Dancing for Centavos

By Martin Mitchinson

When I was a child I dreamed of tall ships and circuses. I ran over open fields, swung on ropes across ravines, and I told far too many lies.

Now in my mid-thirties, drifting along the coast of Honduras, I join a circus and can finally appreciate the wisdom of a child’s dreams.

It is a poor circus, an open-air circus with scrap-lumber bleachers and torn tarps for walls. A circus with no tent to house the show, no truck of their own to move locations—only tin roofs over two-by-fours for sleeping, canvas flaps for privacy, pots of watery stew cooking over a wood fire, and an abundance of children wading about in the tall grass of a vacant lot.

I only just stumble upon the circus as I bicycle along the Caribbean coastal road. As a lone traveler with an open schedule, my trips seem to either thrive with vitality or die with a fizz and a trail of smoke. At the worst of times, I am overwhelmed with isolation and self-pity, secluding myself in some village pension and writing endless letters home describing my lonely, detached observations on local culture.

At the best of moments—those rare moments—I trip and stumble forward, falling through side doors, learning to revel with each unexpected detour until eventually I come to embrace discomfort as a motivator and a mode of transport.

“What would you think,” I ask Renaldo, head of El Circo Emperador, “if a gringo wanted to join on and work with you for a while,” proposing that I might photograph something of their shows and daily life.

Renaldo is thirty-eight. He’s trim and strong and handsome in the manner of a gypsy. After my proposal he studies me with an expression of muted dismay, a lack of comprehension evident in his gaze, as if I were speaking in Hindi, or had committed some outlandish faux pas.

I wait. I consider rephrasing my broken-Spanish request, but instead I just wait.

“Explain to me again,” says Renaldo after the pause. “Why would he—this gringo…” he asks, speaking slowly and looking straight into my eyes. “Why would he want to travel with us?”

I struggle with that. My Spanish falters; but in the end I tell a half lie that is likely almost truth, explaining that as a photographer and artist I want to document the lives and work of other artists. Renaldo accepts that as a valid reason. When he gathers the others together to ask their support, I can see them nod when he mentions, “well, he’s an artist, like us.”

El Circo Emperador is a family circus with thirty-five members—thirty of them relatives—mostly children, heavy women, a few old men, and Jenny the transsexual dancer. It is a world in a bubble, floating and bobbing from Nicaragua, through Honduras, into El Salvador and Guatemala. It is a string of 100-watt bulbs and a floodlit ring with a rotted picket fence in a region best known for poverty, desperation, and civil war.

“If we had a tent…” Doña Lydia starts to tell me. She is in her late fifties, and is queen of the circus, ruling from a rusted-steel bed frame and a straw-stuffed mattress. Her eyelids are puffy from the heat. Her words form slowly. “Yes, if we had a circus tent of good strong canvas…and a truck…”

Her voice trails off and she seems to have tired of the story, as if she has been saying these same words all her life. “With a truck and a tent…then we could move as we wished, and we could work every night, even in the rainy season.”

But they don’t have a tent, and a truck can’t be imagined. Even the next meal is often a question.

“Renaldo is my oldest,” Lydia tells me. “He isn’t like my husband was. There aren’t circus men like that anymore, but my son will find something for us. He always does. We always eat,” she assures me.

On the Caribbean coast in May, when I’m sleeping on a cot in a dirt lot—even with a fan blowing directly on my body—I begin perspiring heavily by six in the morning. By ten A.M. I abandon any hope of appearing composed, and I follow along footpaths behind Renaldo. He looks like the Pied Piper with a trailing line of star-struck children carrying dirty laundry, pots and pans, and empty sacks. He fishes in private ponds, casting his net for fifteen minutes until a security guard threatens us with a machete.

“Get out of here, you whore,” shouts the guard. “I told you last year to stay away.”

Renaldo apologizes, as he has done many times before, and we file away with the sack full of fingerlings, wandering back to dirty rivers in the time of cholera. A dozen children trudge along behind, trying to skip and pirouette while dragging their bundles to a deeper bend in the stream. Our soft-focus lethargy slips away to water fights, swimming lessons, and afternoon naps. The river water washes off the blanket of salt and dust, and the furnace heat. We welcome the breezes in the shade of a giant ceiba tree, washing pots and pans and clothes and diapers.

Renaldo slips back onto private property and scrambles up a knotted rope to steal mangos. He dances from branch to branch in a fifty-foot tree, dropping fruit while the children scramble to catch them in the folds of empty flour sacks.

In the late afternoon when we gather our belongings, there are a hundred pounds of mangos, and four watermelons to cut and sell at the nighttime show.

I’m not a clown by nature. I love laughter and good humor, and I’ve been known to hog the limelight; but slapstick overacting, oversized shoes, and a sponge nose have never been a natural part of my character.

“Yo no sabo nada,” says Limonada, a third-generation clown, now approaching his fiftieth birthday. He patiently instructs me in the art of speaking like a gringo who knows very little Spanish—horrible accent, faulty grammar, and a certain expression of bewilderment when the clown teacher asks me questions in the classroom sketch.

“Yo no saaaaabo nada,” he repeats, emphasizing the grammatical errors and pronunciation. This should come naturally to me, but I’ve come to learn that there are some gaps that are difficult to bridge, subtleties that only a circus clown can discern; a true, natural-born, circus clown.

The mimicking, braying, and bellowing continues for another half-hour in his tent before he declares that I’m ready. I think I exhausted his effort. He has a hard time looking me in the eye.

Limonada is gruff and gnarled, and looks as if he were born in a cantina. He travels with four miniature dogs, and performs a rude marionette skit. He plays the roughhouse drunk in clown acts, and he stands on his head alone, swinging upside down on a low trapeze, his arms outstretched while drinking down a bottle of Coca-Cola, the bottle clenched between his lips and teeth. “God, that really hurts,” he says to me as he leaves the ring, and the announcer asks the audience, “Is it in his head or in his stomach? Only the Great Limonada knows for sure.”

Limonada joined Emperador earlier in the year to be with his son Sebastian, and his only grandson, now five months old. In the afternoon, the three generations sit in Sebastian’s tent, a soap opera on the black-and-white television while they cut up sheets of pink and yellow foam, tacking pieces together with contact cement, and then drawing designs and faces with colored marking pens. In between acts at the evening show, they will parade along the bleachers, hawking goofy hats and foam clown puppets along with candies, watermelon slices, and stolen mangos. Every centavo earned is precious.

Not every member is so endearing. Sixty-four-year-old Salazar seems forever bitter.

“Such shit for food,” he complains about the fish soup. “And we get paid a joke here. I could just leave this circus,” he tells me, “leave these cheap assholes behind.”

With his bowl of soup he walks off to the side to sit on a wooden box and stare out at the empty ring, stomach hanging over his trousers and rope belt. He won’t leave. He’s old. He’s been with the Emperador since the days before they had bleachers and tarps and a ticket booth, since the time when they would arrive in a town and knock on doors to rent a living room. Three clowns, a juggler, and Doña Lydia the dancer.

I wonder if it was all about art in those days.

On most afternoons, Salazar passes away the hottest part of the day in his tent room filled with boxes and wood-crate furniture. He wears a pair of bikini underwear and sits on the dirt floor—a whiskered man with cards in his hands, beads of perspiration rolling slowly down his sagging breasts and over his stomach. He plays poker in the shade of his tent cheating those precious centavos from the children, women, and fellow clowns. He isn’t well liked, and in the late afternoon he paints his face alone in his tent and waits for the event to begin.

I love the build-up to an evening show. Crackled voices blare from the pole-top speakers, Renaldo’s taped message shouting away in a static madness: “Dancing Women! Clowns and Laughs! Tingo the Bird Man Defies Gravity! The Giant Clown, Twenty-Two Feet Tall!” announces Renaldo’s amplified voice. “Only ten minutes till show time! Get your ticket and move inside!”

I love the flow of people arriving, the bleachers filling with unruly children, drunks, and local machos with their shirts unbuttoned and chests stuck out, whistling and catcalling at passing women. And I feel for the penniless boys trying to slide past the barbed wire fence, past the security boys armed with wooden clubs.

My role in the evening is minimal. They pay me a little more than a dollar a night, along with three square meals, to speak Spanish like a gringo, and then beat upon me with a wooden paddle while we dance around the ring. The remainder of the show I run around with my cameras trying to capture the performance and the life around the ring.

I climb up a rickety ladder with the Bird Man when he dives out on the trapeze lines, the crowd gasping as Tingo releases and flies through the floodlit night, relying on a net that is so disgustingly narrow, so obviously short, that Edwin stands at the end trying to align a “rebound rope” in readiness for a mishap.

I lie on my belly and shoot upward with a wide-angle lens as the seven-meter clown performs shaky dances on two-by-four legs overhead. And only once do I fire a flash photo when Alberto throws knives at an audience volunteer. “No problem,” insists Alberto when I ask if he minds. But I can hardly stand to watch while he humbles the drunken macho standing spread-eagled against the backstop.

A lesson learned: Never swagger and attempt to steal the show from your knife thrower. He demands respect.

The first two knives slam into the backstop on either side of the man’s head; then one beside his waist; one below his crotch, and then another again even closer to his crotch—just to let him know.

As that final act comes to a close, boys run shouting and wrestling into the vacant ring, the bleachers empty, and friends leave laughing, arm in arm. The evening humidity passes into a nighttime shower, muffling voices, and dampening the dancing torches and paste-on glitter. The children roll up the tarps and unplug floodlight cords. A tide of heaviness descends on this dirt-lot world gone suddenly quiet. All that remains are paint-streaked faces, frilled costumes of shiny beads, and a tiny whisper of madness.

Renaldo’s woman, the mother of his youngest child, runs through the blackness, tripping over ropes and pegs, screaming and crying, hiding in the darkness under the wash table until Renaldo approaches, coaxing her, pleading with her, then locking his hands with hers and slowly pulling her out from below.

His face is still half painted, and his tears mix with rain. He bands his arms around her body, absorbing her kicks and blows, holding her tight to his chest, speaking her name until she quiets her rage to heavy sobs, letting him carry her limp body across the camp, back to the privacy of canvas walls, so that only shadows and forms are seen.

I’m alone at that moment. Others look out from their doorways. Knowing glances pass from one to another before they slip back behind tarp flaps, into that precious sleep that will bring them into yet another day. I’m alone.

Only Limonada, the tough one, is still outside. His posture tells me that he knows that sometimes the clown has the saddest life.

“I’m fine,” he says quietly. “I’m fine.”

On those nights after the circus closes down, when he stands under the streetlight on a muddy road—baggy sweatpants and an open shirt—his eyes look sad and lost, a heavy weight pulling his shoulders down.

“I’m fine,” he says again. And time slips away through the haze of heat and humidity, between the dust and the mud, the fleas in the mattresses, and the holes in tin roofing. And I know that this will never be my home.

Six months later at my home in northern Canada, the temperature has dropped to below zero degrees. We sit around the wood stove, and it’s wonderful to be with family again. In some ways it was only half of a journey. My father hates to hear that when they asked me to stay on long-term and learn the trapeze, I had to wait three or four days before I could decide to decline the offer.

On the twenty-third of December, surrounded by a world of snow and ice, of family and friends, I feel nothing but elation when the telephone rings with a collect call from Renaldo, the static hissing and pops like a worn vinyl LP of your favorite music. We shout back and forth to be heard and exchange greetings and wishes from two separate worlds until the line goes dead, as it invariably does in Honduras. But for that briefest moment I can smell and taste and hear all of El Emperador. I can see the children playing, the heavy-set women dancing, Jenny’s warm smile, and a tent full of Latin clowns trying to teach me to speak like a gringo.