Avenue of Mysteries

16. King of Beasts

Several passengers paused at the cockpit exit for Philippine Airlines 177, telling the flight attendant of their concerns about the older-looking, brown-skinned gentleman who was slumped over in a window seat. “He’s either dead to the world or just dead,” one of the passengers told the flight attendant, in a confounding combination of the vernacular and the laconic.

Juan Diego definitely looked dead, but his thoughts were far away, on high, in the spires of smoke funneling above the Oaxaca basurero; if only in his mind, he had a vulture’s view of the city limits — of Cinco Señores, where the circus grounds were, and the distant but brightly colored tents of Circo de La Maravilla.

The paramedics were notified from the cockpit; before all the passengers had left the plane, the rescuers rushed on. Various lifesaving methods were seconds away from being performed when one of the lifesavers realized that Juan Diego was very much alive, but by then the supposedly stricken passenger’s carry-on had been searched. The prescription drugs drew the most immediate attention. The beta-blockers signified there was a heart problem; the Viagra, with the printed warning not to take the stuff with nitrates, prompted one of the paramedics to ask Juan Diego, with no little urgency, if he’d been taking nitrates.

Juan Diego not only didn’t know what nitrates were; his mind was in Oaxaca, forty years ago, and Lupe was whispering in his ear.

“La nariz,” Juan Diego whispered to the anxious paramedic; she was a young woman, and she understood a little Spanish.

“Your nose?” the young paramedic asked; to make herself clear, she touched her own nose when she spoke.

“You can’t breathe? You’re having trouble breathing?” another of the paramedics asked; he also touched his nose, doubtless to signify breathing.

“Viagra can make you stuffy,” a third paramedic said.

“No, not my nose,” Juan Diego said, laughing. “I was dreaming about the Virgin Mary’s nose,” he told the team of paramedics.

This was not helpful; the insanity of mentioning the Virgin Mary’s nose distracted the medical personnel from the line of questioning they should have pursued — namely, if Juan Diego had been manipulating the dosage of his Lopressor prescription. Yet, to the team of paramedics, the passenger’s life signs were okay; that he’d managed to sleep through a turbulent landing (crying children, screaming women) was not a medical matter.

“He looked dead,” the flight attendant kept saying to anyone who would listen to her. But Juan Diego had been oblivious to the rocky landing, the sobbing children, the wails of the women who’d been certain they were going to die. The miracle (or not) of the Virgin Mary’s nose had completely captured Juan Diego’s attention, as it had so many years ago; all he’d heard was the hissing blue flame, which had disappeared as suddenly as it first appeared.

The paramedics didn’t linger with Juan Diego; they weren’t needed. Meawhile, the nose-dreamer’s friend and former student kept sending text messages, inquiring if his old teacher was all right.

Juan Diego didn’t know it, but Clark French was a famous writer — at least in the Philippines. It is too simplistic to say this was because the Philippines had a lot of Catholic readers, and uplifting novels of faith and belief were received in a more welcoming fashion there than such novels were greeted in the United States or in Europe. Partly true, yes, but Clark French had married a Filipino woman from a venerable Manila family — Quintana was a distinguished name in the medical community. This helped make Clark a more widely read author in the Philippines than he was in his own country.

As Clark’s onetime teacher, Juan Diego still saw his former student as needing protection; the condescending reviews Clark had received in the United States amounted to all that Juan Diego knew of the younger writer’s reputation. And Juan Diego and Clark corresponded by email, which gave Juan Diego only a general idea of where Clark French lived — namely, somewhere in the Philippines.

Clark lived in Manila; his wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana, was what Clark called a “baby doctor.” Juan Diego knew that Dr. Quintana was a higher-up at the Cardinal Santos Medical Center—“one of the leading hospitals in the Philippines,” Clark was fond of saying. A private hospital, Bienvenido had told Juan Diego — to distinguish Cardinal Santos from what Bienvenido disparagingly called “the dirty government hospitals.” A Catholic hospital was what registered with Juan Diego — the Catholic factor mingled with his annoyance at not knowing if a “baby doctor” meant that Clark’s wife was a pediatrician or an OB-GYN.

Because Juan Diego had spent his entire adult life in the same university town, and his life as a writer in Iowa City had (until now) been inseparable from that as a teacher at a single university, he hadn’t realized that Clark French was one of those other writers — the ones who can live anywhere, or everywhere.

Juan Diego did know that Clark was one of those writers who appeared to be at every authors’ festival; he seemed to like, or excel at, the nonwriting part of being a writer — the talking-about-it part, which Juan Diego didn’t like or do well. In fact, increasingly, as he grew older, the writing (the doing-it part) was the only aspect of being a writer that Juan Diego enjoyed.

Clark French traveled all over the world, but Manila was Clark’s home — his home base, anyway. Clark and his wife had no children. Because he traveled? Because she was a “baby doctor,” and she saw enough children? Or, if Josefa Quintana was the other kind of “baby doctor,” perhaps she’d seen too many terrible complications of an obstetrical and gynecological kind.

Whatever the reason for the no-children situation, Clark French was one of those writers who could and did write everywhere, and there wasn’t an important authors’ festival or writers’ conference that he hadn’t traveled to; the public part of being a writer did not confine him to the Philippines. Clark came “home” to Manila because his wife was there; she was the one with an actual job.

Probably because she was a doctor, and one from such a distinguished family of doctors — most medical people in the Philippines had heard of her — the paramedics who’d examined Juan Diego on the plane were somewhat indiscreet. They gave Dr. Josefa Quintana a full account of their medical (and nonmedical) findings. And Clark French was standing right beside his wife, listening in.

The sleeping passenger had an out-of-it appearance; he’d laughingly dismissed the dead-to-the-world episode on the grounds of having been engrossed in a dream about the Virgin Mary.

“Juan Diego was dreaming about Mary?” Clark French interjected.

“Just her nose,” one of the medics said.

“The Virgin’s nose!” Clark exclaimed. He’d told his wife to be prepared for Juan Diego’s anti-Catholicism, but a tasteless joke about Mother Mary’s nose denoted to Clark that his former teacher had descended to a lower level of Catholic bashing.

The paramedics wanted Dr. Quintana to know about the Viagra and Lopressor prescriptions. Josefa had to tell Clark, in detail, about the way beta-blockers worked; she was completely correct to add that, due to common side effects of the Lopressor tablets, the Viagra might have been “necessary.”

“There was a novel in his carry-on, too — at least I think it was a novel,” one of the paramedics said.

“What novel?” Clark asked eagerly.

“The Passion by Jeanette Winterson,” the medic said. “It sounds religious.”

The young-woman paramedic spoke cautiously. (Maybe she was trying to connect the novel to the Viagra.) “It sounds pornographic,” she said.

“No, no — Winterson is literary,” Clark French said. “A lesbian, but literary,” he added. Clark didn’t know the novel, but he assumed it had something to do with lesbians — he wondered if Winterson had written a novel about an order of lesbian nuns.

When the paramedics moved on, Clark and his wife were left alone; they were still waiting for Juan Diego, though it had been a while, and Clark was worried about his former teacher.

“To my knowledge, he lives alone — he has always lived alone. What’s he doing with the Viagra?” Clark asked his wife.

Josefa was an OB-GYN (she was that kind of “baby doctor”); she knew a lot about Viagra. Many of her patients had asked her about Viagra; their husbands or boyfriends were taking it, or they thought they wanted to try it, and the women wanted Dr. Quintana to tell them how the Viagra would affect the men in their lives. Would the women be raped in the middle of the night, or mounted when they were just trying to make coffee in the morning — humped against the unyielding car, when they’d merely been bending over to lift the groceries out of the trunk?

Dr. Josefa Quintana said to her husband: “Look, Clark, your former teacher might not live with anybody, but he probably likes getting an erection — right?”

That was when Juan Diego limped into sight; Josefa saw him first — she recognized him from his book-jacket photos, and Clark had prepared her for the limp. (Naturally, Clark French had exaggerated the limp — the way writers do.)

“What for?” Juan Diego heard Clark ask his wife, the doctor. She looked a little embarrassed, Juan Diego thought, but she waved to him and smiled. She seemed very nice; it was a sincere smile.

Clark turned and saw him. There was Clark’s boyish grin, which was confused by a concurrent expression of guilt, as if Clark had been caught in the act of doing or saying something. (In this case, by responding to his wife’s professional opinion that his former teacher probably liked getting an erection with a doltish “What for?”)

“What for?” Josefa quietly repeated to her husband, before she reached to shake Juan Diego’s hand.

Clark couldn’t stop grinning; now he was pointing to Juan Diego’s giant orange albatross of a bag. “Look, Josefa — I told you Juan Diego did a lot of research for his novels. He brought all of it with him!”

The same old Clark, a lovable but embarrassing guy, Juan Diego was thinking; he then steeled himself, knowing he was about to be crushed in Clark’s athletic embrace.

In addition to the Winterson novel, there was a lined notebook in Juan Diego’s carry-on. It contained notes for the novel Juan Diego was writing — he was always writing a novel. He’d been writing his next novel since he took a translation trip to Lithuania in February 2008. The novel-in-progress was now almost two years old; Juan Diego would have guessed he had another two or three years to go.

The trip to Vilnius was his first time in Lithuania, but not the first of his translations to be published there. He’d gone to the Vilnius Book Fair with his publisher and his translator. Juan Diego was interviewed onstage by a Lithuanian actress. After a few excellent questions of her own, the actress invited the audience to ask questions; there were a thousand people, many of them young students. It was a larger and more informed audience than Juan Diego usually encountered at comparable events in the United States.

After the book fair, he’d gone with his publisher and translator to sign books at a bookstore in the old town. The Lithuanian names were a problem — but not the first names, usually. So it was decided that Juan Diego would inscribe only his readers’ first names. For example, the actress who’d interviewed him at the book fair was a Dalia — that was easy enough, but her last name was much more challenging. His publisher was a Rasa, his translator a Daiva, but their last names were not English- or Spanish-sounding.

Everyone was most sympathetic, including the young bookseller; his English was a struggle, but he’d read everything Juan Diego had written (in Lithuanian) and he couldn’t stop talking to his favorite author.

“Lithuania is a birth-again country — we are your newborn readers!” he cried. (Daiva, the translator, explained what the young bookseller meant: since the Soviets had left, people were free to read more books — especially foreign novels.)

“We have awakened to find someone like you preexisted us!” the young man exclaimed, wringing his hands. Juan Diego was very moved.

At one point, Daiva and Rasa must have gone to the women’s room — or they just needed a break from the enthusiastic young bookseller. His first name was not so easy. (It was something like Gintaras, or maybe it was Arvydas.)

Juan Diego was looking at a bulletin board in the bookstore. There were photographs of women with what looked like lists of authors’ names next to them. There were numbers that looked like the women’s phone numbers, too. Were these women in a book club? Juan Diego recognized many of the authors’ names, his own among them. They were all fiction writers. Of course it was a book club, Juan Diego thought — no men were pictured.

“These women — they read novels. They’re in a book club?” Juan Diego asked the hovering bookseller.

The young man looked stricken — he may not have understood, or he didn’t know the English for what he wanted to say.

“All despairing readers — seeking to meet other readers for a coffee or a beer!” Gintaras or Arvydas shouted; surely the despairing word was not what he’d meant.

“Do you mean a date?” Juan Diego had asked. It was the most touching thing: women who wanted to meet men to talk about the books they’d read! He’d never heard of such a thing. “A kind of dating service?” Imagine matchmaking on the basis of what novels you liked! Juan Diego thought. But would these poor women find any men who read novels? (Juan Diego didn’t think so.)

“Mail-order brides!” the young bookseller said dismissively; with a gesture toward the bulletin board, he expressed how these women were beneath his consideration.

Juan Diego’s publisher and translator were back at his side, but not before Juan Diego looked longingly at one of the women’s photographs — it was someone who’d put Juan Diego’s name at the top of her list. She was pretty, but not too pretty; she looked a little unhappy. There were dark circles under her haunting eyes; her hair looked somewhat neglected. There was no one in her life to talk to about the wonderful novels she’d read. Her first name was Odeta; her last name must have been fifteen letters long.

“Mail-order brides?” Juan Diego asked Gintaras or Arvydas. “Surely they can’t be—”

“Pathetic ladies with no lifes, coupling with characters in novels instead of meeting real mens!” the bookseller shouted.

That was it — the spark of a new novel. Mail-order brides advertising themselves by the novels they’d read — in a bookstore, of all places! The idea was born with a title: One Chance to Leave Lithuania. Oh, no, Juan Diego thought. (This was what he always thought when he thought of a new novel — it always struck him, at first, as a terrible idea.)

And, naturally, it was all a mistake — just a language confusion. Gintaras or Arvydas couldn’t express himself in English. Juan Diego’s publisher and translator were laughing as they explained the bookseller’s error.

“It’s just a bunch of readers — all women,” Daiva told Juan Diego.

“They meet one another, other women, for coffee or beer, just to talk about the novelists they like,” Rasa explained.

“Kind of an impromptu book club,” Daiva told him.

“There are no mail-order brides in Lithuania,” Rasa stated.

“There must be some mail-order brides,” Juan Diego suggested.

The next morning, at his unpronounceable hotel, the Stikliai, Juan Diego was introduced to a policewoman from Interpol in Vilnius; Daiva and Rasa had found her and brought her to the hotel. “There are no mail-order brides in Lithuania,” the policewoman told him. She didn’t stay to have a coffee; Juan Diego didn’t catch her name. The policewoman’s grittiness could not be disguised by her hair, which was dyed a surfer-blond color, tinged with sunset-orange streaks. No amount or hue of dye could conceal what she was: not a good-time girl but a no-nonsense cop. No novels about mail-order brides in Lithuania, please; that was the stern policewoman’s message. Yet One Chance to Leave Lithuania had endured.

“What about adoption?” Juan Diego had asked Daiva and Rasa. “What about orphanages or adoption agencies — there must be state services for adoptions, maybe state services for children’s rights? What about women who want or need to put their children up for adoption? Lithuania is a Catholic country, isn’t it?”

Daiva, the translator of many of his novels, understood Juan Diego very well. “Women who put their children up for adoption don’t advertise themselves in a bookstore,” she said, smiling at him.

“That was just the start of something,” he explained. “Novels begin somewhere; novels undergo revision.” He’d not forgotten Odeta’s face on the bookstore bulletin board, but One Chance to Leave Lithuania was a different novel now. The woman who was putting up a child for adoption was also a reader; she was seeking to meet other readers. She didn’t just love novels and the characters in them for themselves; she sought to leave her life in the past behind, her child included. She wasn’t thinking about meeting a man.

But whose one chance to leave Lithuania was it? Hers, or her child’s? Things can go wrong during the adoption process, Juan Diego knew — not only in novels.

AS FOR JEANETTE WINTERSON’S The Passion, Juan Diego loved that novel; he’d read it two or three times — he kept returning to it. It wasn’t about an order of lesbian nuns. It was about history and magic, including Napoleon’s eating habits and a girl with webbed feet — she was a cross-dresser, too. It was a novel about unfulfilled love and sadness. It was not uplifting enough for Clark French to have written it.

And Juan Diego had highlighted a favorite sentence in the middle of The Passion: “Religion is somewhere between fear and sex.” That sentence would have provoked poor Clark.

It was almost five in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve in Bohol when Juan Diego limped out of the ramshackle airport and into the mayhem of Tagbilaran City, which struck him as a squalid metropolis of motorcycles and mopeds. There were so many difficult names for places in the Philippines, Juan Diego couldn’t keep them straight — the islands had names, and the cities, not to mention the names of the neighborhoods in the cities. It was confusing. And in Tagbilaran City, there were also plenty of the now-familiar religious jeepneys, but these were intermixed with homemade vehicles that resembled rebuilt lawnmowers or supercharged golf carts; there were lots of bicycles, too, not to mention the masses of people on foot.

Clark French had manfully lifted Juan Diego’s enormous bag above his head — out of consideration for the women and small children who didn’t come up to his chest. That orange albatross was a woman-and-child crusher; it could roll right over them. Yet Clark didn’t hesitate to knife like a running back through the men in the mob — the smaller brown bodies got out of his way, or Clark muscled through them. Clark was a bull.

Dr. Josefa Quintana knew how to follow her husband through a crowd. She kept one of her small hands flat against Clark’s broad back; with the other, she held tightly to Juan Diego. “Don’t worry — we have a driver, somewhere,” she told him. “Clark, notwithstanding his opinion to the contrary, doesn’t have to do everything.” Juan Diego was charmed by her; she was genuine, and she struck him as both the brains and the common sense in the family. Clark was the instinctual one — both an asset and a liability.

The beach resort had provided the driver, a feral-faced boy who looked too young to drive — but he was eager to do so. Once they were out of the city, there were smaller mobs of people walking along the road, although the vehicular traffic now careened at highway speeds. There were goats and cows tethered at the roadside, but their tethers were too long; occasionally, a cow’s head (or a goat’s) would reach into the road, causing the assorted vehicles to veer.

Dogs were chained near the shacks, or in the cluttered yards of those homesteads along the roadside; when the dogs’ chains were too long, the dogs would attack the pedestrians passing by — hence people, not only the heads of cows and goats, would materialize in the road. The boy driving the resort’s SUV relied heavily on his horn.

Such chaos reminded Juan Diego of Mexico — people spilling into the road, and the animals! To Juan Diego, the presence of improperly-cared-for animals was a telltale indication of overpopulation. So far, Bohol had made him think about birth control.

To be fair: Juan Diego’s birth-control awareness was keener around Clark. They’d exchanged combative emails on the subject of fetal pain, inspired by a fairly recent Nebraska law preventing abortions after twenty weeks’ gestation. And they’d fought about the use of the 1995 papal encyclical in Latin America, an effort by conservative Catholics to attack contraception as part of “the culture of death”—this was how John Paul II preferred to refer to abortion. (That Polish pope was a sore subject between them.) Did Clark French have a cork up his ass about sexuality — a Catholic cork?

But Juan Diego thought it was hard to say what kind of cork it was. Clark was one of those socially liberal Catholics. He said he was “personally opposed” to abortion—“it’s distasteful,” Juan Diego had heard Clark say — but Clark was politically liberal; he believed women should be able to choose an abortion, if that was what they wanted.

Clark had always supported gay rights, too; yet he defended the entrenched position of his revered Catholic Church — he found the Church’s position on abortion, and on traditional marriage (that is, between a man and a woman), “consistent and to be expected.” Clark had even said he believed the Church “should uphold” its views on abortion and marriage; Clark saw no inconsistency to his having personal views on “social subjects” that differed from the views upheld by his beloved Church. This exasperated Juan Diego no end.

But now, in the darkening twilight, as their boy driver dodged fleetingly appearing and instantly vanishing obstacles in the road, there was no talk of birth control. Clark French, befitting his self-sacrificing zeal, rode in the suicide seat — the one beside the boy driver — while Juan Diego and Josefa had buckled themselves into the seeming fortress that was the SUV’s rear seat.

The resort hotel on Panglao Island was called the Encantador; to get there, they drove through a small fishing village on Panglao Bay. It grew darker there. The glimmer of lights on the water and the briny smell in the heavy air were the only hints that the sea was near. And reflected in the headlights, at every curve of the winding road, were the watchful, faceless eyes of dogs or goats; the taller pairs of eyes were cows or people, Juan Diego guessed. There were lots of eyes out there in the darkness. If you were that boy driver, you would have driven fast, too.

“This writer is the master of the collision course,” Clark French, ever the expert on Juan Diego’s novels, was saying to his wife. “It is a fated world; the inevitable looms ahead—”

“It’s true that even your accidents are not coincidental — they’re planned,” Dr. Quintana said to Juan Diego, interrupting her husband. “I think the world is scheming against your poor characters,” she added.

“This writer is the doom master!” Clark French held forth in the speeding car.

It irritated Juan Diego how Clark, albeit knowledgeably, often spoke of him in the third person while delivering a dissertation on his work—à la this writer—notwithstanding that Juan Diego was present (in this case, in the car).

The boy driver suddenly veered the SUV away from a shadowy form — with startled-looking eyes, with multiple arms and legs — but Clark was carrying on as if they were in a classroom.

“Just don’t ask Juan Diego about anything autobiographical, Josefa — or the lack thereof,” Clark continued.

“I wasn’t going to!” his wife protested.

“India is not Mexico. What happens to those children in the circus novel is not what happened to Juan Diego and his sister in their circus,” Clark went on. “Right?” Clark suddenly asked his former teacher.

“That’s right, Clark,” Juan Diego said.

He’d also heard Clark hold forth on the “abortion novel”—as many critics had called another of Juan Diego’s novels. “A compelling argument for a woman’s right to an abortion,” Juan Diego had heard Clark describe that novel. “Yet it’s a complicated argument, coming from a former Catholic,” Clark always added.

“I’m not a former Catholic. I never was a Catholic,” Juan Diego not once failed to point out. “I was taken in by the Jesuits, which was neither my choice nor against my will. What choice or will do you have when you’re fourteen?”

“What I’m trying to say is,” Clark went on in the swerving SUV — on the dark, narrow road that was everywhere dotted with bright, unblinking eyes—“in Juan Diego’s world, you always know the collision is coming. Exactly what the collision is — well, this may come as a surprise. But you definitely know there’s going to be one. In the abortion novel, from the moment that orphan is taught what a D and C is, you know the kid is going to end up being a doctor who does one — right, Josefa?”

“Right,” Dr. Quintana answered in the backseat of the car. She gave Juan Diego a difficult-to-read smile — or a faintly apologetic one. It was dark in the back of the jouncing SUV; Juan Diego couldn’t tell if Dr. Quintana was apologizing for her husband’s assertiveness, his literary bullying, or if she was smiling a little sheepishly in lieu of admitting she knew more about a dilation and curettage than anyone in the collisiondaring car.

“I do not write about myself,” Juan Diego had said in interview after interview, and to Clark French. He’d also explained to Clark, who adored Jesuitical disputation, that (as a former dump kid) he had greatly benefited from the Jesuits in his young life; he’d loved Edward Bonshaw and Brother Pepe. Juan Diego even wished, at times, he could engage in conversation with Father Alfonso and Father Octavio — now that the dump reader was an adult, and somewhat better equipped to argue with such formidably conservative priests. And the nuns at Lost Children had done him and Lupe no harm — notwithstanding what a bitch Sister Gloria had been. (Most of the other nuns had been okay to the dump kids.) In the case of Sister Gloria, Esperanza had been the disapproving nun’s principal provocateur.

Yet Juan Diego had anticipated that a part of being with Clark — devoted student though he was — would be once more to find himself under scrutiny for the anti-Catholicism charge. What got under Clark’s oh-so-Catholic skin, Juan Diego knew, wasn’t that his former teacher was an unbeliever. Juan Diego was not an atheist — he simply had issues with the Church. Clark French was frustrated by this conundrum; Clark could more easily dismiss or ignore an unbeliever.

Clark’s casual-sounding D&C remark — not the most relaxing subject for a practicing OB-GYN, Juan Diego imagined — seemed to turn Dr. Quintana away from further discussion of a literary kind. Josefa clearly sought to change the subject — much to Juan Diego’s relief, if not to her husband’s.

“Where we’re staying, I’m afraid, is all about my family — it’s a family tradition,” Josefa said, smiling more uncertainly than apologetically. “I can vouch for the place—I’m sure you’ll like the Encantador — but I can’t begin to be an advocate for every member of my family,” she continued warily. “Who’s married to whom, who never should have married — their many, many children,” she said, her small voice trailing off.

“Josefa, there’s no need to apologize for anyone in your family,” Clark chimed in from the suicide seat. “What we can’t vouch for is the mystery guest — there’s an uninvited guest. We don’t know who it is,” he added, disassociating himself from the unknown person.

“My family generally takes over the whole place — every room at the Encantador is ours,” Dr. Quintana explained. “But this year, the hotel booked one room to someone else.”

Juan Diego, his heart beating faster than he was used to — enough so he noticed it, in other words — stared out the window of the hurtling car at the myriad eyes bobbing along the roadside, staring back at him. Oh, God! he prayed. Let it be Miriam or Dorothy, please!

“Oh, you’ll see us again — definitely,” Miriam had said to him.

“Yeah, definitely,” Dorothy had said.

In the same conversation, Miriam had told him: “We’ll see you in Manila eventually. If not sooner.”

“If not sooner,” Dorothy had repeated.

Let it be Miriam—just Miriam! Juan Diego was thinking, as if an enticing pair of eyes aglow in the darkness could possibly be hers.

“I suppose,” Juan Diego said slowly, to Dr. Quintana, “this uninvited guest must have booked a room before your family made your usual reservations?”

“No! That’s just it! That’s not what happened!” Clark French exclaimed.

“Clark, we don’t know exactly what happened—” Josefa started to say.

“Your family books the whole place every year!” Clark cried. “This person knew it was a private party. She booked a room anyway, and the Encantador took her reservation — even knowing all the rooms were fully booked! What kind of person wants to crash a private party? She knew she would be entirely isolated! She knew she would be absolutely alone!”

“She,” was all Juan Diego said, once again feeling his heart race. Outside, in the darkness, there were no eyes now. The road had narrowed, and turned to gravel, then to dirt. Perhaps the Encantador was a secluded place, but she would not be entirely isolated there. She, Juan Diego hoped, would be with him. If Miriam was the uninvited guest, she absolutely wouldn’t be alone for long.

That was when the boy driver must have noticed something odd in the rearview mirror. He spoke quickly in Tagalog to Dr. Quintana. Clark French only partially understood the driver, but there was an element of alarm in the boy’s tone; Clark turned and peered into the rear seat, where he could see that his wife had unbuckled her seat belt and was looking closely at Juan Diego.

“Is something wrong, Josefa?” Clark asked his wife.

“Give me a second, Clark — I think he’s just asleep,” Dr. Quintana told her husband.

“Stop the car — stop it!” Clark told the boy driver, but Josefa spoke sharply in Tagalog to the boy, and the kid kept driving.

“We’re almost there, Clark — it’s not necessary to stop here,” Josefa said. “I’m sure your old friend is sleeping—dreaming, if I had to guess, but I’m sure he’s just asleep.”

• • •

FLOR DROVE THE DUMP kids to Circo de La Maravilla, because Brother Pepe was already beginning to blame himself for los niños taking such a risk; Pepe was too upset to go with them, although el circo had been his idea — his and Vargas’s. Flor drove Pepe’s VW Beetle, with Edward Bonshaw in the passenger seat and the kids in the back.

Lupe had delivered a tearful challenge to the noseless statue of the Virgin Mary; this was seconds before they’d driven away from the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús. “Show me a real miracle — anyone can scare a superstitious cleaning woman to death!” Lupe had shouted at the towering Virgin. “Do something to make me believe in you — I think you’re just a big bully! Look at you! All you do is stand there! You don’t even have a nose!”

“You’re not going to offer some prayers, too?” Señor Eduardo asked Juan Diego, who was disinclined to translate his sister’s outburst for the Iowan — nor did the limping boy dare to tell the missionary his most dire fears. If anything happened to Juan Diego at La Maravilla — or if, for any reason, he and Lupe were ever separated — there would be no future for Lupe, because no one but her brother could understand her. Not even the Jesuits would keep her and care for her; Lupe would be put in the institution for retarded children, where she would be forgotten. Even the name of the place for retarded children was unknown or had been forgotten, and no one seemed to know where it was — or no one would say exactly where it was, nothing more than “out of town” or “up in the mountains.”

At that time, when Lost Children was relatively new in town, there was only one other orphanage in Oaxaca, and it was a little bit “out of town” and “up in the mountains.” It was in Viguera, and everyone knew its name — Ciudad de los Niños, “City of Children.”

“City of Boys” was what Lupe called it; they didn’t take girls. Most of the boys were ages six to ten; twelve was the cut-off, so they wouldn’t have taken Juan Diego.

City of Children had opened in 1958; it had been around longer than Niños Perdidos, and the all-boys’ orphanage would outlast Lost Children, too.

Brother Pepe would not speak ill of Ciudad de los Niños; perhaps Pepe believed all orphanages were a godsend. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio said only that education was not a priority at City of Children. (The dump kids had merely observed that the boys were bused to school — their school was near the Solitude Virgin’s basilica — and Lupe had said, with her characteristic shrug, that the buses themselves were as beat to shit as you would expect for buses accustomed to transporting boys.)

One of the orphans at Lost Children had been at Ciudad de los Niños as a younger boy. He didn’t bad-mouth the all-boys’ orphanage; he never said he was mistreated there. Juan Diego would remember that this boy said there were shoe boxes stacked in the dining hall (this was said without any explanation), and that all the boys — twenty or so — slept in one room. The mattresses were unsheeted, and the blankets and stuffed animals had earlier belonged to other boys. There were stones in the soccer field, this boy said — you didn’t want to fall down — and the meat was cooked on an outdoor wood fire.

These observations were not offered as criticisms; they simply contributed to Juan Diego and Lupe’s impression that City of Boys would not have been an option for them — even if Lupe had been the right sex for that place, and even if both kids hadn’t been too old.

If the dump kids went crazy at Lost Children, they would go back to the basurero before they would submit to the institution for the retarded, where Lupe had heard the children were “head-bangers,” and some of the head-bangers had their hands tied behind their backs. This prevented them from gouging out the eyes of other kids, or their own eyes. Lupe would not tell Juan Diego her source.

There’s no explaining why the dump kids thought it was perfectly logical that Circo de La Maravilla was a fortunate option, and the only acceptable alternative to their returning to Guerrero. Rivera would have welcomed the Guerrero choice, but he was notably absent when Flor drove the dump kids and Señor Eduardo to La Maravilla. And it would have been a tight fit for the dump boss, had he tried to squeeze into Brother Pepe’s VW Beetle. To the dump kids, it also seemed perfectly logical that they were driven to the circus by a transvestite prostitute.

Flor was smoking as she drove, holding her cigarette out the driver’s-side window, and Edward Bonshaw, who was nervous — he knew Flor was a prostitute; he didn’t know she was a transvestite — said, as casually as he could, “I used to smoke. I kicked the habit.”

“You think celibacy isn’t a habit?” Flor asked him. Señor Eduardo was surprised that Flor’s English was so good. He knew nothing of the unmentionable Houston experience in her life, and no one had told him that Flor had been born a boy (or that she still had a penis).

Flor navigated her way through a wedding party that had exited a church into the street: the bride and groom, the guests, a nonstop mariachi band—“the usual imbeciles,” Flor called them.

“I’m worried about los niños at the circus,” Edward Bonshaw confided to the transvestite, choosing not to engage the celibacy subject, or tactfully allowing it to wait.

“Los niños de la basura are almost old enough to be getting married,” Flor said, as she made threatening gestures out the driver’s-side window to anyone (even children) in the wedding party, the cigarette now dangling from her lips. “If these kids were getting married, I would be worried about them,” Flor carried on. “At the circus, the worst that can go wrong is a lion kills you. There’s a lot more that can go wrong with a marriage.”

“Well, if that’s how you feel about marriage, I suppose celibacy isn’t such a bad idea,” Edward Bonshaw said, in his Jesuitical way.

“There’s only one actual lion at the circus,” Juan Diego interposed from the backseat. “All the rest are lionesses.”

“So that asshole Ignacio is a lioness tamer — is that what you’re saying?” Flor asked the boy.

She’d just managed to get around, or through, the wedding party, when Flor and the VW Beetle encountered a tilted burro cart. The cart was overloaded with melons, but all the melons had rolled to the rear end of the cart, hoisting the burro by its harness into the air; the melons outweighed the little donkey, whose hooves were flailing. The front end of the burro cart was also suspended in the air.

“Another dangling donkey,” Flor said. With surprising delicacy, she gave the finger to the burro-cart driver — using the same long-fingered hand that once again held her cigarette (between her thumb and index finger). About a dozen melons had rolled into the street, and the burro-cart driver had abandoned the dangling donkey because some street kids were stealing his melons.

“I know that guy,” Flor said, in her by-the-way fashion; no one in the little VW knew if she meant as a client or in another way.

When Flor drove into the circus grounds at Cinco Señores, the crowd for the matinee performance had gone home. The parking lot was almost empty; the audience for the evening show hadn’t begun to arrive.

“Watch out for the elephant shit,” Flor warned them, when they were carrying the dump kids’ stuff down the avenue of troupe tents. Edward Bonshaw promptly stepped in a fresh pile of it; the elephant shit covered his whole foot, up to his ankle.

“There’s no saving your sandals from elephant shit, honey,” Flor told him. “You’ll be better off barefoot, once we find you a hose.”

“Merciful God,” Señor Eduardo said. The missionary walked on, but with a limp; it was not as exaggerated a limp as Juan Diego’s, but enough of one to make the Iowan aware of the comparison. “Now everyone will think we’re related,” Edward Bonshaw good-naturedly told the boy.

“I wish we were related,” Juan Diego told him; he had blurted it out, too sincerely to have any hope of stopping himself.

“You will be related — all the rest of your lives,” Lupe said, but Juan Diego was suddenly unable to translate this; his eyes had welled with tears and he couldn’t speak, nor could he understand that, in this case, Lupe was being accurate about the future.

Edward Bonshaw had difficulty speaking, too. “That’s a very sweet thing to say to me, Juan Diego,” the Iowan haltingly said. “I would be proud to be related to you,” Señor Eduardo told the boy.

“Well, isn’t that great? You’re both very sweet,” Flor said. “Except that priests can’t have children — one of the downsides of celibacy, I suppose.”

It was twilight at Circo de La Maravilla, and the various performers were between shows. The newcomers were an odd foursome: a Jesuit scholastic who flagellated himself, a transvestite prostitute who’d had an unspeakable life in Houston, and two dump kids. Where the flaps of the troupe tents were open, the kids could see some of the performers fussing with their makeup or their costumes — among them, a transvestite dwarf. She was standing in front of a full-length mirror, putting on her lipstick.

“¡Hola, Flor!” the stout dwarf called, wiggling her hips and blowing Flor a kiss.

“Saludos, Paco,” Flor said, with a wave of her long-fingered hand.

“I didn’t know Paco could be a girl’s name,” Edward Bonshaw said politely to Flor.

“It isn’t,” Flor told him. “Paco is a guy’s name — Paco is a guy, like me,” Flor said.

“But you’re not—”

“Yes, I am,” Flor said, cutting him off. “I’m just more passable than Paco, honey,” she told the Iowan. “Paco isn’t trying to be passable — Paco is a clown.”

They went on; they were expected at the lion tamer’s tent. Edward Bonshaw kept looking at Flor, saying nothing.

“Flor has a thing, like a boy’s thing,” Lupe said helpfully. “Does the parrot man get it that Flor has a penis?” Lupe asked Juan Diego, who didn’t translate her helpful tip to Señor Eduardo, although he knew his sister had trouble reading the parrot man’s mind.

“El hombre papagayo — that’s me, isn’t it?” the Iowan asked Juan Diego. “Lupe is talking about me, isn’t she?”

“I think you’re a very nice parrot man,” Flor said to him; she saw that the Iowan was blushing, and this had encouraged her to be more flirtatious with him.

“Thank you,” Edward Bonshaw said to the transvestite; he was limping more. Like clay, the elephant shit was hardening on his ruined sandal and between his toes, but something else was weighing him down. Señor Eduardo seemed to be bearing a burden; whatever it was, it appeared to be heavier than elephant shit — no amount of whipping would lessen the load. Whatever cross the Iowan had borne, and for how long, he couldn’t carry it a step farther. He was struggling, not only to walk. “I don’t think I can do this,” Señor Eduardo said.

“Do what?” Flor asked him, but the missionary merely shook his head; his limp looked more like staggering than limping.

The circus band was playing somewhere — just the start of a piece of music, which stopped shortly after it began and then started up again. The band couldn’t overcome a hard part; the band was struggling, too.

There was a good-looking Argentinian couple standing in the open flap of their tent. They were aerialists, checking over each other’s safety harnesses, testing the strength of the metal grommets where the guy wires would be attached to them. The aerialists wore tight, gold-spangled singlets, and they couldn’t stop fondling each other while they checked out their safety gear.

“I hear they have sex all the time, even though they’re already married — they keep people in the nearby tents awake,” Flor said to Edward Bonshaw. “Maybe having sex all the time is an Argentinian thing,” Flor said. “I don’t think it’s a married thing,” she added.

There was a girl about Lupe’s age standing outside one of the troupe tents. The girl was wearing a blue-green singlet and a mask with a bird’s beak on it; she was practicing with a hula hoop. Some older girls, improbably costumed as flamingos, ran past the dump kids in the avenue between the tents; the girls wore pink tutus, and they were carrying their flamingo heads, which had long, rigid necks. Their silver anklets chimed.

“Los niños de la basura,” Juan Diego and Lupe heard one of the head-less flamingos say. The dump kids hadn’t known they would be recognized at the circus, but Oaxaca was a small city.

“Cunt-brained, half-dressed flamingos,” Flor observed, saying nothing more; Flor, of course, had been called worse names.

In the seventies, there was a gay bar on Bustamante, in the neighborhood of Zaragoza Street. The bar was called La China, after someone with curly hair. (The name was changed about thirty years ago, but the bar on Bustamante is still there — and still gay.)

Flor felt at ease; she could be herself at La China, but even there they called her La Loca—“The Crazy Lady.” It was not all that common, in those days, for transvestites to be themselves — to cross-dress everywhere they went, the way Flor did. And in the parlance of the crowd at La China, their calling Flor “La Loca” had a gay connotation — it amounted to calling her “The Queen.”

There was a special bar for the cross-dressers, even in the seventies. La Coronita—“The Little Crown”—was on the corner of Bustamante and Xóchitl. It was a party place — the clientele was mostly gay. The transvestites all dressed up — they cross-dressed like crazy, and everyone had a good time — but La Coronita was not a place for prostitution, and when the transvestites arrived at the bar, they were dressed as men; they didn’t cross-dress until they were safely inside The Little Crown.

Not Flor; she was always a woman, everywhere she went — whether she was working on Zaragoza Street or just partying on Bustamante, Flor was always herself. That was why she was called The Queen; she was La Loca everywhere she went.

They even knew her at La Maravilla; the circus knew who the real stars were — they were the ones who were stars all the time.

Edward Bonshaw was only now discovering who Flor was, as he tramped through elephant shit at Circus of The Wonder. (To Señor Eduardo, “The Wonder” was Flor.)

A juggler was practicing outside one of the troupe tents, and the contortionist called Pajama Man was limbering up. He was called Pajama Man because he was as loose and floppy as a pair of pajamas without a body; he moved like something you might see hanging on a clothesline.

Maybe the circus isn’t such a good place for a cripple, Juan Diego was thinking.

“Remember, Juan Diego — you are a reader,” Señor Eduardo said to the worried-looking boy. “There is a life in books, and in the world of your imagination; there is more than the physical world, even here.”

“I should have met you when I was a kid,” Flor told the missionary. “We might have helped each other get through some shit.”

They made way in the avenue of troupe tents for the elephant trainer and two of his elephants; distracted by the actual elephants, Edward Bonshaw stepped in another enormous mound of elephant shit, this time with his good foot and the one clean sandal.

“Merciful God,” the Iowan said again.

“It’s a good thing you’re not moving to the circus,” Flor told him.

“The elephant shit isn’t small,” Lupe was babbling. “How does the parrot man manage not to see it?”

“My name again — I know you’re talking about me,” Señor Eduardo said cheerfully to Lupe. “ ‘El hombre papagayo’ has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”

“You not only need a wife,” Flor told the Iowan. “It would take an entire family to look after you properly.”

They came to the cage for the three lionesses. One of the lady lions eyed them languidly — the other two were asleep.

“You see how the females get along together?” Flor was saying; it was increasingly clear that she knew her way around La Maravilla. “But not this guy,” Flor said, stopping at the solitary lion’s cage; the alleged king of beasts was in a cage by himself, and he looked disgruntled about it. “Hola, Hombre,” Flor said to the lion. “His name is Hombre,” Flor explained. “Check out his balls — big ones, aren’t they?”

“Lord, have mercy,” Edward Bonshaw said.

Lupe was indignant. “It’s not the poor lion’s fault — he didn’t have a choice about his balls,” she said. “Hombre doesn’t like it if you make fun of him,” she added.

“You can read the lion’s mind, I suppose,” Juan Diego said to his sister.

“Anyone can read Hombre’s mind,” Lupe answered. She was staring at the lion, at his huge face and heavy mane — not at his balls. The lion seemed suddenly agitated by her. Perhaps sensing Hombre’s agitation, the two sleeping lionesses woke up; all three of the lionesses were watching Lupe, as if she were a rival for Hombre’s affection. Juan Diego had the feeling that Lupe and the lionesses felt sorry for the lion — they seemed almost as sorry for him as they feared him.

“Hombre,” Lupe said softly to the lion, “it’ll be all right. Nothing’s your fault.”

“What are you talking about?” Juan Diego asked her.

“Come on, niños,” Flor was saying, “you have an appointment with the lion tamer and his wife — you don’t have any business with the lions.”

By the transfixed way Lupe was staring at Hombre, and the restless way the lion paced in his cage as he stared back at her, you would have thought that Lupe’s business at Circo de La Maravilla was entirely with that lone male lion. “It’ll be all right,” she repeated to Hombre, like a promise.

“What will be all right?” Juan Diego asked his sister.

“Hombre is the last dog. He’s the last one,” Lupe told her brother. Naturally, this made no sense — Hombre was a lion, not a dog. But Lupe had distinctly said “el último perro”; the last one, she’d repeated, to be clear—“el último.”

“What do you mean, Lupe?” Juan Diego asked impatiently; he was sick of her endlessly prophetic pronouncements.

“That Hombre — he’s the top rooftop dog and the last one,” was all she said, shrugging. It irritated Juan Diego when Lupe couldn’t be bothered to explain herself.

Finally, the circus band had found its way beyond the beginning of the repeated piece of music. Darkness was falling; lights were turned on in the troupe tents. In the avenue ahead of them, the dump kids could see Ignacio, the lion tamer; he was coiling his long whip.

“I hear you like whips,” Flor said quietly to the hobbling missionary.

“You earlier mentioned a hose,” Edward Bonshaw replied, somewhat stiffly. “Right now, I would like a hose.”

“Tell the parrot man to check out the lion tamer’s whip — it’s a big one,” Lupe was babbling.

Ignacio was watching them approach in the calmly calculating way he might have measured the courage and reliability of new lions. The lion tamer’s tight pants were like a matador’s; he wore nothing but a fitted V-necked vest on his torso, to show off his muscles. The vest was white, not only to accentuate Ignacio’s dark-brown skin; if he were ever attacked by a lion in the ring, Ignacio wanted the crowd to see how red his blood was — blood shows up the brightest against a white background. Even when dying, Ignacio would be vain.

“Forget his whip — look at him,” Flor whispered to the beshitted Iowan. “Ignacio is a born crowd-pleaser.”

“And a womanizer!” Lupe babbled. It didn’t matter if she failed to hear what you whispered, because she already knew what you were thinking. Yet the parrot man’s mind, like Rivera’s, was a hard one for Lupe to read. “Ignacio likes the lionesses — he likes all the ladies,” Lupe was saying, but by now the dump kids were at the lion tamer’s tent, and Soledad, Ignacio’s wife, had come out of the troupe tent to stand beside her preening, powerful-looking husband.

“If you think you just saw the king of beasts,” Flor was still whispering to Edward Bonshaw, “think again. You’re about to meet him now,” the transvestite whispered to the missionary. “Ignacio is the king of beasts.”

“The king of pigs,” Lupe said suddenly, but of course Juan Diego was the only one who understood her. And he would never understand everything about her.