Maximus and Massima

The trouble began when Massima Benvenuti, only 25, broke the distance record for a human cannonball set by her father, Maximus, in 1957.

She had not set out to do so, and was in fact unaware of her feat until Tommaso Ciccolini, owner and manager of the Ciccolini Family Circus, insisted on measuring the distance after she had nearly overshot the net. Her flight from the mouth of the cannon to the farthest point of the net, where Massima had landed, measured 60.06 meters, nearly two full meters farther than her father had flown.

Over the course of his career, Maximus Benvenuti had been blasted from a cannon more than 5,000 times. At the peak of the Ciccolini Family Circus’s success, he performed the feat once daily, six days a week, for 50 weeks a year. By the time of his retirement in 1962, he’d suffered numerous injuries, including multiple fractured vertebrae and herniated discs, and was also hard of hearing from the repeated blast of the “cannon.” (Not actually a cannon at all but a propulsion of compressed air, although the use of explosive pyrotechnics to mimic a cannon-like effect had proved just as deafening over time.) Maximus had three sons with his wife, Regina (and others with women not his wife), none of them with the desire to follow his airborne trail. As toddlers, Maximus had tested his children’s mettle by hurling them across the room into their beds, his sons reacting with terror unbecoming a human cannonball and weeping that continued past bedtime, until Regina (and the other mothers) begged him to stop.

Only Massima reacted with incongruent joy.

Barely 12 years old when she joined the Ciccolini Family Circus, “Magnificent Massima,” compact and lightweight, flew easily, although not very far at her mother’s insistence. (Regina had also insisted on earplugs, resolved not to have the same shouted conversations with her daughter that she was forced to endure with her husband.) Tommaso even commissioned a second cannon, firing father and daughter past each other into opposite nets. Massima also learned the art of the trapeze and, in a pinch, could fill in on the high wire. (Again, at her mother’s insistence, not without a net.) But Massima’s preference was always for the cannon. What she loved even more than flight was the acrobatics of landing — aiming herself, tucking chin to chest, and executing the somersault. This was within her control, while her air-propelled flight, for the most part, was not, and landing wrong could leave her maimed or dead. The trick was to aim for the back of the net while not overshooting it, accounting for the rebound that, if she fell short, would bounce her to solid ground, the primary cause of death for a human cannonball.

Massima’s record-breaking shot was a boost for the small traveling enterprise that had seen better days — a modest affair without elephants, lions, or bears. (Who could afford to feed them? Their strongman was trouble enough.) The circus’s bread and butter was spectacle: human cannonball, trapeze artists, tightrope walkers, and a bareback equestrian who somersaulted off the back of the circus’s lone animal through a flaming hoop. Also in residence were the requisite clowns and familiar sideshow acts: sword swallowers and knife throwers, fire-eaters, jugglers and tumblers, and the strongman who performed impressive feats of strength when his sciatica wasn’t flaring up. Various Ciccolinis filled many of the functionary positions — ticket takers, carpenters, drivers, and the like — as well as a handful of performers. Ana was the equestrian, brothers Luca and Luigi were tumblers, Giacomo did a little clowning. Francesco Ciccolini had replaced the knife-thrower, an outsider, when he nicked his assistant — also his wife, and Tommaso’s niece — with whom he had been feuding. Adding to the chaos of the circus, all the male family members went by “Chic” after their grandfather. There was a junior and Roman numerals III and IV, and the tumblers who went by Chic 1 and Chic 2 (the latter a sliver of a man who didn’t look like any of the others), but none of those distinctions mattered when someone simply shouted for “Chic,” as they did almost exclusively.

Massima’s unintended feat had boosted ticket sales over the current leg of the tour before its return for a brief, scheduled hiatus at the troupe’s home base just outside of Naples. From there, Massima was eager to hop on the ferry to Casamicciola to see her father and celebrate with her family. A crowd equal to half the village met her at the port, including many of her old classmates, the mayor, who happened to be her uncle, and their parish priest, who was also her older brother Enzo. Enzo was a former featherweight boxer who had experienced a religious epiphany after a fight, believing a crown of thorns was causing blood to run down his face when in fact the source of the miraculous flow was the cuts opened above both eyes by his opponent. The repetitive concussive force of the blows Enzo had suffered in the ring, along with exhaustion and heat stroke, contributed to his hallucination. Regina was grateful for her son to quit the ring, and also for her unexpected inside track to heaven via a holy family member.

Massima’s other brothers, Donato and Antonio, were also there. Donato was a postman who picked up his mail every weekday but only delivered it every other day, cutting his workload by half. The villagers on his route didn’t seem to mind, or if they did, did not wish to cause a ruckus. Who needs mail every single day? Antonio, a fisherman, felt the same way about fishing: He only took his boat out when the muse struck, and never early enough for a very good catch. He spent most of his time painstakingly weaving or repairing his nets, an act he found as peaceful and comforting as prayer. All the siblings were slender and compact, as was Maximus; only the sturdy Regina topped five feet. That efficiency of size is partly what made father and daughter such good human projectiles, and Enzo the boxer light on his feet. Despite their diminutive size, the children were also strong, like their mother, Enzo notching knockouts with both hands, Antonio pulling many times his weight in fish from the sea, Donato lugging two-day accumulations of mail every other day.

After nearly 30 minutes of the friendly commotion visited on her daughter, Regina scooped her under one great arm and flapped the other to disperse the crowd, leading her family home for a celebratory meal. The family had committed to speak nothing but English to help Massima prepare for a rumored appearance on America’s Ed Sullivan Show — just five years after the Beatles! Her mother was especially excited for Massima to meet the Italian mouse, Topo Gigio.

Massima trailed her family into the tiny bungalow where she and her brothers were born, glad to be home. Meat sizzled in pots over the stove, as it had for hours. Her brothers were already swabbing up puddles of olive oil with fresh-baked focaccia, but Massima headed straight for her father, for whom the scene at the dock would have proven difficult, at the head of the long family table.

“Papa!” she shrieked, and flew to him.

He beamed and struggled to lift himself with his cane, but she met him with a hug. He still weighed nothing and had even shrunk, vertebrae compressed like the floors of a collapsed building.

“Massima! What you did!” he said, hugging her back tightly as she lowered him to his chair. “I am so proud!”

“An accident,” she said, shrugging. “When I nearly overshot the net, Tommaso was certain I’d gone further than anyone.”

“Tommaso,” her mother repeated. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he rigged the cannon to overshoot. If he’d fired you completely out of the tent, he’d have sold more tickets.” She came and went with endless platters of food until the table underneath disappeared.

“Mama, so much food!” Massima exclaimed.

“Eat!” she demanded.

Enzo said grace and then they all ate like condemned prisoners, except Massima, who had to maintain a consistent weight around which the physics of her act had been precisely calculated. Maximus also barely nibbled, causing her concern. Was he ill?

“Your name means ‘greatest,’ you know,” Maximus told his daughter, and of course she did know. He’d told her often enough.

“And yours,” she reminded him.

“You’re not eating,” Regina told her husband, ladling a fresh meatball on his already stacked plate.

“I’ll need to get back into my suit,” he said, pushing his plate away.

Regina stopped chewing. She knew he meant the one with the sparkles in the white, red, and green tricolore of the Italian flag. Massima stopped eating too. Her brothers did not.

“Papa, what?”

“I’m so proud of you. But there can only be one greatest. I get my record back.”

“That’s crazy!”

“You can’t even walk,” Donato chortled, and Maximus struck him with his cane.

Antonio laughed and Enzo slapped the back of his head. Before Antonio could retaliate, their mother reminded her youngest son of the consequences of hitting a priest.

“You’ll go to hell!” she said, and turned to her husband. “And you’ll get there first, if you do this. For the philandering alone.”

“I have absolution,” he said, nodding at Enzo.

“He repented.” Enzo shrugged and continued eating. “That’s all it takes.”

“Papa! Why?” Massima demanded.

“I’m so proud of you.” He held his daughter’s hand. “It’s what we all want, our children to surpass us. You’re the only one.”

“Really?” Enzo protested, setting down his fork.

“I feed the hungry!” Antonio said.

“You sell fish,” his father dismissed him.

“Half the village gets their mail from me,” Donato said.

“Fish. Mail. These are not great things,” Maximus told them. “And God? You found him only after your brain was rattled. My Massima defies gravity to fly with angels.”

He still had not released her hand.

“Then why … ?”

“The record is mine.” He shrugged. “I had it all this time. And now you have it. But only for now. I end my retirement to reclaim it. After I’m gone, you take it back.”

He kissed her hand and returned it.

“Crazy old man,” Donato said and slurped, and when his father raised his cane again, Donato rose and took his plate to the next room.

“Tommaso will refuse,” Massima said.

“It was his idea,” Maximus said, and she was stunned. “He called from Bari to tell me of your feat and offer congratulations. Then he said, ‘You know, under the right conditions …’”

“Anything to sell tickets,” Antonio said.

Enzo shook his head. “The sin of greed.”

“Tickets,” Regina scoffed. “He wants Maximus dead. Ever since Luigi.”

She glared at her husband and he shrank a little and, in that moment, Massima knew: Tommaso’s wife, Nina, had been another of her father’s conquests, and Luigi (Chic 2, the little one) was the result of that affair. It struck her now that Luigi looked more like Enzo than Antonio did, and more like Antonio than Donato, and more like Donato than either of them. Luigi was her half-brother. She shuddered at the memory of a brief flirtation between them, one that never went anywhere, thank God. She made the sign of the cross, and so did Enzo out of habit.

“I said I was sorry,” Maximus told his wife.

“He repented,” Enzo repeated, and everyone resumed eating.

* * *

The next morning, Massima took the early ferry to Naples to try to put a stop to this madness.

“It’s done,” Tommaso told her. “See?”

He showed her a poster fresh from the printer featuring a photo of a much younger Maximus on whom an artist had added white whiskers, despite her father remaining clean-shaven.

“Because of Luigi?”

“You know about Luigi?”

“Mama told me.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Because of Nina. My wife, who your father slept with. Luigi is a gift.”

“You’ll kill Papa!”

“I don’t think so.”

“He’s old,” she shouted, and Tommaso — a decade older — raised an eyebrow. “Broken and brittle,” she corrected herself. “He needs a cane to cross the room.”

“I’ve no desire to see him dead,” Tommaso said. “Just humbled. Shamed and emasculated, as he made me feel. A shadow of the man he used to be. When he can’t even climb inside the cannon.”

He chuckled at the metaphor he’d just inadvertently created, of the man no longer able to slip in and out of things as he once did so easily of women.

“This is your plan?” she said. “To humiliate him? The people will be furious and want their money back!”

“No refunds,” he shrugged.

“I’ll quit.”

“You like flying too much,” he told her, and she did.

She rode the ferry back, worried for her father. Maximus never knew about G-forces or PSI or understood the other physics of his profession — velocity and mass, air pressure and wind flow, the pull of gravity that ended his flight. He knew only the sensations — the jolt that propelled him from the cannon, the impact of landing, and the flight in between. He was an acrobat, and fearless. Now he was only one of those.

Massima arrived home to find her father on the roof, her three brothers stretching one of Antonio’s fishing nets below, ready to catch him.

“Don’t you dare!” she shouted up at him.

“I have to practice my landing!” he implored her.

“Idioti!” she snarled, pulling the net free from her brothers.

“English,” Donato reminded her. “Ed Sullivan!”

“You’re just jealous Papa is going to have his record back,” Antonio scolded.

“However you got him up there,” she told her brothers, “get him down twice as carefully!”

“I’m not a baby!” her father shouted down at her.

She noticed he could not look down easily at her without bending forward at the waist. The fractured vertebrae in his neck had over time healed into immobility, while the rest of his spine was similarly rigid. He’d never be able to tuck his chin, much less execute the somersault necessary to land on his back.

“Just come down!” she shouted up and headed into the house.

Inside, her mother was mending holes in her husband’s costume.

“Still fits,” she marveled. “He’s gained maybe a single kilogram.”

“He’s shrunken five centimeters,” Massima said.

“I cuffed his pant legs,” her mother told her, showing them proudly.

Massima told her mother of Tommaso’s plan to humiliate her Maximus. While she had no desire to see her father humbled and embarrassed, it was preferable to watching his bones break under the sudden impact of a net landing.

“Stupido Tommaso,” Regina laughed. “All these years, and he still knows nothing of your father. Of course he goes into the cannon.”

Massima knew her mother was right.

“There!” Regina declared, holding up her husband’s finished costume as he entered with his sons.

“Please don’t be jealous, little one,” Maximus said.

“‘Little one?’ Mama had to cuff your pants because you’re shrinking.”

“My love,” he said, taking his costume from his wife and admiring it. “I try on.”

He kissed her on the top of her head and headed to the next room as Massima’s brothers tried to disappear, but Massima held them.

“He can’t even bend his neck. The broken bones are fused like paste,” she told them. “How can he somersault into the net?”

“We were going to catch him on his belly,” Antonio said.

“At 100 kilometers an hour, his bones will shatter.”

“Discussion is pointless,” her mother said. “Now that he’s committed, your father will not walk away from the cannon.”

Now she was sewing a seam in his other suit, the one he wore to funerals, and likely his own. A tear fell and she brushed it away. There had been a time Regina wanted him dead, during all the philandering. But not now.

Massima’s father entered the room in costume, arms outstretched, fringe dangling.

“Ta-da!” he said, presenting himself.

Massima knew, if Papa was going to break her record, she had to help him.

She convinced Tommaso to prepare for a water landing. It was not uncommon, when the circus performed outdoors, to fire the cannon into a nearby lake or river when one was available. Bigger target, difficult to miss, a spectacular splash followed by a dramatic moment — milked by the performer — before they surfaced with a wave to applause. A water landing wouldn’t require her father to somersault and, as long as he met it cleanly, it would be less stressful on his body than the sudden jolt of the net.

Tommaso liked the idea immediately. Outdoors, he could sell more tickets. Although he still believed Maximus would fail to go through with his performance, preparations were made to fire him into the port at Molo Beverello.

Massima began her preparations, ready to make any necessary last-minute adjustments for wind and weather conditions on the day of his performance. Most critical were the calculations for velocity and mass, figured with a same-size-and-weight dummy under the same conditions in which her father would be fired. Enzo brought a statue from his church, a hollow plaster figure of the blessed Mother that was the same height and weight as Maximus. He wondered if this wasn’t a blasphemy but believed he’d be forgiven; he was after all trying to save the life of his father. With the cannon set on the edge of the dock, Massima and her regular team oversaw the firing, again and again, of the plaster virgin into the Tyrrhenian Sea, where the brothers quickly fished it into Antonio’s boat with a net. Like a miracle, she landed in almost the exact same spot every time, nearly 66 meters, well past the record. If Massima was going to break it again at a later date, it would prove difficult.

On the morning of Maximus’s performance, there was one more precaution Massima had come up with to compensate for her father’s physical limitations. The spine, knee, and core strength essential to stay as rigid as possible during the blast were beyond his present condition. Her solution was to wrap him tightly neck to toe in tape, effectively mummifying him, to remain rigid in flight.

“Can you lift your arms in front of you?”

He did, raising them overhead, but not without difficulty.

“Forget your instincts,” she told him. “No flip. No somersault. Hit the water in a clean dive.”

“I’ve done the water splash before,” he reminded her.

“No theatrics! The dramatic waiting. Swim to the top, and let Antonio do the rest.”

“All my children there to see me. What a blessed day.”

It was time to tell him what she knew.

“Tommaso thinks you won’t go through with it. It’s okay not to. We’d all be much happier if you did not.”

“I wish I never made love to his wife,” he said, “but she deserved to be with a man before she died.”

“I’m your daughter! Don’t tell me these things!”

“I have to pee,” he told her.

She sighed. “I’ll ask Mama to cut a hole.”

But Maximus had no intention of letting his wife that near his manhood with scissors. By the time she appeared in the bathroom doorway, he was already urinating happily through the hole he’d carefully made himself.

“I wish you’d change your mind and come,” he said.

“I’ve seen it before,” Regina said. “If this one goes wrong, it’s better I don’t.”

“My love,” he said again. He kissed her and they held each other a long time.

* * *

The port was packed with spectators, each paying 5,000 lire to see Italy’s former greatest human cannonball attempt to reclaim his record … or perish in the sea. Tourists mingled with locals and a lone furtive American in a suit and sunglasses, rumored to be from The Ed Sullivan Show. Tommaso Ciccolini was pleased at the turnout but angered to find a ferry full of Casamicciolans bobbing off shore, refusing to dock, ready to watch the show for free. He considered aiming the cannon directly at the ferry for a warning shot, but relented. He still believed Maximus would withdraw.

Maximus arrived on a motorcycle driven by his daughter, both in their spangled costumes and helmets. His legs, stiff with tape, stuck out on both sides as they circled the parking lot to cheers and applause. She steered for the cannon, still horizontal and pointing straight out to sea. Massima dismounted the motorcycle and removed her helmet as her father hopped off with an ease that surprised her. Tommaso approached and goaded the crowd to cheer some more, and the three of them waved. Tommaso addressed Maximus through a frozen smile.

“What do you think you’re doing, you crazy fool?”

“Reclaiming my prize!”

“It’s suicide,” Tommaso said.

“It’s murder,” Massima corrected him.

“I absolve you,” Maximus promised, and turned to him as the crowd quieted. “I’m sorry. I never should have slept with Nina. She loved you, you know. As I do Regina. What can I say? Sometimes, the devil whispers and we listen. Forgive me.”

“Please!” Tommaso begged. “Don’t do this! It’s okay! I’ll even refund everyone the money.”

He began to weep and Maximus spied Luigi nearby.

“Does the boy know?”

“He does not.”

Maximus waved Luigi to join them.

“Good luck, Mr. Benvenuti!” Luigi gushed, thrilled to be in his presence.

“Thank you, Luigi!” Maximus said. “You know, your father is a great man.”

Tommaso blubbered harder now, and Maximus continued.

“He’s brave. Sometimes foolhardy. He can be too proud. But a good man with a good heart, and he loves all his children.”

As it slowly dawned on Tommaso that Maximus was talking about himself, he stopped weeping.

“Let’s get on with this,” he said, and led Luigi away. “Good luck.”

“Remember what we said,” Massima reminded her father.

“Arms in front. Cleave the water. Surface, and let Antonio do the rest.”

“Don’t forget these,” she said, offering a pair of earplugs. But her father declined.

“I want to hear the crowd.”

She understood. He kissed her forehead and took a step toward the cannon as the band played a dramatic fanfare. It was the usual practice for the human cannonball to stand on the mouth of the cannon as it was raised to a firing position, and then lower himself inside. Maximus couldn’t do that, so instead, the circus strongman lifted him, secure and rigidly taped, as the crowd cheered once more, and two acrobats helped him slide feet first inside the barrel. The band segued to a low, dramatic thrum as the cannon barrel slowly rose and then stopped at the angle predetermined by their tests with the Virgin Mary.

Massima gazed offshore where her three brothers waited in Antonio’s boat several meters from the target. Tommaso was weeping again, and a sudden breeze caused Massima to turn in alarm, too late, as the cannon fired.

Maximus flew, rigid as an arrow, arms spread wide like a bird, and grinning. The unexpected tailwind sent him faster and farther than expected and, as his arc began to wane, recalling the instructions of his daughter, he brought both arms in front of him to cleave the water, overshooting his target and even Antonio’s boat with a clean splash.

“Seventy meters!” Tommaso shouted, and the crowd on the dock cheered while the ferry from Casamicciola rocked under the exultations of its passengers.

Massima was already in the water, swimming like a dolphin, while Antonio swung his net to the other side of the boat. Enzo prayed, and Donato was just glad not to be delivering mail today. Maximus hadn’t surfaced, and now they’d also lost sight of Massima. Only then did the crowd realize something was wrong, and a hush fell across the dock while the ferry stilled.

Suddenly Massima surfaced on the far side of Antonio’s boat, Maximus in her grasp, his head bobbing with unconsciousness. All three brothers leaped into the water, meaning there was no one in the boat to help pull him up.

“Idioti,” she sputtered as they struggled to get him, and themselves, aboard.

They forced water from Maximus’s lungs and he was driven by ambulance to the hospital where, after cutting him from the tape that wrapped him, they discovered several freshly slipped discs. But otherwise, Maximus was fine.

He returned home where his wife resolved to make him fat so he’d never fit inside a cannon again. Over the next few weeks, he received so much fan mail from around the world that Donato had to deliver every single day.

Massima rejoined the Ciccolini Family Circus, where Tommaso urged her to attempt to break her father’s long-distance record once more. She refused, and made a bid for a record of her own — highest shot by a human cannonball. Crowds came from across Europe to see what became her signature act, launched 60 meters in the air and caught on her downward arc by a perfectly timed trapeze artist — her half-brother, Luigi — who deposited her with a somersault flourish into a nearby body of water, barely raising a splash. She liked to stay under as long as possible, breaking the surface to thunderous, relieved applause.