The bumper cars are the most popular with their flashing lights and bright rhythmic music. Gliding in ballet-like squirls and wiggles they crash: into one another, against the painted wooden blocks at the side or the unused or unusable cars parked at the bottom. Children, especially girl children who seem to have looser throats, scream at each bump, toss their heads back and spin the wheel. Some cool characters take it alone and plan devilish raids on the young or gigglish, they seem skilled and lethal and always on their own. Around the sides stand the various onlookers; anxious mothers, proud teenagers, eager infants. But it's a small arena and has no need for young cocksure gypsies leaping from car to car aware that everyone is watching them. Only Antonio is needed to give out the plastic yellow discs that mysteriously put the teddy boy shoes into action, and to change the music tapes. He sits in his little cabin looking down on the crazy multi-coloured scene and is as sombre as an overcast day. The priest at an orgy or the drunk at a spiritual meeting he looks totally out of place. And yet he isn't, of course. At the larger fairs, with whom we sometimes used to join forces, the wilder rides are invariably run by these dour faced types. 'Two euros' they grunt at the ecstatic crowd pressing to get the front row on the big dipper as if the sight of so many people enjoying themselves day after day was enough to turn you to stone.
Before I began to understand Antonio I used to try to have conversations with him, used to try to get him to say something back. He rarely did and I considered him to be a miserable bastard for quite a time. To general questions like 'How's it going?' or 'How are you feeling?' he'd not even reply, simply look at me as if to say 'Oh shut up!' I left him to it and judged him as anti-social. I spoke to Paco about him and he told me not to worry about it - that Antonio was a silent type, but that there was a lot more to him than met the eye.
Still water. I decided not to force the issue, to let him speak to me if he wanted to.
It came unexpectedly and left me almost speechless. I was sitting on a kerb looking up at the side of a white-washed wall. Nailed to it were various wooden bird cages, some housing mad little birds that hopped incessantly from one perch to another, almost as prisoners pace their cells. Some brightly coloured larger birds pecked morosely at their food or stared out at the blue sky. There was also a fat quail, in a ridiculously small cage, whose exercise consisted of jerking its neck up and down - it had no room for more. Strangely though, a scattering of intricate yet simple music floated off the wall deepening the air. It was at once perverse and beautiful. I sat there squinting at the intensely bright wall involved in the cross-harmonies of their calls, when a voice said
'We cage them because we are jealous of their liberty.'
He stood directly behind me and I had to twist round to see him. He was staring at the wall, towering above me, motionless.
'I'm convinced of it'
he added
'Jealous of their ability to fly, us being earthbound.'
'It's a thought'
I replied, or something like that. I was too taken aback to respond. I was aware that whatever I might say would sound either glib or daft - so I said nothing. I turned to the wall again and the notes zig-zagged, rebounding off the light-struck wall. The nervousness of their actions seemed to echo the staccato jagged edged rhythms as they popped and perched and pecked, bundles of musical pipes loosening off their incessant cries to the world. The jail birds sing despite themselves. And I remember another night in another country with Linda alive and warm at my side, walking down the bleak road that skirts the prison, well-lit and windscoured and treeless. And through the ever present grumbling of the traffic came soft waves of a choir of men's voices, vague but reassuring as we crept guiltily below the towering wall, silent and songless in our freedom.
Since then we've had quite a few conversations, although they're slow and based heavily on long silences. I realise now that he's only interested in enigmas, or subtleties of behaviour or paradoxes, and that his shyness and his lack of interest inhibits him in a social sense. I've never heard him talk of the weather, or himself, or make a joke, or gossip. It's as if he censors his thoughts before passing them to speech, and is not an easy man to please. Say what you mean and mean what you say taken to its furthest limit. Melancholic, humourless, sincere, hushed, a rain cloud of a man who suddenly bursts and spatters rain, refreshing and without menace. Then somewhere the wind changes and he floats off, brooding, shadowy. Yet there he sits, like a dud bulb among the frenzied lights that chase each other across the caravan windows, up and down the roof supports and round and round the square. Every so often when a car gets stuck or breaks down or hurls its treasure of yellow plastic coins across the floor after a particularly nasty collision, Antonio has to abandon his look-out post and put things to rights. Then you will see a short, stocky, slow moving yet obviously powerful man, with an expressionless face and eyes that seem only to have a surface and no depth. And if the teenagers get rowdy and aggressive Antonio will restore order without voice, without threat, without speed. Return to his seat, put on some disco double beat, rebegin the thought processes and not a word to anyone. He's the sort of man that would have been a poet, if poetry wasn't so tied up with business, a subject that bores him. As it is, his interest in life finds expression only in these slow thoughtful conversations where he seems like a man walking in the dark, his hand cupped protectively in front of a candle. Candles, cojones, something worth guarding.