Life: A User's Manual (The Good Parts)

2 - Trapeze Shartist

(p43-44)

Shortly after this, dejected, his mind made up to abandon the performing arts, but not wishing to leave the world of show business, Rorschach became the manager of an acrobat, a trapeze artist who had rapidly become a celebrity because of two features: the first was that he was very young -- Rorschach met him when he was not yet twelve -- and the second was his talent for staying on his trapeze for hours at a stretch. Crowds flocked to the music halls and circuses where he was on, not only to see him do his act, but to watch him napping, washing, dressing, or drinking a cup of chocolate on the narrow bar of his trapeze, ninety or a hundred feet from the round.

At the start, the partnership flourished, and all the major cities of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East applauded the amazing feats of the young man. But as he grew older, the trapeze artist became more and more demanding. At first, purely out of a desire to improve but subsequently from the tyranny of habit as well, he so organized his life that, for as long as he was working in one establishment, he spent his whole time, day and night, on his trapeze. His very modest needs were all met by relays of servants who kept watch below and who raised and lowered everything required up above in specially constructed containers. His way of life occasioned no particular difficulties as far as those around him were concerned, except that, during the other acts on the programme, it was slightly disturbing that he stayed aloft -- the fact could not be concealed -- and that the audience, though it usually remained calm, let its gaze stray in his direction. The management forgave him this, however, because he was an outstanding and irreplaceable artist. Also, of course, they appreciated that he did not live like that out of mischief and that it was, in fact, the only way he could keep himself in constant form and maintain his act at the level of perfection.

The problem was harder to manage when his seasons ended and the trapeze artist had to travel to another town. His manager saw to it that he was spared any unnecessary prolongation of his sufferings: for trips in towns they used racing cars, dashing, if possible at night or in the very early morning, through the deserted streets at top speed, though of course still too slowly for the languishing trapeze artist; in trains, they took a whole compartment, where, adopting a pathetic but at least partial substitute for his normal way of life, he spent the journey up in the luggage rack; in the next theatre on their tour the trapeze was in place long before the acrobat's arrival and all the doors between them and the auditorium were wide open and all the corridors clear, so that he could be back up on high without losing a second. "Seeing him set foot on the rope-ladder," Rorschach wrote, "and climb back up to his eyrie with the speed of lightning, were the happiest moments of my life."