Queen of the Air

by Dean N. Jensen

  In Lalo’s first appearances in Victoria’s drawings, he was present as a babe in Edward’s or Hortense’s arms. After a while, he started turning up in the artworks as a boy. He was always standing in the middle, between Papa and Mama on one side and Victoria and Alfredo on the other. Lalo, blond, was always grinning even more widely than the rest of them.

  The two desperadoes entered the tent in the inkiest hour of morning when Edward and Hortense and the children were asleep. They were drunk, loud, and boisterous. They started firing pistols, putting flashes of red light in the complete darkness. They were hooting.

  “Oh, did we awaken you? Oh, we’re sorry. So sorry. We should be more respectful, shouldn’t we?”

  There was more barking and flaring from their pistols and the men cackled again. The smell of sulfur thickened in the air.

  Edward’s heart was racing. He lighted a lantern.

  The lamp’s glow revealed the faces of the intruders. Edward had seen the same men eight or ten hours earlier, as had Hortense and the children. The pair had turned up on horseback for the circus’s twilight show. They reeked of alcohol and strode into the tent without buying tickets. Edward did not challenge them. Both were dressed in the uniforms of the Mexican Guardia Rural. They wore wide-brimmed sombreros and gray shirts and britches trimmed with braided silver. They were part of a countrywide constabulary maintained by Mexico’s perennial president, dictator Porfirio Díaz, to seize land and property from the indigenous poor. When the men took their seats in the audience before the circus ring, the mothers and fathers sitting around them drew their children nearer.

  When the pair entered the tent a second time, well beyond midnight, they demanded money. The Gran Circo Codona seldom drew audiences of more than two or three dozen at any of its presentations. The only cash Edward had in the tent were the receipts the show had earned in the last day or two. He offered the paramilitaries all the cash he had in the tent, but the men started cursing him. The paltry receipts were hardly enough to satisfy them.

  They started rummaging through the family’s trunks, throwing costumes and cooking utensils to the ground, looking without success for more money. Next they moved to where Hortense and the children were huddled on the blankets. They cast the light of the lantern onto the faces of Hortense and Victoria.

  “Bonita, bonita,” they appraised. “Ah, muy bonita.”

  The fear deepened in Edward. He felt suddenly sick, as though he had just swallowed some fast-acting poison.

  What would he have been able to do if the armed rurales assaulted his wife and daughter? He tried talking calmly to the men, pleading with them not to harm his wife and daughter.

  To get them away from his family, Edward led the men from the tent and walked a half mile through the desert with them until they came upon a small village. Parked there, on a railroad siding, was the baggage car that moved the Gran Circo Codona from one stand to another. Edward unlocked the padlock at the door of the car, and, with the rurales following, entered the wheeled wooden box. By the light of his lantern, he lifted a floorboard, exposing a chamber containing two or three canvas sacks. The bags were filled with every centavo of the savings Edward had been able to accumulate with the circus over the years after meeting the family’s barest living expenses and paying the train operators who towed his show from one place to another. The bandits fit the sacks under their arms and disappeared into the night.

  When the sun rose, Edward arranged to have the baggage car moved to some new place up or down the rails. There was no trace of any kind of future visible to Edward when the Gran Circo Codona started rolling again. It had been scrubbed from the far skies, every detail of it, including his long-held vision of Victoria’s white house, with the family standing before it.

  “All those years, all those sacrifices for the circus, even the deaths of those babies who came before me, my brothers, and sister, who lived for only days or weeks—all this had been for nothing,” Victoria said. “Our family lost everything. Papa wept and wept.”

  In time, though, Edward’s spirits gradually started to brighten. He again began to see a future for his family, although just yet it lacked the shimmer of the old one and appeared further away than ever.

  “The circus was the only life he knew,” Victoria said. “It was the thing he could pass on to his children. He kept the show going for my brothers and me.”

  Dozens of small circuses, most of them horse-drawn wagon affairs, but also a few railroad enterprises of one or two cars, crosshatched the same countryside that the Gran Circo Codona roved in the 1880s, 1890s, and in the early part of the twentieth century. The tented shows were a favorite entertainment of Mexico’s poor families. The circuses, most of them presented entirely by members of the same family, were called carpas. Most of them combined features of the American and European circuses with elements of clownery and acrobatics that could be traced to the Aztec mountebanks who traipsed the land centuries earlier.

  Of all the carpas that crisscrossed the countryside early in the twentieth century, though, probably few presented entertainment that was as distinctive, varied, and finished as that of the Gran Circo Codona. Though nearing fifty, Edward continued to ascend and descend the Spiral Mountain at the conclusion of every performance. Hortense walked a tightrope, rode the Codona horse, did some clowning, and also wove through the circus’s benches, peddling homemade candies and pastries. More and more, though, it was their children who were becoming the circus’s most luminous attractions. This was always what Edward and Hortense had wanted. It had been their plan.

  While Alfredo’s earliest appearances on the trapeze were as a baby passenger in a leather pouch that Edward kept belted around his waist when he was flying, the boy started begging for a chance to perform in the family tent alone when he was about four. Edward and Hortense were apprehensive, but in time they relented. Still, they always positioned themselves below the trapeze when their son was swinging, holding a stretched blanket between them, ready to catch Alfredo if he should ever fall. He never did.

  “We all believed that Alfredo must have gotten his love and gifts from the hummingbirds in Hermosillo,” said Victoria. “Papa, Mama, and I always thought back to the days we spent there when Mama was still carrying him and waiting for his arrival. We thought those hummingbirds there must have transferred their magic right through her belly to her womb.”

  By the time Alfredo was ten or eleven, he was appearing in the circus on both the single trapeze and in a flying, double trapeze act with Edward, who did the catching. Alfredo had yet to turn any midair somersaults in his flying act with Papa, but he started presenting a stunt that was every bit as dazzling. While standing on the trapeze platform, he slipped a black hood over his head. Now unable to see anything, he stepped onto his bar and started swinging farther and farther out into the air. Finally he let go of the ropes and catapulted into space.

  He was an eagle, but one that was now blind as a bat. With his arms extended before him, he shot through the air for twenty feet or so. Then with the trueness of an arrow fired from William Tell’s crossbow, he hit his bull’s-eye: the strong and harboring hands of his father hanging upside down from a bar at the opposite end of the rigging.

  The feat never failed to bring everyone in the tent to their feet, cheering. The adoration that Alfredo received did not stop there. He had a shy manner and wavy brown hair, and by the time he was twelve or thirteen, his physique had already started to take on the concinnities of Michelangelo’s David. He was shirtless and wore tight, white leggings whenever he performed on the trapeze. There were always senoritas, and senoras, too, who were anxious to have a closer look at the boy flyer after the show.

  Of all the daredevils who appeared in Mexican circuses, none were more widely esteemed than trapeze flyers. The people saw them as successors to the voladores, Aztec neck-riskers from five centuries earlier who scaled one-hundred-foot poles, attached themselves to ropes, and then, in imitation of condors, leaped into space and
soared and circled around and around their tower.

  As virtuosic as young Alfredo’s trapeze performances were, Victoria may have been an even bigger favorite with the families inside the tent of the Gran Circo Codona—Primero en Su Clase. She had so many talents that she seemed to be something close to a full-blown circus by herself.

  Almost always, the circus began with Victoria appearing in the ring as an equestrienne. While the family horse cantered in a circle of sawdust, she pirouetted and did handstands on its back, and bounded into the air, throwing backward somersaults, always alighting on its hindquarter, inches from its tail. Two or three acts would pass, and then she would reappear, this time to perform on the single trapeze. Her presentations there, while lacking the dazzle of Alfredo’s, were always more than merely creditable. Next Victoria might reappear before spectators to join with her mother and brother Lalo in a clowning routine. Finally, usually as the last feature in the tent before Edward led the audiences outside where he ascended the Spiral Mountain, Victoria would return before the audiences yet another time.

  The mere sight of her was breathtaking. She was a vision costumed in a skirt of multilayered red and black cloth with multiple ruffles and an off-the-shoulders white peasant blouse. Her expression was demure as she stood before the audience, and because the benches were so close to the ring, it was possible for everyone to gaze into her eyes. Was there another young woman in the whole of Mexico whose eyes were that color? They were purplish blue, almost the color of lilacs. Her hair was wavy and black, and glinted as though there were specks of gold in it.

  She ascended a ladder of eight or ten steps to a taut, braided wire that was hardly thicker than a telephone cable and stretched eighteen or twenty feet between securing frames at both ends. At first she merely pranced back and forth over the cable. Next, with the lightness of a sparrow, she moved over it in little hops.

  And then she transformed herself from a child of innocence to a young gypsy lady of bewitchery. She gathered her ruffles in one hand and lifted her skirt a few inches above her feet. With her other hand, she started clicking a castanet. Her gold slippers jabbed at the wire over and over in a rapid staccato. She might have been in a smoke-smeared cabaret, moving among the tables, as she danced a flamenco.

  She was not quite finished.

  Edward, in a black tuxedo and always nearby when she was in the ring, made adjustments to her cable, changing her half-inch-wide performing stage from a tight wire to a slack wire. He loosened the strand so greatly that it drooped to within a foot of the ground at its midpoint. Victoria repositioned herself at the lowest point of the wire, bobbling a bit because of her shaky underfooting. Slowly at first, she started rocking the wire laterally from side to side with her feet. The slack wire moved a little higher right and left of her with each of her pushes. Eventually it was oscillating to her sides a full 180 degrees. Her head and feet were now exactly horizontal, and, impossibly it seemed, she was able to maintain her balance on the whipping strand. The wire moved even higher. Finally she allowed it to fling her into the air. She sailed a dozen feet and then landed safely in her father’s arms.

  Victoria was surpassing as a circus artist, and so arrestingly pretty, that her reputation soon began to extend well beyond those arid places of sand and steer bones where the Gran Circo Codona mostly raised its tent. Agents from the circuses that only played the big cities started turning up at the Codona carpa, trying to arrange with Edward to have Victoria make special appearances with their shows.

  One of these circuses was the Orrin Bros. Great Metropolitan Circus. It was the largest circus in all of Mesoamerica, and also the oldest. Victoria was still short of her thirteenth year, but Edward could not turn away the offer. It had always been his and Hortense’s dream that their children achieve wide renown. When Victoria appeared in the Great Metropolitan Circus’s tent, it was before an audience of thousands, not one of a dozen or two that typically entered the tent of the Gran Circo Codona.

  Three or four years later, on a December 12, Victoria’s wire was stretched from one stone wall to another in Mexico City’s El Toreo, not a circus, but the most famous of Mexico’s bull rings. Her appearance there was a part of a celebration commemorating the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a high holiday in Mexico. There were mariachi bands, voladores, a chariot race, even bullfighters, but none of the attractions was quite as sensational as “The Venus of the Wire,” as Victoria was beginning to become known.

  The coliseum was absolutely hushed as she moved forward, inches at a time, over her wire highway in the sky. Sixty or eighty feet below her was the same soil where the blood of dozens of bulls and at least a few matadors had been spilled over the years. When she finally reached the end of her journey, El Toreo erupted in a storm of roars. So great was the tumult that day, in fact, that one newspaper observed five years later that Victoria’s “ovation [was] still remembered … in the gay capital.”

  Among those on their feet, cheering and blowing kisses to Victoria, was a man occupying a special box in the stadium decorated in red, white, and green bunting, the national colors of Mexico. He was surrounded by dignitaries and wore a helmet and a military coat whose front was covered with two or three dozen medals and ribbons. It was a man whom Edward frankly despised, Porfirio Díaz, then nearing eighty, and in his eighth term as Mexico’s president. Through his henchmen, the dictator had once stolen a future from Edward and his family. Probably that was not so much on Edward’s mind this moment, though.

  The cries of “Brava! … Brava! … Brava!” just kept ringing out for Victoria, the Venus of the Wire, from the crowd of fifty thousand on their feet in the stone arena, and Papa Codona was enjoying what likely was the proudest moment of his life. Alfredo was, too. He revered his sister. He might also have been hoping that a day would come when his father would be just as proud of him.

  CHAPTER 10

  Alfredo had never seen a fairy before.

  She was impossibly small and delicate, as fragile-looking as a butterfly, and so beautiful. She was all in white—tutu, stockings, slippers. Her hair was the color of gathered sunlight.

  A luminous nimbus glowed all around her. She looked like a saint on a holy card. She might have been seventy or eighty feet up in the air of the Coliseum in Chicago, seemingly somehow kept aloft by nothing more than the beams of phosphorescent white light aimed at her.

  How Alfredo wished he could be up there, too, joined with her in an aerial pas de deux, floating and fluttering in nothingness. Her beauty moved in and through him, flooding him everywhere with feelings he had never known as deeply before. He was sixteen.

  In the parlance of the circus, Alfredo was a flyer, or as he was identified by other big top performers, a “leaper.” Leitzel was an aerialist. Immediately, though, he saw the two of them as birds of a feather. Both were more at ease in the air than on earth.

  There were times when Alfredo had a sense that she had made eye contact with him as she performed. Just him. That was foolish, of course. Even he must have known that. He was inside the cavernous arena, watching her from a dusky aisle between the seats. Thousands of others were peering up at her, too. It was the first night of a new season for the Barnum & Bailey Circus.

  As young as he was, Alfredo even by then was regarded as the most beautiful male with the circus. In stolen moments in dark and empty tents, he had been with other young women before, showgirls, and sometimes young town girls who might have come to the circus with their parents one night, and then, after seeing him, returned a second night, unaccompanied and free.

  After Leitzel descended from the Coliseum’s stratosphere to take her bows and harvest the cheers and applause, Alfredo ran to a performers’ dressing area in the building where Victoria, as a headliner of the circus, had a small, private, curtained-off cubicle with a mirror and makeup table, a cot, a costume rack, and a Taylor trunk. Papa Edward was with her.

  “After seeing Leitzel that first time, Alfredo was changed, all right,” Victoria sai
d. “He was giddy. He was gushing. He was breathless. He said he had just seen the loveliest creature he had ever seen in his life. He would marry her someday, he said. He sounded loco, just plumb crazy.”

  Alfredo always seemed to be on wires, jittery, his attention ping-ponging from one subject to another, but she had never before seen him quite as discombobulated as he was this night. She suppressed an urge to laugh at him. How many times had she herself turned boys into mooncalves simply by appearing in the circus ring?

  “Alfredo was in love, crazy in love, and for the first time ever,” Victoria said. “He was all mixed up, happier than a lark and also aching because he had just seen the girl of his dreams.”

  It was the night of April 1, 1909, and the first time in the Barnum & Bailey Circus’s three decades’ history that the show had opened a new season in a city anywhere outside New York. In the past, it had always rankled on the Ringling brothers that the Barnum show had a lock on Madison Square Garden, the most prestigious of the circus halls in America. Because they were now in possession of not just the Ringling Bros. World’s Greatest Shows but also the Barnum colossus, they decided to premiere their eponymously named circus in New York, and the Barnum show in the Windy City.

  By 1909, the Codona family finally had their own house, a home in El Paso, Texas, with a small barn in the backyard that Papa Edward hoped to turn into a school for aspiring circus athletes. Alfredo and Victoria, along with their father, traveled by train to Chicago’s Coliseum, arriving just a few days before the circus’s opening. Hortense remained in El Paso, caring for Lalo, then thirteen, and another child who had been born into the family, Edward, five.