The Acrobats

by Mordecai Richler

  “Would people laugh at you?”

  “That’s no way to talk.”

  “Get out, Barney.”

  “What?”

  “I’m expecting a boy-friend.”

  “You’re just a goddam queer. I should have known better.”

  Derek got out of bed and opened up the door. “That’s no way to start off a business relationship,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. It’s … well, I lost my temper. Come on, let’s shake on it.”

  “So long, Barney.”

  “You mean you’re not coming?”

  “No. And just in passing. It was me, I stole your two hundred bucks.”

  “Do you know where Jessie is?”

  “No.”

  “Well you tell her when I find her I’m going to break her neck.”

  Derek laughed, and Barney slammed the door.

  X

  Pepe rushed into the room, and he was laughing. “Where is my wife?” he yelled. “Who has run off with her? My wife who is going to have a boy, where is she?”

  María was sitting up in bed. Several pillows were propped up behind her. She was wearing the lovely shawl that had belonged to her grandmother. She smiled.

  “Ah, there she is! Well tell her that her husband has inherited a fortune!” He tossed a bundle of bills on the blanket. “Seventy-five pesetas. Count it!”

  “Pepe! Where did you get it?”

  Pepe howled and slapped his thighs. “It is my army pension. The very excellent Generalissimo Franco, Chief of our State, has decided to issue pensions to veterans of the Fifth Regiment.”

  “Where did you get the money?”

  Pepe sat down on the bed. He kissed María, and pulled her hair.

  “Pepe!”

  “Look!” he said. He produced a bouquet of flowers from behind his back. “For my wife who is going to have triplets.”

  “I know! André has sold another picture.”

  “No.”

  “Chaim?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you get the money?”

  “Last night our friend Luís who is an anarchist picked up an American tourist and showed him all the wonderful sights of our city. The kind American rewarded him handsomely.” He dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out a bottle of manzanilla. “Where is André? I thought he was coming for supper.”

  “He must have forgotten.”

  Pepe noticed that the table was set for a feast. All the cutlery had been polished, the linen napkins were out, there was a bottle of wine and three loaves of bread. “How could he have forgotten? Did you see him today?”

  “No.”

  María shrugged her shoulders. “All that food,” she said. Pepe kissed her solemnly. “Are you in pain?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “It will be a boy.”

  “Why do you keep saying that? What if it is a girl?”

  “It will be a boy.” Pepe noticed the table again and he felt badly. “It isn’t like him. He seldom forgets.”

  “Perhaps he is ill again?”

  Pepe rolled himself a cigarette. He had planned on a truly wonderful evening with his wife and his best friend. “Why should he be ill?” he asked.

  “There are many reasons. He is unhappy, and he has no church.”

  “Must you always bring religion into it?”

  “Are you upset about something?”

  “No.”

  She coughed. The pain came again, quickly.

  “In a way you are right,” he said. “He is unhappy. But I am glad that they can’t get the educated people or the artists. It makes me feel good that he does not believe in God.”

  “I pray for him every morning. I have been doing it for months.”

  Pepe groaned impatiently. “He doesn’t need your prayers!” he said.

  “He has killed. It is a sin.”

  “Only when the church kills it isn’t a sin.”

  “The church never kills. It is only the priests.”

  “Look, he doesn’t believe in it. None of us do!” There was a note of desperation in his voice. “How many times must I tell you that?”

  “He may not think he does but I know differently.”

  “Sure. You know all about it.”

  “God believes in him.”

  Pepe laughed. “You will drive me mad,” he said. “It is a bad thing that he has killed. It will ruin him.”

  “I told you a hundred times that it wasn’t his fault.”

  “If it had been his fault it wouldn’t have mattered so much. Don’t you understand?”

  “You know,” he said. “You know everything.”

  XI

  On the calle de Sangre, André in a delirium stumbles onwards for six blocks before he is able to assess his surroundings with any degree of penetration. Mechanically he looks at his wrist-watch: it is 12:30 a.m. This, he acknowledges, is a fact, recognition of which is a condition of sanity.

  Darkness, buildings looming, rot eating into walls. Lamp posts like the luminous yellow spittle of gnarled immobile cripples. Neon café lights, wavering kaleidoscopic breeze in a cash-and-carry limbo, advertising particular brands of glitter death. Mock halos rounding yellow lamps.

  He pauses at the Plaza del Mercado, then turns leftwards towards the sea. Cold in his lungs, suspended, seeps into his bones. His feet are wet lumps of bread floating on icy water, his head a soggy sponge. I live inside a polluted womb, he thinks, and dismissing this thought he tries to think of something funny. Chaim in the army, Toni a nun, his mother in a chorus line. Ho-ho! He remembers Paris …

  When he had first arrived it had been summer. He had got off the metro at Saint Germain-des-Prés and a stale sun hung like a drying lemon in the sky. (He remembered thinking just that when he had climbed the metro steps on to the street.) Men with beards, and women sloppily dressed, idled obligingly at the sidewalk café tables, just as they always did for picture stories in Life or Collier’s.

  Paris is skeletons copulating on tin roofs and the culminating corpse of a dead civilisation dying and raising a stench to jeering heaven while toasting on the wicked flames of wanton ennui and sin. Intellectual maggots crawling, sucking, impervious to their own horrid secretions. (No grand bang finale here.) The aimless, the destitute, the degenerate. Integrity cheap at five cents a cup, souls going quick at bargain basement prices, love liberated on tap in cafés and dim doorways. Clearing-house international for queers with pinchpolly asses and googoo eyes. (God, they say in the Reine Blanche, is a Queen.) Aged discards fishing for their souls in the Seine and not getting even a nibble. Boring depravity shimmying like hep sin in the Tabou. (God is a hipster and when he wakes of from dis l’il ole dream dat is us he’s gonna have himself a real ball.) Jitterbug becomes philosophy and boogie-woogie love. (Do you believe in God? The old man in the jardins giggled. Wouldn’t you, he said?)

  I shall grow old and die not knowing.

  Buildings, like bloated lungs gasping, and a café open. A gang of ragged soldiers, a drunken boy, a few labourers and two floozies, are drinking vino blanco and singing:

  Ay! puerto moro de Tanger

  puerto que me vio marchar

  en un barquito de espuma

  por la esmeralda del mar.

  Unmelodious wail flowing, deranged plaint of dead souls. Tumbling, rolling, screaming. People in a circle around a soldier, homemade guitar, woeful voice. Together, clapping, singing, taking turns at verses, dumb despair tumbling on endlessly, spiritual hemophilia.

  Yo soy pobre emigrante

  que traigo a esta tierr extraña

  en mi pecho uno estandarte

  con los colores de España.

  Drunken boy clambers up on the bar, sigh of wonder up from the crowd, he kicks his feet down sharply, music leaping, a floozie tosses off her jacket and jumps up to join him. Crowd yelling, crowd clapping. Girl flings her body about, legs kicking, tears rolling down her cheeks. Sweaty boy stamping, bending backwards again, dancing around her.…r />
  Por mi patria y por mi novia

  y mi Virgen de San Gil

  y mi rosario de cuentas

  yo me quisiera morir.

  André felt exposed, dazzled as well, as if suddenly a secret door to his soul had swung ajar. There was something hauntingly abysmal about their song. Perhaps, he thought, if the unknown can never become known it can at least be sung. (God, simply, is what we do not know.) He felt as if he was living within a memory, that this experience must be only so that it might become a part of his spiritual past. Then the door swung shut.

  But the abysmal something was still there.

  Mundos y planetas en “revolución”

  con el fuego! fuego! de mi “corazón”!

  The girl, he did not know her, took him by the arm and dragged him into the bar. The makeup on her face had streaked. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes were dark. She had a woman’s body, she tried to walk like a woman, but her mannerisms were those of a deficient child.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Lolita.”

  “Lolita?”

  Perhaps, somewhere, he had known a Lolita? But he had known so many things.

  “I come from Cadiz. My mother was a kitchen maid but she is dead now. My brother, Paco, is dead too. He was a communist. He sang such lovely songs.”

  “So many people are dead now.”

  “Silly! Everybody dies.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean why?”

  “Why? That’s all.”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Have you any money?”

  “I think … Yes, I have money.”

  “Buy me a drink.”

  He called the waiter.

  “You’re very pale. Are you sick?”

  “No.”

  “What is your name?”

  “My name?” He began to scratch his head desperately. “My name? Oh, yes, André. Certainly, André.”

  “Are you French?”

  “Your hair must have been so lovely.”

  “Naughty boy! You have had too much to drink. Give me a cigarette.”

  He took an envelope out of his pocket. His movements were measured, slow, as he no longer counted on even the simplest of his reactions. He stared at the envelope, trying to remember, trying to think. But there was a constant booming in his head, and that made it difficult.

  The envelope was filled with bills. He took out a five-hundred peseta note and handed it to her. “Here, buy cigarettes.”

  She glanced at the contents of the envelope and she was startled because she had never seen so much money. He must be a very great gentleman, she thought, to have so much money.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m a sailor. No, I’m not a sailor.”

  “Be careful with the money.”

  “What’s that you’ve got under your arm?”

  She showed him the photo album.

  “Have you a photo you could give me?” she said. “I keep photos of all the men I have known. Often in the morning I’m alone in bed and it is frightening, so I look at my album for hours. Do you think I’m silly? Sometimes I talk to my photos.”

  “No. It’s not silly.”

  “It is so good,” she said. “If only it was good all the time.”

  He kissed her hand. She withdrew it hastily.

  “Many of them are signed. Later, up in my room, I’ll show you.”

  He blinked. There was something important that he had to do. What? “May I touch your hair?” he asked.

  “Don’t be bad! We’ll soon go up to my room.” She squeezed his hand. “Then you can do everything. I’m very good. All the men say so.”

  Unconsciously he reached out and caught a lock of hair between his shaky fingers. She tossed her head back, her hair swirling about, falling again to her shoulders. He sensed the nature of his rejection, he slumped back in his chair. The girl sneered. At nineteen she had already grasped that her silken hair was hoax and that the only truth was to make herself eager many times nightly so that faceless men might enjoy her again and again.

  “Who is that man sitting there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The man – a tall, balding German – heard, and shifted in his chair.

  “He must be a foreigner.” So many things, he thought. Why can’t I remember?

  She took him by the hand. “Come, we’ll go to my room. We’ll have fun.”

  It was damp outside, and still misty. But the fresh air was exhilarating.

  “If I’m good will you tip well?”

  “Did you see if the man got up?”

  “The man! Phew! I’ll do anything you want. So long as you pay.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Don’t be shy guapo.”

  The room was small. A rope was suspended from one cracked wall to the other. Two soiled towels and a faded pink slip hung from a rope. A small, unscreened window looked out on the street. A bottle of wine, a package of cheese, and an ashtray overflowing with butts were on the window-sill.

  He flopped down on the bed.

  “Are there any rats?”

  “No.”

  She was at the sink, filling up a pail of water.

  “I want to go …”

  “Now you be good!”

  “I don’t want to pay. I want to make love for nothing.”

  “But you have so much money.”

  “I don’t want to pay.”

  She laughed. “You try to sleep while I get ready,” she said.

  He felt the tiny sensation of sharp claws creeping along his trouser leg. On his thigh now, slowly, moving stealthily. He opened his eyes. And there, sniffing along his thigh, now almost on his stomach, was a rat. Suddenly something snapped, he felt it go. The strain, the booming in his head, everything easing up. So they were wrong. The doctors, Chaim, Pepe, they were all wrong. There were, and always had been, rats in the room. He wanted to sing or dance or cry. But he was careful not to move, not to startle the animal, he watched it crawl, cautious, grey, up his body. It stopped on his chest. Suddenly, from different directions, he shot both his hands out at the rat.

  Sweating, he lay there, clutching his rumpled shirt, digging his fingernails into his own skin.

  He screamed.

  “Stop it!” Lolita grabbed her hair and pulled at it as if she would go crazy. “Do you want me to be thrown out of here too?”

  He stared at her dumbly. He was deeply puzzled, but he was not certain about what.

  “Don’t be greedy,” she said. “I’ll only be a minute. But I’m not going to undress you as well. Now off with your clothes guapo!”

  She flung her kimono to the floor.

  Her body was olive, rounded, and warm-looking. As though suspended in a mood she could not comprehend she walked towards him slowly. She seemed to be saying with her body, if you just give me a chance, just a bit of a chance, I can make it right. He watched in amazement. Time seemed to stop, waiting on her, allowing her a chance at self-redemption. And then suddenly, as if she perceived the irony of the situation, she relapsed into vulgarity. Smiling, giggling moronically, she paused immediately before him. She rubbed her arms and brushed back her hair, her eyes widening. “Good!” she said in English. “Spaneeesh one.”

  “I’m sorry. Please forgive me,” he said. He jumped off the bed and grabbed her in his arms. “I’m sorry.”

  She pushed him away. “Take your clothes off!”

  “I can’t. I don’t want to.”

  “Hurry!”

  “No, please, no.”

  “Then pay me. You wasted my time. Pay me now!”

  He shuddered, and laughing, he grabbed her in his arms. “I’m not going to fight him. No, not at all! I don’t understand, but I’m beginning to. It’s coming. No, I’m not going to fight him. I’m going to live. I’m going to get her now. I do love her. Yes, I do.”

  “Give me my money!”

  He pulled the envelope out of
his pocket. Holding it high, he overturned it. Money spiralling, tumbling, falling to the floor. She fell down on her hands and knees and began snatching up the notes.

  “It’s no good,” he said. “Don’t pick it up.”

  But she had not heard him. She was sprawled out on the floor, naked, gathering up the notes quickly.

  “I’m free,” he stumbled absently. “I don’t understand, but …”

  He left the room, stepping over her, and she hardly noticed.

  XII

  Suddenly all the street lights were extinguished and the fireworks display began.

  A thin nervous line of red light shot up into the sky, ripping the darkness, exploding into shivering streaks of red and orange and green. Another scratch of light darted skywards, shattering itself in mid-air and momentarily illuminating the plaza in an eerie yellow. The people sighed ominously. Some recoiling, others tittering. Soon the sky was exploded in a multi-coloured grandeur, bleeding a myriad of trickling starlets, shot through with gaping holes and oblique pin-lines of firecracker lights.

  A man in the crowd fell into a fit of laughter.

  The giant falla of the wooden gypsy burst into flames. The crowd gasped. They trembled.

  Another send-off of rocket lights swooshed into the sky, blossoming open above the flames of the burning falla, spluttering and hissing, pumping more angry rents into the sky.

  An elderly woman, quivering, clutched Toni by the arm.

  Still another flurry zoomed heavenwards, rattling, spluttering, dribbling coloured stars on the plaza.

  XIII

  He heard the first of the explosions, he saw the lights in the sky, all around him minor fallas were going up in flames.

  He saw Kraus as well, but he did not pay any attention.

  He walked across to the bridge still feeling puzzled about some things but richly resolved about others. The bridge, the dead river, the madly lit sky, all seemed wonderfully good. He stood silently for a moment, feeling amazed with himself, remembering that somehow it had started in the room. But he remembered nothing in particular, no incident, no idea, just a vague kind of pain. A duty, perhaps. Something, anyway, that he had undertaken long ago. The duty itself was unremembered, but the need to act, the dignity that was truly wanted, came through clearly.