Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

Author:Angela Carter [Carter, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9789985300572
Published: 1998-11-14T13:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

Since the star had not worked circuses before, there was a good deal of animosity towards her in the company, especially amongst the Charivaris, high-wire dancers themselves for centuries, who were engaged in the same debate with gravity as she -- except that she was cheating! They were sure of it: they knew it in their bones; they needed no proof. And the cheat had nudged them out of their customary place at the top of the bill with the aid of mechanical contrivances. They even held, a little, to the "gutta-percha" theory concerning Fevvers' anatomy. That very morning, over breakfast coffee and milk, the children suggested perhaps there was some way she might be dropped from heaven -- "to see if she would bounce." Mama remonstrated: "Naughty, naughty!" but she and Papa exchanged thoughtful looks. When Fevvers turned the children's stomachs with her gift of poisoned pies, it was the last straw.

They resentfully arrived to witness Fevvers' band rehearsal, dozen upon dozen of them, Papa, Mama, brothers, sisters, cousins. They possessed in full measure that Italian knack of making a crowd, so the Charivaris en masse seemed far more than the sum of their parts, even without the little children who stayed home in their bunks, groaning. As if by right, the Charivaris occupied the Imperial Box, for the family had entertained every European emperor of note since Nero. Indeed, they felt themselves to be a vital part of circus history, and it was at such a rich tradition they thought that Fevvers thumbed her nose. All bore fixed expressions of hostility and contempt upon their faces. Little people, delicately made but wiry, in leotards. The women left curling rags in their hair in order to show contempt.

It is a phenomenon of the trapeze that its practitioners always look larger upon it than they are in life. Little and lithe is, therefore, the rule for the air (as it is, as the Charivaris well knew, for the wire); a big flyer looks a clumsy flyer, no matter how great the art. The ideal female flyer turns the scale at, say, a hundred pounds and stands no higher in her slippers than five feet two. Her male partner might give her, perhaps, ten more pounds and three more inches but still he will be a small man on the ground though he might look like a Greek god as he hurtles through the air at those speeds of theirs in excess of sixty miles an hour. Fevvers, remember, was six feet two in her stockinged feet and turned the scale at fourteen English stone.

God, she looked huge. Her crimson, purple wings, in flight, obscured the roof-tree of the Imperial Circus. Yet those marmoreal, immense arms and legs of hers, as they made leisurely, swimming movements through the air, looked palely unconvincing, as if arbitrarily tacked on to the bird attire.

Walser, drawn to the ring like a moth to a flame, thought, as he had before: "She looks wonderful, but she doesn't look right.

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