Flea Circus

By Leonard Gardner

Javier Mora had spent his life in traveling shows. Born in a carnival, he had been abandoned in another when he was nine years old. Following an apprenticeship to a flea trainer, he had struck out on his own—he was fond of saying—with only a dirty suit of clothes and seventeen fleas, and never had to beg a meal in his life.
His mustache was partially gray now, ragged, nicotine-stained, and his eyes were beginning to fail. He had never seen his father, but as his mother had been a Nahua Indian he could surmise from his own looks who his father had been—a man of Spanish origin, apparently, with a long head, prone to baldness, long earlobes, and a long nose, fleshy at the end.
“Flea circus!” Javier called from his ticket stand with slight discomfort, for barking had never seemed appropriate to the dignity of El Gran Maestro de las Pulgas. “Stupendous fantastic flea spectacle!” he shouted, nevertheless. As none of his assistants had ever had the patience to learn anything, and as his receipts were seldom enough to support two persons, he had barked for himself most of his career.
Stars were spread across a black sky above the tents. Across the lot on a platform illuminated by floodlights, a woman in a red costume was grinding her hips while a boy thumped a drum and a man yelled through a megaphone. Though the woman had only joined the show there in Veracruz, the glittering costume was a familiar sight to Javier. Too tight for these particular buttocks, it left them half exposed. After the regular show inside, there was another performance for those who wished to remain at a slightly higher admission.
“See the educated fleas!” Javier exhorted, and two men, after indecisive shrugging, bought tickets, then complained about the show not starting.
Rodolfo Punete limped past with a bottle of beer during a volley of rifle shots. He rode a motorcycle inside a sphere of meshed wire, reinforced with steel rods, in the show next to Javier’s. The cage spun on an axis like a squirrel’s treadmill until the motorcycle was at a certain rate of speed, then the cage was locked still and Rodolfo would go shooting up the sides and upside down across the ceiling. He came to the carnival from the racetracks of southern California, where he had been a popular driver—he had told Javier—until forced to retire because of brain concussions.
On Javier’s tent was painted a large black red-eyed flea with a sword and a three-cornered hat that an unescorted young woman had stopped to examine. When Javier urged her to buy a ticket, she compliantly opened her purse just as Rodolfo’s motorcycle started up with thunderous blasts.
Unable to hear his own shouts, Javier conducted his audience of three into his tent, where a model three-ring circus stood on a card table. He switched on a spotlight, sat down, hooked over his ears a pair of black-rimmed spectacles bought from a street peddler, and pulled on a green eyeshade.
“Ladies and gentlemen, years of tedious travail have gone into the making of this circus. What you are about to see is truly one of the wonders of the world,” he stated as he opened a cigar box. Inside were matchboxes marked with cryptic signs.
“Introducing the incomparable Carlos, artist of the high wire. Step up closely, please.” With tweezers he brought out a flea with a tiny parasol attached to it, and he placed it on a short string stretched in the air between two sticks. Javier bent down until his spectacles almost touched the flea, and after prodding it delicately with a hatpin, watched it run along the high wire.
“Careful!” said one of the men. He was plump, with a sparse mustache and a half-zipped fly.
“He already ran across,” commented his friend, whose mustache was dense and who had a large hair mole above his eyebrow and smaller moles scattered over his face.
“What kind of circus is this, if you can’t even see it?”
Javier stood a convex magnifying glass, a foot in diameter, on the card table. The plump man peered through it. “I don’t see anything,” he grumbled.
Returning the flea to its box, Javier looked at the young woman, who dimpled her cheeks in polite acknowledgment. She was not Indian. Pale under the bright light, her skin seemed so soft Javier wanted to feel it. He thought of drinking a beer after the performance.
Javier’s life had not been without women. There was usually someone like the woman in the strip show, and when he was younger, before he lost his hair, there had sometimes been wives and widows in his audiences whom his patience had fascinated. He learned early not to overvalue youth. Youth usually cost him money. During lean times when he had spread his circus on a handkerchief in markets, it had always been women with lines of sorrow and suffering around their eyes and mouths who ended his long spells of loneliness. Sometimes he still remembered them as he lay at night on the canvas cot at the back of the tent. The young indifferent women who took his money had all faded from his memory, though he knew some of them had been beautiful.
“Presenting Pepe the football star. Ready, hup!” In the center ring he pushed a minute particle of foam rubber against the flea’s legs. As the flea was in a harness of spider web that kept it from leaping away, it kicked at this irritant. In his youth Javier had lost a number of performers by their escaping onto members of his audience and never being seen again.
The man with the hair mole grinned at the woman as if he had kicked the ball himself.
While a revolutionary flea dragged a cannon and the man with the hair mole cheered, Javier glanced at the woman’s belly and broad hips, in a blue pleated dress, level with his head across the table.
“Introducing the great Amelia, who will execute feats of daring upon the high trapeze without a net.” The trapeze was made from a flat stick bearing the stains of a popsicle. With the flea released on it, Javier swung the trapeze close to a white platform. The flea hopped off the stick onto the white surface, and Javier had it immediately back between the tweezers. He was startled by applause; the young woman was clapping, her huge white face near him in the light, her cheeks full, nose delicately arched, her black hair gleaming.
Javier jerked as the motorcycle roared out like an airplane. In the magnifying glass a tremendous brown eye looked at him. There were blasts, pops, and blasts again in a regular rhythm, for the cage would be stationary now and Rudolfo hurtling around the walls and ceiling. The pops came when he was shooting down the walls, the roars when he was flying up. He claimed a natural law kept him from falling when he went across the ceiling, but Javier knew it was only high speed. Rodolfo went across so fast, whatever made things fall did not even know he had been there.
The broadness of the woman’s face reminded Javier of Yolanda Quiroga, who had left her husband to go with him years ago and who had a wide thick-lipped smile that bulged her cheeks out at the sides. Both her eyes were black when he met her. She was not pleasing to look at, but when she asked to go with him in the carnival, he took her, because he put no value on beauty. He never asked why her husband had beaten her so badly, though he supposed she had been unfaithful, which meant nothing to Javier either. He did not understand how men expected permanency; he was satisfied just to have her. They were together three months. Bands of peasants passed them along the road; there was some kind of uprising going on and business became poor. In lguala the carnival disbanded. Yolanda walked with him from village to village and helped gather audiences. One day they earned no money at all and ate nothing, and as Yolanda did not complain, Javier felt an intense fondness for her: she seemed to understand the way he had to live. They entered a village at night, passed cantinas full of noisy men, and slept beside some bales in the market. When Javier awoke the next morning, Yolanda was gone. He searched the streets and returned and waited at the bales, sobbing questions to vendors squatting nearby. That night he walked off down the road alone.
“Introducing Lupita La Rosa, Fleadom’s queen of burlesque.” The flea’s abdomen was covered with an infinitesimal skirt Javier had peeled with a razor blade from a piece of red tissue paper. As he prodded it about and the two men scuffled for the place at the magnifying glass, Javier’s eyes began to blur. But he would rest them the next day on the road to Jalapa. Mardi Gras was ending that night in Veracruz.
“Take it off!” The man with the mole pulled at the tuft of coarse hair above his brow, and the plump man whistled shrilly through his teeth, though he seemed not to be looking exactly where Lupita was.
With the pin Javier pushed the skirt up against the leg joints. The flea kicked at it, a foot caught under the paper, and the skirt flicked off.
Laughing, the man with the hair mole nudged the woman. As she moved a step away, he put his hand out to her back, raising his brows in mockery of her offense.
“Don’t molest her,” said Javier.
“Me? Are you talking to me? What did I do? I didn’t do anything.”
“Just be polite.”
“I’m very polite.”
“It’s all right,” interceded the woman.
“You see, it’s all right. My most polite apologies. We’re all friends?”
Javier returned to his matchboxes without answering. “Now, for the feature attraction of the evening, Juan Belmonte will fight one bull.” But the bull refused to charge. An inept picador, Javier poked its rear with the pin. Laying his face beside it under the hot light, he stared at the dark sleek body that, except for the paper horns, looked more like a lean pig than a bull. The horns had tipped forward to the table. Studying the flea through the blur of his own nose, Javier wondered if it even knew he was there—or was he too gigantic to be noticed? The motorcycle was shut off, leaving the tent in silence. Javier gave the flea another poke and it toppled over. He dropped the pin in horror. Had he thrust too hard? Could it have been propped up by the horns and already dead? He was always readying new performers. They were caught, outfitted for a part, they played it for awhile—two weeks, three weeks—then they were gone and he did everything again. His life’s work had been done over and over and nothing had lasted except what was here on the card table and in his workbox at the back of the tent. It was so hopeless he wanted never to lift his head again, but unless he kept up there would soon be nothing at all. Way across the ring Juan Belmonte was waiting with a flake of red paper. One of the men began to mutter. Javier glanced up at the massive bodies and saw that the woman was still smiling expectantly.
“The management regrets that there will be no bullfight this evening due to the untimely death of the bull,” Javier announced with his face on the table. Grunting, he sat back in the chair. “And so, ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our show. We hope that you found it entertaining.”
The plump man sputtered his lips. “I don’t think there is any show,” he said as the two men were leaving, and the one with the hair mole asked the woman if they could walk with her. Though she turned away without replying, they lingered outside the tent.
“Do you want me to escort you out?” asked Javier, rising, wondering why she was alone anyway.
“No, thank you. They go soon . . . will go,” she answered; and with disappointment Javier realized from her speech that she was probably a tourist. They waited, and the men outside waited, too. After a moment she indicated the circus. “Very good.”
“You like it? There’s a spectacular in back I can let you see. It’s not quite finished.” As she smiled uncomprehendingly, Javier pulled aside the curtain to his sleeping area.
She looked at him carefully, murmured that she had to go, thanked him and dimpled her cheeks insincerely. Javier let the curtain fall back. “I worked on it all day,” he said.
Again she appraised him, glanced back out the entrance, where two cigarettes glowed, and she consented. Javier parted the curtain, and when he had twisted on the light bulb, she followed him. There was only the cot on the ground, a scarred leather theatrical case, accordion style with straps, and several cigar boxes.
“Sit down, sit down.”
“No, thank you.”
Javier shrugged. “As you wish.” Under the light he opened a shallow cigar box, and the two tilted their faces down together. Inside on the white paper lining were sixteen fleas hitched in pairs to a half-inch piece of drinking straw on wheels.
“Ah,” said the young woman. “How do you make it?”
“Tweezers.”
On the straw was the word BORAXO, painted with a hair from Javier’s mustache. He admired it, as ordinarily he could not write; he had copied it from a carton of soap. The tap of his fingers under the box started the team pulling. He laughed, looked at the woman peering in at the fleas, and touched her cheek with the back of his hand. She sprang away, and for an instant the cigar box hung in the air, juggled on the tips of Javier’s fingers as he lunged and fumbled. It was not until he held the box shaking against his belly that the woman’s incredible anger rushed into his mind. She had enjoyed the fleas, but the fleas would be nothing without him, unknown to the whole world except for the few people they might bite.
“I thought you were too old . . . that you have respect for a woman,” she stammered.
“Please,” he said without knowing what he meant by it. But she was leaving. As he watched her pass through the curtain, the breathless agitation in his chest went on as if the cigar box were still tipping about in his hands. Stooping, he placed the box on the ground, and as he rose the woman was hurrying out of the tent. “I trained all the fleas!” he shouted.
Outside, he could smell the Gulf through the gasoline fumes and the odor of hot lard. The woman was walking away from the two men, who were calling after her. As she slowed at the edge of a crowd, Javier overtook her.
“What do you want now?” she asked contemptuously. He was unable to say. Ignored, he walked beside her in his green eyeshade, bumping against the crowd. Near the outhouse she rose on her toes and waved over passing heads to a man waiting by the door. “You ought to go now,” she advised Javier, but he remained with her uncertainly until the man had joined them. He had a short haircut and no mustache. Taking his arm, the woman spoke to him in English, and Javier wondered if the man would try to hit him, as he was sure she was talking about him. But the man held out his hand to Javier, who shook it.
“With much pleasure,” said the man formally.
The woman’s face conveyed only relief. She was smiling again as she held onto the man’s arm. “Her husband?” asked Javier.
The man consulted her with a quizzical look; she said something, and he nodded to Javier in an excessive pantomime. After this they all stood awkwardly silent.
“You . . .” the man stuttered. Smiling, he pointed to Javier.
“Yes, yes,” Javier agreed, though not comprehending. The man continued with something totally garbled, and Javier nodded. They shook hands again and thanked each other for no reason.
Javier returned to his tent and lay down in the depression of the cot. Beyond the din he could hear the bands from the street-dancing several blocks away, until Rodolfo’s motorcycle started up again. At its roar, Javier suffered a moment of confusion. Feeling as if the carnival had left without him, he wanted to pack up immediately and leave. A nameless grief came over him, though he knew the tents would not be struck until morning. There was nothing wrong, he told himself. A night’s work still lay ahead, though he was afraid he might smash up his circus if he tried to give another performance. The thought of all the care it would take made him want to scream out, but he quietly watched the moths flutter around the light bulb.
Remembering Juan Belmonte, Javier got up stiffly. He found the flea still in the ring, free of its red paper, and looked at it in the tweezers before putting it in its matchbox. He brought all the boxes back to the cot. When he was stretched out again, Javier unbuttoned his shirt. He took out a flea, dropped it on his sunken belly covered with red bumps, and continued opening boxes until all his fleas were crawling over him. They were like a herd of distant black cattle, except that one was pulling a cannon and another carried a parasol.

“Flea Circus,” by Leonard Gardner, Vol. 50, No. 4, Fall 1965.

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