The window of the room where I am writing looks out onto a light well in the building and I can see the blonde Russian woman in her kitchen, lighting the fire for the kettle of breakfast tea, her braids gathered into a crown and her face full of sleep because the Venezuelan with the baritone voice came to visit her last night. He sits down to wait for her to prepare the blinis for dinner while he tells her lies, and after she clears away the plates they turn off the light and silence comes.
In the kitchen that follows, the owner stretches her arms out of the window to reach the clothesline, the apron bags full of clothespins that she puts two at a time in her mouth while hanging up a pair of her husband’s blue trousers, an Atlético shirt, a nightgown, and enters into a dispute over the use of one of the lines with the neighbor, the retiree who even inside his house always wears a baseball cap. jockey, And he says that rope doesn’t belong to him, and she says, well, it doesn’t belong to me, and then he says, don’t start a war, and she says, damn it, come on now, since I like wars.
In the adjacent light patio, which faces the Circus Price on one side, when the hanging clothes come off, the notice appears on the bulletin board in the lobby to the owner of the underwear that fell in the patio of the Circus Price. go to claim them with the guard because otherwise they will dispose of them. The voices and muffled laughter of the schoolchildren also enter through the window at the tests that the magician will be doing, sawing in half the box where he has put the woman dressed in sequins, making her disappear under the black cloth, I always tell myself that I’m going to go to one of those shows, all you have to do is take the elevator down the five floors and I’m already at the door of the circus, but it’s been three years now, a fixed circus like the famous Moscow circus, before there was a cookie factory there, and smells of vanilla and anise will have reached this window.
The circuses in my memory are wandering, they set up their sheds in a vacant lot and those who came to my town, some of them didn’t even have a tent, just a round of canvas through which the silhouettes of the spectators sitting in the sections of the road could be seen. gallery, they hired my uncle Carlos José with his clarinet with which he punctuated the entrance of the clowns, Gustavo Blanco with the snare drum, a child with the cymbals, and in the open sky you could see the trapeze artists flying executing the jump of death preceded by the crescendo of the snare drum and marked by the explosion of the cymbals, clowns, jugglers, tamers, tightrope walkers, it’s not that they slept in those trailers that you see in circus movies, they all rented an empty house and went out into the streets like beings from another world, one day one of them entered my father’s store to buy cigarettes and there was the Mercedes Alborada polishing the floor with the mop, her little son walking on all fours behind her, and the man, who must have been one of The clowns, without their painted faces, how could they know, said to her, “Madam, you are selling me that child to throw him to the lion for lunch,” and like a flash she put down the mop and, enraged, grabbed the knife to cut the cheese into one-pound pieces. , half a pound and four ounces and he pounced on the clown or whatever it was and if he didn’t manage to jump back he would cut his throat right there.
What we were doing, going down in the elevator and I’m already at the door of the circus, but the fact is that the Venezuelan got stuck in that elevator recently and had to wait an hour while the maintenance company sent someone to rescue him, the Russian with the crown braids sitting on the steps of the stairs consoling him, the elevator stuck halfway between the third and fourth floors, and the baritone voice, as if from the bottom of a well, saying that it’s better to laugh at these situations, but none of that sonorous laughter of his while waiting for the blinis, rather cowardly, it’s hot in here like in Maracaibo, buddy, do you think Ekaterina, that they’ll come soon?, and she, looking into the well, the mobile phone in her hand, they come near the Puerta de Toledo but there’s too much traffic, an elevator that goes slowly, as if full of fatigue and disdain, and it’s neither old nor new, safer those old ones that look like they’re from a museum, a cabin of shiny wood with double glass doors and a stool covered in maroon velvet, a beveled mirror, a whole boudoir, or rather, a magician’s box.
