"!Madre!" Sister Gloria once more cried, as if Mother Mary were the nun's single savior and confidante--truly, as the nun's responsive prayer maintained, her one and only guide.
That was when el gringo bueno slipped and fell forward into the bathtub; the soapy water sloshed over the sides of the tub, drenching the bathroom floor. The hippie, now on his hands and knees, had enough presence of mind to turn off the running water. The tub, at last, could drain, but as the water quickly receded, those kindergartners still in the bathroom--for the most part, they'd been too afraid to run away--saw the emerging American flag (torn in two) on the gringo Christ's bare ass.
Sister Gloria saw the flag, too--a tattoo of such secular certainty that it clashed with the tattoo of the Agonizing Jesus. To the instinctively disapproving nun, a satanic discord seemed to emanate from the naked boy in the emptying tub.
Juan Diego had not moved. He knelt on the bathroom floor, the spilled bathwater touching his thighs. Around him, the cringing kindergartners lay curled in wet balls. It must have been the future writer developing in him, but Juan Diego thought of the amphibious troops killed in recapturing Corregidor, some of them not much older than children. He thought of the wild promise he'd made to the good gringo, and he was thrilled--the way, at fourteen, you can be thrilled by an utterly unrealistic vision of the future.
"Ahora y siempre--now and forever," one of the soaking-wet kindergartners was whimpering.
"Now and forever," Juan Diego said, more confidently. He knew this was a promise to himself--to seize every opportunity that looked like the future, from this moment forward.
* 14 *
Nada
In the corridor outside Edward Bonshaw's classroom at Ninos Perdidos was a bust of the Virgin Mary with a tear on her cheek. The bust stood on a pedestal in a corner of the second-floor balcony. There was often a beet-red smudge on Mary's other cheek; it looked like blood to Esperanza--every week she wiped it off, but the next week it was back. "Maybe it is blood," she'd told Brother Pepe.
"It can't be," Pepe told her. "There have been no reported stigmata cases at Lost Children."
On the landing between the first and second floors was the suffer-the-little-children statue of San Vicente de Paul with two infants in his arms. Esperanza reported to Brother Pepe that she'd also wiped blood off the hem of the saint's cloak. "Every week I wipe it off, but it comes back!" Esperanza had said. "It must be miraculous blood."
"It can't be blood, Esperanza," was all Pepe would say about it.
"You don't know what I see, Pepe!" Esperanza said, pointing to her fiery eyes. "And whatever it is, it leaves a stain."
They were both right. It was not blood, but every week it came back and it left a stain. The dump kids had had to lie low with the beet juice after the episode with the good gringo in their bathtub; they'd had to cut back on their nighttime visits to Zaragoza Street, too. Senor Eduardo and Brother Pepe--not to mention that witch Sister Gloria and the other nuns--were keeping a close eye on them. And Lupe was right about the gifts el gringo bueno could afford for them: they were less than outstanding presents.
The hippie had no doubt haggled over the cheap religious figures he'd bought from the Christmas-parties place, the virgin shop on Independencia. One was a small totem, in the category of a statuette--more of a figurine than a lifelike figure--but the Guadalupe virgin was life-size.
The Guadalupe virgin was actually a little bigger than Juan Diego. She was his present. Her blue-green mantle--a kind of cloak or cape--was traditional. Her belt, or what looked like a black girdle, would one day give rise to the speculation that Guadalupe was pregnant. Long after the fact, in 1999, Pope John Paul II invoked Our Lady of Guadalupe as Patroness of the Americas and Protectress of Unborn Children. ("That Polish pope," Juan Diego would later rail against him--and his unborn business.)
The virgin-shop Guadalupe didn't look pregnant, but this Guadalupe mannequin appeared to be about fifteen or sixteen--and she had breasts. The boobs made her seem not religious at all. "She's a sex doll!" Lupe immediately said.
Of course, that wasn't strictly true; there was, however, a sex-doll aspect to the Guadalupe figure, though Juan Diego could not undress her and she didn't have movable limbs (or recognizable reproductive parts).
"What's my present?" Lupe asked the hippie boy.
The good gringo asked Lupe if she forgave him for sleeping with her mother. "Yes," Lupe said, "but we can't ever get married."
"That sounds pretty final," the hippie said, when Juan Diego translated Lupe's answer to the forgiveness question.
"Show me the present," was all Lupe said.
It was a Coatlicue figurine, as ugly as any replica of the goddess. Juan Diego thought it was a blessing that the hideous statuette was small--it was even smaller than Dirty White. El gringo bueno had no clue how to pronounce the name of the Aztec goddess; Lupe, in her hard-to-follow fashion, couldn't manage to help him say it.
"Your mom said you admired this weird mother goddess," the good gringo explained to Lupe; he didn't sound so sure.
"I love her," Lupe told him.
Juan Diego had always found it hard to believe that one goddess could have so many contradictory attributes attached to her, but it was easy for him to see why Lupe loved her. Coatlicue was an extremist--a goddess of childbirth and of sexual impurity and wrongful behavior. Several creation myths were connected to her; in one, she was impregnated by a ball of feathers that fell on her while she was sweeping a temple--enough to piss anyone off, Juan Diego thought, but Lupe said this was the kind of thing she could imagine happening to their mother, Esperanza.
Unlike Esperanza, Coatlicue wore a skirt of serpents. She was basically dressed in writhing snakes; she wore a necklace of human hearts and hands and skulls. Coatlicue's hands and feet had claws; her breasts were flaccid. In the figurine the good gringo gave to Lupe, Coatlicue's nipples were made of rattlesnake rattles. ("Too much nursing, maybe," Lupe observed.)
"But what do you like about her, Lupe?" Juan Diego had asked his sister.
"Some of her own children vowed to kill her," Lupe had answered him. "Una mujer dificil." A difficult woman.
"Coatlicue is a devouring mother; the womb and the grave coexist in her," Juan Diego explained to the hippie boy.
"I can see that," the good gringo said. "She looks deadly, man on wheels," the hippie more confidently stated.
"Nobody messes with her!" Lupe proclaimed.
Even Edward Bonshaw (always looking on the bright side) found Lupe's Coatlicue figurine frightening. "I understand there are repercussions that come from the ball-of-feathers mishap, but this goddess is not very sympathetic-looking," Senor Eduardo said to Lupe, as respectfully as anyone possibly could.
"Coatlicue didn't ask to be born who she was," Lupe answered the Iowan. "She was sacrificed--supposedly to do with creation. Her face was formed by two serpents--after her head was cut off and the blood spurted from her neck in the form of two gigantic snakes. Some of us," Lupe told the new missionary, pausing for Juan Diego's translation to catch up, "don't have a choice about who we are."
"But--" Edward Bonshaw began.
"I am who I am," Lupe said; Juan Diego rolled his eyes when he repeated this to Senor Eduardo. Lupe pressed the grotesque Coatlicue totem to her cheek; it was apparent that she didn't just love the goddess because the good gringo had given her the statuette.
As for his gift from the gringo, Juan Diego would occasionally masturbate with the Guadalupe doll lying next to him on his bed, her enraptured face on the pillow alongside his face. The slight swell of Guadalupe's breasts sufficed.
The impassive mannequin was made of a light but hard plastic, unyielding to the touch. Although the Guadalupe virgin was a couple of inches taller than Juan Diego, she was hollow--she weighed so little that Juan Diego could carry her under one arm.
There was a twofold awkwardness attached to Juan Diego's attempts to have sex with the life-size Guadalupe doll--better said, the awkwardness of
Juan Diego's imagining he was having sex with the plastic virgin. In the first place, it was necessary for Juan Diego to be alone in the bedroom he shared with his little sister--not to mention that Lupe knew her brother thought about having sex with the Guadalupe doll; Lupe had read his mind.
The second problem was the pedestal. The fetching feet of the Guadalupe virgin were affixed to a pedestal of chartreuse-colored grass, which was the circumference of an automobile tire. The pedestal was an impediment to Juan Diego's desire to snuggle with the plastic virgin when he was lying next to her.
Juan Diego had thought about sawing off the pedestal, but this meant removing the virgin's pretty feet at her ankles, which would mean the statue couldn't stand. Naturally, Lupe had known her brother's thoughts.
"I don't ever want to see Our Lady of Guadalupe lying down," Lupe told Juan Diego, "or leaning up against our bedroom wall. Don't even think about standing her on her head in a corner, with the stumps of her amputated feet sticking up!"
"Look at her, Lupe!" Juan Diego cried. He pointed to the Guadalupe figure, standing by one of the bookshelves in the former reading room; the Guadalupe mannequin looked a little like a misplaced literary character, a woman who'd escaped from a novel--one who couldn't find her way back to the book where she belonged. "Look at her," Juan Diego repeated. "Does Guadalupe strike you as being even slightly interested in lying down?"
As luck would have it, Sister Gloria was passing by the dump kids' bedroom; the nun peered into their room from the hall. Sister Gloria had objected to the life-size Guadalupe doll's presence in the ninos' bedroom--more unmerited privileges, the sister had presumed--but Brother Pepe had defended the dump kids. How could the disapproving nun disapprove of a religious statue? Sister Gloria believed Juan Diego's Guadalupe figure more closely resembled a dressmaker's dummy--"a suggestive one," was the way the nun put it to Pepe.
"I don't want to hear another word about Our Lady of Guadalupe lying down," Sister Gloria said to Juan Diego. The virgins from La Nina de las Posadas were not proper virgins, Sister Gloria was thinking. The proprietors of The Girl of the Christmas Parties and Sister Gloria did not see eye to eye concerning what Our Lady of Guadalupe looked like--not like a sexual temptation, Sister Gloria thought, not like a seductress!
*
IT WAS, ALAS, THIS memory--among all the others--that woke Juan Diego from his dream in the suddenly stifling heat of his hotel room at the Makati Shangri-La. But how was it possible for that refrigerator of a hotel room to be hot?
The dead fish floated on the surface of the green-lit water in the becalmed aquarium; the previously upright-swimming sea horse was no longer vertical, its lifeless prehensile tail signifying that it had joined (forever) those lost members of its family of pipefish. Had the aquarium's water-bubble problem returned? Or had one of the dead fish clogged the water-circulation system? The fish tank had ceased gurgling; the water was unmoving and murky, yet a pair of yellowish eyes stared at Juan Diego from the clouded bottom of the aquarium. The moray--his gills gulping in the remaining oxygen--appeared to be the sole survivor of the disaster.
Uh-oh, Juan Diego was remembering: he'd returned from dinner to a freezing-cold hotel room; the air-conditioning was once more blasting. The hotel maid must have cranked it up--she'd also left the radio on. Juan Diego couldn't figure out how to turn the relentless music off; he'd been forced to unplug the clock radio to kill the throbbing sound.
And the maid wasn't easily satisfied: she'd seen how he'd prepared his beta-blockers for his proper dose; the maid had laid out all his medications (his Viagra, too) and the pill cutter. This both irritated and distracted Juan Diego--it didn't help that he discovered the maid's interfering attention to his toilet articles and his pills only after he'd unplugged the clock radio and had drunk one of the four Spanish beers in the ice bucket. Was San Miguel ubiquitous in Manila?
In the harsh light of the aquarium calamity, Juan Diego saw there was only one beer bobbing in the tepid water in the ice bucket. Did he drink three beers after dinner? And when had he turned the air-conditioning completely off? Maybe he'd woken up with his teeth chattering, and (half frozen to death, and half asleep) he'd shivered his way to the thermostat on the bedroom wall.
Keeping a watchful eye on Senor Morales, Juan Diego quickly dipped an index finger in and out of the aquarium; the South China Sea was never this warm. The water in the fish tank was nearly as hot as a slowly simmering bouillabaisse.
Oh, dear--what have I done? Juan Diego wondered. And such vivid dreams! Not usual--not with the right dose of the beta-blockers.
Uh-oh, he was remembering--uh-oh, uh-oh! He limped to the bathroom. The power of suggestion would reveal itself there. He'd apparently used the pill-cutting device to cut a Lopressor tablet in half; he'd taken half the right dose. (At least he'd not taken half a Viagra instead!) A double dose of the beta-blockers the night before, and only a half-dose last night--what would Dr. Rosemary Stein have said to her friend about that?
"Not good, not good," Juan Diego was muttering to himself when he walked back into the overheated bedroom.
The three empty bottles of San Miguel confronted him; they resembled small but inflexible bodyguards on the TV table, as if they were defending the remote. Oh, yes, Juan Diego remembered; he'd sat stupefied (for how long, after dinner?) watching the obliteration-to-blackness of the limping terrorist in Mindanao. By the time he'd gone to bed, after the three ice-cold beers and the air-conditioning, his brain must have been refrigerated; half a Lopressor tablet was no match for Juan Diego's dreams.
He remembered how hot and humid it had been outside on the street when Bienvenido drove him back to the Makati Shangri-La from the restaurant; Juan Diego's shirt had stuck to his back. The bomb-sniffing dogs had been panting in the hotel entranceway. It upset Juan Diego that the night-shift bomb-sniffers weren't the dogs he knew; the security guards were different, too.
The hotel manager had described the aquarium's underwater thermometer as "most delicate"; maybe he'd meant to say thermostat? In an air-conditioned hotel room, wasn't it the underwater thermostat's job to keep the seawater warm enough for those former residents of the South China Sea? When Juan Diego had turned off the air-conditioning, the thermostat's job had changed. Juan Diego had cooked an aquarium of Auntie Carmen's exotic pets; only the angry-looking moray eel was clinging to life among his dead and floating friends. Couldn't the thermostat also keep the seawater cool enough?
"Lo siento, Senor Morales," Juan Diego said again. The eel's overworked gills weren't merely undulating--they were flapping.
Juan Diego called the hotel manager to report the massacre; Auntie Carmen's store for exotic pets in Makati City had to be alerted. Maybe Morales could be saved, if the pet-store crew came quickly enough--if they disassembled the aquarium and revived the moray in fresh seawater.
"Maybe the moray needs to be sedated for traveling," the hotel manager suggested. (From the way Senor Morales was staring at him, Juan Diego thought the moray would not take kindly to sedation.)
Juan Diego turned on the air-conditioning before he left his hotel room in search of breakfast. At the doorway to his room, he took what he hoped would be a last look at the loaned aquarium--the fish tank of death. Mr. Morals watched Juan Diego leave, as if the moray couldn't wait to see the writer again--preferably, when Juan Diego was on his deathbed.
"Lo siento, Senor Morales," Juan Diego said once more, letting the door close softly behind him. But when he found himself alone in the stifling stink-box of an elevator--naturally, there was no air-conditioning there--Juan Diego shouted as loudly as he could. "Fuck Clark French!" he cried. "And fuck you, Auntie Carmen--whoever the fuck you are!" Juan Diego yelled.
He stopped shouting when he saw that the surveillance camera was pointed right at him; the camera was mounted above the bank of the elevator buttons, but Juan Diego didn't know if the surveillance camera also recorded sound. With or without his actual words, the writer could imagine the hotel security guar
ds watching the lunatic cripple--alone and screaming in the descending elevator.
The hotel manager found the Distinguished Guest as he was finishing breakfast. "Those unfortunate fish, sir--they've been taken care of. The pet-store team, come and gone--they wore surgical masks," the manager confided to Juan Diego, lowering his voice at the surgical-masks part. (No need to alarm the other guests; talk of surgical masks might imply a contagion.)
"Perhaps you heard if the moray--" Juan Diego started to say.
"The eel survived. Hard to kill, I imagine," the manager said. "But very agitated."
"How agitated?" Juan Diego asked.
"There was a biting, sir--not serious, I'm told, but there was a bite. It drew blood," the manager confided, again lowering his voice.
"A bite where?" Juan Diego asked.
"A cheek."
"A cheek!"
"Not serious, sir. I saw the man's face. It will heal--not a bad scar, just unfortunate."
"Yes--unfortunate," was all Juan Diego could say. He didn't dare ask if Auntie Carmen had come and gone with the pet-store team. With any luck, she'd left Manila for Bohol--she might be in Bohol, waiting to meet him (with the Filipino side of Clark French's whole family). Naturally, word of the slain fish would reach Auntie Carmen in Bohol--including the report on the agitated Senor Morales, and the unfortunate pet-store worker's bitten cheek.
What is happening to me? Juan Diego wondered, upon returning to his hotel room. He saw there was a towel on the floor by the bed--doubtless where some of the seawater from the aquarium had spilled. (Juan Diego imagined the moray thrashing his tail and attacking the face of his frightened handler, but there was no blood on the towel.)
The writer was about to use the toilet when he spotted the tiny sea horse on the bathroom floor; the sea horse was so small that it must have escaped the attention of the pet-store team, at that moment when the little creature's fellow fish were flushed away. The sea horse's round and startled eyes still seemed alive; in its miniature and prehistoric face, the fierce eyes expressed an indignation at all humankind--like the eyes of a hunted dragon.