DOUBLE DEATH JUMP
March 13th, Thomas Solvein bent his knees, bowed to the public, grabbed the trapeze bar and jumped off the platform under the watchful eye of his wife. He and Eliza had been separated for twelve years without hearing from one another, searching for each other in the news, asking family and neighbors, but on March 13th, the same day that George Bataille brought his erotisme to the printing press and surgeon Ake Senning put his first pacemaker into a dying man, the Great Circus passed through the old city, in the outskirts of Berlin, and Solvein, now a trapeze artist, knew that Eliza would not miss the occasion to see him again. It was the last number of the evening and from the air, feeling the elastic tension and the pendular swinging of the trapeze, Thomas Solvein could see the audience forming a scattered mass, excited and festive. The spring storm had gotten worse over the course of the evening and many neighbors, especially those who lived in Wansee Bay, had opted to stay at home, watching TV and playing écarté. Any good trapeze artist knows that you should never do a double death jump on a day like that, with a storm and your wife, whom you haven’t seen in over a decade, watching you from the stands. You also shouldn’t do it on the 13th. And much less, as Thomas Solvein intended, without a protection net or safety wires. As he’d told Ariadna two hours earlier, “when a trapeze artist goes out without a net, it’s because he feels the intimate need to do so.” He stressed the adjective “intimate” as if it hid an invisible justification. His trapeze partner looked at him with a certain distance. She was used to Thomas’s ridiculous reflections and would have liked to add that she also knew about the need for balance and that one only jumps without a net when one wants to die or at least needs to know that they have that last escape. But she merely held his gaze and smiled and said yes, that she would jump with him that stormy evening, even if it was the 13th and they didn’t have any safety wires or a net.
In the air, Thomas Solvein felt that familiar weightlessness of the world
below and listened to the murmur of the children in the audience, captivated by
the swinging trapeze. He searched for Eliza in the crowd but realized that he
didn’t even have a vague hazy memory of her. After twelve years she would have
changed, of course. He remembered her “tenderness,” yes, that was her best accessory,
her sweet face, her sweet nose, her lips, her bun with a pencil through it and
her white blouses, always white and the sound of the sewing machine and her
straight back and her profile silhouetted against the evening twilight.
Everything about Eliza was repetition, he thought gaining momentum. The light
those evenings was sinister, as were the spotlights hanging from the big top. All
trapeze artists know that they have to be careful not to get blinded by the lights.
Thomas Solvein looked straight ahead, forcing the angle and saw that Ariadna
was already there, counting the seconds, concentrating on synchronizing the
jump. Her thigh was wound up in the ascent rope and she looked like a mermaid
with her scaled sequin suit, waving at the crowd with her hand extended.
While swinging, Thomas Solvein thought about a lot of things. One of them,
which might explain all the rest, was that, just as cars increase their speed
on the highway and in a tachycardia your heart accelerates for no apparent
reason, on the trapeze, the seconds seem longer and everything becomes more
fleeting and intense. Sometimes he had the feeling of being divided in two, of
being two different people, two irreconcilable halves and then, in the
loneliness of the trapeze, he felt the need to speak with his antagonist, who
was more reasonable and worthy. And if today, finally, I let go and do a
triple?, he asked him, you wouldn’t be able to do anything, not today, today
would be too late, he yelled at him, and if I just let go and fall on top of everybody?
The other part of him stayed quiet, indifferent. It’ll be easy, he continued, just
one wish and you’ll end up bleeding to death on the sand floor. But his
reasonable half, with whom he spoke in an inconsiderate and informal way, knew
that he was an imposter and that he liked to show off, especially while hanging from a trapeze and both their lives depended on him.
Theirs was the last number that evening. The storm fell hard on the big
top, provoking a chaotic, constant pounding. In the air, the oxygen was charged
with ozone and the ground let off a warm smell of elephant urine and wet earth.
While swinging, Thomas remembered the dampness pervading the frozen sheets in
the cabin he and Eliza had shared in the country, when they were still a
married couple. They only went there when they needed to forgive each other for
some infidelity or when something inhospitable appeared between them with a
silent din. It was a small cabin near the wetlands, with high reed ceilings,
the smell of firewood and the crackling of the hearth and the infinite horizon
of reeds and her and Thomas Solvein, a tight-rope walker then, reading infinite
texts lounging on the couch, naked feet touching, The Gulag Archipelago, for example, words after more words and then
the fight, the negotiation, the evidence and the breakdown of Thomas’s few
certainties and the heat inside, near the hearth, the uneasiness and the last
shouts before going to bed and outside the storm and flashes, all poetry as
adornment for the eternal time spent in that cabin. The next morning, as the
storm got worse, they went out to walk on the trail and reached the wetlands
where ghostly trees grew with their roots on tiptoe above the water and they got
lost in the reeds, feet sinking in the black mud. They knew the wetlands by
heart, but the marsh changed its own impulsive geography and replaced the
trails they made as a force of habit, forming a dynamic and unsustainable
labyrinth. Nobody in the world, Thomas Solvein liked to think, could find them
there, in the middle of the reeds, gathering duckweeds in their hands. The
duckweeds were tiny specks of green that floated in the corners of the marsh.
When the water drained through their fingers, the duckweeds stayed stuck to
their skin, like alien moles. Eliza put them all over her face and they laughed
together, each one at the other. Sometimes, posed in that position, with the excuse
of the reeds covering their heads, Thomas Solvein got serious, took her neck,
with his two hands, strong (he felt her weak neck and the feeling that life, what
was normal, she, was something fragile and subtle) and asked her what would
happen if he killed her right there, if he kept squeezing his hands until she
couldn’t breathe anymore and she turned blue and stopped kicking, “if you
shout, nobody will hear you,” “if you try to escape, you know I’ll get you,”
“what would happen,” he continued, “if you were to die at the hands of the
person who loves you the most in this world.” It would just be an inexplicable
contradiction, Thomas thought, but there are contradictions as admissible as
they are terrifying. She then, closing her eyes, lazy, as if she were a virgin
surrendering to her parents’ sacrifice, wracked with silence, resigned to the idea
of death and said, “there couldn’t be anything better than dying in your
hands.” When Thomas Solvein removed them from her neck, her skin was red and there were white fingerprints in the center that disappeared little by little. The duckweeds came off her skin when Eliza got
up and straightened her skirt to go back to the cabin.
Solvein lowered himself from the trapeze bar, hanging from the back of his
knees, extending his hands as far as he could reach. The trapeze bar creaked, flexing
under his weight. In that inverted, pendular world, Ariadna rubbed her hands
with chalk on the platform and adjusted her wristband. A circle of light framed
her body against the big top, near the center pole’s tension cable. Thomas
Solvein had always thought that Ariadna moved with the meticulous elegance of
an Italian tightrope walker. If she could’ve heard him she would’ve told him
that elegance cannot be meticulous and that Italians may be many things, but they
are never meticulous or elegant. Yes, that’s why he fell in love with her. Not
because of her habit of correcting him all the time, but because of her body,
her curves, her hips and the meticulous elegance, he repeated, because it was
precise, studied and unalterable. Three adjectives in disuse sliding down her
figure. Ariadna murmured something between her lips, caught the bar by the
ropes and jumped in the air, throwing herself into the
synchronized swinging that Thomas had initiated mere seconds earlier. And then
he saw her, there below, in the audience, in one of the first rows. It was
Eliza. There was no doubt. Time passes and people change, thought Thomas, your
skin becomes wrinkled and your eyes sink from longing, the tear beds get
deeper, you learn to suffer, you change, you’re someone else, but there are
things, thought Thomas, your tenderness, the pencil in your bun, the white
blouse, the look, those things, which remain unalterable, indolent to history.
Next to her there was a boy with very open, very black eyes, looking up at
the height of the trapeze at that very moment. Thomas Solvein could not avoid
fantasizing that the boy was as old as his separation, twelve years, and that he
was the fruit of something that was as painful as it was necessary. Eliza was
staring at him, unafraid, like those afternoons in the wetlands when she let
herself be strangled with such docility. Ariadna was now swinging in front of
him. One afternoon, in the back of the caravan, she had also confessed that the
double death jump was as close as you could get to being rescued from death.
“It’s like jumping into the abyss and, in the inertia, being caught by two hands
that free you from the free fall.” Sometimes Ariadna was too much like Eliza.
They had repeated the jump thousands of times, following a dangerous but flawless
protocol. She would pull her legs up as high as possible and, extending her arms, she would wait for him to catch her in the precise moment, mathematic, not before
not after, exact, physics applied to the body. “It’s like being a suicide
victim regretting it a thousand times over,” she said, “there’s always someone
determined to rescue you.” When they were coming back from the wetlands, he and
Eliza had the same feeling, that there was someone determined to rescue them
from themselves. Sunday afternoon, after the traffic jam, they reached the city
and everything became constant repetition.
Thomas had lived on the ground floor for many years, he’d been a tolerant neighbor,
he’d organized barbecues and he’d had a decent run. He was working in Berlin,
in construction, walking on beams at great heights and keeping his balance with
his arms. Few people know it. But in construction, as in rock climbing, there’s
always a pioneer risking his life, someone who lays the first beam, the first
post, the plank that will serve for his comrades to walk across behind him. That
worker doesn’t have any safety measures, he depends on his own balance for a minute or two. Enough to die each day. When work was over, Thomas Solvein stayed
on the metal beams for a moment, exploring the entire expanse of the city,
calm, sleeping, its puzzle of streets and avenues, the pollution like a grey
carpet, the skyscrapers bracing the horizon. The trapeze, he was sure now, was
in his body.
And one day he left everything. He joined that entourage of scoundrels going from town to town, without leaving a trace other than the ridiculous flyers
stuck under cars’ windshield wipers and the elliptical silhouette, like a
flying saucer, of the tent in the empty grounds, far beyond the reeds. And now
Eliza was there, with her child, watching Thomas fly above from the ground
below, a childish demand for an explanation whose answer was unknown. Trapeze
artists work instinctively. There’s no other way, no other explanation, to jump
into the abyss. Reason and logic would otherwise make something like this
impossible. That’s why, on instinct, he left home and Eliza never heard from
him again. He changed his name to Thomas Solvein, which was more professional
(although, deep down, he only intended to erase his tracks), and put on his
flying suit, a tight, black leotard, and hung from the trapeze. It was easy,
like satisfying a childish necessity. The mountain cabin and the circus trapeze
weren’t all that different. Isolated, waterproof universes to inhabit. The
story of Eliza and him could have been one of the saddest, most vulgar stories
published by the world of incomprehension, but maybe because Thomas Solvein
sensed the danger, when she told him that she was pregnant, and fled before the
inevitable became reality. He remembered that Saturday morning in the cabin.
From the window he could see the wetlands combed by the wind from the north,
cold, almost mythological and far away, on the trail, the procession of cut-out
silhouettes from the circus, with its signs, its trucks and that despondent and
downcast elephant and those clowns practicing on stilts. Ariadna was leading a
panther, but he couldn’t see much more because the wind stopped and the reeds stood
back up and besides, at that time, he still didn’t know Ariadna and he couldn’t
have known that she was the girl with the panther. Thomas Solvein turned around
and saw that Eliza was sleeping and instinct, the only motor running when
everything else fails, brought him to the certainty, unstable, presumptuous,
that he had to escape and that he had do it in a humiliating, cowardly way. He
didn’t even leave a note. While Eliza was sleeping, he grabbed a few changes of
clothes, a book by Valery and escaped from the house like a thief, following
the fungus-covered paths to the trail. Eliza must have woken up when he closed
the door but, since it wasn’t the first time that Thomas Solvein had escaped,
she probably thought it was just another of her husband’s unsuccessful
pranks. But that day he didn’t come back and the circus people hired him to
clean the cages, help set up and feed the animals. The first person he spoke to
was Ariadna’s husband. He was Bullet Man, a deformed Jew, older than her, with
an unpronounceable Swiss name, a secondary character that always wore gloves
and never apologized to anyone. Ariadna and Thomas observed each other in
silence while he fed the alligator and she hung up her husband’s immense long underwear
and the thousands of gloves he wore on his hands for no apparent reason. They
smiled at each other, of course, she with her absolute goddess superiority and
he with the selfless submission of an animal feeder. Like the pieces of a
puzzle, like a deciphered hieroglyphic, as if you were playing poker and Aces
suddenly appeared in your hands, all those flirtations and games through the
clothesline and Bullet Man’s long underwear, one evening became a long, light,
unplanned kiss, a kiss that, ultimately, not only brought together a few
millimeters of skin, but also vast expanses of desire. While they made love, Thomas
noticed that the caravan ceiling was plastered with newspaper clippings,
“Bullet Man traces a perfect parabola, y=x2,” “dumbfounded
mathematician verifies perfection of technique,” “Bullet Man bursts through the
circus tent”… and when they were finished, wrapped in the folds of the sheets,
he told her, “only a stranger can cure a fugitive.” She did not respond, she just
kissed his armpits, between his ribs, on his belly button, her lips leaving
behind an inextinguishable trace of saliva.
The storm had turned into a deafening downpour. Solvein felt the tension
cable trembling and the expectant silence in the stands. He couldn’t take his
eyes off Eliza, down there, contemplating his swinging body, with her hands on
her lap, as if she presumed something serious was going to happen. The inverted
world under the big top was a world of affection traffickers. They
professed a protective love amongst themselves, almost tribal. The Great Circus travelled around
the country that year from one end to the other, through the white
landscapes of Flensburg and Lek, on small roads where time didn’t exist and
when it was too cold and impossible to breathe, they returned to Lower Saxony,
to eat smoked meat and enjoy the weather and the green color of the world
around them. In one of those warmer towns, they left Bullet Man on the side of
the road, with his suitcase at his feet and his gaze fallen on a small cluster
of houses. Like all secondary characters, he achieved exile through his own free
will, aware of his nullity in the story’s plot. That was when Ariadna mentioned
creating a number together. “The day you no longer love me” she joked “all you
have to do is let me slip.” “I’ll look at you” she continued “I swear that our
eyes won’t separate even for a moment as I fall to the sand.” Later she shrunk
against his chest like a sea star out of water, searching for Thomas Solvein’s
breath. Ariadna had a gifted body for balance, while Eliza had been conceived
under the atmospheric pressure of good sense. Ariadna was above, Eliza was
below. He began to count, one, two, three. Thomas Solvein knew that vertigo was
a luxury he could never allow himself, but now the ground, the stands and
Eliza, took on a distant light. Ariadna clapped twice and extended her arms
before shouting the order in the distance. He felt his sweaty, moist hands. The
rain fell on the big top forming a turbulent noise, the drumming of a metronome
gone crazy. Three, four, Ariadna swung in the distance, gaining momentum for
the jump. She gave him the second warning. At the third she would let go of the
bar, do two somersaults and when she unfolded her body, slowly, opening herself
to the emptiness, he had to grab her wrists, squeeze and feel that she was
squeezing too and thus free her from the fall. The seconds on the trapeze, as
Thomas had always thought, dilated, the lights were gleaming snakes and the
movements were extremely precise. He could see each of Ariadna’s gestures in
her approach swing towards him while Eliza observed from below, with her eyes
closed and the drumroll and the absolute silence in the audience and the boys
pointing their fingers and the notion that something could go wrong, that with
such strict protocols, the smallest mistake could have major consequences.
Thomas Solvein asked his reasonable side what would happen if he let go of
Ariadna, if he let her fall, he asked: will she look into my eyes like she
promised? And if so what will her eyes reflect? will they show betrayal? the
end? submission? It’s possible or maybe it’ll become a death fall, frenetic
kicking, in a hysterical pirouette, with a scream building under the big top,
mingling with the terror of the audience. What would happen if the one who fell
was me? I shouted at him, what would Eliza think when she saw us strewn across
the sand, forming an impossible X, broken? She’d think that she never should
have come to the 9:00 show, she’d curse the 13th, the last performance
and she would have the irremissible certainty that some things end and only
memories remain, like scars with poorly executed stitches. She’d think that she
should never have desecrated the unstable balance of a trapeze artist. And if
we both fall? I asked “and if Ariadna and I speed to a romantic death, a last
communion, a dual suicide? Of course, if Ariadna had been able to censor his
thoughts, she would’ve said that a suicide, no matter how much you try, could
never be dual, it could be synchronized or in solidarity, or both things, but
in the end it’s an act of intimate loneliness. The murder victim would be her.
Five, six. Thomas was marking the time. He saw Eliza two more times in the swinging
interval. One of those times their eyes met ineffectively. At least that’s what
Thomas Solvein thought at 40 meters above the ground. And then Ariadna shouted,
the last signal, ten and she let go of the bar. He saw her trace an exact arch,
with her body closed and initiate a rotation on the invisible axis passing
through her abdomen. During these two slow rotations his attention was drawn to the
stands, to Eliza, to that boy with the big black eyes, immense, as Ariadna completed
the two somersaults and executed the double death jump. He extended his arms as
far as he could, opening the palms of his hands and realized that they were
dripping with sweat. Ariadna began to open, like a newborn after months of
darkness, Thomas breathed in the wetland air one more time, the stench of the
cages and the figure of Bullet Man getting smaller in the rearview mirror. A
lot happened while he was up there and Ariadna traced a perfect curve towards
his arms and then it occurred to him, to move his hands away, to let her slip
through the air and then, while he was thinking of how to do it, how to move
away and repeat the story of his life, complete resignation, he felt the
violent and familiar smack of Ariadna’s hand upon completing her trajectory.
She grabbed his forearm tightly but he didn’t want to respond. He felt how she
slipped down his skin, how the weak applause was starting, how people were
breathing when the drumroll finished, but she kept slipping in that useless
swing, invisible to the crowd’s eyes. And she must have understood because she
looked up and looked him in the eyes and it was a look that didn’t ask for any
explanation, a last look of farewell, almost a promise. Below was the sand floor
and Eliza and that boy and Ariadna smiled due to her own weakness and started releasing
the pressure of her fingers, as he had done with Eliza’s neck in the wetlands
and he felt her slip until, at the last second, Thomas squeezed tightly, so
tight that he felt the narrowness of her bones, he squeezed and squeezed with
so much strength that if Eliza’s neck had been in its place, it would have
snapped with a fragile, precise, vertebral break. Breaks can never be
vertebral, that’s what Ariadna would have told him if she hadn’t surrendered
and submitted to the fall.
Then Ariadna, with the same precision and agility as always, did a
pirouette, escaped from his arms and returned to the platform. From up there,
among the applause, she waved at the audience, with her arm extended. Then the
crowd’s effusiveness lost intensity and people started getting up from their
seats, forming a resigned flow of the defeated silently going home to their
houses on the lake. Eliza and the boy got up and, hand in hand, got lost under
the big top, without even turning around. Ariadna observed him from the
platform, taking off her wristband without looking him in the eyes.
From up there, Thomas Solvein thought that he’d been right, just as cars
increase their speed on the highway and in a tachycardia your heart accelerates
for no apparent reason, on the trapeze, on a day like that, everything was
intensified and became more fleeting and real.
