Raggle-Taggle (1933)/Chapter 11
Chapter XI
Life in a Village Circus
My Arab Fakir Friend
TO-DAY there has been great excitement in Mezökövesd, for a circus has arrived. Early in the morning I heard the rumble of caravans and the beating of drums in the distance, and through the clouds of dust I saw a motley collection of people, some on horseback, others on foot, some leading bears, others clinging on to the assortment of carts that followed the three lumbering houses on wheels that contained the main troupe. Let no reader imagine that this was the famous Ringley or Floto circus with their droves of animals and their battalions of artists: no: this was one of those poor dishevelled circuses that wander about the country brightening the lives of humble folk. Alas, soon will come the day when there will be no more circuses in the country towns, for every street will have its wretched cinema theatre and the antics of the clown will be forgotten. That will be a sad day, for how can we imagine the life of a child without Harlequin, Columbine or Mr. Punch? They symbolize the eternal comedy of life from the days of Aristophanes to Gilbert and Sullivan. The clowns of the circus are the noblest lesson that could be taught to innocent, unspoiled humanity. Look at Harlequin and Brighella, the stupid and the clever clown. Tradition states that they came originally from the city of Bergamo in North Italy, where there is a lower and an upper city. The upper-city inhabitants living on top of a hill were the quickest witted and they looked down on the dwellers in the lower city who had duller and coarser intelligences. And so in every farce, just as in life, there is the clever schemer who deceives his duller brother. Just as in the old play all the plot centred on those two characters, so too in modern life. And the circus with its clowns and dare-devil acrobats does not limit its moral teaching to the comedy of human life. The circus acrobat is an artist whose instrument is his body, and his somersaults and pirouettes and mortal leaps are all the result of technique acquired by sacrifice and self-denial.
A circus clown should be called an artist in the same way that we call a great musical performer an artist. Watch Grock, the Hungarian, the greatest clown in Europe, and you will see a performance worthy of Kreisler or Cortot. Its perfection consists in its marvellous suggestion and preparation. Grock, like the great actor improvisers of the Commedia dell’arte, knows the secret of surprise effects which will dazzle the audience. He knows how to hypnotize the people in the same way as the Indian Fakir who makes you believe that he is standing in mid-air. The art of the circus does not reach its true manifestation in the huge commercial circuses of America, for they are the product of capitalistic enterprise on a gigantic scale. The village circus is the ideal because it plays for simple people who allow their hearts to become childlike again.
The circus in the square at Mezökövesd reminded me of the wandering companies in sixteenth-century Spain described by Agustín de Rojas. Some of the artists were in rags and barefooted, others wore the remains of faded doublets and trunk hose that once had been bright in colour. Out of one of the caravans stepped an enormous woman who was the wife of the proprietor of the circus, a very diminutive mean with huge whiskers, dressed in a black turned-green frock-coat and check trousers. In a few minutes the caravan was surrounded by every little urchin in Mezökövesd, and many of the peasants and their wives. A trio of monkeys clambered out of one cart and perched themselves on top of one of the caravans, scratching themselves, cracking pea-nuts and throwing the husks at the urchins beneath.
As soon as the circus was “parked” in the square, the job of unpacking started. Great big poles were dragged out and lashed to the caravans and masses of flapping canvas were stretched from one to the other, so that a huge tent was constructed, and inside a miniature arena was roped off and sawdust sprinkled on the ground.
Among the circus workers was one gaunt fellow, who was working with demoniac energy, shouting himself hoarse as he tugged at ropes, and cursed the others in a curious jargon, that seemed to be a mixture of German, French and Hungarian. He was grey-haired and so mahogany in colour that at first I thought he was a Gypsy. When I said to him, “San tu rom?”—Are you a Gypsy?-he answered me in French. He was an Egyptian and was the Fakir of the company. He told me he had been living with circuses in Hungary for sixteen years and travelling ceaselessly from the Western borders of Yugoslavia to the Black Sea, but he hardly knew a word of Hungarian except a little Romany. “Ah, Monsieur,” he said, “je suis citoyen du monde: j’ai vovagé partout.” There was an air of pride about him which did not fit in with his ragged, unkempt appearance. His name, he told me, was Ali Hussein, and he came from Egypt. At an early age he became a circus acrobat and wandered from one country to another. “Many is the time I’ve been to England and performed in London at the music halls.” Then said he, passing from French to perfect English: “I was well known in the Alhambra and Victoria Palace for my stunts on the trapeze. I travelled across the Atlantic too with variety companies and performed in New York and Chicago. Ah, how I used to love the life of the acrobat and the thrills of the circus. But, alas, one day my luck was against me: I fell off a bar and broke my leg at the knee and I was useless any more.” Poor Ali Hussein, he was the living embodiment of the circus artists’ tragedy—the tragedy of the broken doll that has amused the young people all over the world. When it is broken, what remains for it but the dust-bin? Ali Hussein, after his fall, sank low in the world: he became a tramp and beggar. Little by little he worked his way back towards the East, and when he returned to Egypt, he set himself to learn the Fakir’s art, for thus he could go back again to the life of the tent and the caravan, his only joy in life. “Ah, Monsieur,” he said, “whoever has lived the life of the circus can never live in a house any more. I must move on from one place to another, otherwise I feel restless and ideas of madness come into my head. My only pleasure is to roll over the roads and see new faces. For sixteen years I have roamed the Hungarian countryside and through Roumania and Bulgaria, always stopping at the same little villages and towns in the great circumference of our wandering. Look you here, sir, we circus people are a race apart. No one knows how we live, and they have the queerest ideas about us. I shall tell you. We are a simple people and we lead a simple life. How many peasants think that we are immoral and that we drink ourselves to death after a life of vice? That is not true. Life in a circus is that of a large family, for we are all one. We do have disputes, but they are the disputes of children who must obey their Father and Mother. And our Father and Mother are yonder little man with the whiskers and his fat wife. Everything we have we divide among one another; some days when business is bad we have hardly enough to eat, but we laugh and play pranks on one another, and so life passes away. Our folk marry early and they have children—for children are a godsend in a circus. We don’t send them to your schools where you torture their little minds with facts they do not want to learn. No; we teach them to bend and twist and exercise their bodies when they are soft and pliable, so that the little ones become as agile as cats.”
As my Arab friend spoke in this enthusiastic way of the life of the circus children, I thought of my own education. At twelve years of age, I was dressed in a tight Eton jacket and seated at a desk struggling over Latin elegiac couplets with my Gradus ad Parnassum before me. If I had only been with Ali Hussein I should have been a brown-faced little circus Arab, dancing from one horse to another and vaulting through hoops—full of joy of life, and eagerness, with not a care in life as long as that Stradivarius, which is our body, remained intact. Ali Hussein has one tragedy in his life, and that is his lameness, which prevents him from doing hair-raising stunts on the trapeze. In every other respect, he is a philosopher. “There is only one thing that is worth while in life and that is freedom in one’s mind—freedom to dream as we wander through the world. You ask me what is my address? I tell you I have no address, for I do not know where I am going next. You ask me have I Father, Mother, Brother, Sister, Wife, Children—and I answer you that I have none. No, sir: I have nobody that belongs to me: nobody but God.”
Ali Hussein has no vices and no wants. Sometimes he sleeps in the caravan, sometimes in an inn, sometimes in the open under the stars. Money is of no value to him except in so far as it enables him to buy cigarettes or drink a glass of wine. Of all the countries that he wandered through as a vagabond those that pleased him most were the Scandinavian because, he said, “the people there love circuses more than elsewhere and you may fish in the rivers for nothing.”
Through Ali Hussein, I was admitted into the intimate circle of the circus and presented to Madame and Monsieur, as he called the Fat Lady and her husband. Madame was a florid woman and very voluble, but it was her timid-looking little husband who ruled everyone with a rod of iron. I have always remarked that a nervy man marries a fat placid woman, and his chief pleasure in life consists in imparting sudden electric shocks to her mountainous frame. Eating meals with Madame’s household in the caravan was a tempestuous business, for everyone feared Monsieur’s ire. He would work himself into a white-hot passion and then suddenly fire potatoes, bones of meat or anything else that came to his hand, at his wife or children. At the first of those not too Lucullian banquets that I attended I happened to be in the line of fire and received a burning potato in my eye! Monsieur, like Ali Hussein, spoke a variety of languages, but very imperfectly, and he was never able to make his meaning clear to me. If I had known Hungarian well I should have appreciated his rhetorical flourishes, but when he launched forth into German or French he would suddenly stop poised in mid-air for loss of the crucial word.
There was one fairy in the ragged troupe—a little girl of ten years old, who was one of the dancers and trick riders. Her name was Gilda and she had Italian blood in her veins. Monsieur told me that she was a foundling that he had adopted and brought up in the circus. “She is the best draw we have,” he added, “for she is the personification of the spirit of the dance: there is a strange wild rhythm in that little imp which works a spell on her and makes her dance all day and all night. Sometimes I think she will burn herself out like a candle by her untiring efforts.” The little girl was already as full of mannerisms and affectations as if she had been born with a prima donna’s gold spoon in her mouth. She postured, she pirouetted before us, and as I was the stranger she exercised all her tricks upon me. I have never seen any child so graceful. When she walked or ran she hardly seemed to touch the ground with her feet. She reminded me of a curious fact which I have noticed, that most of us dash through life, elbowing one another, jolting, bustling, tripping and generally following a vertiginous rhythmless course until Death ends the race. Some there are who dance their way through life, following an inexorable rhythm which little by little burns them up and consumes them like those rare melodies that the Indians speak of, which change those who sing them into blue flames. I am sure that if Gilda once fell she would never be able to catch up her rhythm again and she would whirl round and round in a maelstrom to destruction. When I used to see her dashing round the ring standing on her white horse’s back I felt as if she was the beautiful butterfly on the wheel—a beautiful spirit sailing along at the edge of an abyss that threatens every moment to engulf her. She was a roguish little thing and her face was sallow rather than brown, her mouth dimpled with very red lips, her eyes wild and untamed. At first she sang a lilting song that she had picked up in Serbia and then she rushed off to fetch two boys of her age who assisted her to do acrobatic tricks for me. She was an untamed animal and mote muscular than the boys in spite of her fragile appearance. She had on one garment only, a faded frock that once was red, and nothing else. When she did cartwheels and somersaults she showed her body to us in all its nudity. Then she danced with one of the boys; a violent, spasmodic dance in which each tried to outdo the other in speed and agility. Finally they fell down in a heap exhausted and lay there laughing.
In the sultry afternoons everyone in the circus would take the siesta, and not a sound was heard in the caravans and tents but snores and the clinking of the chains of the animals. There is a certain period in the Hungarian afternoons in the countryside when every living thing seems to become scorched into a deep coma. The sun beats down on the farms and homesteads remorselessly and nothing seems to live save the buzzing flies. Even in the dead of night there is not such deep silence, but then towards evening a cool breeze stirs the leaves on the trees, an excited chorus of birds starts to sing, and everywhere we hear the shrill music which seems to be the salutation to the lumbering oxen that already begin to appear on the horizon, slowly plodding their way home.
When Curfew tolls there begins a period of feverish activity for the circus: the men feed the animals and draw out their variegated costumes from the big chests, the women put rouge on their faces and spangles on their hair. Already the circus band has started off to parade the town with drums, trumpets and megaphones. Soon there must be the grand parade on the cars where every circus artist appears in war-paint to dazzle the towns-people and draw them in their crowds to the evening performance which will start at eight o'clock. Even the animals share the excitement of their masters, for they walk up and down their cages, tugging at their chains, and the old bear already starts to improvise the dance that has been taught it by the Gypsy on the heated iron tray. As for me I had bethought me of my friend Kovács, and as he was liberal he entertained Monsieur and Ali Hussein in the bar of the Rákoczi Inn with bottles of wine and beer. Soon Monsieur was half-tipsy, and it was with difficulty that we led him to the circus to prepare for the show.
As a performance it was the same old village circus that takes place in every country in Europe with the selfsame tunes, the selfsame acrobats and trick-riders. Monsieur clicked his whip and Gilda flitted by on her white horse, a fairy vision in white and silver. There was the same old Harlequin and Brighella, armed with bladders full of peas, and the red-nosed rough-and-tumble man. Ali Hussein would not have taken an honours degree in the college of Indian Fakirs, but he dazzled the open-mouthed peasants and their children by his disappearing tricks. To my mind there was not much respect in their attitude towards him. He was a Gypsy in their eyes, one of the semi-humorous Oriental goblins who was to bring them romance from the East and to be derided in return. Ali Hussein was an Egyptian and not a Romany, but if he had called himself Panuel, Duke of Little Egypt, everyone would have accepted him as one of the Great Band of Gypsies who invaded Europe in 1417, for I heard on all sides the word cigány applied to him.
After the show Monsieur invited me to eat a dish of gulyás with him and drink a bottle of wine in the caravan where he and his wife and Ali Hussein slept. It was a narrow waggon with two narrow beds : in one Madame squeezed her generous form, and in the other Monsieur lay. Ali Hussein squatted in a corner near the door on a doubled-up mattress. And so we passed most of the night, singing songs until Monsieur and Madame became too intoxicated and Ali Hussein made signs for me to go. Outside near the tent I saw Gilda, surrounded by her companions, dancing like a goblin in the moonlight.