Avenue of Mysteries

11. Spontaneous Bleeding

When the dump niños vacated the shack in Guerrero for Lost Children, they brought almost as many water pistols with them as they had clothes. Of course the nuns were going to confiscate the squirt guns, but Lupe let them find only the ones that didn’t work. The nuns never knew what the water pistols were for.

Juan Diego and Lupe had practiced on Rivera; if they could fool the dump boss with the stigmata trick, they thought they could make it work on anyone. They didn’t fool him for long. Rivera could tell real blood from fake, and Rivera bought the beets — Lupe was always asking el jefe to buy her beets.

The dump kids would fill a water pistol with a mixture of beet juice and water. Juan Diego liked to add a little of his own saliva to the mixture. He said his spit gave the beet juice a “bloodier texture.”

“Explain texture,” Lupe had said.

The way the trick worked was that Juan Diego would conceal the loaded squirt gun under the waistband of his pants, beneath an untucked shirt. The safest target was someone’s shoe; the victims couldn’t feel the fake blood when it was squirted on their shoes. Sandals were a problem; you could feel the gunk against your bare toes.

With women, Juan Diego liked to squirt them from behind, on a bare calf. Before the woman could turn her head to look, the boy had time to hide the water pistol. That was when Lupe started babbling. She pointed first to the area of spontaneous bleeding, then to the sky; if the blood were Heaven-sent, surely the source was the everlasting abode of God (and of the blessed dead). “She says the blood is a miracle,” Juan Diego would translate for his sister.

Sometimes Lupe would equivocate, incomprehensibly. “No, sorry — it’s either a miracle or ordinary bleeding,” Juan Diego would then say. Lupe was already bending down, the rag in her small hand; she would wipe the blood, miraculous or not, off the shoe (or the woman’s bare calf) before the victim had time to react. If the money for this service was immediately forthcoming, the dump kids were prepared to protest; they always refused to accept payment for pointing out a miracle, or for wiping the holy (or unholy) blood away. Well, at least they refused the money at first; dump kids weren’t beggars.

After the accident with Rivera’s truck, Juan Diego found that the wheelchair helped; he was usually the one to hold out his palm and reluctantly accept compensation, and the wheelchair offered more options for concealing the squirt gun. The crutches were a bit awkward — that is, letting go of one of them in order to extend his hand. When Juan Diego was on crutches, Lupe was usually the one who hesitantly took the money — never, of course, with the hand that had wiped the blood away.

In the jerkily limping stage of Juan Diego’s recovery — the category of limp that would endure, the one that was not a phase — the dump niños made more impromptu decisions. Generally, Lupe (in her disinclined way) yielded to the men who insisted on rewarding her. With the women victims of the stigmata trick, the limping Juan Diego discovered that a crippled boy was more persuasively sympathetic than an angry-looking girl. Or was it that the women sensed Lupe was reading their minds?

The dump kids reserved the actual stigmata word for those high-risk occasions when Juan Diego dared to aim for a direct hit on the potential customer’s hand; this was always a from-behind shot with the water pistol. When people allow their hands to rest at their sides, whether they are standing or walking, their palms face behind them.

When a sudden splash of diluted, beet-red blood appears in the palm of your hand — and there’s a girl kneeling at your feet, smearing her rapturous face with the blood in your palm — well, you might be more than usually vulnerable to religious belief. And that was when the crippled boy began screaming the stigmata word. With the tourists in the zócalo, Juan Diego would resort to bilingual screaming — both estigmas and stigmata.

The one time the dump kids fooled Rivera, they got him with the shoe shot. The dump boss had glanced at the sky, but he wasn’t looking for Heavenly evidence. “Maybe a bird is bleeding,” was all Rivera had said; nor did el jefe offer to tip the dump kids.

Another time, the direct hit on Rivera’s hand didn’t work. While Lupe was smearing her face with the blood from el jefe’s palm, Rivera had calmly taken his hand away from the enraptured girl. While Juan Diego was screaming the estigmas word, the dump boss licked the “blood” in his palm.

“Los betabeles,” el jefe said, smiling at Lupe. The beets.

THE PLANE HAD LANDED in the Philippines. Juan Diego wrapped part of a green-tea muffin in a paper napkin, putting it in his coat pocket. The passengers were standing, gathering their things — an awkward moment for a crippled older man. But Juan Diego’s mind was not in the moment; in his mind, he and Lupe were barely teenagers. They were scouting the zócalo, in the heart of Oaxaca, on the lookout for unsuspecting tourists and hapless locals who appeared capable of believing that a phantom God had singled them out — from an unseen height — for spontaneous bleeding.

As always, and anywhere — even in Manila — it was a woman who took pity on the older man’s limp. “May I help you?” the young mother asked. She was traveling with her small children, a little girl and an even smaller son. She was a woman with her hands full, in more ways than one, but such was the effect of Juan Diego’s limp (on women, especially).

“Oh, no — I can manage. But thank you!” Juan Diego immediately said. The young mother smiled — she looked relieved, in fact. Her children continued to stare at Juan Diego’s misdirected right foot; kids were always fascinated by that two-o’clock angle.

In Oaxaca, Juan Diego was remembering, the dump niños had learned to be wary in the zócalo, which was closed to traffic but overrun by beggars and hawkers. The beggars could be territorial, and one of the hawkers, the balloon man, had observed the stigmata trick. The dump kids didn’t know he’d been watching them, but one day the man gave Lupe a balloon; he was looking at Juan Diego when he spoke. “I like her style, blood boy, but you’re too obvious,” the balloon man said. He had a sweat-stained rawhide shoelace around his neck, a crude necklace, to which a crow’s foot was attached, and he fingered the crow’s foot while he talked, as if the remnant of the bird were a talisman. “I’ve seen real blood in the zócalo — I mean accidents can happen, blood boy,” he went on. “You don’t want the wrong people to know your game. The wrong people wouldn’t want you, but they’ll take her,” he said, pointing the crow’s foot at Lupe.

“He knows where we’re from; he shot the crow who had that foot at the basurero,” Lupe told Juan Diego. “There’s a pinprick in the balloon. It’s losing air. He can’t sell it. It won’t be a balloon tomorrow.”

“I like her style,” the balloon man said again to Juan Diego. He looked at Lupe, giving her another balloon. “No pinprick; this one isn’t losing air. But who knows about tomorrow? I’ve shot more than crows at the basurero, little sister,” the balloon man told her. The dump kids were freaked out that the creepy hawker had understood Lupe without the benefit of a translation.

“He kills dogs, he has shot dogs at the basurero—many dogs!” Lupe cried. She let go of both balloons. Soon they were drifting high above the zócalo, even the one with the pinprick. After that, the zócalo would never be the same for the dump kids. They became wary of everyone.

There was a waiter at the outdoor café at the most popular tourist hotel, the Marqués del Valle. The waiter knew who the dump niños were; he’d seen the stigmata trick, or the balloon man had told him about it. The waiter slyly warned the kids that he “might tell” the nuns at Niños Perdidos. “Don’t you two have something to confess to Father Alfonso or Father Octavio?” was how the waiter put it.

“What do you mean that you might tell the nuns?” Juan Diego asked him.

“I mean the fake blood — that’s what you’ve got to confess,” the waiter said.

“You said might tell,” Juan Diego insisted. “Are you telling the nuns or aren’t you?”

“I live on tips,” was how the waiter put it. Thus was the best place to squirt beet juice on tourists lost to the dump kids; they had to stay away from the outdoor café at the Marqués del Valle, where there was an opportunistic waiter who wanted a cut.

Lupe said she was superstitious about going to the Marqués del Valle, anyway; one of the tourists they’d nailed with the water pistol dived off a fifth-floor balcony into the zócalo. This suicide happened shortly after the unhappy-looking tourist had rewarded Lupe, very generously, for wiping the blood off his shoe. He was one of those sensitive souls who hadn’t listened to the dump kids’ claim that they weren’t begging; he’d spontaneously handed Lupe quite a lot of money.

“Lupe, the guy didn’t kill himself because his shoe started bleeding,” Juan Diego had explained to her, but Lupe didn’t feel right about it.

“I knew he was sad about something,” Lupe said. “I could tell he was having a bad life.”

Juan Diego didn’t mind avoiding the Marqués del Valle; he’d hated the hotel before he and Lupe had encountered the money-grubbing waiter. The hotel was named for the title Cortés took for himself (Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca), and Juan Diego was suspicious of everything to do with the Spanish conquest — Catholicism included. Oaxaca had once been central to the Zapotec civilization. Juan Diego thought of himself and Lupe as Zapotecs. The dump kids hated Cortés; they were Benito Juárez people, not Cortés people, Lupe liked to say — they were indigenous people, Juan Diego and Lupe believed.

TWO MOUNTAIN CHAINS OF the Sierra Madre converge and meld into a single range in the state of Oaxaca; the city of Oaxaca is the capital. But, beyond the predictable interference of the ever-proselytizing Catholic Church, the Spanish weren’t all that interested in the state of Oaxaca — with the exception of growing coffee in the mountains. And, as if summoned by Zapotec gods, two earthquakes would destroy the city of Oaxaca — one in 1854, and another in 1931.

This history caused Lupe to obsess about earthquakes. Not only would she say, often inappropriately, “No es buen momento para un terremoto”—that is, “It’s not a good moment for an earthquake”—but she would illogically wish for a third earthquake to destroy Oaxaca and its one hundred thousand inhabitants, for no better reason than the sadness of the suicidal guest at the Marqués del Valle or the abominable behavior of the balloon man, that unrepentant dog-killer. A person who killed dogs deserved to die, in Lupe’s judgment.

“But an earthquake, Lupe?” Juan Diego used to ask his sister. “What about the rest of us? Do we all deserve to die?”

“We better get out of Oaxaca — well, you better, anyway,” was Lupe’s answer. “A third earthquake is definitely due,” was how she put it. “You better get out of Mexico,” she added.

“But not you? How come you’re staying behind?” Juan Diego always asked her.

“I just do. I stay in Oaxaca. I just do,” Juan Diego remembered his sister repeating.

In this state of reflection did Juan Diego Guerrero, the novelist, arrive for the first time in Manila; he was both distracted and disoriented. The young mother of those two small children had been right to offer him her help; Juan Diego had been mistaken to tell her he could “manage.” The same thoughtful woman was waiting by the baggage carousel with her kids. There were too many bags on the moving belt, and people were aimlessly milling around — including, it seemed, people who had no business being there. Juan Diego was oblivious to how overwhelmed he appeared in crowds, but the young mother must have noticed what was painfully evident to everyone else. The distinguished-looking man with the limp looked lost.

“It’s a chaotic airport. Is someone meeting you?” the young woman asked him; she was Filipino, but her English was excellent. He’d heard her children speaking only Tagalog, but they seemed to understand what their mom said to the cripple.

“Is someone meeting me?” Juan Diego repeated. (How is it possible he doesn’t know? the young mother must have been thinking.) Juan Diego was unzipping a compartment of his carry-on bag where he’d put his itinerary; next would come the requisite fumbling in the pocket of his jacket for his reading glasses — as he’d been doing in the first-class lounge of British Airways, back at JFK, when Miriam had snatched the itinerary out of his hands. Here he was again, looking like a novice traveler. It was a wonder he didn’t say to the Filipino woman (as he’d said to Miriam), “I thought it was a long way to bring my laptop.” What a ridiculous thing to have said, he now thought — as if long distances mattered to a laptop!

His most assertive former student, Clark French, had made the arrangements in the Philippines for him; without consulting his itinerary, Juan Diego couldn’t remember what his plans were — except that Miriam had found fault with where he was staying in Manila. Naturally, Miriam had made some suggestions regarding where he should stay—“the second time,” she’d said. As for this time, what Juan Diego remembered was the all-knowing way Miriam had used the trust me expression. (“But, trust me, you won’t like where you’re staying”—that was how she’d put it.) As he searched his itinerary for the Manila arrangements, Juan Diego tried to account for the fact that he didn’t trust Miriam; yet he desired her.

He saw he was staying at the Makati Shangri-La in Makati City; he was alarmed, at first, because Juan Diego didn’t know that Makati City was considered part of metropolitan Manila. And because he was leaving Manila the next day for Bohol, no one he knew was meeting his plane — not even one of Clark French’s relatives. Juan Diego’s itinerary informed him that he was to be met at the airport by a professional driver. “Just a driver” was the way Clark had written it on the itinerary.

“Just a driver is meeting me,” Juan Diego finally answered the young Filipino woman.

The mother said something in Tagalog to her children. She pointed to a large, unwieldy-looking piece of luggage on the carousel; the big bag rounded a corner on the moving belt, pushing other bags off the carousel. The children laughed at the bloated bag. You could have packed two Labrador retrievers in that stupid bag, Juan Diego was thinking; it was his bag, of course — he was embarrassed by it. A bag that huge and ugly also marked him as a novice traveler. It was orange — the unnatural orange that hunters wear, so they won’t be mistaken for anything resembling an animal; the eye-catching orange of those traffic cones indicating road construction. The saleswoman who’d sold Juan Diego the bag had persuaded him by saying that his fellow travelers would never mistake his bag for theirs. No one else had a bag like it.

And just then — as the realization was dawning on the Filipino mother and her laughing kids that the garish albatross of all luggage belonged to the crippled man — Juan Diego thought of Señor Eduardo: how his Lab had been shot when he was at such a formative age. Tears came to Juan Diego’s eyes at the awful idea of his hideous bag being big enough to contain two of Edward Bonshaw’s beloved Beatrices.

It often happens with grown-ups that their tears are misunderstood. (Who can know which time in their lives they are reliving?) The well-meaning mother and her children must have imagined that the limping man was crying because they’d made fun of his checked bag. The confusion wouldn’t end there. It was chaos in that area of the airport where friends and family members and professional drivers waited to meet arriving passengers. The young Filipino mother rolled Juan Diego’s coffin for two dogs; he struggled with her bag and his carry-on; the children wore backpacks and toted their mom’s carry-on between them. Of course it was necessary for Juan Diego to tell the helpful young woman his name; that way, they could both look for the right driver — the one holding up the sign with the Juan Diego Guerrero name. But the sign said SEÑOR GUERRERO. Juan Diego was confused; the young Filipino mother knew it was his driver right away.

“That’s you, isn’t it?” the patient young woman asked him.

There was no easy answer regarding why he’d been confused by his own name — only a story — but Juan Diego did comprehend the context of the moment: he’d not been born Señor Guerrero, but he was now the Guerrero the driver was looking for. “You’re the writer—you’re that Juan Diego Guerrero, right?” the handsome young driver had asked him.

“Yes, I am,” Juan Diego told him. He didn’t want the young Filipino mother to feel the least bit bad about not knowing who he was (the writer), but when Juan Diego looked for her, she and her kids were gone; she had slipped away, never knowing he was that Juan Diego Guerrero. Just as well — she’d done her good deed for the year, Juan Diego imagined.

“I was named for a writer,” the young driver was saying; he strained to lift the gross orange bag into the trunk of his limo. “Bienvenido Santos — have you ever read him?” the driver asked.

“No, but I’ve heard of him,” Juan Diego answered. (I would hate to hear anyone say that about me! Juan Diego was thinking.)

“You can call me Ben,” the driver said. “Some people are puzzled by the Bienvenido.”

“I like Bienvenido,” Juan Diego told the young man.

“I’ll be your driver everywhere you go in Manila — not just this trip,” Bienvenido said. “Your former student asked for me — that’s the person who said you were a writer,” the driver explained. “I’m sorry I haven’t read your books. I don’t know if you’re famous—”

“I’m not famous,” Juan Diego quickly said.

“Bienvenido Santos is famous — he was famous here, anyway,” the driver said. “He’s dead now. I’ve read all his books. They’re pretty good. But I think it’s a mistake to name your kid after a writer. I grew up knowing I had to read Mr. Santos’s books; there were a lot of them. What if I’d hated them? What if I didn’t like to read? There’s a burden attached to it — that’s all I’m saying,” Bienvenido said.

“I understand you,” Juan Diego told him.

“Do you have any kids?” the driver asked.

“No, I don’t,” Juan Diego said, but there was no easy answer to this question — that was another story, and Juan Diego didn’t like to think about it. “If I do have any children, I won’t name them after writers,” was all he said.

“I already know one of your destinations while you’re here,” his driver was saying. “I understand you want to go to the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial—”

“Not this trip,” Juan Diego interrupted him. “My time in Manila is too short this trip, but when I come back—”

“Whenever you want to go there, it’s fine with me, Señor Guerrero,” Bienvenido quickly said.

“Please call me Juan Diego—”

“Sure, if that’s what you like,” the driver rejoined. “My point is, Juan Diego, everything’s been taken care of — it’s all been arranged. Whatever you want, at whatever time—”

“I may change hotels — not this time, but when I come back,” Juan Diego blurted out.

“Whatever you say,” Bienvenido told him.

“I’ve heard bad things about this hotel,” Juan Diego said.

“In my job, I hear lots of bad things. About every hotel!” the young driver said.

“What have you heard about the Makati Shangri-La?” Juan Diego asked him.

The traffic was at a standstill; the hubbub in the congested street had the sort of chaotic atmosphere Juan Diego associated with a bus station, not an airport. The sky was a dirty beige, the air damp and fetid, but the air-conditioning in the limo was too cold.

“It’s a matter of what you can believe, you know,” Bienvenido answered. “You hear everything.”

“That was my problem with the novel — believing it,” Juan Diego said.

“What novel?” Bienvenido asked.

“Shangri-La is an imaginary land in a novel called Lost Horizon. I think it was written in the thirties — I forget who wrote it,” Juan Diego said. (Imagine hearing someone say that about a book of mine! he was thinking; it would be like hearing you had died, Juan Diego thought.) He was wondering why the conversation with the limo driver was so exhausting, but just then there was an opening in the traffic, and the car moved swiftly ahead.

Even bad air is better than air-conditioning, Juan Diego decided. He opened a window, and the dirty-beige air blew on his face. The haze of smog suddenly reminded him of Mexico City, which he didn’t want to be reminded of. And the traffic-choked, bus-terminal atmosphere of the airport summoned Juan Diego’s boyhood memory of the buses in Oaxaca; proximity to the buses seemed contaminating. But, in his adolescent memories, those streets south of the zócalo were contaminated — Zaragoza Street particularly, but even those streets on the way to Zaragoza Street from Lost Children and the zócalo. (After the nuns were asleep, Juan Diego and Lupe used to look for Esperanza on Zaragoza Street.)

“Maybe one of the things I’ve heard about the Makati Shangri-La is imaginary,” Bienvenido ventured to say.

“What would that be?” Juan Diego asked the driver.

Cooking smells blew in the open window of the moving car. They were passing a kind of shantytown, where the traffic slowed; bicycles were weaving between the cars — children, barefoot and shirtless, darted into the street. The dirt-cheap jeepneys were packed with people; the jeepneys cruised with their headlights turned off, or the headlights were burned out, and the passengers sat close together on benches like church pews. Perhaps Juan Diego thought of church pews because the jeepneys were adorned with religious slogans.

GOD IS GOOD! one proclaimed. GOD’S CARE FOR YOU IS APPARENT, another said. He’d just arrived in Manila, but Juan Diego was already zeroing in on a sore subject: the Spanish conquerors and the Catholic Church had been to the Philippines before him; they’d left their mark. (He had a limo driver named Bienvenido, and the jeepneys — the lowest of low-income transportation — were plastered with advertisements for God!)

“There’s something wrong with the dogs,” Bienvenido said.

“The dogs? What dogs?” Juan Diego asked.

“At the Makati Shangri-La — the bomb-sniffing dogs,” the young driver explained.

“The hotel has been bombed?” Juan Diego asked.

“Not that I know of,” Bienvenido replied. “There are bomb-sniffing dogs at all the hotels. At the Shangri-La, people say the dogs don’t know what they’re sniffing for — they just like to sniff everything.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Juan Diego said. He liked dogs; he was always defending them. (Maybe the bomb-sniffing dogs at the Shangri-La were just being extra careful.)

“People say the dogs at the Shangri-La are untrained,” Bienvenido was saying.

But Juan Diego couldn’t focus on this conversation. Manila was reminding him of Mexico; he’d been unprepared for that, and now the talk had turned to dogs.

At Lost Children, he and Lupe had missed the dump dogs. When a litter of puppies was born in the basurero, the kids had tried to take care of the puppies; when a puppy died, Juan Diego and Lupe tried to find it before the vultures did. The dump kids had helped Rivera burn the dead dogs — burning them was a way to love the dogs, too.

At night, when they went looking for their mother on Zaragoza Street, Juan Diego and Lupe tried not to think about the rooftop dogs; those dogs were different — they were scary. They were mostly mongrels, as Brother Pepe had said, but Pepe was wrong to say that only some of the rooftop dogs were feral—most of them were. Dr. Gomez said she knew how the dogs ended up on the roofs, although Brother Pepe believed that no one knew how the dogs got there.

A lot of Dr. Gomez’s patients had been bitten by the rooftop dogs; after all, she was an ear, nose, and throat specialist, and that’s where the dogs tried to bite you. The dogs attacked your face, Dr. Gomez said. Years ago, in the top-floor apartments of those buildings south of the zócalo, people had let their pets run free on the roofs. But the pet dogs had run away, or they’d been scared away by wild dogs; many of those buildings were so close together that the dogs could run from roof to roof. People stopped letting their pet dogs up on the roofs; soon almost all the rooftop dogs were wild. But how had the first wild dogs ended up on the roofs?

At night, on Zaragoza Street, the headlights of passing cars were reflected in the eyes of the rooftop dogs. No wonder Lupe thought these dogs were ghosts. The dogs ran along the rooftops, as if they were hunting people in the street below. If you didn’t talk, or you weren’t listening to music, you could hear the dogs panting as they ran. Sometimes, when the dogs were jumping from roof to roof, a dog fell. The falling dogs were killed, of course, unless one landed on a person in the street below. The person passing by served to break the dog’s fall. Those lucky dogs usually didn’t die, but if they were injured from the fall, this made the dogs more likely to bite the people they’d fallen on.

“I guess you like dogs,” Bienvenido was saying.

“I do — I do like dogs,” Juan Diego said, but he was distracted by his thoughts of those ghost dogs in Oaxaca (if the rooftop dogs, or some of them, were truly ghosts).

“Those dogs aren’t the only ghosts in town — Oaxaca is full of ghosts,” Lupe had said, in her know-it-all way.

“I haven’t seen them,” was Juan Diego’s first response.

“You will,” was all Lupe would say.

Now, in Manila, Juan Diego was also distracted by an overloaded jeepney with one of the same religious slogans he’d already seen; evidently, it was a popular message: GOD’S CARE FOR YOU IS APPARENT. A contrasting sticker in the rear window of a taxi then caught Juan Diego’s eye. CHILD-SEX TOURISTS, the taxi sticker said. DON’T TURN AWAY. TURN THEM IN.

Well, yes — turn the fuckers in! Juan Diego thought. But for those children who were recruited to have sex with tourists, Juan Diego believed, God’s care for them wasn’t all that apparent.

“I’ll be interested to see what you think of the bomb-sniffers,” Bienvenido was saying, but when he glanced in the rearview mirror, he saw that his client was asleep. Or dead, the driver might have thought, except that Juan Diego’s lips were moving. Maybe the limo driver imagined that the not-so-famous novelist was composing dialogue in his sleep. The way Juan Diego’s lips were moving, he appeared to be having a conversation with himself — the way writers do, Bienvenido supposed. The young Filipino driver couldn’t have known the actual argument the older man was remembering, nor could Bienvenido have guessed where Juan Diego’s dreams would transport him next.