The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [98]
There were feats of strength and balancing acts, magic tricks and mind reading, Solimão the Black swallowed swords, in nothing flat the Spider Man glided up to the top of the greased pole and then offered a fabulous milreis piece to anyone who could do the same, Pedrim the Giant broke chains, the Bearded Lady danced with the cobra and kissed it on the mouth, and all of them, made up as clowns with burnt cork and rice powder, bent the Idiot, who seemed to have no bones, in two, in four, in six. But the star performer was the Dwarf, who recounted tales, with great sensitivity, vehemence, tender feeling, and imagination: the story of Princess Maguelone, the daughter of the King of Naples, who is abducted by Sir Pierre the knight and whose jewels are found by a sailor in the belly of a fish; the story of the Beautiful Silvaninha, whose own father, no less, wished to marry her; the story of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France; the story of the barren duchess with whom the Devil fornicated, who then gave birth to Robert the Devil; the story of Olivier and Fierabras. His turn was last because it put the audience in a generous mood.
The Gypsy must have been in trouble with the police on the coast, for even in periods of drought he never went down there. He was a violent man; on the slightest pretext, his fists would shoot out and he would mercilessly beat up any creature who annoyed him, be it man, woman, or animal. Despite his mistreatment of them, however, none of the circus people would have dreamed of leaving him. He was the soul of the circus, he was the one who had created it, collecting from all over those beings who, in their towns and their families, were objects of derision, freaks whom others looked upon as punishments from God and mistakes of the species. All of them, the Dwarf, the Bearded Lady, the Giant, the Spider Man, even the Idiot (who could feel these things even though he wasn’t able to understand them), had found in the traveling circus a more hospitable home than the one they had come from. In the caravan that went up and down and around the burning-hot backlands, they ceased to live a life filled with fear and shame and shared an abnormality that made them feel that they were normal.
Hence, none of them could understand the behavior of the youngster from Natuba with long tangled locks, lively dark eyes, and practically no legs at all, who trotted around on all fours. When they gave their show in his town, they noticed that he’d caught the Gypsy’s eye, that he watched the boy all during the performance. Because there was no getting around the fact that freaks of nature—human or animal—fascinated him for some more profound reason than the money he could make by exhibiting them. Perhaps he felt more normal, more complete, more perfect in the society of misfits and oddities. In any event, when the show was over, he asked people where the youngster lived, found the house, introduced himself to his parents, and persuaded them to give the boy to him so as to make a circus performer of him. The thing the others found incomprehensible was that, a week later, this creature who got about on all fours escaped from the circus, just as the Gypsy had started teaching him a turn as an animal tamer.
Their bad luck began with the great drought, on account of the Gypsy’s obdurate refusal to go down to the coast as the circus people begged him to do. They found deserted towns and haciendas that had turned into charnel houses; they realized that they might die of