CIRCUS
Even in my dreams I planned how I
would dig out the ground around the tent, slice the canvas, or in some
other way enter the circus and see the big show. I was ready to seduce the
guard’s daughter, even his wife, turn into a clown, steal, lie, commit
crimes. In vain: the seemingly flimsy, soft canvas fortress was
unconquerable.
The tent was at the edge of the city, where the old wooden
houses disappeared and the field overgrown with wild poppies started.
Stretched and as erect as an elephant’s tusk, it shone in the sun. It
flashed colors like the fire of a dragon. It breathed with its enormous
chest like a child’s toy, swaying this way and that in the wind – a giant
ship on the wide sea.
Strange thing: around the tent there was an empty meadow. No
sleeping cars, no people, no children, no animals. God knows where the
circus people slept. Next to the entrance to the tent was a cabin where the
guard, his wife, and daughter lived.
Late in the night, when the audience arrived, the circus and
the area around it was bathed in a waterfall of light that fell from all
sides. In this full, magical illumination you could not recognize your own
brother, not to mention seeing where the clowns came from, the playthings,
the tamer of the wild beasts.
The audience was chosen. The key to the selection was free:
it had to do with masks and clothes. The visitors, who came masked as
bandits, pigs, or sharks, also had to wear authentic costumes of nobles and
rulers of the past. Those who dressed as children of the modern age needed
authentic masks. Of course, the formal clothes could easily be bought. But
that was not the case with the masks. There were not for sale, and nobody
alive – I mean those with whom I spoke – knew how the guests found them.
The transformation into persons from past centuries also entailed great
difficulties. Indeed, one could buy a mask of a prophet, a harlequin, or a
fox; but where could you find the expensive clothes of a ruler, embroidered
with gold and sterling silver, and lined with jewels?
For the common mortal, a simple solution was to get away from
the glittering stage, erase from one’s mind the magic, gleaming cupola and
the thought of the big show that took place under it. But that didn’t suit
my egotistical, inflammatory nature. So, even when I lost every hope that I
would get into the tent, I persisted in my futile attempts, trusting more
in providence than in common sense.
I cannot tell how much time I wasted in these efforts. But
one day I got lucky. The guard’s dog helped me. I’d noticed that animal a
long time ago, but I couldn’t imagine what use it could be. That day,
watching the dog wandering through the field, far from the tent, I happened
to notice that the animal went into a hole from which it didn’t come out. I
waited all day. In the evening – filled with a strange feeling – I placed a
stone on the hole and ran to the tent. The dog was sleeping near its owner.
How did it get to the tent? It didn’t take much sense to conclude that the
dog used an underground tunnel that connected the outside world and the
circus. It was only a matter of whether the secret route ended outside the
tent, in the guardhouse, or…?
The area around the tent looked clean, untouched. I had
surreptitiously entered the guard’s house several times and looked it over
carefully: I never noticed the slightest sign that a tunnel came out there.
So?
I returned to the place in the field where I had seen the dog
and the hole. The rock still covered it. I removed it. The hole was narrow;
a dog could fit, but not a man. Still, wasting no time, without stopping to
think or arrive at a decision, I took off my coat, and after I enlarged the
opening with a knife, I dug underground clenching a flashlight in my teeth.
I crawled, advancing a centimeter at a time. My head was spinning because
the show was about to start, and that awareness gave me new strength: the
very thought of my reaching the tent too late, when the circus magic would
be over, was awful.
Pressed by rocks and mud on all sides, without air, in the
kingdom of worms and roots, powerless, I believed I was finished. I was
losing consciousness. I was losing strength. For a moment I wanted to go
back; but there was nowhere for me to go, much less turn around, and it was
impossible to crawl backwards. I continued digging earth with my mouth,
swallowing it like a worm.
I was half dead when I realized that the tunnel was
expanding. At first it was almost unnoticeable. I continued with the gloomy
work of a field mouse. After a while I could move left and right; then the
hole became a chamber in which I could crawl more freely; finally it turned
into a hall. I stood up and stepped into the darkness of the earth within.
I immediately noticed a detail: from the corridor along which
I walked, at right angles, other halls branched, narrower ones: from there
something like a reflection of a fire burning within earth came to me, from
a great distance was a kind of gurgling; and I could hear a very clear,
intelligible human whisper. Curious, I wanted to see where this mysterious
light in the bowels of the earth was and what these creatures were who
lived so far from the sun, green meadows, and wavy seas. But it was clear
that both the light and the hiding places of the mysterious creatures were
quite far from me, and I had no time to lose: in the final analysis, I had
gone underground because of the show, not because of mad curiosity. I
decided to check the mysterious light and the origin of the voices on my
way back. Now I had to move on, along the main corridor lighted with the
fiery flames – because I had no doubt I was going along the main road,
mainly because the corridor along which I walked was wider than the others.
When I reached the end, I started carefully checking the
walls. Desperately, because at first glance, the corridor looked like a
dead end. I encountered a hard, smooth rock without a single fissure. But
to my surprise, after a while my hand touched something soft. I started
examining the rock, shining my flashlight on it. The place looked like
everything around it, but this rock – about one meter in diameter – was
soft as a feather. I realized I was standing in front of a spongy curtain
through which one could pass and I stretched out my hand. It sank into the
stone. Slowly, carefully, I poked in my head and my shoulders – I felt as
if I were passing through a thick, muddy stew. When the strange liquid – if
I can call it that – got thinner, above me instead of a starry sky, I saw
(for the first time from inside) the shiny dome of the big tent. I swam out
of the jellylike membrane and, unnoticed, hid behind the first curtain.
I noticed immediately that it served as a decoration. There
was no great danger to be revealed. And when the show was over, I would get
out myself – that was my intention – and I would say to the guard to his
face: See how I fooled you?
I took a position between two heavy curtains, so I could see
both the stage and the audience clearly, and I peered out carefully, to see
what supported the big dome, which – oddly – was without posts, supports,
pillars, ropes, and from the inside looked like a perfect, hermetically
sealed, half-ball of glass.
I noticed something else: in that great hemisphere, the
audience sat across from me, while the stage was almost in front of my
nose. So, the audience did not sit in an amphitheater, nor was the stage
round and in the center, but it was rectangular and at one end of the tent.
For me that was better: I could see what was happening under the roof
without much trouble.
The visitors, all in masks, were at their seats.
The masks and formal clothes were familiar from before. So I
had no trouble recognizing each character.
The audience was mixed together. Old people did not sit with
old people, young with young; they were not separated into small groups,
but were all lumped together: believers and non-believers, sceptered and
mantled, bearded and shaven, fat and thin, the language of the Galapagos
and the language of Moličre’s precisosas.
For no particular reason a thin man with straight hair and
nervous gestures attracted my attention: above his many lips, on his
corporal’s mask he had a moustache that looked like two flies stuck on with
a pin. It looked like the moustache would outlive its owner. The man wore a
uniform with decorations that made you think of a spider, a spider web, and
a spider’s victim at the same time. He was with a smaller and fatter man
with a conquistador’s mask; he wore a uniform with epaulets and a
tri-cornered hat. The thin one and the fat one were talking, and they waved
their arms vigorously, as if they arguing who was the greater hero. Their
conversation was overheard by a boy with a wonderful body, in a canvas
shirt, with a Virgo mask on his face.
There were bare-chinned Huns here, Tartars, in their clothes
and with their idols; there were wine-producers, Slavs, Normans, Saxons,
Goths, there were Mayas with half-moon faces; there were Roman emperors and
church heads; patriarchs, popes, Pharisees and Scribes; chiefs of extinct
tribes; Chinese leaders, Japanese, Indian, Egyptian, Macedonian; there were
Greek dictators; Spanish, Hawaiian; there were Nicholas’ and Alexanders,
Phillips and Louises, Marias and Elisabeths, with names that ended in ov,
va, vo, ski, chki, ich, ik, ah, or, ti, vi, with decorative feathers; there
were the wild and the wise smart of this and that place; their hostages and
hostages’ lovers; jesters and ladies, statesmen and law makers, bankers and
traders, factory owners and entertainers, philosophers and artists,
scientists and alchemists, usurers and dreamers, young and old, beautiful
and ugly, big and small, dirty and clean.
This crowd was like a cluster of grapes, like a bunch of
carnations in whose middle were the man with the moustache and spider
cross, and the fat man; it seemed that they still argued over who had
accomplished the greater deeds. The handsome boy stood just to the side and
watched everything quietly, but not with disinterest.
The stage was brightly lighted. There was nobody, nothing on
it: just the unbearable whiteness.
In time, the shiny light grew weaker, paler, taking on violet
shades. The audience became quieter and quieter.
When the noise stopped, I knew the show was about to start.
And I would surely see it once the workers (did they?) made the final
preparations, unless something averted my attention.
The audience members started taking off their masks. I
watched that unforgettable sight and I couldn’t believe my eyes: under the
pig, wild dog, or puma mask with expensive clothes, were the faces of those
to whom the clothes belonged in a former life. Under the masks of those
persons from more recent times, other masks appeared, like those removed
but more perfect, made of delicate skins, spotted, or white as ivory, hairy
or angelically pure. The matching of the clothes and face, the mask and the
mask, the face and the face, did not leave room for suspicion: the circus
audience was made up of the real and only owners of the clothes and masks.
When I turned toward the stage, everything was ready for the
start of the show.
In fact, there was now nothing on the stage. Only some iron
rings hanging freely in the air. Strangely shaped, they looked like
every-day, though large, scissors: the handles of the scissors were rings,
the two sharp blades crossed ropes.
The scissors were half-open, and the blades formed an angle
of twenty-two or twenty-five degrees. In this space, between the sharp
steel blades, a naked female body dangled, quivering in the emptiness. The
girl was familiar from somewhere, but I couldn’t clearly see her face: it
was in half darkness. The body, young and fresh, voluptuously trembled in
the air, like a fish in an aquarium.
A woman with a water bucket appeared on the stage, bathed in
green light. She was dressed almost like a peasant. She didn’t turn toward
the audience. She put the bucket down at the side of the dark podium, close
to me, and she stood by it, mute, immobile. In the pseudo-peasant I
recognized the wife of the guard.
The guard also came soon (why did I expect him?). Dressed
like a gymnast, illuminated by red light, he stood in the middle of the
stage and bowed to the audience. He went beneath the device and jumped. His
strong hands grabbed the rings; the blades shone in the half darkness.
When the guard leapt from the ground, I thought the girl
would be immediately cut in half: under the pressure of the man’s body, the
blades would fly to each other and slice the girl in two. But he was
obviously a master of his trade. With incomprehensible speed, making
numerous half-movements, wiggling like a caught fish, the shivering body,
bowing and stretching its toes, managed to keep the blades from joining
each other. In fact, the sharp edges gradually grew further apart, leaving
the girl more and more space.
The gymnast was dripping with sweat. With a convulsive
expression, he even managed to open the blades of the scissors as much as
he could spread his arms. And he stood like that for a moment,
triumphantly. Then, all at once, the body started sinking: the blades flew
to each other. The movement of the gymnast and the way he suddenly loosened
his body were so sudden that I spread the curtain in confusion. Everything
happened fast. The blades clinked together and cut off the girl’s head. The
gymnast caught the beheaded body as he fell, and when he touched the
ground, he stood frozen, holding the warm, lifeless flesh in his arms. The
head with flying hair, a shiny meteor in the dark night, flew through the
air and – splash! -- it fell into the water bucket.
Something splashed my face. I wiped it off with my hand.
Blood!
In the beginning I thought that they had seen me, because I
stood in front of the curtain. But apparently everybody was busy with his
or her work, and my insignificance brought no attention. I quickly returned
to my former place.
The show, evidently, had finished, because the viewers got
out of their seats. They put on the masks they had come with and, not
turning toward the stage, left.
I sat motionless, until the last visitor left. I think I
dozed a little. When I again peeked through the curtain, I saw the guard,
his wife, and their daughter. The woman was cleaned up; the guard was
removing the chairs. The girl was sitting, pensive, a bit to the side,
smoking.
Although I intended to address the guard after the end of the
show and let him know how I had tricked him, now I thought it smarter not
to brag too much. Because for him, maybe, it wouldn’t be too hard to fix
the demonic scissors and in a second put me between the sharp blades. For a
man who had such dangerous skill, it seemed that nothing was impossible.
The guard, his wife, and their daughter remained under the
tent for a long time: they spent a lot of time preparing for the next day’s
show. When they left I was relieved.
So I was alone now. I could smoke a cigarette at peace and
think about everything I had seen, how I would get out of there, whether I
would return through the underground tunnel about which nobody (except for
the dog?) knew, or whether I would do something else.
I thought about the show for a long time, and everything
upset me. But most of all I was bothered by one question: Who was the girl?
Now it felt – and while I watched her smoking, I was sure of it – that the
girl whose head flew so awfully was nobody but the guard’s daughter. The
similarity between her and the killed girl was striking: same hair, same
smile, same hands, and same gestures.
But she had been beheaded! How did she resurrect all of a
sudden? I didn’t see where they took the head and the dead body, but I knew
that it was not that simple to glue them together and breathe life into
them again.
Were the victims of the shows dragged from the underworld,
every day a piece (the head and the body of the killed ones were hidden by
the guard, so the newly arrived didn’t know what awaited her)? Well,
without a doubt there were people living under the ground I passed through:
didn’t I hear their whispering? But why was this girl so similar to the
guard’s daughter? Did the earth’s bosom contain thousands of his living
daughters, one of whom was killed today to be replaced by another tomorrow?
I decided to get out as soon as possible, along the same road
I used to get there. Thus I would also have a chance to examine the
underground and discover the secret of the dead girl, then return home. I
came to the place where the spongy opening was. But when I tried to thrust
in my hand I almost broke all the bones of my fingers. The hole was closed,
cemented.
Apparently, it became mushy and penetrable only when somebody
wanted to enter it, a man led by a dog, maybe, or a creature of the
underground, a provocative beauty with white skin who looked so much like
the guard’s daughter that I could never say it was not her. This all lasted
for a short time. Then the opening would close (or better, freeze) itself.
For the first time since I came I remembered that often the
guard, earlier, when I tried unsuccessfully to enter the circus, told me:
You are trying in vain. Nobody but my wife and myself can enter the tent.
Others who do, do not come out.
Then I thought those words were a joke, but now after I had
seen the strange things the guard was doing and understood that the circus
was only a big, shiny trap (for daughters, or naďve, curious people?), I
shuddered.
Was it possible that, searching for luxury, I had found my
own grave?
I ran!
In vain. I yelled in vain, I pushed the chairs in vain. I was
in a glass bell at the bottom of the ocean. The canvas didn’t have even the
slightest crack. And it was canvas only in name and color (in my dimmed
consciousness). As a matter of fact, the trap was made of hard, smooth,
unfamiliar, and, of course, impregnable matter! When I touched the wall of
the trap I felt that behind it there was nothing, nothing, and least of all
a field of wild poppies.
So, I was buried alive.
Doesn’t matter. Tomorrow night, when the masked people come,
when the guard erects the unusual device, when the woman stands by the
water bucket and the magical girl’s body – no doubt, the same, eternally
same girl – shines in the half darkness, swinging like a ship on the sea,
like a speck of dust freely trembling, when the shiny eyes of the rulers,
nymphomaniacs, and vultures, turn toward the red light of the spot lights,
in this short, awful and endlessly precious moment – when the steel becomes
dough, and the secret gates of freedom open, for those who love it
–providence will grant me a small, almost meaningless – but why
unfulfilling? -- chance.
