When they returned home, Valerio—who was sick, hiding his head under the sheets—peeked out and watched the whole glorious spectacle of the circus rolled out like a rug before him in Cipriano’s retellings. Cipriano had a shining halo the color of the sand in the ring, and the bruises on his arms took on the extraordinary shapes of tattoos.

From that day on, Cipriano lived to return to the circus, and Valerio lived for Cipriano to return to the circus. It was through his brother that Valerio experienced joy in all things, with the exception of his fondness for dolls.

An acrobatic fervor grew persistently in the body of Cipriano, and they invented an acrobat suit made of women’s stockings and the doorman’s old undershirts.

One afternoon they no longer felt the chilly draft on their bare arms. Standing on a window ledge on the third floor, they took a glorious leap, and, holding each other in a farewell embrace, they fell, crashing onto the tile of the courtyard. Ironing in the side room, Clodomira, saw the marvelous act and felt, with a smile, that from all the windows came millions of shouts and claps, but she kept on ironing. She recalled her initial anxiety at the circus. Now she was used to such things.

Siesta in the Cedar Tree

Witch hazel, 86% distilled water, and a woman running with two branches in hand, a shapely woman against a stormy yellow background. Looking at the label, Elena dampened a cotton ball with Humphrey’s Maravilla Lotion for those little ribbons of blood curling around each knee. She needed the pain to be able to cry, and so she had fallen on purpose. Swinging higher and harder to reach the highest branches, then dragging her feet on the ground to stop short and letting go of the swing suddenly, she had finally succeeded in falling. Nobody heard her in that house of sleeping shutters at siesta hour. She cried, her face against the ground, her mouth filling with pebbles and tears—any tear that wasn’t shared seemed wasted, lost like a forgotten penance . . . She came crashing down so that someone would feel her suffering as she kneeled, baring her knees like two wounded little hearts.

Her best friends were the gardener’s daughters, skinny barefoot twins named Cecilia and Ester. They lived in a modest house covered with mallow and honeysuckle vines and surrounded by small flowerbeds.

One day she heard the chauffeur say, “Cecilia has tuberculosis. That makes three dying of the same disease in that house.” Quickly she ran to tell her nanny, then her sister. What in the world was so sensual about that ivory-colored word? “Don’t get too close, just in case,” they told her and added softly, “Be careful if she coughs.” The color changed, the word turned black—the color of a horrible, fatal secret.

The next day a hollow-eyed Cecilia came over to play. Only then did Elena notice her coughing every five minutes, and each time it felt like the world opened up to swallow her whole. “Don’t get too close,” she heard them say in every room, “and don’t drink water from the same glass.” But she avidly drank water from the same glass.