Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [102]
That night we celebrated after the show, dancing around the fires outside the train car, opening bottles of champagne that Carlos had run into town to get. The corks popped off and the champagne shimmered down into our plastic glasses. Lollie raised her glass again and again to us, getting more misty each time. Had I been more grounded that night, I might have paid more attention when Geraldo didn’t even show up, and I might have seen how sad Lollie was, underneath the surface of things.
The next morning it was in all the local papers, and there we were, in a photo someone had taken: Mauro and I, side by side, he towering over me as I sparkled up at the camera in my rhinestone leotard. Circus Royalty to Wed, a headline read. “Tiny Tessa, 18, famous for her one-arm swing-over, and Mauro Ramirez, 22, of the Ramirez Brothers tightrope act, announce engagement.”
There we were. I thought for a moment of Mercy Library, all the newspapers and documents stored in the file cabinets downstairs, where I had first seen my name in print alongside my mother’s, father’s, brothers’ and sister’s. This photo seemed to blot out all of it. With a fluttering heart, I clipped out the article carefully and put it into a file alongside all the other articles from that first season, when, for me, the whole world was remade.
We were married the following winter in Mexico City. Returning to the villa was like coming home. I hugged Luis like a long-lost brother—my real brother, not the ones I’d been born with. I embraced Mrs. Ramirez as if she were my true mother. Paulo’s Serena and baby, Pilar, had moved into the house earlier in the fall, and we all rushed to see the beautiful fat baby with tiny gold hoops dangling from her ears.
Mrs. Ramirez and Victoria oversaw the design and making of the intricate lace dress I wore at our wedding, and Mauro and I were married before a gold-covered altar with the Virgen de la Macarena in front. Carlos gave me away. Lollie and Serena and Mrs. Ramirez stood in a line next to Mauro as I walked up to him, a bouquet of white gardenias in my hand. The other brothers formed a line on the right.
As I walked toward Mauro, so handsome in his traditional black suit, I had to force myself to walk in long, graceful steps, to keep my veil and train in place and not yank off the lace and run, laughing, right into his arms.
I was happy, happier than I’d ever been. For the first time happiness was a condition of my world, not a moment that sparked and burned away. I loved being married to Mauro. During my second season, when the Velasquez Circus grew even more popular and well loved, he kept me centered. He formed a cocoon around me as reporters became more and more common on the lot and people began waiting in lines that wrapped three times around the tent to get in.
The years passed in a dizzying array of colors, a thousand colors flashing and sparkling along endless horizons. I practiced less and less and spent more time with my new husband, my family. I continued to work on the rope and hoop. I increased the number of swing-overs I could do at one time to nearly two hundred and began working more on the rope ladder and silks. As for the flying trapeze, I just let it go. I worked so well alone in the air, it didn’t seem necessary to punish my body and heart anymore, to fling myself into empty space again and again and feel that cold fear erupt inside me. I was happy now; I didn’t need to claw my way through whatever it was inside me that would not let me just go.
Paulo didn’t mind by then either. He married Serena and brought her and Pilar on the road with us. Before long they had a second child, Eduardo, born my third winter in Mexico. Lollie doted on Pilar and Eduardo, who seemed to calm her anxious, starved heart, and Paulo and Serena seemed to be made for each other, always laughing as they wandered the lot with their