Yolanda’s parents realised from the time she was born that she was not going to be like her sister Natasha. Internally, there was a partial transposition of her liver and spleen, and her kidneys fused together at the bottom. None of which, they were told, would be a problem in leading a healthy, normal life. She had other differences too–like the little finger on each hand that curled inward and an extra thoracic vertebra. There was a third nipple on her rib cage, as well as something else that was never mentioned. She would find out for herself later in life, though, that these complications also meant that she would be unable to have children. None of this interfered with what was most important to her—a highly prized sense of grace and balance.
Her first steps were on a balance beam low to the ground. She learned to focus not on her feet but on a fixed point at eye level beyond the end of the beam, giving her a longer angle of coordination. If she fell, she was made to get up and try again. Skinned knees were nothing compared to what she might be in for later. Then it was a braided steel cable raised progressively higher and higher. By the time she lost her first tooth, Yolanda was crossing the wire as easily as a squirrel scurrying along a power line. By puberty, her deportment in the heights was as natural and assured as only a fourth-generation wire walker could be.
When she transited the wire, her focus increased to an exalted level in steps that were a series of small corrections always aimed toward an elusive state of perfect equilibrium. She sensed the slightest deviation in her physical reality due to motion in the air, variations in temperature, humidity, phases of the moon. Yet, the jinx at the watering hole of mischance always brought her as close as possible to mortality without actually experiencing it. Without spectators in cities big and small who came to watch this monastic rite going back to antiquity, Yolanda Paladino could not exist.
Before they went up, each Paladino had a personal ritual to protect them from the jinx. It looked somewhat like handshape gestures used in sign language. Grandpa Ludovico made an elaborate sign of the cross followed by a kiss on the tip of his thumb. Yolanda’s mother made a counting motion with her fingers while whispering a prayer in her Kajkavian dialect. Josip stretched his hands outward as if flattening a tablecloth. Zladič made a slow casting motion of two closed fingers along an imaginary line directly ahead. Yolanda put her fingers to her temples and fixed her eyes on a distant point while emptying her mind of everything except the wire.
Natasha was the only one without a ritual. Then it was time. Because of her small size Yolanda always mounted on the shoulders of her father before he fell in Gjirokastër, then brother Petar before he fell in Zaprešić, or on one foot atop her mother’s head before she fell in Maracaibo. Predstava se mora nadaljevati was what Ludovico always said, as if “the show must go on” was a prayer of eternal rest. In the time it took for a vase of flowers to wilt, the Paladinos were already setting up in the next town, where Grandpa Ludovico made sure that what just happened got in the local news.
By the time Yolanda was out of her teens, Ludovico—the patriarch—didn’t think she needed to be chaperoned anymore. In the sombre Slovenian he always spoke in private, he proclaimed, “you are old enough to know what to do and what not to do.”
Except she didn’t know what to do at all. In such a restricted life, she found people outside her family as inscrutable as they found her. She confided to Zladič how difficult it was to fumble her way through the social worlds of young people in the various cities they stayed. At a disco in Oslo, she watched others her age dance under coloured lights in costumes different from the ones she was used to wearing. At alfresco cafés throughout Europe, she saw couples young and old holding hands while having intimate conversations. She was not from their planet. Men approached her, which she didn’t mind if it was only a casual comment in one of the languages she understood. Sometimes she even danced with them in her improvised way, but if they insinuated themselves too far, especially physically, they might end up with a disjointed finger or lacerated cornea before she darted away. Once in a while, there was a promising friendship: a bookstore clerk in Naples, a museum docent in Berlin, a flamenco dancer in Granada, but other obligations always ended things quickly. Her sister Natasha told her about those wonderful places they called a gej bar (gay bar), where men were safer and more congenial, but even there, if she revealed anything about herself, it only brought out how completely different she was.
It was easier for Natasha. She knew how to navigate among interested men, and if time and inclination permitted, she might go to bed with one when she so wished. In Malaga, it was Natasha’s turn to fall—she fell for Oriol Olloqui Alcaide Dario Salmerón, the desk clerk at their hotel. The unwritten rule in the Paladino family was that you were free to strike out on your own at any time, but once you were out, there was no going back. The necessary concentration and trust on which everyone else relied could never be completely regained. Such desertions were not unknown in the Paladino lineage. Grandpa Ludovico had a half-brother who ran off on his own with a woman whose wealthy family owned a shoe factory in Uruguay. Before Yolanda was born, two cousins on her mother’s side decided to marry each other and settle down to raise alpacas in Belgium. Now it was Natasha who decided to start a new life outside the one she had always known.
Yolanda took a side excursion to the Père Lachaise cemetery on the Boulevard de Ménilmontant because of a fascination for the permanency of funerary architecture that contrasted so strikingly with the Paladino requisite of turnbuckles, guy attachments, and stabilising cables constantly set and taken down. She happened to be walking along the same path as an intriguing woman in a floral boho dress and open front poncho. At the grave of Jean-Julien Saqui, they exchanged a few words in French, then found a place to sit and continue their conversation in a language that was difficult for them both. The woman said she was a concert violinist from Warsaw in Paris for a concert. In explaining their respective backgrounds, it got to the point where they could barely understand each other. They had exhausted the limits of their common French vocabulary, so they fell silent, but sensed in each other a kindred spirit. The violinist gazed into Yolanda’s eyes in an unfamiliar way, not the focused stare she was used to from her family, but something more soulful. In this moment of captivation, she advanced her lips closer to Yolanda’s, but only slowly, allowing her the freedom to turn away. But she did not. Yolanda assumed the soft, brief kiss was an expression of friendship from an unknown culture.
“Comme c’est bien,” whispered the violinist.
“Je n’y comprends rien.”
The violinist replied that there was nothing to understand. Things went no further, but there was a vague assumption that more might follow. Rather than the start of something miraculous in the City of Light, it was already the end. Soon they would both be elsewhere.
Whenever she was interviewed by reporters, in a rush to turn in their fluff assignments, they would ask the same predictable question, “are you ever afraid of falling?” Grandpa Ludovico always said, “tell them what they want to hear—your own truth is something they will never understand.” So she learned to say, “Yes, I’m terrified every second.” The true answer was, “The only time I’m afraid is when I’m with other people.”
