Avenue of Mysteries

28. Those Gathering Yellow Eyes

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

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

“Who?” Juan Diego asked her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who what?” Flor had asked Pepe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why would I try it?” Lupe asked him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’ll be all right,” Lupe had repeated to Hombre, from the beginning. “Nothing’s your fault,” she’d told the lion.

That was not how the lion looked, when Juan Diego saw him sitting in a corner at the back of his cage. Hombre looked guilty. Hombre was sitting at the farthest possible distance from where Lupe lay curled in a ball — in the diagonally opposite corner of the lion’s cage. Lupe was curled up in the corner nearest the open slot for the feeding tray; her face was turned away from Juan Diego. At the time, he was grateful he’d been spared seeing Lupe’s expression. Later, Juan Diego would wish he’d seen her face — it might have spared him from imagining her expression for the rest of his life.

Hombre had killed Lupe with one bite—“a crushing bite to the back of the neck,” as Dr. Vargas would describe it after examining her body. There were no other wounds on Lupe’s body — not even a claw mark. There were scant traces of blood in the area of the bite marks on Lupe’s neck, and not a drop of Lupe’s blood anywhere in the lion’s cage. (Ignacio later said that Hombre would have licked up any blood — the lion had finished eating all the meat, too.)

After Ignacio shot Hombre — twice, in his big head — there was quite a lot of the lion’s blood in that corner of his cage, where Hombre had banished himself. Looking remorseful wouldn’t save the confused and sorrowful lion. Ignacio had taken a quick look at the placement of Lupe’s body near the open slot for the feeding tray, and at the diagonally opposite (almost submissive) position Hombre had chosen in the farthest corner of the lion’s cage. And when Juan Diego had come limping, on the run, to the lion tamer’s tent, Ignacio had brought his gun with him to the scene of the crime.

Ignacio shot Mañana because the horse had a broken leg. In Juan Diego’s opinion, Ignacio wasn’t justified in shooting Hombre. Lupe had been right: what happened wasn’t the lion’s fault. What motivated Ignacio to shoot Hombre was twofold. The lion tamer was a coward; he didn’t dare go inside Hombre’s cage after the lion had killed Lupe — not when Hombre was alive. (The tension in the lion’s cage, after Lupe was killed, was unknown territory.) And Ignacio was assuredly motivated by some macho bullshit of the “man-eater” mentality — namely, the lion tamer needed to believe that instances of humans falling victim to lions were always the lions’ fault.

And of course, however misguided Lupe’s thinking was, she’d been right about everything that would happen if Hombre killed her. Lupe knew Ignacio would shoot Hombre — she must have known what would happen as a result of that, too.

As it turned out, Juan Diego wouldn’t fully appreciate Lupe’s foresight (her superhuman, if not divine, omniscience) until the following morning.

The day Lupe was killed, Circo de La Maravilla was overrun by those types Ignacio thought of as the “authorities.” Because the lion tamer had always seen himself as the authority, Ignacio did not function very well in the presence of other authorities — the police, and people with similarly official roles to play.

The lion tamer was curt with Juan Diego when the boy told him that Lupe had fed the lionesses before she fed Hombre. Juan Diego knew this, because he figured that Lupe would have thought no one would feed the lionesses that day if she didn’t.

Juan Diego also knew this because he’d gone to have a look at the lionesses after Lupe and Hombre were killed. The night before, Lupe had unlocked the slot for the feeding tray in the cage for the lionesses, too. She must have fed the lionesses the usual way; then she’d pulled the feeding tray entirely out, leaving it leaning against the outside of the lionesses’ cage, exactly the way she’d left the feeding tray to Hombre’s cage.

Besides, the lionesses looked as if they’d been fed; “las señoritas,” as Ignacio called them, were just lying around at the back of their cage and had simply stared at Juan Diego in their unreadable way.

Ignacio’s response to Juan Diego made the boy feel it didn’t matter to the lion tamer whether Lupe had fed the lionesses before she died, or not, but it did matter, as things would turn out. It mattered a lot. It meant that no one else had to feed the lionesses on the day Lupe and Hombre were killed.

Juan Diego even tried to give Ignacio the two keys to the slots in the lion cages for the feeding trays, but Ignacio didn’t want the keys. “Keep them — I got my own keys,” the lion tamer told him.

Naturally, Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw hadn’t allowed Juan Diego to spend another night in the dogs’ troupe tent. Pepe and Señor Eduardo had helped Juan Diego pack his things, together with Lupe’s few things — namely, her clothes. (Lupe had no keepsakes; she didn’t miss her Coatlicue figurine, not since Mary’s new nose.)

In the hasty move from La Maravilla to Lost Children, Juan Diego would lose the lid to the coffee can that had held the nose-inspiring ashes, but that night he slept in his old room at Lost Children, and he went to bed with Lupe’s lanyard around his neck. He could feel the two keys to the lion cages; in the dark, he squeezed the keys between his thumb and index finger before he fell asleep. Next to him, in the small bed Lupe used to sleep in, the parrot man watched over him — that is, when the Iowan wasn’t snoring.

Boys dream of being heroes; after Juan Diego lost Lupe, he wouldn’t have those dreams. He knew his sister had sought to save him; he knew he’d failed to save her. An aura of fate had marked him — even at fourteen, Juan Diego knew this, too.

The morning after he lost Lupe, Juan Diego woke to the sound of children chanting — the kindergartners were repeating Sister Gloria’s responsive prayer. “Ahora y siempre,” the kindergartners recited. “Now and forever”—not this, not for the rest of my life, Juan Diego was thinking; he was awake, but he kept his eyes closed. Juan Diego didn’t want to see his old room at Lost Children; he didn’t want to see Lupe’s small bed, with no one (or perhaps the parrot man) in it.

That next morning, Lupe’s body would have been with Dr. Vargas. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had already asked Vargas for a viewing of the child’s body; the two old priests wanted to bring one of the nuns from Lost Children with them to Cruz Roja. There were questions about how Lupe’s body should be dressed, and — given the lion bite — whether or not an open casket was advisable. (Brother Pepe had said he couldn’t do it — that is, view Lupe’s body. That was why the two old priests asked Vargas for a viewing.)

That morning, as far as anyone at La Maravilla knew — except for Ignacio, who knew differently — Dolores had simply run away. It was the talk of the circus, how The Wonder herself had just disappeared; it seemed so unlikely that no one had seen her in Oaxaca. A pretty girl like that, with long legs like hers, couldn’t just vanish from sight, could she?

Maybe only Ignacio knew that Dolores was in Guadalajara; maybe the amateur abortion had already occurred, and the peritoneal infection was just developing. Perhaps Dolores believed she would recover soon, and she’d started her return trip to Oaxaca.

That morning, at Lost Children, Edward Bonshaw must have had a lot on his mind. He had a huge confession to make to Father Alfonso and Father Octavio — not the kind of confession the two old priests were used to. And Señor Eduardo knew he needed the Church’s help. The scholastic had not only forsaken his vows; the Iowan was a gay man in love with a transvestite.

How could two such people hope to adopt an orphan? Why would anyone allow Edward Bonshaw and Flor to be legal guardians of Juan Diego? (Señor Eduardo didn’t just need the Church’s help; he needed the Church to bend the rules, more than a little.)

That morning, at La Maravilla, Ignacio knew he had to feed the lionesses himself. Who could the lion tamer have persuaded to do it for him? Soledad wasn’t speaking to him, and Ignacio had managed to make the girl acrobats afraid of the lions; his bullshit about the lions sensing when the girls got their periods had scared the young acrobats away. Even before Hombre killed Lupe, the girls were frightened — even of the lionesses.

“It’s the lionesses the lion tamer should be afraid of,” Lupe had predicted.

That morning, the day after Ignacio shot and killed Hombre, the lion tamer must have made a mistake when he was feeding the lionesses. “They can’t fool me — I know what they’re thinking,” Ignacio had bragged about the lionesses. “The young ladies are obvious,” the lion tamer had told Lupe. “I don’t need a mind reader for las señoritas.”

Ignacio had told Lupe he could read the lionesses’ minds by the body parts they were named for.

That morning, the lionesses must not have been as easy to read as the lion tamer once thought. According to studies of lions in the Serengeti, as Vargas would later impart to Juan Diego, lionesses are responsible for the majority of the kills. Lionesses know how to hunt as a team; when stalking a herd of wildebeest or zebra, they encircle the herd, cutting off any escape routes, before they attack.

When the dump kids had just met Hombre for the first time, Flor whispered to Edward Bonshaw: “If you think you just saw the king of beasts, think again. You’re about to meet him now. Ignacio is the king of beasts.”

“The king of pigs,” Lupe had suddenly said.

As for those statistics from the Serengeti, or other studies of lions, the only part the king of pigs might have understood was what took place in the wild after the lionesses had killed their prey. That was when the male lions asserted their dominance — they ate their fill before the lionesses were allowed to eat their share. Juan Diego was sure the king of pigs would have been okay with that.

That morning, no one saw what happened to Ignacio when he was feeding the lionesses, but lionesses know how to be patient; lionesses have learned to wait their turn. Las señoritas — Ignacio’s young ladies — would have their turn. That morning, the beginning of the end of La Maravilla would be complete.

Paco and Beer Belly were the first to find the lion tamer’s body; the dwarf clowns were waddling along the avenue of troupe tents, on their way to the outdoor showers. They must have wondered how it was possible that the lionesses could have killed Ignacio when his mangled body was outside their cage. But anyone familiar with how lionesses work could figure it out, and Dr. Vargas (naturally, Vargas was the one who examined Ignacio’s body) had little difficulty reconstructing a likely sequence of events.

As a novelist, when Juan Diego talked about plot — specifically, how he approached plotting a novel — he liked to talk about the “teamwork of lionesses” as “an early model.” In interviews, Juan Diego would begin by saying that no one saw what happened to the lion tamer; he would then say that he never tired of reconstructing a likely sequence of events, which was at least partially responsible for his becoming a novelist. And if you add together what happened to Ignacio with what Lupe might have been thinking — well, you can see what could have fueled the dump reader’s imagination, can’t you?

Ignacio put the meat for the lionesses on the feeding tray, as usual. He slid the feeding tray into the open slot in the cage, as usual. Then something unusual must have happened.

Vargas couldn’t restrain himself from describing the extraordinary number of claw wounds on Ignacio’s arms, his shoulders, the back of his neck; one of the lionesses had grabbed him first — then other paws, with claws, took hold of him. The lionesses must have hugged him close to the bars of their cage.

Vargas said the lion tamer’s nose was gone, as were his ears, both cheeks, his chin; Vargas said the fingers of both hands were gone — the lionesses had overlooked one thumb. What killed Ignacio, Vargas said, was a suffocating throat bite — what the doctor described as a “messy one.”

“This was no clean kill,” as Vargas would put it. He explained that a lioness could kill a wildebeest or a zebra with a single suffocating throat bite, but the bars of the cage were too close together; the lioness who eventually killed Ignacio with a suffocating throat bite couldn’t fit her head between the bars — she didn’t get to open her jaws as widely as she wanted to before she got a good grip on the lion tamer’s throat. (This was why Vargas used the messy word to describe the lethal bite.)

After the fact, the “authorities” (as Ignacio thought of them) would investigate the wrongdoings at La Maravilla. That was what always happened after a fatal accident at a circus — the experts arrived and told you what you were doing wrong. (The experts said the amount of meat that Ignacio was feeding the lions was wrong; the number of times the lions were fed was also wrong.)

Who cares? Juan Diego would think; he couldn’t remember what the experts said would have been the correct number of times or the right amount. What was wrong with La Maravilla had been what was wrong with Ignacio himself. The lion tamer had been wrong! In the end, no one at La Maravilla needed experts to tell them that.

In the end, Juan Diego would think, what Ignacio saw were those gathering yellow eyes — the final looks, less than fond, from his señoritas — the unforgiving eyes of the lion tamer’s last young ladies.

THERE’S A POSTSCRIPT TO every circus that goes under. Where do the performers go when a circus goes out of business? The Wonder herself, we know, went out of business fairly soon. But we also know, don’t we, that the other performers at La Maravilla couldn’t do what Dolores did? As Juan Diego had discovered, not everyone could be a skywalker.

Estrella would find homes for the dogs. Well, no one wanted the mongrel; Estrella had to take him. As Lupe had said, Perro Mestizo was always the bad guy.

And no other circus had wanted Pajama Man; his vanity preceded him. For a while, on the weekends, the contortionist could be seen contorting himself for the tourists in the zócalo.

Dr. Vargas would later say he was sorry the medical school had moved. The new medical school, which is opposite a public hospital, away from the center of town, is nowhere near the morgue and the Red Cross hospital, Vargas’s old stomping grounds — where the old medical school was, when Vargas still taught there.

That was the last place Vargas saw Pajama Man — at the old medical school. The contortionist’s cadaver was hoisted from the acid bath to a corrugated metal gurney; the fluid in Pajama Man’s cadaver drained into a pail through a hole in the gurney, near the contortionist’s head. On the sloped steel autopsy slab — with a deep groove running down the middle to a draining hole, also at Pajama Man’s head — the cadaver was opened. Stretched out, forever uncontorted, Pajama Man was not recognizable to the medical students, but Vargas knew the onetime contortionist.

“There is no vacancy, no absence, like the expression on a cadaver’s face,” Vargas would write to Juan Diego after the boy had moved to Iowa. “The human dreams are gone,” Vargas wrote, “but not the pain. And traces of a living person’s vanity remain. You will remember Pajama Man’s attention to sculpting his beard and trimming his mustache, which betrays the time the contortionist spent looking into a mirror — either admiring or seeking to improve his looks.”

“Sic transit gloria mundi,” as Father Alfonso and Father Octavio were fond of intoning, with solemnity.

“Thus passes the glory of this world,” as Sister Gloria was always reminding the orphans at Lost Children.

The Argentinian flyers were too good at their job, and too happy with each other, not to find work at another circus. Fairly recently (anything after 2001, the new century, struck Juan Diego as recently), Brother Pepe had heard from someone who saw them; Pepe said the Argentinian flyers were flying for a little circus in the mountains, about an hour’s drive from Mexico City. They may have since retired.

After La Maravilla went out of business, Paco and Beer Belly went to Mexico City — it was where those two dwarf clowns were from, and (according to Pepe) Beer Belly had stayed there. Beer Belly went into a different business, though Juan Diego couldn’t remember what it was — Juan Diego didn’t know if Beer Belly was still alive — and Juan Diego had a hard time imagining Beer Belly not being a clown. (Of course, Beer Belly would always be a dwarf.)

Paco, Juan Diego knew, had died. Like Flor, Paco couldn’t stay away from Oaxaca. Like Flor, Paco loved to hang out at the old hanging-out places. Paco had always been a regular at La China, that gay bar on Bustamante, the place that would later become Chinampa. And Paco was also a regular at La Coronita — the cross-dressers’ party place that closed, for a while, in the 1990s (when La Coronita’s owner, who was gay, died). Like Edward Bonshaw and Flor, both La Coronita’s owner and Paco would die of AIDS.

Soledad, who’d once called Juan Diego “Boy Wonder,” would long outlive La Maravilla. She was still Vargas’s patient. There’d been stress on her joints, no doubt — as Dr. Vargas had observed of the former trapeze artist — but these joint injuries notwithstanding, Soledad was still strong. Juan Diego would remember that she’d ended her career as a catcher, which was unusual for a woman. She’d had strong enough arms and a strong enough grip for catching men who were flying through the air.

Pepe would tell Juan Diego (around the time of the dissolution of the orphanage at Lost Children) how Vargas had been one of several people Soledad mentioned as a reference when she’d adopted two of Lost Children’s orphans, a boy and a girl.

Soledad had been a wonderful mother, Pepe reported. No one was surprised. Soledad was an impressive woman — well, she could be a little cold, Juan Diego remembered, but he’d always admired her.

There’d been a brief scandal, but this was after Soledad’s adopted kids had grown up and left home. Soledad had found herself with a bad boyfriend; neither Pepe nor Vargas would elaborate on the bad word, which they’d both used to describe Soledad’s boyfriend, but Juan Diego took the word to mean abusive.

After Ignacio, Juan Diego was surprised to hear that Soledad would have had any patience for a bad boyfriend; she didn’t strike him as the type of woman who would tolerate abuse.

As it turned out, Soledad didn’t have to put up with the bad boyfriend for very long. She came home from shopping one morning, and there he was, dead, with his head on his arms, still sitting at the kitchen table. Soledad said he’d been sitting where he was when she’d left that morning.

“He must have had a heart attack, or something,” was all Brother Pepe ever said.

Naturally, Vargas was the examining physician. “It may have been an intruder,” Vargas said. “Someone who had an ax to grind — someone with strong hands,” Dr. Vargas surmised. The bad boyfriend had been strangled while sitting at the kitchen table.

The doctor said Soledad couldn’t possibly have strangled her boyfriend. “Her hands are a wreck,” Vargas had testified. “She couldn’t squeeze the juice out of a lemon!” was how Vargas had put it.

Vargas offered the prescription painkillers Soledad was taking as evidence that the “damaged” woman couldn’t have strangled anyone. The medication was for joint pain — it was mostly for the pain in Soledad’s fingers and hands.

“Lots of damage — lots of pain,” the doctor had said.

Juan Diego didn’t doubt it — not the damage and pain part. But, looking back — remembering Soledad in the lion tamer’s tent, and the occasional glances Soledad sent in Ignacio’s direction — Juan Diego had seen something in the former trapeze artist’s eyes. There’d been nothing in Soledad’s dark eyes resembling the yellow in a lion’s eyes, but there’d definitely been something of a lioness’s unreadable intentions.