Landscape with Trapezes

Charlotte looked down at her breasts. She wore a heavy wool dress embroidered with flowers, the sleeves roughly attached. It made her whole body feel constrained, as if pulled in different directions, similar to being trapped in those wooden elevators stopped between floors. Breakfast was ready on the table—she always had breakfast in hotel rooms when she was dressed and ready to go in the morning. At that naked hour when the city’s voice was quiet, she would open the door to the next room, where Pliny slept. Pliny would hobble in on his twisted legs, greeting the morning as if he carried water buckets or fruit baskets that weighed down each of his extremely tired arms. His eyes were sad with malice and mimicry. Charlotte sat him on her bare lap and gave him lumps of sugar every morning. Sometimes she wondered if it weren’t really thanks to him that she had a place in the circus company, or if it was her own doing, her acrobatic feats. Shouts of admiration followed her on every trip—on ships, train platforms, even from train windows she would hear astonished voices shouting: “Oh, look at the girl with the monkey!”

This attention was not intended for her or for his red wool cap or broad shoulders. That a monkey was capable of riding a bicycle was a big surprise to the public; for them a monkey balancing on a chair was remarkable, and Pliny knew how to do both those things. Of course Charlotte had invested all her patience, her hands sticky with sugar lumps, spending hours teaching him acrobatics. All the applause rained upon Pliny while she, with her trapeze numbers, swollen legs encased in pink tights and bare arms, had to anticipate the applause that followed each daring leap, to force the applause with bows and kisses sent from every corner of the ring. A vast silence made the great arena seem bigger. The first times, Charlotte felt her heart somersaulting like the drumroll announcing dangerous double flips; her breasts swelled like seedpods below her red neck traversed by supple veins . . . and at the end of the show, she’d collapse into bed in some rundown room. She’d feel her pulse throbbing up and down the length of the torn seams of her leotard. Her good health deprived her of sympathy from others—her body could feel devastated by exhaustion, but her cheeks still looked rosy.

The Edna Circus Company had been going from town to town for years and continued on thanks to the half-dozen elephants who could walk with one foot in the air, could spray sand with their trumpeting trunks, could swiftly sit in circles on barrels, and walk delicately like ballerinas on top of the dwarf, without crushing him. And also thanks to Pliny, who, along with a Japanese juggler, inspired monsoons of applause.

But Charlotte had been working since she was ten years old. She had grown up in landscapes of trapezes and rotating nets, among the wrinkled legs of tame elephants. She had never lived out in the country. She didn’t know any animals other than those that came locked in cages. One day, a short time ago, she had been invited to a picnic along El Tigre River. Taking a boat tour she and her friends got off at Las Violetas Park. Charlotte fell asleep under a palm tree. When she awoke, she saw the wrinkled paw of an elephant leaning against her body; her eyes moved up the leg of the elephant until reaching as high as the green palm fronds. The air was not riddled with sawdust and sand, and the most incredible thing in her life was happening: a day in the country.

Nothing extraordinary had ever happened, but rather she lived in a lonely desert without a sheltering sky. She would sleep on benches, awaiting her turn, her eyes circled by the intense fire of sleep (which is why her friends called her “Sleepyhead”). Pliny woke her up, pulling on her skirt and shaking her arms while the audience came through during intermission to visit the animals. One day, among all those people, she was in such a sleepy state, her arms spongy like cotton, her eyelids drooping like two enormous tears ready to fall, and her mouth opened slightly . . . that a man fell in love with her and her cheeks of red rouge, tattooed by the imprint of a woven doormat or an open hand. For him at that precise moment, the incandescent acrobatic movements of that sleeping woman became real: the muscles of each arm and each leg were soft and sleepy like an embrace. In his childhood that man had seen blond seraphims disguised as acrobats in the circus, which is why perhaps he stopped and looked a long time at the resurrected acrobat of his childhood. And she, enveloped in sleep, saw him in the distance, sitting way up in the highest rows, winking at her behind the strangest eyebrows like two mustaches on his forehead. The intensity of his gaze must have been so strong, so great, that Charlotte woke up, but she saw no one. “Pliny, who was that man?” Pliny peered outside the curtains to spy and wobbled back without an answer.

Until that day she had lived so lonely in her desert without a sky, but suddenly that absent sky was filled with butterfly wings from Rio, sent to her as a gift by that stranger—though Pliny was the one who received the grateful kisses. Among the trapezes and the rows of seats, Charlotte’s large round hands thanked the heavens with joy a week later when a tall man in a violet blue suit came over to greet her.

After that brief encounter they met each other every day in a taxi, where Charlotte discovered that love was a game of Catch as Catch Can. Right away her boyfriend wanted to take her to a room for rent but didn’t manage to bring her anywhere but to a German pub, where an out-of-tune version of “The Blue Danube,” repeating like a broken record, ushered in their official courtship. She had to cut off her assignations abruptly to hurry off to her hotel room to feed Pliny: a sacred duty she fulfilled even up to the day of her engagement. A shadow came over the face of her bridegroom, imprisoned in a striped suit, as he said, “I’m done with being jealous.” “Of whom?” Charlotte asked. “Of Pliny.” Laughter briefly stopped them in the middle of their dance. It was cold outside that night, and inside the German pub they were warmed by the thick aromas of people, beer and fried food. Small metal vases, tall and incredibly narrow, stood at the center of every table, each one holding three dead flowers.

For her the days were now incredibly short; for him, however, they were endless. And suddenly, in a dark void, Pliny’s guilty eyes shone forth. The bridegroom thought dishearteningly that it was useless to lower his voice, adjusting it to sound like a priest performing Mass to bless his intentions of taking his bride to a room for rent. It seemed to him that his declarations were not convincing because he didn’t have enough time. And it was Pliny’s fault. It was Pliny who stole his bride, Pliny with whom she spent her time, lewdly teaching him in a nightshirt to ride a bicycle: every day she would leave, running across the city, to feed him.

In the Buenos Aires newspapers the farewell tour of the Edna Circus Company was announced, but each and every show was a farewell. Charlotte left the hotel early that morning to go shopping after finishing her breakfast and returned punctually at noon to feed Pliny. In the hotel hallway she tried to calm the beating of her heart, as if she had just swallowed a large pill without any water. She entered the bedroom, opened the door to the adjoining room; an extremely disorderly mess surrounded the overturned chairs, and Pliny, dead on the floor, seemed to have lost the ability to communicate. Now that he was dead, he who had never spoken needed to speak. Charlotte caressed him, and thick drops of blood left their mark on her hand. He had a deep wound in his chest. Without a doubt, someone had murdered him. Charlotte opened the door and screamed three times. Her boyfriend arrived, having come to see her, but she didn’t notice the new smile he wore like a bouquet of flowers on his face. One hand was bandaged, and he leaned on the door to look at the lifeless Pliny, with disbelief as if he were watching the most complicated acrobatics at the circus. Then he looked at his girlfriend but didn’t recognize her.

She was no longer the angel disguised as a trapeze artist; she was no longer the girl with the dazzling monkey. Sitting on the floor with a determined look in her eyes, she wrote up a notice for the newspapers, demanding that the criminal pay the price for Pliny’s life.