Mandragon

by R. M. Koster

  None of this showed while greying, double-chinned Titana loomed on her platform draped in a high-necked, floor-length robe, but now and then, as her barker spieled of wonders to be viewed within, she lifted her sleeve to consult the gold Omega which her lover stenciled on her wrist the day the last usable patch of her was filled and he deserted her, stopping time once and for all as far as she cared, at twelve noon or midnight, the sixth of some month or another, whatever year it was.

  Next to her was the geek in his wheeled cage. A sign, “CAVERNICULUS ASIATICUS—TERROR DE SUMATRA,” was hung on the platform below him, and his barker (in pith helmet and safari jacket, jodhpur pants and boots) yacked volubly on the travail of bagging him, the danger and the expense, but in truth he was not especially exotic: a dipso Indian, spindly and terra-cotta brown, tremored with shrugs and twitches.

  He looked fierce enough, though. His hair stood straight out from his head like hedgehog quills. His nails were an inch long and bent like talons. He wore a loincloth made of imitation fur and a bone necklace that rattled with his ties. Just squatting in his cage he scared the children. And when the cage was rolled inside, he snarled and whinnied. And when the barker stuffed a chicken in, he squealed. He grabbed it, rent its wings, and popped its head—the snap ping beak and all!—into his mouth and gnawed it off; then spat the head out through the bars into the audience, and (dribbling blood and feathers) tore the rest apart and smeared the offal on his naked chest. He was the best geek in the hemisphere, I’m sure!

  They put him in his cage an hour before show time, and made sure that he got no booze. Sometimes delirium seized him while we miracles were waiting for the Rotunda to open, and he hopped about howling, knocked his head against the bars, flailed his hands across his thighs to sweep away imaginary spiders—at which Gwendolyn would begin weeping, and Harry shake his little sword and shout, “Give him a drink, for Jesus’ sake! She can’t bear that racket,” but there was no drink for the geek till the tent closed.

  Out of his cage he was meek as a kitten. He slept and traveled with Imelda, La Centaura’s Percherons, the wide-rumped greys she rode around the big top, one foot on each. He sang to them when he was drunk in a soft Andean language no one else could understand. He never showed anger, not even when the roustabouts teased him, promised him rum for chewing horseturds and then tossed him an empty bottle. The only trouble he ever caused was in Maracaibo once, when Imelda fainted from heatstroke, and he snatched the rubbing alcohol that someone brought and swigged it off. No matter how miserable the rest of us were, no matter how low, the geek was always clearly in worse shape, so all of us were glad to have him with us. His name, or nickname, was Chancaca.

  Next was the Seal Girl, La Foca Humana, whose hands grew from her shoulders, whose feet hung where her thighs ought to have been. Plenty of spectators came to her plat form to gape and point, but all she could do for a special show was tell her story, made up for her by Don Lorenzo, about how her Eskimo father killed the sacred white seal, and was cursed in all his offspring by the shaman. She told it poorly, in a weak monotone, forgetting details, mixing it all up, and people jeered—“An Eskimo from Barranquilla! If she’s an Eskimo, then I’m a whale!”—and came out yelling “Gyp!” and warned the others not to buy any tickets. She rarely gave more than one special show a day, sometimes only one per town, sometimes not even one, if people remembered her from the year before. That cost her money. Lesser freaks like her got only room and board and a cut of the specials gate, and the barkers cheated us out of most of that. But the worst was that Don Lorenzo posed her on an ice cake—for effect, of course—and no specials meant her bottom got no chance to thaw.

  Mohotty was on her left, turbaned and loinclothed, lotused on his rollered spike board. From time to time he reached into the brazier in his lap and plucked up a live coal. Rubbed it on his chest like a bar of soap. Crushed it on his forehead so the sparks flew. Swallowed the glowing bits. And that was just an hors d’oeuvre. Behind the curtain he drove skewers through his arms, through his scrawny thighs, through both his cheeks. He poked a sword through his flank from back to front so that a foot of steel showed on each side—all without shedding one drop of blood! He held an iron rod out by the ends while his barker warmed the middle with a blowtorch, and when the middle part went white and soft, Mohotty bent the thing into a V, and hung it on his neck. Sat there like a statue, wearing a glowing bar of iron for a shawl!

  They used a volunteer for the finale—and there was always someone, a welder maybe, or a body-shop worker, someone used to handling torches; a foreman, or an off duty cop, someone who liked breaking people down. He got a chance to hose Mohotty with the blowtorch. Flame licked the bottoms of Mohotty’s feet, lapped his crossed thighs. Blue flame tongued in Mohotty’s ear, curled in his lips and eyes. Mohotty sat there on his spikes, palms and fingers pressed together, not even blinking.

  Sometimes the torcher grew desperate, as though Mohotty’s calm impeached his manhood. Drilled fire in Mohotty’s armpit. Swept it along his spine. Stuffed it in his faintly smiling mouth. Once one of them swung the futile torch aside and struck Mohotty’s turban with the fuel tank, knocked it off into the brazier. The cloth flared to ashes in a twinkling, but it wasn’t even singed while Mohotty wore it.

  Why did Mohotty leave Ceylon? Why did he work in sideshow? Some sort of penance maybe, for he took no money from Don Lorenzo, wouldn’t touch money when it was tossed to him. Gili-Gili collected his salary and kept it all, gave Mohotty trailer space and his daily teacup of rice. Mohotty would take no more.

  And I remember when Don Lorenzo was leading the latest rarity in his collection from Zito’s beast truck to Rebozo’s van. Gave me a blanket for my nakedness and pulled me by a corner of it. Mohotty came out of Gili-Gili’s trailer, saw me and stepped in front of me, stopping me and Don Lorenzo. Studied me with his bright little black eyes. Gazed nodding at my teeth. Then pressed his palms and fingers together under his chin and dipped his head two inches.

  “When you are ready I will teach you, if you wish.”

  It might have been better had I taken him for my master.

  We had a pair of Siamese twins, Nico and Pico, Argentine Italians like Amichevole. Their place was between Mohotty and the entrance. But for their deformity they might have been movie stars, with their wavy hair and sparkling teeth, their long-lashed violet eyes. They wore a one-piece yellow satin coverall, and for their special show undressed in tandem, Nico feigning shyness, Pico taunting him on. Down to bikini briefs to show their juncture. Then they did a comedy routine based on their predicament: Pico the brash and Nico the tender, joined at the hip.

  They played this bit off stage as well as on, though it was all pretense, a con worked for the composite freak’s advantage, like the police trick where Brute berates a cringing suspect, snarls and threatens, punches him about, until Cute enters with a show of outrage, shoos the bully out, and offers apologies and a cigarette. Pico flirted scandalously with circus girls and customers alike, while Nico blushed and begged their pardon, told his brother not to be so gross, and in this fashion they got more women than any three men in the Americas. Night and morning their trailer throbbed with the love moans of women lifted past ecstasy by their duplicate attentions, and they played foursomes besides. With sisters, with sisters-in-law, with cousins or friends. With girls who, till the bedding, had been total strangers to each other. And in Havana, once, a woman who spent an hour with them between shows re turned at midnight with her two teen-aged daughters, and called the turns in the quadrille that followed, and stretched the square into a pentagon.

  Nico and Pico were in their twenties, had been in side show since their infancy. Their humporamic angst was fed by boredom. They were heartily sick of the Grand Duchy of Freakenbourg and longed to emigrate to the main tent, so they were always trying to put acts together. At length they hit on motorcycles—nothing original, just jumping over cars, but for them it meant two cycles side by side, precision teamwork. It might have
been a good draw. Nico and Pico thought so. Don Lorenzo thought so too, could hear crowds roaring, could see crowds bustling to buy tickets, but he didn’t let on. Told Nico and Pico not to give themselves airs. Said he’d not have freaks stinking up his big top. Followed, in short, his customary practice with attractions, his artist-freaks and freak-artists, keeping the twins in their place so that he’d get their act dirt cheap when it was ready.

  It never was. One day in practice Pico left the ramp too soon. Or Nico lagged behind by a split second. In any case, they crashed. Not a scratch on Nico, but Pico landed on his chin and snapped his neck—as if he’d been hanged with a six-foot drop, declared the coroner. Dead as a stone before he stopped sliding, and Nico couldn’t last long joined to a corpse.

  “Go get a knife and cut this dumb stiff off me!”

  And then: “Ahh, what’s the use! It wouldn’t work, and I’d rather stick with Pico.”

  And then: “Be nice to get laid again before it’s over, but Pico always made the propositions.”

  On the other side of the Rotunda, half-circling round from the midgets’ right, there was a strong man and a contortionist, a human reptile, a sleight-of-hand artist, and me.

  The strong man was a gringo, but “Here and there” is all he’d say when asked where he was from. He called himself Bruno, but no one was sure about his last name. It sounded like some general’s or some writer’s. He wasn’t tall, or very big of bone, but he had built himself up marvelously. His neck and biceps were a half a yard around. He had no picture build like Mr. This or That, but he could lift double his weight, nearly four hundred pounds, over his head. A large moustache drooped under his large nose. His smile was sad as any clown’s.

  Bruno wore a leopard skin in the Rotunda, and a wide belt, wider at the back than at the buckle, and leather wristbands. He had a show weight with bells like cannon balls, and from time to time he lifted it, grunting volcanically, to draw the spectators, but his real equipment was inside behind the curtain: an Olympic set, his prize possession: a two-meter bar with red cast-iron collars, and matched disks up to fifty kilos. He did the military press, the snatch, the clean-and-jerk, and when he squatted for a clean with the bar full, it bowed and flexed like a willow. He never put on the limit he could lift, not while performing, but he could break the national record of every country that the circus played, and from the grimaces he made, the groans he uttered, the way his face went red, it seemed that he was lifting all the world. For a stunt he lifted his barker, who knew how to keep his body rigid, then held him overhead in his right hand.

  Bruno was a wrestler too, and had a standing offer on the poster of him outside the Rotunda: a hundred US dollars to any man who threw him off his feet, or lasted three minutes with him on the mat without getting his shoulders pinned. In all his time with the circus he never lost. He wanted to wrestle Zito’s bear in an exhibition, and offered Zito half the gate, and pledged he’d take it easy on the beast, but Zito wouldn’t go along, and no one blamed him. Bruno was gentle as a puppy sheep dog off the mat, but in San Juan, Puerto Rico, once a fellow he was wrestling with bit his ear, and Bruno nearly killed him. Zito wouldn’t have had much of an act without his bear.

  Bruno slept fourteen hours a day and complained of insomnia. He always had a cold, or complained of one. He ate six soft-boiled eggs for breakfast, and for dinner a fish or lobster, then a whole chicken, then a steak and a few chops, then several scoops of ice cream. He drank only iced tea and never smoked. Between shows he played chess with Gili-Gili.

  Magda, La Mujer Chicle, could poke her head and shoulders through her legs until her forehead touched her coccyx. She could wrap her legs around her neck and balance on her palms and walk around like a weird sort of bird. She could twist her neck until her face looked back over her shoulders, then clasp her arms over her spine so that her back looked like her front, so that her feet seemed to be pointed the wrong way. She could tuck her toes into her armpits and rock on her belly like a cradle, and tie herself into such knots no spectator knew which limb was which. And for her final stunt she did a handstand on a chair, and raised her head and put her chin up on the chair back, and dropped her feet and curled them round her chin, so that her face grinned out between her ankles, and her ankles seemed to support her severed head.

  She was small and pretty, lean and supple as a weasel through the waist, but mangoed above with breasts that swung provocatively when she bowed to take applause. She was forever flashing her eyes at the men in the audience, even those who had wives and children with them. Huge black eyes, boldly outlined in kohl, and flicking her tongue across her rouged and pouted lips. She moved her hips sinuously before each trick and caressed her arms and shoulders. When contorted, she moaned ecstatically, and smiled out promises of bliss to every guy around. Men came out of Magda’s special shows bent double, holding their sombreros over their groins.

  Not a day passed when she didn’t get three or four propositions, and if the fellow looked prosperous, she’d whisper for him to come to her trailer after the tent closed. And he would grin and blink and nod and hobble off, sperm backed up to his Adam’s apple. She was no whore though. She had a husband, a gypsy like herself. Together they’d escaped from Hungary, and together they played the badger game. As soon as money had changed hands, when trousers were sloughed down around ankles, then enter Sandor, cursing like a fiend, waving his knife, to wilt the sucker’s wand and send him skipping.

  Don Lorenzo billed his human reptile as Ofideo, the Snake Man, but he looked more like an iguana really. His eyes were set wide apart, his neck was humped, his back was ridged with spines. His thumbs were on the outside of his hands, and his short arms could scarcely straighten out past a right angle. His skin was smooth and slick and slimy, fishy-cool to the touch, grey-brown in color, greyer indoors and browner out in the sunlight. When he was specially content, his skin turned a rich green. On all his body there was not one hair, not so much as an eyelash, and his translucent eyelids closed from the bottom up. He looked like something crept from a sick man’s nightmare.

  And yet this monster put our whole troupe to shame. He knew four languages besides his Surinam Dutch, and read thick books in all of them. He knew the countries that the circus played better than most natives, and in his shows quipped cleverly about the local scene, drawing wave upon wave of laughter from the people, till he went green with joy, and unrolled his long vermilion tongue in flashing stabs, and joined in with a high-pitched hee-hee-hee. He gave the circus children lessons, even me, and there was no one abler when it came to arguing with Don Lorenzo. Performers took him for their advocate at contract time. They brought their personal disputes to him as well—that circus seethed with rivalries!—and would abide by his decisions. He was fair, and he attended every case in earnest, though not so earnestly as to lose his sense of humor. A human reptile, but fit to be president of any country that we toured. Pity he was freaked outside where everyone could see it, not in his heart like a legitimate politico!

  He never whined or moped, though his disfigurement was the most hideous of all. Most freaks felt sorry for themselves, he said, because they had the idea normal folk are happy. Freaks ought to look more closely at the rubes.

  Ofideo’s love life was sparse, and that was a shame, but in Managua once a beautiful and wealthy woman took him for her lover, to teach her husband not to fool around. Ofideo stayed green as a palm for weeks.

  Gili-Gili was an Egyptian, a round little man with eyes like ripe olives floating in their oil. His nose curved like a scimitar. His cheeks were so pouchy he could fit a string with all the flags of the United Nations on it into one of them, and not disturb his diction. For his finale he pulled the string out, drew out an end to his arm’s length, then gave it to a spectator, and had him walk backward pulling it until the tiny flags were clotheslined from the stage to the tent wall. He wore tuxedo pants and a white dinner jacket and a fez, from which he took not rabbits but white rats. He pulled twelve or fourteen fat rats
out of his fez and tossed them in the air above the audience and made them vanish. Or so it seemed to the squealing folks, though there was only one rat, and it never left his hand. He took a polished ebony cane a good yard long from the breast pocket of his dinner jacket and rapped it loudly on the platform. He poured a quart of motor oil into his side pocket, and not a drop soaked through or overflowed. He took a thimble from the nearest spectator’s ear and turned it into a fishbowl, then with successive passes of a hand kerchief caused the bowl to fill with water, and the water to have a goldfish swimming in it, and the whole concern—fish, water, and bowl—to disappear. Then fat white rats began creeping from his left sleeve, rat after rat, a new rat poking forth his snout as soon as the rat before it had gone sailing into nothingness above the public’s heads. And with each trick and liquid stare and a low chuckle, an evil grin and a rumbled “Gili-Gili!” He was a first-rate journeyman Illusionist.

  But for tales of his triumphs there was no one like him. He had appeared, he said, in Paris and Berlin, at the Palladium in London, and at the Roxy in New York. He said he’d entertained Prince Constantine of Greece on his sixth birthday, and had a medal struck him by King Paul: a gold disk the size of a demitasse saucer which, alas! was stolen from his suite in Tehran when he performed before the Shah. He was, he said, Farouk’s personal jester, and confidant, and friend, and when the Big Three met in Cairo in ’43, Farouk (said Gili-Gili) took him to play for them. Churchill, he said, was hugely pleased, and Roosevelt offered him US citizenship, but Chiang demanded to know how the tricks worked, then sulked when Gili-Gili refused to tell him.