How do you do it? How the hell do you manage to fit inside such a small box without breaking your back?
I’ve been asked that question so many times.
You see, it’s a matter of training every day since I was a kid, combined with a peculiar physical predisposition. Apparently people like me have ligaments that are unusually long, more flexible than the average person’s.
You might say that I live in a perpetually stretched state. That I’m constantly practicing how to disappear.
An illusionist of the flesh.
In the morning I get up and go through my stretching exercises. Then I rehearse my numbers for the performance until late afternoon, allowing myself only a short break for a frugal, hamster-sized lunch.
My numbers are difficult ones; my organs shift in my rib cage, my backbone bends like a reed, I slip my head under one knee and then the other, keeping my balance with my hands. Finally I scrunch up on the floor like a dying spider, and when I’m limber enough, my muscles warmed up, my joints greased, I can finally get in the box.
The most complicated number, the one that makes the little kids scream and the young ladies wrinkle their noses: my half-naked body closes in on itself, following abstruse angles and geometries, squeezing into a cube a little bigger than a shoebox.
That’s roughly what my days are like. Marked by discipline, fatigue, and sadness. When we don’t perform I go to bed early, lying in the rundown camper listening to the sounds from the Bertacca Circus. The subdued snorting of the horses, the fakir’s blaring television, the clowns’ mournful laughter, the panting of wild beasts deprived of their liberty.
And I think. Try to find new contortions and new ways to bend. To occupy spaces inaccessible to most. To make myself smaller and smaller and smaller.
I think about the interstices and the last box, about the spectators who laugh and clap but whisper ‘monster’ when they see my hairless, limber body, whose thinness borders on emaciation.
And above all I think about my parents.
My mother, a trapeze artist, whose beautiful, radiant face I can barely recall.
My father, a snake-man like me, driven mad by grief, consumed by loss. One of the best contortionists in the world, without a doubt. I learned the secrets of the craft from him.
My father knew many secrets.
He told me all of them, except for one.
The circus where I was born and raised was a small one. Always on the brink of bankruptcy. I remember the holes in the big top, the starving lions whose ribs you could count, the cannonball lady’s obscene, drunken screaming.
There was nothing romantic about that life. Up and down the boot-shaped peninsula, stopping in nameless provincial towns where permit costs were low and the circus manager knew he could at least sell enough tickets to cover expenses.
We passed through foggy landscapes and sunlit roads in a slow caravan of campers, trucks, and trailers; we trudged through regions and seasons to meet yet another audience of dull-eyed yokels in search of cheap thrills, exposed flesh, and cut-rate exoticism.
Every morning, if we weren’t traveling, my parents would practice.
Mom on the trapeze, pirouetting in mid-air like a feather, defying gravity and the sixty feet that separated her from the safety net. Alone. She had no partner aside from those two iron bars supported on four ropes. And the safety net.
Dad outside, in the square or the field where we pitched the big top, curving his body into insane positions that would have meant dislocations (or worse) for most human beings. And I, only a child, trained along with him. Contortionism is also a matter of genetics. Of the distance between vertebrae, the flexibility of collagen. I had taken after him.
‘You’re going to be good. Very good. Maybe better than your dad,’ he would often tell me, smiling as I imitated his positions. ‘We’ll do our first show together before long.’
Mom would join us after she had finished twirling under the red and yellow apse of the big top, squeezed into a gold-sequined outfit, her legs muscular and shapely, her eyes big with love and adrenaline, and she would stop to exercise with us.
I said earlier that there was nothing romantic about our lives. That’s untrue, a statement dictated by years of loneliness and regret, by the dark shadows of depression that have crept into my adult mind.
We were the romantic part. Our family. My mother and father, young, in love, beautiful, the circus’s main attraction, the only two artists able to elicit a standing ovation from the spectators, half asleep from their work in the fields, from their abusive drinking, from the tedious and repetitive way their strings were pulled by the wretched puppeteer that is provincial life.
Us.
I don’t know how my parents wound up working at such a shabby circus, but the other performers were all of the opinion that they would soon be noticed by some major showman who would help them make the leap to better things. They deserved to perform in a great show. The Togni Circus, the Orfei, the Balzelli, or maybe abroad, in France, under a huge and shiny pavilion where the pay was guaranteed and life was easier.
They never got the chance.
There were shadows on the horizon, a plague infesting the future with a seething, wormy rot, a blackness that not even the lights of the most glorious circus in the world could penetrate.
Winter. It was an ashen and skeletal day that greeted our arrival in Orlasco, a rosary of houses and potato fields beading towards the Alps, twenty miles from Turin. In the sky, vapors of fog sketched a perfect backdrop for the crows gliding over the frost-encrusted fields in search of food.
I was only seven, but I can still distinctly remember the architecture of the village and the far-off mountains. As well as the feeling that our caravan was entering hostile territory, a ghost town. A mantle of abandonment and anguish seemed to weigh on the main street, a strip of asphalt lined with decaying buildings and sad poplars.
‘Nice place,’ my mother observed, her eyes squinting to peer through the waves of mist beyond the camper’s windshield.
‘Nice place indeed,’ Dad echoed her. ‘But it’s not going to be like this forever. I can feel it, we just have to hang in there.’
But dreams of glory lead nowhere, even in the best of cases. In the worst, they lead to disaster, like what happened to my family. There’s no such thing as glory. One day even the greatest conductor, the best writer, will vanish from memory, from the chronicles, from history, because sooner or later the chronicles and history will disappear too and only the void that follows us will remain. Within that void, always at our heels, there are axioms in motion that we can’t understand. And which sometimes, if we’re unlucky enough, can haunt our earthly path. I realized this later, as I cried for the caresses I would never receive again, while my father, insane from suffering, would lock himself in the camper, continuing his crazy contortions.
We made our way slowly through the soft stillness of Orlasco, a funeral procession in search of the burial site, all the way to the center of town. We were met by some townspeople, some children.
The circus exists, lives, for children. But in that place even they seemed little more than haze, the sketch of something in progress that would never fully take shape.
Hurrying through the administrative small talk, the ringmaster returned to the square, shouting orders at us with the ugly expression of someone who has realized that business is not going to be good. The tapeworms of bankruptcy had been eating at him for a while. A few years later he would commit suicide by sprinkling goat’s blood on himself and walking naked into the tiger cage.
We rushed to set up the big top under a fat city councilman’s straw-colored and suspicious eye, shrouded in a damp cold that seemed to seep through our clothes, our bones, our marrow.
Our performance was scheduled for the following evening.
I’ll never know how the news made its way through the trailers and sideshows the next morning. But word started to jump from mouth to mouth, lighting the fire of hope in our eyes. There were quite a few of us who longed for something better for the years to come.
‘The manager of the Balzelli circus is supposed to be here tonight, looking for new talent!’
‘They’re on tour in Turin. Maybe Madame Balzelli herself will come too, the divine Madame Balzelli!’
‘They might sign one of us…’
Although none of this could be verified, my parents exploded with joy, for illusions often have a greater power than truth.
All eyes were on them. Envious eyes, for the most part. They were the likeliest candidates. Definitely not the cannonball lady, as irritating as a mosquito, nor the sword swallower who had injured his palate a few weeks earlier, nor the crackhead lion tamer, the squalid clowns, the thuggish strong man.
As if fleeing a hailstorm, all the circus performers retreated to their mobile dwellings, including us. It was time to work out a strategy, refine our tricks, make changes to the performance, in case the manager or Madame Balzelli made an appearance.
There was determination in my father’s eyes. He took me in his arms and ruffled my hair, and I can still smell his scent of aftershave, coffee, sweat, and tobacco. ‘Tonight you’ll perform with me. You’ll do the exercises I taught you, you’ll bend into the Frog Boy. The audience will love it. You want to?’
It was what I had been longing for. I almost burst into tears of happiness. I quivered.
My first performance.
A moment later I saw it in my mother’s eyes: she was already there among the circus elite, conquering the world, in a future of high-tech campers, spotlights, big cities, and deafening applause.
‘Tonight I’ll perform without a net,’ she announced. ‘Like the great trapeze artists. Without a net.’
Dad shook his head in fear but did nothing to dissuade her.
In a greasy fog, thick as lard, the first spectators began to materialize in the streets of Orlasco around nine o’clock that night. Little more than distorted outlines, queuing at the box office to buy a ticket that would give them a break in their routine for a couple of hours. They entered the big top in silence, their mouths open wide and eyes looking upwards, as if they were entering an awe-inspiring cathedral or disembarking on an alien planet.
Children laughed and shouted.
The ringmaster shouted his ‘Come one, come all!’ towards the still-undecided townspeople at the edge of the square.
We artists followed the pantomime from behind the scenes, anxiously wondering whether some representative of the Balzelli circus would settle down in the uncomfortable plastic seats or if we’d gotten excited over nothing.
Despite the cold, dismal night, the big top was nearly full. The villagers munched on peanut brittle and cotton candy, rumbling with anticipation under the spotlights that reduced their faces to featureless blobs.
And when we were about to give up on our dreams of glory, five minutes before the start of the show, a loud ‘Oooh’ rose from the crowd, and we saw the ringmaster give an obsequious bow, guiding a small procession towards the best seats.
It was her. The divine Madame Balzelli, accompanied by two no-neck henchmen, bulls with dim-witted faces.
I had often heard about her.
Even as a child I wondered the reason for that nickname. Divine. There was nothing divine about the woman. Very tall, thin as a willow, wrapped in a golden tunic marked with strange arabesques, she looked like an Egyptian mummy. An enormous turban covered her egg-shaped head, competing in size with the aquiline nose that dominated the center of her wizened face, in which the sly and very black eyes of a predator gleamed.
There were cackles, shouts, and applause as Madame Balzelli made her way through the audience and settled into one of the frontmost seats with the movements of an eel, eyeing our battered big top with a mixture of amusement and disgust.
Then the lights went out.
The ringmaster, a misshapen pupil in the eye of the spotlight, made his little introductory speech.
Backstage the performers held their breath, their eyes fixed on Madame Balzelli.
‘We’re starting,’ someone rasped.
Mom, Dad, and I hugged.
And the show began.
Everyone gave their all, everyone performed to the best of their ability.
In the air there was a smell of revenge, redemption.
The Divine Balzelli followed our adventures with an impassive look, huddling in conversation every so often with her henchmen.
The minutes flew by.
When the ringmaster introduced our number, mine and Dad’s, I experienced a moment of extreme terror, followed by a flash of excitement.
My first show, and in the presence of Madame Balzelli!
‘Everything will be fine,’ Dad said.
‘You’ll both be great,’ Mom said with a laugh. ‘I love you. Show that old witch a thing or two.’
A kiss on the cheek, and the next moment we were out there, in front of about two hundred people, distorting our bodies for glory and because it was all we knew how to do.
It didn’t go well. It went brilliantly.
Synchronicity, elegance, virtuosity, harmony. The audience let out cries at each of our feats, as our choreographies grew increasingly daring and complex.
I transformed myself into the Frog Boy, dislocating my shoulders and legs in such an unnatural way that it forced a shout of surprise from the crowd.
At the end, my father and I squeezed together into a box twenty-eight inches on each side, knotted around each other like two snakes. As we extricated ourselves from our monstrous and harmonic embrace and emerged from the box, we realized our number had been a success. That maybe our dreams would come true.
Everyone was on their feet clapping.
Even Madame Balzelli.
Mad with joy, I whirled around to meet my mother’s eyes.
I didn’t find them.
She had already climbed up, to a world that was only hers, a universe where life depended on two trapezes dangling lazily over the mere mortals below.
The drum roll. Mom sixty feet above the ground, hundreds of eyes turned towards her, a goddess in silver sequins suspended above our heads. The lights low, the lights low.
She performed alone, as I’ve already told you, she always had. She didn’t trust anybody but herself, that’s what she always said…
Platform, trapeze, trapeze, platform. Perfect moves, practiced thousands of times, wrapping and twisting her body like a mermaid of the air, then grasping the bar forcefully, escaping the fall.
Some nights, when I close my eyes, I still seem to see her white, sinuous body twirling in the dark, surrounded in a fluorescence emanating from her strength, her love.
I didn’t realize then the danger of a performance without safeguards. She was my mother. Nothing could go wrong.
Dad was smiling and staring at her, but in his face I read an enormous fear. That was the moment when I realized how much he loved her. I wanted to love someone like that when I grew up, I thought.
Silence after the roar of the drums. Lungs paralyzed from holding in breath.
And then it started.
Without a net. Nothing beneath her but emptiness, sand, the clowns’ melted grease paint, and remnants of horse manure.
Increasingly difficult maneuvers.
Madame Balzelli was mesmerized, her beaky nose stretching upwards, her tiny eyes shining with amazement. When the show was over she would go and talk with the ringmaster, would cough up a good sum of money and take us away from there, away from mediocrity, yes.
My mother had never made a mistake. She wouldn’t make one this time either. And as a matter of fact she didn’t. She fired up the crowd with a triple back flip, landed lightly on the platform, a goldfinch, and we knew the performance was over, and the lights came on, and it was a triumph.
But Mom wasn’t finished with her number yet. Why she decided to keep going, to attempt one last risky and reckless feat, remains a mystery to me. Maybe she wanted to push herself to the limit, assure a future for herself in Madame Balzelli’s circus. Maybe it was just plain vanity. Or maybe, I sometimes tell myself, she had crossed the line that divides bitter reality from happy ending.
She silenced the enraptured crowd with a brusque hand gesture, then made another hand signal to the technicians to dim the lights.
And she jumped again.
I heard my father moan, ‘She’s going to do the reverse pike! No! Why?’ and I squeezed his arm tighter.
A slow-motion tragedy.
Mom swung with force, glued to the trapeze, muscles and nerves tensed to the utmost, then finally let go of the bar. The second trapeze didn’t swing in sync with her angle of descent. She tried to grab it, but it was too far away. A matter of a couple of inches.
She came down like a hunk of lead, screaming.
I still hear that scream, followed by the rumble of shock from the spectators, and then a thud.
Thump.
A block of wood, a sack of potatoes, an inanimate object.
Dad hurtled towards the crumpled bundle in the sand, all sequins and bodily fluids, and although someone tried to hold me back I managed to wriggle away and follow him.
Mom no longer looked like a goddess.
The fall, accelerated by the spin of her leap, had been catastrophic. Her graceful body was completely altered; her neck and spine were twisted at a freakish angle, her face planted in the sand, which was turning black with blood, her legs disarticulated like a puppet’s. Two lines of tears and mascara flowed from her dead eyes, the irises turned towards the bridge of her nose in a tragicomic squint. Subjected to a cruel game of levers, her leotard and the skin on her belly were torn, opening into a red and yellow eye of entrails.
The spine broken at an acute angle.
My mother, in death, had become a work of modern art celebrating the fallibility of the material of which Man is made.
I saw the clowns crying, the strong man vomiting, a distraught Madame Balzelli fleeing for the exit. The locals, torn between alarm and morbid curiosity, circled like a human Ouroboros around the circumference of the rink.
Before they dragged me away from the horror of the scene in a state of shock, I looked at my father.
He was studying my mother’s back as though trying to understand, to comprehend the new and abstruse angles and perspectives of cartilage, bones, muscles. His eyes were bulging out of his head.
For a fraction of a second he turned towards me. He was someone else. I almost didn’t recognize him.
I’ve never seen an expression like that since, thank heavens.
The expression of someone who has understood that even gods can die.
We stayed in the shabby circus.
Dad went crazy.
I think from guilt: blinded perhaps by the chance of success, he hadn’t done anything to force my mother to perform with safety measures in place. The final image of her we would carry with us would be nightmarish, terrible.
I understood that he wanted to be left alone, and so I kept my distance, praying every night that he could process his grief and somehow we could be a family again, him and me.
He closed himself off in a pain made up of silence, obsession, and training. It was like I no longer existed, as if the passing of the woman he loved had erased me as well.
We stopped practicing together, but at night we would perform our show in tandem at the circus, which since the accident had fallen into disarray.
Every day, every night, he did nothing but train, shut inside the trailer’s little bedroom, wallpapered with photos of my mother, of their life together. He wouldn’t let me inside for any reason. He would practice up to eighteen hours a day, and his diet became a nightmare of seeds, apples, and self-pity. Already as thin as a rail, he lost another ten kilos. His face seemed to change, becoming closer and closer to that of a repulsive human snake.
I practiced alone outside, with him always shut up in the damned trailer, cold as stone, his eyes empty, not even a tear.
I was little and couldn’t understand everything. But when about three months had passed since Mom’s death, by which time I had become a ghost too, I made a decision: I would spy on him through the keyhole.
What was he doing in there, without any sound filtering under the door? Why didn’t he want me with him, why did he forbid me to be near him?
It was an evening in late spring when my eye approached the keyhole. It took me a few moments to spot my father, whose body an anorexic model would have envied. He stood lazily doing warm-up exercises. Nothing else. Routine movements for a professional contortionist. He went on for at least an hour, with me there the whole time holding my breath. Then, for another hour, he carried out increasingly daring maneuvers, several of which I had never seen him do before and which caused even me to groan in amazement. I had to cover my mouth to avoid giving myself away.
After some cool-down exercises, I watched him head towards the center of the room, where there was a very small box, around fourteen inches on each side. He sat down beside it and began the most absurd and harrowing contortion I had ever seen. And yet I had seen it before.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I would have liked to gouge them out, but I couldn’t look away.
He was imitating my mother’s death pose.
His spine at an acute angle. His legs twisted behind his back, his head on the floor, turned at an angle not contemplated by a living body, on his face a dreadful and yet ecstatic mask that looked beyond, or perhaps into the great beyond, whatever that means.
It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible for him to bend like that without breaking his neck, without his bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments snapping apart.
It was a caricature of human anatomy, of medical science, even of contortionism.
Anyone would have died in such a position.
Finally—and I heard his joints creak, his tendons whistle—he reassumed a ‘normal’ position, and with a fluid, reptilian movement, he slipped into that tiny box. An incredible feat, but it was nothing compared to what he had done before.
I stifled a cry, moved away from the door, left the trailer and ran through the fields, into swampy, mosquito-infested poplar groves, freaked out and wondering what I had just witnessed. When I got back to the circus two hours later, my father was still locked in his room.
I promised myself I would never peep through the keyhole again, not for any reason.
I never asked him why he did it, and above all how he had managed it.
Was it pain, love, my mother’s death, that had allowed him to do it? And doing it, did he feel closer to her, did he go to her?
I think so, but…who can say?
I can only tell you that my father never recovered…how can you survive the death of the greatest love of your life? You can’t. But for a brief period he was the best contortionist in the world.
He pushed the limits further and further every day, even during his performances. One night he caused a couple of audience members to faint when he squeezed into a box nine inches on each side. It sounds impossible, I know. And yet he did it. I didn’t dare imagine what he got up to in the semi-darkness of his room, half starved, more and more withered, obsessed, elastic.
‘It’s not even fucking contortionism anymore.’ One night I heard these words seep from the ringmaster’s trailer. ‘Never seen anything like it. It’s magic. Witchcraft. Since his wife died he hasn’t been in his right mind anymore. But he’s my best artist, the circus is still standing thanks to him…’
In an atmosphere of constant anguish, the heaviness which precedes those events that trace a boundary line in life, an entire year of mourning, performances, and wanderings passed.
The anniversary of my mother’s death arrived. We were in the vicinity of Idrasca, not too far from Orlasco, another one of those places nobody ever goes—not even by accident—unless they were born there. The big top was pitched, the show scheduled for that evening.
Morning. Dad came out of his room and made me breakfast. He hadn’t done that in a long time. I thought it was a good sign and hugged him, and he returned my embrace, whispering, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
We ate in silence, father and son sitting at a small table in a dilapidated trailer, the dirty windows turning the sunlight the color of an egg yolk.
He drank an entire pot of coffee by himself, smoked a cigarette without looking at me, and I knew he was thinking about Mom. He never thought of anything but her. Neither did I, for that matter.
Finally he stood up, put out his cigarette, and headed for his bedroom. ‘I’m going to practice my routine. Be good. I love you.’
The door closed, I heard the click of the lock.
I waited and waited and waited, never walking away.
Late that night, worried, I knocked softly. ‘Everything all right, Dad?’
No response but silence.
The keyhole. Inside, darkness.
I knocked harder, then I shouted, I cried, and still there was nothing but silence. Someone heard me. A bunch of people came running.
The strong man knocked down the door. We turned on the light. There was no one in the room. The little window was latched from inside. While everyone was calling my father’s name, I noticed something in the middle of the room.
A tiny cardboard box, an inch and a half on each side. With trembling hands I picked it up, looked inside.
Empty.
A faint aroma of coffee, aftershave, sweat, and tobacco reached my nostrils.
No one ever saw him again.
Many years have passed. I’ve performed in many circuses, visited thousands of places, and I’ve been working for years now at the Bertacca. I’ve never stopped practicing, pushing myself a little further every day.
Extreme training, smaller and smaller boxes, even during performances.
Like Dad.
During the shows I often watch the trapeze artists and lose myself in my memories.
But I can’t get distracted.
I have to go on, keep bending my body, disassembling my flesh, discovering new levers and new spaces to reach my parents.
I think I’m making good progress. And maybe there will come a tomorrow when I too manage to get inside the last, smallest box. An inch and a half on each side. It’s only a question of perseverance, physical predisposition, pain, and love.
There’s something magical and terrible about pain and love. They can open doors that are sometimes better left closed. But I’ll do everything I can to open them and explore that emptiness that follows us and grants us no respite.
