This attention was not intended for her or for his red wool cap or broad shoulders. That a monkey was capable of riding a bicycle was a big surprise to the public; for them a monkey balancing on a chair was remarkable, and Pliny knew how to do both those things. Of course Charlotte had invested all her patience, her hands sticky with sugar lumps, spending hours teaching him acrobatics. All the applause rained upon Pliny while she, with her trapeze numbers, swollen legs encased in pink tights and bare arms, had to anticipate the applause that followed each daring leap, to force the applause with bows and kisses sent from every corner of the ring. A vast silence made the great arena seem bigger. The first times, Charlotte felt her heart somersaulting like the drumroll announcing dangerous double flips; her breasts swelled like seedpods below her red neck traversed by supple veins . . . and at the end of the show, she’d collapse into bed in some rundown room. She’d feel her pulse throbbing up and down the length of the torn seams of her leotard. Her good health deprived her of sympathy from others—her body could feel devastated by exhaustion, but her cheeks still looked rosy.

The Edna Circus Company had been going from town to town for years and continued on thanks to the half-dozen elephants who could walk with one foot in the air, could spray sand with their trumpeting trunks, could swiftly sit in circles on barrels, and walk delicately like ballerinas on top of the dwarf, without crushing him. And also thanks to Pliny, who, along with a Japanese juggler, inspired monsoons of applause.

But Charlotte had been working since she was ten years old. She had grown up in landscapes of trapezes and rotating nets, among the wrinkled legs of tame elephants. She had never lived out in the country. She didn’t know any animals other than those that came locked in cages. One day, a short time ago, she had been invited to a picnic along El Tigre River. Taking a boat tour she and her friends got off at Las Violetas Park. Charlotte fell asleep under a palm tree. When she awoke, she saw the wrinkled paw of an elephant leaning against her body; her eyes moved up the leg of the elephant until reaching as high as the green palm fronds. The air was not riddled with sawdust and sand, and the most incredible thing in her life was happening: a day in the country.

Nothing extraordinary had ever happened, but rather she lived in a lonely desert without a sheltering sky. She would sleep on benches, awaiting her turn, her eyes circled by the intense fire of sleep (which is why her friends called her “Sleepyhead”). Pliny woke her up, pulling on her skirt and shaking her arms while the audience came through during intermission to visit the animals. One day, among all those people, she was in such a sleepy state, her arms spongy like cotton, her eyelids drooping like two enormous tears ready to fall, and her mouth opened slightly . . . that a man fell in love with her and her cheeks of red rouge, tattooed by the imprint of a woven doormat or an open hand. For him at that precise moment, the incandescent acrobatic movements of that sleeping woman became real: the muscles of each arm and each leg were soft and sleepy like an embrace. In his childhood that man had seen blond seraphims disguised as acrobats in the circus, which is why perhaps he stopped and looked a long time at the resurrected acrobat of his childhood. And she, enveloped in sleep, saw him in the distance, sitting way up in the highest rows, winking at her behind the strangest eyebrows like two mustaches on his forehead. The intensity of his gaze must have been so strong, so great, that Charlotte woke up, but she saw no one. “Pliny, who was that man?” Pliny peered outside the curtains to spy and wobbled back without an answer.