PERHAPS IT IS THOSE unwieldy arms that make the gypsies love her so. They pluck her from the crowd as if she were the roundest and ripest fruit, and the eleven other girls squirm with envy. A disappearing trick! Sister Clavel wrings her hands; outings make her perspire and she is happy only when her charges are praying or asleep. Madeleine smiles at them from the center of the ring as the gypsy mama unspools, from one of her several and cavernous pockets, an endless piece of string.
Displaying it for all the crowd to see, she secures the greasy end between Madeleine's fists and circles around her with the swiftness of a spider until Madeleine looks like a well-wrapped fly. Can she breathe? Sister Clavel worries, while Bernadette steels herself, preparing to make the rescue.
The little package is raised aloft by the gypsy mama, and then tossed, with a series of shouts, from one epicene acrobat to another. Firecrackers hiss and the sickly, frail animals begin to fret inside their cages. The audience stomp their feet like tribesmen, join in the chanting of the gypsy words, and suddenly, from out of the cacophony, there rises a wounded wail; the midgets scurry, brushing aside a velvet curtain, behind which sits a beautiful woman, who saws upon her own tautly stretched hairs with the energy of the devil. Her costly dress gapes open, her fingers jig up and down her elegant neck, and her bow bobs back and forth across her belly. The faster she plays, the more her face glows: she is self-illuminating, ecstatic, and her strange, discolored song makes the gypsies dance with the desperation of a bear on a chain. They gravitate towards her, yelping, and Madeleine comes flying with them, shuttling over their heads as they reel in tightening circles around the stringed beauty, whose bow moves so quickly it blurs. She scrapes harder, faster, more frantically, her knees atremble, and then: the bow clatters to the ground, the strings jangle, and the player gasps. The spell is cast.
Cuddling it in her arms, the gypsy mama returns the ball of string to center stage. A hush falls over the tent. Is the little girl propped on her head or on her feet? By now it is impossible to tell. Shhhhhhhhhhhhh! the mama commands. See and be amazed!
After a peremptory wiggle of her fingers, she grabs the frayed end of string and yanks it.