Cipriano leapt through the arches like a galloping white horse, and Valerio sometimes balanced on a broken chair and carefully concealed his fondness for dolls. He didn’t understand why little boys weren’t supposed to play with dolls. He hadn’t known it was a forbidden thing until the day he hugged a broken doll he had found on the curb; he had picked her up and cradled her in his arms as he moved to the rhythm of a song. At that moment the laughter of five girls pierced him as they were passing by; then his mother called to him, and, as if throwing away garbage, he got rid of the doll for good. Cipriano’s tears had acutely magnified his shame.

The laundress Clodomira sprinkled the white clothing with her hand, as if watering flowers, and every now and then she looked over at the courtyard to watch the boys playing and showing off their extraordinary poses, their reflections captured in window frames. She never knew what they were talking about, and when she attempted to read their lips the mouths of her sons suddenly become as still as wax. She was an admirable laundress: the creases in shirts opened like big white flowers in the baskets of newly ironed laundry as she watched her sons’ lips. Inside their heads a strange scheme took shape that for a while she tried to discern from the movement of their mouths, until she stopped trying, having become used to the closed door between her and them. In the mornings the two boys went to school, but the afternoons were filled with games in the courtyard, reading in the corners of the laundry room, and experimenting on imaginary trapezes that their mother had already begun to admire.

Cipriano had gone to the circus one day with his mother. During intermission they went to visit the animals. When they returned, crossing in front of the ring, Cipriano felt the vertigo of being up high that he’d once felt on the rooftop of the house, where they were rarely allowed to go. He let go of his mother’s hand and ran into the arena: he galloped around like a furious horse, did somersaults like an acrobat, hung from a trapeze artist’s wire, acted out the clumsy thuds of a clown—all with dizzying velocity under a rain of applause. The entire audience clapped for him. Cipriano, dazzled by his own tour de force, was the ballerina’s white horse, the acrobat who performed death-defying leaps with ten other acrobats standing on his head, the trapeze artist who was all arms and wings floating through the air to land in a net atop an enormous cushion, where trapeze artists sleep. His mother called to him through the tumult of applause “Cipriano, Cipriano!”—and thought that she had lost both her voice and her son forever, until an usher brought him to her covered in bruises and soaked in sweat. The audience smiled all around them, and Clodomira felt her furious terror suddenly turn into admiration, which made her fear her son slightly, as if he were some strange and privileged being.