Avenue of Mysteries

17. New Year’s Eve at the Encantador

Maybe it was nothing more than the melancholy of that moment when the dump kids arrived at La Maravilla, or else the unattached eyes in the darkness — those disembodied eyes surrounding the car speeding toward the beach resort with the bewitching name of Encantador. Who knows what made Juan Diego suddenly nod off? It might have been that moment when the road narrowed and the car slowed down, and the intriguing eyes vanished. (When the dump kids moved to the circus, there were more eyes watching them than they’d been used to.)

“At first, I thought he was daydreaming — he seemed to be in a kind of trance,” Dr. Quintana was saying.

“Is he all right?” Clark French asked his wife, the doctor.

“He’s just asleep, Clark — he fell sound asleep,” Josefa said. “It may be the jet lag, or what a bad night’s sleep your ill-advised aquarium caused him.”

“Josefa, he fell asleep when we were talking — in the middle of a conversation!” Clark cried. “Does he have narcolepsy?”

“Don’t shake him!” Juan Diego heard Clark’s wife say, but he kept his eyes closed.

“I’ve never heard of a narcoleptic writer,” Clark French was saying. “What about the drugs he’s taking?”

“The beta-blockers can affect your sleep,” Dr. Quintana told her husband.

“I was thinking of the Viagra—”

“The Viagra does only one thing, Clark.”

Juan Diego thought this was a good moment to open his eyes. “Are we here?” he asked them. Josefa was still sitting beside him in the backseat; Clark had opened the rear door and was peering into the SUV at his former teacher. “Is this the Encantador?” Juan Diego asked innocently. “Has the mystery guest arrived?”

She had, but no one had seen her. Perhaps she’d traveled a long way and was resting in her room. She seemed to know the room — that is, she had requested it. It was near the library, on the second floor of the main building; either she’d stayed at the Encantador before or she assumed that a room near the library would be quiet.

“Personally, I never nap,” Clark was saying; he had wrestled Juan Diego’s mammoth orange bag away from the boy driver and was now lugging it along an outdoor balcony of the pretty hotel, which was a magical but rambling assemblage of adjoining buildings on a hillside overlooking the sea. The palm trees obscured any view of the beach — even from the perspective of the second- and third-floor rooms — but the sea was visible. “A good night’s sleep is all I need,” Clark carried on.

“There were fish in my room last night, and an eel,” Juan Diego reminded his former student. Here he would have a second-floor room, on the same floor as the uninvited guest — in an adjacent building that was easily reached by the outdoor balcony.

“About the fish — pay no attention to Auntie Carmen,” Clark was saying. “Your room is some distance from the swimming pool. The children in the pool, in the early morning, shouldn’t wake you up.”

“Auntie Carmen is a pet person,” Clark’s wife interjected. “She cares more about fish than she does about people.”

“Thank God the moray survived,” Clark joined in. “I believe Morales lives with Auntie Carmen.”

“It’s a pity no one else does,” Josefa said. “No one else would,” the doctor added.

Below them, children were playing in the pool. “Lots of teenagers in this family — therefore, lots of free nannies for the little ones,” Clark pointed out.

“Lots of children, period, in this family,” the OB-GYN observed. “We’re not all like Auntie Carmen.”

“I’m taking a medication — it plays games with how I sleep,” Juan Diego told them. “I’m taking beta-blockers,” he said to Dr. Quintana. “As you probably know,” he said to the doctor, “beta-blockers can have a depressing effect, or a diminishing one, on your real life — whereas the effect they have on your dream life is a little unpredictable.”

Juan Diego didn’t tell the doctor that he’d been playing games with the dosage of his Lopressor prescription. Probably he came across as being completely candid — that is, as far as Dr. Quintana and Clark French could tell.

Juan Diego’s room was delightful; the sea-view windows had screens, and there was a ceiling fan — no air-conditioning would be necessary. The big bathroom was charming, and it had an outdoor shower with a pagoda-shaped bamboo roof over it.

“Take your time to freshen up before dinner,” Josefa said to Juan Diego. “The jet lag — you know, the time difference — could also be influencing how the beta-blockers affect you,” she told him.

“After the bigger kids take the little kids to bed, the real dinner-table conversation can get started,” Clark was saying, squeezing his former teacher’s shoulder.

Was this a warning not to bring up adult subjects around the children and the teenagers? Juan Diego was wondering. Juan Diego realized that Clark French, despite his bluff heartiness, was still uptight — a fortysomething prude. Clark’s fellow MFA students at Iowa, if they could meet him now, would still be teasing him.

Abortion, Juan Diego knew, was illegal in the Philippines; he was curious to know what Dr. Quintana, the OB-GYN, thought about that. (And did she and her husband — Clark, the oh-so-good Catholic — feel the same about that?) Surely that was a dinner-table conversation he and Clark couldn’t (or shouldn’t) have before the children and the teenagers had trotted off to bed. Juan Diego hoped he might have this conversation with Dr. Quintana after Clark had trotted off to bed.

Juan Diego became so agitated thinking about this that he almost forgot about Miriam. Of course he hadn’t entirely forgotten about her — not for a minute. He resisted taking an outdoor shower, not only because it was dark outside (there would be insects galore in the outdoor shower after nightfall) but because he might not hear the phone. He couldn’t call Miriam — he didn’t even know her last name! — nor could he call the front desk and ask to be connected to the “uninvited” woman. But if Miriam was the mystery woman, wouldn’t she call him?

He elected to take a bath — no insects, and he could keep the door to the bedroom open; if she called, he could hear the phone. Naturally, he rushed his bath and there was no call. Juan Diego tried to remain calm; he plotted his next move with his medications. Not to confuse the issue, he returned the pill-cutting device to his toilet kit. The Viagra and the Lopressor prescriptions stood side by side on the counter, next to the bathroom sink.

No half-doses for me, Juan Diego decided. After dinner, he would take one whole Lopressor pill — the right amount, in other words — but not if he was with Miriam. Skipping a dose hadn’t hurt him before, and a surge of adrenaline could be beneficial — even necessary — with Miriam.

The Viagra, he thought, presented him with a more complicated decision. For his rendezvous with Dorothy, Juan Diego had traded his usual half-dose for a whole one; for Miriam, he imagined, a half-dose wouldn’t suffice. The complicated part was when to take it. The Viagra needed nearly an hour to work. And how long would one Viagra — a whole one, the full 100 milligrams — last?

And it was New Year’s Eve! Juan Diego suddenly remembered. Certainly the teenagers would be up past midnight, if not the little children. Wouldn’t most of the adults also stay up to herald the coming year?

Suppose Miriam invited him to her room? Should he bring the Viagra with him to dinner? (It was too soon to take one now.)

He dressed slowly, trying to imagine what Miriam would want him to wear. He’d written about more long-lasting, more complex, and more diverse relationships than he’d ever had. His readers — that is, the ones who’d never met him — might have imagined that he’d lived a sophisticated sexual life; in his novels, there were homosexual and bisexual experiences, and plenty of the plain-old heterosexual ones. Juan Diego made a political point of being sexually explicit in his writing; yet he’d never even lived with anyone, and the plain-old part of being a heterosexual was the kind of heterosexual he was.

Juan Diego suspected he was probably pretty boring as a lover. He would have been the first to admit that what passed for his sex life existed almost entirely in his imagination — like now, he thought ruefully. All he was doing was imagining Miriam; he didn’t even know if she was the mystery guest who’d checked into the Encantador.

The conviction that he chiefly had an imaginary sex life depressed him, and he’d taken only half a Lopressor pill today; this time, he couldn’t entirely blame the beta-blockers for making him feel diminished. Juan Diego decided to put one Viagra tablet in his right-front pants pocket. This way, he’d be prepared — Miriam or no Miriam.

He often put his hand in his right-front pocket; Juan Diego didn’t need to see that pretty mah-jongg tile, but he liked the feel of it — so smooth. The game block had made a perfect check mark on Edward Bonshaw’s pale forehead; Señor Eduardo had carried the tile with him as a keepsake. When the dear man was dying — when Señor Eduardo was not only no longer dressing himself, but wasn’t wearing clothes with pockets — he’d given the mah-jongg tile to Juan Diego. The game block, once imbedded between Edward Bonshaw’s blond eyebrows, would become Juan Diego’s talisman.

The four-sided gray-blue Viagra tablet was not as smooth as the bam-boo-and-ivory mah-jongg tile; the game block was twice the size of the Viagra pill — his rescue pill, as Juan Diego thought of it. And if Miriam was the uninvited guest in the second-floor room near the Encantador library, the Viagra tablet in Juan Diego’s right-front pants pocket was a second talisman he carried with him.

Naturally, the knock on his hotel-room door filled him with false expectations. It was only Clark, coming to take him to dinner. When Juan Diego was turning out the lights in his bathroom and bedroom, Clark advised him to turn on the ceiling fan and leave it on.

“See the gecko?” Clark said, pointing to the ceiling. A gecko, smaller than a pinky finger, was poised on the ceiling above the headboard of the bed. There wasn’t much Juan Diego missed about Mexico — hence he’d never been back — but he did miss the geckos. The little one above the bed darted on its adhesive toes across the ceiling at the exact instant Juan Diego turned on the fan.

“Once the fan has been on awhile, the geckos will settle down,” Clark said. “You don’t want them racing around when you’re trying to go to sleep.”

Juan Diego was disappointed in himself for not seeing the geckos until Clark pointed one out; as he was closing his hotel-room door, he spotted a second gecko scurrying over the bathroom wall — it was lightning-fast and quickly disappeared behind the bathroom mirror.

“I miss the geckos,” Juan Diego admitted to Clark. Outside, on the balcony, they could hear music coming from a noisy club for locals on the beach.

“Why don’t you go back to Mexico — I mean, just to visit?” Clark asked him.

It was always like this with Clark, Juan Diego remembered. Clark wanted Juan Diego’s “issues” with childhood and early adolescence to be over; Clark wanted all grievances to end in an uplifting manner, as in Clark’s novels. Everyone should be saved, Clark believed; everything could be forgiven, he imagined. Clark made goodness seem tedious.

But what hadn’t Juan Diego and Clark French fought about?

There’d been no end to their to and fro about the late Pope John Paul II, who’d died in 2005. He’d been a young cardinal from Poland when he was elected pope, and he became a very popular pope, but John Paul’s efforts to “restore normality” in Poland — this meant making abortion illegal again — drove Juan Diego crazy.

Clark French had expressed his fondness for the Polish pope’s “culture of life” idea — John Paul II’s name for his stance against abortion and contraception, which amounted to protecting “defenseless” fetuses from the “culture of death” idea.

“Why would you — you of all people, given what happened to you — choose a death idea over a life idea?” Clark had asked his former teacher. And now Clark was suggesting (again) that Juan Diego should go back to Mexico — just to visit!

“You know why I won’t go back, Clark,” Juan Diego once more answered, limping along the second-floor balcony. (Another time, when he’d had too much beer, Juan Diego had said to Clark: “Mexico is in the hands of criminals and the Catholic Church.”)

“Don’t tell me you blame the Church for AIDS — you’re not saying safe sex is the answer to everything, are you?” Clark now asked his former teacher. This was not a very skillfully veiled reference, Juan Diego knew — not that Clark was necessarily trying to veil his references.

Juan Diego remembered how Clark had called condom use “propaganda.” Clark was probably paraphrasing Pope Benedict XVI. Hadn’t Benedict said something to the effect that condoms “only exacerbate” the AIDS problem? Or was that what Clark had said?

And now, because Juan Diego hadn’t answered Clark’s question about safe sex solving everything, Clark kept pressing the Benedict point: “Benedict’s position — namely, that the only efficient way to combat an epidemic is by spiritual renovation—”

“Clark!” Juan Diego cried. “All ‘spiritual renovation’ means is more of the same old family values — meaning heterosexual marriage, meaning nothing but sexual abstention before marriage—”

“Sounds to me like one way to slow down an epidemic,” Clark said slyly. He was as doctrinaire as ever!

“Between your Church’s unfollowable rules and human nature, I’ll bet on human nature,” Juan Diego said. “Take celibacy—” he began.

“Maybe after the children and the teenagers have gone to bed,” Clark reminded his former teacher.

They were alone on the balcony, and it was New Year’s Eve; Juan Diego was pretty sure that the teenagers would be up later than the adults, but all he said was: “Think about pedophilia, Clark.”

“I knew it! I knew that was next!” Clark said excitedly.

In his Christmas address in Rome — not even two weeks ago — Pope Benedict XVI had said that pedophilia was considered normal as recently as the 1970s. Clark knew that would have made Juan Diego hot under the collar. Now, naturally, his former teacher was up to his old tricks, quoting the pope as if the entire realm of Catholic theology were to blame for Benedict’s suggesting there was no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself.

“Clark, Benedict said there is only a ‘better than’ and a ‘worse than’—that’s what your pope said,” Clark’s former teacher was telling him.

“May I remind you that the statistics on pedophilia outside the Church, in the general population, are exactly the same as the statistics inside the Church?” Clark French said to Juan Diego.

“Benedict said: ‘Nothing is good or bad in itself.’ He said nothing, Clark,” Juan Diego told his former student. “Pedophilia isn’t nothing; surely pedophilia is ‘bad in itself,’ Clark.”

“After the children have—”

“There are no children here, Clark!” Juan Diego shouted. “We’re alone, on a balcony!” he cried.

“Well—” Clark French said cautiously, looking all around; they could hear the voices of children somewhere, but no children (not even teenagers, or other adults) were anywhere in sight.

“The Catholic hierarchy believes kissing leads to sin,” Juan Diego whispered. “Your Church is against birth control, against abortion, against gay marriage — your Church is against kissing, Clark!”

Suddenly, a swarm of small children ran past them on the balcony; their flip-flops made a slapping sound and their wet hair gleamed.

“After the little ones have gone to bed—” Clark French began again; conversation was a competition with him, akin to a combat sport. Clark would have made an indefatigable missionary. Clark had that Jesuitical “I know everything” way about him — always the emphasis on learning and evangelizing. The mere thought of his own martyrdom probably motivated Clark. He would happily suffer, just to make an impossible point; if you abused him, he would smile and thrive.

“Are you all right?” Clark was asking Juan Diego.

“I’m just a little out of breath — I’m not used to limping this fast,” Juan Diego told him. “Or limping and talking, together.”

They slowed their pace as they descended the stairs and made their way to the main lobby of the Encantador, where the dining room was. There was an overhanging roof to the hotel restaurant, and a rolled-up bamboo curtain that could be lowered as a barrier against wind and rain. The openness to the palm trees and the view of the sea gave the dining room the feeling of a spacious veranda. There were paper party hats at all the tables.

What a big family Clark French had married into! Juan Diego was thinking. Dr. Josefa Quintana must have had thirty or forty relatives, and more than half of them were children or young people.

“No one expects you to remember everyone’s name,” Clark whispered to Juan Diego.

“About the mystery guest,” Juan Diego said suddenly. “She should sit next to me.”

“Next to you?” Clark asked him.

“Certainly. All of you hate her. At least I’m neutral,” Juan Diego told Clark.

“I don’t hate her — no one knows her! She’s inserted herself into a family—”

“I know, Clark — I know,” Juan Diego said. “She should sit next to me. We’re both strangers. All of you know one another.”

“I was thinking of putting her at one of the children’s tables,” Clark told him. “Maybe at the table with the most obstreperous children.”

“You see? You do hate her,” Juan Diego said to him.

“I was kidding. Maybe a table of teenagers — the most sullen ones,” Clark continued.

“You definitely hate her. I’m neutral,” Juan Diego reminded him. (Miriam could corrupt the teenagers, Juan Diego was thinking.)

“Uncle Clark!” A small, round-faced boy tugged on Clark’s hand.

“Yes, Pedro. What is it?” Clark asked the little boy.

“It’s the big gecko behind the painting in the library. It came out from behind the painting!” Pedro told him.

“Not the giant gecko — not that one!” Clark cried, feigning alarm.

“Yes! The giant one!” the little boy exclaimed.

“Well, it just so happens, Pedro, that this man knows all about geckos — he’s a gecko expert. He not only loves geckos; he misses geckos,” Clark told the child. “This is Mr. Guerrero,” Clark added, slipping away and leaving Juan Diego with Pedro. The boy instantly clutched the older man’s hand.

“You love them?” the boy asked, but before Juan Diego could answer him, Pedro said: “Why do you miss geckos, Mister?”

“Ah, well—” Juan Diego started and then stopped, stalling for time. When he began to limp in the direction of the stairs to the library, his limp drew a dozen children to him; they were five-year-olds, or only a little older, like Pedro.

“He knows all about geckos — he loves them,” Pedro was telling the other kids. “He misses geckos. Why?” Pedro asked Juan Diego again.

“What happened to your foot, Mister?” one of the other children, a little girl with pigtails, asked him.

“I was a dump kid. I lived in a shack near the Oaxaca basurero—basurero means ‘dump’; Oaxaca is in Mexico,” Juan Diego told them. “The shack my sister and I lived in had only one door. Every morning, when I got up, there was a gecko on that screen door. The gecko was so fast, it could disappear in the blink of an eye,” Juan Diego told the children, clapping his hands for effect. He was limping more as he went up the stairs. “One morning, a truck backed over my right foot. The driver’s side-view mirror was broken; the driver couldn’t see me. It wasn’t his fault; he was a good man. He’s dead now, and I miss him. I miss the dump, and the geckos,” Juan Diego told the children. He was not aware that some adults were also following him upstairs to the library. Clark French was following his former teacher, too; it was, of course, Juan Diego’s story that they were following.

Had the man with the limp really said he missed the dump? a few of the children were asking one another.

“If I’d lived in the basurero, I don’t think I would miss it,” the little girl with pigtails told Pedro. “Maybe he misses his sister,” she said.

“I can understand missing geckos,” Pedro told her.

“Geckos are mostly nocturnal — they’re more active at night, when there are more insects. They eat insects; geckos don’t hurt you,” Juan Diego was saying.

“Where is your sister?” the little girl with the pigtails asked Juan Diego.

“She’s dead,” Juan Diego answered her; he was about to say how Lupe had died, but he didn’t want to give the little ones nightmares.

“Look!” Pedro said. He pointed at a big painting; it hung over a comfortable-looking couch in the Encantador library. The gecko was enough of a giant to be almost as visible, even from a distance, as the painting. The gecko clung to the wall beside the painting; as Juan Diego and the children approached, the gecko climbed higher. The big lizard waited, watching them, about halfway between the painting and the ceiling. It really was a big gecko, almost the size of a house cat.

“The man in the painting is a saint,” Juan Diego was telling the children. “He was once a student at the University of Paris; he’d been a soldier, too — he was a Basque soldier, and he was wounded.”

“Wounded how?” Pedro asked.

“By a cannonball,” Juan Diego told him.

“Wouldn’t a cannonball kill you?” Pedro asked.

“I guess not if you’re going to be a saint,” Juan Diego answered.

“What was his name?” the little girl with pigtails asked; she was full of questions. “Who was the saint?”

“Your uncle Clark knows who he was,” Juan Diego answered her. He was aware of Clark French watching him, and listening to him — ever the devoted student. (Clark looked like someone who might survive being shot with a cannonball.)

“Uncle Clark!” the children were calling.

“What was the saint’s name?” the little girl with pigtails kept asking.

“Saint Ignatius Loyola,” Juan Diego heard Clark French tell the children.

The giant gecko moved as fast as a small one. Maybe Clark’s voice had been too confident, or just too loud. It was amazing how the big lizard could flatten itself out — how it managed to fit behind the painting, although it had moved the painting slightly. The painting now hung a little crookedly on the wall, but it was as if the gecko had never been there. Saint Ignatius himself had not seen the lizard, nor was Loyola even looking at the children and adults.

From all the portraits of Loyola that Juan Diego had seen — in the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús, at Lost Children, and elsewhere in Oaxaca (and in Mexico City) — he couldn’t recall the bald but bearded saint ever looking back at him. Saint Ignatius’s eyes looked above; Loyola was looking, ever-beseechingly, toward Heaven. The Jesuits’ founder was seeking a higher authority — Loyola wasn’t inclined to make eye contact with mere bystanders.

“Dinner is served!” an adult’s voice was calling.

“Thank you for the story, Mister,” Pedro said to Juan Diego. “I’m sorry about all the stuff you miss,” the little boy added.

Both Pedro and the little girl with pigtails wanted to hold Juan Diego’s hands when all three of them got back to the top of the stairs, but the stairs were too narrow; it wouldn’t have been safe for a crippled man to go down those stairs holding hands with two little children. Juan Diego knew he should hold the railing instead.

Besides, he saw Clark French waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs — no doubt the new seating plan had given a few of the most senior family members fits. Juan Diego imagined there were women of a certain age who’d wanted to sit next to him; these older women were his most avid readers — at least they were usually the ones who weren’t shy about speaking to him.

All Clark enthusiastically said to him was: “I just love listening to how you tell a story.”

Maybe you wouldn’t love listening to my Virgin Mary story, Juan Diego was thinking, but he felt inordinately tired — especially for someone who’d slept on the plane and had a nap in the car. Young Pedro was right to feel sorry about “all the stuff” Juan Diego missed. Just thinking about all the stuff he missed made Juan Diego miss everyone more—he’d hardly scratched the surface with that dump story for the children.

The seating plan had been very carefully worked out; the children’s tables were at the perimeters of the dining room, the adults clustered together at the center tables. Josefa, Clark’s wife, would be seated to one side of Juan Diego, who saw that the other seat beside him was empty. Clark took a seat diagonally across the table from his former teacher. No one wore a party hat — not yet.

Juan Diego wasn’t surprised to see that the middle of his table was, for the most part, composed of those “women of a certain age”—the ones he’d been thinking about. They smiled knowingly at him, the way women who’ve read your novels (and assume they know everything about you) do; only one of these older women wasn’t smiling.

You know what they say about people who look like their pets. Before Clark commenced making a ringing sound with a spoon against his water glass, before Clark’s garrulous introduction of his former teacher to his wife’s family, Juan Diego saw in an instant who Auntie Carmen was. There was no one else in sight who even slightly resembled a brightly colored, sharp-toothed, voracious eel. And, in the flattering light at the dinner table, Auntie Carmen’s jowls might have been mistaken for a moray’s quivering gills. Like a moray, too, Auntie Carmen radiated distance and distrust — her aloofness disguising the biting eel’s renowned ability to launch a lethal strike from afar.

“I have something I want to say to you two,” Dr. Quintana said to her husband and Juan Diego, when their table had quieted down — Clark had finally stopped talking; the first course, a ceviche, had been served. “No religion, no Church politics, not a word about abortion or birth control — not while we’re eating,” Josefa said.

“Not while the children and teenagers are—” Clark started to say.

“Not while the adults are here, Clark — no talking about any of it unless you two are alone,” his wife told him.

“And no sex,” Auntie Carmen said; she was looking at Juan Diego. He was the one who wrote about sex — Clark didn’t. And the way the eel woman had said “no sex”—as if it left a bad taste in her wizened mouth — implied both talking about it and doing it.

“I guess that leaves literature,” Clark said truculently.

“That depends on which literature,” Juan Diego said. As soon as he’d sat down, he felt a little light-headed; his vision had blurred. This happened with Viagra — usually, the feeling soon passed. But when Juan Diego felt his right-front pocket, he was reminded that he hadn’t taken the Viagra; he could feel the tablet and the mah-jongg tile through the fabric of his trousers.

There was, of course, some seafood in the ceviche — what looked like shrimp, or perhaps a kind of crayfish. And wedges of mango, Juan Diego noticed; he’d slightly touched the marinade with the tines of his salad fork. Citrus, certainly — probably lime, Juan Diego thought.

Auntie Carmen saw him sneaking a taste; she brandished her salad fork, as if to demonstrate that she’d restrained herself long enough.

“I see no reason why we should wait for her,” Auntie Carmen said, pointing her fork at the empty chair next to Juan Diego. “She’s not family,” the eel woman added.

Juan Diego felt something or someone touch his ankles; he saw a small face looking up at him from under the table. The little girl with pigtails sat at his feet. “Hi, Mister,” she said. “The lady told me to tell you — she’s coming.”

“What lady?” Juan Diego asked the little girl; to everyone at the table, except for Clark’s wife, he must have looked like he was talking to his lap.

“Consuelo,” Josefa said to the little girl. “You’re supposed to be at your table — please go there.”

“Yes,” Consuelo said.

“What lady?” Juan Diego asked Consuelo again. The little girl had crawled out from under the table and now endured Auntie Carmen’s cruel stare.

“The lady who just appears,” Consuelo said; she tugged on both her pigtails, making her head bob up and down. She ran off. The waiters were pouring wine — one of them was the boy driver who’d brought Juan Diego from the airport in Tagbilaran City.

“You must have driven the mystery lady from the airport,” Juan Diego said to him, waving the wine away, but the boy seemed not to understand. Josefa spoke to him in Tagalog; even then, the boy driver looked confused. He gave Dr. Quintana what sounded like an overlong answer.

“He says he didn’t drive her — he says she just appeared in the driveway. No one saw her car or driver,” Josefa said.

“The plot thickens!” Clark French declared. “No wine for him — he drinks only beer,” Clark was telling the boy driver, who was a lot less confident as a waiter than he’d been behind the wheel.

“Yes, sir,” the boy said.

“You shouldn’t have provided your former teacher with all that beer,” Auntie Carmen said suddenly to Clark. “Were you drunk?” Auntie Carmen asked Juan Diego. “Whatever possessed you to turn off the air-conditioning? No one turns off the air-conditioning in Manila!”

“That’s enough, Carmen,” Dr. Quintana told her aunt. “Your precious aquarium is not dinner-table conversation. You say ‘no sex,’ I say ‘no fish.’ Got it?”

“It was my fault, Auntie,” Clark started in. “The aquarium was my idea—”

“I was freezing cold,” Juan Diego explained to the eel woman. “I hate air-conditioning,” he told everyone. “I probably did have too much beer—”

“Don’t apologize,” Josefa said to him. “They were just fish.”

“Just fish!” Auntie Carmen cried.

Dr. Quintana leaned across the table, touching Auntie Carmen’s leathery hand. “Do you want to hear how many vaginas I’ve seen in the last week — in the last month?” she asked her aunt.

“Josefa!” Clark cried.

“No fish, no sex,” Dr. Quintana told the eel woman. “You want to talk about fish, Carmen? Just watch out.”

“I hope Morales is okay,” Juan Diego said to Auntie Carmen, in an effort to be pacifying.

“Morales is different — the experience changed him,” Auntie Carmen said haughtily.

“No eels, either, Carmen,” Josefa said. “You just watch out.”

Women doctors — how Juan Diego loved them! He’d adored Dr. Marisol Gomez; he was devoted to his dear friend Dr. Rosemary Stein. And here was the wonderful Dr. Josefa Quintana! Juan Diego was fond of Clark, but did Clark deserve a wife like this?

She “just appears,” the little girl with pigtails had said about the mystery lady. And hadn’t the boy driver confirmed that the lady just appeared?

Yet the aquarium conversation had been intense; no one, not even Juan Diego, was thinking about the uninvited guest — not at that moment when the little gecko fell (or dropped) from the ceiling. The gecko landed in the untouched ceviche next to Juan Diego; it was as if the tiny creature knew this was an unguarded salad plate. The gecko appeared to drop into the conversation at the only empty seat.

The lizard was as slender as a ballpoint pen, and only half as long. Two women shrieked; one was a well-dressed woman seated directly opposite the mystery guest’s unoccupied seat — she had her eyeglasses spattered with the citrus marinade. A wedge of mango slipped off the salad plate in the direction of the older man who’d been introduced to Juan Diego as a retired surgeon. (He and Juan Diego sat on either side of the empty seat.) The surgeon’s wife, one of those readers of “a certain age,” had shrieked more loudly than the well-dressed woman, who was now calm and wiping her eyeglasses.

“Damn those things,” the well-dressed woman said.

“Just who invited you?” the retired surgeon asked the little gecko, who now crouched (unmoving) in the unfamiliar ceviche. Everyone but Auntie Carmen laughed; the anxious-looking little gecko was no laughing matter to her, apparently. The gecko looked ready to spring, but where?

Later everyone would say that the gecko had distracted all of them from the slender woman in the beige silk dress. She had just appeared, they would all think later; no one saw her approaching the table, though she was very watchable in that perfectly fitted, sleeveless dress. She seemed to glide unnoticed to the chair that was waiting for her — not even the gecko saw her coming, and geckos are acutely alert. (If you’re a gecko and you want to stay alive, you’d better be alert.)

Juan Diego would remember seeing only the briefest flash of the woman’s slim wrist; he never saw the salad fork in her hand, not until she’d stabbed the gecko through its twig-size spine — pinning it to a wedge of mango on her plate.

“Got you,” Miriam said.

This time, only Auntie Carmen cried out — as if she’d been stabbed. You can always count on the children to see everything; maybe the kids had seen Miriam coming, and they’d had the good sense to watch her.

“I didn’t think human beings could be as fast as geckos,” Pedro would say to Juan Diego another day. (They were in the second-floor library, staring at the Saint Ignatius Loyola painting, waiting for the giant gecko to make an appearance, but that big gecko was never seen again.)

“Geckos are really, really fast — you can’t catch one,” Juan Diego would tell the little boy.

“But that lady—” Pedro started to say; he just stopped.

“Yes, she was fast,” was all Juan Diego would say.

In the hushed dining room, Miriam held the salad fork between her thumb and index finger, reminding Juan Diego of the way Flor used to hold a cigarette — as if it were a joint. “Waiter,” Miriam was saying. The lifeless gecko hung limply from the glistening tines of the little fork. The boy driver, who was a clumsy waiter, rushed to take the murder weapon from Miriam. “I’ll need a new ceviche, too,” she told him, taking her seat.

“Don’t get up, darling,” she said, putting her hand on Juan Diego’s shoulder. “I know it hasn’t been long, but I’ve missed you terribly,” she added. Everyone in the dining room had heard her; no one was talking.

“I’ve missed you,” Juan Diego said to her.

“Well, I’m here now,” Miriam told him.

So they knew each other, everyone was thinking; she wasn’t quite the mystery guest they’d been expecting. Suddenly, she didn’t look uninvited. And Juan Diego didn’t seem exactly neutral.

“This is Miriam,” Juan Diego announced. “And this is Clark — Clark French, the writer. My former student,” Juan Diego said.

“Oh, yes,” Miriam said, smiling demurely.

“And Clark’s wife, Josefa — Dr. Quintana,” Juan Diego went on.

“I’m so glad there’s a doctor here,” Miriam told Josefa. “It makes the Encantador seem less remote.”

A chorus of shouts greeted her — other doctors, raising their hands. (Mostly men, of course, but even the female doctors put up their hands.)

“Oh, wonderful — a family of doctors,” Miriam said, smiling to everyone. Only Auntie Carmen remained less than charmed; no doubt, she’d taken the gecko’s side — she was a pet person, after all.

And what about the children? Juan Diego was wondering. What did they make of the mystery guest?

He felt Miriam’s hand graze his lap; she rested it on his thigh. “Happy New Year, darling,” she whispered to him. Juan Diego thought he also felt her foot touch his calf, then his knee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes!” Consuelo cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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