Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [78]
For dinner that first night we all sat around a long table by the pool, and that was when I met Lollie’s wheelchair-bound older brother Luis, the most astonishingly handsome man I’d ever seen, who lived in the villa year-round, along with Mrs. Ramirez and the maid, Victoria, who had cared for Luis for twenty years and would care for him until the day he died, bathing him each day with a wet cloth, clipping his beard, and smoothing pomade through his shiny black hair. Everyone knew the two of them were in love, Mauro had told me in the car, but if it weren’t for Paulo’s whispered words at the table, I never would have noticed the way Victoria smoothed down Luis’s hair as if it would break, the way she served up his plates of rice as if sculpting them out of clay. I knew so little of those things back then, and did not expect to.
When Luis bowed his head before me and kissed the top of my hand, I felt like my life could not be more glamorous than it was at the moment, with the moon shining down on the pool and the night obscene with the scent of flowers and mole. “Welcome to our family, Tessa,” he said, raising his wine to me, and then we all clinked glasses. It was my first real glass of wine.
I glanced at Mauro over my glass and caught him watching me. I drank the wine down in one long gulp, my heart racing.
The next day the circus hunkered down in the lot, which was vacant throughout the spring and summer, and the tents were raised like huge animal carcasses in the faded landscape. Here Lollie and Paulo spent most of their days with me, patiently guiding me through each spin and turn, each toss into the air that brought me to the net, to the bar, or to Paulo’s outstretched hands.
I worked eight hours each day in training with Lollie and Paulo. “Paulo is the best catcher,” Lollie explained. “I worked with him before Geraldo came.” Lollie and Paulo led me up to the platform, forced me to listen to the sound of the bar as it moved through air, to listen for the precise moments as it moved through its arc—rising up to the platform, down toward the net, and back up again at the other side, where Paulo waited for me. They had me memorize the sound of the bar whooshing up to the platform, then going still for a second before moving back down.
“Listen for the silence,” Lollie said.
“Now,” Paulo said as I stood crouched and tense. “Go!”
I fell again and again and tried to ignore the fear, that hollow feeling as I looked down at that net and, past it, the sawdust. I tried to listen to the bar, but my heart pounded in my ears, deafening me to anything else. I thought of the corn bent in front of the moon and how, in a way, it had saved me, giving me something to focus on when the rest of the world had hollowed out and gone blank. Block out everything, I thought, but the bar rushing toward you.
The first time I reached out and clumsily grabbed the bar, it was as if I were flying. I twisted myself up to a sitting position and laughed as Paulo and Lollie clapped and whooped.
I was nothing if not determined. My hands cracked and bled from twisting over the bar, my body was covered with bruises. I fell a thousand times into the net. I learned all the infinite adjustments I had to make with my body, the precise alignments and poses that took me from one spin into the next. From the ground you wouldn’t have known the searing that ripped through my muscles or the stinging of my hands as I grabbed the bar. You wouldn’t have known the deep sleep I fell into each night for ten hours straight as my body desperately tried to heal itself for the next day of abuse, or the way the physical strain wiped out everything else for those first weeks, blissfully. My mind was blank, registering only when a turn cut the air as perfectly as a scalpel or when a bad landing shot pain up my legs and left me without