Orphans of the Carnival - Couverture souple

· 1854 ·

The train shook, her brain shook. She flew into the future, dreaming she was lost in a big white house that went on forever, the windows dusty like the windows of the diligence taking her on the first stretch of her journey, from Culiacán to Los Mochis, to get over the mountains and out of Mexico. She saw glimpses of far mountains and miles of scrub, and occasionally a poor peon tramping in rags. Then she was back in her bunk, listening to the sound that had woken her up: a baby crying, far along the train toward New Orleans, a lost thin bleating like a lamb.

Needing privacy, she’d paid a few extra dollars to get a berth for the night. The sleeper was dark and cramped, the passage very narrow, people walking up and down it constantly, brushing against the thick hessian curtain she’d pulled across in front of her bed. A man in the bunk across the passage snored and snorted and tossed, so close it was indecent, and the clanking and screeching, the jolting and swaying, the dusty coal smell kept her awake. At least she had sheets and they were clean. She huddled down into them with old Yatzi, thinking about the great city, every great promised city, New York, Chicago, Boston, and the people she’d meet tomorrow in New Orleans. Yatzi’s bald wooden head was tucked under her chin.

The whistle was a soul in distress. God, but this land was flat and endless. Miles and miles of spreading green, some trees, occasionally a crossroads. The flatness had become a dream verging on nightmare. No one lived here. That there were flat places in the world she’d known, but the enormity of it scared her even more than crossing the mountains. She’d been afraid all the way from Culiacán. The first couple of days she kept thinking she’d get off at the next stop and go back home. She thought she’d be discovered. They’d be attacked by bandits, robbed. Killed. Two more weeks, slogging higher and higher into her mother’s mountains in a smelly wagon she couldn’t even get out of to stretch her legs, not till everyone else was asleep, and then only for a brief interlude of wide cool darkness, a quick look up at the frosty stars. The driver and all the passengers thought she was a young girl traveling alone to meet her guardian, veiled because of a vow she’d made to Our Lady. Respecting her silence, they left her alone and were kind and helpful whenever they made a stop. Up the mountains, down the mountains, going mad with boredom, sleeping and drifting, jerking awake a hundred times, and with every mile that jolted by feeling more and more unreal, losing all sense of distance, the world a giant carpet unfolding endlessly.

In the morning they pulled into a depot. She was up and dressed and veiled, sitting by one of the small windows. The porter came with bread and coffee. New Orleans was no more than a couple of hours away, he said. The coffee was appalling. She was sick to death of this veil. She’d never had to wear it so much at home. It didn’t matter. All these new people she’d have to meet, she’d be famous, Rates said. She would perform. They’d flock in their millions. And they’d pay. After New Orleans, New York. Let them goggle. You show them, you show them what you can do, how proud you are, you go out there and let them see you. Can’t do it, she thought. Scared. Scared. Have to. Come this far. Who is this Rates anyway? Mamá, I’m lost. She sipped the bitter muck. He could be a crook or a madman for all she knew. All she remembered was a suave pudgy little man, well spoken. In New Orleans, Mr. Rates said, there’d be a big rehearsal room where she could practice on a real stage. What if he wasn’t there? Alone in New Orleans. Never get back home.

The conductor was calling all aboard. The place filled up. She watched the country roll by again, flat as ever still, but broken up now with vast stretches of water and acres of sugarcane, and people sprinkled out like black corn, working the flatness. The long car was packed, boys passed up and down the aisle selling candy and papers, and the heat was terrible. Off in the distance from time to time a cluster of slave cabins would appear, and sometimes a great white house. The windows didn’t open. The air was ripe with sweaty people. A stove at one end leaked smoke.

At the station she stood with her grip on the ground beside her. The place swarmed, the same as all the other way stations they’d stopped at along the road, only bigger and noisier. She didn’t see Mr. Rates and didn’t know what to do, where to wait. Everyone was shouting, shunting luggage around. She tried to get out of the way, close to tears. And then he loomed in front of her, the portly man from the night of Marta’s wedding, with his thin-lipped smile and small pale eyes. At the wedding he’d been dressed like a gentleman, but here he wore a loud checked jacket and carried a black cane with a silver tip.

“My dear Miss Julia,” he said in an oily way.

“Mr. Rates,” she said, “I was just wondering what to do if you hadn’t been here.”

“Of course I’m here.”

A thin pockmarked boy whose nose turned up extremely appeared at Mr. Rates’s side. He looked straight at her veiled face, then away.

“And on time, you see,” Rates said. “Is this all you have?”

She looked down. Her stuff looked paltry. “This is all,” she said.

“Excellent. Michael!”

The boy picked up her grip and her guitar and set off briskly, weaving through the crowd. Mr. Rates offered Julia his arm and led her after him. “You must be tired,” he said. “Terrible journey, terrible, I’ve done it myself. All went well, I take it?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent.”

Outside, the horses hung down their long brown heads, nostrils steaming. Their carriage smelled of dung and lemons. All the books she’d read in Don Pedro’s house had not prepared her for the excitement of New Orleans. “But it’s too big!” she said with a nervous laugh. “It goes on and on.” It was a city of long streets and tall terraces, big houses with gardens, Spanish courtyards that put her in mind of Culia­cán, and everywhere people teeming, loitering, meeting and parting, more people than she’d ever seen. Music flashed by, the high whistling peal of a street organ. Trying to see, she carefully lifted her veil, and was aware of a tightening in Rates’s attention. But she held it slantwise, cleverly, so that it was like looking out of a tunnel. No one could see her.

“Careful,” Rates said very softly by her ear.

She had never felt so buried yet so alive, and she dropped the veil.

“I’m scared about meeting all the new people,” she said too quickly.

Rates leaned back. “Of course,” he said, “it’s only natural. But there’s nothing to be afraid of.” He smiled and, putting on his grand stage voice declaimed, “You were born to entertain!”

“I’m sick, sick of this veil!”

“Not long now,” he said, “you can take it off soon,” patting her gloved hand and leaning close so that she could smell a slight odor from his breath. “You’re not shy, Julia,” he said. “It’s what I noticed first about you. How calmly you faced the world with that stupendous, utterly unnatural face of yours, and of course—you know the spirit in which I say that, it’s merely a stated fact—I knew then you were a natural. No, no, there’s no doubt in my mind, no doubt at all, but that you’ll thrive.”

The carriage swerved to get by a crowd spilling into the road.

“Tell her about the St. Charles Theatre, Mikey,” he said.

“It’s grand,” Michael said, bored, looking out of the window on the other side, where a horse pulling a big dray was blocked by a lop­sided cart. The man driving the dray started shouting in an accent she couldn’t make out.

“Wait until you see New York,” said Rates.

“I can’t believe I will.”

“Oh, you will,” he said, “you will.”

“Wish I could go to New York,” said Michael grumpily.

“It’s not as pretty as New Orleans,” said Rates, and the boy gave a crude snort as if prettiness was overrated. “It’s like an old whore,” he said, “all paint and dirty underneath.”

Mr. Rates’s sister-in-law ran a rooming place in one of the faubourgs, an area where shuttered cottages mingled with low terraces and overhanging roofs. On shady wrought-iron balconies, on steps, porches, people, people everywhere, all kinds, Spanish, black, white, every mixture. They pulled up beside a high fence in a busy street, not far from a corner where women hovered seriously over baskets of fruit outside an oddly shaped store. A tall middle-aged woman in a dark blue dress opened the gate immediately as if she’d been watching for them, and peered into the carriage eagerly before they’d even had a chance to get out. “Well, the new girl,” she said and giggled like a giddy girl. Her face, vivacious and fleshily wrinkled, was heavily powdered white and wafted a scent of flowers into the airless carriage. “Can’t wait to see what you got under there,” she said cheerfully.

“Julia, this is Madame Soulie,” Rates said, “my sister-in-law.”

“Terrible journey, I dare say.” Madame Soulie stood down so the driver could open the carriage door. Rates descended heavily, turned and gave his hand to Julia. “It was such a long journey,” she said breathlessly, stepping down.

“Hellish, I’m sure.” Madame Soulie aimed a kick at a wiry gray dog rooting in the trash that bloomed along the bottom of the fence, snarling and unleashing a stream of furious French at it before snapping back startlingly into her practiced smile.

“Please,” she said, “this way. What a tiny little thing you are!”

They followed her through the yard to the house, while Michael came along behind with her luggage. Pink azaleas bloomed along the sides of the path. On either side of the cottage a shingle roof hung down low, and a pomegranate tree shaded the walkway to the back. Somewhere inside a piano plink-plonked lazily.

Madame Soulie jumped up the step with a girlish bob unsuited to her bulk and called, “Charlotte!” She held her hand out behind her to Julia, who took it and stepped into a wide yellow-walled room with a door on either side and a gallery above. She got an impression of faded, leaf-patterned divans. “Charlotte,” Madame Soulie called again. “Where are you? Oh, there you are.”

A bony mulatto girl of about twelve appeared silently.

“Charlotte, take Miss Julia across.” Madame Soulie wore five or six very long strings of beads that she fiddled with constantly. “Are you hungry, dear?”

“Not at all,” said Julia, “only very thirsty.”

“Rest a while,” Rates said genially, flinging himself down in an extra­vagantly exhausted way on one of the divans as if he himself had just come all that way. His belly was a dome of worn white linen. “The girl will bring you hot chocolate. Time enough to meet the others.”

Michael shuffled in, dumped Julia’s grip and guitar in the middle of the floor and stood looking down at them, breathing heavily.

“Well, don’t just leave them there,” said Madame Soulie, “take them across.” She clapped her hands, and as Michael picked up the grip and Charlotte the guitar, turned the clapping into a Spanish dance in their wake, urging Julia after them.

“We are all one big happy family here, madame!” she called after them as they emerged into the backyard. It was large, with three two-room shacks opening onto it. Curtains hung over the windows. A table and benches were pushed against the side of a brick kitchen, and half a dozen chickens pecked between weed-grown stones in front of it. A swing had been fixed to the bough of a very old apple tree. She was aware of figures, one in a doorway, one peering out of a tiny crisscross window, but she felt scared and didn’t look at them. Halfway across the yard a little stooping goblin came running out from the kitchen, sudden and utterly impossible. She screamed.

“It’s only Cato,” Michael said.

He was all face and not enough head. What there was of his head was dark brown and exaggeratedly egg-shaped, bald and tapering to a point like a dunce’s cap.

Seizing her hand in his little stick fingers, he spoke urgently in a high voice that broke and stuck and skidded nasally, drowning any words.

“So tiny,” she said.

His fingers were hot and squirmy. His face pushed itself avidly at her with a massive width of smile. A fat black woman in a guinea blue skirt and white blouse appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, a wooden spoon steaming in her hand. “Come on now, Cato,” she said patiently, “you get back now.”

“He likes people,” Michael said, looking back over his shoulder. “You never saw a pinhead before?”

“Never.”

She stared into the shiny crinkling eyes, wanting unaccountably to unveil.

“He’s just a big baby,” Michael said.

“Cato!” the cook called.

Mewing excitedly, Cato ran back to the kitchen. His breeches were cut off at the knee. His legs were thin, bent sticks and his feet were too big. He put his head very far back and smiled up at the cook as if he were trying to break his face.

“Here we are.” Michael was lugging her grip through an open door. Charlotte, a frail thin-faced girl, stood back and waved her on in, staring at the veil as if trying to see through.

“Thank you,” Julia said. Wouldn’t you just love to know what’s under here? She looked around. It was plain but comfortable. Someone had tried to make it nice with blue flowers in a jug and a clean yellow tablecloth. A game of solitaire was abandoned on a side table. Two narrow beds were neatly turned down, and a pink curtain was half drawn back on a rail of wide, brightly colored skirts. Michael put her grip down. Charlotte drew back another curtain, heavy gray linen. “You in here,” she said. “You sleep here and put your things in there. You want chocolate?”

“I’d love some,” said Julia.

“Look,” the girl said. “You got a window.”

It was open for the air but covered with a net. Another net was ’round her bed. Veil on veil on veil.

“I’ll bring you some chocolate,” said Charlotte, staring blatantly. “You’ll want hot water too, I guess.”

The boy didn’t look at her at all.

When they’d gone, she tore off the veil and tossed it onto the bed. She was dazed. Three weeks and she’d be on a real stage in a theater. What have I done? She got under the net and lay down on the narrow bed with her hands over her face, moaning softly. I should have gone back to the mountains, she thought. When she was little she thought the mountains were full of people like her, that there was a place up there where all the women were hairy and had more teeth. And it had occurred to her to just set off, take that path she clearly remembered, along which her mother had walked away. The path rose first gently and then, in the distance where everything turned blue, very steeply.

Where was the girl with the chocolate and the hot water? She jumped up again and stood at the window, listening to the sounds beyond the end of the street, a muffled hum, a whistle, a rumble and a call. The Mississippi, how far away she didn’t know, not far, she’d seen it from the train, the big steamboats paddling up and down with people on the upper decks with hats and parasols. I am a woman who’s been on a train, she told herself. I’m in a great city. I’m going to New York. I could go anywhere.

A baby cried somewhere, out along the back alley.

She’d met Rates the day of the wedding. She’d been called fromthe kitchen to sing and play her guitar. All the doors and shutters werethrown open to the patio. Everyone was there, all the bright sparklingcrowd of them, the boys, the young men and their wives, Doña Inés, hermouth held in the tight way she had when she was pretending not to bedrunk, all the young bucks and flowery girls,...

In this stunning work of historical fiction, the Booker Prize–nominated author of Jamrach’s Menagerie reimagines the incredible true story of Julia Pastrana, a woman branded a freak at birth. Although she was pronounced by the most eminent physician of the day to be “a true hybrid wherein the nature of woman presides over that of the brute,” Julia was fluent in English, French, and Spanish, and an accomplished musician with an exquisite singing voice. Alternately vilified and celebrated, all she wanted was for people to see beyond her hairy visage—and perhaps, the chance for love. When Julia meets a charming showman who catapults her onto the global stage, she believes that she has found true happiness at last. But the question of whether her lover truly cares for her—or if his management is just a new form of exploitation—lingers heavily. A deeply moving novel, in Orphans of the Carnival Carol Birch has crafted a haunting examination of how we define ourselves and, ultimately, of what it means to be human.