"It's the lionesses the lion tamer should be afraid of," Lupe had predicted.
That morning, the day after Ignacio shot and killed Hombre, the lion tamer must have made a mistake when he was feeding the lionesses. "They can't fool me--I know what they're thinking," Ignacio had bragged about the lionesses. "The young ladies are obvious," the lion tamer had told Lupe. "I don't need a mind reader for las senoritas."
Ignacio had told Lupe he could read the lionesses' minds by the body parts they were named for.
That morning, the lionesses must not have been as easy to read as the lion tamer once thought. According to studies of lions in the Serengeti, as Vargas would later impart to Juan Diego, lionesses are responsible for the majority of the kills. Lionesses know how to hunt as a team; when stalking a herd of wildebeest or zebra, they encircle the herd, cutting off any escape routes, before they attack.
When the dump kids had just met Hombre for the first time, Flor whispered to Edward Bonshaw: "If you think you just saw the king of beasts, think again. You're about to meet him now. Ignacio is the king of beasts."
"The king of pigs," Lupe had suddenly said.
As for those statistics from the Serengeti, or other studies of lions, the only part the king of pigs might have understood was what took place in the wild after the lionesses had killed their prey. That was when the male lions asserted their dominance--they ate their fill before the lionesses were allowed to eat their share. Juan Diego was sure the king of pigs would have been okay with that.
That morning, no one saw what happened to Ignacio when he was feeding the lionesses, but lionesses know how to be patient; lionesses have learned to wait their turn. Las senoritas--Ignacio's young ladies--would have their turn. That morning, the beginning of the end of La Maravilla would be complete.
Paco and Beer Belly were the first to find the lion tamer's body; the dwarf clowns were waddling along the avenue of troupe tents, on their way to the outdoor showers. They must have wondered how it was possible that the lionesses could have killed Ignacio when his mangled body was outside their cage. But anyone familiar with how lionesses work could figure it out, and Dr. Vargas (naturally, Vargas was the one who examined Ignacio's body) had little difficulty reconstructing a likely sequence of events.
As a novelist, when Juan Diego talked about plot--specifically, how he approached plotting a novel--he liked to talk about the "teamwork of lionesses" as "an early model." In interviews, Juan Diego would begin by saying that no one saw what happened to the lion tamer; he would then say that he never tired of reconstructing a likely sequence of events, which was at least partially responsible for his becoming a novelist. And if you add together what happened to Ignacio with what Lupe might have been thinking--well, you can see what could have fueled the dump reader's imagination, can't you?
Ignacio put the meat for the lionesses on the feeding tray, as usual. He slid the feeding tray into the open slot in the cage, as usual. Then something unusual must have happened.
Vargas couldn't restrain himself from describing the extraordinary number of claw wounds on Ignacio's arms, his shoulders, the back of his neck; one of the lionesses had grabbed him first--then other paws, with claws, took hold of him. The lionesses must have hugged him close to the bars of their cage.
Vargas said the lion tamer's nose was gone, as were his ears, both cheeks, his chin; Vargas said the fingers of both hands were gone--the lionesses had overlooked one thumb. What killed Ignacio, Vargas said, was a suffocating throat bite--what the doctor described as a "messy one."
"This was no clean kill," as Vargas would put it. He explained that a lioness could kill a wildebeest or a zebra with a single suffocating throat bite, but the bars of the cage were too close together; the lioness who eventually killed Ignacio with a suffocating throat bite couldn't fit her head between the bars--she didn't get to open her jaws as widely as she wanted to before she got a good grip on the lion tamer's throat. (This was why Vargas used the messy word to describe the lethal bite.)
After the fact, the "authorities" (as Ignacio thought of them) would investigate the wrongdoings at La Maravilla. That was what always happened after a fatal accident at a circus--the experts arrived and told you what you were doing wrong. (The experts said the amount of meat that Ignacio was feeding the lions was wrong; the number of times the lions were fed was also wrong.)
Who cares? Juan Diego would think; he couldn't remember what the experts said would have been the correct number of times or the right amount. What was wrong with La Maravilla had been what was wrong with Ignacio himself. The lion tamer had been wrong! In the end, no one at La Maravilla needed experts to tell them that.
In the end, Juan Diego would think, what Ignacio saw were those gathering yellow eyes--the final looks, less than fond, from his senoritas--the unforgiving eyes of the lion tamer's last young ladies.
THERE'S A POSTSCRIPT TO every circus that goes under. Where do the performers go when a circus goes out of business? The Wonder herself, we know, went out of business fairly soon. But we also know, don't we, that the other performers at La Maravilla couldn't do what Dolores did? As Juan Diego had discovered, not everyone could be a skywalker.
Estrella would find homes for the dogs. Well, no one wanted the mongrel; Estrella had to take him. As Lupe had said, Perro Mestizo was always the bad guy.
And no other circus had wanted Pajama Man; his vanity preceded him. For a while, on the weekends, the contortionist could be seen contorting himself for the tourists in the zocalo.
Dr. Vargas would later say he was sorry the medical school had moved. The new medical school, which is opposite a public hospital, away from the center of town, is nowhere near the morgue and the Red Cross hospital, Vargas's old stomping grounds--where the old medical school was, when Vargas still taught there.
That was the last place Vargas saw Pajama Man--at the old medical school. The contortionist's cadaver was hoisted from the acid bath to a corrugated metal gurney; the fluid in Pajama Man's cadaver drained into a pail through a hole in the gurney, near the contortionist's head. On the sloped steel autopsy slab--with a deep groove running down the middle to a draining hole, also at Pajama Man's head--the cadaver was opened. Stretched out, forever uncontorted, Pajama Man was not recognizable to the medical students, but Vargas knew the onetime contortionist.
"There is no vacancy, no absence, like the expression on a cadaver's face," Vargas would write to Juan Diego after the boy had moved to Iowa. "The human dreams are gone," Vargas wrote, "but not the pain. And traces of a living person's vanity remain. You will remember Pajama Man's attention to sculpting his beard and trimming his mustache, which betrays the time the contortionist spent looking into a mirror--either admiring or seeking to improve his looks."
"Sic transit gloria mundi," as Father Alfonso and Father Octavio were fond of intoning, with solemnity.
"Thus passes the glory of this world," as Sister Gloria was always reminding the orphans at Lost Children.
The Argentinian flyers were too good at their job, and too happy with each other, not to find work at another circus. Fairly recently (anything after 2001, the new century, struck Juan Diego as recently), Brother Pepe had heard from someone who saw them; Pepe said the Argentinian flyers were flying for a little circus in the mountains, about an hour's drive from Mexico City. They may have since retired.
After La Maravilla went out of business, Paco and Beer Belly went to Mexico City--it was where those two dwarf clowns were from, and (according to Pepe) Beer Belly had stayed there. Beer Belly went into a different business, though Juan Diego couldn't remember what it was--Juan Diego didn't know if Beer Belly was still alive--and Juan Diego had a hard time imagining Beer Belly not being a clown. (Of course, Beer Belly would always be a dwarf.)
Paco, Juan Diego knew, had died. Like Flor, Paco couldn't stay away from Oaxaca. Like Flor, Paco loved to hang out at the old hanging-out places. Paco had always been a regular at La China, that gay bar on Bustamante, the place that would
later become Chinampa. And Paco was also a regular at La Coronita--the cross-dressers' party place that closed, for a while, in the 1990s (when La Coronita's owner, who was gay, died). Like Edward Bonshaw and Flor, both La Coronita's owner and Paco would die of AIDS.
Soledad, who'd once called Juan Diego "Boy Wonder," would long outlive La Maravilla. She was still Vargas's patient. There'd been stress on her joints, no doubt--as Dr. Vargas had observed of the former trapeze artist--but these joint injuries notwithstanding, Soledad was still strong. Juan Diego would remember that she'd ended her career as a catcher, which was unusual for a woman. She'd had strong enough arms and a strong enough grip for catching men who were flying through the air.
Pepe would tell Juan Diego (around the time of the dissolution of the orphanage at Lost Children) how Vargas had been one of several people Soledad mentioned as a reference when she'd adopted two of Lost Children's orphans, a boy and a girl.
Soledad had been a wonderful mother, Pepe reported. No one was surprised. Soledad was an impressive woman--well, she could be a little cold, Juan Diego remembered, but he'd always admired her.
There'd been a brief scandal, but this was after Soledad's adopted kids had grown up and left home. Soledad had found herself with a bad boyfriend; neither Pepe nor Vargas would elaborate on the bad word, which they'd both used to describe Soledad's boyfriend, but Juan Diego took the word to mean abusive.
After Ignacio, Juan Diego was surprised to hear that Soledad would have had any patience for a bad boyfriend; she didn't strike him as the type of woman who would tolerate abuse.
As it turned out, Soledad didn't have to put up with the bad boyfriend for very long. She came home from shopping one morning, and there he was, dead, with his head on his arms, still sitting at the kitchen table. Soledad said he'd been sitting where he was when she'd left that morning.
"He must have had a heart attack, or something," was all Brother Pepe ever said.
Naturally, Vargas was the examining physician. "It may have been an intruder," Vargas said. "Someone who had an ax to grind--someone with strong hands," Dr. Vargas surmised. The bad boyfriend had been strangled while sitting at the kitchen table.
The doctor said Soledad couldn't possibly have strangled her boyfriend. "Her hands are a wreck," Vargas had testified. "She couldn't squeeze the juice out of a lemon!" was how Vargas had put it.
Vargas offered the prescription painkillers Soledad was taking as evidence that the "damaged" woman couldn't have strangled anyone. The medication was for joint pain--it was mostly for the pain in Soledad's fingers and hands.
"Lots of damage--lots of pain," the doctor had said.
Juan Diego didn't doubt it--not the damage and pain part. But, looking back--remembering Soledad in the lion tamer's tent, and the occasional glances Soledad sent in Ignacio's direction--Juan Diego had seen something in the former trapeze artist's eyes. There'd been nothing in Soledad's dark eyes resembling the yellow in a lion's eyes, but there'd definitely been something of a lioness's unreadable intentions.
* 29 *
One Single Journey
"Cockfighting is legal here, and very popular," Dorothy was saying. "The psycho roosters are up all night, crowing. The stupid gamecocks are psyching themselves up for their next fight."
Well, Juan Diego thought, that might explain the psycho rooster who'd crowed before dawn that New Year's Eve at the Encantador, but not the subsequent squawk of the rooster's sudden and violent-sounding death--as if Miriam, by merely wishing the annoying rooster were dead, had made it happen.
At least he'd been forewarned, Juan Diego was thinking: there would be gamecocks crowing all night at the inn near Vigan. Juan Diego was interested to see what Dorothy would do about it.
"Someone should kill that rooster," Miriam had said in her low, husky voice that night at the Encantador. Then, when the deranged rooster crowed a third time and his crowing was cut off mid-squawk, Miriam had said, "There, that does it. No more heralding of a false dawn, no more untruthful messengers."
"And because the cocks crow all night, the dogs never stop barking," Dorothy told him.
"It sounds very restful," Juan Diego said. The inn was a compound of buildings, all old. The Spanish architecture was obvious; maybe the inn had once been a mission, Juan Diego was thinking--there was a church among the half-dozen guesthouses.
El Escondrijo, the inn was called--"The Hiding Place." It was hard to discern what kind of place it was, arriving after ten o'clock at night, as they did. The other guests (if there were any) had gone to bed. The dining room was outdoors under a thatched roof, but it was open-sided, exposed to the elements, though Dorothy promised him there were no mosquitoes.
"What kills the mosquitoes?" Juan Diego asked her.
"Bats, maybe--or the ghosts," Dorothy answered him indifferently. The bats, Juan Diego guessed, were also up all night--neither crowing nor barking, just silently killing things. Juan Diego was somewhat accustomed to ghosts, or so he thought.
The unlikely lovers were staying on the sea; there was a breeze. Juan Diego and Dorothy were not in Vigan, or in any other town, but the lights they could see were from Vigan, and there were two or three freighters anchored offshore. They could see the lights from the freighters, and when the wind was right, they could occasionally hear the ships' radios.
"There's a small swimming pool--a kids' pool, I guess you would call it," Dorothy was saying. "You have to be careful you don't fall in the pool at night, because they don't light it," she warned.
There was no air-conditioning, but Dorothy said the nights were cool enough not to need it, and there was a ceiling fan in their room; the fan made a ticking sound, but given the crowing gamecocks and barking dogs, what did a ticking fan matter? The Hiding Place was not what you would call a resort.
"The local beach is adjacent to a fishing village and an elementary school, but you hear the children's voices only from a distance--with kids, hearing them from a distance is okay," Dorothy was saying, as they were going to bed. "The dogs in the fishing village are territorial about the beach, but you're safe if you walk on the wet sand--just stay close to the water," Dorothy advised him.
What sort of people stay at El Escondrijo? Juan Diego was wondering. The Hiding Place made him think of fugitives or revolutionaries, not a touristy place. But Juan Diego was falling asleep; he was half asleep when Dorothy's cell phone (in the vibrate mode) made a humming sound on the night table.
"What a surprise, Mother," he heard Dorothy say sarcastically in the dark. There was a long pause, while cocks crowed and dogs barked, before Dorothy said, "Uh-huh," a couple of times; she said, "Okay," once or twice, too, before Juan Diego heard her say, "You're kidding, right?" And these familiar Dorothyisms were followed by the way the less-than-dutiful-sounding daughter ended the call. Juan Diego heard Dorothy tell Miriam: "You don't want to hear what I dream about--believe me, Mother."
Juan Diego lay awake in the darkness, thinking about this mother and her daughter; he was retracing how he'd met them--he was considering how dependent on them he'd become.
"Go to sleep, darling," Juan Diego heard Dorothy say; it was almost exactly the way Miriam would have said the darling word. And the young woman's hand, unerringly, reached for and found his penis, which she gave an ambivalent squeeze.
"Okay," Juan Diego was trying to say, but the word wouldn't come. Sleep overcame him, as if on Dorothy's command.
"When I die, don't burn me. Give me the whole hocus-pocus," Lupe had said, looking straight at Father Alfonso and Father Octavio. That was what Juan Diego heard in his sleep--Lupe's voice, instructing them.
Juan Diego didn't hear the crowing cocks and the barking dogs; he didn't hear the two cats fighting or fucking (or both) on the thatched roof of the outdoor shower. Juan Diego didn't hear Dorothy get up in the night, not to pee but to open the door to the outdoor shower, where she snapped on the shower light.
"Fuck off or die," Dorothy said sharply to the cats--they stopped yowling. She s
poke more softly to the ghost she saw standing in the outdoor shower, as if the water were running--it wasn't--and as if he were naked, though he was wearing clothes.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean you--I was speaking to those cats," Dorothy told him, but the young ghost had vanished.
Juan Diego hadn't heard Dorothy's apology to the quickly disappearing prisoner of war--he was one of the ghost guests. The emaciated young man was gray-skinned and dressed in prison-gray garb--one of the tortured captives of the North Vietnamese. And by his haunted, guilty-looking expression--as Dorothy would later explain to Juan Diego--she'd surmised he was one of the ones who'd broken down under torture. Maybe the young P.O.W. had capitulated under pain. Perhaps he'd signed letters that said he did things he never did. Some of the young Americans had made broadcasts, reciting Communist propaganda.
It wasn't their fault; they shouldn't blame themselves, Dorothy always tried to tell the ghost guests at El Escondrijo, but the ghosts had a way of vanishing before you could tell them anything.
"I just want them to know they're forgiven for whatever they did, or were forced to do," was how Dorothy would put it to Juan Diego. "But these young ghosts keep their own hours. They don't listen to us--they don't interact with us at all."
Dorothy would also tell Juan Diego that the captured Americans who'd died in North Vietnam didn't always dress in their gray prison garb; some of the younger ones wore their fatigues. "I don't know if they have a choice regarding what they wear--I've seen them in sportswear, Hawaiian shirts and shit like that," was the way Dorothy would put it to Juan Diego. "Nobody knows the rules for ghosts."
Juan Diego hoped he would be spared seeing the tortured P.O.W. ghosts in their Hawaiian shirts, but his first night at the old inn on the outskirts of Vigan, the ghostly appearances of the long-dead R&R clientele at El Escondrijo were as yet unseen by Juan Diego; he slept in the contentious company of his own ghosts. Juan Diego was dreaming--in this case, it was a loud dream. (It's no wonder Juan Diego didn't hear Dorothy speaking to those cats or apologizing to that ghost.)