If it was the right kind of day, Gelo de los Ángeles paid Doris’s caravan a visit after the show to share a spot of supper. Doris invited him to a plain omelet with ham, basically so the fellow, who was clearly very poorly, didn’t have to start messing with pots and pans himself after using up all his energy holding her up on the trapeze. It was no trauma for Doris to sizzle another omelet with her own, and even an extra one for me when I hobnobbed with them late at night. Gelo de los Ángeles coughed when he chewed, drank chicory coffee, and spat out thick gobs of sputum. His illness was eating away his features to the point that they were completely glazed over with a film of mold. I took the Gypsy Ballads, that treasure which didn’t belong to me, to Doris’s caravan and after a meager supper, I’d insist on reciting aloud some of Federico’s poems. It amused them both to watch how sweetly the words flowed in my passionate reading, it shocked them to hear a power that was so at odds with the contemptible, screwed-up figure I cut, they relished the paradox: a deformed dwarf holding on his lips the tempered beauty of Federico’s verse. On the twenty-fifth of June they told the Bitter Man: You can now cut the oleanders in your patio, if you so wish. Paint a cross on the door and put your name beneath, because hemlock and nettles will rise from your ribs and needles of wet lime will sting your shoes. That array of metaphors hit the rocky ground of Gelo de los Ángeles’s mind like the sound of toads croaking. “All that word-spinning gets your tongue into a twist. Idle pursuits for females and fags,” he’d say. “That’s rich from you, a guy without the scrap of sensibility you deserve,” retorted Doris as she counter-attacked. “Poetry requires sensibility the way you require muscles.” Gelo shut up. He basically knew that was true, but at this stage in his life, he could do nothing to change the way he was. He’d continue to display muscle, and only muscle, muscle in his arms, muscle in his legs, a muscular, if sickly, scrotum that would never spill its lusting cum on Doris’s skin. On the other hand, she was so feminine you entered her through the door to her heart, and I made the most of that weakness: The moon turns in the sky over waterless lands while summer sows whispers of tigers and llamas. Sinews of metal rang out above the roofs. Woolen baa-ing curled on the breeze. The earth offers itself full of scarred wounds, or quivering with the piercing cautery of white lights. “How lovely, Gregorito, why don’t you ask Di Battista to let you read poems in the ring? They sound so beautiful when you say them. Come on, recite them again for me, you give me goose bumps,” and savoring that victory in words, I reread the poem, as proud and preening as a Jack of Clubs who’d been proclaimed a King of Spades.
I always kept that yellowish, unbound book with me. My memory will always be marked by the magical rhythm of its verse, their incredible silken yet deeply mournful beauty. My memory always felt the impact of those bitter-sweet soirées, Gelo’s gobs of spit, Doris’s innermost feelings bubbling up after dessert, and that ever-present dedication like the spittle from a forgotten curse that was the prologue to my poetry recitaclass="underline" “For Gurru, my comrade in love and combat, with a French kiss for the moments we have shared, Mary Faith Oxen.”
Nowadays nobody believes in circuses. In these times that augur the end of the world, when leisure is home-based and reality is reeled off in pixels, there’s no place for wild animals, clowns, Chinese jugglers, or deformed dwarves who decimate their dignity on the ring’s compacted sand to hilarious guffaws. It was different then. People came to split their sides over us, and nobody noticed the horrific poverty sustaining it all, the behind-the-stage scenes where all of us involved in that great family of freaks in the Stéfano circus struggled to survive. People applauded, exclaimed, were astonished, let out belly laughs like uncontrolled farts before returning home and continuing with the daily routines that comprised the inner workings of national unity: a job for life to sustain the family future, the vague presence of the catechism in everyone’s behavior, Sunday mass as Saturday’s still wouldn’t do, hierarchical obedience, institutional conformity, the Generalísimo’s Cup, and barbarian females from the north, those barbarians with low-slung breasts now beginning to sow seeds of fantasy or obscenity in the apocalyptic minds of Spanish machos: “Fuck, those bloody birds are what you call tasty, if only we could lay one!” and then they clicked their tongues and downed their glasses of Osborne, took a drag on their cheap cigarettes, and crossed their arms, lust prickling their skin.
We circus folk roamed the seven corners of the nation’s geography and noticed the same damned lust frothing behind all the barriers in the arena of Iberia. “Iberia is like a bull-skin stretched from west to east, with its front limbs pointing eastwards and its bulk stretching from north to south.” And that’s how it was. Our endless wandering across that stretch of skin gave us a privileged perspective on the evolution of lifestyles, distorted only, as is natural, by the rootlessness of our own industry and our status as adepts of transhumance. I learned who I am in those Spartan times, observing, reflecting, and feeling the hard knocks from the logs of life on my battered ribs that caved inwards. I never went to school, they wouldn’t let in the deformed, but I studied on my own from the open book of experience the only subjects that can validate human existence: love, rage, revenge, and the limitless passion to survive.
We reached a city, knocked on its doors with our clappedout megaphones, and people came to our spectacle to see us celebrate the absurd. Children greeted our japes with vicious cruelty — there were times their fingers pinged pellets at us from elastic bands — adults scrutinized our faces, and their petty minds were struck with awe as we unleashed our unrivaled jumps, pirouettes, and other feats that configured our acrobatic existence. In their amazement, they lapped up those grotesque rituals, and the eager tongues of their fantasies licked every scrap of flesh Doris adroitly offered them. The spectacle unfurled like a freak show, which is what it was, in the end, and I went from strength to strength amid all that, with my few possessions, with my nothing at all, really, and with the ice-cool pride slavery grants those who hazily glimpse that one day they will cast off their chains and stand as the indisputable kings of creation. Children are soft-skinned troglodytes who enjoy the anger they see their elders repressing. Children are beasts who enjoy watching others suffer. It was obnoxious to watch them in the front row wishing a tightrope walker would fall and snap the cable on his groin, or that a wild animal would gnash his teeth and rip off its tamer’s arm. The adults were more of the same, only with more elevated, not to say erect, thoughts. I crouched behind the big curtains that were the entrance to the ring and watched them from my hideout. They stared at the sand, and I looked into their eyes. They didn’t know it, but they were my show, the greatest show on earth, I insist, the circus of this world.
Telekinesis doesn’t exist, and I’m telling you that, and telling you convinced that it is a fact. Nor does the spontaneous combustion of people. If telekinesis existed, two-thirds of the audience at our shows in those years would have been struck in their seats by the devastating lightning of my thoughts. I wished they would be and raged in the attempt, but it wasn’t to be. The desires we experience generally stay that way, mere desires that fade and disappear like the smoke of dreams in the air of the real world. Nevertheless, one day a miracle did take place during a performance. It was in a small town in Valencia where we went for its patron saint’s feast day. It was insufferably hot and clammy in the big top. Doris was spinning through the air in looping pirouettes assisted by the hand of Gelo de los Ángeles. In one of my furtive inspections, I noticed someone in the audience following the impossible unfurling of her lightness of being through shabby, squint-eyed binoculars from the civil war. I witnessed that Peeping Tom from my little hideout behind the curtains and immediately saw what his deal was. He was a horny bastard who rather than gaze at the art of the trapeze was weighing up the parabolic dimensions of Doris’s butt and the centrifugal jiggling of her tits. He was an infantry officer in a garish uniform with a worm-like little moustache that emerged from his nostrils in a quite un-martial manner. His gesticulations betrayed the pleasuring he was after: feeding his libido and entertaining himself on the remote possibility that Doris might slip from those heights and split her head open on the sand below. He attentively followed the sequence of acts, scratching his groin on the sly, giving himself an undeserved thrill in the half-light of the tent and getting off on the risky business she was chancing up above. I wasn’t sure whether to walk over and spit in his face, or to let him enjoy himself as he wanted, but Providence solved my dilemma. I looked up and noticed a red circle wetting the material of Doris’s leotard right in the spot where it was drawn inward by her buttocks, like a virgin of yesteryear granted the gift of weeping blood, a virgin transfixed by the immense misery of humanity. Blood of the misery of a float-bearer in Holy Week, holy blood flowing from wellsprings of the suffering, dark, heavy blood of hemorrhoids soaking the Golgotha of this world drip by drip. I looked up at the sky and saw her anointed in ruby red, bedecked by a stain. Two twin drops then rained on him in unison, two drops that hit the wretched fellow ogling with such putrid lust plumb between the eyes. The brightest red was the last thing his retinas registered. The strident color of blindness.