Avenue of Mysteries (52 page)

Dolores, lying on the dead horse in the avenue of troupe tents, kicked her bare legs, thrashed her bare arms, and screamed. Ignacio, uncharacteristically, ignored her. He walked on with the ten policemen, but before
the lion tamer continued his argument with the law-enforcement officers, he said quite a mouthful to Juan Diego.

“If you have ‘some balls,’
ceiling-
walker, what are you waiting for?” Ignacio asked the boy. “When are you going to try skywalking at eighty feet? I think Some Balls should be your name. Or how about Mañana? It’s a free name now,” the lion tamer said, pointing to the dead horse. “It’s yours, if you want it—if you’re always going to put off becoming the first male skywalker until ‘tomorrow.’ If you’re going to keep putting it off—till the next mañana!”

Dolores had gotten to her feet; her towel was stained with the horse’s blood. Before she walked off in the direction of the girl acrobats’ troupe tent, she gave both Beer Belly and Paco a whack on the tops of their heads. “You disgusting little creeps,” she told them.

“Bigger than yours,” was all Beer Belly said to Paco, after Dolores had left them standing there.

“Smaller than mine,” Paco told him quietly.

Ignacio and the ten policemen had walked on; they were still arguing, although the lion tamer was doing all the talking.

“If I need a permit to dispose of a dead horse, I suppose I
don’t
need a permit to butcher the animal and feed the meat to my lions—do I?” the lion tamer was saying, but he wasn’t waiting for an answer from the ten policemen. “I don’t suppose you expect me to drive a dead horse back to Oaxaca, do you?” Ignacio asked them. “I could have left the horse to die in the graveyard. You wouldn’t have liked that very much, would you?” the lion tamer went on, unanswered.

“Forget about skywalking, Lupe’s brother,” Paco said to the fourteen-year-old.

“Lupe needs you to look after her,” Beer Belly told Juan Diego. The two dwarf clowns waddled off; there were some outdoor showers still standing, and the two clowns started taking theirs.

Juan Diego thought that he and Mañana were alone in the avenue of troupe tents; he hadn’t seen Lupe until she was standing beside him. Juan Diego guessed she’d always been there.

“Did you see—” he started to ask her.

“Everything,” Lupe told him. Juan Diego just nodded. “About the new dog act—” Lupe began; she stopped, as if she were waiting for him to catch up to her. She was always a thought or two ahead of him.

“What about it?” Juan Diego asked her.

Lupe said: “I know where you can get a new dog—a jumper.”

• • •

T
HE DREAMS OR MEMORIES
he’d missed, because of the beta-blockers, had risen up and overwhelmed him; his final two days at the Encantador, Juan Diego dutifully took his Lopressor prescription—the correct dose.

Dr. Quintana must have known Juan Diego wasn’t acting; his return to torpor, to a diminished level of alertness and physiological activity, was evident to everyone—he did his dog-paddling in the swimming pool (no sea urchins were lurking there) and ate his meals at the children’s table. He kept company with Consuelo and Pedro, his fellow whisperers.

In the early mornings, drinking coffee by the swimming pool, Juan Diego would reread his notes (and make new notes) on
One Chance to Leave Lithuania
; he’d gone back to Vilnius two more times since his first visit in 2008. Rasa, his publisher, had found a woman in the State Child Rights Protection and Adoption Service to talk with him; he’d brought Daiva, his translator, to the first meeting, but the woman from Child Rights spoke excellent English, and she was forthcoming. Her name was Odeta—the same name as the mystery woman on the bookstore bulletin board, the
not
-a-mail-order bride. That woman’s photograph and phone number had disappeared from the bulletin board, but she still haunted Juan Diego—her suppressed but visible unhappiness, the dark circles under her late-night-reading eyes, her neglected-looking hair. Was there still no one in her life to talk with her about the wonderful novels she’d read?

One Chance to Leave Lithuania
had, of course, evolved. The woman reader was not a mail-order bride. She’d put her child up for adoption, but the adoption (long a work-in-progress) had fallen through. In Juan Diego’s novel, the woman wants her baby to be adopted by Americans. (She’d always dreamed of going to America; now she will give up her child, but only if she can imagine her child as happy in America.)

The Odeta in Child Rights had explained to Juan Diego that it was rare for Lithuanian children to be adopted outside Lithuania. There was quite a lengthy waiting period, allowing the birth mother a second chance to change her mind. The laws were strict: at least six months for international decisions, but the period of time (the waiting period) could take four years—hence older children were the ones most likely to be adopted by foreigners.

In
One Chance to Leave Lithuania,
the American couple waiting to adopt a Lithuanian child has a tragedy of their own—the young wife is
killed on her bicycle by a hit-and-run driver; the widowed husband is in no shape to adopt a child by himself (not that Child Rights would allow him to).

In a Juan Diego Guerrero novel, everyone is a kind of outsider; Juan Diego’s characters feel they are foreigners, even when they’re at home. The young Lithuanian woman, who has had two chances to change her mind about putting her child up for adoption, now has a third chance to change her mind; the adoption of her child is put on hold. Another awful “waiting period” confronts her. She puts her photo and her phone number on the bulletin board at the bookstore; she meets other women readers for coffee or beer, talking about the novels they’ve read—the myriad unhappiness of others.

This is a collision we should see coming, Juan Diego was thinking. The American widower takes a trip to Vilnius; he doesn’t expect to see the child he and his late wife were going to adopt—Child Rights would never have let him. He doesn’t even know the name of the single mother who’d put her child up for adoption. He’s not expecting to meet anyone. There is an atmosphere he hopes to absorb—an essence their adopted child might have brought to America. Or is his going to Vilnius a way of reconnecting with his dead wife, a way of keeping her alive a little longer?

Yes, of course, he goes to the bookstore; maybe it’s the jet lag—he thinks a novel would help him sleep. And there, on the bulletin board, he sees her photo—someone whose unhappiness is both hidden and apparent. Her lack of attention to herself draws him to her, and her favorite novelists were his
wife’s
favorite novelists! Not knowing if she speaks English—of course she does—he asks the bookseller for assistance in calling her.

And
then
? The question that remained was an earlier one—namely,
whose
one chance to leave Lithuania was it? The collision course in
One Chance to Leave Lithuania
is obvious: they meet, each discovers who the other is, they become lovers. But how do they handle the crushing weight of the extreme coincidence of their meeting each other? And what do they do about their seeming fate? Do they stay together, does she keep her child, do they
all three
go to America—or does this lonely American widower remain with this mother and her child in Vilnius? (Her child has been staying with her sister—not a good situation.)

In the darkness of the single mother’s tiny apartment—she is sleeping in his arms, more soundly than she’s slept in years—he lies there
thinking. (He has still seen only photos of the child.) If he’s going to leave this woman and her child and go back to America alone, he knows he’d better leave now.

What we
shouldn’t
see coming, Juan Diego thought, is that the eponymous one chance to leave Lithuania could be the American’s—
his
last chance to change his mind, to get out.

“You’re writing, aren’t you?” Clark French asked his former teacher. It was still early in the morning, and Clark had caught Juan Diego with one of his notebooks, pen in hand, at the Encantador swimming pool.

“You know me—they’re just notes about what I’m going to write,” Juan Diego answered.

“That’s writing,” Clark confidently said.

It seemed natural enough for Clark to ask Juan Diego about the novel-in-progress, and Juan Diego felt comfortable telling him about
One Chance to Leave Lithuania
—where the idea came from, and how the novel had evolved.

“Another Catholic country,” Clark suddenly said. “Dare I ask what villainous role the Church plays in this story?”

Juan Diego hadn’t been talking about the role of the Church; he hadn’t even been thinking about it—not yet. But, of course, Juan Diego
would
have a role for the Church in
One Chance to Leave Lithuania.
Both the teacher and his former student surely knew that. “You know as well as I do, Clark, what role the Church plays in the case of unwanted children,” Juan Diego replied. “In the case of what
causes
unwanted children to be born, in the first place—” He stopped; he saw that Clark had closed his eyes. Juan Diego closed his eyes, too.

The impasse presented by their religious differences was a familiar standoff, a depressing dead end. When, in the past, Clark had used the
we
word, he’d never meant “you and I”; when Clark said “we,” he meant the Church—especially when Clark was trying to sound progressive or tolerant. “We shouldn’t be so
insistent
on issues like abortion or the use of contraceptive methods, or gay marriage. The teachings of the Church”—and here Clark
always
hesitated—“are clear.” Clark would then continue: “But it isn’t
necessary
to talk about these issues all the time, or to sound so combative.”

Oh, sure—Clark could
sound
progressive, when he wanted to; he wasn’t the absolutist about these issues that John Paul II was!

And Juan Diego, over the years, had also been insincere; he’d pulled his punches. He’d teased Clark with that old Chesterton quote too many
times: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.” (Clark, naturally, had laughed this off.)

Juan Diego regretted that he’d wasted dear Brother Pepe’s favorite prayer in more than one of his arguments with Clark. Of course Clark was incapable of recognizing himself in that prayer from Saint Teresa of Ávila, the one Pepe had faithfully repeated among his daily prayers: “From silly devotions and sour-faced saints, good Lord, deliver us.”

But why was Juan Diego reliving his correspondence with Brother Pepe, as if Pepe had written only yesterday? Years ago, he’d written that Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had died in their sleep within days of each other. Pepe expressed his dismay to Juan Diego, regarding how the two old priests had “slipped away”; they’d always been so dogmatic, so punitively opinionated—how had those two dared to die without a final fuss?

And Rivera’s departure from this life also pissed Pepe off. El jefe hadn’t been himself since the old dump had moved in 1981; there was a new dump now. Those first ten families from the colony in Guerrero were long gone.

What really undid Rivera was the no-burning policy instituted after the creation of the new dump. How could they have put an end to the
fires
? What kind of dump
didn’t
burn things?

Pepe had pressed el jefe to tell him more. The end of the hellfires in the basurero hadn’t bothered Brother Pepe, but it was Juan Diego’s paternity that he wanted to know more about.

That woman worker in the old basurero had told Pepe that the dump boss was “not exactly” the dump reader’s father; Juan Diego himself had always believed that el jefe was “probably not” his dad.

But Lupe had said: “Rivera knows something—he’s just not saying.”

Rivera had told the dump kids that Juan Diego’s “most likely” father had died of a
broken
heart.

“A heart attack, right?” Juan Diego had asked el jefe—because that’s what Esperanza had told her children, and everyone else.

“If that’s what you call a heart that’s
permanently
broken,” was all Rivera had ever said to the kids.

But Brother Pepe had finally persuaded Rivera to tell him more.

Yes, the dump boss was pretty sure he was Juan Diego’s biological father; Esperanza had been sleeping with no one else at the time—or so she said. But she’d later told Rivera he was too stupid to have fathered a genius like the dump reader. “Even if you
are
his father, he should never
know it,” Esperanza had said to el jefe. “If Juan Diego knows you’re his father, it will undermine his self-confidence,” she’d said. (This no doubt
undermined
what little self-confidence the dump boss ever had.)

Rivera told Pepe not to tell Juan Diego—not until the dump boss was dead. Who knew if el jefe’s heart had killed him?

No one ever knew where Rivera actually lived; he died in the cab of his truck—it had always been his favorite place to sleep, and after Diablo died, Rivera missed his dog and rarely slept anywhere else.

Like Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, el jefe had also “slipped away,” but not before he’d made his confession to Brother Pepe.

Rivera’s death, including his confession, was a big part of Brother Pepe’s correspondence that Juan Diego would relive—constantly.

How had Brother Pepe managed to live the epilogue to his own life so
cheerfully
? Juan Diego was wondering.

At the Encantador, no more roosters crowed in the darkness; Juan Diego slept through the night, unmindful of the karaoke music from the beach club. No woman slept (or had vanished) beside him, but he woke up one morning to discover what looked like a title—in his handwriting—on the notepad on his night table.

The Last Things,
he’d written on the pad. That had been the night he’d dreamed about Pepe’s last orphanage. Brother Pepe started volunteering at Hijos de la Luna (“Children of the Moon”) sometime after 2001; Pepe’s letters had been so positive—everything seemed to energize him, and he was then in his late seventies.