Here it is. It begins here. It is steep, very steep. It rises up out of the earth: an infinity of rocks and summits. Antananarivo is born here in the fury of the mountains; it is an event in itself.
Antananarivo is a city that rises and descends. As far as the eye can see, it continually reinvents itself in a succession of lines and dashes: streets that rise and streets that turn, the roofs like pointed hats, the serious-looking palaces, the almost vertical footpaths, the breathtaking slopes that skirt disheveled neighborhoods. One can only say that the city unfurls along an extraordinary landscape of hills and rocks, “a rough sea whose immense waves seem as if they were suddenly fixed during a storm,” as Paulhan said. To begin with, the city covered three mountains, then twelve, and today it is eighteen. It is as if the city were born from a decision taken at a meeting of the mountains in a faraway land.
What a surprise! What a joy! At first look a great wild laugh rises in you as you stand before this beautiful capital city. From the lower part of town (which begins at the Analakely market) to the higher part (from the Isoraka district to the ruins of the Queen’s Palace, which overlooks the southeast of the city), all you see are little cobbled, sloping streets, gray basalt staircases on granite hills that are pink at dawn, orange at sundown, and crisscrossed with changing light, with roads and pathways cutting across them, riddled with little rammed-earth houses next to sumptuous dry masonry tombstones. Here and there you see fences made with wood shaped like circumflexes. Everywhere there are tiled roofs and wood balconies, little shutters opening onto immense ravines, verandas overlooking the wonder of the empty spaces below that are devoured by trees, people, and gardens.
The staircase steps are full of vendors and beggars. Crippled men follow you for a coin or two, to sell you a hat, a bracelet, a car tire, or a glass of water, while little girls in white dresses sing hymns and shine in the distance like little gems. Young people themselves look like overhanging rocks, and the old are like trees at the edge of a precipice.
In flights of stairs and flights of sparrows, the little streets descend, hopping in small steps, from the full sun of Ataninandro to the red coral of Andravoahangy, then fork off and broaden toward Ankaditapaka, where opens up the whole plain of Ikopa and the green squares of its rice fields. For a mountain girl, Tana, as the city is known, is the queen of the rice fields. According to the season, she sits above a vast landscape of hens and scarecrows, sheaves and bundles, sowing and hoeing, to the rhythm of the precise gestures and songs of the pickers.
At every step the pedestrian is taken aback by the high-wire act of the roads and alleyways. They scamper, gambol, slam, jump, climb back up to the sky, or throw themselves into a neighboring ravine. Here nothing waits or stops, nothing arrives late. Let’s move on . . .
You pass by the little forest of Analakely, cross the village of the skylark, go across the ditches dug by the people (tiredness gives you wings), and find yourself in the place where all your questions are answered. All around you it’s a whole circus, a spectacle, to say the least: summits, crags, thorns, tufts and crests, furrows and railings, braiding, headlands, overhangs, chasms, sewers, valleys, vales, cuts, and mountain needles . . . And then suddenly, out of the blue, you see a rock decorated in flowers like a fine bell tower.
It is a complete nightmare for cars, which create terrible pollution low down in the city, but it is a delight for walkers: a whole city to climb up or hurtle down. “If you go against the current, you are the prey of the caiman; if you go with it, you are the prey of the crocodile,” says a Malagasy proverb. That says it all, there is no way to escape: Antananarivo has caught you in its delicious trap.
The whole city seems to be on constant alert, exposed as it is to the clouds and the winds in its rocky setting. So, one obviously wants to find things out, get to know the city; you move around from place to place. You climb and climb, walking close to the sky. Near the fourteen hundred–meter highest point of this superb site, behind the remnants of the Queen’s Palace, is found a viewpoint indicator. It was here during the monarchy that those condemned to death were executed, decapitated by an ax or stabbed by an assegai. It is to the piling up of all those bones, swept away by the rains after being gnawed at by birds of prey that the place owes its terrifying name: Ambohipotsy, or “the white place.” Today, taken over by ferns, trees, and dahlias, it has one of the most beautiful wind roses that you could find anywhere in the world. You stop for a moment, you sit in one spot and then another. From high up on the viewpoint, the view is uninterrupted. You say to yourself that you are going to finally grasp what it is, this city.
At first view it seems to be set out in the shape of a Y; oriented from the southeast to the southwest, the two upper branches of this Y turn toward the west so that they encircle the whole city, which was built on a vast hollow that was more or less leveled out. Historians and geographers will tell you that at the beginning of colonization, the new district, a grid of streets, avenues, and businesses, rose up in the lowest part of town, in the branches of the Y, which gave it a semblance of order and organization. However, you never really get over the initial amazement, its explosive impact: very quickly, as the other streets and districts take shape randomly, set against the natural escarpments, you see other letters pitching, forming, then separating: the P of the Mahamasina stadium and the road that leads there, the twin Es of Isotry and the neighboring plateau of Isoraka, the slightly proud R of the former Colbert square, the slender C of Ambadinia, and soon the shapes, for a long time foreseeable in their very irony, of a M, an F, or an S. The city unfurls its alphabet: it is a claybook, a book of land and signs.
It is an unpredictable, undulating journey, made up of twists of phrases and changes in tone, modulations that seem to adapt to every change in the surface and sensibility, music, a score of bricks and branches, churches perched like cliff sides, rugged, studded here and there with a tuft of laurel trees. Aerial and voluble, fragile and willowy, there is a permanent improvisation that underpins this inopportune topography. One has the strange sensation that the city disappears at the same time as it appears, that an immense harmony is hidden there and, despite everything, is present everywhere. As soon as you try to explain it, you lose its movement, as if the city wanted to leave everything to its proper rhythm and momentum.
That sense of joy is inevitably unsettling; there is so much insouciance in the midst of poverty, so many treasures in penury, so much efflorescence in the architecture that could not fail to excite the verve of moralists and censors. Such a beautiful array of Italian palaces and French chateaus, an explosion of styles—neoclassical, baroque, colonial, Anglican, Moorish, Sakalava, Mahafaly, modern, contemporary, neo-Roman—provokes almost inevitably a call for fastidious and fussy order by the official artists. Thus, you have the architect of the central government under Gallienei, Anthony Jully, completely overtaken by events, who writes in an article of the official bulletin of 1898 (the island has been a French colony for two years): “Out of diverse architectural styles, Gothic, hybrid, classical, Hindu, thrown to the mercy of the natives, arises a chaos without character. That was what struck us on our arrival in Tananarive in 1890, and that is why, in building the residences for our senior officials, we sought a single outcome: to make it in French architectural style, as much in the outward appearance as in the interior layout. The period that best characterizes our art being the Renaissance, it is in the works of that period that we have sought our inspiration, while trying to inspire in the natives, in form as in the details, the French ideal.”
Mindful of installing order in this strange muddle and of foregrounding the “positive role” of French colonization, Jully is a stickler for the rules. Clearly, the residence in question only added all the more to the hybrid, polyvalent style that he excoriated with his starchy critique . . .
One day, maybe not so far away, people will see that in its very disorder this city is one of the most beautiful in the world, that it carries the world’s memory in it, as a hub of the Chinese, Indians, and Westerners, and people will come from all over to enjoy this marvel. The city will enter into a new era. But for the moment, as no position of mastery is possible (and is certainly not required), it is already possible to follow it like a lover’s gaze follows their sweetheart and to begin to know this new kind of city.
Thus, it is only the sunrays, the perfumes, and the colors that seem to have any value. Antananarivo is one of the only cities in the world that can rival for color Venice or the paintings of Titian. Colorito alla Malagasy! It is an open delight in an inexhaustible palette of blues, reds, and grays . . . At noon the city is completely ochre, as if burnt by the embers of the cliff sides and irradiated from the interior by the pulsar of the quartz and the faint hue of iron oxide. In the evening the rumble of the city eases up, and on a café terrace you take an aperitif with friends in the softness of the twilight, your head bathed in luminous burgundy, dappled in orange and cherry colors. Above you there is the lush green foliage of the mango trees. Near the table’s leg there is a little strip of wonderful golden color, impalpable like a reflection and superimposed like a luminescent carpet.
Also, you become sensitive to the movements of the wind, the delineation of the details, the form, color, and perfumes of the flowers.
You see zinnias with multicolored shades, red, pink, and white cosmos flowers, the wild and incalculable richness of the violets, geraniums, and palm trees.
You admire the impressive bearing of the camphor trees, their shade, the quality of their perfumed wood, with its light-brown grain running through it.
You listen to the delicious names of the ferns with their spread-out curved fractals: adiantes (maidenhair fern); polypodes (polypodies); and cornes de cerf (staghorn fern).
You learn that the biggest orchid in Madagascar is called la comète (the comet): it is decorated by a bouquet of flat white stars and equipped with long green spurs. This is important; I will try not to forget it.
Proust writes in Lost Time that “flowers divulge in some way one of nature’s secrets: they betray the fact that somewhere in this world must be found life, hope, light, and color.” But who still knows how to see, describe, and name these flowers?
You learn the ways to write about lilacs, guava trees, the sweet and heavy smell of vanilla, and the slightly spicy smell of the mulberry trees.
So, time begins to vibrate differently. Sometimes the city is decked out in the most beautiful clouds—journeys of white cotton tripping across the blue sky. The fiery sun takes hold of the rooftops. The balconies, transported by the light, seem to float in front of their houses like clouds of gold. Everything is covered in all kinds of fruits, flowers, and birds.
At other times there are storms swollen with lightning, and the city is surrounded by the rumbling sounds of the rolling thunder, gaping chasms, and sinister portents. The cracking sounds of the wood have a searing depth and intensity, the lizards scamper at top speed, and the rain comes in battering downpours in a riotous, cavernous sound.
Through the pages of this landscape, of this almanac of rocks and foliage, the Malagasy people walk around, in suits, in rags, in hats. Their way of walking is famous the world over: people see it as nonchalant, slow, and sometimes even slouching. There is a word that goes around, that even the tourists know, which sums up this light, fluid, and harmonious bodily rhythm:
It is sometimes translated as “slowly” or “gently.” There are, however, sometimes sudden accelerations, gestures of incalculable precision—that of the children who, on the bumpiest terrain, roll along with a stick a metal hoop with the care of an acrobat, that of the domino players who hit their tables with their little wooden tiles. You have to allow yourself to fall into step with the country itself, to get with the rhythm of the city, its yellowy pulsation. You then understand that mora mora does not have much to do with speed or slowness (or that which we name as such) but that it reveals, instead, another way of moving in time, outside of one’s frames and resistant to their contours and coordinates: you have to leave the human calendar and its stifling strictures to enter into the energy of the body, its secret histories, its vibrating freedom.
Something is in the air, quite simply, to which one would give the following name: Antananarivo, joy, grace, or elation—take your pick.
*
The Antananarivo-Ivato International Airport is quiet: there are only six international arrivals and six departures every day.
Flights arrive from Bangkok, Mauritius, Paris, Réunion, Johannesburg, and Dzaoudzi.
They leave for Paris, Réunion, Mauritius, Johannesburg, Réunion again, and Paris again.
Georges has come to the airport to pick me up. Georges, a friend of the family, is an old Indian Creole, with bronzed skin and catlike eyes. He is a car salesman. Most important, his father knew Maxime, was acquainted with Arthur Dai Zong, and even went to the Bartolini Circus when he was very small . . . He was mad about the circus and left on his death a collection of papers, newspaper cuttings, leaflets and posters, articles, and tickets. I have high hopes that this pile of papers, which Georges tells me he has put into two cases and a three-drawer chest, will teach me a lot about this period. Right there at the airport, however, he warns me:
— Your grandfather Maxime was a one-man secret society. My father’s papers will be of use to you, but if you want to understand him, you have to go all the way to Mahajanga and speak to many different people. I will lend you a car.
— Thank you, but do you have any idea who is buried in the third grave?
— No. When you told me you were coming, I asked many people, but nobody seems to know. Some say it has something to do with World War II, but I don’t know if that is right. On the other hand, in the pile of papers I spoke about, there are numerous newspaper articles and circus programs. There are also Madame Bartolini’s notebooks. And a chest that belonged to your grandmother, Pauline. Perhaps you will find something in there . . .
*
The following day, after a good night’s sleep. The day rises over Antananarivo. I hear first the wheezing of cars and bursts of voices. Then, in the corridor, I hear someone polishing the parquet floor, people debating, cars, and everywhere a slight air of sharp mockery. Mopeds pass by endlessly, their motorized humming interspersed by the songs of the birds.
I get up and open the shutters. Georges lives right in the center of town, in a charming and agreeable old wooden house that smells of beeswax and pine resin.
To the left I see the walls of an old brick house with all the shutters closed. However, the lower door is open, and I have seen someone move around in the shadow of the staircase, whose guardrail I can almost make out. This house is very nice, but it blocks my view of the Queen’s Palace. Yesterday a teenager was playing there in the courtyard with a kitten.
Below people pass by; mothers take their children to school. A white-tailed tropic bird crosses the sky. Far away a tree welcomes a flock of birds.
At the corner of the street a woman selling telephone cards (two thousand Malagasy francs per card) has just set up her rickety stall, a little shaky table under a leaning parasol. She must be about twenty years old and holds in her arm a baby no bigger than a little sausage.
Farther away a cobbled, steep street like you only find in Tana directs my gaze to the orange-tiled rooftops and the sinuous outline of a mountain, over there, very clearly sketched out under the pale strip of a cloud.
*
Georges, who is exquisitely kind and thoughtful, has brought me the newspaper.
In Malagasy astrology I learn that my sign is Alahasaty. It is the fifth month of the year in the astrological calendar. On the seventh page I come across the most concise and relevant horoscope I have ever read:
And there you have it—it’s all true and so well put!
Georges has also given me the documentation that his father gathered on the Bartolini Circus. Two cases and a little chest of drawers—not forgetting the chest from my grandmother Pauline. I cast an eye over the cases—pages and pages of old magazines, articles cut out and set in old yellow cardboard folders, held together by a metallic strap.
Now I can get to work.
*
As soon as he arrives in Mahajanga, the circus sets up. He moves in with the circus, which makes sense. Space is required for the cages, the trailers, and the blue canvas big-top tent. A little outside of town, there is actually an area of low hills encircling a round red arena, which is crisscrossed by many ravines cut out by erosion. Its successive layers of earth are distinguished by a fantastic palette of pastel, ochre, and blood-red hues, which make it today one of the must-see places in the region. In Maxime’s time the place is empty, populated only by a few lizards and the eagles that fly overhead: they call it the “Red Circus.”
It is a stunning site, a former delta sculpted by the centuries and the unending erosion of the hillsides. The wind swirls in gusts; it opens, catches, devours, rises up again in columns along the brush-covered slopes, and then crashes even more strongly into the highest peaks. Above there is the burning sun of the Boina, immobile, directly overhead . . . For the sun time is not time, it is nothing but an immense silvery constant. It scrapes the rocks, erodes them, detaches them, transforms them into copper, iron, and lead . . . On a yellow, pink, or even red backdrop, speckled formations stand out: you see in them clear sections devoured by quartz, silver areola, and ruby rectangles. The sea so close by splashes its spray into the mix. It moistens the plants and flowers with its salty sweetness.
The colors are varied and powerful. Here you have ferruginous concretions, limestone wells, and anthracite sumps. There a dazzling succession of layers of sandstone, each one with its color, its own vibration, each one with its own style. There are sections of black, red, and yellow that slot together and are layered on top of each other, shielded by the blue sky. In a series of brown rocks, there is sometimes a sliver of tinplate, a strip of glistening mica, like the remains of bits of armor or scraps of shields, vestiges of ancestral combats . . . A palette ground down by typhoons . . . It is to this landscape—which no one knows whether to call wet or dry, land or sea, lunar or equatorial—that the circus brings its wild animals, artists, and monsters.
Maxime feels fine straightaway in this place deserted by the babbling of men and with its inexhaustible colors. Finally, following the trepidations of his flight from home, the short breath of the pursuit, there is nothing before him but pure space and the season. And when the day ends, there is the silence of a night broken only by the cry of eagles, a unique night, always the same since the beginning of time, a night of great vintage.
*
The Red Circus has clearly not been chosen randomly. Not only is there space, but one can imagine that the city’s population prefers to keep at a slight distance the strange Areopagus of the entertainers. What is more, the word is that the circus’s Venus figures were not averse to exercising their talents outside showtimes, under the tolerant—not to say approving—eye of Madame Bartolini . . . The two sisters always work as a family: lesbianism, sadomasochism, and even zoophilia (the whips and the wild animals must also be of use outside the show) . . . in those cases the scenes are played out behind closed doors and information on them is scarce. It appears that a certain number of town councillors and colonial officials are implicated in this mini spectacle and its previously unseen acts. According to some, Madame Bartolini, a fervent Catholic, gives her blessing. According to others, she draws from it payments that amount to a tidy sum . . . Across the country these meetings are known under the delicate name of “soirées Bordelini,” a play on bordel, the French word for “brothel.” Everyone agrees that she sees nothing wrong in a little of what you fancy so long as it does not upset the smooth running of the circus and stays within reasonable limits. The eyes light up, the blood sings, and the bones grow larger: nothing wrong in that, is there?
Did Maxime lend a hand (and his athletic talents) to these unapproved pirouettes? It is hard to say for sure, but it is likely. He is young and free, has just left without ceremony his family, his country, his worries: for him it is now or never. It would be hard to dream of a situation better suited to finally let out that which families repress, the intense secrets of the body, its volatile energy. You have to imagine him also in the midst of this life of trapeze and ropes, of silver and bronze costumes, of gold and steel figureheads leading their lives to the great galloping of twenty circus horses . . . But who could describe today, in the era of the banality of screens and omnipresent entertainment, those free, carefree, monstrous, wonderfully insolent acrobats and entertainers? Our time sees itself as right thinking, egalitarian, and open, but you only have to look at the destiny it has mapped out for the festive revolts of the circus to measure just how sad it really is, how elitist it is without knowing it, hateful, afraid, and terrorizing. What has happened to dance, juggling, and performance? Mime and music? The bravura of men and the respect for the animals? They have disappeared from sight and from most of the circuses themselves. That death is also our own.
Even at the end of the nineteenth century, Rimbaud himself knew that: “In improvised costumes, with a taste for the nightmarish, they play on the laments and tragedies of outlaws and spiritual demigods in ways that history and religion have never done.” Or again: “The master jugglers transform the place and the people there and take playacting to its extreme.” Maxime and all his entertainers are therefore demigods as much as they are outlaws or bandits. The French word is malandrin, and it sits beautifully between marin (sailor) and mandarin. For three years they will regale the inhabitants of the region with their acrobatics and magnetic, alluring jokes and pranks.
*
The circus is a kind of canvas womb; you enter it only at night. You have to wait for the silence of the twilight all around, the slowed-down pulsation of the blood and the unfurling of the black ink over the world, to enter into the real lives of men and women, their desires, their secrets, and their real presence.
It is the night of the circus. There is a sense of joyous expectation; the great canvas theater is filled with a colorful crowd, Europeans with white hats and veils, Malagasy people wearing lambas (those fine cotton togas that make them look like ancient Greeks), and Indian women in red and blue saris . . . The men smoke, the women laugh, the children shout or chat excitedly.
In the Bartolini Circus there is a giant, a dwarf, and a ventriloquist. There is also a bearded woman, a woman with no arms, and a man with no limbs. Real circus freaks. They are the ones who open the show: with music, magic, and juggling, they warm up the crowd, carrying it into the mysteries of nature and the depths of laughter.
No, life is not that which you think, there is another side where you can live more fully and be more alive, full of song, more real: that is what all these monsters demonstrate—the admirable precision of the word’s etymology. Balancing acts, contortionists, drag artists, high-wire acts, antipodists . . . you find a bit of everything, a veritable rabble of people, acts, and characteristics. They have an admirable sense of farce and an astonishing bodily ingeniousness.
Amanda, the woman with no arms, lights a cigarette with her feet . . . a jumping pit placed in the ground allows her to throw herself in the air thanks to the leap of a human torpedo at the other end of the plank. The dwarf Groseille, perched on the shoulders of the strongman, catches her, and then he juggles in quick succession plates, glasses, knives, and forks . . . Dexterity, concentration: the items fly about in an unending, ever-changing loop.
From the shadows to the left, here comes a horsewoman in red livery, with her hair a wine color and her crimson smile. She mounts her trotting horse in a single leap, then jumps on to another’s neck like a rubber ball. A second horsewoman joins her, wearing a large hat and swirling her lasso. These are the Bartoletty sisters (are these Madame Bartolini’s daughters? It’s a mystery . . .). Brunette and blonde, the two Venus sisters: with them everything is reversed. The one called “Brune” is blonde and is the Venus of the morning. The other is called “Blonde,” and her hair is jet-black; she is the Venus of the night. The first mounts a snow-colored thoroughbred, while the other has a dark gray mare. They say that Brune is blonde up top but dark elsewhere and that Blonde . . . is the opposite. The two have veritable lionesses’ manes, and you feel that they are none too familiar with the rigors of the hairbrush.
“They have nothing to envy of the perfect little daughters of the Countess of Ségur . . . ,” notes a journalist mockingly. Indeed! A photo from the time shows them with their legs spread wide, a generous décolletage, their chests prominent, and their avid mouths . . . “A fresh, refreshing, sunny show,” as the program notes say.
They were put in the saddle almost before they were able to walk, tiny little girls prancing on the backs of huge Percherons or standing upright on Anglo-Arab sorrels, the horses’ heads and necks appearing flimsy as they thrust their long backs nervously. They are fully grown now . . . Blonde, with her legs crossed and very bare, in white muslin, smiling radiantly, gives a big wave to the circus, sitting on the edge of a staircase, surrounded by balls. Her smile leaps from her lips to those of the audience: she enflames the whole place. As for Brune, she is wearing satin short pants decorated with red feathers: distinct makeup, lips luscious, red and lustrous like a cherry. Her dark eyes are lined in blue, and she has on her biceps a tattoo of two bracelets—the blue of which recalls that of her eyes—entwined like two snakes. She smokes a cigarette, a scarf wrapped around her neck, and her gaze glows like her lips. Her white, firm, and taut stomach catches the eyes immediately, the little bulge in her tummy, silky and soft to the look as it must be to the touch, as if it and the delicious curve of her ankle contained all the softness of the world.
The “Queen of the Night” aria plays when the second Venus, the one of the night, makes her entrance on a black mare in the act called “Étoiles filantes,” or Shooting Stars: her body is supple and taut, balanced on her mount, she sings while throwing small glass cups that appear like stars. Everything is done with extreme skill and precision at every stage . . . Dance, parade of the chariots, everyone rolling, climbing poles . . . The complex manipulations and the diversity of the acts offer to the eyes and ears an extraordinary conflagration.
*
Some very solid jesters . . . Eyes dazed so that they look like summer nights, red and black . . . The cruel allure of the eccentric characters . . . The posters and articles pass before my eyes, poems of ink and satin, inundated with light and with the smell of dung in the air. Nothing exposes like the circus does the sweet, happy and cruel truth of existence.
The most surprising thing in the newspaper reports on the Bartolini Circus is the general impression of grace given off by all those deformed bodies. In the trampoline act, for example: “As they bounce into the air, the monsters execute graceful figures that delight the spectators.” Or when the human skeleton coils around a narrow bicycle wheel, to which he holds on with his feet and hands: the curious slender athlete with the cone-shaped head and rubbery limbs, of whom there unfortunately remains no photograph, as if he was too fine to be caught on camera, carries out a series of pivots and maneuvers while balanced on a suspended wooden board . . . “There follow some amazing aerial tricks, then some gracious landings on the stage,” notes the journalist . . . There is grace in the art of leaping, grace in the landings, always grace, starting from any point in space, the whole thing a greater marvel than the skies above.
At the heart of the show are the clowns. No need for animals for them—they act like dogs, birds, and monkeys . . . Cowboy movies, the epic, exotic wonders . . . all the genres are mixed together, and the plot is but a pretext for their fantasy, without the slightest care for coherence. Sometimes they tumble onto the wooden floors . . . Then the very small kids hide themselves. The little boys roll their fearful eyes, while the little girls bite their lips . . . But the clowns always get up again, laughing. People scorn them, but they don’t care: while the whole world succumbs to death and stagnation, they are the last bastions of laughter and poetry, a spectacular narrative with inexhaustible japes and exploits.
But the highlight of the show is the acrobats. They fly through veils, swirl through and devour the draping materials. They hoist themselves with the strength of their wrists up to almost inaccessible platforms; they leap over broad and deep chasms; arms added to arms replace the ropes, and the shoulders serve as rungs, while all the others remain down below on the sawdust. Miss Tamara and Miss Julia . . . Miss Julia is all about suppleness and skill on the vertical rope. “An act full of grace and daring . . .” Miss Tamara and her hanging fabrics, suspended more than ten meters from the floor by a silk banner . . . And then there is Axel the tightrope walker . . . His act is “the most stupefying high-wire act in the whole circus world.”
These are aerial artists, they are known as the “icariens.” Like Icarus, they climb as high as they can, to the stars, to infinity. Even if they do not remember it, they know—with a form of knowing almost as ancient as the body and more ancient than knowledge itself—that the word circus comes from circulus, a term from antiquity that goes back to the orbit of the planets. Up there, then, in orbit, they turn in the spotlights, a vast spinning revelation. They curl up and stretch out; they constantly reinvent themselves. They puncture space, step across time . . . It is a rite of agility, an aerial poem, a great open wheel in the sky that you can name in your own way: a living, ephemeral, irregular spectacle; but also intelligent.
*
Here, for example, is a circus program, which dates from 1925 and covers four pages of beige paper: the back is faded, there is tape on the inside folds, it has a few traces of rust on the central fold and some little tears on the edges, but it is perfectly legible, all these years later.
In the center, at the top of the page, there is a medallion photograph of Madame Bartolini: she has her arms crossed, her eyebrows raised, and a long scarf around her neck. Her blonde hair swishes around her oval face. Her nose is pointed, her bust leans slightly to the right, her chin is raised a little in the same direction as if her whole face were drawn forward. Madame Bartolini is smiling. She must be around fifty years old; her skin is marked around her eyes—laugh lines—but her eyes have retained an astonishing sense of freshness. They seem to come looking for you after all these years, to enter into the room, jump up the walls, rebound in a funny way to the edge of the photo, and the message is clear: time is in the midst of tearing up her face, bit by bit, but she is not going to give up.
The central medallion photo is overlaid with a banner that says, in large black letters, BARTOLINI CIRCUS and is surrounded by two pieces of information in smaller letters, also in black ink: “30 tigers, 120 acrobats.” In the upper left-hand corner, some more information, framed this time: “Founded in 1856.” Underneath the medallion there is a phrase in capital letters that announces proudly, in French and English:
Farther down there is a large rectangular photo of the circus floor, a slightly blurred panorama in which you can make out a big audience, a tangible sense of noise and action, kids perched on the shoulders of adults. The floor is round and measures a bit more than thirteen meters. The circus has around a thousand seats: it takes three whole days to set it up and take it down. The tent is filled to the rafters; the laughter of the children rises up and gives life to the tight space that is filled with ropes, poles, and apparatus. Dancers dressed in split skirts reveal their rounded hips, their delicate ankles, and pass by like shadows between the poles.
Inside, in a riot of music and laughter, the artists unfurl the unending ballet of their exploits, their dialogues, and their personalities: Coralis is on the ropes, and Vitalis is on the beam, Igor trains the monkeys, while Hercules tames the tigers . . . You get to meet Anna the balancing act and Olga the drag artist, Régis the tightrope walker and Éliane the woman with the sword . . . You come across Kate Storm’s chimpanzees, Saint Cyr’s trained mules, Amédéo’s elephants, and the Java tigers led by Maia Landwoska. And not to forget the troupe of horsemen and women with such delightful names: Honorine, Apolline, and Rosine . . . A list of wildly eighteenth-century names. When Madame Bartolini needs a name, she searches for it in Choderlos de Laclos or Restif de la Bretonne. Sometimes she opts for a little Molière: Célimène, for example. She opens a book and transposes it immediately onto real life, a constant circulation between the stage and the show, business, exchange, movement, the endless rolling of the novel of life.
As Georges tells me, it is quite likely that these programs were to a large extent fictional. In fact, the circus seems to have had no more than a dozen or so animals and around twenty employees, but Madame Bartolini knows how to expand time and multiply people. In a white, always elegant, outfit, bare arms gloved to the elbow, the body that appears so exuberant highlighted by a long white fur, she smokes cigarettes constantly. She smokes and smokes and smokes; she responds offhandedly to every request, and she smokes, she clouds all of her replies with puffs of white smoke emanating with infinite grace from her long delicate fingers.
— Madame Bartolini, where should we put the apparatus?
— Well, right here, no let’s see, over there, wherever you want . . . [sweeps her hand to the left—a plume of smoke rises from her gloved hands].
— Madame Bartolini, the manager is complaining he has not been paid.
— Next week I said I will pay everyone. Right, be off with you! [a little gesture of her wrist, the cigarette throws a few sparks to the right].
She drinks, she drinks a lot, punch and Campari “con limone e ghiaccio”: she “can really hold her drink,” says the strongman, who fears her like the plague, but no one has ever seen her drunk. All she has to do is walk into a dressing room and the artists make themselves busy, hurry around, bump into each other, the horsewomen suddenly do their makeup more carefully, the gymnasts do their stretches more methodically, and the jugglers do their exercises as meticulously as possible.
She always has new ideas. It is she who, one morning, takes back from the market a funny-looking teenager of indeterminate origin, his body all long and relaxed, his eyes haggard, his nose sharp, and his skin pale. This kind of walking skeleton will become the “rubber man”: his terrible thinness, his gaunt face, and his protruding cheekbones, all of which, accentuated by sumptuous makeup, will make him one of the stars of the circus. Another time it will be an eccentric sailor, hired on the quayside at Les Boutres, that she will transform in a few days into a crazy, chained, and padlocked diver in a box covered with dark velvet at the bottom of an aquarium encircled by three alligators.
She thus manages the daily life of the troupe, advises the costume designer, spurs on the trapeze artists, reprimands the show director, and gives a tongue-lashing to the decorator . . . With her everything is carefully planned, and yet the unexpected is everywhere. She is always prodigiously busy but never does anything. She walks her eccentric and sporting silhouette in the middle of these bronzed people, with their bizarre clothes and curious eyes.
Her passion for classical music is insatiable, unshakable. She wants Mozart for the horses and Monteverdi for the acrobatics. The diver, bound hand and foot and handcuffed, descends into the middle of the crocodiles to the sound of a Haydn quartet. In the confused and disordered agitation of the circus, she infuses everything with a unique rhythm mixed with a strange elegance and an aristocratic benevolence.
In her grand white dresses she improvises the impossible. She transforms a consumptive old monkey into a triumphant gorilla; she turns four smiling children perched on a horse into a spinning carousel. A gray elephant that looks dried-out and thin, with red eyes, its hair worn by rubbing up against its cage, is metamorphosed in a few instants into a great white elephant, a sacred pachyderm come straight from the kingdom of Siam, its robe the color of snow and its eyes the color of honey, its triangular ears deployed like wings! She adapts, she moves things around . . . she modernizes, she modifies . . .
What about the artists’ clothes? The leftovers of old clothes that she transforms into saris seeded with flowers, crab-green or shrimp-red kimonos, one-of-a-kind tunics, sumptuous purple dresses where birds run across the branches of the sleeves . . .
The musical instruments? In the midst of the violins and strings, you can pick out some panhandles, the spouts of coffeemakers, pipes . . . a whole ironworks of cymbals and domestic items escaped from the kitchens. They say that one night, on her command, the orchestra musicians took down the gates of the public gardens and transformed them into sistrums and triangles. In the Bartolini Circus nothing goes to waste; everything is created and re-created. She reworks things, renews them, renovates, and switches them around, she transforms—she transposes. She knows all the secrets and the metamorphoses.
All of that incites at once disquiet and wonder: it is after all this mix that characterizes the circus, and it is why it stands alone among the arts.
The audience sometimes scolds the artists, realizing that it’s a con trick . . . One evening a magic nautical operetta cobbled together with three extras recruited at the last minute draws a hail of cursing, a storm of protests. Called in as a backup, “Rex the king of the clowns”—an elderly worn-out maniac in a white undershirt and suspenders who looks like a poor devil with silvery features—goes out to a chorus of boos and a hail of rotten mangoes. The audience is terrible! . . . When their discontentment explodes, the most diverse set of objects is thrown from the stands, pebbles from the beach, stones from the mountains, banana-missiles, pineapple-bombs, spiky-feathered live chickens . . . They boo them, they shout them down, accuse them of thievery, rape, of buying drink and not paying for it, of kidnappings!
But the people come back, ten times, twenty times, in a row. When the white elephant act comes out, they have to lift the barricades to keep the crowd penned in.
“As white as snow—only his penis is pink!” the program points out blithely. The line stretches back a hundred meters; an endless murmur rises up on the night of the circus, a burlesque din that has a dizzying effect and is punctuated by men spitting, the piercing cries of women and children’s laughter, a procession of feet that trudge through the muddy puddles and the dust of time.
The artists, the dancers, the animals . . . the acrobats . . . the musicians, above all . . . the people hate them, but they cannot do without them. It is their little reserve of life in their rotten existences . . . For deep down inside, the people know that they have only that to live by, that after these wonders, they will assume again in the darkness of the night all the worries of their lives, the weight of their torments, and the despair of their children.
And that is how, every evening, the little Bartolini Circus is transformed into the “Largest Circus in the Indian Ocean.”