Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [94]
We entered through the back flap of the big top and stood behind the starry curtain, where Mauro was waiting.
“Tessita,” he breathed, when he saw me, “you look so beautiful.”
If I hadn’t been so terrified already, I might have been nervous next to him. It was the first time I’d seen him in his full costume since the night he’d taken me into Mexico City. His pale costume curved smoothly against his skin, showing every rounded muscle. The kohl under his eyes made them smolder like two small piles of ash.
I clutched his hand and stood stock-still, waiting.
Lollie left us to head into the ring with Geraldo. We watched them perform through a slit in the curtain. Then I noticed the audience for the first time, and it was like looking from the sky to the earth. The sawdust-coated ground seemed to drop out from under me.
It was right then, at that moment, that Mauro leaned down and said, “Tessita, it is time.”
The feel of the crowd, the din of moving feet, of breath being pulled in and boxes of caramel corn being rattled and dropping to the ground—none of that had been present when I’d rehearsed with Lollie and Paulo in the ring, not in the final days of the last season or in the winter space down in Mexico. While Lollie and Geraldo took their bows, I hurried into the ring, in the shadows, and sidled up the rope ladder to the platform.
I looked down to see my two glittering slippered feet resting on the platform and, far below them, the sawdust-covered ground.
I stood and waited.
When the ringmaster announced my name, my heart thumped in my chest so loudly it drowned out everything else. I was shrouded in darkness, clutching the bar in my hand, waiting for the lights to flare on and send me hurling into space. “Tiny Tessa,” he blared out, to cheers and applause, “now in the center ring.”
I could not even breathe.
When the lights came on I just closed my eyes and leapt.
My act opened with me tearing out in a hoop and then flipping over and over it, catching it with my feet and my palms as it twirled and twisted over the audience. I became a swirling sparkling circle of white before stopping suddenly, splayed out, my arms and feet spread, in the center of the circle. The lights caught on my costume and reflected out into the audience, sitting under me in the dark.
My body moved of its own accord. I cut through the air as if it were a part of me.
One moment I was leaping into the air; the next I was landing on the platform, feeling the sting of the bar in my palms, the platform swaying slightly under me as I adjusted to its surface. The roar of the audience seemed far away. My breath came shallow and quick.
The Roman rings dropped down next as the hoop disappeared into the folds of the tent. I reached for them and went straight into my routine. The iron cross and then a series of positions I had done before on the rope and trapeze. From the rings the movements looked more weightless, fluid.
Finally, the corde lisse dropped from the top of the tent and I caught hold of it. Hanging from the padded loop Paulo had designed for me, I blocked everything out and just started to go.
One swing-over, two swing-overs. By the fifth one, the audience had begun calling them out. It buoyed me, gave me a rhythm where I hadn’t had one before. I closed my eyes, leaned into the rope, and turned in time to the audience’s chant. Twenty-two, twenty-three . . .
“Go,” I said to myself. “Don’t stop.” Twenty-nine, thirty. I turned and turned, moved my body like a stutter as the crowds counted out each spin.
Up in the lights like that, punishing my body with twist after twist, I didn’t actually think; my body took over until I was nothing but breath and movement, the twisting of skin and muscles into one perfect motion after another. Sixty-nine, seventy.
On the ninetieth spin, I felt something in my arm give out, and I stopped. I switched arms and hung there by the rope for a second. I could have been back in Oakley, hanging from the barn rope and the oak tree, until I heard