September 30, Granville.
There was once a boy who loved to ride on top of rickety trucks loaded with a circus tent and his family's belongings. They would travel all over his country, Peru, in South America, to villages in the Amazonian jungle and in the Sierra mountains, to the ocean, to the cities, and pitch the tent for a few days or weeks. He would go to school in the morning and work in the show in the evening. He loved to hide in the darkness beyond the campfire light and listen to the men gossip and talk until the wee hours of the night. He loved to travel and get to be the new kid in town. Then there came a time when he yearned for bigger skies, and he came to the United States. There he worked harder than he ever thought was possible, saved enough to buy a home, and made his way into a new family.
His is a typical American immigrant story. Only he wears makeup and a costume for a living and works thirty-five feet up in the air.
His name is Fridman Torales Rios. He is a circus performer.
Fridman is thirty-three years old, born and raised in what is one of the poorest social group among one of the poorest countries in the world. That he says: In Peru the circus is about the lowest you can get.
And:
I thought everybody's life was like ours: I never thought for a moment that we were exceptional for being in the circus.
A life of hardships, an exceptional life.
But then again, this he says: I had nothing, but I had everything.
There always was food on the table, there always was work, there always was travel, friends, and the circus. A childhood memory, maybe the only one of want: when he was a boy Fridman longed for a bicycle. Not many toys, no toys for Christmas, but a new pair of pants, some new clothes to last you the year. His mother couldn't afford to buy him a bicycle, his father he didn't bother to ask. The circus owner's son had a brand new bicycle, and he so longed for it, and he still remembered that longing years later when he bought a bicycle for his own son.
He made his own toys.
We had nothing but we had everything.
In Peru in the eighties circus life was a camping tent for a home, his family ten feet by ten feet long, richer families as much as twenty feet long, most often home-made, and in the tent one arranged partitions if it was big enough, but the floor was always dirt, and cooking was done on a wood stove, inside a separate tent. There was competition as to who would have the nicest tent, with the nicest decorations, the most windows. Living on his own Fridman soon became well-known for crafting custom tents, and sold them to fellow circus people.
Or simply life was a mattress under the bleachers, under the circus tent, for the city workers, or the odd youth, like Fridman after he left his parents at the age of twelve to go find work on his own.
Like a soldier you carried your mattress on your back, and when the night came you laid out your mattress under the bleachers and there you slept.
That, and you carried your water.
You had to suffer to get water, to bathe, to cook, to do everything, you couldn't waste it. Reminiscing.
Water has always been for me the most precious thing there is, water is sacred.
You had to fetch your daily water at a water truck, or at the river. At the bigger circuses the city would provide a water hose, but in all the others, smaller circuses, one had to carry his own water, bartering a gallon of water for a free entrance to the show at the nearest home, or just buying it. In the Amazon things could be easier, there was often a river where one could wash clothes and bathe. To get power the bigger circuses had generators, like American circuses, and circuses like his father's would get the city's electric company to come and connect them, or would simply send someone to climb the nearest post and steal power. You connected the positive with the negative and here you were.
There I learned about electricity.
We had nothing but we had everything.
(To be continued.)
