Rain Village (24 page)

I learned to ignore Geraldo, and tried to let Lollie’s tears meld into all the other noises of the Ramirez house: the chattering parrots, the lapping water, the brothers’ smooth voices, the whoosh and whisper of the breezes that passed through the open hallways like spirits. When Lollie shut herself in her room and filled the house with her sobbing, I
would sit out by the pool with the rest of the Ramirezes or any number of the guests who dropped by each evening with their hands full of flowers or pitchers of sangria, which Victoria would fill with ice and bits of freshly cut peaches and apple. “There is nothing you can do,” José would say when he saw me covering my ears, trying to block Lollie out. “Love is an illusion, and there is a bitter nut at its core.” I learned later about how José had shot his one true love Clara through the heart, years before I left Oakley.

According to Mauro, who whispered the story to me by the pool, José had loved Clara since before the two of them could speak, back when they had played together in the park near the town plaza. Clara was the most beautiful child in all of Mexico, and as she grew older it only got worse, making all who saw her feel like they’d been momentarily blinded. The two were to be married, but then José returned one December to find Clara holed up with the town lawyer, whom she had married a few months before. José didn’t even stop to think; he took one look at Clara in another man’s arms, then turned around and left the new couple’s home, picked up Mr. Ramirez’s shotgun from the villa’s cellar, walked straight back to his one and only love, and shot her through the heart. José didn’t even put up a fight after firing the gun but dropped it as if it were burning, folded his body down to its knees, and waited for the town sheriff to come take him away. José spent five years in prison and left a changed man, having sworn off love completely.

I loved hearing these stories, just as I loved watching Mrs. Ramirez sit with her embroidery, her hands transforming bits of white cloth into works of art with her children’s names, elephants, and entire miniature circuses blazing up out of them. Just as I loved watching Mauro, whose heavily lashed gaze left a fluttering sensation in my gut.

I often watched Luis, too, imagining how things must have been for him before, when he could throw his arms out to the sides and race
across the wire, or shimmy up a tree the way his brothers still did. While Lollie paced feverishly in the house and one or another of the brothers headed out into the night to meet lovers or friends, Luis always sat with his back perfectly straight, letting the breezes brush against his skin, laughing quietly, telling soft stories, and gazing every so often at Victoria as she set the table or poured a drink.

Victoria was never far from Luis’s side, even as she moved from room to room in the house, plumping up the pillows and sweeping the tile floors. No matter how busy she was, she was constantly dashing onto the terrace or one of the balconies overlooking the pool, whisking up to Luis’s side. “Are you all right,
señor?
” she would ask. “Would you like some more
café?
” He always smiled up to her graciously, and lowered his eyes when he answered.

It was impossible not to be affected by Luis’s gentlemanly manner, and it was no wonder that he received fan letters from all over the globe from women who’d heard legends of his gallantry and gentleness. Despite his injury, he seemed completely at ease in his body, though I wondered if he could feel anything below his skin—the racing of veins, the ripple of muscles, the bursts of joy or sorrow that come from deep in the body. I was fascinated by his unmoving arms and legs, his hands propped on the arms of his wheelchair like ornaments dangling from a tree.

“Do you miss it?” I asked him once, only realizing the moment I said it how rude it must have sounded.

He was unfazed. “Of course I do,” he said, looking at me, “but I can still feel the cut of the wire under my feet. That is how I tell my students what to do—I can feel their movements just by watching them, imagining myself in their place. When the world closes down on you, you must imagine it opening back up again, like a flower.”

He winked at me then, and made me blush.

“Sometimes I have felt that way,” I said shyly, “in my own body. Like it makes everything close down.”

“Before,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “before the trapeze.”

“Your body was born to fly,” he said softly. “It is something that comes from deep in your bones, Tessa. Some people have hollowed-out bones, the kind you can play music on, and those are the people who can fly.”

What happened to him?” I asked Lollie, on one of those rare evenings when she was in a good mood. She had flung her arms around me and announced that we’d spend the evening together, that we’d carry our meat and beans to her room, lock the door, and talk the evening through.

“To Luis?” she asked, spreading out food on the tile floor and handing me my fork.

“Yes,” I said. “How did you see it? What happened?”

Her room was large and sweeping, her bed gray and discolored from all the tears that had fallen on it. A smiling picture of her and Geraldo hung over the bed. She saw me looking at it and said, “I know you must think I am crazy, Tessa, but I am sick with love. Around here all the girls dreamt of him, even the ones with diamonds hanging from their ears. You will have much better luck than I’ve had.”

I laughed, embarrassed. “I don’t think I’ll have to worry about it too much.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered, and leaned in toward me, smiling. “It may happen sooner than you think. Much sooner. Isn’t there someone you think about?”

My mind rushed to Mauro’s black eyes on mine, peering at me through their thick, curving lashes, and I felt my face go instantly hot with shame. “Of course not,” I said, convinced she was making fun of me.

“I know more than you know, more than you even imagine,” she said, tapping my arm playfully. “You underestimate me, but you’ll see.”

“Please tell me about Luis,” I pleaded, and felt my face burn.

“Okay,” she said. “Then maybe you’ll understand how much I know. You see, I saw Luis the day before he fell from the wire. It was the first time I understood that I had been born with the gift of sight, though I did not quite see it as a gift back then. I was in the backyard of my grandfather’s house, nine years old, sunbathing on my back in the hammock he had strung between two oak trees, swinging back and forth.

“Suddenly Luis’s face appeared before me as clearly as if he were standing right there, though I could see the shapes of trees behind him and knew that his body was somewhere else. His face was contorted with pain. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and I realized that he was in a bed with a white-dressed woman leaning over him, wiping the tears away and keeping the plaster cast just under them dry. And then from a distance I saw him crossing the wire with dancer’s steps, crossing them in front and in back and like a pair of scissors. He smiled to the audience as if the wire underneath him did not matter one bit, as if he could dance on air if he wanted to. His arms stretched out on either side, he was never more beautiful than he was right then, flirting with that wire in the brief moment when he had her all to himself, while my other brothers waited on either side. Then in one swift second Luis slipped—he missed the wire with his hands, and he fell to the ground and broke half the bones in his body. When I saw that my brother would break, I howled and howled and I yanked at my hair and I beat at the ground and I screamed into the sunlit yard: ‘Luis! Luis! Luis!’ I was on my knees in
the yard with my heart breaking, and I said, ‘Luis, stay off of the wire!’ I said, ‘Luis, you will fall from the wire! I saw you fall from the wire!’

“Luis came out into the yard. He smiled, held my face between his hands, and said, ‘
¿Qué pasa, mi niñita?
What have you done to yourself?’

“He wrapped his arms around my quaking body, and I told him what I had seen. His heart pounded so strong against my ear, and his arms seemed like iron around me. I begged him to stay on the ground for three days, and he said, ‘I promise,
niñita,
do not worry about anything at all.’ He kissed my cheeks. ‘I am strong like an ox,
niñita,
but I will stay on the ground for you.’

“The very next night Luis stepped up to the wire. At that moment I sat innocently in a trailer behind the tent, my mother stroking rouge over my cheeks and twisting a ribbon down the length of my hair. My act came quickly after my brothers’, so I rarely watched them myself. Only at the moment it happened did the vision come back. Again I saw him float down, but now I could hear the screaming crowds and running steps and the ringmaster trying to calm the crowds. I heard banging on the trailer door and felt my mother slump to the floor behind me.

“After that I did not speak for weeks, not even to Luis, who worshipped me now as if I were a little Maria. Even so, people came from miles away to hear what I saw, what they couldn’t see.

“Later Luis told us how he’d heard my voice in his ear as he fell down from the wire, how it comforted him and told him he would not die as the ground pushed up under him. He said that as he fell he could smell my hair, which my mother always sprinkled with rose petals, and that he felt my hand on his just before he hit the ground.

“‘I knew it was your hand,
niñita,
because I could feel your little gold rings,’ he said.

“After that Luis liked to call me a saint and a healer, and he kept a candle burning for me all the time, and still does, though I’ve always told
him he’s crazy. Victoria used to store crates of candles in the pantry but has complained for years that Luis makes her light a fresh one every day, and makes her sprinkle the dresser top around it with newly cut roses each morning and night.

“‘Dolores is no
santa,
’ she used to say about me. ‘
Santas
do not fly on the trapeze or roll across lawns or crawl into boxes meant for heads of lettuce or cabbage. I don’t know what that crazy man is thinking.’”

Lollie laughed. “People react in all kinds of way to vision, and I never know what way is right. But I am no
santa;
I cannot stop tragedies from happening, and though I have the gift of sight, sometimes I wonder what it has done for me aside from ruining the world a bit.”

Lollie stopped speaking, and I could see the flush on her skin.

“You know I told you, Tessa, about the moments that change our life, how when Mary saw Juan Galindo in that barn the world changed for her completely?” she asked. “My moment was not filled with a passion that licks through the skin and into the blood. The moment that changed my life, you see, was when I saw my brother Luis fall to the ground and break, the moment I understood how death and accidents wait for us, how the world moves without us.”

The house was silent except for the breeze whispering through the curtains and the sound of Lollie’s breathing, as heavy as if she were asleep. When Lollie spoke of the past she seemed to inhabit it, until I could almost see her transform into the young girl with black gleaming hair and smooth sun-soaked skin. It was hard to distinguish between the weight and shape of her words and the power of the world she was calling back to me.

“Could you feel it in Mary?” I asked. Death seemed like water in the room then, like something you could dip your hands in and touch. “Did you see her in the river? Could you see the way her hair tangled around her neck, in the water?”

I felt strange speaking so casually of Mary’s death. I thought back to those days, to the way Mary had let the mail pile at the door, to me running home to shuck corn and help set the giant dinner table. It was a world that stood in my memory like a perfect photograph, something timeless and complete. I could not imagine that my father had continued to exist past the last moment I had seen him, or that Geraldine was somewhere, too, with vegetables springing up under her fingertips. I thought back to those moments inside the memory I had built, the little moments that would seem so significant later. It made me afraid to walk through my life, never able to see the death that must have cloaked Mary back then, that must have been written on her skin and in her tears like an announcement.

“Yes,” Lollie said. “I could always see the water dripping on her skin. I could smell the salmon and pine of where she’d come from, see the leaves that clung to her body.”

I did not speak.

“That day,” Lollie continued, closing her eyes, “I could feel the water swooping in between her dress and her skin, filling her body with its weight. I was in the cookhouse with the others. At first I thought it was just rain, but when I looked around nothing had changed—the day was still as clear as it had started. I felt the breath go out of her body while everyone around me ate their meat and rice. No one knew a thing. I did not say anything. What could I have said?”

“Why couldn’t I feel it?” I asked her. “How could I not have known that something was going to happen? I was in her library drinking tea out of one of her cracked cups, straightening the things she’d left strewn over the floor. How could she have been drowning at the same time?”

“I don’t know, Tessa,” Lollie said.

“Why did she do it?” I whispered.

Lollie reached out and drew me to her.

“I don’t know why she did what she did,” she said. “Only that it was written on her from the first day I saw her, when she showed up at the Velasquez Circus.”

That night I could not sleep. I tossed in my bed, imagining the water on Mary’s skin, the crack of Luis’s bones as he hit the ground. The world moves without us, I thought. I imagined my father in the cornfield, Geraldine working in her garden, Lollie sobbing in her room from love. I saw myself, younger, back in Oakley, crumpled up on the dirt, clutching my skirt in my hands.

There was no way I was going to sleep that night. I tossed and turned. Each movement revealed a new ache that had burrowed into my body, and nothing brought relief. I lifted my starfish hands and traced the cracks raging through them. “Nothing before this matters,” I thought over and over. “I am in the circus now. Nothing before now matters.” But nothing could erase the fear wrenching my gut. Is this all there is? I thought. Does everything come back to this exact feeling?