The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

only hermaphroditic and ventriloquist dwarf in history. An exact, wheeled replica of Christopher Columbus’s caravel completed the Fortunato Family Famous International Circus. This enormous caravan no longer drifted aimlessly, as it had in his father’s day, but steamed purposefully along the principal highways from the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan, stopping only in major cities, where it made an entrance with such a clamor of drums, elephants, and clowns—the caravel at the lead, like a miraculous reenactment of the Conquest—that no man, woman, or child could escape knowing the circus had come to town.
    Fortunato II married a trapeze artist, and they had a son they named Horacio. But one day wife-and-mother stayed behind, determined to be independent of her husband and support herself through her somewhat precarious calling, leaving the boy in his father’s care. Her son held a rather dim picture of her in his memory, never completely separating the image of his mother from that of the many acrobats he had known. When he was ten, his father married another circus artist, this time an equestrienne able to stand on her head on a galloping steed or leap from one croup to another with eyes blindfolded. She was very beautiful. No matter how much soap, water, and perfume she used, she could not erase the last trace of the essence of horse, a sharp aroma of sweat and effort. In her magnificent bosom the young Horacio, enveloped in that unique odor, found consolation for his mother’s absence. But with time the horsewoman also decamped without a farewell. In the ripeness of his years, Fortunato II entered into matrimony, for the third and final time, with a Swiss woman he met on a tour bus in America. He was weary of his Bedouin-like existence and felt too old for new alarms, so when his Swiss bride requested it, he had not the slightest difficulty in giving up the circus for a sedentary life, and ended his days on a small farm in the Alps amid bucolic hills and woods. His son Horacio, who was a little over twenty, took charge of the family business.
    Horacio had grown up with the instability of moving every few days, of sleeping on wheels and living beneath a canvas roof, but he was very content with his fate. He had never envied other little boys who wore gray uniforms to school and who had their destinies mapped out before they were born. By contrast, he felt powerful and free. He knew all the secrets of the circus, and with the same confidence and ease he mucked out the animal cages or balanced fifty meters above the ground dressed as a hussar and charming the audience with his dolphin smile. If at any moment he longed for stability, he did not admit it, even in his sleep. The experience of having been abandoned first by his mother and then by his stepmother had left him slightly insecure, especially with women, but it had not made him a cynic, because he had inherited his grandfather’s sentimental heart. He had an enormous flair for the circus, but he was fascinated by the commercial aspect of the business even more than by the art. He had intended to be rich from the time he was a young boy, with the naïve conviction that money would bring the security he had not received from his family. He increased the number of tentacles spreading from the family enterprise by buying a chain of boxing arenas in several capital cities. From boxing he moved naturally to wrestling, and as he was a man of inventive imagination he transformed that gross sport into a dramatic spectacle. Among his initiatives were the Mummy, who appeared at ringside in an Egyptian sarcophagus; Tarzan, who covered his privates with a tiger skin so tiny that with every lunge the audience held its breath, expecting some major revelation; and the Angel, who every night bet his golden hair and lost it to the scissors of the ferocious Kuramoto—a Mapuche Indian disguised as a Samurai—but then appeared the following day