Avenue of Mysteries (49 page)

To Juan Diego, Dolores looked sad, even doomed; the boy didn’t imagine it was falling from the skywalk that threatened her. It was Ignacio, the lion tamer, who clouded Dolores’s future, as Lupe had forewarned—“let the lion tamer knock her up!” Lupe had cried. “Die in childbirth, monkey twat!” It may have been something Lupe had said in passing anger, but—in Juan Diego’s mind—this amounted to an unbreakable curse.

The boy not only desired Dolores; he admired her courage as a skywalker—he’d practiced the skywalk enough to know that the prospect of trying it at eighty feet was truly terrifying.

Ignacio wasn’t on the bus with the dump kids; he was in the truck transporting the big cats. (Soledad said Ignacio always traveled with his lions.) Hombre, whom Lupe had called “the last dog, the last one,” had
his own cage. Las señoritas—the young ladies, named for their most expressive body parts—were caged together. (As Flor had observed, the lionesses got along with one another.)

The circus site, in northern Mexico City—not far from Cerro Tepeyac, the hill where Juan Diego’s Aztec namesake had reported seeing la virgen morena in 1531—was some distance from downtown Mexico City, but near to the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. Yet the bus carrying the dump kids and Edward Bonshaw broke free from the circus caravan of vehicles, and took an impromptu detour into downtown Mexico City, inspired by the two dwarf clowns.

Paco and Beer Belly wanted their fellow performers in La Maravilla to see the dwarfs’ old neighborhood—the two clowns were from Mexico City. When the bus was slowed in city traffic, near the busy intersection of the Calle Anillo de Circunvalación and the Calle San Pablo, Señor Eduardo woke up.

Perro Mestizo, a.k.a. Mongrel, the baby-stealer—“the biter,” Juan Diego now called him—had been sleeping in Lupe’s lap, but the little dog had managed to pee on Señor Eduardo’s thigh. This made the Iowan imagine he’d peed in his own pants.

This time, Lupe had managed to read Edward Bonshaw’s mind—hence she understood his confusion upon waking up.

“Tell the parrot man Perro Mestizo peed on him,” Lupe told Juan Diego, but by that point the Iowan had seen the elephant measles on the dump kids’ faces.

“You’ve broken out—you’ve caught something dreadful!” Señor Eduardo cried.

Beer Belly and Paco were trying to organize a walking tour of the Calle San Pablo—the bus was now stopped—but Edward Bonshaw saw more elephant measles on the faces of the dwarf clowns. “It’s an epidemic!” the Iowan cried. (Lupe later said he was imagining that incontinence was an early symptom of the disease.)

Paco handed the soon-to-be-
former
scholastic a small mirror (on the inside lid of his rouge compact), which the cross-dresser carried in his purse. “You have it, too—it’s elephant measles. There are outbreaks in every circus—it’s not usually fatal,” the transvestite said.

“Elephant measles!” Señor Eduardo cried. “Not
usually
fatal—” he was saying, when Juan Diego whispered in his ear.

“They’re clowns—it’s a trick. It’s some kind of makeup,” the dump reader told the distraught missionary.

“It’s my burgundy rouge, Eduardo,” Paco said, pointing to the makeup in the little compact with the mirror.

“It made me piss my pants!” Edward Bonshaw indignantly told the transvestite dwarf, but Juan Diego was the only one who understood the Iowan’s excited English.

“The mongrel pissed on your pants—the same dumb dog who bit you,” Juan Diego said to Señor Eduardo.

“This doesn’t
look
like a circus site,” Edward Bonshaw was saying, as he and the dump kids followed the performers who were getting off the bus. Not everyone was interested in the walking tour of Paco and Beer Belly’s old neighborhood, but it was the one look Juan Diego and Lupe would get of downtown Mexico City—the dump kids wanted to see the throngs of people.

“Vendors, protestors, whores, revolutionaries, tourists, thieves, bicycle salesmen—” Beer Belly was reciting as he led the way. Indeed, there was a bicycle shop near the corner of the Calle San Pablo and the Calle Roldán. There were prostitutes on the sidewalk in front of the bikes for sale, and more prostitutes in the courtyard of a whore hotel on the Calle Topacio, where the girls loitering in the courtyard looked only a little older than Lupe.

“I want to go back to the bus,” Lupe said. “I want to go back to Lost Children, even if we—” The way she stopped herself from saying more made Juan Diego wonder if Lupe had changed her mind—or if she’d suddenly seen something in the future, something that made it unlikely (at least in Lupe’s mind) that the dump kids would go back to Lost Children.

Whether Edward Bonshaw understood her, before Juan Diego could translate his sister’s request—or if Lupe, who suddenly seized the Iowan’s hand, made it sufficiently clear to Señor Eduardo what she wanted, without words—the girl and the Jesuit went back to the bus. (The moment had not been sufficiently clear to Juan Diego.)

“Is there something hereditary—something in their blood—that makes them prostitutes?” Juan Diego asked Beer Belly. (The boy must have been thinking of his late mother, Esperanza.)

“You don’t want to think about what’s in their blood,” Beer Belly told the boy.

“
Whose
blood? What about blood?” Paco asked them; her wig was askew, and the stubble on her face contrasted strangely with the mauve lipstick and matching eye shadow—not to mention the elephant measles.

Juan Diego wanted to go back to the bus, too; going back to Lost Children was surely also on the boy’s mind. “Trouble isn’t geographical, honey,” he’d heard Flor say to Señor Eduardo—apropos of
what,
Juan Diego wasn’t sure. (Hadn’t Flor’s trouble in Houston been
geographical
?)

Maybe it was the comfort of the coffee can, and its mixed contents, that Juan Diego wanted; he and Lupe had left the coffee can on the bus. As for going back to Lost Children, did Juan Diego feel this would be a defeat? (At the very least, it must have felt to him like a form of retreat.)

“I look at you with envy,” Juan Diego had heard Edward Bonshaw say to Dr. Vargas. “Your ability to heal, to change lives—” Señor Eduardo was saying, when Vargas cut him off.

“An envious Jesuit sounds like a Jesuit in trouble. Don’t tell me you have
doubts,
parrot man,” Vargas had said.

“Doubt is part of faith, Vargas—certainty is for you scientists who have closed the other door,” Edward Bonshaw told him.

“The
other
door!” Vargas had cried.

Back on the bus, Juan Diego saw who’d skipped the walking tour. Not only the sullen Dolores—The Wonder herself had not left her window seat—but the other girl acrobats as well. What was the matter with Mexico City, or this part of downtown, was at least a little bit troubling to them—namely, the prostitutes. Maybe the circus had saved the girl acrobats from difficult choices; La Maravilla might have thrust Ignacio into their future decision-making moments, but the life of those girls selling themselves on San Pablo and Topacio was not the life of the girl acrobats at Circus of The Wonder—not yet.

The Argentinian aerialists had not left the bus, either; they were cuddled together, as if frozen in the act of fondling—their overt sex life seemed to protect them from falling, as surely as the guy wires they scrupulously attached to each other’s safety harnesses. The contortionist, Pajama Man, was stretching in the aisle between the seats—his flexibility was nothing he wanted to expose to laughter out in public. (No one laughed at him in the circus.) And Estrella, of course, had stayed on the bus with her dear dogs.

Lupe was asleep in two seats, her head in Edward Bonshaw’s lap. Lupe didn’t mind that Perro Mestizo had peed on the Iowan’s thigh. “I think Lupe is frightened. I think you should both be back at Lost Children—” Señor Eduardo started to say, when he saw Juan Diego.

“But you’re leaving, aren’t you?” the fourteen-year-old asked him.

“Yes—with Flor,” the Iowan said softly.

“I heard your conversation with Vargas—the one about the pony on the postcard,” Juan Diego said to Edward Bonshaw.

“You shouldn’t have heard that conversation, Juan Diego—I sometimes forget how good your English is,” Señor Eduardo said.

“I know what pornography is,” Juan Diego told him. “It was a pornographic photograph, right? A postcard with a picture of a pony—a young woman has the pony’s penis in her mouth. Right?” the fourteen-year-old asked the missionary. Edward Bonshaw guiltily nodded.

“I was your age when I saw it,” the Iowan said.

“I understand why it upset you,” the boy said. “I’m sure it would upset me, too. But why does it
still
upset you?” Juan Diego asked Señor Eduardo. “Don’t grown-ups ever get over things?”

Edward Bonshaw had been at a county fair. “County fairs weren’t so
appropriate,
in those days,” Juan Diego had heard the Iowan say to Dr. Vargas.

“Yeah, yeah—horses with five legs, a cow with an extra head. Freak animals—
mutants,
right?” Vargas had asked him.

“And girlie shows, girls stripping in tents
—peep
shows, they were called,” Señor Eduardo had continued.

“In
Iowa
!” Vargas had exclaimed, laughing.

“Someone in a girlie tent sold me a pornographic postcard—it cost a dollar,” Edward Bonshaw confessed.

“The girl sucking off the pony?” Vargas had asked the Iowan.

Señor Eduardo looked shocked. “You know that postcard?” the missionary asked.

“Everyone saw that postcard. It was made in Texas, wasn’t it?” Vargas asked. “Everyone here knew it because the girl looked Mexican—”

But Edward Bonshaw had interrupted the doctor. “There was a man in the foreground of the postcard—you couldn’t see his face, but he wore cowboy boots and he had a whip. It looked as if he had
forced
the girl—”

It was Vargas’s turn to interrupt. “Of course
someone
forced her. You didn’t think it was the
girl’s
idea, did you? Or the pony’s,” Vargas added.

“That postcard haunted me. I couldn’t stop looking at it—I
loved
that poor girl!” the Iowan said.

“Isn’t that what pornography does?” Vargas asked Edward Bonshaw. “You’re not supposed to be able to stop looking at it!”

“The whip bothered me, especially,” Señor Eduardo said.

“Pepe has told me you have a thing for whips—” Vargas started to say.

“One day I took the postcard to confession,” Edward Bonshaw continued.
“I confessed my addiction to it—to the priest. He told me: ‘Leave the picture with me.’ Naturally, I thought
he
wanted it for the same reasons
I’d
wanted it, but the priest said: ‘I can destroy this, if you’re strong enough to let it go. It’s time that poor girl was left in peace,’ the priest said.”

“I doubt that poor girl ever knew
peace,
” Vargas had said.

“That’s when I first wanted to be a priest,” Edward Bonshaw said. “I wanted to do for other people what that priest did for me—he rescued me. Who knows?” Señor Eduardo said. “Maybe that postcard destroyed that priest.”

“I presume the experience was worse for the girl,” was all Vargas said. Edward Bonshaw had stopped talking. But what Juan Diego didn’t understand was why the postcard
still
bothered Señor Eduardo.

“Don’t you think Dr. Vargas was right?” Juan Diego asked the Iowan on the circus bus. “Don’t you think that pornographic photo was worse for the poor girl?”

“That poor girl wasn’t a girl,” Señor Eduardo said; he’d glanced once at Lupe, asleep in his lap, just to be sure she was still sleeping. “That poor girl was Flor,” the Iowan said; he was whispering now. “That’s what happened to Flor in Houston. The poor girl met a pony.”

H
E
’
D CRIED FOR
F
LOR
and Señor Eduardo before; Juan Diego could not stop crying for them. But Juan Diego was some distance from shore—no one could see he was crying. And didn’t the salt water bring tears to everyone’s eyes? You could float forever in salt water, Juan Diego was thinking; it was so easy to tread water in the calm and tepid sea.

“Hi, Mister!” Consuelo was calling. From the beach, Juan Diego could see the little girl in pigtails—she was waving to him, and he waved back.

It took almost no effort to stay afloat; he seemed to be barely moving. Juan Diego cried as effortlessly as he swam. The tears just came.

“You see, I
always
loved her—even before I knew her!” Edward Bonshaw had told Juan Diego. The Iowan hadn’t recognized Flor as the girl with the pony—not at first. And when Señor Eduardo
did
recognize Flor—when he realized she was the girl in the pony postcard, but Flor was all grown-up now—he’d been unable to tell her that he knew the pony part of her sad Texas story.

“You should tell her,” Juan Diego had told the Iowan; even at fourteen, the dump reader knew that much.

“When Flor wants to tell me about Houston, she will—it’s
her
story, the poor girl,” Edward Bonshaw would say to Juan Diego for years.

“
Tell
her!” Juan Diego kept saying to Señor Eduardo, as their time together marched on. Flor’s Houston story would remain hers to tell.

“
Tell
her!” Juan Diego cried in the warm Bohol Sea. He was looking offshore; he was facing the endless horizon—wasn’t Mindanao somewhere out there? (Not a soul onshore could have heard him crying.)

“Hi, Mister!” Pedro was calling to him. “Watch out for the—” (This was followed by, “Don’t step on the—”; the unheard word sounded like
gherkins.
) But Juan Diego was in deep water; he couldn’t touch the bottom—he was in no danger of stepping on
pickles
or
sea cucumbers,
or whatever weird thing Pedro was warning him about.

Juan Diego could tread water a long time, but he wasn’t a good swimmer. He liked to dog-paddle—that was his preferred stroke, a slow dog paddle (not that anyone could dog-paddle fast).

The dog paddle had posed a problem for the serious swimmers in the indoor pool at the old Iowa Field House. Juan Diego swam laps very slowly; he was known as the dog-paddler in the slow lane.