The Circus

On random occasions and with great joy, we would receive the news that the circus had arrived in town. Sometimes it came alone, others with a fair. The circuses that passed through town were always the greatest novelty, especially for children. At least two or three different tents stopped in the village on their itinerant route every year. Some were quality circuses with foreign acrobats and exotic animals. They paraded down the main avenue making their big fuss with circus fanfare and a full cast giving demonstrations of their numbers. At the tail, long trailers loaded cages with wild animals. There was always the typical drunkard who came up to the floats wanting to touch the lion through the bars of his cage or the bald one who complimented the trapeze artists who paraded in bikini suits with silver glitters riding gypsy horses waving their hands at people who applauded with a big smile on their faces.

Those afternoons were pure joy for everyone and more so because you didn’t have to pay a peso and sometimes, they would even give admission tickets away so one could attend the function. Circus parades were then a promotional and entertaining diversion. The parades would sometimes include elephants, lions, Bengal tigers, zebras and monkeys. Most of the animals were used to perform some number in the function, others only to raise the prestige of the company and accentuate the quality of the circus. The more animals, the greater the distinction. A circus without wild animals was a crappy circus. The consciousness that exists today about animal cruelty was still asleep then.

The bullet man, motorcycles in the fire sphere, or the acrobats of death were just some of the stellar numbers that people went to see with the savings of up to a month of work since most of the families were large.

Clowns were always the best part of the show because they made everyone laugh, children and adults alike. The big tent always brought out the best in the soul: laughter, joy, and happiness. There was nothing like laughing until your belly ached and your cheekbones were numb. I’d get cramps in the abdomen from so much laughter.

The acrobats always kept me open-mouthed and the animals in awe, although my favorite part even beyond the clowns, was the magicians. Magic always was and continues to be my thing. Had I had the opportunity, I would have gone to study in Ouagadougou in the Mountains of the Moon to become a magician and appear and disappear at ease. I was always intrigued by illusionism, impossible tricks, and mystery. The mysticism that contains an act of magic is for the spirit and the mind a bridge of dialogue where awe and shock become one.

Pulling a rabbit out of a hat, appearing roses or disappearing doves were arcane acts that left me intrigued for days. I was not satisfied with accepting these events as tricks; I believed more in mysticism than in trickery. Thinking it couldn’t be that hard being a magician or an illusionist, I began to attempt levitation, but someone or something would always interrupt me with some joke. Wake up! They invariably told me. You’re in the clouds! And yes, I guess I spent a lot of time there, which didn’t require being a magician, but simply to be a child. The bullying never bothered me, I was in my own world.

Surely, they thought I was not all there and surely there was some degree of truth in that. The thing is that magic had always captured my soul and led me to the consideration of other possibilities, of alternate realities, of existential planes separated from our own. I did not think like this then. In an attempt to reason, I simply dreamed and from so much dreaming, life passed through my nose, and I did not realize it. There is something in that that seems strange to me even after the years have gone by, but I am sure that it is that same substance – the very thing that has me here remembering and telling what I saw. To some extent, this may have its good side.

At the magazine stand tended by Pistache, I got a book of Houdini and some small esoteric magazines that I shouldn’t have read because of my age and, no matter how much I practiced with metal objects or coins, I could never do telekinesis nor any type of magic. The only thing I was ever able to disappear were the coin change they gave me at the grocery store when mom sent me to buy rice or beans by the kilo. The arcade machines at Doña Abigail’s corner store were great at making my coins vanish through the metal slot into their big square wooden bellies they milked Sunday nights, after a week of taking coins from all the kids who were also magicians, like me.

Circus afternoons were the best afternoons in the village. I say village because I like the word, because of the romanticism that comes with thinking about Chapala like this, although then it was already beginning to give glimpses of a small town. People reacted in a way that I’m sure outsiders paid attention to. We were not misled by the world, and anything made us open our mouths in genuine awe. We still appreciated the things that big cities were already ignoring or overseeing like looking at people in the eyes or always saying please and thank you. The whole town was a sponge that attracted outsiders with its energy, its economic capacity, and its beauty. Lakesiders had no need to leave the town to see new things. New things came to us.

Traveling circuses was one of those things.