Edward Whittemore - Quin’s Shanghai Circus

The Malacca cane.

The one and only Johore jerkin in captivity.

The spectators refuse to acknowledge this list of preposterous acts. Some are stupefied, others angry, a few fearful. They have brought bags of shrimp with them to eat during the performance, and now they begin noisily cracking the tails of the shrimp, peeling them, stuffing the rich meat into their mouths. There is hissing and shouting, stamping, catcalls.

The snare drum rolls again, the juggler plays out his shadowy game. My father continues announcing acts that have never been acted, animals that have never lived. It’s nonsense, of course, yet all of it is serious as well as meaningless.

At last he lowers the megaphone. He walks across the sawdust to the side of the ring looking up at my mother who is poised on the highbar, waiting for her trapeze act, a hundred feet above the ground.

Does she understand at the moment what he is doing? What is about to happen?

Perhaps. But it is too late for her or anyone to stop a performance that began long ago. Long ago, yes, and now it is here.

Tuneless, masterless

Come the acts of memory,

A Shanghai circus.

Kikuchi-Lotmann untied his necktie. He took a black one from his pocket and knotted it in place.

Poetry is a sauce, he said, and like all good sauces it should be both sweet and sour. The performance he had prepared that night, you see, was for a very small audience. The wealthy patrons in the stands, the animals and acts and clowns, the band and the jugglers were all props for a private performance he was about to stage for one person and one person alone, the woman on the highbar. To each of us love is a different mixture. To him it meant a ring and a bed.

But before I complicate the tale, let me say that it is really very simple. A man is enamored with the dash and excitement of the circus. He gives his life to it and discovers too late that the love of one woman is more important. Now wasting one’s life is commonplace. This man’s madness came because he had knowingly refused the gift.

The ring? The circus ring of course, the circle where a confident dissembler struts in his clever costumes sowing shouts and laughter, thinking he will trick life with his acts and disguises by tricking the fools who have come to watch him, which indeed he will one evening after another since spectators are there for that very purpose. The spectators applaud vigorously but after every performance the hall is emptied, and thus at the end of every clever evening the circus master must remember and remove the disguises he has squandered before the trumpets. He is naked then, trapped in the tight silence of the ring that has become his cage, alone with the squeezed tubes of paint and the hollow, worn costumes, standing alone on sawdust strewn with dead footprints that are mere acts of memory. Others come to see and marvel, they leave, and when they are gone he no longer exists.

And the bed? The bed of my mother, all her beds in one. The bed where she was born and slept as a child, a girl, a young woman. Where she took her first lover and her first ten and twenty lovers and many more even after she married because her husband would not receive her love. Because he thought the circus was too important to him. Because he gave his life to become a ring master in the clamor and triumph of a sawdust circle.

Probably he even encouraged her in those transitory affairs in order to be more at ease with himself, in order to think she wasn’t lonely, in order to hide from himself the fact that ultimately he could neither accept her love nor return it. Surely they both must have been involved in those acts of life that became decisive through repetition, even though the two of them might never have openly admitted they were making decisions.

And so it went year after year. An ambitious costumed man cleverly performing in the ring. A lonely woman in a bed exchanging love for hope with one passerby after another, exchanging love for flowers, for dinner, for an evening with someone, anyone, so that at least for an evening time could pass finger by finger instead of minute by minute.

The circus had always been his passion. When did its magic begin to slip away? When did he begin to have doubts about the trumpets that sounded when he stepped into the ring night after night? When did he begin to loathe the costumes and disguises? To detest the audiences who cheered only when he followed one act quickly with another? Who hissed when he faltered, hissed when he stumbled, demanded more and more, and then left the moment the performance ended?

There is no way to know. It happened. The ring became a cage. He had to reinforce himself with heavier and heavier doses of alcohol before he could bring himself to put on his costumes, to fix a smile to his face, to step forward and pretend he was still pleased with himself, still in command of the animals, still trying to amuse the spectators, still striving for the applause that was now utterly meaningless to him. He was given to darker and darker moods. He became morose, even violent.

His wife tried to help him but she couldn’t. Her kindness infuriated him because it reminded him of what he had lost in life, what he had thrown away. Despite her efforts the only time he could be intimate with her was after he had been drinking for hours. When he thought he could forget.

A woman opens

Her legs with smiles and gestures.

The bed is crowded.

Crowded with the men she had known over the years, the men he had driven her to. He tried to forget but he couldn’t. The woman he loved and the circus he hated mixed in his mind, the bed and the ring were entangled. One became a vision of the other and that vision obsessed him. When he looked at her now he saw a succession of vulgar defiling acts, the smiles and gestures of other men that were a part of her, a performing hell of screeching animals and leering jugglers, clowns pulling water pumps out of their trousers, pulling live chickens out of their baggy trousers as they smirked and worked their tongues.

A man so haunted by her past that a time came when he could no longer make love to her at all, no matter how much alcohol he had consumed. And that was the end for him. He could bear it no longer. Exhausted, totally humiliated, he prepared a last performance and stepped into the ring in front of a howling Shanghai mob.

Trumpets. Snare drums. The spotlight rises to the ceiling where a tiny figure is crouching under the skylight, a world-famous dwarf whose high dive will be the opening act. All heads go back. Silence. The dwarf leaps into space blindfolded and hurtles down from the black sky.

A thin silk cord, invisible from below, is attached to the dwarf’s ankle. At the last moment the silk cord will catch him. His fall will be broken a few inches above the floor. He will go into a long bouncing swing as he removes the blindfold, grins, waves triumphantly from his upside-down position.

Except this time the cord is a few inches too long. The snares roll, the drums boom, and the dwarf’s head splatters over the sawdust.

The end of a man who has been my father’s friend for years.

At once the spotlight turns to three clowns approaching the stands on stilts a full thirteen feet high. The clowns assume antic poses. Their hands interpret various obscene suggestions. Suddenly there’s a sharp crack, one of the stilts has been sawed through the middle. The clown comes tumbling down, knocking over the other two as he falls.

One man rips open his face, another is pierced through the heart by the broken stilt. The third lies on his back opening and closing his mouth, unable to move or make a sound.

Once more the spotlight shifts, this time to a balancing act. A man with huge biceps is peddling a unicycle while juggling balls with both hands. On his forehead he supports a tall metal pole, on top of the pole is a crossbar where a naked woman bends backward. The man seems to be peddling more rapidly, the balls drop away. The heavy pad meant to protect his head has been tampered with, the end of the pole has been sharpened and is slowly boring into his head. As the woman on the crossbar spreads her crotch wide to the audience, the pole splits her partner’s skull in two.