Circus Days and Nights

by Robert Lax

  At the stand outside a dark little vegetable store in town, I bought a small bag of tomatoes. The lady wrapped them in a paper cone. I washed them a few at a time in the clear jet of a little fountain in a quiet, empty public square before the worn stone steps of a twilight-colored church. The moment seemed both foreign and familiar.

  The next day we set out for Populi.

  It was not too far from Aquila to Populi, but the road was steep. Every few minutes we would come to a new steep incline and Fritz would have to brake the truck. Puncho and I would jump down and set blocks under the wheels. Then Fritz would start up again. As the convoy rolled forward, I would take the blocks out, set them on a little ledge next to the tent, and scramble onto the trailer while Puncho hopped back into the truck. The day was beautiful, but as the morning advanced it got very hot.

  At one point on a level stretch, Fritz stopped again, came back to my trailer, and detached it from the first trailer which carried the rattling steel poles and girders.

  “You stay here with the tent,” said Fritz. “It’s too heavy to pull up the hill.”

  “All right.”

  For a minute, after Fritz and Puncho drove off with the truck and trailer full of steel poles, I felt marooned. Still I was confident, reassured that they would be back for us; without the tent, there couldn’t be any performance.

  We were off to one side of the road in a nice part of the countryside. I liked seeing the fields and the hills around, and I liked sitting alone on the wagon with the tent, in the midst of it.

  I got down, found a red ladder at the side of the truck and, for a moment, set up my own circus.

  At the edge of the road I stood the ladder on end and stepped up onto the bottom rung and stood balancing on it for a moment. Then I tried the second step, holding tight to the stays of the ladder and leaning back to keep balanced. But the ladder fell forward and I let go. I kept trying until I got as high as the second step. Then I had another trick: standing on the lower rungs and walking with the ladder as though I were on stilts. Whatever I attempted, I did with as much professional flair as possible, bowing graciously to an unseen audience.

  By the time Fritz came back with the truck, I was up on the tent again, stretched out, leaning on one elbow, looking out over the summer fields.

  After they had left me, there had been an accident. On a particularly steep incline, the poles in the first trailer had begun to slide. In a second they had avalanched off the trailer and onto the road.

  At the top of the hill Fritz attached our trailer to “Le Dodge” and went back to pull the poles himself. A crowd of monteurs climbed onto the tent and rode with me: Henri, who had been interned in the States, and had heart trouble and periodic nervous crises; Banane, a Russian from Berlin, the chief monteur, and Marcel, an amiable roustabout who helped prod the lions out of their cages and had a felt hat turned down all around, sideburns, and a carefully trimmed mustache. They passed a bottle of wine among them, made jokes, slept briefly in the folds of the tent.

  When we got to Populi, Banane and the monteurs began to lay out the lines in a piazza in the center of town. Fritz sat for a moment on a concrete curbing at the side of the lot, with his chin in his hands. He was still feeling ill. He was angry at himself and everyone else because of it. I stood beside him for a minute, then decided to have a look at the town. It was almost noon and the sky was overcast.

  The streets were narrow and angular, opening out in one or two places to flat public squares. In one of these, the menagerie wagons had been lined up in a hollow rectangle. The ticket office was set up in another. So it seemed as though there were two shows in town. Harry was working as I went by, tightening a bar on one of the cages. I found a restaurant in town, a little place with red paint around the borders of the windows, a row of potted plants inside, all signs that lunch would be expensive but it seemed to be the only restaurant open. A director and one of the starring clowns were there, already eating when I came in. I ordered spaghetti, cheese and wine. I walked through town; Populi was just the right name for it. It had public schools, banks, post offices, and a sober, civic-minded population. Political posters were on the old stone walls: Parti Communiste.

  The day continued overcast, changing every twenty minutes; showers, a few moments of sunshine, and then clouds again. I stopped back at the circus several times to see how the montage was progressing and how Fritz was feeling. One time I found him sitting outside his wagon talking to ten or fifteen men of the town: against the communists and in favor of Fritz’s kind of peace.

  Later in the afternoon I climbed a hill toward an old castle, got lost in a patchwork of backyards, and finally scrambled down to a narrow street that led back to the circus; past an old man on a stone bench who sat leaning on his cane, past two old women talking together on the stone steps of their house, past a little girl with long blonde hair. I drank water from a public fountain and read a proclamation (heavy black letters on yellow paper) where the mellow light of late afternoon fell on the rugged wall.

  I went back to the circus. The tent was up now and they were beginning to sell tickets. Fritz’s cold was worse, but his spirits were better. He took off five minutes and went down to a café where we drank coffee with a shot of rum.

  Toward evening I walked through the town again and ran into the janitor of the public school, who took me on a tour of the building. Later he gave me the name of his relatives in America and let me look out of the upstairs windows at the beautiful fields beyond the town.

  The monteurs were in all the bars, being very well treated by a democratic population. All of them liked Populi.

  I ran into Harry as he came out of the menagerie, and we headed immediately for a grocery store, bought bread and cheese and anchovies, and ate them standing at the counter. Then at a café we filled a Coca-Cola bottle with hot coffee, added a few shots of rum, and carried it back to Fritz along with some aspirins. He was pleased. He’d been having some trouble with the generator and couldn’t get off the lot. He hadn’t eaten for two days, but rum and coffee was just what he needed.

  By 7:30 the crowd outside the tent was enormous. We had set up only one ring in this town, and were charging only 100 lire a ticket instead of 250 (a one-night stand in a town of poor farmers). By the time the evening performance began, the tent was fuller than it had been since Rome. Children were sitting on the ground in front of the bleachers all the way up to the ring. An enthusiastic crowd, they applauded, demanded encores, gasped at the aerial acts, and were convulsed with laughter at the clowns. Their country faces, ruddy from the fields, shone with delight in the performance. Their dark eyes followed each move, bright with amazement. Their lips were a little open (poised), ready to shout or smile or laugh aloud. None of us had ever known such an enthusiastic and sympathetic audience. The performance itself improved, reaching top form in a single, lively ring.

  At the end, when the children were doing le can-can francais, and before the final circling of plumed horses, I took a walk out away from the town, down a dark main road that led to a long bluff overlooking a valley.

  The stars were bright and seemed near. I sat down at the roadside and looked out over the dark stretch of lowlands. I felt melancholy and yet untroubled; curiously estranged but at the same time at home. It was as though, sitting on this dark rock on a far-off hillside, I had been carried home for a few minutes to sit in the darkness of the hills I knew; hills I knew as well as my own blood, whose depths I had measured as well as my own heart’s, but which in the end I knew no better than the hills around me now (no better and no less). For I was close to each, and far away. Almost weeping, yet with an endurable sorrow, I looked out over the valley, down into its darkness. Not far off down the road, in a rising mist, was the strand of lights which looped before the tent.

  Later, Fritz and I slept under his wagon, putting our mattresses on the road across the width of the wagon so that we faced the tent. I slept soundly; Fritz must have too. I woke at about 5:30 and ther
e was already a grey light dawning. Fritz was just waking then too.

  “Bonjour, Robert, bien dormi?”

  “Oui, très bien, Fritz. Ça va mieux?”

  “Oui, ça va mieux. C’est tout passé.”

  I could have slept another hour but felt a presence near me, urging me to look in its direction. I looked down toward the foot of the mat. Leaning down easily, smiling kindly, attentive, eager, but not importunate, was George Wong, my particular friend in the family of Chinese acrobats. I had forgotten that we had planned to ride together on the tent (le chapiteau) today. But he had arrived exactly on time, well dressed, with his good new camera slung over his shoulder in a dark leather case.

  Fritz got up, pulling his mattress after him. I rolled up the sleeping bag and put it in the back of the truck among the lights and wires.

  Then George and I climbed up on the tent trailer and waited for the caravan to move.

  The road out of Populi went downhill at first, then for a long level stretch through the fields. George and I lay in the folds of the tent, looking up at the sky and white clouds blown in from the sea, then out at parched and stubbly fields where hay had been harvested.

  An hour out of Populi we stopped for coffee and rolls.

  “How’s it going?” asked Fritz.

  “Great,” said George.

  “Wait till you see the roads we have to go down,” said Fritz.

  At about 11 we came to the road leading down to Pescara. The sun by now was bright and hot; the road was narrow with chalky cliffs on either side. Fritz slowed the truck slightly and we could feel the tension of resistance to the sharp descent. The road, which must have begun as a goat path in the mountains, was never meant for trucks and trailers. But Fritz threaded its abrupt turnings cautiously and neatly; leaning out of the cab and working within an inch of the rocks at one side of the road.

  We crept down for almost an hour. We could sense in all we saw, and by the smell and feeling of the air, that we were coming to the sea.

  We leveled off for a few minutes, climbed another hill, and then came down to the outskirts of Pescara. The road had widened out now and was completely flat and straight. We passed a line of stands and restaurants. And now both of us were excited by the prospect of coming to the sea. I knew, and had known for several days, what Pescara would be like; far off at the foot of the mountains, white sand, white sun on the breakers of a green sea.

  The other trucks were catching up to us. On the one just behind us, the roustabouts rode, some in the back with the materials, some sitting on the roof of the cab.

  “As soon as we get there, we’ll put on our bathing suits and go down to the ocean,” I said.

  “We can take our cameras,” said George.

  It didn’t surprise us that the circus lot was so near the sea. Our only disappointment was that it wasn’t right on the sand. Yet we didn’t run to the ocean the minute we got there. We first followed Fritz to a big, light, airy, and newly built café for cups of black coffee and sugared rolls. Then, when it was almost time for lunch, we took a run, George and I, down to the seaside.

  The sand was not white, but a bleached tan, coarse-grained, good for mixing with concrete. The sky was not Italian blue, the sun no whitely glowing ball, but both, for the moment of noon, a little hazy. There were breakers all right, but the waves were a sandy mixture of brown and grey, roiled water. Even the castles of its spray were circled with moats of sand.

  The two perchistes (perch-pole artists) from Savoy had gotten here ahead of us. “Can’t swim in it,” they said. “It’s the change of seasons, August ninth and tenth, feast days of Pescara’s fisherman saint. Nobody ever goes swimming then. It’s forbidden. Tomorrow will be OK.” The snarling ocean affirmed what they said.

  “Well, we can take pictures anyway,” said George, taking one of me in a state of desolation.

  We ate in an upstairs restaurant whose blinds seemed habitually drawn against the sun. We ordered a dish of fish and rice. While we were eating, a clown, whom I had usually seen in his spangled costume, came over to our table, followed by a beautifully smiling woman with lively dark brown eyes. He introduced her to us as his wife, saying that she spoke good English (and she did).

  In the afternoon we went to the beach again, this time meeting the Le Forts, who never missed a chance to swim, and the two Savoy brothers of the perch-pole act. Though one of the Le Forts rushed into the water briefly, the rest of us stayed out; the acrobats playing ball and turning handstands on the beach.

  There was a festival in town that night for the fisherman saint. Most of it took place on a couple of boardwalks along the sea, just a step from the circus grounds. When I got back from supper (which I ate alone at the café), I looked for Fritz. But 15 minutes earlier someone had seen him going toward the festival in his white cap. I had expected him to wait for me. But I had gotten back too late. I found my white cap too, put it on, and went out toward the boardwalks.

  The first of these was a block from the ocean and ran like a deck raised above the sand. The street was festooned with streamers, archways and strings of many-colored lights. A few little stands sold candy, paper birds, hot crullers and little bright red shrimp. Songs of the sea came over a rudimentary speaker system with every scratch amplified and every note pathetically distorted. Yet they were wonderful carnival songs, sung with spirit and listened to in innocence. Beyond the runway of lights and music, the night and the sea seemed a high black wall: a realm of mystery from which things came (winds, mist, the fish and prawns, and even these bright-eyed celebrants on shore), a mysterious realm from which things came, but into which no one should carelessly enter. Was Fritz out there, somewhere beyond the lights, walking along the shore? I wandered among the stands, alone and melancholy. The mist was falling heavily as rain. I was coming closer to the source of the music, when on an impulse I turned, stepped as quickly as I could out of the area of lights, walked back in a straight line through the field to our tent with its filtering lights (the familiar blare of its trumpets, the muffled percussion of its disciplinary drums).

  I lay down on my pad in the grass behind the electric wagon, listening to the music of circus and fair as they battled each other in the night. Then, off in the direction of the sea, rockets went up, red and green sprays of light which spread and glowed, and fell quietly and sadly back into the night. The little runway of lights was still aglow, even after the circus had ended, and the people, talking excitedly, had burst like a wind out of the broad main entrance, then slowed and went off home. I was asleep before Fritz got back to the wagon.

  The next morning was Sunday and I had found a little church (as fragile as a sailboat) between the lot and the sea. At mass there was a handful of little old ladies, mostly in black, and a few soberly dressed, round, kind and serious-looking men. But standing in back were the young of the parish: beautiful young girls with bright scarves on their heads; young men in suits they could have worn only on Sundays. A marble plaque embellished with an anchor listed the names of parishioners lost at sea. But the little church was light as a skiff, and the mass was red as wine and brighter than gold.

  Feeling light and happy, I passed through the lot; stopped a moment to talk to the Le Forts. “Will you be coming with us tomorrow?” they asked. “No, I think I’d better be going back. Where is it tomorrow?”

  “San Juliana,” they said, “then Rimini. Rimini is very nice. You’d better come along.”

  “I’ll see. Anyway, I’ll see you before tomorrow.”

  I went over past the tent to the main street and into the airy café where we had first checked in. Fritz was there and so was George Wong. We had caffe latte and sugared rolls. We sat a long time talking about the weather. Then Fritz went back to the tent. George and I went around the corner to take a picture of the circus billboard: the caravan threading down a mountain road.

  Later I went back to the wagon and lay down again on the mat which we had left spread out on the grass. Fritz, all washed and
shaved, and again with the cap, asked me if I wanted to take a stroll over to the fair. I said sure, and we cut through the field to the boardwalk.

  We ran into Paul, a Breton, who helped Fritz with wiring. He was just coming out of one café, so we strolled along together to another with flap doors that let in air and sunlight. We each ordered a vino rosso, and shared a couple of pieces of heavily spiced salami. “Sure you don’t mind my coming along?” I asked Fritz. “I wouldn’t have asked you,” he said. We wandered around the stands for another half hour and then went back to the tent.

  Toward noon, I walked into town, asked a man in the street for the name of a good restaurant; not too expensive. He took me over to one owned by a friend of his, just a few blocks from the circus. Everyone else had discovered it that day too. All the tables were full of people from the show. I ordered a “spaghetti al burro” and carafe of wine, then took coffee with Monsieur Le Deuff and the Italian accountants for the show. “We’ll have to be getting back to France,” Le Deuff was saying. “Business is good, but traveling here is expensive and taxes are terrible.” As long as they were in Italy, a couple of Italian entrepreneurs were taking a cut of the profits. When they got to Rimini in three days, they could turn back, then go over the border and into the south of France. “It has been beautiful,” Le Deuff said wistfully, “but far too expensive.”

  After lunch, I sat inside the tent, alone on one of the planks in the gallery. Sunlight streamed in from the top of the tent (from the holes that surrounded the center pole) three separate rays which fell as three discs of light into the ring. One was on the bright red tabouret the elephants sat on, one straddled its diagonal blue leg, the third stood poised sedately in the ring as though having performed and about to perform again. There was no sound in the tent, and no other activity but that of the lights and occasionally the breathing of the whole tent when a breeze sighed through it. When the wind moved the tent, the discs of light were displaced from the stool to the ring where they were shaken like dice; set in motion as though by the hands of a juggler. But as the earth moved away from its noon, they mounted again up the blue diagonal toward the top of the red tabouret.