Director's Cut (3 page)

The previous autumn a circus had appeared before Gala's house, materializing out of the ether on the field at the bottom of the hill. Like a colorful hot-air balloon that had chosen to land on her favorite playground. Coming home from ballet the evening before, there hadn't been any sign of it, but the next morning she woke to the sound of trumpeting elephants and a trombonist who was practicing a bass line. She threw her curtains open with surprise and saw cheerful lights twinkling through the bare trees at the end of the street.

On the way to school she got off her bike at the fence to watch the horses in the outside ring. They were trotting in opposite directions, circling a young woman who was standing straight-backed in the middle ground. She held her head so high that her chin was pointing up in the air. She barked out commands that made the animals stop, rear, and turn on the spot, but, just to make sure they obeyed, she was holding a whip behind her back. Now and then, when one of the grays was about to come up with ideas of his own, she cracked the whip, not to hit him: just to remind.

Gala was late getting to school and had to stay after, but on her way back home she stopped at Circus Rinzi again. This time it was much livelier. Inside the tent, the matinee was in full swing. A band was playing. Acrobats in glittering costumes were walking around outside and a tightrope walker was practicing splits on a steel cable strung over a caravan. Gala gasped with admiration, but the woman, whose eyes were fixed firmly on a point in the distance, didn't even wobble. Through a hole in the rhododendrons, which the girl knew about from having played there so often, she was able to get into the circus enclosure. She was behind the caravans looking for wild animals when the shining lights around the mirror of a makeup table attracted her attention.

A clown was putting on his face. He had already smeared his cheeks with red grease and drawn a mousy little black mouth in the middle of his lips. Now he started doing big eyes. One was radiant, with eyelashes like a sunburst. No longer young, he needed to spread his skin smooth with the other hand to draw straight lines. The second eye was completely different. It wasn't really an eye at all, just a vertical stripe that bisected his eyebrow and went down over his eyelid to the middle of his cheek. Then he practiced a look of resignation in the mirror, slowly raising his shoulders, eyebrows, and the corners of his mouth—all at the same time. When the call came for his first number, he pulled an enormous coat on over his suspenders and ran off in outsized, baggy trousers, disappearing through an opening in the side of the tent.

Gala followed him. Peering through that same opening, she could just make out part of the ring. She saw the man standing next to the
stands, unnoticed by the audience until the spotlight touched him and drew him into the middle of the tent. He stumbled over the sawdust. He fell. He was beaten by an arrogant white clown, who began by asking him to do the impossible, then ridiculed him when it proved too much for him. He looked miserable, wretched—an outcast. He reminded Gala of cartoon characters who get trampled by crowds until they are as flat as a pancake but always haul themselves up again, hammer out the dents, and walk on, crumpled but unbroken. This clown was exposed to ridicule, blows, and contempt, but he took it all in good cheer, amused and amusing. Over and over again, he gave that apologetic grin, with his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth raised and his shoulders up to his ears. And each time, the audience had no choice but to forgive him for whatever he'd done. If only I could just touch him, thought Gala, who had never imagined that such extraordinary creatures could exist. This man was stupid yet invincible.

Suddenly someone grabbed Gala hard by the scruff of the neck and dragged her away from the tent. A plump woman with long blond hair had her in a tight grip. A fat snake was wrapped around the woman's neck, resting its head on her ample bosom.

“No ticket, huh?” she snarled, and when Gala shook her head, the woman pretended she was going to kick her in the pants. “Come back tonight with money, and you can watch as much as you like. Now beat it.” She took the snake off her shoulders like a scarf and held it in front of Gala's face. “Otherwise I'll feed you to Ennio.”

Gala ran home nonstop through the rain without once remembering that she'd left her bike at the circus with her schoolbag on the carrier.

When she rushed, panting, into the living room, she found herself standing eye to eye with the Reformed pastor, who was visiting her parents with his wife.

“Hello, child.” The man had a high voice, probably because his tight white collar was strangling him.

“We were just talking about you,” Jan said, while the pastor's wife took Gala by the wrist and pulled her onto her lap.

“We were getting worried,” she said, the girl bouncing on her knees like a rodeo rider.

Gala's father shot her a look that said that all would be forgiven if
she acquitted herself well in the next twenty minutes. The Vandembergs were descended from a long line of clergymen, and, although Jan delivered most of his lectures as if from a pulpit, his decision not to follow in his father's and grandfathers' footsteps had always been resented. He just hadn't dared, he was too much of a doubter himself, and the awe he felt for pastors was not motivated by piety but from the way they could, by choosing their words, either put the fear of God into a whole congregation or choose to comfort them or burden them with guilt. These old-fashioned shepherds possessed the power of the word: a treasure that seemed so valuable to Jan that he had spent his whole life searching for it. Secretly he hoped to refine Gala's verbal skills so much that one day, in this changing world, he might see her standing in the pulpit, with him in the front pew, quaking at her fire and brimstone.

“Your father tells me that you possess the miraculous gift of the word.”

“Miracles,” said Gala, still bobbing up and down on the knees of the pastor's wife, “seem more like your line of business.”

The pastor clapped his hands.

“Goodness, Jan, I believe you've sown a talent here.”

“She's only little,” Gala's mother tempered their enthusiasm. “Let her play now, while she still can.”

“If only she were a miracle,” said Jan. “Miracles come ready-made, but Gala has a gift. And a gift like that is an obligation. It demands a lot of hard work. But still,
dandum etenim est aliquid …
”

“… dum tempus postulat aut res,”
^*
his daughter concluded. The pastor's jaw dropped, and his incredulous mare abandoned her attempts to buck Gala.

“That's nothing,” said Jan. “Her little sister can do that too. What I am saying, our youngest comes close to babbling Cato in her cradle. No, Gala's latest passion is Homer, isn't it, honey? I recite it for her at night as a bedtime story and when she gets up in the morning she just rattles it off.”

“Well, with a week or two of droning and drilling,” said Gala's mother, who had had enough of the whole performance. She liberated her daughter from the grip of the pastor's wife and asked her where she had been.

“Who wouldn't forgive a father's enthusiasm,” crowed the pastor, “when he has such an extraordinary child? It's just …”

At that moment Gala remembered her bicycle. And her schoolbag on the carrier!

“Tell me, O Muse …,”
said Jan, looking hopefully at his daughter. In just a few minutes he would ask her for her lesson book so that he could show his guests her wonderful marks, but right now it was in her saddlebag, soaking up the rain.

“Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero …,”
Jan persisted, already a little impatient,
“that ingenious hero who traveled far …”

“Far away …,” Gala said, “against the fence.” She wriggled out of her mother's arms.

“Which fence?” asked the pastor's wife expectantly, confusing Homer with a nursery rhyme. But Gala knew what she had to do.

“The circus fence. I have to go.”

“The circus!” bleated Jan, as if she had just said something ridiculous. He couldn't understand how the pastor could find a remark like this as entertaining as the words of Cato the Elder, and when the clergyman slapped his knees and exclaimed,
“Sunt pueri pueri, pueri puerilia tractant!”
^*
Jan thought he was scoffing at him. He snapped at Gala to recite the first lines of the
Odyssey
in the original Greek. The girl's hand went to the pocket in the seam of her dress where she kept her bike key, and she realized she hadn't even locked her bike. And her autograph album was in her bag, and so was her diary, and the sketchbook with the new Caran d'Ache pencils that smelled so good when you opened the box.

“Really, Jan,” said the pastor's wife, while clicking open her handbag, “it doesn't matter. Just be grateful for the sparkle in her eyes.” She bent over to Gala and slipped her a banknote. “Maybe Daddy will let you go see the elephants tonight.” But the smile fell from her face when she looked up at Jan.

“Sometimes I don't know whether you're being contrary or if you're just plain stupid.” He'd gone red in the face and tears of shame welled in his eyes. “She knows it. Come on, Gala, don't show me up like this. You know it.
Andra moi ennepe Mousa polutropon hos mala polla …
”

Gala heard the sounds, and they seemed familiar. They spun around inside her head, whizzing past like horses on a merry-go-round that was too fast to jump onto. When she shrugged, she did it the way she'd seen the clown do it, with her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth going up as well, in the hope that it might make the others laugh.

“What stupid children I have!” sighed Jan, just before Gala ran out of the room.

In the auction hall the carts full of flowers had started rolling again. Purple dahlias and salmon orchids rattled over the points and squeaked on the rails, but up above, Gala remained stock-still on the catwalk, searching for words. Lately she had more and more difficulty catching them. As if they were too fast for her. She pictured them the way she had that first time with the pastor, whizzing past on a merry-go-round while she stood in line waiting to get on. As long as she concentrated on a single point, she couldn't make any sense of it, but by quickly following the direction of movement with her eyes, she was able to catch a few sounds, a few syllables at a time, but never a full sentence.

These were the first signs of the disease manifesting itself in Gala—words melting, lights shooting past, sounds bulging—but the child didn't realize it was something to worry about, something she should warn her parents about in the hope of preventing disaster. But when the words started dancing with the shadows, Gala watched them like vivid dreams that come right before you fall asleep. At most, she chided herself for making such a fuss—there was no need for her to get nervous before she was asked to do something. When her father wanted to teach her new poems, she didn't tell him that she couldn't do it anymore; instead, she tried to please him by making an even greater effort to learn the sounds by heart.

If I were just a bit more courageous, she told herself, if only I dared to jump onto that merry-go-round one more time, then I'd get back in control of the words again. But more and more often, they slipped out of her hands, running circles around all those strange ideas inside her head.

•  •  •

Just as furiously, the market's big clock spun back and forth. The hand shot over the dial that formed the heart of the flower auction as the auctioneer, just as quickly, called out each lot number and the bids for the different consignments of flowers that passed by unrelentingly. The buyers sat, two by two, on a steep stand opposite the auction clock. There were Dutch farmers with faces as round as cheeses, but also dealers from the Middle East, some in turbans and others with black velvet skullcaps. You saw Chinese, and a black man in a blue djellaba was just visible through the thick cigar smoke of two Cubans in army uniforms in the row below him. A place of honor was reserved for the Vatican envoy, who came once a week to purchase flowers for all the altars of the Catholic world and today had set his mind on calla lilies and bargain-priced snow-white petunias. The squat Mediterranean priest had to share his seat with a gigantic Scandinavian woman who leapt up every time something that appealed to her came by, bending forward dangerously to bellow at the auctioneer.

“I want it all,” she yelled, “all of it, the whole lot!” The other bidders looked up in annoyance and forgot about the telephones they had held pressed to their ears all morning to ask their mothers back home which scent they wanted to fill the country's bedrooms and living rooms that evening.

At the very top of the stand, behind the last row of bidders, a guide explained the system to Jan, his daughter, and his guest. The lower the price of a consignment fell, the more people wanted it.

Gala wasn't listening. The rhythm of the clock and the calling of the prices formed a cadence in her head and gave her thoughts something to latch onto. In the falling price of carnations she recognized a Catullian meter:
“Passer mortuus est meae puellae,”
^*
she began, and took a few steps away from the others to try to concentrate.
Passer mortuus est …
dancing sounds that meant nothing more to her than little gifts to please her father.

To avoid any distractions, she stared down at the floor, where, from her child's perspective, she discovered something peculiar that the adults didn't seem to have noticed. Beneath the benches ran a gutter, as steep as the stand itself. The men and women sat above it on iron grills, through which they dropped all the things they no longer had any use for. From left and right, spilled coffee trickled down along with brown cigarette butts, disposable cups and balls of paper, pieces of stale bread and bits of eel skin. Everything fell into the broad groove and descended to the depths. Who knows, maybe the men and women were so scared of wasting their valuable time that they even defecated there, like cows in a cowshed. There was a whole battery of these sewers, one under each column of seats, and water flowing down them carried away all the rubbish. They were tall slides that you couldn't see the end of. Water was constantly gurgling down the steep gutters, water with its own tempo, gushing water with its own rhythm, interrupted by the splash of falling trash. This wasn't like any meter Catullus ever wrote, and Gala got stuck in the middle of the third line of the second stanza.