Lucía Zárate: The odyssey of the world’s smallest woman

by Cecilia Velástegui

  “But aren’t we here already, Madam? That sign says: Philadel—”

  “I know how to read, imbecile. That sign is for them hoity-toity folks that can afford the Centennial Exhibition —and then there’s Dinkeytown. That’s for us. We ain’t in no frou-frou building, fool!”

  “But we are in Philadelphia, no?”

  “Moron. Yes, we is in Philadelphia but we’s going to the Shanty Town yonder there.” She pointed further down Elm Avenue.

  “Ah, so we will celebrate the one-hundred-year anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence in a different location, no?”

  “What the hell are you talkin’ about? We’s not celebratin’ nothin’. We got us some midgets and we’s gonna make some money off of them in Shanty Town!”

  Zoila couldn’t comprehend the meaning of Shanty Town. She raised her neck above her packages and noticed flimsy, wooden structures with dangling signs for hotels and beer gardens. She looked left and right, nudging her boxes out of her way with her strong chin so she could see her surroundings. She saw filthy restaurants and sloppy ice cream parlors advertising exotic Mexican vanilla ice cream, and although her mouth watered at the memory, her nose could not detect the sweet scent of real vanilla. It should have permeated the fetid odor engulfing this quarter of the city, but it seemed as though everything in this Shanty Town was foul and fleeting.

  “But surely we cannot bring Lucía to this quarter, Madam,” Zoila pressed. “She might get sick with all the miasm—”

  “Shut up and walk,” Mrs. Uffner snapped. “Any Shanty Town is ugly, stinkin’, and crowded. You and your squirmin’ midget will feel right at home here.”

  Had Zoila read the most recent newspapers she would have discovered that the civic leaders of Philadelphia were up in arms over the Shanty Town fungus, the spores of which had germinated viciously within weeks of the grand opening of the Centennial Exhibition. For miles around the proper exhibition grounds, sideshow spaces had popped-up in alleyways and dark streets. There, the exploitation of humans deemed exotic, disfigured, or non-Western had surged with absolution from the civic leaders.

  Crowds had grown accustomed to being amused by deformities, and they rushed to the sideshows eager to be the first to get the wind knocked-out of them by the suffering human exhibits recoiling in the corners of their stages. Zoila heard the outrageous descriptions and temptations the barkers shouted at the crowds: the more unspeakable and degenerate, the more her heart ached.

  Zoila stopped dead in her tracks. Her heart pounded louder than any of Felipe’s admonitions. Her brain throbbed with visions of Julia Pastrana’s joyful soul withering with every one of her hundreds of humiliating shows, her protruding mouth in a permanent, woefully wide smile that revealed her double row of teeth in order to satisfy the audiences that had paid to ogle and scream. Zoila concluded that these sideshows must be the beginning of the end for people like Lucía, Julia, Carolina and the hundreds whose photographs lined Eisenmann’s studio in New York. If this was indeed the fate of the “performers” at these sordid shows, then Zoila had to escape with Lucía.

  Zoila caught up with Mrs. Uffner as she walked into a cavernous room with a wobbly, center stage.

  “Hurry up and let’s set up Lucía’s parlor,” Mrs. Uffner ordered.

  “But we cannot allow Lucía to be in a cage, Madam.”

  “Does this look like a cage, fool?”

  “But the men shouting their advertisements for the mysterious missing link and the snake boy said that even though he was locked in a cage his venom could reach—”

  “By golly, you’re a total nincompoop!” Mrs. Uffner started setting down a tiny chair and a man’s tall hat on the stage. Under her breath, she added, “and Frank thinks you’re too clever and that we’s gotta keep an eye on you. Jeepers!”

  “But the other man shouted that his ape man could crush—”

  Mrs. Uffner raised her hand. “Enough with your questions!” she shouted. “Here’s how we do our shows—they’re called levées in show business. Business is the important word here. Frank and I are in this God-forsaken show business to make money, not to torture anyone. Got it?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Zoila was unpersuaded. “But this is still no place for Lucía.”

  “I says it is. She don’t gotta do nothin’ but be her cheerful, singin’, yappin’ self. She just goes around the stage and shows the audience her jewelry and then she sings a song and then she jumps inside this man’s tall hat and then she shakes hands with some folks who’ve already paid me a little extra so they can touch her. Then, for the next show we bring out General Mite and she coquettes with him. And on and on.”

  “Excuse me, Madam, but what is ‘coquettes’?”

  “As I just said, you’s plain stupid. Coquettes is when you smile and be chirpy-chirp with your sweetheart. But you wouldn’t know since you’ve never had a sweetheart, have you?”

  Zoila clasped her chest, reaching for the outline of the vial of Felipe’s now dried blood. “I’m just worried about Lucía on this damp and uneven stage and…”

  “And nothin’. In show business, midgets like Lucía are considered very special. She’s at the top of the freak food-chain. She’s got a perfect body and she’s real clever. Hell, she’s even learnin’ English real fast to latch-on to General Mite, ain’t she?”

  “But she will get sick in this damp room,” Zoila persisted.

  “Enough. I want to set up quickly so I can go and drink me some ale. You got nothin’ to worry about. Mr. Uffner will be talking to the audience about Lucía and all her antics, he’ll tell them how Dr. Mott and all them other doctors inspected her and they verified that she’s the weest little gal in the world. Then, we’ll sell lots of her photographs of her and then on to the next show and the next. Did you think that Frank was going to pay her without her putting in a full day and night of shows? We’re here for six weeks and we have ten shows a day. Get used to it.”

  “But that is just too much for Lucía.”

  “This is how we do it. Ask all them other midgets in our troupe. They’s been with us for years. Wait till you read what the newspapers say about Lucía. We got contacts. We’s legit, don’t you know!”

  To Zoila’s astonishment, Lucía performed at the levées like a professional entertainer: cheerful, comical, and sweet. Her audiences loved her and, just as Mr. Uffner had predicted, the newspapers gushed about Lucía as well. On September 29, 1876, newspapers as far away as the The Emporia News in Kansas published effusive reviews of her debut nine days earlier in Philadelphia:

  Fat women and boys, giants and living skeletons, have created their various sensations here, but are now entirely eclipsed by a wonderful little lady from Mexico. The smallest of all the Centennial visitors is little Lucía Zarate, twelve years old, twenty inches high, and weighing only five pounds. This little midget held a reception yesterday that was largely attended, and anything so perfectly comical has never been seen. She ran up and down the parlor screaming and chattering just like mammoth children her age, and coquetted with those who were trying to decoy her into their hands. The little lady was put in one of the gentlemen’s silk hats, and there she sat for about half a second, when she wriggled her way out, got onto a pet, stamped her feet, threw her microscopic rings and bracelets then ran off to swing on the lace window curtains. The sound of music set her to dancing all over, and every little curl on her head shook as she pounced the low window stool with her clenched hands and called for some one to hold her up to see the “musica.” With her little lace handkerchief, about the size of a postage stamp, she insisted upon rubbing the clothes and shoes of those present.

  Frank Uffner read all the newspaper articles aloud to the entire troupe and scolded them for not applauding the uplifting coverage of Lucía’s significant debut. General Mite barely managed to utter one extended word—“Con-gra-tu-la-tions”—before he slouched into his familiar stupor. He was not alone. The fatigue of performing in show after show resulted in
a collective malaise. All the performers were worn down by the attendance of massive crowd after massive crowd, shouting, clapping, and lurching out to touch the little people as if each one held a fortune. It seemed as if all the audiences who had stayed at home for the first few months of the Exhibition now wanted to spend their last days of Indian summer sauntering along the exhibits—and specially the sideshows. It didn’t matter if the civic leaders touted the formal exhibition’s intriguing machinery or the places of amusement they endorsed, people hankered to be awed by the odd.

  The crowds imbibed on pitchers of cheap beer that reduced their inhibitions. They walked arm-in-arm into the sideshow parlors, paid a few cents at the entrance and released foul belches—or worse—into the distorted countenances of the forlorn performers. Frank Uffner knew how to control a ruffian crowd at the entry points to his levées, so at least the little people in his troupe didn’t suffer any obvious cruelty. Frank and his missus focused on creating a levée of gentility and mirth in order to maximize their percentage of the ticket and photograph sales. If this meant cutting down on the food they fed their performers or neglecting to keep to their contractual responsibilities with the little people—so be it. As Mrs. Uffner often asked rhetorically, “No one ever said life’s fair, did they?”

  Lucía took to the stage like a duck to water. The instant her tiny leather boots hit the boards, she knew how to entice her audience with a crafty blend of banter, continuous motion, and goofy antics. With every ooh and aah from the crowd, she revved up her tomfoolery.

  Zoila stood near the stage and tried to give Lucía a cue to slow down, but Lucía ignored her—and upped the ante. She encouraged the audience in their agitated applause as she attempted some unusual tumbling of her own creation.

  Zoila inched closer and whispered to Lucía, “You still have many, many performances to go. Sit down on your little chair and talk to the people instead, why don’t you?”

  “Because they came to see me, the frijol saltarín,” Lucía answered pointedly, “and not you, the armadillo. So move out of my way, why don’t you?”

  The sting of Lucía’s words numbed Zoila. Her small charge had never spoken to Zoila with mocking animosity and she’d never referred to herself as a Mexican jumping bean either. Granted, Lucía had to be worn down from dozens and dozens of performances; the slump of her narrow shoulders mirrored the damp and limp curls on her head, but she’d never been rude to Zoila. With each additional levée, Lucía grew more animated and dangerously daring, particularly in those performances when she had to compensate for General Mite’s funereal attitude.

  At first Zoila assumed Lucía’s hyperactivity was a result of the excitement of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition sideshows, but at the Odd Fellows Hall levée in Baltimore, Lucía attempted to do a cartwheel into General Mite’s unopened arms. Fortunately, Lucía landed softly and everyone laughed at her spontaneity and comic timing. On the evening of that pratfall, Zoila had applied poultices that had eased the pain and bruising. If they had been back in Mexico, Zoila would have brought in a sobadora, the indigenous massage experts who could work wonders with their hands, applying home-made ointments, but in the succession of American cities where the troupe performed after Philadelphia, Zoila felt increasingly suspicious of medical doctors. The thought of another Dr. Mott putting his hands on Lucía repulsed her. Zoila never relinquished the image of the embalmed bodies of Julia Pastrana and her baby as an omen of the evil unscrupulous scientists could inflict on people they designated as freaks, the missing link between ape and man, the distorted. Such human oddities could be injured and mutilated, and exhibited world-wide in the guise of science.

  It was unfortunate that Lucía’s injuries didn’t occur in Philadelphia or New Orleans, because both cities were renowned as pacesetters in pharmacology, in both the British model and in the Spanish model, as far back as 1769. Her most significant fall had been in St. Louis, Missouri where impetuous Lucía had not waited for Zoila to help her down a stairway. The Daily Globe reported: “As she is only twenty-one inches high, it was a more serious mishap to her than it would have been to most women.”

  Just as Zoila was confident of her own girth and vigor she was equally concerned about Lucía’s frailties. When she escaped from Papantla down to the coast, Zoila had to hike ravines and canyons, carrying a sturdy suitcase above her head, but she’d known that her strong body could take such an arduous journey. On the other end of the spectrum, Zoila knew that Lucía’s constitution required meticulously measured nourishment and a large dose of rest, neither of which she was getting in this hectic schedule of cities and performances.

  Zoila felt up to the challenge of caring for a physically vulnerable charge but, day by day, she was losing control because of Lucía’s careless antics. Since audiences loved Lucía’s shenanigans, and because the newspapers embellished her performances, Lucía persisted with abandon. She went to particular extremes to engage General Mite in her performances. The Washington D.C. Evening Star gushed: “the amazing reality of these pigmy prodigies cannot be conceived of from pen descriptions, for no language is potent enough to picture such atomized fragments of the human family.”

  While the audience applauded Lucía, Zoila attempted to approach her again, but Mrs. Uffner yanked Zoila back, away from the stage, and unleased a hoarse—and coarse— admonition.

  “Shut your bone box, girl,” she hissed. “Ain’t nobody here wants to hear you or see your drumsticks, only Lucía’s spindly legs.”

  Mrs. Uffner hammered the heel of her own shoe on top of Zoila’s foot.

  Zoila ignored the pain of having her foot nailed to the floor and wiggled her ten fingers at Lucía, in their mutually agreed silent sign of duress. But Lucía ignored the sign, turned to face the opposite direction and tap-danced her way back towards General Mite’s corner of the parlor stage. He looked ashen in anticipation of another one of Lucía’s overt signs of affection which Zoila knew he found unladylike and intimidating. When Frank Uffner read newspaper articles about the couple in a booming voice in front of the entire troupe, General Mite inevitably left the room. He hated to hear that the Daily Globe reported of the “possibility of another marriage of dwarfs, the midgets, General Mite and Lucía Zarate, now acting the part of devoted lovers. The little lady, however, does most of the wooing. It promises to be a mitey small affair.”

  General Mire saw himself as an up-and-coming, gentleman farmer. He envisioned his future self as happily married to a demure little woman, one who also cherished the quiet life on a farm far, far away from the raucous cities he reluctantly toured with the troupe. He’d agreed to humiliate himself in these lowbrow charades in order to save money that would support his soon-to-be dignified self. His own father was an astute man who did not let Frank Uffner pull the wool over his eyes when it came to his son, Francis. He made sure that General Mite’s earnings were paid regularly and accurately.

  “Francis, my boy,” he would often remark, the only person Zoila ever heard calling General Mite by his given name, “if only you could force yourself to act the fool or at least learn to impersonate famous people, you would have as much wealth as General Tom Thumb.”

  “Can’t and won’t,” General Mite uttered.

  “But you have a fine voice, my boy, by golly! Why not sing with the little señorita?”

  “Nope.”

  “Francis, are you saying you’d rather pass on earning extra money for your future?”

  “Not worth it.”

  “Well, then Francis, sit like a lump on a log and let the señorita dance around you. Let some of her sunshine beam down on you.”

  Francis sat sullenly. Here he was again onstage in another filthy city with the whirling tornado from Mexico staring at him with her big whirlpool eyes, suffused with mystery and mischief. The other members of the troupe gossiped that in Mexico there were sacred sink-holes gorged with water—bottomless and murky—disguising the remains of human sacrifices. They teased General Mite that Luc�
�a would one day take him swimming in one of those cenotes and he would never be seen again. Just the thought of it made him shiver with apprehension, as if by making eye contact with Lucía she would hypnotize him and he would never live out his own dreams, only her own unfathomable fantasies. So instead of playing along with her and entertaining the audience together as he was paid to do, General Mite froze. People laughed at his shyness and they egged him on:

  “Give her a kiss, why don’t you?” they shouted.

  Lucía understood the word kiss in English and she puckered up her lips and ran towards him with open arms. Fortunately for General Mite, Lucía read his jittery body language and changed her mind. Instead she simply continued to dance and sing around him, ignoring his woebegone mien. In contrast to General Mite, Lucía loved the overwrought newspaper articles which described them in minutia. On January 3, 1879, The National Republican in Washington D.C. described the couple in detail:

  General Mite, Age 14, weighs 9 pounds. He is a healthy, bright, active, intelligent, and handsome young gentleman, pronounced by the medical profession, the clergy, the press, and the people to be the most extraordinary human wonder that ever existed since the world was created.

  Luca Zárate, Age 15 years, weighs 4 ¾ pounds. She is the incarnation of the tiny female humanity, and absolutely the smallest natural human being that was ever known to live since the creation of the world.

  When she heard these magnified descriptions, Lucía frolicked about the room. Not once in all the newspaper articles did she ever hear the word chaneque, the word for the little people who ate your soul.