Avenue of Mysteries

  The problem was that Juan Diego couldn't always remember when Pepe had passed along this or that important piece of information; to Pepe, every new thing was "important"--each change mattered, as did those things that hadn't changed (and never would).

  It was during the AIDS epidemic when Brother Pepe wrote to Juan Diego about that gay bar on Bustamante, but whether this was in the late eighties or early nineties--well, this was the kind of specificity that eluded Juan Diego. "Yes, that bar is still there--and it's still gay," Pepe had written; Juan Diego must have asked about it. "But it's not La China anymore--it's called Chinampa now."

  And, around that time, Pepe had written that Dr. Vargas was feeling the "hopelessness of the medical community." AIDS had made Vargas feel it was "irrelevant" to be an orthopedist. "No doctor is trained to watch people die; we're not in the holding-hands business," Vargas had told Pepe, and Vargas wasn't even dealing with infectious disease.

  That sounded like Vargas, all right--still feeling left out because he'd missed the family plane crash.

  Pepe's letter about La Coronita came in the nineties, if Juan Diego remembered correctly. The transvestite "party place" had closed down; the owner, who was gay, had died. When The Little Crown reopened, it had expanded; there was a second floor, and it was now a place for transvestite prostitutes and their clients. There was no more waiting to dress up until you got to the bar; the cross-dressers were who they were when they arrived. They were women when they got there, or so Pepe implied.

  Brother Pepe was doing hospice work in the nineties; unlike Vargas, Pepe was suited for the hand-holding business, and Lost Children was long gone by then.

  Hogar de la Nina, "Home of the Girl," had opened in 1979. It was an all-girls' answer to City of Children--what Lupe had called City of Boys. Pepe had worked at Home of the Girl through the eighties and into the early nineties.

  Pepe would never disparage an orphanage. Hogar de la Nina was not all that far from Viguera, where its all-boys' counterpart, Ciudad de los Ninos, was still open for business. Home of the Girl was in the neighborhood of Cuauhtemoc.

  Pepe had found the girls unruly; he'd complained to Juan Diego that they could be cruel to one another. And Pepe hadn't liked the girls' adoration of The Little Mermaid, the 1989 Disney animated film. There were life-size decals of the Little Mermaid herself in the sleeping room--"larger than the portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe," Pepe had complained. (As Lupe doubtless would have complained, Juan Diego thought.)

  Pepe had sent a picture of some of the girls in their old-fashioned, hand-me-down dresses--the kind that buttoned up the back. In the photo, Juan Diego couldn't see that the girls hadn't bothered to button up the backs of their dresses, but Brother Pepe had complained about that, too; apparently, leaving themselves unbuttoned was just one of the "unruly" things those girls did.

  Brother Pepe (notwithstanding his small complaints) would go on being "one of Christ's soldiers," as Senor Eduardo had been fond of calling himself and his Jesuit brethren. But, in truth, Pepe was a servant of children; that had been his calling.

  More orphanages had come to town; when Lost Children was gone, there were replacements--maybe not with the educational priorities that had once mattered to Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, but they were orphanages nonetheless. Oaxaca, one day, would have several.

  In the late nineties, Brother Pepe went to work at the Albergue Josefino in Santa Lucia del Camino. The orphanage had opened in 1993, and the nuns looked after both boys and girls, though the boys weren't allowed to stay past the age of twelve. Juan Diego didn't understand who the nuns were, and Brother Pepe didn't bother to explain. Madres de los Desamparados--"Mothers of the Forsaken," Juan Diego would have translated this. (He thought forsaken sounded better than abandoned.) But Pepe called the nuns "mothers of those who are without a place." Of all the orphanages, Pepe believed the Albergue Josefino was the nicest. "The children hold your hands," he wrote to Juan Diego.

  There was a Guadalupe in the chapel, and another one in the schoolroom; there was even a Guadalupe clock, Pepe said. The girls could stay until they wanted to leave; a few girls were in their twenties before they left. But it wouldn't have worked for Lupe and Juan Diego, since Juan Diego would have been too old.

  "Don't ever die," Juan Diego had written to Brother Pepe from Iowa City. What Juan Diego meant was that he would die if he lost Pepe.

  THAT NEW YEAR'S EVE, how many doctors must have been staying at the Encantador seaside resort? Ten or twelve? Perhaps more. Clark French's Filipino family was full of doctors. Not one of these doctors--not Clark's wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana, certainly--would have encouraged Juan Diego to skip another dose of the beta-blockers.

  Maybe the men among those doctors--the ones who'd seen Miriam, especially the ones who'd witnessed her lightning-fast skewering of the gecko with a salad fork--would have agreed that the 100-milligram tablet of Viagra was advisable.

  But as for alternating no doses with double doses (or half-doses) of a Lopressor prescription--absolutely not! Not even the men among those doctors celebrating New Year's Eve at the Encantador would have approved of that.

  When Miriam, albeit briefly, made Lupe's death dinner-table conversation, Juan Diego had thought of Lupe--the way she'd scolded the noseless statue of the Virgin Mary.

  "Show me a real miracle," Lupe had challenged the giantess. "Do something to make me believe in you--I think you're just a big bully!"

  Was that what triggered in Juan Diego his growing awareness of a puzzling similarity between the towering Virgin Mary in the Templo de la Compania de Jesus and Miriam?

  At this unresolved moment, Miriam touched him under the table--his thigh, the small lumps in his right-front pants pocket. "What's here?" Miriam whispered to him. He quickly showed her the mah-jongg tile, the historic game block, but before he could begin the elaborate explanation, Miriam murmured, "Oh, not that--I know about the all-inspiring keepsake you carry with you. I mean what else is in your pocket?"

  Had Miriam read about the mah-jongg tile in an interview with the author? Had Juan Diego piddled away the story of such a treasured memento to the ever-trivializing media? And Miriam seemed to know about the Viagra tablet without his telling her what it was. Had Dorothy told her mother that Juan Diego took Viagra? Surely, he hadn't talked about taking Viagra in an interview--or had he?

  His not knowing what Miriam knew (or didn't) about the Viagra made Juan Diego remember the quickly passing dialogue upon his arrival at the circus--when Edward Bonshaw, who knew Flor was a prostitute, learned she was a transvestite.

  It was an accident--through the open flaps of a troupe tent they'd seen Paco, the transvestite dwarf, and Flor had told the Iowan, "I'm just more passable than Paco, honey."

  "Does the parrot man get it that Flor has a penis?" Lupe (untranslated) had asked. It became clear that el hombre papagayo was thinking about Flor's penis. Flor, who knew what Senor Eduardo was thinking, stepped up her flirting with the Iowan.

  Fate is everything, Juan Diego was considering--he thought of the little girl in pigtails, Consuelo, and how she'd said "Hi, Mister." How she reminded him of Lupe!

  The way Lupe had repeated to Hombre, "It'll be all right."

  "I hear you like whips," Flor had said quietly to the hobbling missionary, who had elephant shit all over his sandals.

  "The king of pigs," Lupe had suddenly said, when she saw Ignacio, the lion tamer.

  Juan Diego wondered why it was coming back to him now; it couldn't only be because Consuelo, that little girl in pigtails, had said "Hi, Mister." What had Consuelo called Miriam? "The lady who just appears."

  "Wouldn't you cry if you never forgot how your sister was killed by a lion?" Miriam had asked the children. And then Pedro had fallen asleep with his head against Miriam's breast. It was as if the boy had been bewitched, Juan Diego was considering.

  Juan Diego had been staring at his lap--at Miriam's hand, which was pressing the Viagra tablet against his right thigh--but when he look
ed up at the dinner table (at all the dinner tables), he realized he'd missed the moment when everyone had put on a party hat. He saw that even Miriam wore a paper party hat, like a king's or a queen's crown--hers was pink, however. The party hats were all pastel colors. Juan Diego touched the top of his head and felt the party hat--a paper crown, ringing his hair.

  "Mine is--" he started to say.

  "Powder blue," Miriam told him, and when he patted his right-front pants pocket, he felt the mah-jongg tile but not the Viagra tablet. He also felt Miriam's hand cover his.

  "You took it," she whispered.

  "I did?"

  The dinner dishes had been cleared, though Juan Diego couldn't remember eating--not even the ceviche.

  "You look tired," Miriam was telling him.

  If he'd had more experience with women, wouldn't Juan Diego have known that there was something strange, or a little "off," about Miriam? What Juan Diego knew of women mostly came from fiction, from reading novels and writing them. The women in fiction were often alluring and mysterious; in Juan Diego's novels, the women were intimidating, too. And wasn't it normal--or not unusual, surely--for women in fiction to be a little bit dangerous?

  If the women in Juan Diego's real life lagged behind those women he'd met only in his imagination--well, that might explain why women like Miriam and Dorothy, who were far beyond Juan Diego's experience with actual women, seemed so attractive and familiar to him. (Maybe he'd met them in his imagination many times. Was that where he'd seen them before?)

  If the paper party hats had suddenly materialized on the heads of the New Year's Eve revelers at the Encantador, there was a similar lack of explanation for the equally spontaneous appearance of the band, beginning with three scruffy-looking young men with intermittent facial hair and starvation-symptom physiques. The lead guitarist had a neck tattoo that resembled a scalding injury, a burn-scar facsimile. The harmonica player and the drummer liked the tank-top look, which revealed their tattooed arms; the drummer fancied an insect theme, whereas the harmonica player preferred reptiles--nothing but scaly vertebrates, snakes and lizards, could crawl on his bare arms.

  Miriam's comment on the young men was withering: "Lots of testosterone but few prospects." Juan Diego could tell that Clark French heard this, but Clark had his back turned to the boys in the band--Clark's slightly startled expression revealed that he thought Miriam had meant him.

  "Those boys, behind you--the band, Clark," Dr. Quintana told her husband.

  They were called (everyone knew) the Nocturnal Monkeys. The group's reputation, which was strictly local, rested on the bony bare shoulders of the lead singer--a skeletal waif in a strapless dress. Her breasts were not substantial enough to keep her dress from slipping down, and her lank black hair, savagely chopped at earlobe level, stood in stark contrast to her cadaverous pallor. There was an unnatural whiteness to her skin--not very Filipino, Juan Diego was thinking. That the lead singer looked like a freshly unearthed corpse made Juan Diego wonder if a tattoo or two might have helped--even an insect or a reptile, if not the grotesque damage done to the lead guitarist's neck.

  As for the band's name, the Nocturnal Monkeys, naturally Clark had an explanation. The nearby Chocolate Hills were a local landmark. There were monkeys in the Chocolate Hills.

  "No doubt the monkeys are nocturnal," Miriam said.

  "Exactly," Clark answered her uncertainly. "If you're interested, and if it's not raining, a day trip to the Chocolate Hills can be arranged--a group of us go every year," Clark said.

  "But we wouldn't see the monkeys in the daytime--not if they're nocturnal," Miriam pointed out.

  "That's true--we never see the monkeys," Clark mumbled. He had trouble looking at Miriam, Juan Diego noticed.

  "I guess these monkeys are the best we can do," Miriam said; she languidly waved her bare arm in the general direction of the hapless-looking band. They looked like Nocturnal Monkeys, all right.

  "One night, every year, a group of us go on a riverboat cruise," Clark ventured, more cautiously than before. Miriam made him nervous; she just waited for him to continue. "We take a bus to the river. There are docks by the river, places to eat," Clark rambled on. "After dinner, we take a sightseeing boat up the river."

  "In the dark," Miriam said flatly. "What's there to see in the dark?" she asked Clark.

  "Fireflies--there must be thousands. The fireflies are spectacular," Clark said.

  "What do the fireflies do--besides blink?" Miriam asked.

  "The fireflies blink spectacularly," Clark insisted.

  Miriam shrugged. "Blinking is what those beetles do for courtship," Miriam said. "Imagine if the only way we could come on to one another was to blink!" Whereupon she started blinking at Juan Diego, who blinked back at her; they both began to laugh.

  Dr. Josefa Quintana also laughed; she blinked across the dinner table at her husband, but Clark French was not in a blinking mood. "The fireflies are spectacular," he repeated, in the manner of a schoolteacher who has lost control of the class.

  The way Miriam was blinking her eyes at Juan Diego gave him a hard-on. He remembered (thanks to Miriam) that he'd taken the Viagra, and Miriam's hand on his thigh, under the table, might have contributed. Juan Diego found it disconcerting that he had the distinct impression someone was breathing on his knee--very near to where Miriam's hand rested on his thigh--and when he looked under the table, there was the little girl in pigtails, Consuelo, staring up at him. "Good night, Mister--I'm supposed to go to bed," Consuelo said.

  "Good night, Consuelo," Juan Diego said. Both Josefa and Miriam looked under the table at the little girl. "My mother usually unbraids my pigtails before I go to bed," the child explained. "But tonight a teenager is putting me to bed--I have to sleep in my pigtails."

  "Your hair will not die overnight, Consuelo," Dr. Quintana told the little girl. "Your pigtails can survive one night."

  "My hair will be all twisted," Consuelo complained.

  "Come here," Miriam told her. "I know how to unbraid pigtails."

  Consuelo was reluctant to go to Miriam, but Miriam smiled and held out her arms to the little girl, who climbed into Miriam's lap. She sat there with her back very straight and her hands clasped tightly together. "You're supposed to brush it, too, but you don't have a brush," Consuelo was saying nervously.

  "I know what to do with pigtails with my fingers," Miriam told the little girl. "I can brush your hair with my fingers."

  "Please don't make me fall asleep, like Pedro," Consuelo said.

  "I'll try not to," Miriam said in her deadpan, no-promises fashion.

  When Miriam was unbraiding Consuelo's pigtails, Juan Diego looked under the table for Pedro, but the boy had slipped unseen into Dr. Quintana's chair. (Juan Diego also hadn't noticed when Dr. Quintana had left her seat, but he saw now that the doctor was standing next to Clark, diagonally across the table.) Many of the adults had left their chairs at the tables in the center of the dining room; those tables were being carried away--the center of the dining-room area would become the dance floor. Juan Diego didn't like to watch people dance; dancing doesn't work for cripples, not even vicariously.

  The little children were being taken to bed; the older children, the teenagers, had also left the tables at the perimeter of the dance floor. Some adults had already seated themselves at those perimeter tables. When the music started, no doubt the teenagers would be back, Juan Diego was thinking, but they had disappeared for the moment--doing whatever teenagers do.

  "What do you suppose has happened to the big gecko behind that painting, Mister?" Pedro quietly asked Juan Diego.

  "Well--" Juan Diego began.

  "It's gone. I looked. Nothing there," Pedro whispered.

  "The big gecko must be off on a hunting expedition," Juan Diego suggested.

  "It's gone," Pedro repeated. "Maybe the lady stabbed the big gecko, too," Pedro whispered.

  "No--I don't think so, Pedro," Juan Diego said, but the boy looked convinced that the big g
ecko was gone for good.

  Miriam had unbraided Consuelo's pigtails and was expertly running her fingers through the little girl's thick black hair. "You have beautiful hair, Consuelo," Miriam told the girl, who was sitting only slightly less rigidly in Miriam's lap than before. Consuelo was fighting off sleep, suppressing a yawn.

  "Yes, I do have nice hair," Consuelo said. "If I were ever kidnapped, the kidnappers would cut off my hair and sell it."

  "Don't think about that--it isn't going to happen," Miriam told her.

  "Do you know everything that's going to happen?" Consuelo asked Miriam.

  For some reason, Juan Diego held his breath; he was waiting intently for Miriam's answer--he didn't want to miss a word.

  "I think the lady does know everything," Pedro whispered to Juan Diego, who shared the fearful-looking boy's premonition about Miriam. Juan Diego had stopped breathing because he believed that Miriam did know the future, though Juan Diego doubted Pedro's conviction that Miriam had done away with the big gecko. (She would have needed a more formidable murder weapon than a salad fork.)

  And the whole time, while Juan Diego wasn't breathing, both he and Pedro were watching Miriam massage Consuelo's scalp. Not a single kink remained in the little girl's luxuriant hair, and Consuelo herself was slumped against Miriam in a succumbed state; the drowsy-looking little girl had half-closed her eyes--she seemed to have forgotten that she'd ever asked Miriam an unanswered question.

  Pedro hadn't forgotten. "Go on, Mister--you better ask her," the boy whispered. "She's putting Consuelo to sleep--maybe that's what she did to the big gecko," Pedro suggested.

  "Do you--" Juan Diego started to say, but his tongue felt funny in his mouth and his speech was slurred. Do you know everything that's going to happen? he'd meant to ask Miriam, but Miriam held a finger to her lips and silenced him.

  "Shhh--the poor child should be in bed," Miriam whispered.

  "But you--" Pedro began. That was as far as he got.

  Juan Diego saw the gecko fall or drop from the ceiling; it was another small one. This one landed on Pedro's head, in his hair. The startled-looking gecko had landed perfectly on top of the boy's head, inside the open crown of the paper party hat, which in Pedro's case was a sea-green color--not that different from the little lizard's coloring. When Pedro felt the gecko in his hair, the boy began to scream; this retrieved Consuelo from her trance--the little girl started screaming, too.