“Take them to your room and try them on,” Andor said. “Let me know tomorrow if they fit you or they need to be altered.”
Ada smelled the costumes. He’d had them cleaned, and she wondered whether he had done it for her. She folded the clothes neatly one by one.
They were hers now. She’d take good care of them.
* * *
After long stretches of golden wheat fields rolling past the window, the road began to climb through low, undulating green hills and then into the mountains of Irpinia. The weather changed. The sun disappeared behind the heavy clouds and it was suddenly cold and rainy, as if they had stepped into winter in the course of only a few hours. Tall pines shrouded the side of the mountain and the landscape seemed to Ada sadder and somehow ominous.
Just before the entrance to a town called Grottaminarda, Andor turned into a large parking lot. The green circus tent was pitched right there, across from a crummy supermarket: a smaller affair than Ada had expected. Caravans and rusty trucks were parked behind the building in the midst of a muddy field beside a deserted playground. Tiny colorful flags tied to the tent’s ropes flapped in the wind; half-ripped posters on the wall of the parking lot shouted in bold red and purple letters WEISSER CIRCUS—ALL THE WAY FROM GERMANY! A blurry photo showed a trainer holding a whip, tigers jumping through a fire ring. Ada was silent and seemed deflated somehow. Andor wished they’d arrived on a sunnier afternoon, when there were more people around, music blaring from the speakers.
“It’s a family circus, more intimate. You’ll see, it’s a real fun way of living,” he said.
Ada didn’t respond. She kept her eyes on the derelict playground and the windswept field. Andor tried to sound joyful as he began to unload the boxes near his caravan.
“We should start right away. We have only a couple of days of rehearsals. I want you to be ready to start next week.”
* * *
Ada felt better the minute she stepped inside Andor’s caravan. It was another world in there: it had a living room with carpets, a red sofa and armchairs. There was a large bedroom, a kitchenette and a bathroom with a small bathtub. There were books piled up here and there, lots of pictures stacked on the walls, embroidered and fringed lampshades, cushions and bright curtains made from Indian fabrics. It was cozy, colorful, like rooms she had seen only in the old Hollywood movies she loved.
“You can sleep on the sofa,” Andor said casually, as he carried a couple of suitcases.
“Where is everybody else?” she asked.
“It’s our day off today. Probably sleeping or watching TV inside their caravans. Or maybe getting drunk at the village bar. Who knows.”
Later that same night Andor asked her to try on the clothes he had given her. He then combed and tightened her long hair in a bun, like he would do with a child, gently lined her eyes with a black pencil, applied rouge on her cheeks and red on her lips, then picked each piece of jewelry from the duffel bag and clasped it to her neck, ankles and wrists. No one had ever done anything like this to her. For a fleeting moment her mind went back to her sister on her wedding day: how she had been attended by so many hands in order to complete her transformation. How she had walked down the aisle made up like a doll, with her hair curled into a stiff pyramid, her body constricted in a polyester gown bursting at the seams. Ada looked at herself in a full-length mirror. The heavy makeup aged her too, and the clothes looked cheap and a tad sleazy, but she didn’t mind: what she was meant to do was just play a part, like an actress onstage, under the lights. Her life still belonged to her, and to her only.
Ada started out handling the smaller snakes first, and pretty soon she got the gist of it. She let them slide along her arms and shoulders, slither around her waist like a belt. The tight grip of the snakes, as they twirled around her body, gave her a jolt of excitement. Now she was dancing slowly around the room, with her eyes half closed, to the sound of music booming from the portable stereo. When the music stopped she did a little shimmying dance of triumph. Andor clapped, ecstatic.
“When can I handle Snow?” she asked. Her eyes were glowing now.
“Tomorrow we can start practicing with her in the ring. We need more space than this room. That baby’s a big one.”
* * *
The following week, in front of the audience—mainly local families from the nearby villages who had come by the hundreds—they perfected and improved their act until they could do it with their eyes closed. Andor appeared onstage playing a flute, as Ada, hidden in one of the trunks, slowly emerged. By then Ada was sufficiently at ease with the snakes, and she didn’t mind lying with them in the dark for a handful of seconds. She slid out of the trunk and danced around the ring, holding the smaller python and the green anaconda above her head. There were gasps and whispers, ooohs and aaahs from the children. The minute the excitement began to wane, Ada lifted the lid of the larger trunk, as Andor had instructed her, and stretched out her arm, as an invitation. The audience gasped as Snow’s head and thick body arose, erect. Under the bright lights Snow’s white and golden skin was almost blinding. The Burmese python came slowly out of the box, and all her seven feet began to climb upon Ada’s extended arm, reaching her shoulder, her back, twirling around her body as if on a pole. People from the audience began to scream. At this point Ada lay down and pretended to be gasping for air. Snow knew to curl around her torso and her neck, but never to tighten her grip. This was Ada’s favorite moment of the show. Not only because the audience went crazy as the music reached a frenzied pitch, but because in the few minutes before Andor mimicked her rescue and the number came to the end, she was at her closest with Snow; it was their most intimate time. She felt Snow’s cold scales pressing against her skin. It was better than being stoned, to be able to allow that embrace without fear. The knowledge that her body had become a familiar territory for this incredible creature, who by now knew her shape and smell so intimately, who would never hurt her, and the feeling that within their embrace some kind of amazing, magical energy was exchanged: she couldn’t name it, but it was like an electric shock, even a revelation.
Maybe she had never known she had a power. Maybe she was an otherworldly creature herself.
* * *
The days had a pretty late start in the circus; everyone liked to sleep in and nothing happened before ten or eleven. There were animals to feed—a few horses, a couple of camels, a small Sri Lankan elephant, two aging tigers—numbers to rehearse, the tent to clean up and prepare for the next show. Despite its name, nobody in the Weisser Circus came from Germany. Most of the performers were from Eastern Europe, Romania and Hungary; only a few of them spoke some Italian, and none as fluently as Andor.
After only a few days Ada had fallen half in love with the four sisters from the Flying Hawks acrobatic number. In the early afternoons she sneaked inside the empty ring, sat on a hay bale and watched them practice. The girls were tiny, barely five feet, but they were precision machines; even when they were just standing still, they had a way of adhering to the ground that made them look as if they were made of steel. They did a quick warm-up routine of handstands and push-ups, and when they climbed the ladder up to the trapeze and began to swing, hanging by one leg, catching each other’s hands in midair and shimmering under the spotlights, they looked twice the size.