Above It All
Carnaval de las Americas was assembling the parts to its antiquated thrill rides in Guastatoya, Guatemala. They were also assembling something else, higher than anything anyone had seen up close, which was why it worked as an advertising gimmick to draw people in from a distance to have a closer look. It was once an eighty-foot radio tower, now converted to the rigging for a woman to do balancing stunts at the top. The idea was to keep people there long enough to go on the rides that happened to be working that day and buy fried cinnamon dough and snow cones.
The carnival was an ongoing symphony of dysfunction. The owner, Lázaro Milla, was a jumpy man who spoke in a loud voice as he directed his players to patch this, rewire that, to connect what was hopelessly disconnected and keep his operation running. There was a gear problem with the Tilt-A-Whirl that made it spin too fast, but no one was able to fix it so it continued to spin too fast and people continued to buy tickets to ride it. A bucket on the Scrambler ride kept flying off, so he solved the problem by not putting anyone in that seat, but the only operator he could get to work for forty quetzales a day was old and known to be forgetful.
The woman on the tower was Yolanda Paladino, the last survivor of a family of hardcore wire walkers originally from Slovenia. She was used to walking the high wire in European circuses and not balancing on a used radio tower in Guatemala, but this is what it had come to. sharing a trailer with a Pakistani truck driver and a pinwheel vendor from Thailand. And a man with his mind set on seduction. Her father fell to his death at an outdoor festival in Croatia, and then her mother died from a fall in Maracaibo. Grandpa Ludovico who he met his end in Riga, always said, “Predstava se mora nadaljevati.” (The show must go on.) That’s how she was raised, in a dubious pact with certainty. When one brother had to retire because of a back injury, and another found he could make more money as a drunk-going-home clown on a slack wire with Cirque Benweis, she was the only Paladino left. At an age when many young women lived with babies—which she could never have anyway—she lived with scars and improperly healed bones from falls from various heights. In her reincarnation as a solo perch act, she traveled with Carnaval de las Americas in partnership with an undocumented prop assistant named Miguel who she hired in Honduras. She could not exist without him and he could not exist without her, although for different reasons. He was able to produce a welding rod as if from nowhere in Villa Nueva, or find hydraulic fluid for a post driver on a Sunday in Cuilapa. What he was not able to find was her attraction to him. He had desired her since they first met in San Pedro Sula when she came up with the tower idea. She hired him to repurpose eighty feet of broadcasting scrap into something that could be broken down and transported. He welded a two-by-two platform at the top and kept trying to attach himself to her.
Because the tower had no moving parts did not mean it was without its problems. In each plaza, park, and pasture, the ground was different. If it was too soft, the cable anchors for the guy wires came loose, and if it was too hard, they wouldn’t go in deep enough and the same thing happened. Besides its sway, she lived with the tower’s alarming squeaks and sudden snaps and pings. Breezes blew through the latticework creating ominous whispers. Miguel told her that a tower can trap and release parts of every soul that went into making it, that would include him.
After its run in Guastatoya, Carnaval de las Americas collapsed back into itself and went onto overloaded trucks that moved like slow beasts of burden into the cartel-infested mountain areas of western Huehuetenango. During their first night in Aldea Chuanoj, the sound of automatic weapons in the distance could be heard over the chugging sound of motors that ran the rides. In Salcajá a stray bullet zinged off a tower strut while she did a handstand on the elevated perch.
There had been an increase in antigovernment activity in the area around Xecul, resulting in the recent massacre of seven alleged guerrillas (four women and three children), but Lázaro, like every farmer, street vendor, and shop owner, still had to make a living. Military authorities didn’t like the sudden appearance of what looked like a radio tower so they assigned a technical unit to come out and make sure it wasn’t being used for subversive broadcasts. Local residents saw it differently. They appreciated looking up for a change to see a sequined, female daredevil instead of looking down and seeing a body without a head. A reporter from a newspaper in Chiantla, otherwise restrained by politics, unleashed his imagination to the fullest when describing Yolanda as balancing “over the jaws of death.” Another reporter in Todos Santos described her performance as taking place “where gods are appeased by human sacrifice.” In spite of these depictions, she was received in other places with bland indifference, especially by young people. Something had numbed them. They roamed with their cell phones around the carnival’s worn amusements like automatons while uniformed soldiers in red berets ambled watchfully among campesino families who came in from the opium fields.
In a rare moment of privacy in their trailer, Yolanda and Miguel sat crowded together on the couch. The reality of the scene she was reading in her book became synonymous with the fictional one of their bodies crowded together and touching on the cluttered couch. She knew about love from Slovenian romance novels, but had never experienced it herself because travel and her occupation did not allow it. Her sister did better, leaving the family to marry a desk clerk in Malaga, but Yolanda had always been told she wasn’t like her. And never would be.
She felt his eyes upon her and this time it seemed different. She put down her book, marking her place with a ride ticket. He polished his Romeo act growing up in Miclantecuhtli where there was nothing else in his life to perfect but his skills at seduction. He liked the shy ones, the naïve virgins, because he wanted them to enjoy what he could offer them for the first time. She turned to face him, which meant she might be open to a kiss. His lips advanced slowly to hers and when they touched, a sensation she never felt before began to inflate within her. He made sure it was all right by whispering, “Esta bien?” She said nothing, which didn’t mean no. He cooed the same soft words to accompany his hand resting here, resting there, then gently caressing as there roise withinwithin her a chorus of devils, jinxes, and angels. This must be the way it’s done, she thought. He slipped his hand downward to the waistband of her shorts and over a taut abdomen in search of another place, accompanied by more soft words seeking their acceptance. Her body acquiesced. He continued cautiously as an aerialist walking a tightwire, then suddenly drew his hand back and looked at her with the same shock as seen on the faces of spectators watching her on the verge of falling from the tower. All this time he had no idea.
As daylight faded, the crude spectacle of Carnaval de las Americas came to life with tinny music over old horn speakers and the sound of grinding metal turning the rides. Strings of lights, with quite a few missing, put everything into a twilight of almost yellow. There was the usual night crowd of teenagers and young adults taking full advantage of this special occasion to forget about their struggles for survival. Young men held liter-size bottles of tequila and clinched their girlfriends possessively around the neck. They roughly bumped into each other and at times it seemed like everything was about to break into a drunken riot.
When Lázaro decided the moment was right, he amplified his voice over the loud speakers in an ascending series of exaggerated announcements. In forceful Spanish with prolonged rolling of the r’s, he asserted that Yolanda Paladino would perform “one hundred meters in elevation WITHOUT A SAFETY NET OF ANY KIND!!!” He knew how to play to fear. Just the sight of a female figure in red sequins climbing higher and higher was enough to draw in spectators who instinctively opened a radius of open ground in case she should fall. Lázaro continued his running commentary as she balanced on a chair tipped back (rigged for marginal safety with a wire), and Lázaro emphasized with the loudest possible voice her eminent plunge to certain death. She balanced, she hung, she dropped. They gasped, they screamed, they looked away. They made the sign of the cross.
The next morning, Miguel was nowhere to be found. Yolanda disassembled the tower without his help. When the caravan started pulling out for Sibinal, she waited but still no Miguel. She may have been naïve about forms of attraction other than gravity, but like her mother said, she would never be like her sister. It was one more fall from another height and another scar, another fracture. But the show must go on. She was the only one left behind as Carnaval de las Americas went ahead. Still no Miguel. With Grandpa Ludovico’s words in her thoughts, the last of the Paladinos turned the key to start her truck and set out alone on the long road to Sibinal.
John-Ivan Palmer’s third book, Hypnotic Control, Reflections on the Nature of Stage Influence, was recently published by Whistling Shade Books. He divides his time between Minneapolis and his wife’s home town of Choshi, Japan. They garden and raise large moths.
