Chapter one
The platform comes together quickly when urgency presses; whether it turns out well or not is a separate problem altogether. Two planks chosen at random, a rope that has already been used countless times for other purposes—having even carried a hanged man on its back—a canvas faded by sun and rain, with a drawing painted in haste and with pride. The first spectator arrives before the last nail is fully driven in. There is always someone in the audience who comes early: they want to snoop, they want to know in advance whether what they paid for the ticket will be worth it. What they don’t know is that laughter is a product of immediate consumption; you can’t know if it was worth the cost until the clown performs his first act—the one that opens the rest. The first always makes clear what to expect afterward.
The seats are old wooden boards, most of them salvaged from a fishing boat that had run aground in the city’s harbor years earlier. Sitting, sweating in the heat, the audience is varied: children eating hard bread with a ladle of water, men with sour wine raising their jugs to signal that they want the show to begin, women with lipstick painted beyond the corners of their mouths. The square fills the way politicians fill their pockets with what isn’t theirs: shamelessly. Someone waves a crumpled bill in the air, betting on how long it will take for the star of that decadent circus to appear; another accepts the wager, saying he won’t show up today, because even misery—stubborn as it is—learns to ration itself when it knows the show is all that’s left.
The clown enters late on purpose. He’s made it part of his act. The delay raises the crowd’s perceived value, and he knows it well. He knows it the way one knows a useful lie, the kind you profit from and that needs no defense. When his white-painted face appears, his slender body and nearly six-foot-three height, the square has already become a massive bar without walls: sweat, anticipatory laughter, the smell of agitated bodies and expectation—especially among women without husbands, and some with husbands too—who see him more as a stud than as a clown who earns his living telling jokes, doing somersaults, and pulling off whatever trick he’s learned or copied from some other clown somewhere else.
They almost always arrange themselves the same way: in the front row, women of ill repute whose patience has grown as long as their years; farther back, powdered ladies who look on with sideways glances of disgust and prejudice, like investors evaluating a risky venture they believe to be a bad deal. But almost all who’ve come before know the same thing. All who come for the first time have heard the same thing. That he is beautiful, that there has never been a clown like him. Those who’ve slept with him agree on one point: that in bed he does not negotiate, that the clown who draws laughter in that decadent circus, once he removes the costume, is the temptation Satan placed on earth to incite sin.
As he strings one rallying cry after another, he looks at no one. He focuses on what he’s doing. He likes being on that platform. He feels like someone else. Haven’t we all wanted to be someone else at some point? We all fantasize about being another person; for him, makeup and a pom-pom hat helped him escape everyday convulsion. He does a backflip. Everyone knows it’s his signal of farewell. Then he kneels, lowers his head, and looks at the platform like someone inspecting a wounded animal: will it hold one more small show? How much more can it take before collapsing?
He adjusts the costume, which fits him a bit too tight because of his musculature, especially in the arms and the crotch. He doesn’t wear a looser one because he’s not stupid: he knows it’s women, not children, who have forced husbands and boyfriends to bring them to the circus. He has to eat, and he doesn’t like being kept; he knows he would lose his freedom, and there is nothing more boring or more damaging to a man than conditional freedom. Either you are free as you want, or you might as well use the ever-reliable rope around your neck. The makeup can’t take another drop of sweat—a minimal omen that no one notices. Not yet.
He bids farewell to the stifled crowd, raises both arms, and waves them energetically. That gesture makes everyone begin to leave the circus, though leaving is more a verb than anything else, because there are no walls: just roof, platform, and seats. Some laughter can still be heard even though no one is telling jokes anymore. There is laughter by habit, laughter out of fear of silence and failure, nervous laughter and laughter for nothing. The clown registers them all and keeps none of them; they don’t matter to him in the slightest.
Not everyone has left. There’s always a considerable number of people who ask for entertainment a bit longer. The clown nods. He tries to climb a rope, but it comes loose and he falls. There is always a fall—literal and metaphorical; both work almost the same. His body, thrown flat on its back, inaugurates a new wave of laughter. The audience responds like a trained choir. Sometimes the exaggeration is obvious, it feels forced, but he doesn’t care: the order has been fulfilled. Laughter flows, and so does money.
As he gets up, he speaks to the void; he threatens it by dragging his thumb across his neck from left to right. He insults a chair while kicking it to pieces. He argues with his shadow. He does all this while removing one of his grotesque red shoes, lifting it to face level and asking it for forgiveness, kissing it while shouting that the shoe doesn’t understand anything, that it was made in another country and doesn’t speak his language. Absurdity is not a joke—it’s a method. When meaning breaks and gives way to the implausible, laughter walks in on its own. Those who stayed thank him with applause. Incomprehension sells, and artists know it—even the most clownish of them all.
Inside, something fails to appear. Pain? No. Not pain. Not yet. It’s a delay, a lag: there are two where there was one. The body obeys before the mind finishes deciding. It moves by inertia. The clown is in charge. On the crowded edges of the square, taverns open like hungry mouths. From doorways and dark interiors come voices, bets, beckoning hands, and a smell of liquor, tobacco, and desires destined to die. The stage doesn’t end at the meager platform: it expands to wherever the last person stands. The show must go on where there is demand. The clown continues, even though he already wants to leave. He falls again. Gets up with a flourish. Makes mistakes on purpose. Laughter rises. The day is profitable.
The taverns function as extensions of the stage. So do the brothels. As if they were a multi-headed beast with many tentacles. All these places are well known to the clown: tired curtains stained with wine, rooms that smell of old soap and promises repeated in the heat of amorous combat. He has walked through all of them; he knows them like the path from bathroom to bedroom. He knows who pays first, who pays later, and who never pays. His body is a circulating asset. He doesn’t manage it with pride; he manages it with method and efficiency.
The powdered women don’t laugh like the others. They simply observe. They wait for the exact moment when the tight costume slips a centimeter and reveals the skin of his abdomen. That second is enough to confirm the rumor that brought them there like flies to fruit. He is beautiful. Perhaps more by excess than symmetry. By a beauty that doesn’t fit in like the rest, but goes against the grain. By a presence that occupies all the space even when he curls into his juggling.
On stage, the absurd escalates without losing its finesse. He talks to his reflection in a metal jug, accusing himself of having stolen his own joke. He laughs, knowing laughter is contagious; then the audience, watching even without understanding much, lets itself be dragged along by that initial laugh. The old spectators already know the routine; the new ones quickly learn what they’ve come to buy.
The clown adjusts the rhythm, accelerates, falls again. At this point he’s exhausted. He’s no longer acting—he’s responding. He moves by inertia. His brain doesn’t even tell him what to do anymore; the body goes first, as if the trade itself had taken control and were pushing him scene after scene, fall after fall.
Inside, the balance sheet is different. There is a weariness that can’t be seen from the platform, but that he feels as if he’s been carrying it for a century. A deterioration that doesn’t factor into profit calculations; perhaps he loses more than he gains. A whirlwind of sensations runs through him. Now yes: the pain arrives, accompanied by something else he still can’t name. It’s not guilt or fear. It’s an old fatigue, a debt that never expires. Laughter, which once worked in his favor, now only postpones, lending him borrowed strength. He longs with all his heart for the silence waiting behind the curtain, when everyone has finally gone and he can sink into his beloved solitude.
When it ends, applause falls in a block and stretches on for several minutes. Faces that looked worn now renew themselves just enough to abandon the circus shelter. He feels the applause like closing the register.
The clown bows, exaggerates his gratitude once more, promises to return—though sometimes he hates it—though he always returns because there are many more times he loves it. He promises nothing else. He winks and steps down from the platform. The square approaches him like a market at the end of the day, when things about to rot by morning are sold off. Hands, eyes, voices. Direct offers, calculating looks. He slips through the crowd, removes the cap and puts on a hat. He pulls on a high-collared coat to cover the costume and takes the same alley as always.
He walks without looking back. His shoes bother him; he takes them off and continues barefoot. At a public basin he stops and wipes off the makeup, though it doesn’t fully come off. He straightens up and continues down the alley. He pulls the hat down to eye level and rolls up the coat sleeves further. He doesn’t want to be stopped.
The room has a low ceiling, made of the same wood as the circus. The lamp trembles and flickers, casting dancing shadows on the walls. It’s as if hell had sent its demons to remind him who he truly is. The clown lies back on the bed; the springs squeal and then land with a dull thud. He lights a cigarette and fills half a glass with wine. He concludes that the world boils down to surfaces, just like that: skin, wood, cloth, earth. Everything is stupidly connected. Skin becomes a territory of transit, like land. In that world of surfaces, words aren’t necessary.
He thought he would finally have a night alone. He had wanted it for a long time.
But there was a knock at the door with the urgency of someone demanding their day’s wage.
He sees her naked on the bed. He doesn’t want to kiss her, but she begs him while placing her hand between his legs. She squeezes. There is no tenderness and no violence. There is efficiency. The body, provocateur of the darkest desires, delivers. He kisses her as she squeezes harder. The girl’s desire grows until it becomes suffocating; she asks for mercy. But once the clown steps aside and David Silvano takes control, there is no mercy for anyone who comes seeking to fulfill their most carnal impulses. The invisible mask remains on: that of the insatiable lover. Even there, he exaggerates the gestures—this time, those of desire.
When they finish, she dresses slowly. She wants to stretch the moment. Silvano only wants her gone. He gets out of bed and stands in front of the full-length mirror beside it. He looks at himself while the girl watches, still ecstatic.
Functional.
After sleeping a couple of hours, uninterrupted, he feels renewed. He’s ready for the next performance. He touches his face like someone inspecting a tool before going to work. He lights the cigarette he had left half-smoked. He walks back to the tavern through one of his usual alleys. He likes the darkest ones, where no one can recognize anyone. He arrives, takes a seat at the bar, and orders a jug of wine. Someone tells the joke he told in his last show. Laughter passes from mouth to mouth. That, too, is success.
He gets up from the bar and goes to a secluded spot. He sits and drinks as if he never has before. He talks to himself in a low voice, as if negotiating a small truce. He wants to get away from everything, but he knows it’s a vicious circle. More will come. He knows that tomorrow there will be another like him. Or the same one. It doesn’t matter.
Outside, the sun begins to release its first rays on the horizon. The square empties. What remains is dust, which dirties everything. What remains is the smell, which makes the nostrils ache. What remains is the platform waiting for the next day, with the mute hope that someday Silvano won’t show up.
He gets up unsteadily and pays. He walks. The city sleeps with one eye open and the other half-closed. He knows that tomorrow he will fall again only to get back up: a curse turned into a joke. He knows that absurdity is what keeps the business alive.
He walks slowly. The body weighs more when it isn’t acting. He realizes there is no place to cry where laughter is mandatory. There is no back room for exhaustion, no field of roses to rest for eternity.
He laughs.
