Rain Village (29 page)

When the news about me and Mary broke, none of us could have predicted the way the crowds would react. The morning we arrived at the second lot, for the third show of that first season, Rachel’s article came out in the
Tribune:
“Mystery Girl Tessa Trained by Marionetta.” The story was picked up by the other papers even as the
Tribune
itself made its way to the next town, and the next.

The crowds went crazy. Mary had been a popular performer, and now there was a mystery behind her leaving the circus, which somehow made its way to me and heightened my “mystique,” as Paulo said. Even before the midway opened, people were lining up on the streets, all around the lot, waiting for the show.

“Everyone thinks you have a wonderful, secret past now,” Paulo said. “And then they come and you’re all light, a spinning blurring thing. It’s incredible.”

He passed me a copy of the paper as we rested on the grass. There, right on the front, were two photos, side by side: me darting out in the
hoop, all lights and sparkle, and Mary, hanging by her hands from the bar, her hair in a long ponytail down her back, as beautiful as I’d ever seen her. I couldn’t even trace the mixture of feelings it brought out in me: anger, rage, love, pride, a sadness that blotted out everything.

Mary would always be attached to me, I thought. I would never leave her to forge my own way.

Those first weeks with the Velasquez Circus passed by in a whirlwind. The pace was frantic and crazed, something I wasn’t used to after the unhurried luxury of Mexico, the dull throb of the factory, the long days at Mercy Library. In the circus it was working and crowds and shows and moving to the next lot, always. Building and dismantling, building and dismantling again. Asserting ourselves in the world with the brightest lights, loudest colors, and visions out of a dream.

I practiced every day, learning new tricks and perfecting old ones, adding little flourishes to my standard routines. No matter how crazy everything got, or how many whispers I heard or thought I heard as I walked by, no matter how many fans ran up to me begging for my autograph or just wanting to touch me, I could hang from the rope or the bar and feel like everything was normal. Exactly right. I dreamt of the tricks at night, woke up with adrenaline rushing through my body. I learned to wrap my shoulders in a sheet that hung from a steel hook overhead, and to glide through the room, wrapping and unwrapping myself as the sheet shimmered and flapped around me. In time I could wrap the sheet under each shoulder so that it hung out like wings, wrap it around my torso and throw my arms above it so that it seemed I was not held up by anything at all.

And still I tried to master the flying trapeze. I climbed to the platform and stared at Paulo hanging from the cradle, his feet wrapped around it, his body hanging down and his arms stretched out. As he swung, he kept his eyes on me the whole time. He called for me to jump to the bar, and then, once I was there, swinging upward into empty space, he called for me to release my hands and fly into the air, spinning and turning and then reaching out at the exact right moment to place my hands in his.

I swung. I released. I soared in the air, and time slowed down. I could have been up there for hours. Turning, precisely moving my body from one position to the next. And then I froze up at the moment when I should have given myself over completely to the world, to the air, to Paulo’s sure hands reaching out for mine.

Again and again the fear spread like ice through my body. I missed his hands and dropped into the net. I became an expert at falling, falling smoothly on my back and bouncing up to land on my feet. Landing on the back was important. Landing on the belly, as I had more than once, could tear your muscles and burn your skin. Landing on the head or feet could result in a broken neck, broken ankles. Luis was like a ghost haunting the ring, and I think we all woke up at least once, our bodies drenched in sweat, thanking God that we could still move our fingers and toes, that we were still whole.

“Tessita, just let go,” Mauro told me. “When you’re up there, just give yourself up to it. Trust that Paulo is there.”

After all my failures, I was surprised sometimes that Paulo still showed up in the tent each morning, dressed in his catcher’s outfit. More and more it was just him and me. Now that we were back on the road, Lollie was thoroughly caught up in Geraldo—kissing him passionately one minute, right there in the cookhouse or the tent, and the next minute screaming at him or shutting herself in her train car to weep.

I had more than a sneaking suspicion that Lollie was not altogether happy about my success. She remained my friend and had a vested interest in me, having trained me and made me part of the Ramirez act, but I saw her face when children called out my name and not hers when we went past in the parade. Everyone loved Lollie, but she had been a flyer for twenty years. I was new, brand-new to the world. I did tricks no one had ever seen before.

I saw her looking in the mirror, tracing her fingers along the lines that outlined her mouth and eyes. I sat next to her sometimes and just gazed at her, at how wonderful she was. So glamorous and rounded, so sexy and soft. Her light-brown wavy hair and hazel eyes.

“I’m old,” she said once. “Too old for this, for babies, for love. You are lucky, Tessa, to be young.”

“Lollie,” I said, “you are so beautiful. How can you say that?”

She turned to me. “Men used to line up to meet me after the shows. They used to send enough flowers to fill the villa with roses and tulips. Now look at me. All used up.”

“But you’re only forty,” I said.

“In the circus,” she said, “I am ancient. And it is too late for me. I never had a normal life. No family, no babies, no husband.”

“You can still be married,” I said. “Why don’t you and Geraldo marry?”

“He will never marry, and I will never leave him.”

“But why?”

“Let it rest,” she said, turning from me. She stood up and angrily reached for her bag. “Do not judge me,
chica.
”

She left me sitting there. I looked at my own face in the mirror. My blue eyes and pale skin, my small features. I held my hands up under the light and thought of what Mauro had said just a few days before.

“Your hands are beautiful.”

“They are starfish hands,” I had said.

“Tessita, what you see is all wrong,” he had laughed, picking up my hand and holding it out in front of both of us. “These hands are not fish shaped like stars. Why do you say these things?”

I was surprised to learn, slowly, that Lollie was like me. That she hated herself sometimes, felt ashamed the way I did.

To me, she was perfect. I never understood her self-loathing, or what it was about love that could reduce a woman like her and keep her tied to a man like Geraldo, who was nowhere near her equal. Lollie’s love for Geraldo pressed down on her like a sieve, but it was only later that I understood how painful it was for her to bear. I did not know back then about how much she had longed for children with Geraldo and how she had been betrayed by her own barren body, while he had fathered at least a dozen bastard children over the years.

Still, I don’t think Lollie minded so much that I could not do the flying trapeze. As attractive as it would have been, from a business standpoint, to include me and Paulo in her act, it was only on the flying trapeze that Lollie had Geraldo all to herself. There, under the lights, drenched in glitter and feathers, she could live out the love story she could not seem to have in real life. All his flaws fell away and it was just him, flying to her, cradling her as if she were the most precious woman in the world. Before every performance Lollie had a glow about her, an anticipation, and afterward it was always as if she had fallen to earth. It was a strange thing, how the air and the lights could seduce you like that, making you believe that what happened up there was more real than anything else.

Paulo was the one who wanted me to fly. “It’ll come,” he said. “In time. And when it does, there will be nothing like it in the world.” He was endlessly patient with me as I fell and fell and fell.

I knew his fiancée back home, Serena, had recently sent word that she was pregnant, that it was important for Paulo to make my act
first-rate—for the Ramirez act in general, for me, and for the baby growing in Serena’s belly. I wanted to master the trick so badly I could taste it, but the fear was bigger than my want. When it came on, it just swept me down to the net like I’d been caught in a waterfall. I looked down at the ground and saw only empty space.

“Concentrate,” Paulo would say, but in truth I was concentrating so hard I’m surprised I didn’t start levitating.

Despite my frustration, the air gave me a confidence I’d never had before. The deeper we went into the heart of the country and the more times I went into the ring and performed, the more a confidence grew in me, straight out of bone and muscle and blood. It was larger than anything I’d experienced before, even the shame that came over me sometimes, the jealousy I felt when I glimpsed Clementine from the big top, when I sat in the train car and tortured myself with images of her and Mauro in the same bed. It was larger than the corn-clawed moon that never quite left the periphery of my dreams. This was something from deep within my body. A surety, a calmness.

I walked arm in arm with Mauro and felt proud. I found myself in restaurants reaching for salt or butter and realized I wasn’t curling my palm over to conceal the shape of my hand. I found myself looking strangers straight in the eye, hugging the fans who pushed through the starry curtain to say hello.

I found myself feeling that I had a presence and a shape that were only mine.

It was only my jealous heart that threatened to unmoor me, for a time. In Mexico I had imagined that Clementine would be there every day, taunting me, but in reality the sideshow could have been a hundred miles away from the big top. As it was, I only caught glimpses of
Clementine. I’d see the white flash of her hair and wince. I’d see her hauling pails of water or wandering through one of the towns we stayed in, and every vein in my body would grow cold. If I was with Mauro I’d squeeze his hand and look at the ground, without saying a word.

“What is wrong, Tessita?” he asked.
“Qué pasa?”

And the words burned on my tongue:
What happened with her? Did you love her? How can you even look at me?

They crowded my brain, stuck through me like pinpricks. And yet I didn’t say anything. Even over the countless hours in the ring, on the train, and wandering over the lot, even as Mauro told me stories about his life and I told him about Oakley and Riley Farm and the factory. Even when I sucked in my breath and told him about the day in front of the courthouse, the endless afternoons in the library, Mary’s rich, raspy voice and card games and her penchant for cataloging and reading out loud and cooking pots of soup and tea. Even when I told him about the hair that curled wetly around her neck and the opal that glittered spook-ily from her breast. The story had been beating within me like a heart. If I had tried to tell it before, it would have stayed buried in my throat, bound up in grief.

But I could not ask him about Clementine, and I could not tell him that when I saw Clementine’s perfect starlight hair, I heard my father’s voice again in my ear:
Barely even a girl,
he had said, as the dirt and rocks pressed into my skin. I felt ugly and ridiculous, the way I had then.

I waited for Mauro to bring up Clementine himself. I walked hand in hand with him to the cookhouse or to watch the Kriminov Twins practice in the late afternoons, after I finished with Paulo and showered in preparation for the show, waiting. Mauro loved watching the twins. People said the earth had disappointed them so much that they chose to walk in the clouds, on stilts. One afternoon that first summer, I sat with Mauro and watched Sergei balance Masha on his shoulders so that her
head nearly grazed the canvas top. The words and questions beat in my head, but I wouldn’t ask him. Instead I asked him about the sideshow, about performers like the fat lady, Josephine, whose skin fell from her bones and just kept right on falling, like huge sails.

“Jo is a great lady,” Mauro said. “The daintiest woman you’ll ever meet. You could scoop up her hands and eat them for dessert.” He laughed and pulled me close to him.

I leaned in. “Mauro,” I said, “how can you be so close to the people in the ten-in-one? Lollie and your brothers never go near it. The twins and Ana don’t.”

“Oh,” he said, laughing, “they’ve always been that way—circus folk, that is. It doesn’t mean anything. They just have to believe the people come here for them and them only.”

“Don’t you think they’re horrible, though?” I asked, holding my breath. “With their tattoos and scales and wings?”

He looked at me, surprised. “Why, do you?” he asked.

“No.” I whispered it, staring at my hands folded in my lap. I stretched my feet till they tapped the bleacher below. “But I’ve heard Geraldo call them all freaks. I’ve heard others say it, too.”

He laughed. “Geraldo! Who could be more of a freak than that guy? He’s probably got ten children in every town we pass through.”

His voice was so loud, I looked around the tent to see if anyone had heard. The Kriminov Twins were still practicing—Masha flipping from Sergei’s shoulders to the floor. It was beautiful. There, a perfect moment, right in the middle of a long afternoon. Why wasn’t I happier than I was, surrounded by such things?

“Ana told me that we don’t mix with them, that her family never does,” I said.

Suddenly I heard Ana’s voice that first day:
Aren’t you in the ten-in-one?

No!
I thought.
Clementine is the freak.
I thought of the wings stretching
out of flesh and bone. The disgusting fusion of feather and bone and blood and flesh.

Mauro turned to me. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Why do you care what the Vadalas do? They think their Italian blood is more pure than our blood.”

“I’m fine,” I said, but could feel my face scrunching up and tears burning at my eyes.