Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [82]
“Suddenly Luis’s face appeared before me as clearly as if he were standing right there, though I could see the shapes of trees behind him and knew that his body was somewhere else. His face was contorted with pain. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and I realized that he was in a bed with a white-dressed woman leaning over him, wiping the tears away and keeping the plaster cast just under them dry. And then from a distance I saw him crossing the wire with dancer’s steps, crossing them in front and in back and like a pair of scissors. He smiled to the audience as if the wire underneath him did not matter one bit, as if he could dance on air if he wanted to. His arms stretched out on either side, he was never more beautiful than he was right then, flirting with that wire in the brief moment when he had her all to himself, while my other brothers waited on either side. Then in one swift second Luis slipped—he missed the wire with his hands, and he fell to the ground and broke half the bones in his body. When I saw that my brother would break, I howled and howled and I yanked at my hair and I beat at the ground and I screamed into the sunlit yard: ‘Luis! Luis! Luis!’ I was on my knees in the yard with my heart breaking, and I said, ‘Luis, stay off of the wire!’ I said, ‘Luis, you will fall from the wire! I saw you fall from the wire!’
“Luis came out into the yard. He smiled, held my face between his hands, and said, ‘¿Qué pasa, mi niñita? What have you done to yourself?’
“He wrapped his arms around my quaking body, and I told him what I had seen. His heart pounded so strong against my ear, and his arms seemed like iron around me. I begged him to stay on the ground for three days, and he said, ‘I promise, niñita, do not worry about anything at all.’ He kissed my cheeks. ‘I am strong like an ox, niñita, but I will stay on the ground for you.’
“The very next night Luis stepped up to the wire. At that moment I sat innocently in a trailer behind the tent, my mother stroking rouge over my cheeks and twisting a ribbon down the length of my hair. My act came quickly after my brothers’, so I rarely watched them myself. Only at the moment it happened did the vision come back. Again I saw him float down, but now I could hear the screaming crowds and running steps and the ringmaster trying to calm the crowds. I heard banging on the trailer door and felt my mother slump to the floor behind me.
“After that I did not speak for weeks, not even to Luis, who worshipped me now as if I were a little Maria. Even so, people came from miles away to hear what I saw, what they couldn’t see.
“Later Luis told us how he’d heard my voice in his ear as he fell down from the wire, how it comforted him and told him he would not die as the ground pushed up under him. He said that as he fell he could smell my hair, which my mother always sprinkled with rose petals, and that he felt my hand on his just before he hit the ground.
“‘I knew it was your hand, niñita, because I could feel your little gold rings,’ he said.
“After that Luis liked to call me a saint and a healer, and he kept a candle burning for me all the time, and still does, though I’ve always told him he’s crazy. Victoria used to store crates of candles in the pantry but has complained for years that Luis makes her light a fresh one every day, and makes her sprinkle the dresser top around it with newly cut roses each morning and night.
“‘Dolores is no santa,’ she used to say about me. ‘Santas do not fly on the trapeze or roll across lawns or crawl into boxes meant for heads of lettuce or cabbage. I don’t know what that crazy man is thinking.’”
Lollie laughed. “People react in all kinds