Love, Let Me Not Hunger by Paul Gallico Page B

burlesquing the wire act, while Mr. Albert and four of the Spanish roustabouts were engaged in dismantling the supports for the steel wire to clear the ring for Fred Deeter and the Liberty horses to follow.
    Williams said, “You tell me, cul,” and parted the curtain a trifle at eve level for the American to see.
    It was hot enough in the confined enclosure where the performers waited their turn to go into the ring, but the furnace blast of heat from within which blew through the aperture was appalling. The July sun had been baking the unrelieved Spanish plain for twenty consecutive days, and since early morning had been cooking the atmosphere within the circus tent to boiling point. Nine hundred spectators packed in tiers into the enclosure added their body heat to the stifling, stagnant air.
    Rose appeared at the rear of the enclosure clad in a long spangled gown of blue sequins which showed off the smooth copper shine of her hair and the milky skin that went with her colouring. She carried a whip in one hand, preparing to go on with Fred Deeter and the Liberty act, and a towel in the other. She went over to the clown and removed the jackdaw from his shoulder, carrying it to a perch at the rear of the back entrance where it settled in a heap of miserable ruffled feathers. The heat was affecting it, as it was every human and animal connected with the circus. Then she returned and with the towel mopped the sweat from the steaming back and neck of the Auguste, who ignored her, and glancing through the opening said, “Over there on the left. You can’t miss her!”
    Deeter applied an eye to the aperture for an instant and then drawled in genuine amusement, “Well, Jee-sus Christ! What the hell do you call that?” Then he said, “You’re sure that ain’t a Gee put up by Sam Marvel?” using the circus term applied to a performer who pretends to be a member of the audience until he or she joins the act.
    “Nunti,” said Williams. “I saw it come in.”
    They were playing the matinée performance in Zalano, a town of some six thousand population in the midst of the Spanish wine and olive country, and where an evening performance had been scheduled as well.
    The creature who was the object of their attention was so obese that the broad spread of her hams, encased in what seemed to be countless layers of ruffled skirts, spread over three of the star-backed folding chairs of the front row, her knees almost touching the red wooden circle of the circus ring. Out of the voluminous skirts arose a thick torso over which swelled, seemingly about to burst from their confinement, breasts as huge as melons. A black lace shawl covered her shoulders, but her enormous arms were free. No neck was visible; the woman’s head, monstrous and grotesque, rested upon the triple folds of chin dewlapping her chest. Her face, chalked in powder as milk-white as her arms, had two precise circles of crimson rouged onto the cheeks which seemed almost an imitation of those on the countenance of Gogo, the white-faced clown. Her mouth, which was ridiculously small for the rest of the vast expanse of her, had been meticulously painted with a fine hand-brush into a tiny Cupids bow. Her eye make-up was startling. The eyes themselves were as green as a cruel and stormy sea, but the eyelids were silvered with some kind of metallic paste, the dark pouches beneath them emphasised with purple, with black pencilled lines drawn to the corners. Some illness or accident must have left her as bald as an ostrich egg, for her head was surmounted by a towering peruke, brick-red in colour and consisting of tiers and masses of stiff artificial curls and ringlets. Topping off this formidable pile was a majestic ten-inch tortoiseshell comb.
    She must have been six feet tall and appeared to be almost as wide. The fingers, like five fat white slugs, which held an enormous black lace fan which was never still, were covered with rings, and two enormous pear-shaped emerald