Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [100]
“Concentrate,” Paulo would say, but in truth I was concentrating so hard I’m surprised I didn’t start levitating.
Despite my frustration, the air gave me a confidence I’d never had before. The deeper we went into the heart of the country and the more times I went into the ring and performed, the more a confidence grew in me, straight out of bone and muscle and blood. It was larger than anything I’d experienced before, even the shame that came over me sometimes, the jealousy I felt when I glimpsed Clementine from the big top, when I sat in the train car and tortured myself with images of her and Mauro in the same bed. It was larger than the corn-clawed moon that never quite left the periphery of my dreams. This was something from deep within my body. A surety, a calmness.
I walked arm in arm with Mauro and felt proud. I found myself in restaurants reaching for salt or butter and realized I wasn’t curling my palm over to conceal the shape of my hand. I found myself looking strangers straight in the eye, hugging the fans who pushed through the starry curtain to say hello.
I found myself feeling that I had a presence and a shape that were only mine.
It was only my jealous heart that threatened to unmoor me, for a time. In Mexico I had imagined that Clementine would be there every day, taunting me, but in reality the sideshow could have been a hundred miles away from the big top. As it was, I only caught glimpses of Clementine. I’d see the white flash of her hair and wince. I’d see her hauling pails of water or wandering through one of the towns we stayed in, and every vein in my body would grow cold. If I was with Mauro I’d squeeze his hand and look at the ground, without saying a word.
“What is wrong, Tessita?” he asked. “Qué pasa?”
And the words burned on my tongue: What happened with her? Did you love her? How can you even look at me?
They crowded my brain, stuck through me like pinpricks. And yet I didn’t say anything. Even over the countless hours in the ring, on the train, and wandering over the lot, even as Mauro told me stories about his life and I told him about Oakley and Riley Farm and the factory. Even when I sucked in my breath and told him about the day in front of the courthouse, the endless afternoons in the library, Mary’s rich, raspy voice and card games and her penchant for cataloging and reading out loud and cooking pots of soup and tea. Even when I told him about the hair that curled wetly around her neck and the opal that glittered spook-ily from her breast. The story had been beating within me like a heart. If I had tried to tell it before, it would have stayed buried in my throat, bound up in grief.
But I could not ask him about Clementine, and I could not tell him that when I saw Clementine’s perfect starlight hair, I heard my father’s voice again in my ear: Barely even a girl, he had said, as the dirt and rocks pressed into my skin. I felt ugly and ridiculous, the way I had then.
I waited for Mauro to bring up Clementine himself. I walked hand in hand with him to the cookhouse or to watch the Kriminov Twins practice in the late afternoons, after I finished with Paulo and showered in preparation for the show, waiting. Mauro loved watching the twins. People said the earth had disappointed them so much that they chose to walk in the clouds, on stilts. One afternoon that first summer, I sat with Mauro and watched Sergei balance Masha on his shoulders so that her head nearly grazed the canvas top. The words and questions beat in my head, but I wouldn’t ask him. Instead I asked him about the sideshow, about performers like the fat lady, Josephine, whose skin fell from her bones and just kept right on falling, like huge sails.
“Jo is a great lady,” Mauro said. “The daintiest woman you’ll ever meet. You could scoop up her hands and eat them for dessert.” He laughed and pulled me close to him.
I leaned in. “Mauro,” I said, “how can you be so close