise height, above the ring, and die. Do I grow too abstract, in my gesture of invitation to you? Are you happier without me? That is a secret I could not bear to hear.
Have you considered a period of convalescence in Aigues-Mortes, after our performance? There is no need for you to rush back to Mechanical Street. I could book you a room, on a floating, semi-permanent basis, in the Hotel Constance, overlooking the Étang de Psalmody. I would not like to give up my privacy, by suggesting that we share a suite, but we could have rooms on the same floor, and we could meet, in the morning, before rehearsal, for breakfast downstairs, as we did at the Hotel de Anza. The Hotel Constance lacks the glory and repute of the Hotel de Anza, but I have it on faith, from Alfonso Reyes, and the Aigues-Mortes festival organizers, that a Hotel de Anza will open here, beside the Tour du Sel, before next year, and we could reserve rooms, if you recover spontaneity, and arrive in Aigues-Mortes before the border closes, the threshold always about to shut down, whether or not the newspapers faithfully advertise this fact.
But I do not wish idle speculations about next year to distract you from the present moment. Paolo tells me that what made Wanda Osiris great was her attention to everyday consciousness. I am tired of circus, but I am not tired of awareness.
A circus star wearies of her travels and tricks. Exhaustion helps me understand history, how wrecked Europe is, as it waits, in the sea, for other conquerors to overtake it, as it has plundered others, in turn . . . Resting in my hotel, I recall the cemetery in Nice: I think of Picard, who enjoyed my Grand Parade, as I led the cream ponies, and, later, danced upon their backs.
Take heart. As long as there is Moira Orfei, there will be circus. As long as there is circus, there will be Aigues-Mortes. As long as there is Aigues-Mortes, there will be Mechanical Street. As long as there is Mechanical Street, there will be Moira Orfei. Perfect circulation of the parts creates circus happiness.
As long as there is Moira Orfei, there will be Theo Mangrove. As long as there is Theo Mangrove, there will be Mechanical Street. As long as there is Mechanical Street, there will be Aigues-Mortes. As long as there is Aigues-Mortes, there will be Moira Orfei.
“Much of my life has been a waste, but not this moment,” you once wrote to me. Which moment did you mean?
Words. Mere words. Circus is more. That is why the public yearns for the Orfei precipice, my dive away from the known, the sayable. With me, darling, stumble away from circus, in the unbuilt Hotel de Anza: decline need not be solitary.
On carnival distractions I have wasted my life, looking away from the mystery. In my hotel room, facing enigma, I find it less frightening than I had thought, when I avoided it, in Montecatini, and in other stops on my endless, reality-deferring tour. I wish I had had the strength, years ago, to halt my life, escape to Aigues-Mortes, and here, in the Hotel Constance, witness the fall away from dream into fact. For what you will see, when you arrive in Aigues-Mortes, and greet me, is not a dream. Horses, flamingos, parapets, salt: the daily arrival of darkness, here, is as authentic—and paralyzing—as the distance between us.
Moira Orfei
© Ebru Yildiz
WAYNE KOESTENBAUM is a poet, critic, and artist. His books include The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon; My 1980s and Other Essays; Humiliation; Hotel Theory; The Pink Trance Notebooks; and Camp Marmalade. He lives in New York City, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center.
RACHEL KUSHNER is the bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2013; Telex from Cuba, a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Mars Room, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Los Angeles.
Circus Page 21