Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [85]
“Eventually we can integrate so that you, I, Geraldo, and Paulo can do one long flying act together,” Lollie said.
“You are a gift to us from Marionetta,” I heard Carlos comment more than once.
Once Paulo and Lollie felt I had the swing-over under control—the centerpiece of my act, they both agreed—they began to teach me other solo acts. The hoop, a bar with semicircles rising from the top and bottom, that spun around, making it seem like you were enclosed in a beautiful bubble. The Roman rings, the two small rings hanging from two cords that I could work like a gymnast, performing numerous tests of strength. The long rope ladder that let you do all kinds of tricks while ascending and descending through the air.
I took to all of these acts much more easily and readily than to the flying trapeze. Despite all the hours and days and weeks we spent on the trapeze, I hadn’t been able to master it. I could not catch Paulo’s hands and pull my body to the opposite platform. I’d panic, looking down to see that his hands were there, and ruin the trick. I’d either miss it completely or grab his hands clumsily, breaking a clean line or luxurious spin.
What I could do was leap to the Roman rings, pull myself up until my arms shot straight across on either side, and then hang for many minutes, steady and sure, as if I were just relaxing on one of the lounge chairs by the pool. My muscles were unbelievably strong from Mary’s library, the river, and the bar in the kitchen window. Of course it helped that I was so small, that my muscles probably outweighed all my skin and bones and blood put together. Lollie could not stay up in the iron cross for more than thirty seconds, her body shaking the whole time.
“I have never seen anyone take to the air so quickly,” she said to me one evening as we drove back to the villa. “I almost think Mary passed something on to you in that crazy library. Some people can pass memories or dreams from one body to the next, you know. Maybe that was Mary’s power, the reason everyone who saw her fell in love with her.”
Paulo glanced over at me from the driver’s seat. “I believe it,” he said. “But it also comes from your bones, like Luis always says.”
I laughed as the heavy night air blew against my skin from the open window.
I felt, for the first time, that I belonged somewhere. Carlos, Mauro, Luis, José, and Paulo were like brothers to me, kissing my cheeks in the morning and at night, making sure I had enough to eat and was never by myself in the city or on the roads surrounding the villa. Victoria taught me to make flan and her special mole, laughing with me in the kitchen over the huge industrial stove.
But despite everything, Mary was often there, around the edges—not the woman I had known and loved but a reminder, a sense that I had left something undone. Like everyone else in my life, she was split off, between the woman I had known and the woman who stayed with me. And she was separate from everything. As close as I became to Lollie or Luis, I could not tell them about the way Mary haunted me or what it had felt like to spend those long days with her in the library, listening to her voice or watching her brew tea on the stove. I could not tell them about the opal ring that I kept hidden in my room, sewn back up in a skirt, or what it had felt like to come upon her