Nights at the Circus (17 page)

He felt a draught on his forehead. His get-up was of the ‘silly kid’ type, with white shirt, baggy short pants, comedy suspenders, a schoolcap atop a fright wig and the wig was coming adrift. Hastily adjusting it, he returned to the keyboard. Dateline, St Petersburg, a city stuck with lice and pearls, impenetrably concealed behind a strange alphabet, a beautiful, rancid, illegible city. Outside, in the squalid yard, Little Ivan and his friend trapped a stray cat and walked it up and down the cobbles on its scrawny hind legs. They wanted to see the poor, starveling, piteously mewing creature dance, just as its cousins, the suave, mysterious tigers, danced in the circus of Colonel Kearney.

If one pig trotted off to St Petersburg to pray, another less pious porker travelled to Petersburg for fun and profit between silk sheets in a first class
wagon lit.
This lucky one, the very good friend of the great impresario, was particularly accomplished; she could spell out your fate and fortune with the aid of the alphabet written out on cards – yes, indeed! could truffle the future out of four-and-twenty Roman capitals if they were laid out in order before her and that wasn’t the half of her talents. Her master called her ‘Sybil’ and took her everywhere with him. When Walser first presented himself at the Ritz Hotel in London begging for a job with the circus – feed the elephants, curry the horses, anything that would safeguard his anonymity – Colonel Kearney invited his pig to tell him whether to hire the young man or no.

‘Ah’m ridin’ high on the hawg’s back, young man,’ said Colonel Kearney in the inimitable lilt of Kentucky. ‘Allow me to introduce you to the hawg in question.’

He cradled affectionately in the crook of his arm a lean, agile, inquisitive-looking young sow whose head sat, with as decapitated a look as that of John the Baptist’s on a platter, on a wide, stiff, crisp, white taffeta frill. Her dainty little toe-dancer’s trotters were neatly folded under her breast and her quick, small, bright, not unfriendly eyes twinkled away at Walser like pink fairy-lights. She was a delicious creamy yellow in colour and shone like a pig of gold because, every morning, the Colonel massaged her with the best olive oil from Lucca, to keep her delicate skin from cracking. The Colonel chucked her under the chin, making her dangling ears flap.

‘Mr Walser, make the acquaintance of Sybil, my pardner in the Ludic Game.’

The Colonel lounged at his ease in a swivel chair, his varnished boots up on the desk in front of him among the makings of a mid-morning julep – the bottle of Old Grandad, the bucket of ice, a bunch of mint that turned the air a refreshing green. A little, fat man, with a sparse pepper-and-salt crop bristling on his round head to match the attempted goatee on his chin – he’d no great facility for growing hair. A snub nose, and mauvish jowls.

A gun-metal buckle, in the shape of a dollar sign, fastened the leather belt just below his pot belly, presumably the dollar sign to which Fevvers had referred. Even in the relative privacy of his hotel suite, the Colonel sported his ‘trademark’ costume – a pair of tightly tailored trousers striped in red and white and a blue waistcoast ornamented with stars.

The Old Glory itself, topped with a gilt eagle, unfurled with grandiose negligence from a pole propped in the corner – born in Kentucky he might have been, but no Dixie patriot he! No profit margin to the bonny blue flag, these days; he was all for the stars and stripes. His shirtsleeves, rolled to the elbow, were secured with nickel bands. His full-tailed frock-coat of old-fashioned cut hung from the knob of his chair, on which was perched his billycock hat. He chewed as on the cud on a Havana the size of a baby’s arm. Lilac, aromatic smoke lolled and swagged around his head.

His damask walls were layered over with an ill-secured frieze of showbills, on which Walser made his first acquaintance of those who would be his travelling companions – the lady with the big cat who called herself the Princess of Abyssinia; Buffo the Great and his troupe of white-face clowns; Monsieur Lamarck’s Educated Apes (‘clever as a barrel-load of monkeys’). High-wire walkers, earth-shaking elephants – no end to the marvels the Colonel intended to transport about the globe, joined together in amity at the sight of the dollar bill.

And there she was, again, Fevvers, the most marvellous, flourishing her coccyx at Walser as she took off for some empyrean or other out of the frame. So many showbills, it was as if the Colonel had rigged himself up a flimsy, impermanent, wonderful tent within the too-solid walls of the hotel; not only did the brightly coloured, loosely pinned posters jostle one another as if vying for attention as they rippled on the walls, but a mighty torrent of newspaper clippings, contracts, greenbacks, overflowed the enormous wastepaper basket he used as a filing cabinet, crisply rustling in the draught from the window open on to the cheerful bustle of Piccadilly outside. All within seemed in motion, eager to be up and off.

On the floor beside the Colonel was a blessedly static barrel of apples. From time to time, the Colonel reached down for a pippin, which Sybil would snap up.

‘Yessir, we’re old hands at the Ludic Game, Sybil and me,’ he rasped, removing the cigar from between his gapped, discoloured teeth and squinting confidentially at the glowing tip. ‘Years ago, years, down on my daddy’s farm in Lexington, Kentucky, I was jest a kid, then, knee-high to a ham-hock, weren’t I, Sybil, when I first made the acquaintance of the grandest little lady that ever drank pigswill, present company excepted. Yessir! that was Miss Sybil here’s very own great-grandma, yessir! First in the great dynasty of my porcine assistants!

‘I, being a young feller of an idle but perseverin’ disposition, I’d spent my en-tire eleventh year perfectin’ the technique of the bum flute, know what I mean? used to get right up on the school-desk when my teacher’s back was turned and let rip with a chorus of “My Old Kentucky Home!” on the good ol’ bum flute whilst he was writin’ up the principal rivers of Europe on the blackboard, that kind of young feller I was, could set my mind to anything provided it weren’t of any use, soon as I clapped my eyes on Sybil’s great-grandma, there, I says to myself: here’s a challenge!

‘Played hookey from school, took me three whole months un-tiring effort to get the old girl to stand on her hind legs and wave the flag. Didn’t think nothing of it, at first, jest a way of passing the time, but after I charged my first nickel down at the bar-room for a sight of the Patriotic Pig, then, yessirree! we was on the road. Mighty oaks from little acorns grow, you know that, young man? My movable feast, my opera of the eye, my peripatetic celebration of life and laughter – it all began one steamy southern mornin’ all those years ago, when the great-grandma of Miss Sybil here got right up on her hind legs and taught me a lesson I never learned in school – know what it was, young man?’

Leering through the screen of cigar smoke, he paused, not for assent but for effect, before he gleefully sang out the motto of the Ludic Game: ‘A fool and his money is soon parted!

‘Ho! ho! ho!’ he boomed, like Santa Claus. ‘Care for another julep?’ He kept a supply of glasses in the top right-hand drawer of his desk.

‘So you hail from sunny California by way of the Horn, is it, young man? And, just like every red-blooded American kid, he wants to run away with the circus . . .’

His pale blue, pebbly, red-rimmed eyes went this way and that way; he never stopped looking at you just so long as it wasn’t directly. He wasn’t soothing company, there was something restless, something turbulent under his surface bonhomie, he was nobody’s fool and did not suffer fools gladly. Walser had no special skills to offer, could not walk the high-wire, would have ridden a zebra like a sailor on horseback, yet all the Colonel’s bountiful intuition told him the handsome young man might be hired cheaply, was strong, was versatile, was, perhaps, on the run, would be a bargain, but might be, not in spite of but because of all this, trouble. The Colonel shared his predicament with his partner.

‘What’s your opinion, Sybil? Hire or fire?’

She put her head on one side for a moment, scrutinising Walser’s face; then she let out a curious, gruff little squeak – and nodded, ears jiggling.

‘Reckon a handsome young man like yourself can charm a pretty lady the moment she sets eyes on him,’ the Colonel remarked seductively, with another sidelong glance at Walser. He took the saliva-rimmed cigar butt from his mouth and knocked six inches off the end on to the carpet. Then he brought the famous pack of dog-eared, grease-stained alphabet cards from his waistcoat pocket, flicked through to make sure all were there, cleared the desk of its clutter with a single sweep of his arm. The empty bourbon bottle bounced harmlessly on a red-ribboned pile of court summonses. Breathing heavily, the Colonel set out the cards while Walser watched with bewildered amusement. The Colonel dropped the little pig squarely down on all fours in front of the capitals.

‘Now, Sybil, tell me next, in what fashion might this bold caballero here delight us?’

Sybil studied the cards for a moment, squinnied again at Walser, appeared for a few moments sunk in thought, then, with her questing snout, she nudged out:

And sat back on her haunches, gratified. The Colonel rewarded her with a round of applause, tossed her an apple, upset the wastepaper basket entirely and disclosed within its susurrating depths a cache of Old Grandad. Uncorking another bottle – ‘let the ice and mint go hang’ – he refreshed their drinks. The pig leapt back into his welcoming bosom where the Colonel nuzzled and cuddled her but his restless eyes, no pinker-rimmed than Sybil’s own, kept on going over and over Walser: what’s his game, what’s his racket . . . is he the fool he looks or a bigger fool?

‘So, young man,’ he said, ‘now you are a First-of-May. Don’t ask me how the cognomen arose – it’s what we allus calls the neophytes, the virgins in the ring, the green beginners in the art of playing. Just a coupla questions. First: is it squeamish about
bedbugs
?’

As Walser, laughing, shook his head: ‘that’s just dandy, on account of there ain’t no place like a circus train for bedbugs. Why, a circus is just one big Pullman diner to
citnex lectularius
.’

Then he contrived to fix Walser with his twitching eye for as long as one entire second but he went on gnashing away at his cigar so the smoke bounced round him and his skinny fingers with the gnawed nails kept tweaking away at Sybil’s ears; the pig herself cocked an intent head towards the young man, as if she, too, was anxious to hear Walser’s answer to the second question the Colonel was about to pose:

‘How does it stand humiliation?’

Startled, Walser coughed on his bourbon.

‘I see you don’t know the first thing about clowning,’ said the Colonel in a melancholy voice. ‘Very well. Okay by me. Some was born fools, some was made fools and some make fools of theirselves. Go right ahead. Make a fool of yourself. I’ll take you on as apprentice august, young man; sign a contract for six months, we’ll take you across Siberia. Siberia! Oh, the challenge of it! Old Glory across the tundra!’

At that, he flipped up Sybil’s ear, dipped in, drew forth a stream of little silk handkerchiefs each printed with the stars and stripes and waved them round his head.

‘Surely I can rely on a fellow Amurrican to see the glory of it! All nations united in the great Ludic Game under the banner of Liberty itself! D’you see the grand plan, young man? Old Glory across the tundra, crowned heads bow to the democratic extravaganza! Then, think of it, tuskers to the land of the Rising Sun, young man! Hannibal’s tuskers stopped short after the Alps but mine, mine shall go round the en-tire world! Never before, in the en-tire history of thrills and laughter, has a free Amurrican circus circumnavigated the globe!’

What a visionary he was!

‘And, after this unprecedented and epoch-making historical event, I’ll land you safe and sound back home in the good old U.S. of A. Yessir!’

With that, he brought his fist (still grasping his streamer) down on the desk, rattling bottle and glasses, and cried out, with neither irony nor sarcasm but, evidently, from a full, buoyant and excited heart:

‘Welcome to the Ludic Game!’

When Walser first put on his make-up, he looked in the mirror and did not recognise himself. As he contemplated the stranger peering interrogatively back at him out of the glass, he felt the beginnings of a vertiginous sense of freedom that, during all the time he spent with the Colonel, never quite evaporated; until that last moment when they parted company and Walser’s very self, as he had known it, departed from him, he experienced the freedom that lies behind the mask, within dissimulation, the freedom to juggle with being, and, indeed, with the language which is vital to our being, that lies at the heart of burlesque.

Her orizens concluded, the baboushka lay down on top of the stove and soon began snoring. Walser typed: ‘end’ to his report for fear the rattle of his machine disturbed her ancient sleep. He did not want to draw attention to his reporting activities but he was doomed to his comic rig for his stay in the city because the clowns walked the streets in peripatetic advertisements for Colonel Kearney’s circus. Therefore he went to the kitchen door and whistled Little Ivan away from his game. Even if the child found the presence of clowns inexpressibly sinister and troubling, he could be bribed with a few kopeks to take Walser’s sealed envelope to the British Embassy, whence it returned to London in the discretion of the diplomatic bag. (Walser saw how the child hated to touch his hands.)

Unless he wanted to walk to work with the hooting, mocking company of half the rag, tag and bobtail of the city at his heels, he must skulk along the back ways, along stinking alleys hung with washing, past gloomy doors of stark tenements. Of this most beautiful of cities, Walser, as it turns out, has, in reality, seen only the beastly backside – a yellow light in a chemist’s window; two noseless women under a streetlamp; a drunk rolled under a doorway in a pool of vomit . . . In a scummed canal, ice in the pelt of the dead dog floating there. Mist, and winter coming on.