Avenue of Mysteries (39 page)

“Hi, Mister,” Consuelo said, from under the table. This time, the little girl in pigtails was not alone; Pedro had crawled under the table with her. Juan Diego peered at them.

Josefa had not seen the children—she was leaning across the table, involved in some unreadable sign language with Clark.

Miriam looked under the table; she saw the two children peering up at them.

“I guess the lady doesn’t love geckos, Mister,” Pedro was saying.

“I don’t think she
misses
geckos,” Consuelo said.

“I don’t love geckos in my ceviche,” Miriam told the children. “I don’t miss geckos in my
salad,
” she added.

“What do
you
think, Mister?” the little girl in pigtails asked Juan Diego. “What would your
sister
think?” she asked him.

“Yeah, what would—” Pedro started to say, but Miriam leaned down to them; her face, under the table, was suddenly very close to the kids.

“Listen, you two,” Miriam told them. “Don’t ask him what his sister thinks—his sister was killed by a lion.”

That sent the kids away; they crawled off in a hurry.

I didn’t want to give them nightmares, Juan Diego was trying to tell Miriam, but he couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to
frighten
them! he tried to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come. It was as if he’d seen Lupe’s face under the table, although the girl with pigtails, Consuelo, was much younger than Lupe had been when she died.

His vision suddenly blurred again; this time, Juan Diego knew it wasn’t the Viagra.

“Just tears,” he said to Miriam. “I’m fine—there’s nothing wrong. I’m just crying,” he tried to explain to Josefa. (Dr. Quintana had taken his arm.)

“Are you all right?” Clark asked his former teacher.

“I’m fine, Clark—there’s nothing wrong. I’m just
crying,
” Juan Diego repeated.

“Of course you are, darling—of course you are,” Miriam told him, taking his other arm; she kissed his hand.

“Where is that lovely child with the pigtails? Get her,” Miriam said to Dr. Quintana.

“Consuelo!” Josefa called. The little girl ran up to them at the table; Pedro was right behind her.

“There you are, you two!” Miriam cried; she let go of Juan Diego’s arm, hugging the children to her. “Don’t be frightened,” she told them. “Mr. Guerrero is sad about his sister—he’s always thinking about her. Wouldn’t you cry if you never forgot how
your
sister was killed by a lion?” Miriam asked the children.

“Yes!” Consuelo cried.

“I guess so,” Pedro told her; he actually looked like he might forget about it.

“Well, that’s how Mr. Guerrero feels—he just
misses
her,” Miriam told the kids.

“I miss her—her name was Lupe,” Juan Diego managed to tell the children. The boy driver, now a waiter, had brought him a beer; the awkward boy stood there, not knowing what to do with the beer.

“Just put it down!” Miriam told him, and he did.

Consuelo had climbed into Juan Diego’s lap. “It’ll be okay,” the little girl was saying; she was tugging on her pigtails—it made him cry and cry. “It’ll be okay, Mister,” Consuelo kept saying to him.

Miriam picked up Pedro and held him in her lap; the boy seemed somewhat uncertain about her, but Miriam quickly solved that. “What do you imagine
you
might miss, Pedro?” Miriam asked him. “I mean, one day—what would you miss, if you lost it?
Who
would you miss? Who do you love?”

Who
is
this woman? Where did she
come from
? all the adults were thinking—Juan Diego was thinking this, too. He desired Miriam; he was thrilled to see her. But who
was
she, and what was she doing here? And why were they all riveted by her? Even the children, despite the fact that she’d frightened them.

“Well,” Pedro started to say, frowning seriously, “I would miss my father. I
will
miss him—one day.”

“Yes, of course you will—that’s very good. That’s exactly what I mean,” Miriam told the boy. A kind of melancholy seemed to descend
on little Pedro; he leaned back against Miriam, who cradled him against her breast. “Smart boy,” she whispered to him. He closed his eyes; he sighed. It was almost obscene how Pedro looked
seduced.

The table—the entire dining room—seemed hushed. “I’m sorry about your sister, Mister,” Consuelo said to Juan Diego.

“I’ll be okay,” he told the little girl. He felt too tired to go on—too tired to change anything.

It was the boy driver, the unsure-of-himself waiter, who said something in Tagalog to Dr. Quintana.

“Yes, naturally—serve the main course. What a question—serve it!” Josefa said to him. (Not a single person had put on one of the party hats. It was still not party time.)

“Look at Pedro!” Consuelo said; the little girl was laughing. “He’s fallen asleep.”

“Oh, isn’t that sweet?” Miriam said, smiling at Juan Diego. The little boy was sound asleep in Miriam’s lap, his head against her breast. How unlikely that a boy his age could just drop off to sleep in the lap of a total stranger—and she was such a scary one!

Who
is
she? Juan Diego wondered again, but he couldn’t stop smiling back at her. Maybe all of them were wondering who Miriam was, but no one said anything or did the slightest thing to stop her.

•
18
•

Lust Has a Way

For years after he’d left Oaxaca, Juan Diego would stay in touch with Brother Pepe. What Juan Diego knew about Oaxaca since the early seventies was largely due to Pepe’s faithful correspondence.

The problem was that Juan Diego couldn’t always remember
when
Pepe had passed along this or that important piece of information; to Pepe, every new thing was “important”—each change mattered, as did those things that hadn’t changed (and never would).

It was during the AIDS epidemic when Brother Pepe wrote to Juan Diego about that gay bar on Bustamante, but whether this was in the late eighties or early nineties—well, this was the kind of specificity that eluded Juan Diego. “Yes, that bar is still there—and it’s still gay,” Pepe had written; Juan Diego must have asked about it. “But it’s not La China anymore—it’s called Chinampa now.”

And, around that time, Pepe had written that Dr. Vargas was feeling the “hopelessness of the medical community.” AIDS had made Vargas feel it was “irrelevant” to be an orthopedist. “No doctor is trained to watch people die; we’re not in the holding-hands business,” Vargas had told Pepe, and Vargas wasn’t even dealing with infectious disease.

That sounded like Vargas, all right—still feeling left out because he’d missed the family plane crash.

Pepe’s letter about La Coronita came in the nineties, if Juan Diego remembered correctly. The transvestite “party place” had closed down; the owner, who was gay, had died. When The Little Crown reopened, it had expanded; there was a second floor, and it was now a place for transvestite prostitutes and their clients. There was no more waiting to dress up until you got to the bar; the cross-dressers were who they were when they arrived. They were women when they got there, or so Pepe implied.

Brother Pepe was doing hospice work in the nineties; unlike Vargas, Pepe was suited for the hand-holding business, and Lost Children was long gone by then.

Hogar de la Niña, “Home of the Girl,” had opened in 1979. It was an all-girls’ answer to City of Children—what Lupe had called City of
Boys.
Pepe had worked at Home of the Girl through the eighties and into the early nineties.

Pepe would never disparage an orphanage. Hogar de la Niña was not all that far from Viguera, where its all-boys’ counterpart, Ciudad de los Niños, was still open for business. Home of the Girl was in the neighborhood of Cuauhtémoc.

Pepe had found the girls unruly; he’d complained to Juan Diego that they could be cruel to one another. And Pepe hadn’t liked the girls’ adoration of
The Little Mermaid,
the 1989 Disney animated film. There were life-size decals of the Little Mermaid herself in the sleeping room—“larger than the portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe,” Pepe had complained. (As Lupe doubtless would have complained, Juan Diego thought.)

Pepe had sent a picture of some of the girls in their old-fashioned, hand-me-down dresses—the kind that buttoned up the back. In the photo, Juan Diego couldn’t see that the girls hadn’t bothered to button up the backs of their dresses, but Brother Pepe had complained about that, too; apparently, leaving themselves unbuttoned was just one of the “unruly” things those girls did.

Brother Pepe (notwithstanding his small complaints) would go on being “one of Christ’s soldiers,” as Señor Eduardo had been fond of calling himself and his Jesuit brethren. But, in truth, Pepe was a servant of children; that had been his calling.

More orphanages had come to town; when Lost Children was gone, there were replacements—maybe not with the
educational
priorities that had once mattered to Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, but they were orphanages nonetheless. Oaxaca, one day, would have several.

In the late nineties, Brother Pepe went to work at the Albergue Josefino in Santa Lucía del Camino. The orphanage had opened in 1993, and the nuns looked after both boys and girls, though the boys weren’t allowed to stay past the age of twelve. Juan Diego didn’t understand who the nuns were, and Brother Pepe didn’t bother to explain. Madres de los Desamparados—“Mothers of the Forsaken,” Juan Diego would have translated this. (He thought
forsaken
sounded better than
abandoned.
) But Pepe called the nuns “mothers of those who are without a place.” Of
all the orphanages, Pepe believed the Albergue Josefino was the nicest. “The children hold your hands,” he wrote to Juan Diego.

There was a Guadalupe in the chapel, and another one in the schoolroom; there was even a Guadalupe
clock,
Pepe said. The girls could stay until they wanted to leave; a few girls were in their twenties before they left. But it wouldn’t have worked for Lupe
and
Juan Diego, since Juan Diego would have been too old.

“Don’t ever die,” Juan Diego had written to Brother Pepe from Iowa City. What Juan Diego meant was that
he
would die if he lost Pepe.

T
HAT
N
EW
Y
EAR
’
S
E
VE
, how many doctors must have been staying at the Encantador seaside resort? Ten or twelve? Perhaps more. Clark French’s Filipino family was full of doctors. Not one of these doctors—not Clark’s wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana, certainly—would have encouraged Juan Diego to skip another dose of the beta-blockers.

Maybe the
men
among those doctors—the ones who’d seen Miriam, especially the ones who’d witnessed her lightning-fast skewering of the gecko with a salad fork—would have agreed that the 100-milligram tablet of Viagra was advisable.

But as for alternating no doses with double doses (or half-doses) of a Lopressor prescription—absolutely not! Not even the men among those doctors celebrating New Year’s Eve at the Encantador would have approved of
that.

When Miriam, albeit briefly, made Lupe’s death dinner-table conversation, Juan Diego had thought of Lupe—the way she’d scolded the noseless statue of the Virgin Mary.

“Show me a
real
miracle,” Lupe had challenged the giantess. “
Do
something to make me believe in you—I think you’re just a big bully!”

Was
that
what triggered in Juan Diego his growing awareness of a puzzling similarity between the towering Virgin Mary in the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús and Miriam?

At this unresolved moment, Miriam touched him under the table—his thigh, the small lumps in his right-front pants pocket. “What’s here?” Miriam whispered to him. He quickly showed her the mah-jongg tile, the historic game block, but before he could begin the elaborate explanation, Miriam murmured, “Oh, not
that
—I know about the all-inspiring keepsake you carry with you. I mean what
else
is in your pocket?”

Had Miriam read about the mah-jongg tile in an interview with the author? Had Juan Diego piddled away the story of such a treasured memento
to the ever-trivializing media? And Miriam seemed to know about the Viagra tablet without his telling her what it was. Had Dorothy told her mother that Juan Diego took Viagra? Surely, he hadn’t talked about taking Viagra in an interview—or had he?

His not knowing what Miriam knew (or didn’t) about the Viagra made Juan Diego remember the quickly passing dialogue upon his arrival at the circus—when Edward Bonshaw, who knew Flor was a prostitute, learned she was a transvestite.

It was an accident—through the open flaps of a troupe tent they’d seen Paco, the transvestite dwarf, and Flor had told the Iowan, “I’m just more
passable
than Paco, honey.”

“Does the parrot man get it that Flor has a penis?” Lupe (untranslated) had asked. It became clear that el hombre papagayo was thinking about Flor’s penis. Flor, who knew what Señor Eduardo was thinking, stepped up her flirting with the Iowan.

Fate is everything, Juan Diego was considering—he thought of the little girl in pigtails, Consuelo, and how she’d said “Hi, Mister.” How she reminded him of Lupe!

The way Lupe had repeated to Hombre, “It’ll be all right.”

“I hear you like whips,” Flor had said quietly to the hobbling missionary, who had elephant shit all over his sandals.

“The king of
pigs,
” Lupe had suddenly said, when she saw Ignacio, the lion tamer.

Juan Diego wondered why it was coming back to him now; it couldn’t only be because Consuelo, that little girl in pigtails, had said “Hi, Mister.” What had Consuelo called Miriam? “The lady who just appears.”

“Wouldn’t you cry if you never forgot how
your
sister was killed by a lion?” Miriam had asked the children. And then Pedro had fallen asleep with his head against Miriam’s breast. It was as if the boy had been bewitched, Juan Diego was considering.