Orphans of the Carnival

by Carol Birch

  Yo soy como el chile verde, Llorona, picante pero sabraso…

  Still. Not a single one of them would ever love her. Solana had made that clear. “I’ll be honest with you,” she’d said, a long time ago, “you can be as good as anyone, and you can be proud and always stick up for yourself and get respect, but there’s one thing you won’t get, nena, and that’s a man. Not with your face so far gone. Don’t expect it.”

  “I know.”

  Hadn’t she always?

  “The world’s a cruel place, and there’s nothing fair about it.”

  Julia had been about nine or ten, and even then Solana had been very old. She’d taken Julia’s face between her hands and looked fiercely into her eyes and said, “Listen, you. It’s not your fault. None of it’s your fault. And you won’t get a man but it doesn’t matter. What’s a man? Same as a woman. Nothing. It all goes anyway. God loves you, and Solana loves you, and your mother loved you, and that’s all that matters. She did it for the best, your mamá. Of course she didn’t look back. That would have made it harder for you. She gave you to the vaqueros because she wanted you to have a good life.”

  She remembered the vaqueros, big men with wide sunburned faces, high on their soft-eyed brown horses. They drove three black-spotted cows with twisted horns before them. She’d never seen horses and cattle and men before. They put her on a horse, wrapped up like a bundle, strapped safe to the ripe poncho of a fat vaquero, and her mother walked away. She could say “Mamá” by the time she reached the orphanage, that much she knew because they told her so. Mamá was in the big mountains. Mamá was a kind, surrounding feeling that could bring tears to her eyes if she let it. And Mamá was a sharp clear picture, the first memory, her mother’s back walking away from her, with resolution. She’d cried out, “Mamá!” But her mother never turned around. Mother’s shawl was sad and frayed. Her pigtail curled at the end under a battered straw hat. Water ran nearby, and the mountains glowed with a light that seemed to flicker faintly at the edge of vision.

  Julia had ancient dreams. From the very beginning they were there, before any articulation—dreams that had little of substance, but friendly oceans of feeling. In the dreams Julia was full and warm, and darkness was above and all around, safe. And there were places of great light, where the ground fell away and birds with forked tails flew below her. But it had all gone, whatever it was. The Sanchez household had its own little chapel. When the priest told them about the Garden of Eden, she thought that was it, those mountains into which her first clear memory, the memory of her mother’s back, retreated. The fat vaquero made kind clucking noises at Julia as they rode down into Culiacán, speaking a language she’d yet to learn. The men stared at her, big brown bloodshot eyes all over her face. One of them dabbed himself here and there, thick fingers to the shoulders, the forehead, again and again as they babbled and jabbered, she as strange to them as they to her. She looked back with her thumb in her mouth, clutching her doll and crying. You, Yatzi. They took her away to a place where a woman looked at her and screamed. They tried to give her a proper doll with a painted face, but she didn’t want it, she wanted Yatzi that had come with her out of the mountains, and she screamed when they tried to take him away. They said her mother said she wasn’t her mother. Then again, said the nun, the man said she wept as she handed the child over, and kissed her, and prayed over her. Julia didn’t remember that. Only the pigtail. Then the shadows in the orphanage, the smell of beans and garlic, a wide white staircase rising up to a shady corridor in the Palace, arcaded and tiled in blue and white, and two boys playing a game of cards in their Sunday suits. Their iguana, the one there on the vine, sitting patiently watching from the top of a balustrade. These things were so far away they inhabited a space from which also rose dreams and fairy stories and the things you saw halfway between waking and sleeping.

  Ay de mí,

  Llorona, Llorona— Llorona—

  llévame al río—

  tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona

  porque me muero de frío.

  I could get paid for this, she thought.

  That’s when she’d known she was going away. But not yet.

  Oh, St. Jude, she’d prayed, holy apostle, worker of miracles, close kinsman to Jesus Christ, hear me again, dear Jude, come now to my aid in my great need, bring the consolation and succur of heaven in all my necessities, tribulations and sufferings, and let me be loved like other girls, let me be loved like a human, and I promise to forever remember your great favor and always love and honor you as my special patron and do my best forever to increase devotion to you wherever I go. Thank you, St. Jude. Amen.

  Solana died six months later, and then she was free. She left early one morning, before it was light. Federico the iguana was sitting on the fountain with his face pointing at the moon. No one else was about. The old patio, there it was as it had always been. They were all sleeping. She’d said no real good-byes, just slipped away. She didn’t think anyone else would miss her very much. Maybe a little. After all, what was she? A servant, moving on. She took a small grip, her harmonica, her guitar, a half round of white cheese, Solana’s old rosary beads and her doll Yatzi.

  You and me, Yatzi. You and me.

  She heard the lonesome baby cry again, out there somewhere toward the Mississippi. Julia opened her eyes. Myrtle and Delia must have woken her, coming in with whispers and a smothered giggle. They bumped about in the dark, trying not to disturb her. How strange. Far away under this sky it’s all still there. The patio, the stone bench, the fig tree, the shadow of the fountain. She saw it in moonlight, full of broken paper flowers, as it was that night.

  Hot night, summer 1983. These were not nights for sleep, too febrile, too sweaty. Rose, walking home from some eternal flop-out, some smoky mustering in Camberwell, twoish, threeish, singing sotto voce the Heart Sutra to lighten the road (still the length of Coldharbour Lane to go) stopped still when the sky growled. A cosmic dog, big one with teeth. She was drunk enough to look up and laugh out loud. What the hell, there was no one around. A change of pressure, a flicker of lightning, then the first high murmur of rain.

  Rose had sad brown eyes with tired hollows beneath, a wide big-lipped mouth and hair that stood out all around her head, thick, black and wiry. A scar sliced through her right eyebrow, giving that eye a slight droop at the outer corner. The years had rolled her into her thirties, thin and rakish, somewhat tousled and rough around the edges, and it was OK. The fear was at bay. As the rain set in, she turned her face up. It was good to be drunk. Simply wonderful sometimes to fray the edges, crank up the contrast. All she had on was a loose silky top and some old jeans, and she was getting soaked, but it was nice. She walked on, savoring the dark empty street and the way the soft hissing of late-night traffic from Denmark Hill, and the lights shining on the wet pavement, made everything romantic.

  Ahead of her, halfway down Love Walk, was a large garbage bin piled high with rubbish. She never could resist a garbage bin, particularly one full of the dregs and leavings of a house clearance. Whenever she came upon one, and London was awash with them, she stopped and had a good rummage and rescued anything that moved her. Many things did. When she was small, she’d bestowed consciousness on the things around her. Not just dolls and soft toys, but books, clothes, crockery, chairs, teapots and hairbrushes, rugs and pencils, even the corners of rooms and the turns of staircases, the gentle purring sound her bedroom window made when a car’s engine idled in the street outside, or the feathery stroking sensation in her chest when she was nervous with someone. All these things she’d named and given personalities.

  She didn’t do it now, of course. But still—

  Oh! Poor piece of paper, she’d think, passing a torn scrap in the street. Poor grape, last on the stalk, missing its friends and wondering why no one wants it.

  This bin was nothing special, a pile of rags and rubble. She walked ’round it. A drop of rain hung on one eyelash, quivering in the edge of sight. Askew on the heap was
a scattering of debris, shadowy nothings, in their very nothingness as heart-wrenching as anything, she thought, but you couldn’t stop for everything. The doll’s remains lay half in, half out of a doorless microwave oven near the top of the mound. She had to clamber aboard and scramble a bit to reach him. He was naked and limbless, with brown leathery skin, and a big head so damaged that his face resembled an untreated burn victim, the mouth a raised gash, the nose and ears pockmarked craters. One eye, made of glass, was sunk deep in his skull. The other was a black hollow.

  “Poor baby,” she said, picking him up, cradling him sentimentally in her arms for a long moment before shifting him to her shoulder and patting his back. “Poor, poor baby,” swaying happily in the rain.

  She took him back to the ridiculous rambling old tip of a house on Coldharbour Lane where she lived, four enormous floors filled with escapees from small crap towns the length and breadth of the land. The air was an essence of all the people who’d ever passed through, and even though it was the middle of the night, the house had a faint hum of people doing things behind closed doors.

  Rose went up to her flat at the top of the house. A waft of incense and dope greeted her when she opened the door. Inside was like an Arabian souk, all colored hangings and cushions, mirrors, embroidery, long-fingered plants tumbling down deep purple walls. The room was full of stuff she’d brought home from garbage bins and gutters and pavements, shelves full of things she felt sorry for. Old matchboxes and broken jewelry, bits of paper, sticks, fragments, remnants, residues, boxes, knickknacks, broken things, the teeming leavings of the world.

  “Poor thing,” she said, putting the maimed doll among her Indian cushions as if it were a cuddly toy, sitting back on her heels and looking into its round black face. The empty holes of the eyes and mouth conveyed an impression of sweetness.

  “Tattoo,” she said.

  Next morning Julia dressed quickly, drew back the curtain and crept silently through the room where the two girls were still asleep. A cockerel crowed in the dark, not too near. Another, closer, answered. Finding the latch, she lifted it silently and went out into the yard. Voices passed on the street. A light burned in the house. There was a movement over by the vegetable patch, and when she looked she saw the tall thin figure of a man walking backward. With no hesitation, he passed along the side wall, turned and crossed the back of the house, momentarily dimming the light from the window, then disappeared ’round the corner into the leaf-hung walkway that led to the front. Though the light was coming, nothing but his shape and peculiar swift locomotion was clear. Diablo. There was no sound. He’s come for wicked children who won’t go to sleep. You don’t have to worry about that, Julia, the Sanchez boys used to joke, one look at you and he’ll run! Like the devil! When she was sure he wasn’t coming back, she walked down and used the privy, and by the time she was back Delia was up, sitting on her bed smoking a small cigar.

  “So,” she said in a blunt throaty way, “your big show.” Thick black pigtails hung on either side of her face, and a red shawl was wrapped ’round her shoulders. Emerging from it, her forearms were tawny and muscled, thick-veined as a fighter’s.

  “The first,” Julia said.

  “How long’s it been? Since you went on the road?”

  “I’m losing track. Two or three months.”

  “Ooh! So new. So how’s it all getting along with you?” She waved one brown arm. “All this.”

  “Sometimes wonderful,” said Julia, “sometimes frightening.”

  “Rates said you lived in a palace. Down in Mexico.”

  “A long time ago. My guardian was governor in Sinaloa, but I hardly remember it. Then we moved to the house I grew up in.”

  “He decent? Your guardian? Why you wanna leave?”

  “I was looking after an old lady,” said Julia, “but then she died.”

  “An old lady?”

  “Old nurse lady.”

  “So was he decent?”

  Don Pedro had always been fond of her in a distant way, as if she were a good old dog that had been with the family a long time. Sixteen years. “He was decent,” Julia said.

  Delia blew out a cloud of thick blue smoke, put her head back and gazed pensively at her. “Has Rates given you any money yet?” she asked.

  “I have some money,” said Julia, “a little. My guardian gave me some before I left. But Mr. Rates has been buying everything, I haven’t had to…”

  “You made a deal?”

  “Of course. There’ll be money when we’ve done the shows.”

  “No, I mean a deal,” said Delia impatiently, “a deal in writing.”

  “I haven’t signed anything.”

  “Oh, but you must, you must.” Delia jumped down from the bed onto her hands, cigar in mouth. “Don’t go a step further till you’ve got something in writing,” she said, loping across the floor with strong arms and poking Myrtle in the backside. “Wake up, Myrt.” Sinking down, the cigar wagging on her lip. “Listen to this, she hasn’t got a contract.”

  Julia hated thinking about money. There’d always been enough. Other people provided, but she had to work. She could sweep and wash and light fires, or she could sing and dance and let them look. Singing and dancing won all, hands down. Money made her head ache.

  “Myrt!”

  Myrtle mumbled, then turned over. When her eyes opened they were glazed for a while, unfocused, but suddenly they registered Julia and shot open. A brief hysterical indrawing of breath, quickly controlled, and she jerked up. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, laughing awkwardly at herself.

  “She hasn’t got a contract!”

  Myrtle closed her eyes again. “You should have had a lie-in,” she said to Julia, “you’re supposed to.”

  “I always wake early.”

  “It can be a curse.” Myrtle opened her eyes again but closed them immediately. Last night’s eye paint had bruised her pillow and lay encrusted across the top part of her cheeks. She looked both older and younger than the night before.

  “You have to get a contract.” Delia sprang back onto the bed. “No word of mouth. Today. Before you sing another note. Tell him.”

  Myrtle clenched her eyes and yawned till she shook. The sound of Cato’s swerving stumbling voice came in from the yard along with a faint, drainy smell of sewage.

  “Who is that?” Julia asked. “That Cato. Where’s he from?”

  “He come from Alabama,” said Delia.

  “With a banjo on his knee,” said Myrtle, and they laughed.

  “True enough,” Myrtle said, “he comes from Alabama. Off of a big plantation.”

  “Does he live here all the time?”

  “No one lives here all the time.”

  “He’s not with us,” said Delia. “He’s with this kid Ezra.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Cato? Oh, people just like to see Cato. He don’t do much.”

  “He dances,” Myrtle said. “Kind of.”

  “Yeah. Kind of. But mostly he just runs around.”

  Myrtle burst out of bed in a flurry of white and went behind the screen. The sound of peeing trickled through the room.

  “Myrt, have you got my comb?” Delia raised her voice. “The one with the fans?”

  “I saw it,” came Myrtle’s voice from behind the screen, “but I can’t remember where.”

  “What about you,” said Julia, “how long have you been doing this?”

  “For always,” said Delia, relighting her cigar, which had gone out. “We used to be with a showman. Separate acts, this was, a long time ago, and we got along so we figured we’d try and make a go of it together and cut him out. He was slippery. Nothing written down. Got to get it written down. We get good rates now. We negotiate. This man Rates now.” She lounged back against the pillow. “We all started out on the right foot.”

  “So you remember,” Myrtle called from behind the screen, “you tell him, you want a contract, numbers, security.”

  “I will.”


  “Don’t underestimate it, Julia,” Delia said. “All this. It’s hard work. Always on the move, God, you can die of boredom. You got to get paid. You make sure.”

  “I will. I’ll talk to him.”

  Charlotte was sweeping the yard outside the back door. A fat white cat with a smug expression watched from the step. Ted and Jonsy were eating pancakes and eggs on a bench outside the kitchen, and Cato was on the swing, thin legs kicking, head thrown back.

  “Sit down, Julia,” Myrtle said, “you want some eggs?” She sauntered toward the kitchen door. “Morning, Cass,” she said, leaning in, “any coffee?”

  Julia sat down at the table nervously, nodding at Ted and Jonsy. Ted nodded back. “Sleep well?” he asked, shoveling egg with his fork. By daylight, he was cadaverous.

  “Not so well,” she replied, “I kept waking up and wondering where I was. But I’ve been doing that ever since I left home.”

  Jonsy was still wearing the pink suit.

  “That’s a nice color,” she said, nodding at it.

  Jonsy’s mouth and eyes widened at her.

  “He doesn’t speak,” Myrtle said.

  Ted ate food like a man filling a hole in a hurry. “You’ve come a long way,” he said, emptying his plate and sitting back with a satisfied shifting of the shoulders.

  “I have,” she said, “and I’m going a long way more.” The strangest feeling, sitting out here with strangers, bare-faced. What do you want? she asked herself. Just this, out in the world, free, unafraid. Don’t spoil it by being afraid, fool. Pretend. Shake inside but never let it show.

  Ted put his plate down next to him on the bench, picked up his can of coffee and slurped loudly. “I can tell fortunes,” he said dryly.