Julio Llamazares*

Balancing the World on His Chin

The posters advertising movies or dances were not the only ones that occasionally clamoured for our attention from Olleros’ walls and tree trunks. Sometimes, too, a travelling circus would stop there or a family troupe of actors or puppeteers with a tiny cast (I remember one in particular, in which the man not only sold the tickets on the door and played the parts of lion, devil and monk in the play, he also, still wearing his lion costume, organized the drawing of raffle tickets in the interval) and, for a few days, they would pitch their tents and park their trucks in the square and fill the village streets with posters.

They usually arrived around the fifteenth of each month, which was el día del pago in Olleros, when the company paid its employees. On that day, which people waited for all month (some with a certain degree of anxiety since prudent household management was not the most common of virtues), Olleros woke in a state of great agitation. The miners let off rockets and exploded dynamite charges, the women crowded into the shops (some to buy and others to settle accumulated debts) and, from noon onwards, when we children would be coming out of school and the miners returned from the first shift, the day became a holiday, regardless of whether it was a Sunday or a weekday. All afternoon and late into the night or, indeed, depending on the weather and the circumstances, into the early hours, people would fill the bars, stroll along the road or rush to visit the many stalls set up around the square since the previous day. There were tombolas, carousels, rifle ranges and try-your-strength machines, fairground barkers, photographers, stands selling sweet fritters, itinerant salesmen and bands, and, from time to time, a special attraction that would be announced with much fanfare several days in advance. I remember, for example, The Great Guzzler, a bald, but otherwise extremely hairy man who devoured coins and lengths of metal pipe and who could, he said, corrode a whole motorbike with his own saliva and eat it bit by bit (this was never actually put to the test because no one in the crowd dared take the risk); or Muscle Woman, who claimed to be the strongest woman in the world and who was capable of bearing the weight of nine men on her body and of dragging a truck several yards with just her teeth; or the Pita Brothers, who performed on a tightrope strung between a chimney and the pithead tower and walked along it many feet above the ground, lit from below by a spotlight; but over and above all of them – even Fu Manchu the Chinaman who could trace the outline of his wife’s body with knives which he threw at her from a distance while she stood there against a wooden board, breathing fire – I remember the man who was depicted on all the posters with the globe of the world balanced on his chin, the man who, having first balanced a large lamp post, held me and the chair I sat in poised in the air, as this photo of Barbachey the Seal-Man unequivocally shows and records.

He was a burly, fair-haired man who performed before the public naked from the waist up and whose sideburns formed part of his moustache. He travelled in a van with a woman who acted as his assistant and who was in charge of collecting the money at the end of each performance. For me it proved an unforgettable night. Having balanced the lamp post on his chin and held it there for a while, Barbachey dried his sweat, rested for a moment, and then, addressing the audience in his strange, accented Spanish (for Barbachey was French, as was the woman who accompanied him), he called for a volunteer. Several of us offered, but he chose me, perhaps because I was the tallest. Barbachey gave me his hand – a hand, I remember, as rough and hard as the root of a tree – and told me to sit on the chair which his assistant had placed there for the purpose. A silence fell, the woman stood to one side, and Barbachey, after first flexing his muscles, made the sign of the cross, looked up at the sky, planted his feet wide apart, and then, to the astonishment of all, suddenly lifted up the chair, and me with it, and placed it carefully on his chin, on just one of its legs; then he began to turn, keeping his balance with his arms. I don’t know how long I was up there, not daring to move or even breathe – still less look down – but I do know that, when he lowered me to the ground again, I could no longer hear the audience’s shouts and applause or Barbachey’s voice congratulating me. I was still up there, suspended in the air, floating, holding time stopped in my hands just like the globe he balanced on his chin in the posters. It was the most remarkable night of my life and my most vivid memory from those years.

But life keeps turning. Life turns and turns just as the world did on Barbachey’s chin while I was up in the air, and, as it turns, it sometimes surprises us, the way old photographs do, unexpectedly lobbing remnants of the past in our direction. Some time ago, in a village in Soria, I came across an abandoned van. It had lost its wheels, was covered in rust and almost entirely overgrown by brambles, but, despite this, I could still just make out the red lettering which continued to announce from amidst the rust and dust: Barbachey the Seal-Man. Travelling Show. Someone from the village told me it had been there several years, precisely the same number of years that had passed since its owner was found hanging from a rope slung over the oak tree beside it. It seems that Barbachey, who had for some time been wandering the villages of Castile performing his show alone (the woman who used to accompany him must have either left him or died), had, with the passing of time, lost his strength and, one day, doubtless no longer able to bear the weight of the world on his old chin, had decided to take his own life. He was buried there, in the village’s small cemetery, in the nettle-infested corner reserved for suicides and those who die in mortal sin.

I chose not to go there. I left without saying goodbye and without visiting his grave. I did not even turn round when I was some way off, to look back for the last time at the place where he lay buried. Before I left, though, I went over to the van and, unseen by anyone, removed the torn poster that was still stuck to it like a photograph of the past, but from which the sun and the rain had almost completely erased the image, and I took it with me as a souvenir of the man who had unwittingly taught me that sometimes it’s more difficult to bear the passage of time than it is to balance the world on your chin, even though the world turns out to be as hard and difficult as the one balanced by all of them, by Barbachey the Seal-Man and by the miners of Olleros, who are still watching us in this photograph.