Avenue of Mysteries (36 page)

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

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

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

“Merciful God,” the Iowan said again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Lord, have mercy,” Edward Bonshaw said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•
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.