Love, Let Me Not Hunger (11 page)

Williams said, “You tell me, cul,” and parted the curtain a trifle at eve level for the American to see.

It was hot enough in the confined enclosure where the performers waited their turn to go into the ring, but the furnace blast of heat from within which blew through the aperture was appalling. The July sun had been baking the unrelieved Spanish plain for twenty consecutive days, and since early morning had been cooking the atmosphere within the circus tent to boiling point. Nine hundred spectators packed in tiers into the enclosure added their body heat to the stifling, stagnant air.

Rose appeared at the rear of the enclosure clad in a long spangled gown of blue sequins which showed off the smooth copper shine of her hair and the milky skin that went with her colouring. She carried a whip in one hand, preparing to go on with Fred Deeter and the Liberty act, and a towel in the other. She went over to the clown and removed the jackdaw from his shoulder, carrying it to a perch at the rear of the back entrance where it settled in a heap of miserable ruffled feathers. The heat was affecting it, as it was every human and animal connected with the circus. Then she returned and with the towel mopped the sweat from the steaming back and neck of the Auguste, who ignored her, and glancing through the opening said, “Over there on the left. You can’t miss her!”

Deeter applied an eye to the aperture for an instant and then drawled in genuine amusement, “Well, Jee-sus Christ! What the hell do you call that?” Then he said, “You’re sure that ain’t a Gee put up by Sam Marvel?” using the circus term applied to a performer who pretends to be a member of the audience until he or she joins the act.

“Nunti,” said Williams. “I saw it come in.”

They were playing the matinée performance in Zalano, a town of some six thousand population in the midst of the Spanish wine and olive country, and where an evening performance had been scheduled as well.

The creature who was the object of their attention was so obese that the broad spread of her hams, encased in what seemed to be countless layers of ruffled skirts, spread over three of the star-backed folding chairs of the front row, her knees almost touching the red wooden circle of the circus ring. Out of the voluminous skirts arose a thick torso over which swelled, seemingly about to burst from their confinement, breasts as huge as melons. A black lace shawl covered her shoulders, but her enormous arms were free. No neck was visible; the woman’s head, monstrous and grotesque, rested upon the triple folds of chin dewlapping her chest. Her face, chalked in powder as milk-white as her arms, had two precise circles of crimson rouged onto the cheeks which seemed almost an imitation of those on the countenance of Gogo, the white-faced clown. Her mouth, which was ridiculously small for the rest of the vast expanse of her, had been meticulously painted with a fine hand-brush into a tiny Cupids bow. Her eye make-up was startling. The eyes themselves were as green as a cruel and stormy sea, but the eyelids were silvered with some kind of metallic paste, the dark pouches beneath them emphasised with purple, with black pencilled lines drawn to the corners. Some illness or accident must have left her as bald as an ostrich egg, for her head was surmounted by a towering peruke, brick-red in colour and consisting of tiers and masses of stiff artificial curls and ringlets. Topping off this formidable pile was a majestic ten-inch tortoiseshell comb.

She must have been six feet tall and appeared to be almost as wide. The fingers, like five fat white slugs, which held an enormous black lace fan which was never still, were covered with rings, and two enormous pear-shaped emerald pendants dripped from her ears.

She stood out against the drab background of the poorly clad audience, for by the simple expedient of buying up half a dozen seats on each side of her as well as several rows behind, she was able to sit removed from the rabble; alone except for her entourage of attendants arrayed behind her but within call. These consisted of her personal maid, a smartly liveried chauffeur, and an elderly man who in spite of the heat was clad in striped trousers, short black jacket, white shirt, and stiff collar.

Her name, as they ascertained later, was the Marquesa Felicia de Pozoblanco de la Mancha. She was sixty years old and immensely rich, owning vineyards, olive groves, and saffron fields in the environments of Zalano as far as the eye could reach. The residents of the town regarded her with a mixture of fear and superstition. The elderly man accompanying her was Don Francisco, her major-domo, who never once during the performance kept his eyes anywhere but fixed upon the broad expanse of the back of the Marquesa awaiting and prepared for the slightest signal from his mistress.

Old Mr. Albert—now functioning as prop man and ring manager, the tails of his rusty, black frock-coat which he wore for the performance as a kind of uniform flapping with the effort—was struggling with the taut, steel guy struts supporting one of the platforms of the wire act. Two Spanish roustabouts helped him, trying to loosen the travelling bolts. The suffocating heat and lack of any understanding of the directions Albert was shouting at them in English increased their nervousness and excitability, plus the fact that they were unaccustomed to working in the public eye and the glare of spotlights.

Also, Sam Marvel, clad in a dinner jacket, the ends of his black tie tucked beneath his collar, a red cummerbund around his middle, and a black bowler hat atop his head, was cracking his whip and shouting, “Get on with it!” Acting as his own ringmaster, he insisted upon split-second adherence to schedule, heat or no heat. Indeed, he seemed to be the only one unaffected by the oven-like interior of the tent.

He snapped his whip again, and this time the lash flicked up a bit of the dirt at Mr. Albert’s feet as a bullet might have done. “Come on, get that out of there!”

Albert, clinging to the pole supporting the platform so that it would not tumble too abruptly when released, pointed and shouted, “That way! That way, you garlic-eating barstids!” The two Spaniards inserted the long, flat piece of iron used for leverage into the opening of the travelling screw-bolt and turned it the wrong way, tightening instead of loosening it.

With a loud twang, like the release of a gigantic crossbow, the steel strut snapped and lashed viciously across the ring.

It missed Albert, whom it would otherwise have killed, but the end of it bit into the elegant, white-satin-clad buttocks of Gogo, the classic clown, causing him to leap into the air, expelling his breath in a long “Ooo-ooh!” of pain, clapping both hands to his behind and drawing a great shout of laughter from the spectators, who took it as a part of the comedy act.

But when he removed his hands from his rear, his painted mouth formed into an “O” of surprise; they were red and dripping, and the seat of his breeches was already staining crimson.

There was a gasp from the nearest spectators. Panache, the Joey working as Gogo’s partner, alert to the accident, took off his battered straw hat and began to fan the rear end of the clown shouting, “Hoi, hoi, hoi!” and hustled him towards the exit as though it was all indeed a part of the turn. And little Janos, the dwarf clown, shouted likewise and began turning a series of rapid flip-flaps to distract attention.

Sam Marvel had missed not one fractional moment of the accident, yet there was no change whatsoever in the wry and half-mocking expression he adopted during the time he compered the show, nothing more than a slight gleam of satisfaction in his eyes that his clowns had played it smart and got the injured man off before more than a few in the audience knew what had happened. To distract attention he blew his silver whistle, cracked his whip and, sidling over smoothly to the electric panatrope that supplied the music for the acts, turned up the volume so that the crash and blare of the opening bars for the next turn drowned out the cries of pain and fright from the bleeding clown.

The spectators in the tent, with the exception of those close enough to realise what had happened, were rocking with laughter at the comical finale.

On their way to the exit curtain the group passed close to the Marquesa de Pozoblanco. The green eyes beneath the shining silver lids were ablaze with excitement, for she had missed nothing of the accident. With the sight of the blood, the tempo of her fanning had increased to the speed almost of a hummingbird’s wing, and sweat had suddenly begun to cut furrows from her chalk-white temples through the red patches on her cheeks. The great spheres of her breasts were heaving as though they might at any moment burst and rise like balloons from their bindings, and the corners of the tiny Cupid’s-bow mouth were twitching.

The exit curtain parted and closed again, swallowing up the clowns. The broken guy wire released the platform gear and in a moment the property man and his assistants had hustled it clear of the ring. The whistle shrilled, Marvel’s whip snapped like pistol shots, the panatrope blared into the music of a
galop.
The eight shining Liberty horses, their consecutively numbered discs, gleaming trappings, and red, white, and blue head plumes glittering in the spotlights that bathed them, trotted into the ring, followed by the lean, leathery figure of Fred Deeter, now appearing as Signor Alfredo, and the girl Rose in her blue-sequined dress, looking elfin, mischievous, yet timid, her eyes glistening in the limelight, her full red lips and pale colouring contrasted with the glossy dark brown of the horses, making her appear desirable. None in the audience recognised her as the girl who, in blue slacks and a too large, red-frogged uniform coat and oversized, peaked, red cap pulled down over her ears, had taken their tickets at the gate, shown the gentry to the reserved star-backed seats, sold programmes, and later passed among them offering drinks and sweets for sale.

She pointed to Signor Alfredo, who took a bow then raised his arms, lifting his stock whip; and the eight horses stopped, wheeled and reared onto their hind legs, their eyes flashing, forelegs, and hooves pawing the air.

The tempo of fanning of the extraordinary creature who sat alone in the front row by the ringside was slowed, but the eyes of the Marquesa were not upon the rearing horses or the figures in the ring, but instead were bent to the trail of blood in the sawdust leading to the exit. The twitch was still at the corners of her mouth and remained there until the horses, now wheeling about the ring, churned up the mingled dirt and shavings and obliterated the last traces of the incident.

The music blaring from the circus tent told Toby, who had been lying on his back on his bunk, that the Liberty act in the ring was half over. He arose and went out into the frightful heat and stood looking for a moment at the brazen sky and the burning sun, still hanging high and potent although it was already past four o’clock.

His slender figure was clad in white doeskin ankle breeches. He wore a short jacket of gold sequins, a red sash about his middle, and on his dark head a white turban with a jewelled spray rising therefrom, marking the Rajah Poona presenting Saba, the Sacred Elephant from the royal stables.

Toby picked up the iron ankus or elephant hook which he rarely used but held during the act to keep Judy attentive to her work and in a respectful mood. He walked slowly along the line of living wagons and cages, for it was too hot to move quickly. King, Rajah, and Bagheera, the big cats, were lying in a torpor on the floor of their respective cages, and Toby wondered how Deeter was going to be able to put them through their paces in the stifling oven of the arena. He wondered likewise whether Judy was going to prove fractious or temperamental.

The tober where the circus was pitched was on the outskirts of the shining, white-washed town, and soon, on his way to where the elephant was staked, Toby came to the edge of nothing, the rim of civilisation as it were, for beyond the town there stretched the flat, bare plain of La Mancha, unrelieved by so much as a tall tree or a hill. The plateau, shimmering grey-green as the heat waves danced above the grape vines and stunted olive trees in orderly rows, stretched endlessly and desolately to the edges of the horizon. There were not even those comforting symbols of the modern world, poles and wires to carry voices, messages, and light. The vista was primitive and, for all of the orderly rows under cultivation, savage. There was nothing to relieve the eye but an occasional peasant’s square hut of white-washed stone with red-tiled roof, or a squat, fat windmill with rectangular sails. Far to the south, uncertain in the heat haze, were the hills of a low sierra outcropping from the plain, and they created in Toby a feeling of even greater desolation, for they gave the impression that one could never reach them, that one could march towards them endlessly and as endlessly they would recede.

Except for the incongruous blare of music from the tent and the
thump, thump, thump
of the petrol-driven generator, there was an awful stillness in the air, as though the relentless sun in its prodigious marathon had boiled the capacity to utter sound out of man and beast. Not a bird chirped or hen clucked or child cried.

He looked through a gap in the row of low, one-storey houses, their dazzling coats of white-wash throwing off the reflection of the broiling sun. Here a dirt street cut through the town, running westwards, and at the end of it the flat plain with its shimmering, dancing heat waves resumed. And in the far distance, low on the horizon, Toby saw a bank of dark cloud poking up over the rim of the world.

He stood for a moment regarding this irregular line and wondering. For they had not seen so much as a single wisp of cloud to relieve the seamless blue dome of the sky for three solid weeks. It seemed as though never again would the sun be concealed or water fall from the burning heavens.

He went on to the shadeless field where the elephant stood swaying from side to side, “rocking the cradle,” twittering and grumbling to herself.

She greeted Toby with a flapping of her ears and a jangling of her leg chains. Ordinarily, she would have probed and caressed his features with the delicate tip of the finger at the end of her trunk, but the heat had made her irritable, an irritation which Toby shared.