One day, my mother gained back her strength and went up on the ropes and hanged herself. She was discovered because of the dogs’ howls, and because the chimp pointed to the sky and the elephant walked in circles around the large tent, trumpeting an end.
I know that my mother was buried somewhere between the Danube River and the heel of the Italian peninsula. I remember holding the hand of the bearded lady and marching behind the band of gypsies, the elephants and the horses in coloured feathers above dancing hooves. Her coffin was carried by the clown, the strongman, the cannon man, and her favourite white horse. We walked in silence, and then the music began and got loud and we all danced with umbrellas in our hands.
Wanderers, tent makers, and animal herders have the privilege of dying anywhere, the bearded lady said as she gave her eulogy. The earth is their land and all the roads are their burial ground.
Above the open grave, my little left hand was squeezed in the bearded lady’s palm, and my right grasped a handful of dust. I threw it over my mother’s remains and the gypsies played again.
The next day, the circus packed up and moved on. On the way, we were stopped by border guards who blocked our roads and mocked our ways. The officers tried to steal the horses but the clown distracted them and the magician made all the animals disappear. And then food became scarce and the animals’ bones bulged against their sides. They all slept in hunger, they all whimpered, and our money ran out. Finally, we came together and the owner of the circus gathered some sticks and threw them into the bottom of the magician’s long hat. One by one we drew them out. I was handed a gun and five bullets. I walked to the stable and I shot the biggest horse.
After six days of horsemeat and feeble fires, the mime drew sad faces and the strongman gathered everyone and said: We all must depart upon our different paths. We’ll take the horses to Ireland and set them free, the dogs to Spain, and the elephant and the chimps to Africa. The rest of you should go wherever you see fit. The world has gone mad and our way of life was bound to change.
The bearded lady packed our bags and told me: I’ll write to my distant cousin in the Americas. He lives in a city where a carnival takes place.
HAT
AFTER WE HAD all wept, sung, and danced our goodbyes, the bearded lady wrapped me in new clothes, a hat, and new shoes. We took a boat from Marseilles and sailed through the Mediterranean and then into and across the Atlantic.
On the boat, we encountered a magician who was doing all the tricks we knew so well. The bearded lady and I stood there and smiled as he performed: the Floating Wand, the Protocol of Knots, the Lantern of Diogenes, the Frame of Cards. And when he was done, the two of us went to him and asked if he could perform for us, in private, the Enchanted Bank Bill, or the Wreath of Flowers in the Hat, or the Magical Bell and the Butterfly.
The magician laughed and introduced himself as Mr. W. Frinkell. And when the bearded lady asked his real name and offered to feed the birds in his hat, he said, Call me Pips, and we all shook hands and I, who was rehearsed in the art of illusions and sleeves, offered to assist him with his next show. I picked up his tall hat and collected the riches while the handkerchief turned into birds and the stick turned into flowers and the horizon into a sun and the hat into the world. At night, as we walked along the deck, he told the bearded lady, I’ve been around the world, and the sweetest people I’ve ever met are dwarfs and misfits.
During the rest of the crossing, I would wake up in the middle of the night and see that the bed I shared with the bearded lady was empty except for me, but I was happy because I knew that Pips would take care of La Dame. He would love having her in his bed as the sea rocked the boat and splashed the deck and the little round windows with water and fish and every other kind of creature that originated from the sea.
Pips decided to travel with us the rest of the way, and when we arrived in the Carnival city the three of us shared small rooms with a communal bathroom. Pips found a few birthday gigs and a restaurant where we performed some nights, but then, suddenly, poverty hit us and hunger surfaced again from beneath our clothing and hats, it settled in our mattresses and covered the tablecloth, and we all went looking for jobs. I wore a turban on my head and a long robe that reached past my feet. I stood on corners while Pips shouted, The Surmise Boy, ladies and gentlemen! He will guess your age and weight and the remaining number of your living years. .
The bearded lady couldn’t find a job because people here want everything to be clear: men are men and women are women and those who are in between are left to the vultures and the crocodiles. We were barely surviving, and one day Pips held me and said, Listen, kid, I have another trick up my sleeve, but you have to help me without our lady knowing. He showed me a book on “spiritism,” as he called it. He flashed the book in front of my eyes. I read the title, The Book of Mediums and the Secret World of Beyond and After. When I tried to grab it, Pips pulled it back and said, You will read it someday.
With the little money we made on the street, Pips rented a room and proclaimed himself a spirit medium. We fed on old ladies who had lost their husbands, mothers who talked to their missing sons in the jungles of war or the sunken ships below the seas, and we summoned lost lovers, wives, dogs, sons, and daughters from the beyond. When new clients called for an appointment, Pips, to look important and sincere, would ask for a reference, and then he would ask for their names and the year of their birth and tell them that he would be in touch soon. And I would go to the library and research past addresses, occupations, and lives. Then, in the afternoons, Pips and I would stroll to our clients’ childhood places: we would note trees and watch kids play, we would observe the colours of window frames, the meadows, or the electric poles nearby. We went to the local bars and coffee shops and made conversation. It was easy to evoke the dead, because their traces are everywhere. Their past lives stretched and covered candy stores, benches, water fountains, dirt roads, and dusty graves. The dead, Pips would say, are what we make of them.
Pips and I dimmed the lights in the rented room, hung velvet drapes, and skilfully positioned the dancing tables and talking chairs. We bought a cheap skull and passed thin ropes through it. And I let my own dark spirit hide behind the wardrobe door to pull the rope and make the skull talk and shiver. We built a wooden box, placed a bell inside it, and positioned the box under the table. Whenever the box was kicked or nudged, the bell would ring. Just when the spirit was about to respond, Pips would hold the client’s arm and ask everyone to move back from the table, hold hands, close their eyes, and let their bodies fall forward. From there he would faintly jiggle the table with his head, making it shift and squeak, and kick the box.
Later we oiled the wardrobe’s door so that when it opened, no sound could be heard. Before the client came into the room, I would slip inside the wardrobe with a few sealed envelopes. During the session, Pips would ask the client, let’s say it was a lady, to write a question to the deceased. She would insert it into an envelope, seal it, and Pips would take it from her and ask her to close her eyes and concentrate. From inside the wardrobe, I would exchange envelopes with Pips, right under the lady’s nose. Then Pips would ask the lady to open her eyes and read the answer of the spirits. The messages we wrote were always vague, a reference to a place that we, Pips and I, eerie humans that we were, had visited the day before.
Pips even made deals with the undertaker. He promised him that, once in a while, a client would come to him wanting to upgrade a loved one’s headstone to something more expensive. And Pips would take a cut. The contents of some envelopes read The white stone, change the white stone, or simply the fountain, I am happy here, or Grandpa. From inside the wardrobe, I tried not to breathe heavily, not to sneeze, not to laugh or feel sorry.