Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [80]
During the day she was mine completely, guiding my body through spin after spin, laughing with me when I fell or executed a turn so perfectly that she almost forgot that I wasn’t born into the circus the way she had been. There was always a difference between those who felt the circus in their blood and those who had actually been born into it, just like there was a difference, in the sideshow tent, between those who had been born freakish, like the woman with hair made of moss, and those who had mutilated or marked themselves. I was a strange one, not fitting in anywhere exactly. But I was burning a place for myself every time I forced my body through the air, slicing it right open.
I pretended Lollie was two separate women: the woman who had known Mary and whom I spent my days with, the seer and trapeze star who had given me a room in her compartment and who made up a bed for me in her own family’s house, and the woman who would have stayed on the ground for Geraldo, baking cakes and pastries for him, making his bed for him, wiping the floors he walked on. There was a time when she would have done that, though the circus ran through her blood like a river and forced her face to the sky. I’m quite sure that, back then, Lollie would have said her love for Geraldo was what made her who she was. She could spend whole nights weeping for him, and I watched her helplessly, feeling like I was back in Mercy Library, wishing I could remember what teas to brew, what herbs to give her to chew on.
I learned to ignore Geraldo, and tried to let Lollie’s tears meld into all the other noises of the Ramirez house: the chattering parrots, the lapping water, the brothers’ smooth voices, the whoosh and whisper of the breezes that passed through the open hallways like spirits. When Lollie shut herself in her room and filled the house with her sobbing, I would sit out by the pool with the rest of the Ramirezes or any number of the guests who dropped by each evening with their hands full of flowers or pitchers of sangria, which Victoria would fill with ice and bits of freshly cut peaches and apple. “There is nothing you can do,” José would say when he saw me covering my ears, trying to block Lollie out. “Love is an illusion, and there is a bitter nut at its core.” I learned later about how José had shot his one true love Clara through the heart, years before I left Oakley.
According to Mauro, who whispered the story to me by the pool, José had loved Clara since before the two of them could speak, back when they had played together in the park near the town plaza. Clara was the most beautiful child in all of Mexico, and as she grew older it only got worse, making all who saw her feel like they’d been momentarily blinded. The two were to be married, but then José returned one December to find Clara holed up with the town lawyer, whom she had married a few months before. José didn’t even stop to think; he took one look at Clara in another man’s arms, then turned around and left the new couple’s home, picked up Mr. Ramirez’s shotgun from the villa’s cellar, walked straight back to his one and only love, and shot her through the heart. José didn’t even put up a fight after firing the gun but dropped it as if it were burning, folded his body down to its knees, and waited for the town sheriff to come take him away. José spent five years in prison and left a changed man, having sworn off love completely.
I loved hearing these stories, just as I loved watching Mrs. Ramirez sit with her embroidery, her hands transforming bits of