The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [63]
Because of the hindrance of the girl, Pacipia was exercising before the sun came up; anyone who was awake would hear the bounce of the trampoline and in the semi-darkness see Pacipia wheel in mid-air, land on her back or her knees, pivot up once more, further into darkness. By the time the sun rose she was covered in sweat and walking to a farmer’s well, pulling up the roped bucket to pour water over herself again and again. There was always that singular pleasure at a well. She walked back in her drenched costume, which would dry in the sunlight, to the tent where the girl would be waking. What independence Pacipia owned had, it seemed, disappeared. She was never married, had no children, but now there was this girl she was responsible for until her brother returned.
THERE IS A STORY, ALWAYS AHEAD OF YOU. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You find in this way the path of your life. And so, within a few weeks, the girl Asuntha could be found in mid-air, held by an outstretched arm, then thrown towards the grip of another, swinging down simultaneously from another tree. She had her father’s strong, light bones, and she had beneath her first fears a self-sufficient nature. She would have to loosen that away from herself in order to allow trust. Pacipia would help. Pacipia too had been full of self-sufficiency once, one of those seemingly stunned-looking children who hold an anger in them; it had scared her parents and the friends of her parents. But acrobats always needed to trust the company around them.
The circus performed along any stretch of country road that was bordered by trees. Villagers brought mats and sat on the tarmac in the late afternoon when it was no longer too hot but before the shadows lengthened to confuse the performers’ sight. Then the sound of a fanfare emerged, some of it out of the depths of the forest, some more magically from the high branches of the trees where the trumpeter was. And a man seemingly on fire, his face painted like a bird’s, swept down on a rope, skimming the spectators’ heads, smoke trailing behind him, catching another rope and swinging this way further and further along the stretch of audience-covered road. There were harp sounds and whistles coming off him until the painted man disappeared into a tree and was never seen again.
Then the rest of them came out, in stained and ragged colours, and for the next hour leapt from trees into the empty air and were caught in the arms of others, who seemed to fall from even greater heights. A man covered in flour fell into the central trampoline and rose out of the dust he left behind. Men walked across tightropes stretched from tree to tree, carrying brimming buckets of water, slipping in mid-air and hanging on with just one arm, releasing the contents into the crowd. Sometimes it was water, sometimes it was ants. Each time a man stepped out onto the tightrope, the drummer warned of the danger and the difficulty, and the trumpet shrieked and laughed with the crowd. Eventually the men on the tightrope fell to earth. They curled their bodies when they hit the tarmac, and stood. They were the only ones standing until the people in the crowd got to their feet. It was over, save for one acrobat still up there, still yelling for help, hanging from a rope by one foot.
At first Asuntha would be caught only by Pacipia. But this was not trust. It came from the belief that if this relative would not pluck her out of the air into safety, then she might as well lose her life in the fall to earth. The greater test came when Pacipia stepped away from Asuntha, who was on a high branch, and ordered her to throw herself to another. Knowing