Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [79]
“Good, Tessa,” Lollie said as I spun through the air. “That’s exactly right.”
I remember floating in the pool after long days of flying, letting the water run over my bruised skin and cracked hands, barely able to move without feeling I was ripping a limb from my body. In the evenings, wonderful smells from the kitchen filled the air as Victoria cooked up vats of beans and rice and pork and pans of fried plantains and sopapillas for us to eat at the long table stretched out near the pool.
Outside of practice and eating and the luxury of the pool, my days were filled with stories. The Ramirezes were all storytellers, and I wondered if it was part of the circus life, this constant weaving of words into air. Sometimes I felt I had never left Mercy Library at all, but was still lying on the wooden planks of the floor with my eyes closed, listening to Mary as she described her life with the Ramirezes, all their crazy stories, their larger-than-life personalities, their great passions and lusts.
Carlos, the tallest and oldest Ramirez sibling, was driven by his passions more than any member of the Ramirez family, but he also had the most control over them, enough that he was able to manage his twenty mistresses deftly, without a dissatisfied one among them. Mauro told me about his brother by the pool one day after dinner, when Carlos was nowhere to be found. No one knew where Carlos got the boundless energy, Mauro said, that allowed him to leap from bed to bed and then back to the family breakfast table each morning, where Carlos could always be found setting the schedule for each day’s practice. But he somehow managed not only to fulfill his impressive love and professional obligations, but to indulge his great fondness for books. Carlos owned thousands of books, Mauro told me, though I myself never saw them; Mauro claimed that Carlos’s collection spanned ten floor-to-ceiling shelves that pressed together and took up three walls of his room. He had tales of explorers, gypsies, and medical doctors, volumes of folktales and physics theorems, and stories of love and sadness propped up against delicate volumes of poetry whose amber-colored pages were so thin you could see right through them. Some of his books were imposing and bound in leather, others were ragged from all the reading he’d subjected them to. I heard each of the Ramirezes on separate occasions muse about Carlos’s unbearable schedule, and not one of them could come up with an adequate explanation for his prowess.
At first I couldn’t help but feel nervous around Carlos and the brothers, being so exposed, the way everyone was with them. These were men used to feeling out a crowd, the wind and rain and landscape, the audiences waiting for them in each new town and in the bleachers each night. This was necessary with the high wire, Lollie told me. The brothers could gauge the colors of the dreams that influenced each person in the audience’s sleep, sensing all the desires and longings the audience would bring to the ring. The feel of the people crowding the bleachers could alter a performance as much as the weight of the air and the speed of the wind, she said. All the longings and sorrows and betrayals traveled through the big top like wisps of smoke, and the Ramirez brothers always felt them. It was this, José explained later, that kept them safe on the wire, allowing them to flirt with it and tease it.
Slowly, over the next few weeks, I started to get used to the way the brothers looked right into you, as if they could see your past and your future. Though Lollie was the only true seer in the bunch, they all had a bit of vision in them, born from years of dancing across wires so thin you could floss your teeth with them.
Lollie’s vision might have been the strongest, but it could not protect her from her own fate. As innocent as I was of the world, as amazed and overwhelmed as I was being with the Ramirez family in Mexico, I had spent enough time in that library with Mary listening to heartbroken, desperate women to recognize Lollie’s sickness