Avenue of Mysteries

27. A Nose for a Nose

The nighttime flight from Manila to Laoag was packed with crying children. They weren’t in the air for more than an hour and a quarter, but the wailing kids made the flying time seem longer.

“Is it a weekend?” Juan Diego asked Dorothy, but she told him it was a Thursday night. “A school night!” Juan Diego declared; he was dumbfounded. “Don’t these kids go to school?” (He knew, before she did it, that Dorothy was going to shrug.)

Even the nonchalance of Dorothy’s shrug — it was such a slight gesture — was sufficient to dislocate Juan Diego from the present time. Not even the crying children could keep him in the moment. Why was he so easily (and repeatedly) carried back to the past? Juan Diego wondered.

Was it all to do with the beta-blocker business, or was his footing in the Philippines of an insubstantial or transient nature?

Dorothy was saying something about her inclination to talk more when there were children around—“I would rather listen to myself than the kids, you know?”—but Juan Diego found it difficult to listen to Dorothy. Though it had happened forty years ago, the conversation with Dr. Vargas at Cruz Roja — on the occasion of Vargas’s stitching the thumb and index finger of Rivera’s left hand — was more present in Juan Diego’s mind than Dorothy’s monologue en route to Laoag.

“You don’t like children?” was all Juan Diego had asked her. After that, he didn’t say a word for the rest of the flight. He’d listened to more of what Vargas and Rivera and Lupe were saying — over the stitches, that long-ago morning at the Red Cross hospital — than he actually heard (or would remember) of Dorothy’s discursive soliloquy.

“I’m okay if people have children — I mean other people. If other adults want kids, that’s fine with me,” Dorothy stated. Not quite in chronological order, she began her lecture on local history; Dorothy must have wanted Juan Diego to know at least a little about where they were going. But Juan Diego missed most of what Dorothy would tell him; he was paying closer attention to a conversation at Cruz Roja, one he should have listened to more closely forty years ago.

“Jesus, jefe — were you in a sword fight?” Vargas was asking the dump boss.

“It was just a chisel,” Rivera told Vargas. “I tried the bevel chisel first — it has a cutting edge that makes an oblique angle — but it wasn’t working.”

“So you changed chisels,” Lupe prompted el jefe. Juan Diego translated this.

“Yeah, I changed chisels,” Rivera said. “The problem was the object I was working on — it doesn’t lie flat. It’s hard to hold at the base — the object doesn’t really have a base.”

“It’s hard to stabilize the object with one hand while you cut, or chip away, with the chisel in your other hand,” Lupe explained. Juan Diego translated this clarifying point, too.

“Yeah — the object is hard to stabilize, all right,” the dump boss agreed.

“What kind of object is it, jefe?” Juan Diego asked.

“Think of a doorknob — or the latch to a door, or to a window,” the dump boss answered him. “Kind of like that.”

“Tricky business,” Lupe said. Juan Diego also translated this.

“Yeah,” was all Rivera said.

“You cut the shit out of yourself, jefe,” Vargas told the dump boss. “Maybe you should stick to the basurero business.”

At the time, everyone had laughed — Juan Diego could still hear their laughter, as Dorothy rambled on and on. She was saying something about the northwestern coast of Luzon. Laoag was a trading port and a fishing site in the tenth and eleventh centuries—“one sees the Chinese influence,” Dorothy was saying. “Then Spain invaded, with their Mary-Jesus business — your old friends,” Dorothy said to Juan Diego. (The Spanish came in the 1500s; they were in the Philippines for more than three hundred years.)

But Juan Diego wasn’t listening. There was other dialogue that weighed on him, a moment when he might have (could have, should have) seen something coming — a moment when he might have diverted the course of things to come.

Lupe stood near enough to touch the stitches, watching Vargas close the wounds in Rivera’s thumb and index finger; Vargas told Lupe he was in danger of attaching her inquisitive little face to el jefe’s hand. That was when Lupe asked Vargas what he knew about lions and rabies. “Can lions get rabies? Let’s start with that,” Lupe began. Juan Diego translated, but Vargas was the kind of guy who wouldn’t readily admit there was something he didn’t know.

“An infected dog can transmit rabies when the virus reaches the dog’s salivary glands, which is about a week — or less — before the dog dies from rabies,” Vargas replied.

“Lupe wants to know about a lion,” Juan Diego told him.

“The incubation period in an infected human is usually about three to seven weeks, but I’ve had patients who developed the disease in ten days,” Vargas was saying, when Lupe interrupted him.

“Let’s say a rabid dog bites a lion — you know, like a rooftop dog, or like one of those perros del basurero. Does the lion get sick? What happens to the lion?” Lupe asked Vargas.

“I’m sure there have been studies — I’ll have to look at what research has been done on rabies in lions,” Dr. Vargas said, sighing. “Most people who get bitten by lions probably aren’t worried about rabies. That wouldn’t be the first worry you would have, in the case of a lion bite,” he told Lupe.

Juan Diego knew there was no translation for Lupe’s shrug.

Dr. Vargas was bandaging the thumb and index finger of Rivera’s left hand. “You have to keep this clean and dry, jefe,” Vargas was telling the dump boss. But Rivera was looking at Lupe, who looked away from him; el jefe knew when Lupe was keeping something to herself.

And Juan Diego was anxious to get back to Cinco Señores, where La Maravilla would be setting up the tents and quieting down the animals. At the time, Juan Diego believed he had more important business to attend to than what was on Lupe’s mind. As a fourteen-year-old boy will, Juan Diego was dreaming about himself as a hero — he had skywalking aspirations on his mind. (And of course Lupe knew what her brother was thinking; she could read his thoughts.)

The four of them fit into Pepe’s VW Beetle; Pepe drove the dump kids to Cinco Señores before he took Rivera back to the shack in Guerrero. (El jefe had said he wanted to take a nap before the local anesthetic wore off.)

In the car, Pepe told the dump kids they were welcome to come back to Lost Children. “Your old room is ready for you, anytime,” was the way Pepe put it. But Sister Gloria had returned Juan Diego’s life-size sex doll of the Guadalupe virgin to the Christmas-parties place — Lost Children would never be the same, Juan Diego was thinking. And why would you leave an orphanage, and then go back? If you leave, you leave, Juan Diego thought — you move on, not back.

When they got to the circus, Rivera was crying; the dump kids knew the local anesthetic had not worn off, but the dump boss was too upset to speak.

“We know we would be welcome to come back to Guerrero, jefe,” Lupe said. “Tell Rivera we know the shack is our shack, if we ever need to go home,” Lupe told Juan Diego. “Tell him we miss him, too,” Lupe said. Juan Diego said all that, while Rivera kept crying — his big shoulders were shaking in the passenger seat.

It is simply amazing, at that age, when you’re thirteen or fourteen, how you can take being loved for granted, how (even when you are wanted) you can feel utterly alone. The dump kids were not abandoned at Circo de La Maravilla; yet they’d stopped confiding in each other, and they were confiding in no one else.

“Good luck with that object you’re working on,” Juan Diego told Rivera, when the dump boss was leaving Cinco Señores to go back to Guerrero.

“Tricky business,” Lupe repeated, as if she were talking to herself. (After Pepe’s VW Beetle drove off, only Juan Diego could have heard her, and he wasn’t really listening.) Juan Diego was thinking about his own tricky business. When it came to having balls, apparently, only the main tent — the skywalk at eighty feet, without a net — was a true test. Or so Dolores had said, and Juan Diego believed her. Soledad had coached him, teaching him how to skywalk in the troupe tent for the young-women acrobats, but Dolores said that didn’t count.

Juan Diego remembered that he’d dreamed about skywalking — before he knew what skywalking was, when he and Lupe were still living in Rivera’s shack in Guerrero. And when Juan Diego had asked his sister what she thought of his dream about walking upside down in the heavens, she’d been typically mysterious. All he’d said about the dream to Lupe was: “There comes a moment in every life when you must let go with your hands — with both hands.”

“It’s a dream about the future,” Lupe had said. “It’s a death dream,” was how she’d put it.

Dolores had defined the crucial moment, the one when you must let go with your hands — with both hands. “I never know whose hands I am in then, at that moment,” Dolores had told him. “Maybe those miraculous virgins have magic hands? Maybe I’m in their hands, at that moment. I don’t think you should think about it. That’s when you have to concentrate on your feet—one step at a time. In every life, I think there’s always a moment when you must decide where you belong. At that moment, you’re in no one’s hands,” Dolores had said to Juan Diego. “At that moment, everyone walks on the sky. Maybe all great decisions are made without a net,” The Wonder herself had told him. “There comes a time, in every life, when you must let go.”

The morning after a road trip, Circo de La Maravilla slept late—“late” for a circus, anyway. Juan Diego was counting on getting an early start, but it’s difficult to get up earlier than dogs. Juan Diego tried to sneak out of the dogs’ troupe tent without causing suspicion; naturally, any dog who was awake would want to go with him.

Juan Diego got up so early, only Pastora heard him; she was already awake, already pacing. Of course the sheepdog didn’t understand why Juan Diego wouldn’t take her with him when he left the tent. It was probably Pastora who woke up Lupe, after Juan Diego had left.

In the avenue of troupe tents, there was no one around. Juan Diego was on the lookout for Dolores; she got up early, to run. Lately, it seemed, she was running too much or too hard; some mornings, she made herself sick. Though he liked Dolores’s long legs, Juan Diego had no appreciation for her insane running. What boy with a limp likes to run? And even if you loved to run, why would you run until you threw up?

But Dolores took her training seriously. She ran, and she drank a lot of water. She believed both were essential for not getting muscle cramps in her legs. In the rope loops of the skywalk, Dolores said, you didn’t want to get a cramp in your weight-bearing leg — not at eighty feet, not when the foot attached to that leg was all that held you to the ladder.

Juan Diego had comforted himself with the thought that none of the girls in the acrobats’ troupe tent was ready to replace Dolores as The Wonder; Juan Diego knew that, next to Dolores, he was the best skywalker at La Maravilla — if only at twelve feet.

The main tent was another story. The knotted rope was what all the aerialists used to climb to the top of the tent. The knots were spaced on the thick rope to accommodate the hands and feet of the trapeze artists — the knots were within Dolores’s reach, and within the reach of the sexually overactive Argentinian flyers.

For Juan Diego, the knots were not a problem; his grip was strong (he probably weighed about the same as Dolores), his hands could easily reach the next knot above him, and his good foot could securely feel the knot at his feet. He pulled himself up and up; climbing a rope is a workout, but Juan Diego looked fixedly ahead — he looked only up. Above him, he could see the ladder with the rope loops at the top of the main tent — with every pull of his arms, he saw the ladder inch nearer.

But eighty feet is a long climb, only an arm’s length at a time, and the problem was that Juan Diego didn’t dare look down. He kept the rope rungs of the ladder for the skywalk in view above him; his only focus was the top of the main tent, which was inching closer — one tug at a time.

“You have another future!” he heard Lupe call to him, as she’d said to him before. Juan Diego knew that looking down wasn’t an option — he kept climbing. He was almost at the top; he’d already passed the platforms for the trapeze artists. He could have reached out and touched the trapezes, but that would have meant letting go of the rope, and he wouldn’t let go — not even with one hand.

He had passed the spotlights, too — almost without noticing them, because the lights were off. But he was marginally aware of the unlit bulbs — the spotlights were pointed in an upward direction. They were meant to illuminate the skywalker, but they also lit the rope rungs of the skywalking ladder with the brightest possible light.

“Don’t look down—never look down,” Juan Diego heard Dolores say. She must have finished her run, because he could hear her retching. Juan Diego didn’t look down, yet Dolores’s voice had made him pause; the muscles in his arms were burning, but he felt strong. And he didn’t have far to go.

“Another future! Another future! Another future!” Lupe called to him. Dolores went on throwing up. Juan Diego guessed they were his only audience.

“You shouldn’t have stopped,” Dolores managed to tell him. “You have to get from the climbing rope to the skywalking ladder without thinking about it, because you have to let go of the rope before you can grab hold of the ladder.” This meant he had to let go twice.

No one had told him about this part. Neither Soledad nor Dolores had thought he was ready for this part. Juan Diego realized that he couldn’t let go once—not even with one hand. He just froze; holding still, he could feel the thick rope sway.

“Come down,” Dolores said to him. “Not everyone has the balls for this part. I’m sure you’re going to have the balls for lots of other stuff.”

“You have another future,” Lupe repeated, more calmly.

Juan Diego came down the rope without once looking down. When his feet touched the ground, he was surprised to see that he and Lupe were alone in the vast tent.

“Where did Dolores go?” Juan Diego asked.

Lupe had said some terrible things about Dolores—“let the lion tamer knock her up!” Lupe had said. (In fact, Ignacio had knocked Dolores up.) “That’s her only future!” Lupe had said, but now she was sorry she’d said those things. Dolores had gotten her first period a while ago; maybe the lions didn’t know when Dolores started bleeding, but Ignacio did.

Dolores had been running to lose the baby — she wasn’t having her period anymore — but she couldn’t run hard enough to make herself miscarry. It was morning sickness that made Dolores throw up.

When Lupe told all this to Juan Diego, he asked Lupe if Dolores had talked about it, but Dolores hadn’t told Lupe about her condition. Lupe had just read what was on Dolores’s mind.

Dolores did say one thing to Lupe that morning when The Wonder left the main tent — once Dolores knew Juan Diego was coming down the climbing rope. “I’ll tell you what I don’t have the balls for — because you’re such a little know-it-all, you probably know already,” Dolores said to Lupe. “I don’t have the balls for the next part of my life,” the skywalker said. Then Dolores left the main tent — she wouldn’t be back. La Maravilla wouldn’t have a skywalker.

The last person to see Dolores in Oaxaca was Dr. Vargas, in the ER at Cruz Roja. Vargas said Dolores died of a peritoneal infection — from a botched abortion in Guadalajara. Vargas said: “The asshole lion tamer knows some amateur he sends his pregnant skywalkers to see.” By the time Dolores got to Cruz Roja, the infection was too advanced for Vargas to save her.

“Die in childbirth, monkey twat!” Lupe had once said to The Wonder. In a way, Dolores would; like Juan Diego, she was only fourteen. Circo de La Maravilla lost La Maravilla.

The chain of events, the links in our lives — what leads us where we’re going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don’t see coming, and what we do — all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.

Vargas was a good doctor, and a smart man. One look at Dolores, and Vargas had known everything: the abortion in Guadalajara (Vargas had seen the results before); the amateur who’d botched the job (Vargas knew the butcher was Ignacio’s pal); the fourteen-year-old who’d gotten her first period fairly recently (Vargas was aware of the weird connection between skywalking and menstruating, though he’d not known the lion tamer had told the girls that the lions knew when the girls were bleeding).

But not even Vargas knew everything. For the rest of his life, Dr. Vargas would be interested in lions and rabies; he would continue to send Juan Diego details of the existent research. Yet when Lupe had asked the question — when Lupe was looking for answers — Vargas never followed up with any lion information.

True to his nature, Vargas had a scientific mind — he couldn’t stop speculating. He wasn’t really interested in lions and rabies, but long after Lupe’s death, Vargas would wonder why Lupe had wanted to know.

Señor Eduardo and Flor had died of AIDS and Lupe was long gone when Vargas wrote to Juan Diego about some incomprehensible “studies” in Tanzania. Research on rabies in lions in the Serengeti raised these “significant” points, which Vargas had highlighted.

Rabies in lions originated in domestic dogs; it was thought to spread from dogs to hyenas, and from hyenas to lions. Rabies in lions could cause disease, but it could also be “silent.” (There had been epidemics of rabies in lions in 1976 and 1981, but no disease occurred — they were called silent epidemics.) Presence of a certain parasite, which had been likened to malaria, was thought to determine whether the disease from rabies did or didn’t occur — in other words, a lion could spread rabies while not being sick, and never getting sick; whereas a lion could get the same rabies virus and die, depending on coinfection with the parasite.

“This has to do with the effects on the immune system caused by the parasite,” Vargas had written to Juan Diego. There had been “killer” epidemics of rabies in lions in the Serengeti — these occurred in periods of drought, which killed off the Cape buffalo. (The buffalo carcasses were infested with ticks, which carried the parasite.)

It wasn’t that Vargas thought these Tanzanian “studies” would ever have helped Lupe. She’d been interested in whether or not Hombre could get rabies, and if the rabies would make Hombre sick. But why? That’s what Vargas wished he knew. (What was the point of knowing it now? Juan Diego thought. It was too late to know what Lupe had been thinking.)

For a lion to get sick with rabies was a long shot, even in the Serengeti, but what crazy idea had Lupe considered, before she changed her mind and thought of her next crazy idea?

Why would Hombre’s getting sick with rabies have mattered? That must have been where the rooftop-dog idea came from, before Lupe abandoned it. A rabid dog bites Hombre, or Hombre kills and eats a rabid dog, but then what? So Hombre gets sick — then Hombre bites Ignacio, but what happens next?

“It was all about what the lionesses thought,” Juan Diego had explained to Vargas a hundred times. “Lupe could read the lions’ minds — she knew that Hombre would never harm Ignacio. And the girls at La Maravilla would never be safe — not as long as the lion tamer lived. Lupe knew that, too, because she could read Ignacio’s mind.”

Naturally, this fanciful logic was not in the language of the scientific studies Dr. Vargas found convincing.

“You’re saying Lupe somehow knew that the lionesses would kill Ignacio, but only if the lion tamer killed Hombre?” Vargas (always incredulous) asked Juan Diego.

“I heard her say it,” Juan Diego had told Vargas repeatedly. “Lupe didn’t say the lionesses ‘would’ kill Ignacio — she said they ‘will’ kill him. Lupe said the lionesses hated Ignacio. She said the lionesses were all dumber than monkey twats — because the lionesses were jealous of Ignacio, and thought Hombre loved the lion tamer more than the lion loved them! Ignacio had nothing to fear from Hombre — it was the lionesses the lion tamer should have been afraid of, Lupe always said.”

“Lupe knew all that? How did she know all that?” Dr. Vargas always asked Juan Diego. The doctor’s studies of rabies in lions would continue. (It was not a very popular field of study.)

THE SAME DAY THAT Juan Diego chickened out of skywalking would be known (for a while) in Oaxaca as “The Day of the Nose.” It would never be called “El Día de la Nariz” on a church calendar; it wouldn’t become a national holiday, or even a local saint’s day. The Day of the Nose would soon pass from memory — even from local lore — but, for a while, it would amount to a small big deal.

In the avenue of troupe tents, Lupe and Juan Diego were alone; it was still early in the morning, before the first morning Mass, and Circo de La Maravilla was still sleeping in.

There was some commotion coming from the dogs’ troupe tent — clearly Estrella and the dogs weren’t sleeping in — and the dump kids hurried to see what the cause of the commotion was. It was unusual to see Brother Pepe’s VW Beetle in the avenue of troupe tents — the little car was empty, but Pepe had left the engine running — and the kids could hear Perro Mestizo, the mongrel, barking his brains out. At the open flaps of the dogs’ troupe tent, Alemania, the female German shepherd, was growling — she was holding Edward Bonshaw at bay.

“There they are!” Pepe cried, when he saw the dump kids.

“Uh-oh,” Lupe said. (Obviously, she knew what was on the Jesuits’ minds.)

“Have you seen Rivera?” Brother Pepe asked Juan Diego.

“Not since you saw him,” Juan Diego answered.

“The dump boss was thinking about going to the first morning Mass,” Lupe said; she waited for her brother to translate this, before she told Juan Diego the rest. Since Lupe knew everything Pepe and Señor Eduardo were thinking, she didn’t wait for them to tell Juan Diego what was going on. “The Mary Monster has grown a new nose,” Lupe said. “Or the Virgin Mary has sprouted someone else’s nose. As you might expect, there’s a debate.”

“About what?” Juan Diego asked her.

“About the miracle business — there are two schools of thought,” Lupe told him. “We scattered the old nose’s ashes — now the Mary Monster has a new nose. Is it a miracle, or is it just a nose job? As you might imagine, Father Alfonso and Father Octavio don’t like to hear the milagro word used loosely,” Lupe reported. Naturally, Señor Eduardo had heard and understood the milagro word.

“Does Lupe say it’s a miracle?” the Iowan asked Juan Diego.

“Lupe says that’s one school of thought,” Juan Diego told him.

“And what does Lupe say about the change in the Virgin Mary’s color?” Brother Pepe asked. “Rivera cleaned up the ashes, but the statue is much darker-skinned than she used to be.”

“Father Alfonso and Father Octavio say she’s not our old Mary, with the white-as-chalk skin,” Lupe reported. “The priests think the Mary Monster looks more like Guadalupe than like Mary — Father Alfonso and Father Octavio think the Virgin Mary has become a giant dark-skinned virgin.”

But when Juan Diego translated this, Edward Bonshaw became quite animated — or as animated as he dared to be, with Alemania growling at him. “Aren’t we — I mean we, the Church—always claiming that, in a sense, the Virgin Mary and Our Lady of Guadalupe are one and the same?” the Iowan asked. “Well, if the virgins are one, surely the color of this one’s skin doesn’t matter, right?”

“That’s one school of thought,” Lupe pointed out to Juan Diego. “The color of the Mary Monster’s skin is also a matter of debate.”

“Rivera was alone with the statue — he asked to be alone with her,” Brother Pepe reminded the dump kids. “You niños don’t suppose the dump boss did anything, do you?”

As you might imagine, the issue of whether or not Rivera did anything had already been a matter of debate.

“El jefe said the object he was working on didn’t lie flat, and it was hard to hold at the base — the dump boss said the object didn’t really have a base,” Lupe pointed out. “Sounds like a nose,” she said.

“Think of a doorknob — or the latch to a door, or to a window. Kind of like that,” el jefe had said. (Kind of like a nose, Juan Diego was thinking.)

“Tricky business,” Lupe had called what the dump boss was working on. But Lupe would never say if she knew Rivera had made a new nose for the Mary Monster, and — long before the dump kids drove back to the Temple of the Society of Jesus, with Brother Pepe and Señor Eduardo in the VW Beetle — Lupe and Juan Diego had adequate experience to know that el jefe had harbored secrets before.

From Cinco Señores into the center of Oaxaca, they were driving with the rush-hour traffic. They got to the Jesuit temple after the Mass. Some of the new-nose devotees were still hanging around, gawking at the darker-skinned Mary Monster; in cleaning up the statue, Rivera had managed to remove some of the staining elements from the chemical contents of the ash assault on the Virgin Mary. (It appeared that the giant virgin’s clothes hadn’t been darkened — at least her clothes weren’t as noticeably darkened as her skin.)

Rivera had attended the Mass, but he’d separated himself from the nose-gawkers; the dump boss was quietly praying to himself on a kneeling pad, at some distance from the front rows of pews. El jefe’s stolid temperament had been an impenetrable barrier against the insinuations of the two old priests.

As for the new darkness of the Virgin Mary’s skin, Rivera spoke only of paint and turpentine — or of “some kind of paint thinner” and “stuff for staining wood.” Naturally, the dump boss also mentioned the possibly harsh effects of gasoline, his favorite fire starter.

As for the new nose, Rivera claimed that the statue had still been noseless when he had finished the cleaning job. (Pepe said he hadn’t noticed the new nose when he locked up for the night.)

Lupe was smiling at the darker-skinned Mary Monster — the giant Virgin Mary was definitely more indigenous-looking. Lupe liked the new nose, too. “It’s less perfect, more human,” Lupe said. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, who were unused to seeing Lupe smile, asked Juan Diego for a translation.

“It looks like a boxer’s nose,” Father Alfonso said, in response to Lupe’s assessment.

“One that’s been broken, certainly,” Father Octavio said, staring at Lupe. (No doubt he believed that less perfect, more human was an inappropriate look for the Virgin Mary.)

The two old priests had asked Dr. Vargas to come and give them his scientific opinion. It wasn’t that they liked (or believed in) science, Brother Pepe knew, but Vargas was not one to use the milagro word loosely; Vargas wasn’t inclined to use the miracle word at all, and Father Alfonso and Father Octavio were very much in favor of downplaying the miraculous interpretation of the Mary Monster’s darker skin and new nose. (The two old priests must have known they were taking a risk in seeking Vargas’s opinion.)

Edward Bonshaw’s beliefs had been newly shaken, his vows, not to mention his “yielding-under-no-winds” resolve, having been broken; he had his own reasons for seeking a liberal acceptance of the altered but no less all-important Virgin Mary before them.

As for Brother Pepe, he was ever the one to embrace change — and tolerance, always tolerance. Pepe’s English had been much improved by his contact with Juan Diego and the Iowan. But in his enthusiasm to accept the darker-skinned virgin with her different nose, Pepe declared that the transformed Mary Monster was a “mixed blessing.”

Pepe must not have realized that the mixed word carried pro and con meanings, and Father Alfonso and Father Octavio failed to see how an indigenous-looking Virgin Mary (with a fighter’s nose) could be anything resembling a “blessing.”

“I think you mean a ‘mixed bag,’ Pepe,” Señor Eduardo helpfully said, but this was not well received by the two old priests, either.

Father Alfonso and Father Octavio did not want to think of the Virgin Mary as anything resembling a “bag.”

“This Mary is what she is,” Lupe said. “She’s already done more than I expected her to do,” Lupe told them. “At least she’s done something, hasn’t she?” Lupe asked the two old priests. “Who cares where her nose came from? Why does her nose have to be a miracle? Or why can’t it be a miracle? Why do you have to interpret everything?” she asked the two old priests. “Does anyone know what the real Virgin Mary looked like?” Lupe asked all of them. “Do we know the color of the real virgin’s skin, or what kind of nose she had?” Lupe asked; she was on a roll. Juan Diego translated every word she said.

Even the new-nose devotees had stopped gawking at the Mary Monster; they’d turned their attention to the babbling girl. The dump boss had looked up from his silent prayers. And they all saw that Vargas had been there the whole time. Dr. Vargas was standing at some distance from the towering statue. He’d been looking at the Virgin Mary’s new nose through a pair of binoculars; Vargas had already asked the new cleaning woman to bring him the long ladder.

“I would like to add one thing Shakespeare wrote,” Edward Bonshaw — ever the teacher — said. (It was that familiar passage from the Iowan’s beloved Romeo and Juliet.) “ ‘What’s in a name?’ ” Señor Eduardo recited to them — the scholastic changed the rose word to nose, naturally. “ ‘That which we call a nose / By any other word would smell as sweet,’ ” Edward Bonshaw orated in a booming voice.

Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had been speechless upon hearing Juan Diego’s translation of Lupe’s inspired utterances, but Shakespeare hadn’t impressed the two old priests — they’d heard Shakespeare before, very secular stuff.

“It’s a question of materials, Vargas — her face, the new nose, are they the same material?” Father Alfonso asked the doctor, who was still examining the nose in question through his all-seeing binoculars.

“And we’re wondering if there’s a visible seam or crack where the nose attaches to her face,” Father Octavio added.

The cleaning woman (this sturdy roughneck looked like a cleaning woman) was dragging the ladder down the center aisle; Esperanza could not have dragged that long ladder (she certainly couldn’t have carried it) by herself. Vargas helped the cleaning woman set up the ladder, leaning it against the giantess.

“I’m not remembering how the Mary Monster reacts to ladders,” Lupe said to Juan Diego.

“I’m not remembering with you,” was all Juan Diego told her.

The dump kids didn’t know, for sure, if the Mary Monster’s former nose had been made of wood or stone; both Lupe and Juan Diego believed it was wood, painted wood. But, years later, when Brother Pepe wrote to Juan Diego about the “interior restoration” of the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús, Pepe had mentioned the “new limestone.”

“Did you know,” Pepe had asked Juan Diego, “that limestone yields lime when burned?” Juan Diego didn’t know that, nor did he understand if Pepe meant the Mary Monster herself had been restored. Was the giant virgin included in what Pepe had called the temple’s “interior restoration”—and, if so, did the restored statue (now made of “new limestone”) imply that the former Virgin Mary had been made of another kind of stone?

As Vargas climbed the ladder to get a closer look at the Mary Monster’s face — inscrutable, for the moment; the indigenous-looking virgin’s eyes betrayed no potential for animation, so far — Lupe read Juan Diego’s mind.

“Yes, I’m also thinking wood — not stone,” Lupe said to Juan Diego. “On the other hand, if Rivera was using woodworking chisels for cutting and shaping stone—well, that might explain why he cut himself. I’ve never seen him cut himself before, have you?” Lupe asked her brother.

“No,” Juan Diego said. He was thinking that both noses were made of wood, but that Vargas would probably find a way to sound scientific without saying too much about the material composition of the miraculous (or unmiraculous) new nose.

The two old priests were watching Vargas intently, though the doctor was a long way up the ladder; it was hard to see what Vargas was doing, exactly.

“Is that a knife? You’re not cutting her, are you?” Father Alfonso called up the long ladder.

“That’s a Swiss Army knife. I used to have one, but—” Edward Bonshaw began, before Father Octavio interrupted him.

“We’re not asking you to draw blood, Vargas!” Father Octavio called up the long ladder.

Lupe and Juan Diego didn’t care about the Swiss Army knife; they watched the Virgin Mary’s unresponsive eyes.

“I must say, this is a pretty seamless nose job,” Dr. Vargas reported from near the top of the precarious-looking ladder. “As surgery goes, there’s often quite a distinction between the amateur and the sublime.”

“Are you saying this surgery is in the sublime category, but a surgery nonetheless?” Father Alfonso called up the ladder.

“There’s a slight blemish on the side of one nostril, like a birthmark — you would never see it from down there,” Vargas said to Father Alfonso.

The so-called birthmark could have been a bloodstain, Juan Diego was thinking.

“Yes, it could be blood,” Lupe said to her brother. “El jefe must have bled a lot.”

“The Virgin Mary has a birthmark?” Father Octavio asked indignantly.

“It’s not a flaw — it’s actually intriguing,” Vargas said.

“And the materials, Vargas — her face, the new nose?” Father Octavio reminded the scientist.

“Oh, there is more of the world about this lady than I detect of Heaven,” Vargas said; he was having fun with the two old priests, and they knew it. “More of the basurero in her perfume than I can smell of the sweet Hereafter.”

“Stick to science, Vargas,” Father Alfonso said.

“If we want poetry, we’ll read Shakespeare,” Father Octavio said, glaring at the parrot man, who understood from Father Octavio’s expression not to recite more passages from Romeo and Juliet.

The dump boss was done praying; he was no longer on his knees. Whether the new nose was his doing or not, el jefe wasn’t saying; he was keeping his bandage clean and dry, and he was keeping quiet.

Rivera would have left the temple, leaving Vargas high on the ladder and the two old priests feeling mocked, but Lupe must have wanted all of them to be there when she spoke. Only later would Juan Diego realize why she’d wanted all of them to hear her.

The last of the idiot nose-gawkers had left the temple; maybe they’d been miracle-seekers, but they knew enough about the real world to know they weren’t likely to hear the milagro word from a doctor with binoculars and a Swiss Army knife on a ladder.

“It’s a nose for a nose — that’s good enough for me. Translate everything I say,” Lupe said to Juan Diego. “When I die, don’t burn me. Give me the whole hocus-pocus,” Lupe said, looking straight at Father Alfonso and Father Octavio. “If you want to burn something,” she said to Rivera and Juan Diego, “you can burn my clothes — my few things. If a new puppy has died — well, sure, you can burn the puppy with my stuff. But don’t burn me. Give me what she would want me to have,” Lupe told them all — pointing to the Mary Monster with the boxer’s nose. “And sprinkle—just sprinkle, don’t throw — the ashes at the Virgin Mary’s feet. Like you said the first time,” Lupe said to the parrot man, “maybe not all the ashes, and only at her feet!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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