Lollie smiled at me, and in that moment she reminded me so much of Mary that I wondered for a second if it was from Lollie that Mary had learned to tell stories. From this great bright family of circus gypsies, so different from the pale, rain-soaked folk she’d left behind. At those moments I felt so close to Mary that I could almost touch her, and yet, at the same time, I felt the most piercing sense of loss, knowing I was just imagining her and how she would have been. I could never truly know what her experience had been, how she had felt when she’d sat right in the place I was now.
“I wish I had come from a family like yours,” I breathed, as Lollie twisted her hair into a knot at the base of her neck.
“It is nice,” she said, turning to me, “to know where you belong. But you have your gifts too, niña.”
I was regaled with stories during those first days as we traveled down through Oklahoma, all the way through Texas, watching the landscape become more and more sparse, and made our way into Mexico. In the daytime I worked on the ropes in the big top, beating myself into shape. At night, after watching the performances from behind the back curtain, I stumbled through the cars into the cookhouse or the common areas where performers met to eat and talk, or wandered outside the cars by the train tracks, where everyone gathered around bonfires to exchange all kinds of stories about the tiny circuses they’d started out in, circuses run by gypsies who’d scatter through the crowd to steal money out of children’s hands or who made their money by peddling the flesh of women and young boys. Some told of their most exciting moments in the tent, others about the most horrifying deaths: tigers who’d turned on their trainers, men who’d been trampled by elephants, and flyers who’d crashed to the ground or into the crowds below them. One of the clowns had even seen the most famous circus wreck in history, when a train carrying seventy people and sixty-two animals had run off the track and into the river below, killing everyone and everything on board. I listened to their stories as every fiber in my body burned with pain, then dropped off to sleep before the sun even set.
It seemed like we arrived in Mexico within minutes. The green-and-yellow scrub turned to clay, and the sun seemed to burn right into the ground, set the entire world to flame. I sat with my face pressed to the window, on the bed in Lollie’s compartment, and watched the landscape go by in a dull red haze.
We arrived in Mexico City in the late afternoon. Mrs. Ramirez met us at the train station. Lollie and her brothers filled her car to bursting before hiring several more to transport the rest of their trunks and suitcases home. I liked Mrs. Ramirez right away. She was petite and elegant, yet formidable as she stepped out of the car and came marching toward us. I could almost look her eye to eye, and she didn’t flinch. She just leaned in, grabbed my hand firmly, and said, “Welcome to the family, niña.” The brothers all seemed to compete for her attention, and she directed the procession as if she’d been running a circus for years herself. She was quite a businesswoman, Mauro explained to me, as the two of us bumped through the countryside to the villa in one of the rented cars. “She inherited the savvy of our ancestors. Everyone here loves the circus. Our children don’t have swings but long pieces of wire their parents stretch from tree to tree in the backyard. Mi madre bakes cookies in the shapes of lions and giraffes, paints huge canvases of circus scenes, and makes shirts with the Vadala horses silkscreened on the back. She is a very rich woman, Tessa.”
I listened to him raptly, though he was so handsome I could barely look him in the eye. Instead I stared out at the hills and countryside as we passed out of the city, at the sun as it set over the hilltops, sinking into them until it disappeared. The lush, heavy scent of jasmine filled the air, which was warm and thick despite the fact that it was December. It seemed crazy to me that the world was not coated in snow.
“You will like it here, Tessita,” Mauro said, smiling at me, and I smiled back at him, blushing. His eyelashes curled over his eyes and gave his whole face a sweetness that I was sure had broken many a girl’s heart. He seemed exactly like the kind of man I’d read about, the kind a woman would light a candle for and not move until it had burned all the way down. I thought of Mary in Mercy Library, all the women who’d come to see her, suffering from love, and vowed to stock up on cranberry bark. I could brew some up for Lollie, too, I thought.
When we pulled up to the villa, sprawling down the side of a hill, I was bouncing with excitement. Inside, it was exactly what I’d pictured: all fresh flowers, white stucco walls and black iron railings, chattering parrots, and embroidered pillows. It was tiled and open, the kind of place you could walk around barefoot and wrapped in a towel, and the scent of jacaranda and jasmine wafted from room to room through the open arched doorways. The others had already arrived, and the house was full of voices and the smell of dinner on the stove. Lollie led me to my own room with a window that took up most of one wall and looked out over the pool, and a bed with crisp white sun-drenched sheets. I couldn’t believe it. I loved everything about it: the walls indented in places and filled with figures of saints and crosses, the lemons I could pluck from the tree just outside my window. I did not have many possessions, but I hung every skirt and shirt in the closet and placed a few of the trinkets I had collected in Kansas City on the oak dresser.
For dinner that first night we all sat around a long table by the pool, and that was when I met Lollie’s wheelchair-bound older brother Luis, the most astonishingly handsome man I’d ever seen, who lived in the villa year-round, along with Mrs. Ramirez and the maid, Victoria, who had cared for Luis for twenty years and would care for him until the day he died, bathing him each day with a wet cloth, clipping his beard, and smoothing pomade through his shiny black hair. Everyone knew the two of them were in love, Mauro had told me in the car, but if it weren’t for Paulo’s whispered words at the table, I never would have noticed the way Victoria smoothed down Luis’s hair as if it would break, the way she served up his plates of rice as if sculpting them out of clay. I knew so little of those things back then, and did not expect to.
When Luis bowed his head before me and kissed the top of my hand, I felt like my life could not be more glamorous than it was at the moment, with the moon shining down on the pool and the night obscene with the scent of flowers and mole. “Welcome to our family, Tessa,” he said, raising his wine to me, and then we all clinked glasses. It was my first real glass of wine.
I glanced at Mauro over my glass and caught him watching me. I drank the wine down in one long gulp, my heart racing.
The next day the circus hunkered down in the lot, which was vacant throughout the spring and summer, and the tents were raised like huge animal carcasses in the faded landscape. Here Lollie and Paulo spent most of their days with me, patiently guiding me through each spin and turn, each toss into the air that brought me to the net, to the bar, or to Paulo’s outstretched hands.
I worked eight hours each day in training with Lollie and Paulo. “Paulo is the best catcher,” Lollie explained. “I worked with him before Geraldo came.” Lollie and Paulo led me up to the platform, forced me to listen to the sound of the bar as it moved through air, to listen for the precise moments as it moved through its arc—rising up to the platform, down toward the net, and back up again at the other side, where Paulo waited for me. They had me memorize the sound of the bar whooshing up to the platform, then going still for a second before moving back down.
“Listen for the silence,” Lollie said.
“Now,” Paulo said as I stood crouched and tense. “Go!”
I fell again and again and tried to ignore the fear, that hollow feeling as I looked down at that net and, past it, the sawdust. I tried to listen to the bar, but my heart pounded in my ears, deafening me to anything else. I thought of the corn bent in front of the moon and how, in a way, it had saved me, giving me something to focus on when the rest of the world had hollowed out and gone blank. Block out everything, I thought, but the bar rushing toward you.
The first time I reached out
and clumsily grabbed the bar, it was as if I were flying. I twisted myself up to a sitting position and laughed as Paulo and Lollie clapped and whooped.
I was nothing if not determined. My hands cracked and bled from twisting over the bar, my body was covered with bruises. I fell a thousand times into the net. I learned all the infinite adjustments I had to make with my body, the precise alignments and poses that took me from one spin into the next. From the ground you wouldn’t have known the searing that ripped through my muscles or the stinging of my hands as I grabbed the bar. You wouldn’t have known the deep sleep I fell into each night for ten hours straight as my body desperately tried to heal itself for the next day of abuse, or the way the physical strain wiped out everything else for those first weeks, blissfully. My mind was blank, registering only when a turn cut the air as perfectly as a scalpel or when a bad landing shot pain up my legs and left me without breath or speech.
“Good, Tessa,” Lollie said as I spun through the air. “That’s exactly right.”
I remember floating in the pool after long days of flying, letting the water run over my bruised skin and cracked hands, barely able to move without feeling I was ripping a limb from my body. In the evenings, wonderful smells from the kitchen filled the air as Victoria cooked up vats of beans and rice and pork and pans of fried plantains and sopapillas for us to eat at the long table stretched out near the pool.
Outside of practice and eating and the luxury of the pool, my days were filled with stories. The Ramirezes were all storytellers, and I wondered if it was part of the circus life, this constant weaving of words into air. Sometimes I felt I had never left Mercy Library at all, but was still lying on the wooden planks of the floor with my eyes closed, listening to Mary as she described her life with the Ramirezes, all their crazy stories, their larger-than-life personalities, their great passions and lusts.
Carlos, the tallest and oldest Ramirez sibling, was driven by his passions more than any member of the Ramirez family, but he also had the most control over them, enough that he was able to manage his twenty mistresses deftly, without a dissatisfied one among them. Mauro told me about his brother by the pool one day after dinner, when Carlos was nowhere to be found. No one knew where Carlos got the boundless energy, Mauro said, that allowed him to leap from bed to bed and then back to the family breakfast table each morning, where Carlos could always be found setting the schedule for each day’s practice. But he somehow managed not only to fulfill his impressive love and professional obligations, but to indulge his great fondness for books. Carlos owned thousands of books, Mauro told me, though I myself never saw them; Mauro claimed that Carlos’s collection spanned ten floor-to-ceiling shelves that pressed together and took up three walls of his room. He had tales of explorers, gypsies, and medical doctors, volumes of folktales and physics theorems, and stories of love and sadness propped up against delicate volumes of poetry whose amber-colored pages were so thin you could see right through them. Some of his books were imposing and bound in leather, others were ragged from all the reading he’d subjected them to. I heard each of the Ramirezes on separate occasions muse about Carlos’s unbearable schedule, and not one of them could come up with an adequate explanation for his prowess.
At first I couldn’t help but feel nervous around Carlos and the brothers, being so exposed, the way everyone was with them. These were men used to feeling out a crowd, the wind and rain and landscape, the audiences waiting for them in each new town and in the bleachers each night. This was necessary with the high wire, Lollie told me. The brothers could gauge the colors of the dreams that influenced each person in the audience’s sleep, sensing all the desires and longings the audience would bring to the ring. The feel of the people crowding the bleachers could alter a performance as much as the weight of the air and the speed of the wind, she said. All the longings and sorrows and betrayals traveled through the big top like wisps of smoke, and the Ramirez brothers always felt them. It was this, José explained later, that kept them safe on the wire, allowing them to flirt with it and tease it.
Slowly, over the next few weeks, I started to get used to the way the brothers looked right into you, as if they could see your past and your future. Though Lollie was the only true seer in the bunch, they all had a bit of vision in them, born from years of dancing across wires so thin you could floss your teeth with them.
Lollie’s vision might have been the strongest, but it could not protect her from her own fate. As innocent as I was of the world, as amazed and overwhelmed as I was being with the Ramirez family in Mexico, I had spent enough time in that library with Mary listening to heartbroken, desperate women to recognize Lollie’s sickness for what it was, and to see that she had no power over it. Lollie was always waiting for Geraldo, who was always doing anything other than coming to find her. Whenever he wasn’t at the villa, Lollie stalked through the house like she was in some kind of fever. She would pinch her dark cheeks in the mirror and coat her lips with red gloss. She would brush her hair in long, slow sweeps. She would cover her face with her hands, and I knew: no seer can see her own future, even if it clacks across the floor in five-inch heels.
During the day she was mine completely, guiding my body through spin after spin, laughing with me when I fell or executed a turn so perfectly that she almost forgot that I wasn’t born into the circus the way she had been. There was always a difference between those who felt the circus in their blood and those who had actually been born into it, just like there was a difference, in the sideshow tent, between those who had been born freakish, like the woman with hair made of moss, and those who had mutilated or marked themselves. I was a strange one, not fitting in anywhere exactly. But I was burning a place for myself every time I forced my body through the air, slicing it right open.
I pretended Lollie was two separate women: the woman who had known Mary and whom I spent my days with, the seer and trapeze star who had given me a room in her compartment and who made up a bed for me in her own family’s house, and the woman who would have stayed on the ground for Geraldo, baking cakes and pastries for him, making his bed for him, wiping the floors he walked on. There was a time when she would have done that, though the circus ran through her blood like a river and forced her face to the sky. I’m quite sure that, back then, Lollie would have said her love for Geraldo was what made her who she was. She could spend whole nights weeping for him, and I watched her helplessly, feeling like I was back in Mercy Library, wishing I could remember what teas to brew, what herbs to give her to chew on.
I learned to ignore Geraldo, and tried to let Lollie’s tears meld into all the other noises of the Ramirez house: the chattering parrots, the lapping water, the brothers’ smooth voices, the whoosh and whisper of the breezes that passed through the open hallways like spirits. When Lollie shut herself in her room and filled the house with her sobbing, I would sit out by the pool with the rest of the Ramirezes or any number of the guests who dropped by each evening with their hands full of flowers or pitchers of sangria, which Victoria would fill with ice and bits of freshly cut peaches and apple. “There is nothing you can do,” José would say when he saw me covering my ears, trying to block Lollie out. “Love is an illusion, and there is a bitter nut at its core.” I learned later about how José had shot his one true love Clara through the heart, years before I left Oakley.
According to Mauro, who whispered the story to me by the pool, José had loved Clara since before the two of them could speak, back when they had played together in the park near the town plaza. Clara was the most beautiful child in all of Mexico, and as she grew older it only got worse, making all who saw her feel like they’d been momentarily blinded. The two were to be married, but then José returned one December to find Clara holed up with the town lawyer, whom she had married a few months before. José didn’t even stop to think; he took one look at Clara in another man’s arms, then turned around and left the new couple’s home, picked up Mr. Ramirez’s shotgun from the villa’s cellar, walked straig
ht back to his one and only love, and shot her through the heart. José didn’t even put up a fight after firing the gun but dropped it as if it were burning, folded his body down to its knees, and waited for the town sheriff to come take him away. José spent five years in prison and left a changed man, having sworn off love completely.
I loved hearing these stories, just as I loved watching Mrs. Ramirez sit with her embroidery, her hands transforming bits of white cloth into works of art with her children’s names, elephants, and entire miniature circuses blazing up out of them. Just as I loved watching Mauro, whose heavily lashed gaze left a fluttering sensation in my gut.
I often watched Luis, too, imagining how things must have been for him before, when he could throw his arms out to the sides and race across the wire, or shimmy up a tree the way his brothers still did. While Lollie paced feverishly in the house and one or another of the brothers headed out into the night to meet lovers or friends, Luis always sat with his back perfectly straight, letting the breezes brush against his skin, laughing quietly, telling soft stories, and gazing every so often at Victoria as she set the table or poured a drink.
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