Victoria was never far from Luis’s side, even as she moved from room to room in the house, plumping up the pillows and sweeping the tile floors. No matter how busy she was, she was constantly dashing onto the terrace or one of the balconies overlooking the pool, whisking up to Luis’s side. “Are you all right, señor?” she would ask. “Would you like some more café?” He always smiled up to her graciously, and lowered his eyes when he answered.
It was impossible not to be affected by Luis’s gentlemanly manner, and it was no wonder that he received fan letters from all over the globe from women who’d heard legends of his gallantry and gentleness. Despite his injury, he seemed completely at ease in his body, though I wondered if he could feel anything below his skin—the racing of veins, the ripple of muscles, the bursts of joy or sorrow that come from deep in the body. I was fascinated by his unmoving arms and legs, his hands propped on the arms of his wheelchair like ornaments dangling from a tree.
“Do you miss it?” I asked him once, only realizing the moment I said it how rude it must have sounded.
He was unfazed. “Of course I do,” he said, looking at me, “but I can still feel the cut of the wire under my feet. That is how I tell my students what to do—I can feel their movements just by watching them, imagining myself in their place. When the world closes down on you, you must imagine it opening back up again, like a flower.”
He winked at me then, and made me blush.
“Sometimes I have felt that way,” I said shyly, “in my own body. Like it makes everything close down.”
“Before,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “before the trapeze.”
“Your body was born to fly,” he said softly. “It is something that comes from deep in your bones, Tessa. Some people have hollowed-out bones, the kind you can play music on, and those are the people who can fly.”
What happened to him?” I asked Lollie, on one of those rare evenings when she was in a good mood. She had flung her arms around me and announced that we’d spend the evening together, that we’d carry our meat and beans to her room, lock the door, and talk the evening through.
“To Luis?” she asked, spreading out food on the tile floor and handing me my fork.
“Yes,” I said. “How did you see it? What happened?”
Her room was large and sweeping, her bed gray and discolored from all the tears that had fallen on it. A smiling picture of her and Geraldo hung over the bed. She saw me looking at it and said, “I know you must think I am crazy, Tessa, but I am sick with love. Around here all the girls dreamt of him, even the ones with diamonds hanging from their ears. You will have much better luck than I’ve had.”
I laughed, embarrassed. “I don’t think I’ll have to worry about it too much.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered, and leaned in toward me, smiling. “It may happen sooner than you think. Much sooner. Isn’t there someone you think about?”
My mind rushed to Mauro’s black eyes on mine, peering at me through their thick, curving lashes, and I felt my face go instantly hot with shame. “Of course not,” I said, convinced she was making fun of me.
“I know more than you know, more than you even imagine,” she said, tapping my arm playfully. “You underestimate me, but you’ll see.”
“Please tell me about Luis,” I pleaded, and felt my face burn.
“Okay,” she said. “Then maybe you’ll understand how much I know. You see, I saw Luis the day before he fell from the wire. It was the first time I understood that I had been born with the gift of sight, though I did not quite see it as a gift back then. I was in the backyard of my grandfather’s house, nine years old, sunbathing on my back in the hammock he had strung between two oak trees, swinging back and forth.
“Suddenly Luis’s face appeared before me as clearly as if he were standing right there, though I could see the shapes of trees behind him and knew that his body was somewhere else. His face was contorted with pain. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and I realized that he was in a bed with a white-dressed woman leaning over him, wiping the tears away and keeping the plaster cast just under them dry. And then from a distance I saw him crossing the wire with dancer’s steps, crossing them in front and in back and like a pair of scissors. He smiled to the audience as if the wire underneath him did not matter one bit, as if he could dance on air if he wanted to. His arms stretched out on either side, he was never more beautiful than he was right then, flirting with that wire in the brief moment when he had her all to himself, while my other brothers waited on either side. Then in one swift second Luis slipped—he missed the wire with his hands, and he fell to the ground and broke half the bones in his body. When I saw that my brother would break, I howled and howled and I yanked at my hair and I beat at the ground and I screamed into the sunlit yard: ‘Luis! Luis! Luis!’ I was on my knees in the yard with my heart breaking, and I said, ‘Luis, stay off of the wire!’ I said, ‘Luis, you will fall from the wire! I saw you fall from the wire!’
“Luis came out into the yard. He smiled, held my face between his hands, and said, ‘¿Qué pasa, mi niñita? What have you done to yourself?’
“He wrapped his arms around my quaking body, and I told him what I had seen. His heart pounded so strong against my ear, and his arms seemed like iron around me. I begged him to stay on the ground for three days, and he said, ‘I promise, niñita, do not worry about anything at all.’ He kissed my cheeks. ‘I am strong like an ox, niñita, but I will stay on the ground for you.’
“The very next night Luis stepped up to the wire. At that moment I sat innocently in a trailer behind the tent, my mother stroking rouge over my cheeks and twisting a ribbon down the length of my hair. My act came quickly after my brothers’, so I rarely watched them myself. Only at the moment it happened did the vision come back. Again I saw him float down, but now I could hear the screaming crowds and running steps and the ringmaster trying to calm the crowds. I heard banging on the trailer door and felt my mother slump to the floor behind me.
“After that I did not speak for weeks, not even to Luis, who worshipped me now as if I were a little Maria. Even so, people came from miles away to hear what I saw, what they couldn’t see.
“Later Luis told us how he’d heard my voice in his ear as he fell down from the wire, how it comforted him and told him he would not die as the ground pushed up under him. He said that as he fell he could smell my hair, which my mother always sprinkled with rose petals, and that he felt my hand on his just before he hit the ground.
“‘I knew it was your hand, niñita, because I could feel your little gold rings,’ he said.
“After that Luis liked to call me a saint and a healer, and he kept a candle burning for me all the time, and still does, though I’ve always told him he’s crazy. Victoria used to store crates of candles in the pantry but has complained for years that Luis makes her light a fresh one every day, and makes her sprinkle the dresser top around it with newly cut roses each morning and night.
“‘Dolores is no santa,’ she used to say about me. ‘Santas do not fly on the trapeze or roll across lawns or crawl into boxes meant for heads of lettuce or cabbage. I don’t know what that crazy man is thinking.’”
Lollie laughed. “People react in all kinds of way to vision, and I never know what way is right. But I am no santa; I cannot stop tragedies from happening, and though I have the gift of sight, sometimes I wonder what it has done for me aside from ruining the world a bit.”
Lollie stopped speaking, and I could see the flush on her skin.
“You know I told you, Tessa, about the moments that change our life, how when Mary saw Juan Galindo in that barn the world changed for her completely?” she asked. “My moment was not filled with a passion that licks through the skin and into the blood. The moment that changed my life, you see, was when I saw my brother Luis fall to the ground and break, the moment I understood how death and accidents wait for us, how the world moves without us.”
The house was silent
except for the breeze whispering through the curtains and the sound of Lollie’s breathing, as heavy as if she were asleep. When Lollie spoke of the past she seemed to inhabit it, until I could almost see her transform into the young girl with black gleaming hair and smooth sun-soaked skin. It was hard to distinguish between the weight and shape of her words and the power of the world she was calling back to me.
“Could you feel it in Mary?” I asked. Death seemed like water in the room then, like something you could dip your hands in and touch. “Did you see her in the river? Could you see the way her hair tangled around her neck, in the water?”
I felt strange speaking so casually of Mary’s death. I thought back to those days, to the way Mary had let the mail pile at the door, to me running home to shuck corn and help set the giant dinner table. It was a world that stood in my memory like a perfect photograph, something timeless and complete. I could not imagine that my father had continued to exist past the last moment I had seen him, or that Geraldine was somewhere, too, with vegetables springing up under her fingertips. I thought back to those moments inside the memory I had built, the little moments that would seem so significant later. It made me afraid to walk through my life, never able to see the death that must have cloaked Mary back then, that must have been written on her skin and in her tears like an announcement.
“Yes,” Lollie said. “I could always see the water dripping on her skin. I could smell the salmon and pine of where she’d come from, see the leaves that clung to her body.”
I did not speak.
“That day,” Lollie continued, closing her eyes, “I could feel the water swooping in between her dress and her skin, filling her body with its weight. I was in the cookhouse with the others. At first I thought it was just rain, but when I looked around nothing had changed—the day was still as clear as it had started. I felt the breath go out of her body while everyone around me ate their meat and rice. No one knew a thing. I did not say anything. What could I have said?”
“Why couldn’t I feel it?” I asked her. “How could I not have known that something was going to happen? I was in her library drinking tea out of one of her cracked cups, straightening the things she’d left strewn over the floor. How could she have been drowning at the same time?”
“I don’t know, Tessa,” Lollie said.
“Why did she do it?” I whispered.
Lollie reached out and drew me to her.
“I don’t know why she did what she did,” she said. “Only that it was written on her from the first day I saw her, when she showed up at the Velasquez Circus.”
That night I could not sleep. I tossed in my bed, imagining the water on Mary’s skin, the crack of Luis’s bones as he hit the ground. The world moves without us, I thought. I imagined my father in the cornfield, Geraldine working in her garden, Lollie sobbing in her room from love. I saw myself, younger, back in Oakley, crumpled up on the dirt, clutching my skirt in my hands.
There was no way I was going to sleep that night. I tossed and turned. Each movement revealed a new ache that had burrowed into my body, and nothing brought relief. I lifted my starfish hands and traced the cracks raging through them. “Nothing before this matters,” I thought over and over. “I am in the circus now. Nothing before now matters.” But nothing could erase the fear wrenching my gut. Is this all there is? I thought. Does everything come back to this exact feeling?
Restless, I slipped on a robe and tiptoed through the hallways, feeling the cool tile under my bare feet. The crosses scattered throughout the house, the twisting wrought-iron railings and candle holders, the earthenware vases filled with roses and other flowers, the sparkling costumes that hung in closets and across doorways and on the line that stretched over the back porch—all of it looked different in the sleeping house, lit only by a faint moon through the open windows.
I let my hands glide over the railings and the walls as I walked from room to room, then past the pool. I plucked a lemon from one of the shimmery trees and turned it over in my hand. I thought of Luis as a young man, falling falling to the ground. I thought of Lollie listening to the screams from the trailer, and I imagined how her heart must have exploded in her chest.
“Nothing before this matters,” I whispered, into air.
With every corner I turned, I was convinced I heard the whisper of spirits. Moonlight dappled the walls, a breeze moved through the room, the crosses throughout the house seemed heavy with meaning. Back in Oakley the world had been flat and stark; here it was filled with memory, story, spirit, and all the colors of the circus and the lemons and roses. I could not stop thinking of Luis falling to the ground, the way he sat by the pool each evening as splendid as a sun.
I walked from room to room, breathing in the scent of the jasmine, imagining the feel of the bar under my hands, myself flying over everything. The memory of it pressed against my palms. It was strange to reconcile the quiet lushness of the house with the clean, precise feeling of flight, my limbs cutting through air and forcing it to sweep from my body in waves. A different feeling took hold of me. The house, the moon, the quiet—it all seeped into me until I had so much energy I could hardly stand it, despite the soreness of my limbs, my ravaged muscles and cracked skin. I thought how I had no body, no father, nothing before what I was right then, and I began running through the hallways, racing right through them as if I could not be contained by anything. I felt absolutely weightless then in a way I had never felt on earth, on the ground—as light as pure air, pure feeling and desire. The breath in my lungs felt like glass. This is all that matters, I thought: the clean feeling of air slicing open.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The days and weeks passed, and the new season loomed before me. I wore my body down to the bone and quickly mastered the new movements Lollie showed me. At practice I had a much easier time with the rope than the flying trapeze. Lollie and Paulo were both appalled to learn that I’d used only the thick rope from a barn and a hardware store before, and that my wrists were scarred from the countless sores that had opened because of it. Paulo threw away my own rope and insisted I work with the corde lisse, the long braided rope all aerialists used. With a swivel and a ring, he attached a padded rope loop to the corde lisse for me to slip my hand through to do the swing-overs. The difference was amazing: the trick was still difficult, still required a complete shoulder rotation, but the padded loop made my grasp on the rope more sure and protected my palm and wrist. Suddenly I was able to do fifty swing-overs at one time, sometimes sixty or more.
“Beautiful!” Lollie would call out. “Just keep the leg straight as you turn, lean your body in.”
I learned to keep my shoulder close to the rope to control the movement, to polish the violent, angry thrusting of the river and the boardinghouse in Kansas City.
“Here it is about creating poetry in the air, not throwing yourself around without even thinking. The more you harness that energy, chica, the more disciplined you make each movement, the more magical you will be. An artista.”
Every day Lollie, Paulo, and I drove to the big top at dawn. I worked on the ropes each morning before the long afternoons on the trapeze. I came to understand that the Ramirezes had wanted a solo aerialist in their act for a long time but that it was a touchy thing, bringing a new aerialist into an established act, especially when egos like Lollie’s and Geraldo’s were concerned, not to mention the brothers’. But I was much less of a threat than the sinewy aerialists from the Russian and European circuses the Ramirezes had spoken with. I was so different from Lollie in the air, my quick, strong movements a striking contrast to her more silken, flowing ones. Lollie evoked romance and languor and lushness while I was all raw power and blurring, spinning movement.
“Eventually we can integrate so that you, I, Geraldo, and Paulo can do one long flying act together,” Lollie said.
“You are a gift to us from Marionetta,” I heard Carlos comment more than once.
Once Paulo and Lollie felt I had the swing-over under
control—the centerpiece of my act, they both agreed—they began to teach me other solo acts. The hoop, a bar with semicircles rising from the top and bottom, that spun around, making it seem like you were enclosed in a beautiful bubble. The Roman rings, the two small rings hanging from two cords that I could work like a gymnast, performing numerous tests of strength. The long rope ladder that let you do all kinds of tricks while ascending and descending through the air.
I took to all of these acts much more easily and readily than to the flying trapeze. Despite all the hours and days and weeks we spent on the trapeze, I hadn’t been able to master it. I could not catch Paulo’s hands and pull my body to the opposite platform. I’d panic, looking down to see that his hands were there, and ruin the trick. I’d either miss it completely or grab his hands clumsily, breaking a clean line or luxurious spin.
What I could do was leap to the Roman rings, pull myself up until my arms shot straight across on either side, and then hang for many minutes, steady and sure, as if I were just relaxing on one of the lounge chairs by the pool. My muscles were unbelievably strong from Mary’s library, the river, and the bar in the kitchen window. Of course it helped that I was so small, that my muscles probably outweighed all my skin and bones and blood put together. Lollie could not stay up in the iron cross for more than thirty seconds, her body shaking the whole time.
“I have never seen anyone take to the air so quickly,” she said to me one evening as we drove back to the villa. “I almost think Mary passed something on to you in that crazy library. Some people can pass memories or dreams from one body to the next, you know. Maybe that was Mary’s power, the reason everyone who saw her fell in love with her.”
Paulo glanced over at me from the driver’s seat. “I believe it,” he said. “But it also comes from your bones, like Luis always says.”
I laughed as the heavy night air blew against my skin from the open window.
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