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. Senor 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 ninos at the circus," Edward Bonshaw confided to the transvestite, choosing not to engage the celibacy subject, or tactfully allowing it to wait.
"Los ninos 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 Senores, 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," Senor 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," Senor 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 Senor 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. Senor 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," Senor 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 ninos 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 Xochitl. 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 Senor 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.
"Remember, Juan Diego--you are a reader," Senor 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," Senor 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, ninos," 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 ultimo perro"; the last one, she'd repeated, to be clear--"el ultimo."
"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."