Avenue of Mysteries (35 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you’re not—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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