Over the next few weeks, the village savored soft, delicious bread richly spliced with our physiological spice.
TWO
Pudgy Di Battista was a posh bastard fallen on hard times; circuses didn’t make money anymore. Pudgy Di Battista treated his raging blood pressure by diluting his cognac with dashes of Carabaña mineral water. High blood pressure threatens the obese, and the second they drop their guard, it bursts their veins. “Carabaña water — high blood pressure, laxative, gallbladder infections, different dosages. Dilute three spoonfuls of Carabaña water in a cup of chamomile or lime tea and take on an empty stomach. It reduces blood pressure and drains the gallbladder.” The impact was immediate, and you wanted to defecate on the spot. They don’t make it anymore. It’s today’s world: less chewy and more plastic. Perhaps bowels move better now; what can I tell you of the inner workings of my business? Pudgy Di Battista added Carabaña water to his first morning shot of cognac. Then he’d have an urgent need and rush to a chamber pot he kept under the bed next to a few other items of personal hygiene.
“A stick can trick the hicks from Carabaña,” my brother used to sing, before a train engine throttled the voice in his throat. He was on his way to pick tomatoes from a tiny plot my mother owned next to the cemetery, well fertilized by the bodies of its unburied tenants. He met a bad end but didn’t complain. They don’t necessarily have to be from Carabaña. A stick can trick any hick, a long, willowy one, say, the sort used to thwack a lion’s back when it’s starving and opening its jaws to snaffle the first thing in sight, a hunk of meat, a tamer’s forearm, or a monkey wrench. It’s a circus thing. Wild animals, clowns, trapeze artists, the filth in the wings, the picturesque poverty you glimpse behind the big top. “Hey, Gregorio,” my mother said one day, “grab this lion-taming stick and off you go with this gentleman who’ll show you the world and make a man of you.” Pudgy Di Battista grabbed my hand. He grasped it in limp, boiled-fish fashion and told me to kiss my mother because I wouldn’t be seeing her for a long time. And the truth is I never saw her again.
What was my life going to be like from then on? A set of futile queries buzzed around my brain, a desolate scenario that quickly took shape in a caravan, trapezes, transhumance, and hollow clownish laughter.
The red and crimson canvas of the Stéfano circus big top was erected on the village threshing ground in lovely spring weather. Children bawled cheerily. High spirits spread through the air like a fleeting firework display. Di Battista’s megaphone van drove around the streets broadcasting the wonders of the show. “Come, old folks and kids, young gents and ladies, come and be thrilled by beautiful Doris’s balancing act on the trapeze, come and laugh at the Culí-Culá brothers’ clowning. Come and wonder at the wild animals from the Atlas Mountains that can split a man in two with one swipe of a paw. Buy your tickets now for the three once-in-a-lifetime performances of the Stéfano circus before it leaves for its triumphal tour of Europe and the United States of America. Big show, tonight at six. Half-price for babies at the breast and army conscripts.”
The children’s chatter in the wake of the van sounded like bees humming. All that blather seemed so exotic. Bliss blossomed on skin toughened by the harsh country breezes, fierce frosts, and itches from eczema brought on by poor personal hygiene. Bliss feeds itself and only needs a sugar lump or the plain taste of a bread roll to find expression in a child’s smile. The circus was a fabled paradise in children’s dreams, tangible proof that apart from pain and hard grind, there was room for fantasy.
I performed under various names. They called me “Gregorio the Great.” They also put “Goyo the Dwarf” on the posters for a time. I spent sixteen, almost seventeen years in pudgy Di Battista’s company, doing the rounds of the Spanish circuit. Sixteen interminable years in which I learnt to measure the miserliness of Lady Luck and the happenstance of Providence. I was there until I escaped, when the company went bankrupt and collapsed. A pity about Di Battista, he met a bad end, his guts burnt to a cinder, and he didn’t ask for any pity.
Pudgy Di Battista was a posh bastard fallen on hard times; circuses weren’t making money anymore — too much food for the animals, too much worn out equipment, too many wages from so few box-office takings. Pudgy Di Battista waxed flabby fat, and sweat beaded his brow the whole year through. His flesh looked like remolding, and however hard he tried to lose weight, it always reverted to its original gravitational pull. A universe of pap you could say, of pap and cognac. The poor bugger. He wasn’t spared a bad end, either. He was desperate. Delirious, he kept saying that the Virgin of Fátima had appeared to him, until finally one day he glugged a bottle of bleach for breakfast, and that washed his gripes away.
The more devastating the exit, the worthier it seems. Not that it’s much consolation now with you opposite, but it’s true enough that surprise factors can help gild the vulgar pill. The second I saw you, I knew why you’d come. I recognized it in the changed expression in your eyes, the glint in your gaze, and the scornful way you abstained from answering any of my questions. Tonight, over the course of supper, my body trembled from head to toe several times, but I blamed that on European Commissioner Belinda Dixon’s obscene advances. In our concern for the minutiae of everyday life, we never stop to think how one supper may perhaps be our last, yet, as you see, everything can come to that.
I don’t know whether to call the fact we were served cocks’ combs as an entrée astonishing or simply odd. My fellow guests gaped in amazement, not crediting the plate that had been placed before them. Bragging in the upbeat tone of his own election posters, the mayor insisted they were really a kind of mushroom cooked in court bouillon; concretely, oyster mushrooms, he added. Someone to my right reckoned, however, that they were bamboo shoots, a delicious, typically Cantonese dish. Some people seize the first opportunity to display a would-be cosmopolitanism that sets them apart from the rest of us mortals; it’s unavoidable, they’re born that way. Others argued they were slices of porterhouse steak marinated in aspic, but it was left to Commissioner Dixon to reveal the secret without the help of the maître d’. “They are cocks’ combs,” she remarked, looking horrified, “cocks’ combs in bread crumbs.” I tried them out of curiosity. They were slippery on the tongue and fell apart like communion wafers. In fact, I quite liked them and downed several glasses of wine so I could squeeze even more taste out for my discerning palate. So you see, that was my last supper. I’d like to know how to pray and commend myself to a Supreme Being in which my individual consciousness could be extended after the final call, but I’m afraid that’s impossible in my case. Prayers relax and comfort, but never change what has to be. At the time, what had to be was my forced exit from that village.