I worked steadily for the rest of that night, and towards morning I drove back home. The streets were empty but for the hundreds of plastic cups and beer bottles that littered the ground. From behind the haze of the windshield, the streets looked like an ocean filled with bottles carrying messages. I remembered the letters the bearded lady had received from the dispersed people of the circus. Once in a while she would get a colourful letter from a magician in Germany or a lion tamer in Africa, or photos from the Siamese twins who had married two women and had, between them, four kids. The circus people all kept in touch and, through this network of letters, we learned that it was the animal keeper who was having the worst time making a living. He had tried all the zoos and all the circuses, but nothing had come of his efforts. In one of his letters, he told the bearded lady that he was working in the furnace room of a cement factory, and he eloquently described to her the fires and the baking of the earth. All starts here, he wrote. All these new nations bake the earth to build and make stones. But the weight of progress and the benefits of contractors and the wealth of nations began to take a toll on the man. His skin itched and his lungs were clogged with dust and chemicals, and then, one day, he died from the smoke and the toxic powders and asbestos that make cities and pave their stretches of sidewalks.
Another tragedy was the magician, who had left Germany and retreated to a small village in the Balkans. He lived in a modest house and ate what the villagers sold to him for a good price. Life was good until he made the wife of the baker disappear at night and reappear in the morning naked from behind the bushes, and until he transformed the daughter of the mayor into an adorable rabbit, hopping through the window every evening and into the meadow. After that, he packed his top hat, escaped, and flew with the help of his cape back to the city.
And then there was Mimi the dwarf, who got involved in an international diamond-trafficking ring. Mimi was provided with a fake passport stating a fake age and a fake name. She dressed up as a little girl and carried a doll in her hands. She was accompanied by another lady who pretended to be her mother. And then they crossed the ocean in fancy cruise ships, smuggling stolen diamonds inside Mimi’s doll. The so-called mother pretended to be a White Russian countess from the Cossack region. She was known as the Contessa Tambbar Koussa. She snubbed everyone as expected and spoke French in the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian writers such as Turgenev and Pushkin. She had schooled Mimi in manners and le savoir-vivre, and Mimi was always on her best behaviour in her bell-shaped dress and curly hair.
Mimi would curtsy to society ladies and men and she even played the piano and occasionally tap danced, but when the conversation became unbearably pompous, conservative, and dull, Mimi would throw a tantrum and kick the women in the ankles and punch the men in their groins. On deck, the Contessa Tambbar Koussa, whose main conversational tack was to reminisce about her two dogs and the cruelty of not allowing animals in the dining hall, would call out to Mimi, Precious, don’t get yourself wet! A coded phrase meaning: Don’t get too excited about the muscular sailors on board, about whom Mimi fantasized every night, masturbating under the sheets of the top bunk of their cabin.
But then one day, Mimi got very drunk and saw the handsome ship’s doctor, and her eyes were transfixed, her lips quivered, and her thighs wiggled against the lower metal ramps of the ship. She forgot the doll and her age and smiled, held her doll under her arm, lit a cigarette, and made rings of smoke sail above the ocean winds. Dolphins jumped inside the white hoops, to the delight of the passengers, and a few clouds magically descended to join the circle of smoky sighs trailing through the tropical heat.
The doctor, who saw Mimi’s provocative gestures, was alarmed and perturbed by his own desires for the little girl. He kept an eye on Mimi and followed her until, one day, he caught her standing in the engine room beneath the belt of the mechanic, giving him some steamy head. At first he thought it was a case of child molestation, but then, after conducting an investigation into the matter, he realized that Mimi was not the innocent child that she pretended to be, nor was the Contessa Tambbar Koussa a real White Russian. To make things even more insulting, this so-called Contessa was found to be an Arab, with a fabricated Arabic name that, translated, meant “the countess with the swollen vagina.” The Contessa was interrogated about her fake passport and her impersonation of an aristocrat, and she was threatened with prison. Fearing a long sentence, she made a deal with the authorities to reduce the charges against her by telling them of the diamond hidden in Mimi’s doll.
Mimi was arrested and sent to jail for life. In jail, she was harassed and beaten by the big women in the cell, who made her do the circus dance, as they called it, and walk a tightrope tied between two bed rails. In the showers, a pedophile guard molested her and called her names. Early one morning, when everyone was asleep and before the bell rang and the count of the prisoners was made, Mimi untied the rope that she had walked the night before, to the cheers, taunts, and laughter of her cellmates, secured it to one of the high bars of her cell, and hanged herself. That morning, there was no applause in the room, only silence and the faint squeaking of the rope, and the light, and the quiet swings of a small body.
HAT
WHEN I ARRIVED home, I parked in the garage, then I opened my trunk and pulled out the quilt I’d found lying on the back seat. I took all the cash in my wallet and wrapped it inside my hat, and I neatly folded the quilt and placed it on the back seat with the hat on top.
I slept all morning.
In the afternoon I went down to my car. The quilt in the back seat was unfolded and the hat and the money were gone.
I took my car, left the lantern unlit, and decided to drive to nowhere. It was rush hour, and at that time a driver could pick up passengers easily, but I decided to leave the centre and seek the river. I drove until my wheels took me to the bridge where Otto had once dwelt and drunk and slept. The spot, he used to call it.
But the spot was not his discovery or Tammer’s, it was Fredao’s. Otto and Fredao used to spend nights there drinking and arguing and even, if one were to take them seriously, conspiring. And Tammer, while he waited for his mother to come back from her walks through the night, would sometimes stay awake with them, listening to them talk politics and power. Once Fredao pulled out his gun and showed it to Tammer. Here, son: I am not your fucking father just because I call you son, but I know who is. You are the bastard son of an Arab. Those Arabs were the first to come and enslave my people and sell us to the Portuguese. You, son, you are one part Spanish genocider and one part slave-driver. Bullshit, all that religious boasting about mercy to the slaves, it is all bullshit. A slave is a slave. There is no such thing as mercy to a slave like those books of revelations will tell you. Here, son, come over here. I want to teach you power so you will always be free. Now hold the gun like that, aim, and shoot the bottle.
The gunshots must have been heard by the sailors on the cargo boats, but either they didn’t give a damn or they, like those on the shore, were drunk, wobbling with the motion of the water and waiting with boredom for the departure of their ships.
On the weekends Tammer would watch these sailors from beneath the bridge, stumbling drunk, singing the same songs all together. It wasn’t their accents that surprised him most, nor the uniforms with the lost ties and crooked hats, but the fact that they all knew the same songs. No matter how drunk they were, they sang and conformed. Fredao would curse the sailors. Filthy white-trash bastards! he would say. A few hundred years ago, they would have been chasing me to put chains around my neck and obliging me to row their filthy, rat-infested boats.