Calima

Callao Salvaje. Late spring, 2036. Afternoon to full dark.

The Santana parked at the top edge of the village, where the road from the TF-1 turned into the cobble that belonged to nobody and everybody, and Mateo lifted Saga from the bench seat onto his shoulders without asking, the way he had been lifting her onto his shoulders for as long as either of them could remember. She was eight. She was getting heavy in the way eight-year-olds get heavy, which is to say not quite enough yet for either of them to admit the bit was nearing its end.

"Periscopio," Mateo said.

"Periscopio," Saga agreed.

She put one hand on the top of his head ⁓ gently, the way Yara had taught her, do not crush the captain ⁓ and looked down the slope toward the bay.

The calima had been thickening since morning. The Sahara had decided, sometime in the night, to send a portion of itself to Tenerife, and the air over Callao Salvaje was the color of weak tea. The sun was a copper coin somebody had pressed flat against the haze. The sea was not blue. The sea was the color of the sky and the sky was the color of the sea and the line where they were supposed to meet had been mislaid for the day.

It was, all things considered, beautiful.

"Where are we putting the stage," Saga said.

"You tell me."

She turned her head left. She turned her head right. She made a small hmm sound that she had picked up from her mother and did not know she had picked up from her mother.

"The plaza is too narrow on the west side. The kids will sit in the well."

"They will not sit in the well. The well has a lid."

"The Hidalgo cousins will lift the lid and sit in the well, Papá."

Mateo conceded this with a small grunt, because he had been to Callao Salvaje twice before with La Tropa and was familiar with the Hidalgo cousins as a phenomenon.

"Tibor is doing the geometry," he said.

"Tibor is doing it wrong. He is putting Yara upstage of the lime tree. The tree will be backlit at sunset and the audience will only see her in silhouette."

"Yara likes being in silhouette."

"Yara likes being in silhouette when she chooses to be in silhouette. Not when the lime tree chooses for her."

Mateo made the small chuckling sound that came up from somewhere inside his chest. He carried her down through the cobbled street toward the plaza. The kids were already running alongside. There were always kids running alongside. A boy of about six attached himself to Mateo's left elbow and would not be dislodged; a girl of about the same age fell in behind, with the expression of someone joining an army.

"Saga," the girl said. Her name was Auxi, short for Auxiliadora, which was bigger than she was.

"Hola, Auxi."

"Are you doing the lights tonight?"

"At dusk."

"Can I help?"

"You can help with the tarp. We need someone short to pin the corners."

The girl's face did something complicated. Short was, at six, both the literal truth and a possible insult. She decided to take it as a job offer. She fell back into the running pack with the air of having been promoted.

In the plaza Tibor was indeed putting Yara upstage of the lime tree. Saga, from her father's shoulders, made a small noise of vindication. Mateo set her down without comment. She walked across the plaza with the gait of an eight-year-old foreman and tugged at the bottom of Yara's green linen shirt.

"The tree," Saga said.

Yara looked at the tree. Yara looked at the line of the setting sun, which would not set for four hours but would be in approximately that sector of the sky when it did. Yara looked at Tibor.

"Persze," Tibor said, who had heard nothing but had felt the look. "We move it."

He moved it. The pallet stage shifted three meters east. The Hidalgo cousins, who had already been assembling near the original spot in the way young teenage boys assemble near anything that looks like it might become important, drifted three meters east as well, with the embarrassed shuffle of having been outflanked by a child.

Yara was unloading the lanterns from their wooden case. They were paper, mostly, with a few of glass ⁓ old hotel-bar lanterns from the Splendora Royale, salvaged ten years ago when the salvaging was new. She handed Saga the small ones to string along the upper edge of the tarp.

"Calima will be heavier by sundown," Yara said.

"I know."

"The pins will look strange through it."

"I know."

"You will need to throw cleaner. The audience won't see the spin if the pin smears."

"I know, Yara."

Yara smiled the small smile she only gave to Saga, which was the smile of someone watching their apprentice become the kind of apprentice who is irritated by being told what they already know. This was, in Yara's view, the correct trajectory.

"The pins are charged?"

"They've been on the roof since Garachico."

"Good."

Saga climbed the stepladder with three lanterns hooked over her wrist. Below her, in the cobbled street, the village had begun to sweep itself. An old woman with a broom appeared from a doorway and made a slow patient pass across the section of cobble that would become standing room. A man in a fisherman's cap brought a chair out for her. She sat in the chair. She inspected the broom for damage. She decided the broom was fine. She set it against the doorframe and folded her hands in her lap, in the universal posture of someone who has done their part of the work and is now ready for the show that will not begin for three hours.

Above the street, the Hidalgo cousins were stringing the banderines: the village's fiesta bunting, triangles of paper and cloth gone soft pastel from years of sun, mended at the corners with tape and thread, the same strings that had crossed this plaza for every fiesta since before the quiet. They ran from balcony to balcony, from the lime tree to the cooperative roof, until the copper sky had a ceiling of small faded flags. And from her niche in the wall of the old fish cooperative ⁓ small and dark and gilt, with somebody's fresh marigolds at her feet despite the calima ⁓ the Virgin of Candelaria watched the plaza dress itself, the way she had watched it dress itself for longer than anyone now sweeping it had been alive.

This, Saga had come to understand, was the part of the day she liked best. The waiting. The gathering of a thing that did not yet exist. The plaza becoming, in slow motion, a room.

Up the slope, on a higher terrace from which one could see the bay on a clear day and could see, on this day, an indistinct copper smear with hints of village in it, Klaus lowered the binoculars and rubbed his eyes.

"Verfluchte Calima."

He raised the binoculars again.

He had been raising and lowering them, in this particular sector of his sweep, since approximately one in the afternoon, when his usual leftward arc across the dead resorts had, as part of his expanded vigilance practice, extended a further twenty degrees west and caught what was unmistakably a vehicle being unloaded in the central plaza of Callao Salvaje. He had identified the vehicle by its silhouette: an Iberian Santana, the long-wheelbase model, towing what he had determined, after some study, was a custom-built equipment trailer of the kind used by ⁓ he had said the words to himself with a particular German precision ⁓ the wandering performers.

Diese fahrenden Spieler.

Klaus had a position on wandering performers. He had had a position on wandering performers in 1993, in Karlsruhe, when a circus had put up a tent in the field behind the apartment block where he was doing his civilian service, and the noise had gone past midnight on three consecutive evenings, and he had made a complaint that had not been answered. He had not fundamentally revised the position since.

"Sonja."

There was no answer from inside the villa.

"Sonja. The performers are in Callao Salvaje."

There was still no answer. Klaus, who was beginning to recognize the texture of certain silences, lowered the binoculars and turned around. The kitchen door was open. The stove was off. Sonja's chicory cup was on the counter, washed and inverted on the drying rack. Sonja's cardigan was not on the back of the chair where Sonja's cardigan lived.

Klaus considered this.

He raised the binoculars again, in a different sector this time, and swept very slowly down the access road that switchbacked from the upper terraces toward the coast. Halfway down, walking with the unhurried stride of someone who had given themselves four hours to make a thirty-five-minute walk, was a tall woman in a linen dress with a cardigan over her shoulder.

Klaus lowered the binoculars.

He picked them up.

He lowered them.

He went inside, very deliberately, and put on the kettle for the second pot of chicory of his day, although chicory was not coffee and never would be, and stood at the counter in his house shoes while it boiled.

The show began, as La Tropa shows always began, by not beginning.

Mateo set up at the far edge of the plaza with his synth and the small solar battery and the little black box of pedals he had built himself out of salvage and stubbornness. He did not announce himself. He played, very quietly, the recording he had made that afternoon of the Callao Salvaje fishermen pulling a patera up the cobble ⁓ the scrape of hull on stone, a man's voice saying something that ended in laughter, the small bell on the church up the slope ringing once for no reason anybody had asked the bell to. He played it with a thin pad of synth under it, moving slow. The plaza did not stop talking. The plaza talked a little quieter. Then a little quieter than that. Then somebody noticed that what they were hearing was the sound of their own afternoon, and elbowed somebody else, and within about four minutes the plaza had become an audience without anyone announcing that this was what was happening.

Tibor walked into the center of the plaza carrying one juggling club and looking for the other. The other was in his other hand the entire time. Saga, watching from the edge with Auxi gripping her shirt, had seen the bit eighty times and still laughed, because the genius of Tibor was that he did the bit as if it were the first time he had ever lost a club, every time, and the cave of his face when he found the lost club was a cave the audience could fall into.

He juggled. He dropped a fruit. The grandmother in the front row, whose name was, Saga would learn later, Doña Pino, leaned forward with the swift hand of a woman who had spent forty years at a market stall and put the fruit into the cloth bag in her lap. Tibor, mid-cascade, did not notice. He dropped another. She caught that one too. By the third unintentional offering she had three oranges and a small green apple, and the front rows had begun to laugh at something other than Tibor, and Tibor finally clocked it, and looked at Doña Pino with the expression of a man who has been outflanked by an audience member, and bowed to her, slightly, without breaking the cascade. She inclined her head. The bag of fruit stayed in her lap. By the end of his act she had dinner.

Yara came on next with the tarot. She had a small folding table that Tibor had built out of an Ikea desk in 2031. She did not call audience members up; she walked into the audience and sat down next to one. Tonight she chose a fisherman with sun-scarred hands. She laid out three cards. She did not speak. She turned one card over, looked at it, did not show it, turned it back face-down, and slid the deck toward him with one finger. He folded his hands over it. She nodded. She got up. She walked back to the lime tree. The fisherman sat for a long moment with his hands on the deck and then he picked it up and put it in his shirt pocket and did not give it back. Nobody asked him to. Yara had three more decks.

The puppet show ⁓ the troupe's puppeteer voicing all the parts over the folding stage ⁓ was about a cat who had lost the moon. The cat questioned a goat. The goat lied. The cat questioned the wind. The wind told the truth and the truth was inconvenient. The cat went home and slept and dreamed of a moon that, in the morning, had been on the windowsill the whole time. The Hidalgo cousins, who were too old to be enchanted by puppets, were enchanted by the puppets. Auxi, gripping Saga's shirt, did not breathe for the duration of the wind's monologue.

And while three hundred people were watching a cat interrogate the wind, something had happened above them. A wire now ran from the roof beam of the old fish cooperative to the high fork of the lime tree, and nobody had seen it go up. This was policy. The brothers held that a wire you watched being rigged was only rope, but a wire that appeared while your back was turned was a piece of the sky.

Ruymán stepped out beside the stage. He was the troupe's timplista, a man in his sixties who tuned constantly and spoke rarely, and he did not speak now. He put two fingers to his lips and whistled ⁓ not a toot, not a birdcall: silbo, the islands' old whistled speech, real sentences with grammar in them, rising and turning like Spanish held up to sunlight. Then he said the phrase aloud, and then whistled the next, so that whistle and voice took turns like a lighthouse and its echo.

«whistle» "Ladies and gentlemen!" «whistle-whistle» "We are proud to present to you tonight ⁓ " «whistle» "From Gran Canaria ⁓ "

And then no words at all. Ten whistles, one for each syllable, while from the standing rows the men and women who had grown up whistling answered back out of the haze, and the Hidalgo cousins attempted to and produced spit.

"LOS MAGNÍFICOS ⁓ HERMANOS ⁓ CHACHO."

From the dark behind the fish cooperative: "¡CHACHO!"

And the plaza, which knew its part the way it knew the mass responses, roared it back ⁓ "¡CHACHO!" ⁓ with Auxi screaming it half a beat late with her entire body.

They came over the roofline on their lances. Two long shepherd's poles planted in the cobble below, two brothers airborne above them ⁓ the salto del pastor, the herders' vault the islands have used to drop down cliffsides for a thousand years, performed sideways, at dusk, for joy. They landed. They planted again. They crossed the plaza in three vaults each, traded poles in the air on the fourth, which should not have been possible and had taken eleven years to look easy, and arrived at the foot of the lime tree, bowing, while the cobbles were still ringing.

Then up the tree and out onto the wire, one after the other, and the plaza's chin went up and stayed up. Ayoze walked out backward. Echedey followed, juggling two of Tibor's clubs and holding the third in his teeth. Halfway across, Ayoze remarked, conversationally, to the entire town: "In Gran Canaria, the plazas are wider."

The plaza booed with love.

"And the sunsets ⁓ " Echedey began, around the club.

" ⁓ are worse," Ayoze finished.

The plaza cheered. The brothers then argued, on the wire, about whether the sentence had been finished correctly, and the argument was part of the act, and also it was not.

For the finale, Echedey stood at the dead center of the wire, above three hundred upturned faces, and reached into his shirt and produced ⁓ impossibly, for it had survived everything ⁓ the flag: white, blue, and yellow, snapping open against the copper haze like a signal to somewhere. He held it overhead with both arms, balancing on nothing anyone could see, and through the calima the colors did what colors do in that light, which is to say they glowed.

"Agüita," said Doña Pino, to nobody, which settled it.

By then it was dusk.

By then the calima had done what calima does at dusk, which was to take the dying sun and turn it into an event. The whole western sky was a slow rust. The lanterns came on along the upper edge of the tarp ⁓ the small yellow ones first, then the larger orange-paper ones at the corners ⁓ and the plaza became, in the way certain plazas become at certain hours, a ship lit in a fog.

Saga went to the wooden case at the back of the stage and lifted out the LED pins.

There were six of them, which was three apiece. Yara's were on her right hip in a soft holster Tibor had sewn from a Splendora Royale bathrobe. Saga had hers in both hands. The pins glowed faintly in the standby state ⁓ a slow white pulse ⁓ and when she pressed the small switch on each pommel the pulse changed to a steady hum of programmable color, which she had set, this afternoon on the roof of the Santana while they were charging, to a rotation of: fuchsia, deep blue, white, fuchsia, deep blue, white.

Yara lit her poi from the candle on the lantern post.

The candle was a real candle. The fire was real fire. Yara walked into the center of the plaza with the poi spinning slowly at her sides ⁓ the smallest version of the pattern, the warm-up, the part where the audience understands that what is about to happen is going to require their attention. From beside the stage, under Mateo's slow pad of synth, Ruymán's timple came in: folías over the drone, the islands' own strings under the flame.

Saga stepped into the pattern from the opposite side.

The LED pins, in the calima dusk, did not behave the way LEDs behaved on a clear night. The haze caught the color and pushed it outward, so that each pin trailed a faint halo behind itself, and the pattern Saga threw ⁓ a simple three-pin cascade rising into a four-beat reverse ⁓ left a smear of light in the air for perhaps a third of a second before the haze swallowed it. The audience made the small intake-of-breath sound that audiences make when they have been promised something and the something has begun to be delivered.

Yara picked up the spin to its proper speed. The fire became a continuous arc on either side of her, two wheels of light, the wheels not quite identical because Yara's left hand had always been very slightly the more inventive of the two. Saga moved the cascade up to the four-and-a-half beat the high pattern needed. The LED pins arced. The fire wheeled. The plaza held still.

Two of the Hidalgo cousins, who had drifted forward during the puppet show and had not drifted back, were sitting cross-legged at the very front of the audience, perhaps a meter and a half from Yara's right hip. Saga saw it. Yara saw it. Yara did not break rhythm. Yara did not shorten her arc. Yara raised her arc, by perhaps fifteen centimeters, on the next two passes, so that the trailing fire on her right side cleared the tops of the cousins' heads by a margin that was generous to nobody but was in no possible danger of singeing anybody. The cousins felt the heat above them. The cousins did not move. The cousins, when they walked home that night, were going to tell each other a version of this moment in which they had been very much in danger and had been very brave, and they would tell that version of it for the rest of their lives.

It was, Saga thought, throwing a one-handed reverse, the best thing about the work. People wrote their own version of what had happened. The version was almost always better than what had happened.

The LED pins began to dim somewhere around the eight-minute mark.

Saga felt it before she saw it ⁓ the third pin, the one she had charged last on the roof, was hesitating in the color rotation, sticking on the deep blue a half-beat too long before snapping back to fuchsia. The halo through the calima was getting thinner. She had perhaps a minute before the pattern would not read.

Yara did not look at her. Yara kept spinning.

At the next moment of natural transition ⁓ Saga's pattern changed from cascade to fountain, a half-second pause where her pins were all in the air ⁓ Yara stepped sideways once, picked the lit candle off the lantern post with her free hand, walked it three steps, and held it out.

Saga caught her three pins. She set them down on the cobble. She picked up, from the wooden case at the edge of the stage, the small fire pins ⁓ the practice ones, the half-size ones, the ones Yara had lent her at six and never taken back ⁓ and lit them off the candle Yara was holding.

The whole exchange took perhaps four seconds.

The audience thought it had been planned.

It had not been planned.

Saga stepped back into the pattern with fire in her hands, and the difference in the plaza was the difference between watching a beautiful thing through a window and standing in the room with it. The cousins at the front leaned back, slightly. Doña Pino, in the second row with her bag of fruit, made a small approving sound. The fisherman with the tarot card in his shirt pocket touched the pocket without looking.

Yara picked up the spin one more notch. Saga matched her. The two of them made, for perhaps three minutes, in the calima dusk in the plaza of Callao Salvaje, a thing that none of the people in that plaza would ever fully describe to anybody who had not been there, although several of them would try, and most of them would write the trying down, and for one or two of them the trying would become, over the years, the central poem of their inner life.

Then Yara slowed. Then Saga slowed. Then Yara stopped, with a small flourish that was the opposite of a flourish, and Saga stopped on the half-beat after, and there was no applause, the way there had been no applause that night at Tibor's cave in 2027, although nobody in this plaza knew about that night and Saga was too young to have ever been told.

There was, instead, the long held breathing-in of three hundred people who did not yet know what to do with their hands.

In her niche, under the bunting, the firelight found the Virgin's gilt. She watched.

Tibor, from the back, said "Természetesen," very quietly, to nobody.

Mateo's set ran into the night.

People danced. People did not dance. Doña Pino took her bag of fruit and walked home up a side street with the slow deliberation of a queen retiring from court. Auxi, who had attached herself to Saga for the day, fell asleep on a folded jacket somebody had brought her. The Hidalgo cousins, who had been singed by no flame and thrilled by no danger, danced together in a corner of the plaza with the careful seriousness of teenage boys who had not yet realized that dancing together with a sister was anything other than the obvious thing to be doing.

Yara passed through the back of the crowd, dealing tarot cards from the deck without breaking stride ⁓ one to a man who had been weeping during the puppet show and did not know why, one to a woman who was leaning against a wall with her eyes closed, one to a tall woman in a linen dress who had taken a place at the very back, alone, and who took the card with both hands and held it without looking at it. Yara did not stop walking. The tall woman did not move from the wall.

After perhaps an hour she pushed off the wall and turned the card over and looked at it. She put it in the pocket of her cardigan. She went back up the slope, alone, the way she had come down.

On his terrace, Klaus had been watching the bay through the binoculars without seeing very much. The calima had thickened. The plaza, three kilometers away, was a halo of yellow lantern-light in a copper smear, and inside the halo there had been, for a time, a brighter pulsing of color ⁓ fuchsia, deep blue, white, fuchsia, deep blue, white ⁓ that he had stared at for a long minute trying to determine whether it was a signal of some kind, and to whom.

He had decided it was not a signal.

He had then decided that he could not tell.

He had lowered the binoculars and gone inside and made another pot of chicory, which he had drunk from a Wedgwood cup, standing at the counter, looking out the kitchen window at a sky he could no longer see. The kitchen door had been open. The cardigan had not been on the back of the chair.

When he heard, much later, the soft sound of the front door, he did not turn around.

"Sonja."

"Klaus."

"There is chicory."

"I see that."

A pause. The sound of a cardigan being hung on its hook.

"Klaus."

"Yes."

"There was a girl with lights on a stick. She was eight."

"I see."

"You should have seen her."

He did not turn around. He heard her footsteps cross the kitchen floor and go to the bedroom. He heard the bedroom door close gently ⁓ gently, which was the part that lodged in him ⁓ and he stood at the counter with the cup in his hand for some time, looking at the sky he could not see.

Saga slept on Mateo's shoulders on the walk back up the cobbled street to the Santana, the way she had been sleeping on Mateo's shoulders since she had been small enough to wear his shirt as a blanket. She did not hear Tibor finding his glasses (the rope-walker brothers had stepped on them; Tibor had located them by sound, which was the way he always located them). She did not hear the clatter of the wooden lantern case being loaded, or the trailer being secured, or the small whuff of laughter Yara made when Mateo said something quiet to her in Spanish that Saga would not have understood even awake.

She did not hear, when the Santana started up the road north along the coast at cyclist speed, the calima softening behind them as the wind off the sea began, at last, to clear.

She was eight. She was asleep on her father's shoulders. The pins, in their wooden case, were charging again, very faintly, in the moonlight that was beginning, behind the thinning haze, to come through.