Travels with a Mexican Circus by Katie Hickman

Author:Katie Hickman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408853610
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

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1 The Mexican Day of the Dead coincides with our Hallowe’en, but is a predominantly Indian celebration in which the souls of the dead are believed to return to visit their loved ones on earth.

2 There was no concept of social drinking in the circus. Those who drank were considered drunkards, and that was that.

Ten

It is a proposition of Mexican geographical logic that the nearest way between two points is by a distant third. The only way, in fact. If one wishes to get from one place to another, one must first go somewhere else …

Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio

The language of violence and the language of love. In the butterfly wood it had been hard to tell the difference. Occasionally as we watched, a pair of butterflies, locked in lovers’ combat, would drop on to the ground beside us, writhing together in the soft dust. Butterfly rape? Or butterfly ecstasy?

In the circus, too, there were times when it was difficult to tell. Often aggressive, occasionally violent, Circo Bell’s was charged with strange, erotic currents. People came to the circus for many reasons, but almost always for love: Olga’s love for her Ilish; Gallo for his Karina; Ramón for Vanessa. Love could be many things – capricious, vengeful, erotically possessed – but it was never half-hearted. In the circus love struck with all the violence and drama of Greek tragedy. I thought of Karina and Gallo, tossing tempestuously between fights and passionate reconciliation. I thought of Mara and Omar: she, a diminutive silver fairy spinning on the end of her rope; he, in the front row of the stalls, gazing up at her with his soft brown eyes, both struck dumb with love in the same, single instant.

The zeal with which the girls were guarded by their brothers, fathers and cousins, was largely aimed at the world beyond our camp. Inside the circus itself, love, young and yearning, was on everyone’s lips. The lack of privacy, even between husbands and wives, was no impediment, but rather added spice, taxing lovers’ ingenuity and fanning their ardour to fever pitch. During the day, when vigilant mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles were at large, the younger lovers were as chaste as children. Their languid kisses, cool and white as milk, dropped casually on to unerogenous cheeks and foreheads; arms and hands, with calm and unrequiting fingers, came together as innocently as kindergarten partners. It was only at night, beneath the cover of darkness, that childish innocence gave way to something more red-blooded. At night, I came to understand, the sighs from the Big Top were not merely the phantom creakings of the trapeze or the pull of the guy ropes. At night the circus pulsed with secret rendezvous: the darkened corridors between the rows of sleeping caravans, the silent silhouette of the deserted box-office, a bush, a tree, a hidden flap of canvas.

Everyone had their lover or their novio, if not in the circus then in another of Mexico’s

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