WORK IN PROGRESS : Raising the Roof : Circus Vargas’ tentmaster’s job begins early and ends after the show is finished.

It takes a lot of shouting to put up a circus tent. Also shrill whistles, hand signals, arguments and epithets. The men who do it have endurance and strong lungs.

“Do something, camel Jockey!”

“Ferme la boca!”

“Get it over here! You awake?

“Down, down, down! Come down! Please!”

Please? The last is Victorio Arata, Circus Vargas’ tentmaster, who does most of the yelling, but who keeps a kind of grace in his insults.

He has 18 men in his crew and 300 feet of dusty vinyl between him and those lashing ropes at the far end of the flattened big top.

Not that he stands still.

He circles the staked-out acre under a spider web of cables, checking the ropes, lashing some again, measuring slack allowance to the inch, hauling cables for a helper to stake, moving to one of the five 16-wheelers to position it for unloading equipment.

He yells at Dale Long, the sidewall man atop a near-empty truck bed, to finish handing down doorway framework.

On his next loop, he notices the load is unchanged, and mounts the truck in a bound to shout at Long, “Get it down, please!”

“I’m waiting for somebody to hand it down to!” Long shouts back at his boss, whom he towers over--as do most of the crew.

Arata, who likes to point out that he is tall for an Italian--looks his worker in the eye, grins and responds, “OK, where’s Marshall?”

Arata leaves to flush Marshall out of the trailer area. Marshall appears, munching on a poor-boy sandwich, to take his place amiably at the tailgate. The day began at 5 a.m., and lunch break will not come until everything is ready for the show, in late afternoon.

Arata stays to help carry the heavy gridwork into position. His own schedule is longer than the crew’s; he will not sleep until after the show tonight. He never misses a performance.

“I can’t really just stay away from it,” he says. Anyway, he must give his wife, Dione, support and feedback on her act with Colonel Joe, the lead elephant.

Arata was born into a circus family, the fifth generation. His father, he says, owned a small circus, which traveled throughout Europe, entirely staffed by extended family members.

It was different, there.

“(Europeans) consider it an art,” he says. “There will be a line of people waiting for autographs outside the tent.”

The thing that is the same everywhere is the feeling of belonging. Circus people around the world have a strong sense of kinship that bonds them like family.

“We feel like we are part of it--it’s not like a job,” Arata says.

By late morning, it is time to place the perimeter poles that will raise the tent to its knees, and he coaches two new men in positioning the poles for the tractor to raise.

“Skip one, and one you put in, OK? Every other one, OK?” he says.

Arata mounts the tractor, and disappears into a black hole of vinyl and diesel fumes beneath the tent, the nose of his vehicle appearing for each pole to be attached by a chain. The first one is right, the second wrong.

“No, no, l’otro!”

The tentmaster can give directions in six languages, including his native Italian.

Above the noise of the tractor, a sharp clanking sound begins. Deep inside the tent folds, men are turning the winch that will lift its 15 tons up the massive king poles. It will still be more than an hour before the big top takes form--too slow for the well-monitored schoolchildren who are watching the event from a safe distance. Soon, flanked by teachers, they march away in pairs to see the unloading of the elephants--the only other action on the deserted circus lot.

Arata completes a semi-circle of the tent, and dismounts from the tractor to check on the rest of his men, leaping over the engine rather than exit through the doorway. Later, carrying two 16-foot bleacher seats--on one shoulder--he looks like Barishnikov toting a ballerina.

Probably because he spent 20 years balancing on a high wire.

It’s been a decade since he left the act, just before turning 40--a fact that seems improbable, since he looks on the upside of 35 now, after a sleepless night.

In the early years, there was a duo act with his brother.

“He was the top man--I was balancing him on my head. He is thinking, ‘I am upside down, what if I fall?’ Smart people, do you know.”

So, the brother became a circus agent, and Arata went solo. And thereby saw the whole world, and eventually, Las Vegas, from behind footlights. It was his life’s dream--but one that took a lot of maintenance.

“There, you get stage fright,” he says. “In the circus you are far away. In Las Vegas, they (look you right) in the eyes.”

Arata does not like doing things “less than completely.” Just as he now drives a rig between towns, and spends much of his winter holiday at the circus grounds, he then aimed his life at perfecting new and more intricate acts, adding stress to tension. He would have quit young at any rate--it’s better to stop while the memories are good, he says.

Right now, being tentmaster suits him. He always took a hand in putting up the big top when he was a child, and when he was a performer.

He stops to look at the array of chrome, steel, lights, speakers and unidentifiable things spread out around the swelling tent.

“It’s like a gigantic Lego game,” he says, and is off to direct the setting of the quarter poles--the tent’s shoulders.

Arata and Dione--a rare American in the troupe--left the show once, and settled in Arizona. She opened a cosmetic shop and he sold RVs. It went OK. But when Circus Vargas played El Paso, they traveled 400 miles to see it. And at the end of two years, they signed on again, building a nursery into the trailer for their son.

Whether there will be a sixth-generation performer in the family is unsure. Anthony Arata is now 5, the age at which his father began performing as a clown. But Anthony’s schooling is a concern, and he may stay with his grandparents much of the year to gain a solid education.

“It is always easier to come back to the circus than to go out,” his father says, “because it gets into you.”

* WHERE AND WHEN

Circus Vargas will be performing from Friday through Tuesday at Highway 23 and Janss Road in Thousand Oaks. Adult admission prices run from $8.50 to $18.50 for ringside reserve seats. Children 11 years old and younger get into the back bleacher seating section free with coupons available at participating Alpha Beta stores and from several Ventura County merchants. For tickets or more information, call 371-0489.