"In my job, I hear lots of bad things. About every hotel!" the young driver said.
"What have you heard about the Makati Shangri-La?" Juan Diego asked him.
The traffic was at a standstill; the hubbub in the congested street had the sort of chaotic atmosphere Juan Diego associated with a bus station, not an airport. The sky was a dirty beige, the air damp and fetid, but the air-conditioning in the limo was too cold.
"It's a matter of what you can believe, you know," Bienvenido answered. "You hear everything."
"That was my problem with the novel--believing it," Juan Diego said.
"What novel?" Bienvenido asked.
"Shangri-La is an imaginary land in a novel called Lost Horizon. I think it was written in the thirties--I forget who wrote it," Juan Diego said. (Imagine hearing someone say that about a book of mine! he was thinking; it would be like hearing you had died, Juan Diego thought.) He was wondering why the conversation with the limo driver was so exhausting, but just then there was an opening in the traffic, and the car moved swiftly ahead.
Even bad air is better than air-conditioning, Juan Diego decided. He opened a window, and the dirty-beige air blew on his face. The haze of smog suddenly reminded him of Mexico City, which he didn't want to be reminded of. And the traffic-choked, bus-terminal atmosphere of the airport summoned Juan Diego's boyhood memory of the buses in Oaxaca; proximity to the buses seemed contaminating. But, in his adolescent memories, those streets south of the zocalo were contaminated--Zaragoza Street particularly, but even those streets on the way to Zaragoza Street from Lost Children and the zocalo. (After the nuns were asleep, Juan Diego and Lupe used to look for Esperanza on Zaragoza Street.)
"Maybe one of the things I've heard about the Makati Shangri-La is imaginary," Bienvenido ventured to say.
"What would that be?" Juan Diego asked the driver.
Cooking smells blew in the open window of the moving car. They were passing a kind of shantytown, where the traffic slowed; bicycles were weaving between the cars--children, barefoot and shirtless, darted into the street. The dirt-cheap jeepneys were packed with people; the jeepneys cruised with their headlights turned off, or the headlights were burned out, and the passengers sat close together on benches like church pews. Perhaps Juan Diego thought of church pews because the jeepneys were adorned with religious slogans.
GOD IS GOOD! one proclaimed. GOD'S CARE FOR YOU IS APPARENT, another said. He'd just arrived in Manila, but Juan Diego was already zeroing in on a sore subject: the Spanish conquerors and the Catholic Church had been to the Philippines before him; they'd left their mark. (He had a limo driver named Bienvenido, and the jeepneys--the lowest of low-income transportation--were plastered with advertisements for God!)
"There's something wrong with the dogs," Bienvenido said.
"The dogs? What dogs?" Juan Diego asked.
"At the Makati Shangri-La--the bomb-sniffing dogs," the young driver explained.
"The hotel has been bombed?" Juan Diego asked.
"Not that I know of," Bienvenido replied. "There are bomb-sniffing dogs at all the hotels. At the Shangri-La, people say the dogs don't know what they're sniffing for--they just like to sniff everything."
"That doesn't sound so bad," Juan Diego said. He liked dogs; he was always defending them. (Maybe the bomb-sniffing dogs at the Shangri-La were just being extra careful.)
"People say the dogs at the Shangri-La are untrained," Bienvenido was saying.
But Juan Diego couldn't focus on this conversation. Manila was reminding him of Mexico; he'd been unprepared for that, and now the talk had turned to dogs.
At Lost Children, he and Lupe had missed the dump dogs. When a litter of puppies was born in the basurero, the kids had tried to take care of the puppies; when a puppy died, Juan Diego and Lupe tried to find it before the vultures did. The dump kids had helped Rivera burn the dead dogs--burning them was a way to love the dogs, too.
At night, when they went looking for their mother on Zaragoza Street, Juan Diego and Lupe tried not to think about the rooftop dogs; those dogs were different--they were scary. They were mostly mongrels, as Brother Pepe had said, but Pepe was wrong to say that only some of the rooftop dogs were feral--most of them were. Dr. Gomez said she knew how the dogs ended up on the roofs, although Brother Pepe believed that no one knew how the dogs got there.
A lot of Dr. Gomez's patients had been bitten by the rooftop dogs; after all, she was an ear, nose, and throat specialist, and that's where the dogs tried to bite you. The dogs attacked your face, Dr. Gomez said. Years ago, in the top-floor apartments of those buildings south of the zocalo, people had let their pets run free on the roofs. But the pet dogs had run away, or they'd been scared away by wild dogs; many of those buildings were so close together that the dogs could run from roof to roof. People stopped letting their pet dogs up on the roofs; soon almost all the rooftop dogs were wild. But how had the first wild dogs ended up on the roofs?
At night, on Zaragoza Street, the headlights of passing cars were reflected in the eyes of the rooftop dogs. No wonder Lupe thought these dogs were ghosts. The dogs ran along the rooftops, as if they were hunting people in the street below. If you didn't talk, or you weren't listening to music, you could hear the dogs panting as they ran. Sometimes, when the dogs were jumping from roof to roof, a dog fell. The falling dogs were killed, of course, unless one landed on a person in the street below. The person passing by served to break the dog's fall. Those lucky dogs usually didn't die, but if they were injured from the fall, this made the dogs more likely to bite the people they'd fallen on.
"I guess you like dogs," Bienvenido was saying.
"I do--I do like dogs," Juan Diego said, but he was distracted by his thoughts of those ghost dogs in Oaxaca (if the rooftop dogs, or some of them, were truly ghosts).
"Those dogs aren't the only ghosts in town--Oaxaca is full of ghosts," Lupe had said, in her know-it-all way.
"I haven't seen them," was Juan Diego's first response.
"You will," was all Lupe would say.
Now, in Manila, Juan Diego was also distracted by an overloaded jeepney with one of the same religious slogans he'd already seen; evidently, it was a popular message: GOD'S CARE FOR YOU IS APPARENT. A contrasting sticker in the rear window of a taxi then caught Juan Diego's eye. CHILD-SEX TOURISTS, the taxi sticker said. DON'T TURN AWAY. TURN THEM IN.
Well, yes--turn the fuckers in! Juan Diego thought. But for those children who were recruited to have sex with tourists, Juan Diego believed, God's care for them wasn't all that apparent.
"I'll be interested to see what you think of the bomb-sniffers," Bienvenido was saying, but when he glanced in the rearview mirror, he saw that his client was asleep. Or dead, the driver might have thought, except that Juan Diego's lips were moving. Maybe the limo driver imagined that the not-so-famous novelist was composing dialogue in his sleep. The way Juan Diego's lips were moving, he appeared to be having a conversation with himself--the way writers do, Bienvenido supposed. The young Filipino driver couldn't have known the actual argument the older man was remembering, nor could Bienvenido have guessed where Juan Diego's dreams would transport him next.
* 12 *
Zaragoza Street
"Listen to me, Mr. Missionary--these two should stick together," Vargas was saying. "The circus will buy them clothes, the circus will pay for any medicine--plus three meals a day, plus a bed to sleep in, and there's a family to look after them."
"What family? It's a circus! They sleep in tents!" Edward Bonshaw cried.
"La Maravilla is a kind of family, Eduardo," Brother Pepe told the Iowan. "Circus children aren't in need," Pepe said, more doubtfully.
The name of Oaxaca's little circus, like Lost Children, had not escaped criticism. It could be confusing--Circo de La Maravilla. The L in La was uppercase because The Wonder herself was an actual person, a performer. (The act itself, the alleged marvel, was confusingly called la maravilla--a lowercase wonder or marvel.) And there were pe
ople in Oaxaca who thought Circus of The Wonder misleadingly advertised itself. The other acts were ordinary, not so marvelous; the animals weren't special. And there were rumors.
All anyone in town ever talked about was La Maravilla herself. (Like Lost Children, the circus's name was usually shortened; people said they were going to el circo or to La Maravilla.) The Wonder herself was always a young girl; there had been many. It was a breathtaking act, not always death-defying; several previous performers had been killed. And the survivors didn't continue to be The Wonder for very long. There was a lot of turnover among the performers; the stress probably got to these young girls. After all, they were risking their lives at that time when they were coming of age. Maybe the stress and their hormones got to them. Wasn't it truly wondrous that these young girls were doing something that could kill them while they were having their first periods and watching their breasts get bigger? Wasn't their coming of age the real danger, the actual marvel?
Some of the older dump kids who lived in Guerrero had sneaked into the circus; they'd told Lupe and Juan Diego about La Maravilla. But Rivera would never have tolerated such shenanigans. In those days when La Maravilla was in town, the circus set up shop in Cinco Senores; the circus grounds in Cinco Senores were closer to the zocalo and the center of Oaxaca than to Guerrero.
What drew the crowds to Circo de La Maravilla? Was it the prospect of seeing an innocent girl die? Yet Brother Pepe wasn't wrong to say that La Maravilla, or any circus, was a kind of family. (Of course, there are good and bad families.)
"But what can La Maravilla do with a cripple?" Esperanza asked.
"Please! Not when the boy is right here!" Senor Eduardo cried.
"It's okay. I am a cripple," Juan Diego had said.
"La Maravilla will take you because you're necessary, Juan Diego," Dr. Vargas said. "Lupe requires translation," Vargas said to Esperanza. "You can't have a fortune-teller you don't understand; Lupe needs an interpreter."
"I'm not a fortune-teller!" Lupe said, but Juan Diego didn't translate this.
"The woman you want is Soledad," Vargas said to Edward Bonshaw.
"What woman? I don't want a woman!" the new missionary cried; he'd imagined that Dr. Vargas had misunderstood what a vow of celibacy entailed.
"Not a woman for you, Mr. Celibacy," Vargas said. "I mean the woman you need to talk to, on behalf of the kids. Soledad is the woman who looks after the kids at the circus--she's the lion tamer's wife."
"Not the most reassuring name for the wife of a lion tamer," Brother Pepe said. "Solitude doesn't bode well--widowhood awaits her, one might conclude."
"For Christ's sake, Pepe--it's just her name," Vargas said.
"You are an antichrist--you know that, don't you?" Senor Eduardo said, pointing to Vargas. "These kids can live at Lost Children, where they will receive a Jesuit education, and you want to put them in harm's way! Is it their education you're frightened of, Dr. Vargas? Are you such a convinced atheist that you're afraid we might manage to turn these kids into believers?"
"These kids are in harm's way in Oaxaca!" Vargas cried. "I don't care what they believe."
"He's an antichrist," the Iowan said, this time to Brother Pepe.
"Are there dogs at the circus?" Lupe asked. Juan Diego translated this.
"Yes, there are--trained dogs. There are acts with dogs. Soledad trains the new acrobats, including the flyers, but the dogs have their own troupe tent. Do you like dogs, Lupe?" Vargas asked the girl; she shrugged. Juan Diego could tell that Lupe liked the idea of La Maravilla as much as he did; she just didn't like Vargas.
"Promise me something," Lupe said to Juan Diego, holding his hand.
"Sure. What?" Juan Diego said.
"If I die, I want you to burn me at the basurero--like the dogs," Lupe told her brother. "Just you and Rivera--nobody else. Promise me."
"Jesus!" Juan Diego shouted.
"No Jesus," Lupe told him. "Just you and Rivera."
"Okay," Juan Diego said. "I promise."
"How well do you know this Soledad woman?" Edward Bonshaw asked Dr. Vargas.
"She's my patient," Vargas replied. "Soledad is a former acrobat--a trapeze artist. Lots of stress on the joints--hands and wrists and elbows, especially. All that grabbing and holding tight, not to mention the falls," Vargas said.
"Isn't there a net for the aerialists?" Senor Eduardo asked.
"Not in most Mexican circuses," Vargas told him.
"Merciful God!" the Iowan cried. "And you're telling me that these children are in harm's way in Oaxaca!"
"Not a lot of falls in fortune-telling--no stress on the joints," Vargas replied.
"I don't know what's on everybody's mind--it's not clear to me what everyone is thinking. I just know what some people are thinking," Lupe said. Juan Diego waited. "What about those people with minds I can't read?" Lupe asked. "What does a fortune-teller say to those people?"
"We need to know more about how the sideshow works. We need to think about it." (That was how Juan Diego interpreted his sister.)
"That's not what I said," Lupe told her brother.
"We need to think about it," Juan Diego repeated.
"What about the lion tamer?" Brother Pepe asked Vargas.
"What about him?" Vargas said.
"I hear Soledad has trouble with him," Pepe said.
"Well, lion tamers are probably difficult to live with--I suppose there's no small amount of testosterone involved in taming lions," Vargas said, shrugging. Lupe imitated his shrug.
"So the lion tamer is a macho guy?" Pepe asked Vargas.
"That's what I hear," Vargas told him. "He's not my patient."
"Not a lot of falls in lion-taming--no stress on the joints," Edward Bonshaw commented.
"Okay, we'll think about it," Lupe said.
"What did she say?" Vargas asked Juan Diego.
"We're going to think about it," Juan Diego told him.
"You can always come to Lost Children--you could visit me," Senor Eduardo said to Juan Diego. "I'll tell you what to read, we can talk about books, you could show me your writing--"
"This kid is writing?" Vargas asked.
"He wants to, yes--he wants an education, Vargas; he clearly has a gift for language. This boy has a future in some kind of higher learning," Edward Bonshaw said.
"You can always come to the circus," Juan Diego said to Senor Eduardo. "You could visit me, bring me books--"
"Yes, of course you could," Vargas told Edward Bonshaw. "You can practically walk to Cinco Senores, and La Maravilla also travels. There are occasional road trips; the kids will get to see Mexico City. Maybe you can go with them. Travel is a kind of education, isn't it?" Dr. Vargas asked the Iowan; without waiting for an answer, Vargas turned his attention to the dump ninos. "What is it you miss about the basurero?" he asked them. (Everyone who knew the ninos knew how much Lupe missed the dogs, and not only Dirty White and Diablo. Brother Pepe knew it was a long walk from Lost Children to Cinco Senores.)
Lupe didn't answer Vargas, and Juan Diego silently counted to himself--adding up the things he missed about Guerrero and the dump. The lightning-fast gecko on the shack's screen door; the vast expanse of waste; the various ways to wake up Rivera when he was sleeping in the cab of his truck; the way Diablo could silence the barking of the other dogs; the solemn dignity of the dogs' funeral fires in the basurero.
"Lupe misses the dogs," Edward Bonshaw said--Lupe knew it was what Vargas had wanted the Iowan to say.
"You know what?" Vargas suddenly said, as if he'd just thought of it. "I'll bet Soledad would let these kids sleep in the tent with the dogs. I could ask her. It wouldn't surprise me if Soledad thought the dogs would like that, too--then everyone would be happy! Small world, sometimes," Vargas said, shrugging again. Once more, Lupe imitated his shrug. "Does Lupe think I don't know what she's doing?" Vargas asked Juan Diego; both the boy and his sister shrugged.
"Children sharing a tent with dogs!" Edward Bonshaw exclaimed.
&n
bsp; "We'll see what Soledad says," Vargas said to Senor Eduardo.
"I like most animals better than most people," Lupe remarked.
"Let me guess: Lupe likes animals better than people," Vargas told Juan Diego.
"I said most," Lupe corrected him.
"I know Lupe hates me," Vargas said to Juan Diego.
Listening to Lupe and Vargas bitch about each other, or to each other, Juan Diego was reminded of the mariachi bands that forced themselves on tourists in the zocalo. On weekends, there were always bands in the zocalo--including the miserable high school bands, with cheerleaders. Lupe liked pushing Juan Diego in his wheelchair through the crowds. Everyone made way for them, even the cheerleaders. "It's like we're famous," Lupe said to Juan Diego.
The dump kids were famous for haunting Zaragoza Street; they became regulars there. No stupid stigmata tricks on Zaragoza Street--no one would have tipped the ninos for wiping up any blood. Too much blood was routinely spilled on Zaragoza Street; wiping it up would have been a waste of time.
Along Zaragoza Street, there were always prostitutes, and the men cruising for prostitutes; in the courtyard of the Hotel Somega, Juan Diego and Lupe could watch the prostitutes and their customers come and go, but the kids never saw their mother on Zaragoza Street or in the hotel courtyard. There was no verification that Esperanza was working the street, and there may have been other guests at the Somega--people who were neither prostitutes nor their clients. Yet Rivera was not the only one the kids had heard call the Somega the "whore hotel," and all the coming and going certainly made the hotel appear that way.
One night, when Juan Diego was wheelchair-bound, he and Lupe had followed a prostitute named Flor on Zaragoza Street; they knew the prostitute wasn't their mother, but Flor looked a little like Esperanza from behind--Flor walked like Esperanza.
Lupe liked to make the wheelchair go fast; she would come up close to people who had their backs turned to her--they never knew the wheelchair was there until it bumped them. Juan Diego was always afraid that these people would fall backward into his lap; he would lean forward and try to touch them with his hand before the speeding wheelchair made contact. That was how he first touched Flor; he'd meant to touch one of her hands, but Flor swung her arms back and forth when she walked, and Juan Diego unintentionally touched her swaying bottom.