Текст книги "Under the Big Top: A Season with the Circus"

Автор книги: Bruce Feiler

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

“But why would you leave your family?” I asked.

“Because I want to buy a house, a car. I don’t want to raise my kids on the road. Let’s just say I get married—” Danny halted himself in mid-sentence. Maybe the rumor was true, I thought. Was Danny not telling me something? He returned quickly to his tale. “I couldn’t afford it. My father gets okay money, but it has to support four families. He couldn’t afford to give me more right now, and the truth is, he’ll probably never be able to. There used to be a lot of large families around the circus. But look around, we’re one of the only ones left. Nobody else can afford it.” He sat up in his chair and straightened his brace. “Look, man, I want my children to go to school. I wish I had gone. I wish I could have played football, baseball. I might have sucked, but at least I would have had the chance. Here, you work every day, you live on the road, and for what? You wake up every morning hurting, all sore and shit. You’re ruining your body. When I first arrived here I bruised my body and couldn’t work for a month. Last year I tore all the ligaments in my shoulder. This year I broke my collarbone. My brother broke his foot. This is a dangerous business.”

Shelagh Sloan came out of her trailer in a bathrobe and slippers and asked the workers to turn down the music. For a moment the sound of rap disappeared, only to return as soon as she left. The smell of exhaust from Big Pablo’s generator permeated the air.

“But you’re good at what you do,” I said. “How can you give it up?”

Danny slumped back into the chair. His arms dangled between his knees. Since his accident several weeks before he had let his ponytail grow raggedly uncut and his postadolescent fuzz grow spottily unshaved.

“I might have been good,” he said. “But I’m too tall. I used to do the three-and-a-half in the flying act. I might have done the four, or the four-and-a-half, but for what? They don’t give you more money or shit. Let’s face it, people don’t come to the tent to see the quadruple somersault. I don’t mean to put anybody down, but look at the program. When you open it up, who are the stars: Kathleen Umstead and Sean Thomas. Kathleen is finished. Nobody remembers her. And Sean? He has a good act, but all he does is get into a cannon and get shot out every show. Anybody can learn that. All it takes is several months.”

“So why are they the stars?”

“Because they’re blond, because they’re American, and because the owners don’t want this place to look like a lettuce farm.”

It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. “They’re stars because the show says they are stars. And because the public likes flashy acts. Yet to be a flyer, to be an acrobat, even to be a juggler you have to practice for many years. But the owners don’t care about that, and the public doesn’t either.”

“So how are you going to decide what to do?” I asked.

“My cousin already said I could come join him. I’ve been thinking about it for the last several weeks. I spoke with my parents about it and they really don’t want me to go. My brothers tell me it’s up to me, as long as I serve out the contract. Basically I don’t know what I want to do, but I do know I have to decide soon…” Danny drifted into silence. He was staring at the ground. After a moment he looked at my feet.

“Those are ugly shoes,” he said.

This time I didn’t hesitate. “That’s an ugly face.”

Danny looked up from the ground. “Well done,” he said. “You’re almost there.”

“So what happened?”

“What do you mean what happened?” Big Man said. “I stole some tapes, and I got caught. Cost me three hundred dollars and eight days in prison. I didn’t get any help from the show. It all came out of my pocket.”

Actually his mother’s pocket. The man they call Big Man was standing in front of the side door of the tent making sure no one along Route 1 in Princeton decided to sneak into the circus. In truth there weren’t any seats available inside the tent even if anyone did get in, and in any case they didn’t stand much of a chance of getting by Big Man. Big Man was, as advertised, big—close to three hundred pounds, in fact, with dark black skin, off-white eyes, and one prominent gold incisor. Somewhere around thirty years old, he had first joined the show when we were in North Carolina. Before that he had been working at a warehouse and living in a mission in Orlando when Bill Lane, the man known as Buddha, made his monthly run of homeless shelters, halfway houses, and Salvation Army hostels in South Florida looking for potential workers. Receiving one hundred dollars for every man he delivers to the circus, Buddha promises his prospects a world of travel and adventure in order to get them into his van. Once they arrive at the tent, however, many find themselves only halfway over the rainbow. Some quit on the spot, some hang on until the first rain, but a few manage to enjoy the routine. They get a job, a bed, three meals a day, plus seventy-five dollars a week. And for better or for worse, they also become part of one oversized, slightly racially segregated traveling soap opera and circus sideshow.

Big Man had been one of the few newcomers in the course of the year who openly enjoyed the camaraderie of show life. After one of our gags he would usually comment on some detail we had changed on a whim. He loved the big-breasted nurse in the stomach pump. He laughed at my painting the burning house. To me he seemed to be making an effort to feel a part of the circus.

“What happened was, they caught me on one of those overhead cameras. I had my Clyde Beatty T-shirt on. The one that’s a little too small.” I smiled at the thought: wasn’t everything he wore too small? “Anyway, they brought me into the station. I agreed to come to court, but that night the show moved to Vineland. I had no way to get back to Voorhees. I thought they would just let it slip.”

The police didn’t see it that way. The next day, minutes before the 4:30 show in Vineland, the local sheriff rolled onto the lot, walked up to Doug’s daughter, Blair, who was selling elephant ride tickets, and demanded a halt to the show. Someone on the lot was in contempt of court, he said, and the circus could not go on until the fugitive was apprehended. All this seemed a bit histrionic for two cassette tapes, but five minutes later Big Man was guarding the big top from the backseat of a patrol car. By that evening he was dreaming about it from jail. From this vantage point, even Truck No. 63 seemed like paradise, and a week later, having served his time, Big Man walked out onto Route 1 in South Jersey and began hitchhiking north. The next morning he arrived in Princeton.

“I actually never lost my job,” he said. “When I got back the manager told me I couldn’t go into malls anymore. Later Mr. Holwadel gave me permission. He told me next time I want something I should just go ahead and pay for it.”

“So how long are you going to stay this time?”

“Until I get some money. I only make seventy-five a week, you know. I try to save as much as possible, but that’s hard. Now if I could sell popcorn or something, that would be easier. But they won’t let me.”

“Why’s that?”

“They might tell you something else. But put it this way: I’m the wrong color.”

“The wrong color?”

“White people don’t want to buy popcorn from a black man. Look at the butchers, all of them are white. I don’t have anything against the circus. I like it, but it’s a prejudiced place. The only black man who makes any money is New York, the crew boss, and he has to work for it…” Big Man straightened his glasses. “Look at you,” he continued. “You’ve got it made.”

“Me?” I said, awkwardly.

“You. You get to work in the ring and make everybody laugh. You live in a nice Winnebago. You can take ladies in there. Look at me: I live in that sleeper and if I want to have a lady in there I have to put five people out. And hell, I wouldn’t want to take a lady in there anyway.”

“So do you think you can save money?” I asked.

“Unfortunately I have to take a draw tomorrow. I need fifty dollars to have a tooth pulled. I went to the dentist in the last town and he wanted sixty-seven. I didn’t have it. New York said he didn’t have it either. I even went to Rob the clown. I can’t wait any longer. This morning I almost couldn’t work. After we put the tent up I had to go lie down under the truck and go to sleep. When I woke up it was time to go to my door. I didn’t even have time to change my clothes.” He was wearing blue jeans covered in mud and a dirty blue mechanic’s shirt. “I think I’ll have enough saved up to leave this fall.”

“And then what will you do?”

“I’d like to work in a warehouse again,” he said. “I can make about nine or ten dollars an hour. I can live on that, help out my mother. She’s not doing too well. I can get an apartment, fix it up real nice, and start changing my life around. I’d go to church.”

“Church?” I said, surprised.

“Yes, I’m a church person, child. I come from Carolina originally. What I’d like to do is get me a job, find me a lady, and have us a nice wedding in a church. I could turn my life around, you know. All I need is a real job. Right now this is the best I got.”

The Amazing Art of Hair Suspension

“Oh, my God. I don’t believe it…”

“You mean she’s going to…”

“Wait a minute, this can’t be real…”

Michelle Quiros, like a bird of paradise, glides from the wings of the darkened tent into a light that ignites the plumes that sprout from her Napoleonic hat. Dressed regally in a flowing black cape embroidered with pink-and-white fleurs-de-lis, she drifts into the ring with a silent flutter of chiffon, ruffling the feathers of her never-ending train with a not quite flirtatious quiver. Draped on the arms of her tuxedoed chaperon, she appears for a moment like a lithe ballerina in the pastel fantasies of Degas. That is, before she takes off her hat.

“Ladies and gentlemen, what yoooou are about to seeeee, is an amazing display of haaair suspension…”

Michelle steps forward into the center of the ring, flitters her arms like a butterfly, and in one dramatic sweeping motion flings the cape off her shoulders and into the arms of her consort. For a moment she poses—both arms in the air—as the next layer of costume, long black pantaloons, settles over her fragile body. Then, almost coyly and with no apparent chagrin, she carefully removes her hat. And suddenly there it is: it’s almost imperceptible, it’s draped in black velvet, many find it fascinating, a few even revolting. Sticking out of the top of Michelle’s well-oiled head of hair is a three-inch solid-steel ring.

“You don’t really think…”

“I’m going to be sick…”

“In ring three…,” the ringmaster calls, “from Brazil, Elizabeth Crystal, and in ring one”—his voice escalates—“from Mexico, Margarita Michelle…”

Elizabeth Crystal, alias Lupe Rodríguez, struts to the center of ring three, while her cousin Margarita Michelle, alias Michelle Quiros, walks to the middle of ring one. Michelle takes a bow as her attendant attaches the ring sticking out of her head to a three-quarter-inch cable hung from a pulley at the crest of the tent. With a slight lift and a gentle push around the ring, the twenty-three-year-old Michelle slowly rises into the air and begins to slither out of her next layer of clothes. First she takes off her left shoe, then her right, and tosses them to her attendant, who is actually her husband. Next she unzips the pantsuit down her back and lets it ripple down her legs and drift teasingly toward the earth.

“It’s all a matter of presentation,” she told me in a voice as elegant as her act. “I’m trying to gather attention, to draw your mind to my act. When I take off my cape I’m still wearing my pantsuit, but when I take off my pantsuit all I have on is my bikini. At that point you look at my hair.”

And look at her hair people do. Though naturally brown, it has been dyed black for the act. Though fairly brittle, it has been wetted down for pliancy. And though relatively thin, it is clearly strong enough to support her body weight. Still there’s the trouble of that ring: How did it get there? What does it do? And where does it go at night? These questions, like Michelle, just linger in the air, cryptic and aloof. Indeed, as she hangs in the dark for a moment before turning her own set of tricks, Michelle’s hair pulls up on her scalp, which in turn pulls up on her forehead, which in turn pulls up on the edges of her eyes, giving them an oddly Asian look—the essence of enigma.

“The act was originally done by Chinese acrobats hundreds of years ago,” explained Michelle. “When they did it they used to drink tea and fold their legs, sort of like having a tea break in the air. In Mexico they bring a lot of Chinese acrobats into the circus. My grandmother learned it from one of them. She taught it to my mother, and my mother taught it to me.”

Michelle started practicing the act when she was eleven years old. “I told my father one day, ‘I want to tie my hair up like Mom.’ I stood on a chair and he hooked my hair to a cable. At first I didn’t even kick my feet out, but then, little by little, I slowly lifted my body weight to see what it felt like. At first it hurt, it hurt a lot, but I wanted to do it so much I didn’t care. I vowed I wouldn’t cry.”

After a few months Michelle was ready to kick out the chair and hang alone for several minutes. Within six months she was ready to try a few tricks. Then tragedy intervened.

“We were on Ringling at the time. My mother was doing her act in the center ring. She was spinning in the air one night when the cable holding her up suddenly snapped, dropping her thirty-five feet to the floor. It was horrible. She broke a vertebra in her neck. She fell into a coma. It was a miracle she didn’t die. For several months she stayed in the hospital and after that we moved back to Florida. We stayed home the whole year. I couldn’t stand to see her upset, so that’s when I told my dad, ‘I want to do the act. I want to help the family…I want to be like Mom.’”

Michelle had just turned twelve years old.

After stripping to her bikini, Michelle is ready for her first trick. Starting from a stationary position several feet above the ground, Michelle slips one neon-green hoop around each of her thighs and spins them toward each other. Moving deliberately, she then slips one hoop on each of her elbows, one on each of her forearms, and one on each of her hands. At this stage she looks like an octopus spinning eight mini-Hula-Hoops. Next, the three members of the prop crew who are controlling the rope that holds her hair slowly step backward and hoist her upward as if the rings around her limbs are propelling her into the air. As if to illustrate the point, the band plays “The Wind Beneath My Wings.” The trick could easily seem comical, instead it is sublime.

“My father always taught me: ‘It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.’ He’s always told me you can do something very difficult, but if you don’t do it nice the people won’t appreciate it. But if you do something simple and you know how to make it elegant, the act will look nicer and the people will like it.”

With her sparrowlike body, her graceful figure, her caramel-candy skin, Michelle always looks nice in the ring…even when she’s on fire. For her second trick, Angel lights three juggling torches and carefully tosses them up to his wife. Occasionally she would catch one on the wrong end, several times she actually singed the hair on her forearms, and on one frightful occasion during the fourth week of the year the torch unfortunately alit on her bangs and set her hair ablaze. “Oh, the smell!” was all she could remember. “What delight!” the crowd responded: they thought it was part of the act.

“I’ve noticed that people like things that look strange. If I just hung by my hair, at first they would be ‘Oh, wow.’ Then, after a while, they would say, ‘Big deal.’ I have to make it exciting. Not only can I hang by my hair but I can juggle while hanging by my hair. That’s the way people think.”

Ironically, by hanging by her hair thirty feet above the ground, even more, by juggling three fiery clubs while hanging by her hair thirty feet above the ground, Michelle does nothing but undermine any bond she might feel with the audience. The reason is simple: they all think she’s odd.

“I want the audience to think my act is elegant, but I don’t always get that. There are always people who say to me, ‘Wow, that was beautiful.’ But then I see a lot of people who are laughing. I guess I understand. If I had never seen this act and I saw it in a show I don’t know how I would react. When I see these people, at first it upsets me, but then I try to be respectful.”

Sometimes, she confesses, it’s hard to be respectful with so many silly questions.

“For some reason everybody asks me if it’s really my hair. What do they think, that it’s just a wig with bobby pins in it? Some people think I have an invisible rope under my arms. One guy came up to me and said, ‘So, you have a screw in your head, right?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I was joking, of course, but the guy said, ‘I thought so.’ Sometimes people are really dumb.”

Michelle was not alone in this thought. Her difficulties with the audience were part of a larger problem that all circus performers seem obliged to endure: most people don’t think circus people are real; they think performers are fake. Just as many visitors asked Michelle if she had a screw in her head, an equal number asked her wirewalking husband if he had magnets on his feet. They asked Khris Allen if he sedated his tigers. They asked Sean if he had a double who slid into the cannon while he ran all the way around the tent and appeared magically at the bottom of his air bag 3.5 seconds later. In Ladson, South Carolina, a local woman came up to a table in Burger King where I was sitting along with several other performers. An entire section of the restaurant had been taken over by the show for a party. “I recognize you people,” the woman said. “Aren’t you from the circus?”

“That’s right,” replied Mary Chris Rodríguez.

“What are you doing here?” the woman asked.

“We’re having a birthday party for our son.”

“Oh,” the woman said. “You mean you’re normal?”

While I found this badge of oddity sad (it would seem like quite an accomplishment to be considered weird in America today), I could see how it developed. Many of the novels I read about circus life seemed to have characters that were psychopathic, satanic, or, worse, half man, half animal—a trapeze artist with the body of a swan, a sideshow prophet with the flippers of a turtle. Perhaps even more important, most of the people who came to see our show had grown up on a steady diet of television and movies and had rarely seen real people performing real feats. You can’t rewind a circus act, you can’t replay it either. The essence of the show is that it is real—you can smell it, you can feel it, you thrill with excitement while it happens in front of you, you tremble with fear when it happens above you, and if you decide to walk around in it, you might get muddy or sticky or covered in dung but you’ll definitely know from any spot in the tent that this is the one thing you’ve done all day that isn’t operated by remote control.

Lamentably, disbelief among audience members often translates into disrespect toward performers. I learned this matter-of-factly in Winchester, Virginia. We had pulled into town on a Thursday night for our twelfth annual stop at the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival, a weeklong event celebrating its sixty-sixth year that swells the sleepy Southern town of 32,000 to a population of over 100,000 and fills hotels from Harpers Ferry to Harrisonburg. The Garden Club’s Annual Ladies’ Lunch on Friday had been sold out for months. Saturday’s Sports Breakfast for Men had no tickets available. Sunday’s Blue Grass Festival was guaranteed to be packed. As a result, those looking for something to do flocked to anything available, and probably the best thing available at 6 A.M. on Friday was the tent raising of the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus. Besides, it was free.

By 7 A.M. close to a thousand people had arrived at the little hill alongside Route 50, a number not only larger than all our tent-raising crowds put together but also larger than many of our paying audiences as well. The problem was that even though the crowd may have been our largest to date, our lot was one of the smallest and my camper was parked right up against the stake line near the front door, the best spot, it turned out, for viewing tent raising. Beginning at 7:30, there was constant bumping, scraping, and shoving against my camper. At about 8:00, in response to one particularly annoying bump that roused me from my sleep, I knocked against my back window where the crowds were gathered. The bumping didn’t stop. Ten minutes later, when someone actually climbed on my fender to get a better view, I opened my blind to reveal that I was sleeping inside. The rocking didn’t ebb. Finally, at 8:24, two women in their early twenties actually climbed the ladder on the back of my camper and sat on the roof of my mobile home. “I am not an animal,” I wanted to shout. “I am a human being.”

These sorts of incidents only got worse the farther north we went. Several weeks later, in Pennsylvania, a kind-looking gentleman holding his school-age daughter by the hand stopped me while I was in makeup and asked me if his daughter could urinate on one of the stakes in Clown Alley. In New Jersey they didn’t even bother to ask. I walked back to my trailer during intermission in Freehold and found a mother supervising two young boys who were urinating directly on the back of my Winnebago. “Excuse me,” I said, “I live here.” A minute later, after going inside, I walked around the corner once more, to find that the boys were continuing to do their business and the mother had started to laugh.

The irony of this denigration of performers as unreal is that circus people are actually quite expert at re-creating real life on the road. Half the families on the show had kids; ninety-five percent had pets. Seasonal events were celebrated with all the traditional trappings: in the spring there was an Easter egg hunt for children inside the tent; in the summer a special Fourth of July picnic in the cookhouse with steaks on the open grill; and in the fall a high-stakes Halloween costume contest in the center ring, followed by a trick-or-treating bonanza in which children marched down the trailer line knocking on everyone’s door. Community gambling pools were particularly popular. In the most hotly contested wager of the year, participants were invited to pay five dollars and select a fifteen-minute time period when they thought Susie, one of the ticket sellers and wife of the prop boss, would have her baby. When she had a little girl at 12:10 A.M. in Annapolis, the show’s mechanic won $175. But all these activities were “abnormal” compared to the one feature of life on the show that convinced me beyond all doubt that circus people are abnormally normal. In the course of nine months on the road, in addition to dozens of birthday parties, two proposals of marriage, several baby showers, and one Pentecostal revival meeting, the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus hosted not one but two communal Tupperware parties (actually they’re called “demonstrations”), featuring “games, mini-prizes and special previews of products designed to ease the ‘bumps’ of life on the road.”

Of course, life on the road does have its bumps, and therein lies the ultimate difference between circus and townie life. Most town people know where their job is, where the nearest gas station is, where the best supermarket is. All they crave is a little glamour, excitement, and travel. Circus people, meanwhile, have all the glamour, excitement, and travel they can take, but would gladly pay for information leading to the nearest pay telephone. In the end the only thing abnormal about life in the circus is the lack of telephone service. It’s for that reason that normally sane people walk through the pouring rain with pockets full of change or stand in the blazing heat through the middle of the day all for a chance to worship at the altar of Ma Bell. For these troubadours of the twentieth century the telephone offered the only way to escape from their normally isolated world. Some, like Kris Kristo, often used the phone to call girls; others, like Dawnita Bale, usually used it to call home. But a few, like Michelle and Angel, have used it in the course of their circus lives for arguably its most salient real-life function: conducting a long-distance romance.

As they mingle in the center ring, she hanging by her hair in bikini evening wear, he guiding her gently from the ground in bolero dinner jacket, Michelle and Angel seem like a circus fairy tale come true. The look in his eyes is adoring and passionate. The smile on her face is loving and calm. But the story behind his look, her smile, is anything but serene.

“I first saw her when I was practicing about eight years ago,” Angel said. A dashing Spanish conquistador type, Angel has piercing eyes, ink-black hair, and a sprightly matador step. In addition he boasted a naughty smile. “I was twenty-three at the time. She was sixteen. I thought she was kind of young—”

“Plus he had a girlfriend.”

“Well, of course,” he said. “But I had many girlfriends at the time.”

“Many is not the word, I’d say. Kris Kristo is nothing compared to you and your brother.”

Angel breathed a guilty sigh. Sitting in their brand-new Shasta trailer on a Monday night in early summer, Angel was soaking his feet in hot water and wrapping an open sore in the palm of his hand where he had caught himself on the high wire. Michelle spooned some vanilla ice cream into three bowls, gave one to each of us, and settled into an easy chair as if she were about to watch a Hallmark romance on their portable television. In this case the romance was hers.

“So, anyway,” Angel continued, “I had this friend who told Michelle’s father that I wanted to go out with his daughter. He said, ‘Well, he should know I’ve got a gun, and the one who goes near my daughter…Pow!’ I was standing nearby when he said this and I thought: Uh-oh, better stay away. Still, I saw something in her I liked, and I never forgot what I saw. Two years later she came to the show again. She looked more like a woman that time. We started dating. Two weeks later I asked her to marry me. I thought it would be okay.”

It wasn’t. For the next two years Michelle and Angel were forced to conduct their engagement in secret. They were on different shows at the time—in a different town almost every night—making communication all but impossible. But still they persisted, and at the end of that period, when Michelle, her sister, and her mother, remarkably recovered from her fall, were invited by Kenneth Feld to do a mother-and-daughter hair hang on the Ringling Show, the two lovers were reunited. Unfortunately, their families were reunited as well.

“It all started with one family on the show,” Michelle said. “They were Catholic and became born-again Christians. After they were born again they started talking to people on the show. About the Bible and stuff. My family was all Catholic, but we never read the Bible. We followed what the priest said and believed it. But if you read you find out the truth. So this family showed the truth to my mother and she became a Christian. It took about a year. Then Angel found out about my mom and he told me, ‘You better not change.’ He even told me if I ever became a Christian like her that we were going to break up.”

“And I was serious,” he added. “My family is Catholic. In Spain we are very proud. That’s the way we are. My parents would not understand.”

“Of course, I told him I was not going to do that. At that time all my family was against my mom. Then six months after that my dad became a Christian, too. And a month later, me. At the time Angel didn’t know what it means to be a Christian…”

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It means I read the Bible and realized that it is the word of God. To be Christian is to live like Christ, or as close to Christ as possible. Like Jesus when he walked the earth. Nobody can be perfect. God knows that. But he knows you are trying. You stop drinking, you stop smoking. Around here they say we sacrifice chickens. But if you live a crazy and wild life like Sean Thomas then that’s considered normal.”

“And were you prepared to end the relationship?”

“If it was for God.” Her answer was firm. “For me, God is first. Before anybody—my mother, my father, even him. Of course, I didn’t tell him right away. In fact, I said I would never talk to him about it. For a while he knew I was going to some Bible study. I told him that was all. Then one day my father was going to church to get baptized. I didn’t want to go, but my father begged me to go with him. I agreed. Angel was standing outside and he saw me leave with my family. He gave me the dirtiest look. It was then that he knew what was happening.”

“And I was so mad,” he seethed. “I was on fire. Boiling, I’d say. I had told her, ‘If you go to that church we will break up.’ Now I knew it was over.”

“The next day he asked for the ring back. I gave it to him, then I tried to calm him down. ‘Oh, Angel, don’t get mad,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing wrong. I just went with my father.’ I tried to convince him, but he was angry. ‘No, I don’t care,’ he shouted. I tried eight hundred ways to calm him down, but none worked. By the end of the day everyone on the show knew it was over. I thought we would never speak again.”

There was a long pause in the conversation. Their gloomy faces were reflected in the oversized mirrors and glassy windows that gave their compact trailer a larger-than-life feel. Peach pillows and blown-up photographs covered a seamless path from sofa to ceiling. On the wall was an ornate scripted plaque that said: “En este hogar somos cristianos. Aquí todos son bienvenidos.” (“In this home are Christians. Here everyone is welcome.”)