Avenue of Mysteries (65 page)

As he translated her, word for word, Juan Diego could see that the two old priests were captivated by Lupe’s speech. “Be careful of the little Jesus—don’t get the ashes in his eyes,” Lupe told her brother. (She was even being considerate of the shrunken Christ, suffering on the diminutive cross, bleeding at the big Virgin Mary’s feet.)

Juan Diego didn’t have to be a mind reader to know Brother Pepe’s thoughts. Could this be a conversion, in Lupe’s case? As Pepe had said on the occasion of the first scattering: “This is different. This represents quite a change in thinking.”

This is what we think about in a monument to the spiritual world, such as the Temple of the Society of Jesus. In such a place—in the towering presence of a giant Virgin Mary—we have religious (or irreligious) thoughts. We hear a speech like Lupe’s, and we think of our religious differences or similarities; we hear only what we imagine are Lupe’s
religious
beliefs, or her
religious
feelings, and we weigh her beliefs or feelings against our own.

Vargas, the atheist—the doctor who’d brought his own binoculars and a knife to investigate a miracle, or to examine an unmiraculous nose—would have said that, for a thirteen-year-old, Lupe’s spiritual sophistication was “pretty impressive.”

Rivera, who knew Lupe was special—in fact, the dump boss, who was a Mary worshiper and
very
superstitious, was afraid of Lupe—well, what can one say of el jefe’s thoughts? (Rivera was probably relieved to hear that Lupe’s religious beliefs were sounding less radical than those he’d heard her express before.)

And those two old priests, Father Alfonso and Father Octavio—surely they were congratulating themselves, and the staff at Lost Children, for having made such apparent progress in the case of a challenging and incomprehensible child.

The good Brother Pepe may have been praying there was hope for Lupe, after all; maybe she wasn’t as “lost” as he’d first assumed she was—maybe, if only in translation, Lupe could make sense, or at least make sense
religiously.
To Pepe, Lupe sounded converted.

No burning—that was probably all that mattered to dear Señor Eduardo. Certainly, no burning was a step in the right direction.

This must have been what they all thought, respectively. And even Juan Diego, who knew his little sister best—even Juan Diego missed hearing what he should have heard.

Why was a thirteen-year-old girl thinking of
dying
? Why was this the time for Lupe to be making last requests? Lupe was a girl who could read what others were thinking—even lions, even
lionesses
. Why had none of them been able to read Lupe’s mind?

•
28
•

Those Gathering Yellow Eyes

This time, Juan Diego was so deeply immersed in the past—or he was so removed from the present moment—that the sound of the landing gear dropping down, or even the jolt of their landing in Laoag, didn’t instantly bring him back to Dorothy’s conversation.

“This is where Marcos is from,” Dorothy was saying.

“Who?” Juan Diego asked her.

“Marcos. You know
Mrs.
Marcos, right?” Dorothy asked him. “Imelda—she of the million shoes,
that
Imelda. She’s still a member of the House of Representatives from this district,” Dorothy told him.

“Mrs. Marcos must be in her eighties now,” Juan Diego said.

“Yeah—she’s really old, anyway,” Dorothy concluded.

There was an hour’s drive ahead of them, Dorothy had forewarned him—another dark road, another night, with quickly passing glimpses of foreignness. (Thatched huts; churches with Spanish architecture; dogs, or only their eyes.) And, befitting of the darkness surrounding them in their car—their innkeeper had arranged the driver and the limo—Dorothy described the unspeakable suffering of the American prisoners of war in North Vietnam. She seemed to know the terrible details of the torture sessions in the Hanoi Hilton (as the Hoa Lo prison in the North Vietnamese capital was called); she said the most brutal torture methods were used on the U.S. military pilots who’d been shot down and captured.

More politics
—old
politics, Juan Diego was thinking—in the passing darkness. It wasn’t that Juan Diego
wasn’t
political, but, as a fiction writer, he was wary of people who presumed they knew what his politics were (or should be). It happened all the time.

Why else would Dorothy have brought Juan Diego
here
? Just because he was an American, and Dorothy thought he should see where those aforementioned “frightened nineteen-year-olds,” as she’d called them, came for their R&R—
fearfully,
as Dorothy had emphasized, in terror of the torture they anticipated if they were ever captured by the North Vietnamese.

Dorothy was sounding like those reviewers and interviewers who thought Juan Diego should somehow be more Mexican-American
as a writer.
Because he was a Mexican American, was he
supposed to
write like one? Or was it that he was supposed to write about
being
one? (Weren’t his critics essentially telling him what his subject should be?)

“Don’t become one of those Mexicans who—” Pepe had blurted out to Juan Diego, before stopping himself.

“Who
what
?” Flor had asked Pepe.

“One of those Mexicans who hate Mexico,” Pepe had dared to say, before hugging Juan Diego to him. “You don’t want to become one of those Mexicans who are always coming back, either—the ones who can’t stay away,” Pepe had added.

Flor had just stared at poor Pepe; she’d given him a withering look. “What else
shouldn’t
he become?” she’d asked Pepe. “What
other
kind of Mexican is forbidden?”

Flor had never understood the
writing
part of it: how there would be expectations of what a Mexican-American writer should (or shouldn’t) write about—how what was
forbidden
(in the minds of many reviewers and interviewers) was a Mexican-American writer who
didn’t
write about the Mexican-American “experience.”

If you accept the Mexican-American label, Juan Diego believed, then you accept performing to those expectations.

And compared to what had happened to Juan Diego in Mexico—compared to his childhood and early adolescence in Oaxaca—nothing had happened to Juan Diego since he’d moved to the United States that he felt was worth writing about.

Yes, he had an exciting younger lover, but her politics—better said, what Dorothy imagined his politics
should be
—drove her to explain the importance of where they were to him. She didn’t understand. Juan Diego didn’t need to be in northwestern Luzon, or see it, in order to imagine those “frightened nineteen-year-olds.”

Perhaps it was the reflection of the headlights from a passing car,
but a glint of a lighter color flashed in Dorothy’s dark eyes and for just a second or two, they turned a tawny yellow—like a lion’s eyes—and, in that instant, the past reclaimed Juan Diego.

It was as if he’d never left Oaxaca; in the predawn darkness of the dogs’ troupe tent, redolent of the dogs’ breath, no other future awaited him but his life as his sister’s interpreter at La Maravilla. Juan Diego didn’t have the balls for skywalking. Circus of The Wonder had no use for a
ceiling
-walker. (Juan Diego hadn’t yet realized there would be no skywalker after Dolores.) When you’re fourteen and you’re depressed, grasping the idea that you could have another future is like trying to see in the dark. “In every life,” Dolores had said, “I think there’s always a moment when you must decide where you
belong.
”

I
N THE DOGS
’
TROUPE
tent, the darkness before dawn was impenetrable. When Juan Diego couldn’t sleep, he tried to identify everyone’s breathing. If he couldn’t hear Estrella’s snoring, he figured she was dead or sleeping in another tent. (This morning, Juan Diego remembered what he’d known beforehand: Estrella was taking one of her nights off from sleeping with the dogs.)

Alemania slept the most soundly of the dogs; her breathing was the deepest, the least disturbed. (Her waking life as a policewoman probably tired her out.)

Baby was the most active dreamer of the dogs; his short legs ran in his sleep, or he was digging with his forepaws. (Baby woofed when he was closing in on an imaginary kill.)

As Lupe had complained, Perro Mestizo was “always the bad guy.” To judge the mongrel strictly by his farting—well, he was definitely the bad guy in the dogs’ troupe tent (unless the parrot man was also sleeping there).

As for Pastora, she was like Juan Diego—a worrier, an insomniac. When Pastora was awake, she panted and paced; she whined in her sleep, as if happiness were as fleeting for her as a good night’s rest.

“Lie down, Pastora,” Juan Diego said as quietly as he could—he didn’t want to wake the other dogs.

This morning, he’d easily singled out the breathing of each dog. Lupe was always the hardest to hear; she slept so quietly, she seemed to breathe scarcely at all. Juan Diego was straining to hear Lupe when his hand touched something under his pillow. He needed to grope around for
the flashlight under his cot before he could see what his under-the-pillow hand had found.

The missing lid to the once-sacred coffee can of ashes was like any other plastic lid, except for its smell; there’d been more
chemicals
in those ashes than there were traces of Esperanza or the good gringo or Dirty White. And whatever magic might have been contained in the Virgin Mary’s old nose, it wasn’t something you could smell. There was more of the basurero on that coffee-can lid than there was anything
otherworldly
about it; yet Lupe had saved it—she’d wanted Juan Diego to have it.

Also tucked under Juan Diego’s pillow was the lanyard with the keys to the feeding-tray slots in the lion cages. There were two keys, of course—one for Hombre’s cage and the other for the lionesses’.

The bandmaster’s wife enjoyed weaving lanyards; she’d made one for her husband’s whistle when he was conducting the circus band. And the bandmaster’s wife had made another lanyard for Lupe. The strands of Lupe’s lanyard were crimson and white; Lupe wore the lanyard around her neck when she carried the keys to the lion cages at feeding time.

“Lupe?” Juan Diego asked, more quietly than he’d told Pastora to lie down. No one heard him—not even one of the dogs. “Lupe!” Juan Diego said sharply, shining the flashlight on her empty cot.

“I am where I always am,” Lupe was always saying. Not this time. This time, just as the dawn was breaking, Juan Diego found Lupe in Hombre’s cage.

Even when the feeding tray was removed from the slot at the floor of the cage, the slot wasn’t big enough for Hombre to escape through the opening.

“It’s safe,” Edward Bonshaw had told Juan Diego, when the Iowan first observed how Lupe fed the lions. “I just wanted to be sure about the size of the opening.”

But on their first night in Mexico City, Lupe had said to her brother: “I can fit through the slot where the feeding tray slides in and out. It’s not too small an opening for
me
to fit through.”

“You sound like you’ve
tried
it,” Juan Diego had said.

“Why would I try it?” Lupe asked him.

“I don’t know—why
would
you?” Juan Diego asked her.

Lupe hadn’t answered him—not that night in Mexico City, not ever. Juan Diego had always known that Lupe was usually right about the past; it was the future she didn’t do as accurately. Mind readers aren’t necessarily
any good at fortune-telling, but Lupe must have believed she’d seen the future. Was it
her
future she imagined she saw, or was it Juan Diego’s future she was trying to change? Did Lupe believe she’d envisioned what their future would be if they stayed at the circus, and if things remained as they were at La Maravilla?

Lupe had always been isolated—as if being a thirteen-year-old girl isn’t isolating enough! We’ll never know what Lupe believed, but it must have been a terrifying burden at thirteen. (She knew her breasts weren’t going to grow any bigger; she knew she wouldn’t get her period.)

More broadly, Lupe had foreseen a future that frightened her, and she seized an opportunity to change it—dramatically. More than her brother’s future would be altered by what Lupe did. What she did would make Juan Diego live the rest of his life in his imagination, and what happened to Lupe (and to Dolores) would mark the beginning of the end of La Maravilla.

In Oaxaca, long after everyone had stopped talking about The Day of the Nose, the more talkative citizens of the city still gossiped over the lurid dissolution—the sensational demise—of their Circus of The Wonder. It is unquestionable that what Lupe did would have an
effect,
but that isn’t the question. What Lupe did was also terrible. Brother Pepe, who knew and loved orphans, said later it was the kind of thing that only an extremely distraught thirteen-year-old would have thought of. (Well, yes, but there’s not much anyone can do about what thirteen-year-olds
think of,
is there?)

Lupe must have unlocked the slot for the feeding tray in Hombre’s cage the night before—that way, she could leave the lanyard with the keys to the lion cages under Juan Diego’s pillow.

Maybe Hombre was agitated because Lupe had shown up to feed him when it was still dark outside—that was unusual. And Lupe had slid the feeding tray entirely out of the cage; furthermore, she didn’t put the meat on the tray for Hombre.

What happened next is anyone’s guess; Ignacio speculated that Lupe must have brought the meat to Hombre by crawling inside his cage. Juan Diego believed that Lupe may have pretended to eat Hombre’s meat, or at least she would have tried to keep the meat away from him. (As Lupe had explained the lion-feeding process to Señor Eduardo, you wouldn’t believe how much lions think about
meat.
)

And, from the first time she met him, hadn’t Lupe called Hombre “the last dog”
—“the last one,”
hadn’t she repeated? “El último perro,”
she’d distinctly said of the lion. “El último.” (As if Hombre were the king of the rooftop dogs, the king of
biters
—the
last
biter.)