June 5, Benicia.
I stayed in Dallas from the end of February to early May, when my mother and I made the road trip to California with the two babies. I stayed with Sheyla, Fridman's sister, and her in-laws, a circus family from Brazil who settled in Dallas four years ago.
Sheyla's boyfriend, Alain - a French name they pronounce the English way, Alan, - is their youngest son, a quiet lanky boy of eighteen, with long, jet-black hair he wears loose, an aquiline nose, and a soft smile that came out often when he held his then four-month-old baby son, Fridman (Sheyla named him after her brother, not out of tradition or respect but because she just liked the name; it's a stranger name yet on a baby.) Alain has an adult's eagerness and seems mature beyond his adolescent's years; his patience with his baby is endearing. Fridman's cries coming from the house soon became familiar but they would be less frequent once Alain would come back from school; Sheyla, at her wits' end, would hand him the baby as soon as he got out of the car and he wouldn't put Fridman down for much time after that, rocking him, talking to him, letting go only for him to nurse.
Sheyla met Alain by accident, as these things happen, as she was looking for a place to stay after deciding to leave the circus in order to study and try and get ahead. Alain's parents, Sandro and Margarida Ordoniz, we call don Sandro and dona Maigo in the Latino custom of addressing people who are older than you in a respectful way. They are both circus performers, but whereas dona Maigo (her real name is Margarida) comes from a circus family, don Sandro became a circus artist after his mother, unwed, abandoned him as a young child, leaving him with relatives, who didn't take care of him. He was rescued by a dwarf who worked in a circus; the man raised him and taught him what would become his livelihood: don Sandro did a hand balancing act and was once famous for it in Brazil. Later, when he worked in her family's circus, he met dona Maigo; they had two sons, Narley and Alain.
Don Sandro is in his fifties and on his way to lose the body of a life-long performer for the beginning of a beer belly. Like his youngest son, his smile is gentle and he has an easy way about him that makes you instantly like him, an inviting nonchalance and generosity.
People tend to take advantage of him time and time again but he doesn't toughen up. Yet luck is often on his side too, and he has a way to get out of a bad step by sheer chance. He now earns a living buying and selling used cars although his honesty, bordering on naivete, makes him an unlikely candidate for that occupation. Once when I was there a man who had bought him a car with a forged check returned two weeks week later to buy another car, just as don Sandro was about to give up on getting the police's fraud department to help him. The man had left the stolen car parked a few blocks away so don Sandro got it back and recouped his loss, minus the hundred bucks he spent when he couldn't find the keys anywhere and had them made (only to have dona Maigo find them under the driver's seat the next day.) He likes to recall the time at the border with Paraguay in Brazil when he and dona Maigo went swimming in a river, leaving the car parked nearby, and dona Maigo kept telling him the area was full of thieves but he kept saying she was too distrustful, their usual quarrel; they left the water to find the car gone. The next day as don Sandro was waiting to cross the street in town he spotted the car at the light, shouted at its occupants that this was his car they'd stolen, getting them to run and leave the car behind, keys still in the ignition.
Now that she's living with the family, Sheyla acts as kind of a guard dog between don Sandro and the endless cohorts of people, mostly from the circus, where his reputation for being soft-hearted is widely known and sometimes derided, who stand ready to take advantage of him in every way, from leaving their cars or trailers parked in the yard for months on end to coming to live with the family rent-free with three meals a day in one of the other trailers that dot the landscape around the house awaiting repair.
Sheyla is the kind of girl that people say doesn't take any rap from anybody. She has big, long-lashed hazel eyes and very full curves. She laughs often and heartily. She is very short and always wears impossibly tall platform shoes so that you'd miss that about her entirely, which is her intention. She used to do contortion in the circus but her figure doesn't allow that anymore. She misses the circus intensely, as dona Maigo does, as most people raised in the circus do, and is busy making plans to return with Alain once the baby is older.
Even though he grew up in the circus, Alain, like his brother, was not taught a circus act; his father likes to tell him that the circus left him with nothing, not even a pension, and that he should study and find another way to earn a living. Fridman keeps saying the same thing to his sister; it is the reason she stayed behind in Dallas, to study and get herself a good-paying job, to take advantage of this country's possibilities and secure a better future for herself than working in the circus could ever give her.
But it seems it is hard to escape the circus: both Alain and Sheyla are well on their way to ignoring that advice.
Sheyla, Alain and their four-month-old son, Fridman in the Ordoniz' home, Dallas, May 8.
Don Sandro Ordoniz, Dallas, May 8.
