Rubén Darío says that he was about 13 years old when “an erotic flame” awoke in him, caused by “a barely pubescent North American acrobat, who was making prodigious leaps in a traveling circus.” Her name was Hortensia Buislay. “As I did not always have what was necessary to enter the circus,” he says, “I became friends with the musicians and sometimes entered, now with a large roll of papers, now with a violin case; but my greatest glory was meeting the clown, to whom I made repeated requests to be admitted to show business. My uselessness was recognized. So, then, I had to resign myself to seeing the temptress leave.”
When the circus raised its tent to go to another square, the child poet, who was called that because he already had a reputation as a prodigious versifier, wanted to go after the group of his efforts, perhaps as an usher of the portable chairs in the lunettes; but the adults, owners of the common sense that is always so boring and monotonous, prevented him from doing so.
I have remembered this episode, and those from my own childhood that have to do with trapeze artists, jugglers, Amazons and illusionists, last night when I was invited by my neighbors from the Price circus to a splendid performance in which the artists of the Ibero-American Circus Festival performed. ; and as if I entered the time tunnel headlong, I returned to the prodigious world of knife throwers, aerial acrobats, and fliers who rise through the air hanging by their hair.
It is enough for me to stop in front of The mountebanks by Doré, The musical clown by Renoir, The blue circus of Chagall, the Family of acrobats with monkey by Picasso, or circus people by Botero, and the playful capering of my uncle Carlos José Ramírez’s clarinet that accompanied the departure of the clowns, hired to play at performances every time a traveling circus camped in Masatepe, returns to my ears.
Jules Verne inaugurated the Amiens circus in 1889 with a speech that earned repeated interruptions of applause, and how enviable I find the image of a writer speaking under the light of the spotlight, before the triumphal entry of the clowns; and in Around the world in eighty days Jean Passepartout, Phileas Fogg’s squire, who among many other jobs in his life has been a circus, secures passage by boat to reach California, the next stage of the journey, returning to work in a circus.
Chaplin brings us back to childhood in the circusCharlot, the fugitive pursued by the police, suddenly on a tightrope, suddenly locked in the lion’s cage. And Ingmar Bergman returns to childhood with his Alberti circus in Circus Nightsthat parade of artists down the street to announce the performance that is in my own memories, the music of the band that suddenly explodes and pushes you to run to the door of the house, the clowns that advance on stilts, the fire-eaters who blow flames from their mouths, the languid contortionists with their poor patched tights who greet with frozen smiles.
And Fellini’s unforgettable tribute to the circuses of his childhood in The clownswhich is also in my own memories, because an image seen always leads to another image lived. The fakir, so skinny that you can measure his ribs, buried alive under seven quarters of earth, the strong woman with hair on her chest capable of defeating a troop of brave males; the mermaid woman with shaggy hair who feeds on raw fish, and the old clowns, the saddest in the world, who tell their lives in front of the camera; a film shot in the Amiens circus that is now called, and there is no waste in the tribute, the Jules Verne circus, just as there should be a Fellini circus with its bearded women, its seven-league giants and its two-headed calves.
The circuses of my own childhood were poor in solemnity, and the light that illuminates them in my memory remains dim. In the absence of a lion, a mathematical goat who knew how to count with its legs appeared on the scene, or there was a lecherous monkey whose trick was to pounce on women with less than modest intentions.
Or Don Torcuato, Firuliche’s donkey, the most famous of Central American clowns, who heeded his owner’s instructions to bow his head to my father, the municipal mayor, sitting in the front row; or the magician Fuller who pierced with sharp swords the garnet-red box where he had locked his assistant dressed in sequins.
And because these unsuccessful circuses most of the time did not have a tent, then, in the moonlight sheds, as now from my seat in the Price circus, I contemplated the flight of the trapeze artists who performed their triple somersault while the crescendo of the snare drum exploded.
