"This is where Marcos is from," Dorothy was saying.
"Who?" Juan Diego asked her.
"Marcos. You know Mrs. Marcos, right?" Dorothy asked him. "Imelda--she of the million shoes, that Imelda. She's still a member of the House of Representatives from this district," Dorothy told him.
"Mrs. Marcos must be in her eighties now," Juan Diego said.
"Yeah--she's really old, anyway," Dorothy concluded.
There was an hour's drive ahead of them, Dorothy had forewarned him--another dark road, another night, with quickly passing glimpses of foreignness. (Thatched huts; churches with Spanish architecture; dogs, or only their eyes.) And, befitting of the darkness surrounding them in their car--their innkeeper had arranged the driver and the limo--Dorothy described the unspeakable suffering of the American prisoners of war in North Vietnam. She seemed to know the terrible details of the torture sessions in the Hanoi Hilton (as the Hoa Lo prison in the North Vietnamese capital was called); she said the most brutal torture methods were used on the U.S. military pilots who'd been shot down and captured.
More politics--old politics, Juan Diego was thinking--in the passing darkness. It wasn't that Juan Diego wasn't political, but, as a fiction writer, he was wary of people who presumed they knew what his politics were (or should be). It happened all the time.
Why else would Dorothy have brought Juan Diego here? Just because he was an American, and Dorothy thought he should see where those aforementioned "frightened nineteen-year-olds," as she'd called them, came for their R&R--fearfully, as Dorothy had emphasized, in terror of the torture they anticipated if they were ever captured by the North Vietnamese.
Dorothy was sounding like those reviewers and interviewers who thought Juan Diego should somehow be more Mexican-American as a writer. Because he was a Mexican American, was he supposed to write like one? Or was it that he was supposed to write about being one? (Weren't his critics essentially telling him what his subject should be?)
"Don't become one of those Mexicans who--" Pepe had blurted out to Juan Diego, before stopping himself.
"Who what?" Flor had asked Pepe.
"One of those Mexicans who hate Mexico," Pepe had dared to say, before hugging Juan Diego to him. "You don't want to become one of those Mexicans who are always coming back, either--the ones who can't stay away," Pepe had added.
Flor had just stared at poor Pepe; she'd given him a withering look. "What else shouldn't he become?" she'd asked Pepe. "What other kind of Mexican is forbidden?"
Flor had never understood the writing part of it: how there would be expectations of what a Mexican-American writer should (or shouldn't) write about--how what was forbidden (in the minds of many reviewers and interviewers) was a Mexican-American writer who didn't write about the Mexican-American "experience."
If you accept the Mexican-American label, Juan Diego believed, then you accept performing to those expectations.
And compared to what had happened to Juan Diego in Mexico--compared to his childhood and early adolescence in Oaxaca--nothing had happened to Juan Diego since he'd moved to the United States that he felt was worth writing about.
Yes, he had an exciting younger lover, but her politics--better said, what Dorothy imagined his politics should be--drove her to explain the importance of where they were to him. She didn't understand. Juan Diego didn't need to be in northwestern Luzon, or see it, in order to imagine those "frightened nineteen-year-olds."
Perhaps it was the reflection of the headlights from a passing car, but a glint of a lighter color flashed in Dorothy's dark eyes and for just a second or two, they turned a tawny yellow--like a lion's eyes--and, in that instant, the past reclaimed Juan Diego.
It was as if he'd never left Oaxaca; in the predawn darkness of the dogs' troupe tent, redolent of the dogs' breath, no other future awaited him but his life as his sister's interpreter at La Maravilla. Juan Diego didn't have the balls for skywalking. Circus of The Wonder had no use for a ceiling-walker. (Juan Diego hadn't yet realized there would be no skywalker after Dolores.) When you're fourteen and you're depressed, grasping the idea that you could have another future is like trying to see in the dark. "In every life," Dolores had said, "I think there's always a moment when you must decide where you belong."
IN THE DOGS' TROUPE tent, the darkness before dawn was impenetrable. When Juan Diego couldn't sleep, he tried to identify everyone's breathing. If he couldn't hear Estrella's snoring, he figured she was dead or sleeping in another tent. (This morning, Juan Diego remembered what he'd known beforehand: Estrella was taking one of her nights off from sleeping with the dogs.)
Alemania slept the most soundly of the dogs; her breathing was the deepest, the least disturbed. (Her waking life as a policewoman probably tired her out.)
Baby was the most active dreamer of the dogs; his short legs ran in his sleep, or he was digging with his forepaws. (Baby woofed when he was closing in on an imaginary kill.)
As Lupe had complained, Perro Mestizo was "always the bad guy." To judge the mongrel strictly by his farting--well, he was definitely the bad guy in the dogs' troupe tent (unless the parrot man was also sleeping there).
As for Pastora, she was like Juan Diego--a worrier, an insomniac. When Pastora was awake, she panted and paced; she whined in her sleep, as if happiness were as fleeting for her as a good night's rest.
"Lie down, Pastora," Juan Diego said as quietly as he could--he didn't want to wake the other dogs.
This morning, he'd easily singled out the breathing of each dog. Lupe was always the hardest to hear; she slept so quietly, she seemed to breathe scarcely at all. Juan Diego was straining to hear Lupe when his hand touched something under his pillow. He needed to grope around for the flashlight under his cot before he could see what his under-the-pillow hand had found.
The missing lid to the once-sacred coffee can of ashes was like any other plastic lid, except for its smell; there'd been more chemicals in those ashes than there were traces of Esperanza or the good gringo or Dirty White. And whatever magic might have been contained in the Virgin Mary's old nose, it wasn't something you could smell. There was more of the basurero on that coffee-can lid than there was anything otherworldly about it; yet Lupe had saved it--she'd wanted Juan Diego to have it.
Also tucked under Juan Diego's pillow was the lanyard with the keys to the feeding-tray slots in the lion cages. There were two keys, of course--one for Hombre's cage and the other for the lionesses'.
The bandmaster's wife enjoyed weaving lanyards; she'd made one for her husband's whistle when he was conducting the circus band. And the bandmaster's wife had made another lanyard for Lupe. The strands of Lupe's lanyard were crimson and white; Lupe wore the lanyard around her neck when she carried the keys to the lion cages at feeding time.
"Lupe?" Juan Diego asked, more quietly than he'd told Pastora to lie down. No one heard him--not even one of the dogs. "Lupe!" Juan Diego said sharply, shining the flashlight on her empty cot.
"I am where I always am," Lupe was always saying. Not this time. This time, just as the dawn was breaking, Juan Diego found Lupe in Hombre's cage.
Even when the feeding tray was removed from the slot at the floor of the cage, the slot wasn't big enough for Hombre to escape through the opening.
"It's safe," Edward Bonshaw had told Juan Diego, when the Iowan first observed how Lupe fed the lions. "I just wanted to be sure about the size of the opening."
But on their first night in Mexico City, Lupe had said to her brother: "I can fit through the slot where the feeding tray slides in and out. It's not too small an opening for me to fit through."
"You sound like you've tried it," Juan Diego had said.
"Why would I try it?" Lupe asked him.
"I don't know--why would you?" Juan Diego asked her.
Lupe hadn't answered him--not that night in Mexico City, not ever. Juan Diego had always known that Lupe was usually right about the past; it was the future she didn't do as accurately. Mind readers aren't necessar
ily any good at fortune-telling, but Lupe must have believed she'd seen the future. Was it her future she imagined she saw, or was it Juan Diego's future she was trying to change? Did Lupe believe she'd envisioned what their future would be if they stayed at the circus, and if things remained as they were at La Maravilla?
Lupe had always been isolated--as if being a thirteen-year-old girl isn't isolating enough! We'll never know what Lupe believed, but it must have been a terrifying burden at thirteen. (She knew her breasts weren't going to grow any bigger; she knew she wouldn't get her period.)
More broadly, Lupe had foreseen a future that frightened her, and she seized an opportunity to change it--dramatically. More than her brother's future would be altered by what Lupe did. What she did would make Juan Diego live the rest of his life in his imagination, and what happened to Lupe (and to Dolores) would mark the beginning of the end of La Maravilla.
In Oaxaca, long after everyone had stopped talking about The Day of the Nose, the more talkative citizens of the city still gossiped over the lurid dissolution--the sensational demise--of their Circus of The Wonder. It is unquestionable that what Lupe did would have an effect, but that isn't the question. What Lupe did was also terrible. Brother Pepe, who knew and loved orphans, said later it was the kind of thing that only an extremely distraught thirteen-year-old would have thought of. (Well, yes, but there's not much anyone can do about what thirteen-year-olds think of, is there?)
Lupe must have unlocked the slot for the feeding tray in Hombre's cage the night before--that way, she could leave the lanyard with the keys to the lion cages under Juan Diego's pillow.
Maybe Hombre was agitated because Lupe had shown up to feed him when it was still dark outside--that was unusual. And Lupe had slid the feeding tray entirely out of the cage; furthermore, she didn't put the meat on the tray for Hombre.
What happened next is anyone's guess; Ignacio speculated that Lupe must have brought the meat to Hombre by crawling inside his cage. Juan Diego believed that Lupe may have pretended to eat Hombre's meat, or at least she would have tried to keep the meat away from him. (As Lupe had explained the lion-feeding process to Senor Eduardo, you wouldn't believe how much lions think about meat.)
And, from the first time she met him, hadn't Lupe called Hombre "the last dog"--"the last one," hadn't she repeated? "El ultimo perro," she'd distinctly said of the lion. "El ultimo." (As if Hombre were the king of the rooftop dogs, the king of biters--the last biter.)
"It'll be all right," Lupe had repeated to Hombre, from the beginning. "Nothing's your fault," she'd told the lion.
That was not how the lion looked, when Juan Diego saw him sitting in a corner at the back of his cage. Hombre looked guilty. Hombre was sitting at the farthest possible distance from where Lupe lay curled in a ball--in the diagonally opposite corner of the lion's cage. Lupe was curled up in the corner nearest the open slot for the feeding tray; her face was turned away from Juan Diego. At the time, he was grateful he'd been spared seeing Lupe's expression. Later, Juan Diego would wish he'd seen her face--it might have spared him from imagining her expression for the rest of his life.
Hombre had killed Lupe with one bite--"a crushing bite to the back of the neck," as Dr. Vargas would describe it after examining her body. There were no other wounds on Lupe's body--not even a claw mark. There were scant traces of blood in the area of the bite marks on Lupe's neck, and not a drop of Lupe's blood anywhere in the lion's cage. (Ignacio later said that Hombre would have licked up any blood--the lion had finished eating all the meat, too.)
After Ignacio shot Hombre--twice, in his big head--there was quite a lot of the lion's blood in that corner of his cage, where Hombre had banished himself. Looking remorseful wouldn't save the confused and sorrowful lion. Ignacio had taken a quick look at the placement of Lupe's body near the open slot for the feeding tray, and at the diagonally opposite (almost submissive) position Hombre had chosen in the farthest corner of the lion's cage. And when Juan Diego had come limping, on the run, to the lion tamer's tent, Ignacio had brought his gun with him to the scene of the crime.
Ignacio shot Manana because the horse had a broken leg. In Juan Diego's opinion, Ignacio wasn't justified in shooting Hombre. Lupe had been right: what happened wasn't the lion's fault. What motivated Ignacio to shoot Hombre was twofold. The lion tamer was a coward; he didn't dare go inside Hombre's cage after the lion had killed Lupe--not when Hombre was alive. (The tension in the lion's cage, after Lupe was killed, was unknown territory.) And Ignacio was assuredly motivated by some macho bullshit of the "man-eater" mentality--namely, the lion tamer needed to believe that instances of humans falling victim to lions were always the lions' fault.
And of course, however misguided Lupe's thinking was, she'd been right about everything that would happen if Hombre killed her. Lupe knew Ignacio would shoot Hombre--she must have known what would happen as a result of that, too.
As it turned out, Juan Diego wouldn't fully appreciate Lupe's foresight (her superhuman, if not divine, omniscience) until the following morning.
The day Lupe was killed, Circo de La Maravilla was overrun by those types Ignacio thought of as the "authorities." Because the lion tamer had always seen himself as the authority, Ignacio did not function very well in the presence of other authorities--the police, and people with similarly official roles to play.
The lion tamer was curt with Juan Diego when the boy told him that Lupe had fed the lionesses before she fed Hombre. Juan Diego knew this, because he figured that Lupe would have thought no one would feed the lionesses that day if she didn't.
Juan Diego also knew this because he'd gone to have a look at the lionesses after Lupe and Hombre were killed. The night before, Lupe had unlocked the slot for the feeding tray in the cage for the lionesses, too. She must have fed the lionesses the usual way; then she'd pulled the feeding tray entirely out, leaving it leaning against the outside of the lionesses' cage, exactly the way she'd left the feeding tray to Hombre's cage.
Besides, the lionesses looked as if they'd been fed; "las senoritas," as Ignacio called them, were just lying around at the back of their cage and had simply stared at Juan Diego in their unreadable way.
Ignacio's response to Juan Diego made the boy feel it didn't matter to the lion tamer whether Lupe had fed the lionesses before she died, or not, but it did matter, as things would turn out. It mattered a lot. It meant that no one else had to feed the lionesses on the day Lupe and Hombre were killed.
Juan Diego even tried to give Ignacio the two keys to the slots in the lion cages for the feeding trays, but Ignacio didn't want the keys. "Keep them--I got my own keys," the lion tamer told him.
Naturally, Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw hadn't allowed Juan Diego to spend another night in the dogs' troupe tent. Pepe and Senor Eduardo had helped Juan Diego pack his things, together with Lupe's few things--namely, her clothes. (Lupe had no keepsakes; she didn't miss her Coatlicue figurine, not since Mary's new nose.)
In the hasty move from La Maravilla to Lost Children, Juan Diego would lose the lid to the coffee can that had held the nose-inspiring ashes, but that night he slept in his old room at Lost Children, and he went to bed with Lupe's lanyard around his neck. He could feel the two keys to the lion cages; in the dark, he squeezed the keys between his thumb and index finger before he fell asleep. Next to him, in the small bed Lupe used to sleep in, the parrot man watched over him--that is, when the Iowan wasn't snoring.
Boys dream of being heroes; after Juan Diego lost Lupe, he wouldn't have those dreams. He knew his sister had sought to save him; he knew he'd failed to save her. An aura of fate had marked him--even at fourteen, Juan Diego knew this, too.
The morning after he lost Lupe, Juan Diego woke to the sound of children chanting--the kindergartners were repeating Sister Gloria's responsive prayer. "Ahora y siempre," the kindergartners recited. "Now and forever"--not this, not for the rest of my life, Juan Diego was thinking; he was awake, but he kept his eyes closed. Juan Diego didn't wa
nt to see his old room at Lost Children; he didn't want to see Lupe's small bed, with no one (or perhaps the parrot man) in it.
That next morning, Lupe's body would have been with Dr. Vargas. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had already asked Vargas for a viewing of the child's body; the two old priests wanted to bring one of the nuns from Lost Children with them to Cruz Roja. There were questions about how Lupe's body should be dressed, and--given the lion bite--whether or not an open casket was advisable. (Brother Pepe had said he couldn't do it--that is, view Lupe's body. That was why the two old priests asked Vargas for a viewing.)
That morning, as far as anyone at La Maravilla knew--except for Ignacio, who knew differently--Dolores had simply run away. It was the talk of the circus, how The Wonder herself had just disappeared; it seemed so unlikely that no one had seen her in Oaxaca. A pretty girl like that, with long legs like hers, couldn't just vanish from sight, could she?
Maybe only Ignacio knew that Dolores was in Guadalajara; maybe the amateur abortion had already occurred, and the peritoneal infection was just developing. Perhaps Dolores believed she would recover soon, and she'd started her return trip to Oaxaca.
That morning, at Lost Children, Edward Bonshaw must have had a lot on his mind. He had a huge confession to make to Father Alfonso and Father Octavio--not the kind of confession the two old priests were used to. And Senor Eduardo knew he needed the Church's help. The scholastic had not only forsaken his vows; the Iowan was a gay man in love with a transvestite.
How could two such people hope to adopt an orphan? Why would anyone allow Edward Bonshaw and Flor to be legal guardians of Juan Diego? (Senor Eduardo didn't just need the Church's help; he needed the Church to bend the rules, more than a little.)
That morning, at La Maravilla, Ignacio knew he had to feed the lionesses himself. Who could the lion tamer have persuaded to do it for him? Soledad wasn't speaking to him, and Ignacio had managed to make the girl acrobats afraid of the lions; his bullshit about the lions sensing when the girls got their periods had scared the young acrobats away. Even before Hombre killed Lupe, the girls were frightened--even of the lionesses.