It is Sunday. A volley of church bells rings out as I wake. The white curtains, the little bedroom eaten up with all my papers, the smell of wax, which the sun that comes in through the window breaks down into specks of dust that smell faintly of resin, gypsum, and pitch.
Like every morning, Georges brings me the newspaper. I tell him how much the Malagasy horoscope delights me. Three calendars rule the lives of the Malagasy people, he explains to me: the official (Gregorian) calendar; the agricultural calendar, linked to the solar cycle that measures out the field work; and the calendar of destiny, which has 355 days. It is the latter, the lunar-solar calendar of Arab origin, that is used by the soothsayers to decide the best time for each activity and to draw up the horoscopes. These people straddle time and stride across the planets.
This morning’s horoscope gives me particular delight, so full of advice, as simple as it is wise:
But above all, this one, which gets right to the heart of my preoccupations:
The Malagasy astrologers, the famous mpanandro, are right. Do not neglect the details. Georges’s chest of drawers is in the corner, waiting for me. I open a drawer . . . I open a second drawer . . .
*
Among the artists of the Bartolini Circus, three stand apart, and they are always placed at the climax, at the end of the program. These are the most striking figures, those upon whom the newspapers write the most detailed articles. Honor where honor is due: Arthur Dai Zong.
Arthur: it is he who is in the first tomb, the one farthest to the right, against the wall, as if it were seeking to escape from the cemetery. A little leaping Chinese gymnast, with slender hands and muscular calves, whose name rings like a gong: Arthur Dai Zong.
Arthur: slanted eyes, pointed nose, his mouth crossed by an indefinable smile (“a kind of Chinese Mona Lisa,” Madame Bartolini says of him). His very long chin has a little beard that he caresses constantly. But the most striking thing, which is noticed by all those who know him and comes back like a refrain in the eyewitness accounts in Madagascar, as in China, are his hands. Arthur’s hands don’t stay in one place; they flit around constantly from his chin to his eyebrow, from a cigarette to the ashtray, they trace in space innumerable curls that seem to have no end. A knife, a stone, a pen . . . Arthur’s hands are never empty, they can leave nothing in place, they are always working to move things about, to make them fly around, to balance them, place them on the edges, in suspense . . . People say of him that he has wings in place of hands.
Arthur was born south of Peking, in the region of Wuqiao, on the border between the provinces of Hebei and Shandong. His real name is Ha Chou, but everyone calls him Arthur: like Maxime, in changing his country, he changed his name. For over twenty years the Dai Zong family had multiplied its journeys to Madagascar: it was originally his uncle who settled there at the end of the nineteenth century to flee the first Sino-Japanese War. Then it was his father, who arrived in 1905 to, like thousands of other Chinese, build the railroads. Left alone with his mother, the young man grew up with the legend of this traveler father. When he was barely twenty years old, he also left for the Indian Ocean. It was on Mauritius that he was recruited by Madame Bartolini as “cook and acrobat.”
You have to know a bit about China to understand. I went there two years ago. I have a wonderful memory of the visit because it is a very beautiful country and also because it was there I met Li-An. Two years ago, then, I made my way there in stages—I left from Tokyo, stopped over in Paris, then went to New York for a conference, and then I transferred to China . . . Wuqiao County . . . the port of Changhzhou . . . the plane, then the train, then increasingly narrow roads, Xiaomachang . . . I carried on, passed through some kind of hole in time coming from New York to a hundred years earlier, in the immense countryside, where the sky seemed to rest on top of the trees. It is there, in the perfume of the rice fields and among the people who speak of the coming harvest, after an hour of walking in darkness on a path of yellow sand, that I found Arthur’s track, his imprint, in the middle of the vast plain of northern China.
Bathed in the east by the Bohai Sea and backing onto the Taihang Mountains, Wuqiao is a land of beaches and plateaus, of mountains and vales. The region has been known for millennia for its acrobats: they say that in its villages every family is a troupe in the making. I saw, in a hamlet in Xiaomachang, some graves covered in frescoes dating from the Eastern Wei dynasty. That takes us back to the sixth century before Christ, where you already find girls juggling with plates and boys walking on their hands. Costumed musicians accompany them, with zithers, bells, drums, and wind instruments. In the center a man dances, a cross balancing on his forehead, while two young people around him imitate the flight of the swallow so that they might squeeze into very narrow rings: the joyous and attentive body transforms itself; it passes, it seems, through the hoops of the species, tumbling and rolling, and becomes wind, dragon, and bird.
All of this to say that it is not to a Chinese person, and especially a native of Wuqiao, that you will be giving lessons in acrobatics. The district registers make reference to a piece of writing by Fan Jingwen, an advisor to the Ming cabinet and himself a native of Wuqiao. Entitled A Visit to the Garden of the South, this text describes an equestrian show at the Terrace of the Wind (the southern gate of the city): “Some horses gallop across the floor as fast as lightning. The horsemen adopt all kinds of postures: lying on their backs or on their stomachs, curled up on themselves or simply crouching, on sidesaddle or straddling, their hands holding the horse or in the air, leaping or standing still, their feet touching the ground or at the side of the horse; sometimes they let the reins drop and come out of their stirrups. Just when you think they are going to fall to the ground, they climb back on to the horse with incredible skill.”
It is no surprise to find so many horses in these exercises of skill. For the province of Shandong is also the land of Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War. Acrobatics, beneath its festive exterior, is not just entertainment: it is a very special way of being in the world, a form of aerial combat as well as a hidden, secret battle. We should perhaps read in that regard the final pages of Sun Tzu’s book, the famous chapter 13, in which he insists on the importance of secret agents and draws up a typology of them . . . In the magical network that he puts in place—the “divine labyrinth”—a special place is reserved for certain spies, who are called “living agents” or “flying agents”: underneath a common or even disgraceful outward appearance, these are “nimble, vigorous, tough, and brave men.” They may well have a slightly gauche or inoffensive air, but it is they who are sent to collect information at the right time. They have the acrobat’s furtive ways and rapidity of execution, the glance and the intrepid nature. In contrast to suicide agents, they return to make their reports following their mission. The paradox is that these sons of peasants, for all their lives attached to the land, have given to the world—in addition to juicy pears and little jujubes with red skin and yellow flesh—the quickest acrobats and the most subtle strategists.
This secret agent side will serve him well later, as we will see. But for the moment Arthur is ahead of the game so far as horse riding goes; he is a flying horseman. In his acts, in a nod to his peasant origins perhaps, he uses a set of agricultural objects—vases, containers, pitchers, cooking pots . . . But he uses them only to make them dance through the air. In the Jar Act, for example: “earthenware jars destined to be used to store harvested grain are no longer heavy vases—they fly off his feet and land balanced on the back of his neck.” Porcelain, pottery, earthenware, fortified enamel, everything works for him: with every material, he draws on an infinite reservoir of movements that seem to come out of the utensils themselves, suddenly liberated from the tyranny of work and returned to their quivering, leaping, spinning lives . . . On his touch, the tools pick themselves up; the ornaments take on a magical quality.
I carry on flicking through the programs . . . There is not a description for all of Arthur’s acts, but their very titles are enough for me to imagine the contours of a swirling landscape that is at once poetic and athletic. As if to signal that he is going to get your own head spinning, Arthur begins often with a Pagoda. What is a Pagoda? Bowls are seized in his toes and placed on the soles of his feet, he passes them from one leg to the other, hops, the bowls run along the ankles, then go back up to the toe, balancing there, following the sharp notes of an accompanying bamboo flute. The acrobat goes around the circus on his hands. You need to know how to live like that, with your head perched, an oblique look, and an offbeat perspective.
A Pagoda hand balancing act, using bowls and the support of the hand, a Pagoda using bowls with the two swallows in full flight . . . Suddenly, a Pagodan using a flower basket! Why is that called a “Pagoda”? Because, like in a pagoda, the rhythm rises regularly, the acts form a chain or build on one another, you move from apparatus to the rings to the ropes to the ladders—and you find yourself, without realizing it, up high, way up high, in the blue of the sky.
Some nights, however, Arthur gets bored of tumbling and pagodas and takes out his bicycle. It is his specialty, his secret weapon: the acrobatic bicycle. Everything that works in cycles and circles propels him along on his joyful journey. Perched in turns on a unicycle, a bicycle, a tricycle, and even a push-bike—there is a whole set of bikes in the Bartolini Circus—he spins like a top and does endless pivots and maneuvers, pirouettes and turns . . .
In the Act with Bowls on a Unicycle there he is undulating on a round table: his left foot pedals while his right foot throws bowls, forks, and spoons that fall with uncanny precision in the basket placed on top of his head. Arthur can do anything on the bike: stand still, reverse, pedal backward, drop suddenly under the bike frame, move onto the bracket, and rise up vertically . . . The crowd’s eyes never leave him all through his convolutions. Standing on the handlebars, crouching on the wheel guards or pedaling backward, he is at once strength and suppleness, height and inversion. On the ground, on a plank, on a wire, nothing stops this encyclopedist of the velocipede, who unfurls in the round of the circus his living catalog of virtuoso exploits.
The circus round is free; it has no beginning or end. At the end of his act, almost at a halt—arms spread for balance, victory, and saluting—he spins to the right and left in a thousand turns, never tiring, never stopping.
The second main attraction of the Circus Bartolini is Axel the tightrope walker. He is a quite pale and fragile-looking boy. The oldest of the three acrobats is also the most easily influenced: you could bet money that it was Maxime who set him on this journey. Axel, who is the oldest child of a notable family in Mauritius, does not get on well with his father, who is too bourgeois and too serious in his eyes. He likes the circus and poetry, he dreams of becoming an artist or performer. When he meets Maxime, he is immediately fascinated by this ball of energy from a family well below his on the social scale but who derives from that poverty a great surfeit of freedom.
Languid, lanky, a bit effeminate, Axel has a touching sense of grace. But behind his slender appearance, he is a formidable athlete: they say that of the three acrobats, he is the most assiduous trainer and that he can spend a whole evening suspended on his wire practicing an exercise until he is satisfied with it. “Who, if he is normal and of sound mind, walks on a wire or expresses himself in verse?” asks Jean Genet in his marvelous work “Le Funambule,” or “The Tightrope Walker.” “It is too crazy. Man or woman? A monster, for sure.” Indeed.
In the Red Circus his act plunges the audience into a subtle mix of suspense, anguish, and happiness. Axel performs on a thin, taut brass wire, suspended high in the air and held up by two metallic crosses set into the ground. Down below is the arena, the vast stretch of sand. Up above, among the fire and air, Axel must pass through a series of circles, large ropes of braided raffia that are soaked in suet and ignite as he goes through them. He uses a pole to keep his balance; the pole is weighted down at either end with little bags of sand, which adds to and distributes his mass and gives him time to correct his position. He is there, between death and a miracle. Life hangs by a wire, and for once the expression means something. He has aplomb, that is for sure. He is a solitary dancer, a flaming wonder.
Toward the middle of his crossing, as several newspapers point out, Axel often has a difficult period: “You will know a bitter time—a kind of hell—” says Genet again (who truly recognized himself in the figure of the tightrope walker), “and it is following this passage through the dark forest that you will rise once more, the master of your art.” It’s a Dantean spectacle, then. At the middle of his pilgrimage, alone on his wire, Axel looks ahead, then he looks behind: there is no question of making an about-face, as the way back is as far as the one ahead, so you see it is the same, you only have to be hanging there to feel it, to know it, and underneath lies the chasm, the most simple thing in the end would be to let yourself slide into it . . .
The tightrope walker in the middle of his wire is like the swimmer between two shores—a citizen between two countries—at equal distance from both. Lost overseas. Don’t think it is so easy to be a child of l’outre-mer, the overseas. The continents are no longer in sight, and your reference points and landmarks slip away . . . So, you are left with nothing but a fragile piece of greenery, cut across by the winds. The slightest breeze is to him a storm, the smallest puff of air a frightening whirlwind. Desolation lies in wait for him, the doldrums, fear. The muscles stiffen up; he is a little tired already. He feels the swelling overtake his fingers; stiffness climbs up the length of his calves . . . It would be so easy just to stop there, to crouch down on the wire, go to one side or the other—it doesn’t matter which one—crawling . . .
But it is nothing; the best have felt the same. Axel’s inspiration is Blondin . . . Jean-François Gravelet, the Great Blondin, the first to cross the Niagara Falls on a cable and who would repeat the exploit several times during the nineteenth century. When Blondin reached the middle of his 335 meters of rope, above the gaping precipice, in a halo of mist rising from the chasm below, he took out a bottle of wine and served himself a pitcher right there, above the abyss! Another time he took out a stove and cooked himself an omelet on the wire. Always at that point in the crossing, there is that moment of horror, to which he chose to respond with humor.
The Great Blondin was to cross waterfalls many times, each time increasing the difficulty of the exploit: once he was blindfolded, another time he had his feet in a bag or his hands in handcuffs . . . It was, of course, all about inventing exploits that were more and more audacious but also about increasingly setting himself apart, confirming with every step the infinite precision of his own person in the surrounding racket.
In doing that, he took along the whole world with him, his friends, his family, his agent . . . In London’s Crystal Palace, in 1862, he pushed along at fifty-five meters above the ground a wheelbarrow in which he had put his five-year-old daughter, who, full of smiles, threw great handfuls of rose petals over the crowd below! It was an unreal spectacle, poetic and flowery, a wonderful affirmation of filial love: of course, it was banned right away by the Home Office, which was alerted by the press, which gave forth on the fate of the child. But what can you say to this gentleman who is up there on high as if he were at home?
Blondin’s stage was the whole world. We have forgotten it, but the Niagara Falls were for a long time nicknamed the “Blondin Falls”: he made the place his own, leaving it free and open for all but the inhabitant of his singular presence. A wire held between air and water, a great rush.
So, Axel sets off again, gently. His hips are back in place, his foot grips more solidly right along the taut wire. His breathing is once again fluid and silent. All of his joints are working, his spine, kneecaps, all the cogs turn, and his thoughts feed through his body, right to his bones. He crosses the chasm, the circles, the fire, and he reemerges on the other side, in the clouds of smoke and a deafening explosion. He smiles. The tightrope walker is an island who remembers the continents and salutes them from afar.
I stop for a minute and open the dictionary. The word acrobat is from the same family as microbes: it comes from the Greek, from acro (extremities) and from bios (life). The Greek acrobat was the one with the ability to move on tiptoes or on a wire, a pole, or an apparatus: at the extreme. In a word it is the ability to live on points, on edges. Maxime is the perfect example of this: he is stubborn and pointed in the sense of being sharp and refined.
The life of the extremities, the life of the fingers, the lips, the soles of the feet . . . The pride of the toes, the nails, the grace of the eyelashes. It is touch in waves, the word at the tip of the tongue. The hands speak, and the feet trace on the ground a strange calligraphy, as if one were physically posing the question of language.
They often say that the art of the circus is that which consists in arranging all the other arts together. They are constantly straddling, composing. They belong to multiple places and disciplines. They have no interest in setting up precise borders to their sovereignty. In every one of these acts there is a certain relationship with knowledge (“one would say that knowledge has found its act,” said Valéry about female dancers) and a great science of the multiple. Each one of their steps, every one of their gestures, opens up an in-between space, an alternative idiom, a science of the gaps that can be applied to numerous fields: language, cooking, music, medicine . . .
In the Bartolini Circus the horsewomen, who are the first to make your heart leap, know how to jump in many different ways on a walking or stationary horse. They can also kneel down on the saddle, sitting on the soles of their back-to-front feet. Arthur Dai Zong knew how to sing with his head held low, with a top spinning on the sole of his left foot and a saber balanced on the sole of his right foot. Axel the tightrope walker knew how to ride a bike on a wire and wave a silk scarf. They seem at each turn to pose a question to us: what about you, what kinds of crossings are you capable of?
But the most astonishing of this trio is Maxime.
There are those who know how to carry and those who know how to throw. Those who do the bridge and those who do cartwheels. Those who lift up, those who hold, those who launch . . . Specialists in balancing and those skilled in rotation . . . Maxime knows how to do everything; he was hired for precisely that reason. “The possibility of switching roles, carrier, acrobat, joker . . .” I found this phrase in Madame Bartolini’s notebooks. She wrote it in haste just after Maxime’s audition. It is the first written description that I have found of my grandfather, and I find it suits him well.
On the ground a carrier, observer, or acrobat . . . In the sky he is a high-wire walker, a ropedancer, a trapeze artist. He can replace most of the other artists at short notice. He is what they call, in circus vocabulary, a “joker.” A young man, with a pyramid-like frame, a scintillating gymnast.
A sketchbook—perhaps also drawn by the hand of Madame Bartolini—shows him to us in all his talents. Maxime wears a superb ruby-colored costume with black flashes: he is a cherry elf, a Carmelite imp. When the gardine opens, the great red velvet curtain that separates the backstage from the arena, a whole range of intense situations and different sensations run through him. He enters into the private space of his attentive flesh, into the country that breathes and pounds beneath his skin . . . fingers-fingers, feet-fists, hands-wrists, hands-elbows, he is already thinking where, when, and how to place each of his supports.
He hits one hand with the other. Magnesia reduces perspiration and improves the grip, but it is also a kind of starting point, with its oxide smell, of a spectacle of white powder where all forms are dissolved. The blood flows, the door opens, and the body speaks. Then it is the joy of being onstage that kicks in.
On this point Madame Bartolini’s notebooks are precious and precise: Maxime is “alive, attentive,” he “opens himself up like a corolla to take on the jumps,” he also knows how to “close himself up again for protection.”
The technical indications state: “alternation between fast and slow tempo.”
Body line: “slender, elegant.”
Posture: “vigorous.”
She notes also the extreme variation of the speeds and the almost musical punctuation of his floor exercises, as shown in this astonishing notation, which is like the directions in a musical score: “Moderate, fast, strong, soft, merry.”
There is a fault, however, that is spotted during his practice: “he doesn’t like falling into line.” On the other hand, he can take part in any combination, sitting, standing, lying down, static or dynamic, in a pyramid, in a group or a column, solo or in a trio . . . The joker’s role: I help you to climb up and stay balanced atop the person who carries you. The aim is for you to stand alone, alone against the whole world if you have to. Then I help you to come straight down. I can also help you to come down acrobatically: I carry you, lift you up, throw you and hold you. I throw you into the open space, into the magic of the blue and white canvas sky. I exult you; I catapult you.
When it comes to Maxime’s turn, he examines first the protruding bones, the muscular masses, their elasticity, their robustness . . . It is a strange rapport that this body has with itself and all the others. He feels the other bodies, wraps them up, flies above them, with the palm of his hand or the leap of his eye; he recognizes in passing the most solid surfaces for support, the places for strategic positioning, the best bits for taking flight . . . It is for him the great geography of the body.
Hands on the pelvis, hands on the shoulder and the pelvis, hands on the shoulder: the first thing to do is to foresee the various ways of making contact with the other. Then, very quickly, he passes beneath the skin, as it were, detects the veins and the joints. He taps, he climbs up, he gathers himself and takes flight: the most important things take place there, in the gaps.
Can I put my foot here, my hand in that place? Where and when precisely and for how long? In what form is my partner this evening? Will I throw him for a jump, a double jump, or a twist? A good acrobat is first of all a great physiologist: he x-rays his partners’ bodies, he crosses them bit by bit, and all of that must be done very quickly, in an instant. The eyes, the forehead, the lips, the tongue, the voice, the arms, the legs, the bearing, the color of the face, the salivary glands, the heart, the lungs, the stomach, the arteries and the veins, and the whole nervous system, shivers, heat . . . Everything is important. An internal and external sweep, a complete scanning: he knows the world through his five senses and through one further sense that he possesses. He knows what is going on in the body at all times.
And now you hear the endless drumroll . . . It is the last act, the climax of the show before the final parade: the trapeze. At the end, with all the others worn-out, he is the only one still standing; no one can follow him now. First he crosses his legs, then pulls himself up with his arms: there he is climbing; he is going to seek out the light, the projectors superimposed onto his body. He does the corde lisse, the cloud swing; he climbs; he is going back up to the trapeze . . .
The trapeze is a ship: you hear the sound of wood cracking, the ropes sway; you sense a breath of wind. The crossing is about to begin . . . A few moments of silence, two or three swaying movements, he begins with a few passes to test his balance. He does a succession of figures: the Low Frog, the High Frog . . . the Front Stork, the Back Stork . . . All of these animal spirits warm up, get into position, change position . . . he comes out of confusion, he puts things in order. He is synchronous. A tour of the ropes, and then, very smoothly, he continues with some geometrical figures: first the Right Angle, then the Square. The muscles in his arms tighten, but his face belies no trace of exertion. A vertical climb . . . Waiting, stationary. A swing to the front, and there you have it, The Siren and the Seagull.
There is in the act the physical engagement with the apparatus, the muscular strength, but there is also something else: rhythm and breathing, a certain way of not being overtaken by the speed and energy he builds up, to be always present at the right pulsation. Balance is a constant disequilibrium, a play of forces and movements. Above all, do not force things. On the contrary, back off . . . . Know-how here lies in letting go: compression of the muscle and detachment of the mind; breathing is everything. It is all in what the French call “détente,” which signifies at once impetus and rest. Thus, the body adjusts itself, the leg around the rope, the hand on the bar . . . Suddenly, all the supports fall in just the right places, and in this exactitude lies beauty itself.
Maxime smiles, climbs back up his rope ladder, grips another rope . . . A short rest, and here is the Hammock figure. Suspended five meters up, he stretches out between the two ropes nonchalantly. Madame Bartolini plays a little tune on the harpsichord . . . It is by Couperin, a banal sarabande. The audience laughs; they also catch their breath. Quietly, as this goes on, the tent has been transformed into a great cathedral of silence. High above, the flying archangel starts up again: the Ship, the Escape, the Flag, and—a complete reversal—the strange figure of the Arc of Time. Finally, the Airplane and then, very simply, the Cross. He hangs there for several seconds, his arms like two great white wings.
Then, suddenly, he flies into the air.
The dangerous triple turn with twist is Maxime’s specialty: in a single movement he passes from one trapeze to another situated a few meters below in the religious silence of a crowd that seems to hang onto his shoulders, arms, and the hollow of his knees. He does three turns in the air in his red costume, looking like a burning wheel. It is a strange moment, where time does not stop—as the common cliché goes—but is instead unfurled in all its wild diversity.
There is a single photograph of Maxime carrying out his famous twist; I found it in Georges’s papers. It is a poor-quality photo, with a blurred background and fuzzy composition, his face in motion. But there is something moving in seeing this man alone, thrown into the immensity of a sky of blue canvas, suddenly rendered in the slightly faded darkness of the paper that has been devoured by the years. The photographer must have clicked the shutter shortly after he jumped and, given the speed of reaction of the subject, Maxime was caught—or more precisely, intercepted—at the highest point of his loop, his arms stretched out into the darkness, a bit like the Olympic divers just before they dive. In spite of the poor quality of the photo—or, in fact, because of it—you understand right away the extraordinary graceful strength of this flying madman. He is standing in the darkness, his arms open, his hands reaching for the sky. There it is as if he breaks the circle of his kind, his species, he extracts himself from the cycle, he eclipses himself—and it is like each turn allowed him to cross an infinite number of degrees of freedom. It is a new space-time, threaded by light, carved by matter, an elastic time untrammeled by rules and laws.
*
Maxime the acrobat: a peaceful bird that flies in reverse. When he is not flying, there is no salvation. He has to make himself fly, by means of a long, immense, and reasoned deployment of all the senses. There is nothing predictable in his movements and, at the same time, nothing that has no use. Bird, monkey, fish, plant—he has become unclassifiable. He is the world, a world suddenly knowable through the body, decomposing and recomposing. It is the acrobat’s victory.
Thus, he enters into other coordinates of space and time, another state of the body itself. He has his own tempo, a sort of organic music that leads him to the other side of things, their invisible source. He will hold onto that time, which is his own, until his dying day.
On that last point I have a very precise memory. It is toward the end of his life, Maxime is almost seventy years old, but every morning he still does a series of stretching exercises on the floor and a few turns on the wooden bar that is curiously suspended above his front door . . . (So that no one may enter here if they are not in some way acrobatic, that is no doubt what he meant by putting it there.) The memory that I am speaking about—I am five years old—concerns one of the rare conversations I had with him, our knees touching each other gently, on the little bench at the house at Mahajanga, on the other side of the boulevard, facing the sea. I still hear his very distinctive voice, a serious voice, a bit sarcastic. I can smell his cologne and its subtle lemon scent. As I bombard him with questions about the circus, Maxime tells me that at the moment of the dangerous leap, he always closed his eyes.
— All you need is to close your eyes.
— Close your eyes? Up there?
— Absolutely. At the right moment. That allows you to find the trapeze, with the eyes closed, from the inside.
He is not trying to pass on to me a piece of knowledge—he is not interested in that—but at that moment he is extraordinarily jolly and serious. Without stopping on the trapeze, he doubles himself up and mutates, transforms himself, changes weight and speed. He escapes ceaselessly, endlessly coming back to the same point of his own space, with the rope loose, in a sequence that repeats itself many times. And the secret—so he tells me—is so simple that even a child of five years can understand it, before the whole of his adult life tries to make him forget it. The secret is to close the eyes, that is, to substitute all the usual visual markers with a sort of internal vision that is sharp and ruthless. He is a resistance fighter to the core, an indefinable worker who reinvents himself by the day. In him everything is breath, sound, muscle, music, and voice.
Even today in my dreams, I can see him, sitting on his trapeze in the darkness of the hoists and ropes, red among the shadows. He is far away. People say to me that we are separated by dense layers of time, and it would be vain to try to connect with him again. However, he looks at me: then the whole enormous reservoir of things is open again, in every direction.