"It was what her children wanted, Father--that's how it goes," Rivera said.
"It's what we do with what we love," Juan Diego said.
Lupe was smiling serenely; she was watching the ascending columns of smoke drifting far away, and the ever-hovering vultures.
" 'Take me to the valley, and lay the sod o'er me,' " Lupe sang. " 'For I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong.' "
"These children are orphans now," Senor Eduardo was saying. "They are surely our responsibility, more than they ever were. Aren't they?"
Brother Pepe didn't immediately answer the Iowan, and the two old priests just looked at each other.
"What would Graham Greene say?" Juan Diego asked Edward Bonshaw.
"Graham Greene!" Father Alfonso exclaimed. "Don't tell me, Edward, that this boy has been reading Greene--"
"How unsuitable!" Father Octavio said.
"Greene is hardly age-appropriate--" Father Alfonso began, but Senor Eduardo wouldn't hear of it.
"Greene is a Catholic!" the Iowan cried.
"Not a good one, Edward," Father Octavio said.
"Is this what Greene means by one moment?" Juan Diego asked Senor Eduardo. "Is this the door opening to the future--Lupe's and mine?"
"This door opens to the circus," Lupe said. "That's what comes next--that's where we're going."
Juan Diego translated this, of course, before he asked Edward Bonshaw: "Is this our only moment? Is this the one door to the future? Is this what Greene meant? Is this how childhood ends?" The Iowan was thinking hard--as hard as he ever had, and Edward Bonshaw was a deeply thoughtful man.
"Yes, you're right! That's exactly right!" Lupe suddenly said to the Iowan; the little girl touched Senor Eduardo's hand.
"She says you're right--whatever you're thinking," Juan Diego said to Edward Bonshaw, who kept staring into the raging flames.
"He's thinking that the poor draft dodger's ashes will be returned to his homeland, and to his grieving mother, with the ashes of a prostitute," Lupe said. Juan Diego translated this, too.
Suddenly there was a harsh spitting sound from the funeral pyre, and a thin blue flame shot up among the vivid oranges and yellows, as if something chemical had caught fire, or perhaps a puddle of gasoline had ignited.
"Maybe it's the puppy--it was so wet," Rivera said, as they all stared at the intense blue flame.
"The puppy!" Edward Bonshaw cried. "You burned a dog with your mother and that dear hippie child? You burned another dog in their fire!"
"Everyone should be so lucky as to be burned with a puppy," Juan Diego told the Iowan.
The hissing blue flame had everyone's attention, but Lupe reached up her arms and pulled her brother's face down to her lips. Juan Diego thought she was going to kiss him, but Lupe wanted to whisper in his ear, although no one else could have understood her, not even if they'd heard.
"It's definitely the wet puppy," Rivera was saying.
"La nariz," Lupe whispered in her brother's ear, touching his nose. The second she spoke, the hissing sound stopped--the blue flame disappeared. The flaming blue hiss was the nose, all right, Juan Diego was thinking.
The jolt of Philippine Airlines 177 landing in Bohol didn't even wake him up, as if there were nothing that could wake Juan Diego from the dream of when his future started.
* 16 *
King of Beasts
Several passengers paused at the cockpit exit for Philippine Airlines 177, telling the flight attendant of their concerns about the older-looking, brown-skinned gentleman who was slumped over in a window seat. "He's either dead to the world or just dead," one of the passengers told the flight attendant, in a confounding combination of the vernacular and the laconic.
Juan Diego definitely looked dead, but his thoughts were far away, on high, in the spires of smoke funneling above the Oaxaca basurero; if only in his mind, he had a vulture's view of the city limits--of Cinco Senores, where the circus grounds were, and the distant but brightly colored tents of Circo de La Maravilla.
The paramedics were notified from the cockpit; before all the passengers had left the plane, the rescuers rushed on. Various lifesaving methods were seconds away from being performed when one of the lifesavers realized that Juan Diego was very much alive, but by then the supposedly stricken passenger's carry-on had been searched. The prescription drugs drew the most immediate attention. The beta-blockers signified there was a heart problem; the Viagra, with the printed warning not to take the stuff with nitrates, prompted one of the paramedics to ask Juan Diego, with no little urgency, if he'd been taking nitrates.
Juan Diego not only didn't know what nitrates were; his mind was in Oaxaca, forty years ago, and Lupe was whispering in his ear.
"La nariz," Juan Diego whispered to the anxious paramedic; she was a young woman, and she understood a little Spanish.
"Your nose?" the young paramedic asked; to make herself clear, she touched her own nose when she spoke.
"You can't breathe? You're having trouble breathing?" another of the paramedics asked; he also touched his nose, doubtless to signify breathing.
"Viagra can make you stuffy," a third paramedic said.
"No, not my nose," Juan Diego said, laughing. "I was dreaming about the Virgin Mary's nose," he told the team of paramedics.
This was not helpful; the insanity of mentioning the Virgin Mary's nose distracted the medical personnel from the line of questioning they should have pursued--namely, if Juan Diego had been manipulating the dosage of his Lopressor prescription. Yet, to the team of paramedics, the passenger's life signs were okay; that he'd managed to sleep through a turbulent landing (crying children, screaming women) was not a medical matter.
"He looked dead," the flight attendant kept saying to anyone who would listen to her. But Juan Diego had been oblivious to the rocky landing, the sobbing children, the wails of the women who'd been certain they were going to die. The miracle (or not) of the Virgin Mary's nose had completely captured Juan Diego's attention, as it had so many years ago; all he'd heard was the hissing blue flame, which had disappeared as suddenly as it first appeared.
The paramedics didn't linger with Juan Diego; they weren't needed. Meawhile, the nose-dreamer's friend and former student kept sending text messages, inquiring if his old teacher was all right.
Juan Diego didn't know it, but Clark French was a famous writer--at least in the Philippines. It is too simplistic to say this was because the Philippines had a lot of Catholic readers, and uplifting novels of faith and belief were received in a more welcoming fashion there than such novels were greeted in the United States or in Europe. Partly true, yes, but Clark French had married a Filipino woman from a venerable Manila family--Quintana was a distinguished name in the medical community. This helped make Clark a more widely read author in the Philippines than he was in his own country.
As Clark's onetime teacher, Juan Diego still saw his former student as needing protection; the condescending reviews Clark had received in the United States amounted to all that Juan Diego knew of the younger writer's reputation. And Juan Diego and Clark corresponded by email, which gave Juan Diego only a general idea of where Clark French lived--namely, somewhere in the Philippines.
Clark lived in Manila; his wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana, was what Clark called a "baby doctor." Juan Diego knew that Dr. Quintana was a higher-up at the Cardinal Santos Medical Center--"one of the leading hospitals in the Philippines," Clark was fond of saying. A private hospital, Bienvenido had told Juan Diego--to distinguish Cardinal Santos from what Bienvenido disparagingly called "the dirty government hospitals." A Catholic hospital was what registered with Juan Diego--the Catholic factor mingled with his annoyance at not knowing if a "baby doctor" meant that Clark's wife was a pediatrician or an OB-GYN.
Because Juan Diego had spent his entire adult life in the same university town, and his life as a writer in Iowa City had (until now) been inseparable from that as a teacher at a single university, he hadn't realized that Clark French was
one of those other writers--the ones who can live anywhere, or everywhere.
Juan Diego did know that Clark was one of those writers who appeared to be at every authors' festival; he seemed to like, or excel at, the nonwriting part of being a writer--the talking-about-it part, which Juan Diego didn't like or do well. In fact, increasingly, as he grew older, the writing (the doing-it part) was the only aspect of being a writer that Juan Diego enjoyed.
Clark French traveled all over the world, but Manila was Clark's home--his home base, anyway. Clark and his wife had no children. Because he traveled? Because she was a "baby doctor," and she saw enough children? Or, if Josefa Quintana was the other kind of "baby doctor," perhaps she'd seen too many terrible complications of an obstetrical and gynecological kind.
Whatever the reason for the no-children situation, Clark French was one of those writers who could and did write everywhere, and there wasn't an important authors' festival or writers' conference that he hadn't traveled to; the public part of being a writer did not confine him to the Philippines. Clark came "home" to Manila because his wife was there; she was the one with an actual job.
Probably because she was a doctor, and one from such a distinguished family of doctors--most medical people in the Philippines had heard of her--the paramedics who'd examined Juan Diego on the plane were somewhat indiscreet. They gave Dr. Josefa Quintana a full account of their medical (and nonmedical) findings. And Clark French was standing right beside his wife, listening in.
The sleeping passenger had an out-of-it appearance; he'd laughingly dismissed the dead-to-the-world episode on the grounds of having been engrossed in a dream about the Virgin Mary.
"Juan Diego was dreaming about Mary?" Clark French interjected.
"Just her nose," one of the medics said.
"The Virgin's nose!" Clark exclaimed. He'd told his wife to be prepared for Juan Diego's anti-Catholicism, but a tasteless joke about Mother Mary's nose denoted to Clark that his former teacher had descended to a lower level of Catholic bashing.
The paramedics wanted Dr. Quintana to know about the Viagra and Lopressor prescriptions. Josefa had to tell Clark, in detail, about the way beta-blockers worked; she was completely correct to add that, due to common side effects of the Lopressor tablets, the Viagra might have been "necessary."
"There was a novel in his carry-on, too--at least I think it was a novel," one of the paramedics said.
"What novel?" Clark asked eagerly.
"The Passion by Jeanette Winterson," the medic said. "It sounds religious."
The young-woman paramedic spoke cautiously. (Maybe she was trying to connect the novel to the Viagra.) "It sounds pornographic," she said.
"No, no--Winterson is literary," Clark French said. "A lesbian, but literary," he added. Clark didn't know the novel, but he assumed it had something to do with lesbians--he wondered if Winterson had written a novel about an order of lesbian nuns.
When the paramedics moved on, Clark and his wife were left alone; they were still waiting for Juan Diego, though it had been a while, and Clark was worried about his former teacher.
"To my knowledge, he lives alone--he has always lived alone. What's he doing with the Viagra?" Clark asked his wife.
Josefa was an OB-GYN (she was that kind of "baby doctor"); she knew a lot about Viagra. Many of her patients had asked her about Viagra; their husbands or boyfriends were taking it, or they thought they wanted to try it, and the women wanted Dr. Quintana to tell them how the Viagra would affect the men in their lives. Would the women be raped in the middle of the night, or mounted when they were just trying to make coffee in the morning--humped against the unyielding car, when they'd merely been bending over to lift the groceries out of the trunk?
Dr. Josefa Quintana said to her husband: "Look, Clark, your former teacher might not live with anybody, but he probably likes getting an erection--right?"
That was when Juan Diego limped into sight; Josefa saw him first--she recognized him from his book-jacket photos, and Clark had prepared her for the limp. (Naturally, Clark French had exaggerated the limp--the way writers do.)
"What for?" Juan Diego heard Clark ask his wife, the doctor. She looked a little embarrassed, Juan Diego thought, but she waved to him and smiled. She seemed very nice; it was a sincere smile.
Clark turned and saw him. There was Clark's boyish grin, which was confused by a concurrent expression of guilt, as if Clark had been caught in the act of doing or saying something. (In this case, by responding to his wife's professional opinion that his former teacher probably liked getting an erection with a doltish "What for?")
"What for?" Josefa quietly repeated to her husband, before she reached to shake Juan Diego's hand.
Clark couldn't stop grinning; now he was pointing to Juan Diego's giant orange albatross of a bag. "Look, Josefa--I told you Juan Diego did a lot of research for his novels. He brought all of it with him!"
The same old Clark, a lovable but embarrassing guy, Juan Diego was thinking; he then steeled himself, knowing he was about to be crushed in Clark's athletic embrace.
In addition to the Winterson novel, there was a lined notebook in Juan Diego's carry-on. It contained notes for the novel Juan Diego was writing--he was always writing a novel. He'd been writing his next novel since he took a translation trip to Lithuania in February 2008. The novel-in-progress was now almost two years old; Juan Diego would have guessed he had another two or three years to go.
The trip to Vilnius was his first time in Lithuania, but not the first of his translations to be published there. He'd gone to the Vilnius Book Fair with his publisher and his translator. Juan Diego was interviewed onstage by a Lithuanian actress. After a few excellent questions of her own, the actress invited the audience to ask questions; there were a thousand people, many of them young students. It was a larger and more informed audience than Juan Diego usually encountered at comparable events in the United States.
After the book fair, he'd gone with his publisher and translator to sign books at a bookstore in the old town. The Lithuanian names were a problem--but not the first names, usually. So it was decided that Juan Diego would inscribe only his readers' first names. For example, the actress who'd interviewed him at the book fair was a Dalia--that was easy enough, but her last name was much more challenging. His publisher was a Rasa, his translator a Daiva, but their last names were not English-or Spanish-sounding.
Everyone was most sympathetic, including the young bookseller; his English was a struggle, but he'd read everything Juan Diego had written (in Lithuanian) and he couldn't stop talking to his favorite author.
"Lithuania is a birth-again country--we are your newborn readers!" he cried. (Daiva, the translator, explained what the young bookseller meant: since the Soviets had left, people were free to read more books--especially foreign novels.)
"We have awakened to find someone like you preexisted us!" the young man exclaimed, wringing his hands. Juan Diego was very moved.
At one point, Daiva and Rasa must have gone to the women's room--or they just needed a break from the enthusiastic young bookseller. His first name was not so easy. (It was something like Gintaras, or maybe it was Arvydas.)
Juan Diego was looking at a bulletin board in the bookstore. There were photographs of women with what looked like lists of authors' names next to them. There were numbers that looked like the women's phone numbers, too. Were these women in a book club? Juan Diego recognized many of the authors' names, his own among them. They were all fiction writers. Of course it was a book club, Juan Diego thought--no men were pictured.
"These women--they read novels. They're in a book club?" Juan Diego asked the hovering bookseller.
The young man looked stricken--he may not have understood, or he didn't know the English for what he wanted to say.
"All despairing readers--seeking to meet other readers for a coffee or a beer!" Gintaras or Arvydas shouted; surely the despairing word was not what he'd meant.
"Do you mean a date?" Juan
Diego had asked. It was the most touching thing: women who wanted to meet men to talk about the books they'd read! He'd never heard of such a thing. "A kind of dating service?" Imagine matchmaking on the basis of what novels you liked! Juan Diego thought. But would these poor women find any men who read novels? (Juan Diego didn't think so.)
"Mail-order brides!" the young bookseller said dismissively; with a gesture toward the bulletin board, he expressed how these women were beneath his consideration.
Juan Diego's publisher and translator were back at his side, but not before Juan Diego looked longingly at one of the women's photographs--it was someone who'd put Juan Diego's name at the top of her list. She was pretty, but not too pretty; she looked a little unhappy. There were dark circles under her haunting eyes; her hair looked somewhat neglected. There was no one in her life to talk to about the wonderful novels she'd read. Her first name was Odeta; her last name must have been fifteen letters long.
"Mail-order brides?" Juan Diego asked Gintaras or Arvydas. "Surely they can't be--"
"Pathetic ladies with no lifes, coupling with characters in novels instead of meeting real mens!" the bookseller shouted.
That was it--the spark of a new novel. Mail-order brides advertising themselves by the novels they'd read--in a bookstore, of all places! The idea was born with a title: One Chance to Leave Lithuania. Oh, no, Juan Diego thought. (This was what he always thought when he thought of a new novel--it always struck him, at first, as a terrible idea.)
And, naturally, it was all a mistake--just a language confusion. Gintaras or Arvydas couldn't express himself in English. Juan Diego's publisher and translator were laughing as they explained the bookseller's error.
"It's just a bunch of readers--all women," Daiva told Juan Diego.
"They meet one another, other women, for coffee or beer, just to talk about the novelists they like," Rasa explained.
"Kind of an impromptu book club," Daiva told him.
"There are no mail-order brides in Lithuania," Rasa stated.
"There must be some mail-order brides," Juan Diego suggested.
The next morning, at his unpronounceable hotel, the Stikliai, Juan Diego was introduced to a policewoman from Interpol in Vilnius; Daiva and Rasa had found her and brought her to the hotel. "There are no mail-order brides in Lithuania," the policewoman told him. She didn't stay to have a coffee; Juan Diego didn't catch her name. The policewoman's grittiness could not be disguised by her hair, which was dyed a surfer-blond color, tinged with sunset-orange streaks. No amount or hue of dye could conceal what she was: not a good-time girl but a no-nonsense cop. No novels about mail-order brides in Lithuania, please; that was the stern policewoman's message. Yet One Chance to Leave Lithuania had endured.