Avenue of Mysteries (20 page)

“A rite worth maintaining,” Father Octavio said. (Whatever else they thought of Edward Bonshaw, both priests found his whipping himself brave.) And while these two
twelfth-century
admirers continued to criticize Señor Eduardo’s Hawaiian shirts, Brother Pepe was also amused that the two old priests never connected Edward Bonshaw’s flagellations with the Polynesian parrots and jungles on his overlarge shirts. Pepe knew that Señor Eduardo was always oozing blood; he whipped himself
hard.
The riotous colors and overall confusion of the zealot’s Hawaiian shirts concealed the bleeding.

The bathroom they shared, and the close proximity of their separate bedrooms, made unlikely roommates out of Pepe and the Iowan, and their rooms were on the same floor of the orphanage as the former reading room the dump kids shared. No doubt Pepe and the Iowan were aware of Esperanza—she passed by in the late hours of the night, or in the wee hours of the morning, as if she were more the ghost of the dump niños’ mom than an actual mother. Because Esperanza was an
actual
woman, she might have been a disconcerting presence to these two celibate men; she must have occasionally heard Edward Bonshaw beating himself, too.

Esperanza knew how clean the floors were in Lost Children; after all, she had cleaned them. She was barefoot when she came to visit her children; she could be more silent that way, and—given the hours she kept during her time
not
spent as a cleaning woman—almost everyone else in Niños Perdidos was asleep when Esperanza was creeping around. Yes, she came to kiss her niños when they were sleeping—in this single respect, Esperanza resembled other moms—but she also came to steal from them, or to leave them a little perfumed money under their pillows. Most of all, Esperanza made these silent visits in order to use the bathroom Juan Diego and Lupe shared. She must have wanted some privacy; either in the Hotel Somega or in the servants’ quarters of the orphanage, Esperanza probably had no privacy. She must have wanted, at least once a day, to bathe alone. And who knows how the other female servants at Lost Children treated Esperanza? Did those other women like sharing their communal bathroom with a prostitute?

Because Rivera had left his stick shift in reverse, he backed over Juan Diego’s foot; because of a broken side-view mirror, the dump kids slept in a small library, a former reading room, in the Jesuit orphanage. And because their mother was a cleaning woman for the Jesuits (
because
she was also a prostitute), Esperanza haunted the same floor of Niños Perdidos where the new American missionary lived.

Wasn’t this an arrangement that might have endured? Doesn’t the deal they all had sound compatible enough to have worked? Why wouldn’t the dump kids have preferred, eventually, their life at Lost Children to their shack in Guerrero? As for the perishable beauty, which Esperanza surely was, and the perpetually bleeding Edward Bonshaw, who so tirelessly whipped himself—well, is it absurd to imagine they might have taught each other something?

Edward Bonshaw might have benefited from hearing Esperanza’s thoughts about celibacy and self-flagellation, and it’s certain she would
have had something to say to him on the subject of sacrificing his life to prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night.

In turn, Señor Eduardo might have asked Esperanza why she was
still
working as a prostitute. Didn’t she already have a job and a safe place to sleep? Was it her vanity, perhaps? Was she so vain that being
wanted
was somehow better than being loved?

Weren’t both Edward Bonshaw and Esperanza going to extremes? Wouldn’t some middle ground have worked as well?

In one of their many late-night conversations, here is how Brother Pepe put it to Señor Eduardo: “Merciful Lord, there must be some middle ground where it is possible
not
to sacrifice your life and still prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night!” But they would not resolve this; Edward Bonshaw would never explore that middle ground.

They would not, all of them, live together long enough to learn what
might have
happened. It was Vargas who first said the
circus
word; the undying idea of the circus came from him.

Blame it on the atheist. Hold the secular humanist (the everlasting enemy of Catholicism) accountable for what happened next. It might not have been a bad life: to be slightly less than actual orphans, or to be orphans with unusual privileges, at Lost Children. It could have turned out all right.

But Vargas had planted the circus seed. What children don’t love the circus, or imagine that they do?

•
11
•

Spontaneous Bleeding

When the dump niños vacated the shack in Guerrero for Lost Children, they brought almost as many water pistols with them as they had clothes. Of course the nuns were going to confiscate the squirt guns, but Lupe let them find only the ones that didn’t work. The nuns never knew what the water pistols were for.

Juan Diego and Lupe had practiced on Rivera; if they could fool the dump boss with the stigmata trick, they thought they could make it work on anyone. They didn’t fool him for long. Rivera could tell real blood from fake, and Rivera bought the beets—Lupe was always asking el jefe to buy her beets.

The dump kids would fill a water pistol with a mixture of beet juice and water. Juan Diego liked to add a little of his own saliva to the mixture. He said his spit gave the beet juice a “bloodier texture.”

“Explain
texture,
” Lupe had said.

The way the trick worked was that Juan Diego would conceal the loaded squirt gun under the waistband of his pants, beneath an untucked shirt. The safest target was someone’s shoe; the victims couldn’t feel the fake blood when it was squirted on their shoes. Sandals were a problem; you could feel the gunk against your bare toes.

With women, Juan Diego liked to squirt them from behind, on a bare calf. Before the woman could turn her head to look, the boy had time to hide the water pistol. That was when Lupe started babbling. She pointed first to the area of spontaneous bleeding, then to the sky; if the blood were Heaven-sent, surely the source was the everlasting abode of God (and of the blessed dead). “She says the blood is a miracle,” Juan Diego would translate for his sister.

Sometimes Lupe would equivocate, incomprehensibly. “No, sorry—it’s
either a miracle or ordinary bleeding,” Juan Diego would then say. Lupe was already bending down, the rag in her small hand; she would wipe the blood, miraculous or not, off the shoe (or the woman’s bare calf) before the victim had time to react. If the money for this service was immediately forthcoming, the dump kids were prepared to protest; they always refused to accept payment for pointing out a miracle, or for wiping the holy (or unholy) blood away. Well, at least they refused the money
at first
; dump kids weren’t beggars.

After the accident with Rivera’s truck, Juan Diego found that the wheelchair helped; he was usually the one to hold out his palm and reluctantly accept compensation, and the wheelchair offered more options for concealing the squirt gun. The crutches were a bit awkward—that is, letting go of one of them in order to extend his hand. When Juan Diego was on crutches, Lupe was usually the one who hesitantly took the money—never, of course, with the hand that had wiped the blood away.

In the jerkily limping stage of Juan Diego’s recovery—the category of limp that would endure, the one that was not a phase—the dump niños made more impromptu decisions. Generally, Lupe (in her disinclined way) yielded to the men who insisted on rewarding her. With the women victims of the stigmata trick, the limping Juan Diego discovered that a crippled boy was more persuasively sympathetic than an angry-looking girl. Or was it that the women sensed Lupe was reading their minds?

The dump kids reserved the actual
stigmata
word for those high-risk occasions when Juan Diego dared to aim for a direct hit on the potential customer’s hand; this was always a from-behind shot with the water pistol. When people allow their hands to rest at their sides, whether they are standing or walking, their palms face behind them.

When a sudden splash of diluted, beet-red blood appears in the palm of your hand—and there’s a girl kneeling at your feet, smearing her rapturous face with the blood in your palm—well, you might be more than usually vulnerable to religious belief. And that was when the crippled boy began screaming the
stigmata
word. With the tourists in the zócalo, Juan Diego would resort to bilingual screaming—both
estigmas
and
stigmata
.

The one time the dump kids fooled Rivera, they got him with the shoe shot. The dump boss had glanced at the sky, but he wasn’t looking for Heavenly evidence. “Maybe a bird is bleeding,” was all Rivera had said; nor did el jefe offer to tip the dump kids.

Another time, the direct hit on Rivera’s hand didn’t work. While
Lupe was smearing her face with the blood from el jefe’s palm, Rivera had calmly taken his hand away from the enraptured girl. While Juan Diego was screaming the
estigmas
word, the dump boss licked the “blood” in his palm.

“Los betabeles,” el jefe said, smiling at Lupe. The beets.

T
HE PLANE HAD LANDED
in the Philippines. Juan Diego wrapped part of a green-tea muffin in a paper napkin, putting it in his coat pocket. The passengers were standing, gathering their things—an awkward moment for a crippled older man. But Juan Diego’s mind was not in the moment; in his mind, he and Lupe were barely teenagers. They were scouting the zócalo, in the heart of Oaxaca, on the lookout for unsuspecting tourists and hapless locals who appeared capable of believing that a phantom God had singled them out—from an unseen height—for spontaneous bleeding.

As always, and anywhere—even in Manila—it was a woman who took pity on the older man’s limp. “May I help you?” the young mother asked. She was traveling with her small children, a little girl and an even smaller son. She was a woman with her hands full, in more ways than one, but such was the effect of Juan Diego’s limp (on women, especially).

“Oh, no—I can manage. But thank you!” Juan Diego immediately said. The young mother smiled—she looked relieved, in fact. Her children continued to stare at Juan Diego’s misdirected right foot; kids were always fascinated by that two-o’clock angle.

In Oaxaca, Juan Diego was remembering, the dump niños had learned to be wary in the zócalo, which was closed to traffic but overrun by beggars and hawkers. The beggars could be territorial, and one of the hawkers, the balloon man, had observed the stigmata trick. The dump kids didn’t know he’d been watching them, but one day the man gave Lupe a balloon; he was looking at Juan Diego when he spoke. “I like her style, blood boy, but you’re too obvious,” the balloon man said. He had a sweat-stained rawhide shoelace around his neck, a crude necklace, to which a crow’s foot was attached, and he fingered the crow’s foot while he talked, as if the remnant of the bird were a talisman. “I’ve seen
real
blood in the zócalo—I mean accidents can happen, blood boy,” he went on. “You don’t want the wrong people to know your game. The wrong people wouldn’t want you, but they’ll take
her,
” he said, pointing the crow’s foot at Lupe.

“He knows where we’re from; he shot the crow who had that foot at
the basurero,” Lupe told Juan Diego. “There’s a pinprick in the balloon. It’s losing air. He can’t sell it. It won’t be a balloon tomorrow.”

“I like her style,” the balloon man said again to Juan Diego. He looked at Lupe, giving her another balloon. “No pinprick; this one isn’t losing air. But who knows about
tomorrow
? I’ve shot more than crows at the basurero, little sister,” the balloon man told her. The dump kids were freaked out that the creepy hawker had understood Lupe without the benefit of a translation.

“He kills dogs, he has shot
dogs
at the basurero
—many
dogs!” Lupe cried. She let go of both balloons. Soon they were drifting high above the zócalo, even the one with the pinprick. After that, the zócalo would never be the same for the dump kids. They became wary of everyone.

There was a waiter at the outdoor café at the most popular tourist hotel, the Marqués del Valle. The waiter knew who the dump niños were; he’d seen the stigmata trick, or the balloon man had told him about it. The waiter slyly warned the kids that he “might tell” the nuns at Niños Perdidos. “Don’t you two have something to confess to Father Alfonso or Father Octavio?” was how the waiter put it.

“What do you mean that you
might tell
the nuns?” Juan Diego asked him.

“I mean the fake blood—that’s what you’ve got to confess,” the waiter said.

“You said
might tell,
” Juan Diego insisted. “Are you telling the nuns or aren’t you?”

“I live on tips,” was how the waiter put it. Thus was the best place to squirt beet juice on tourists lost to the dump kids; they had to stay away from the outdoor café at the Marqués del Valle, where there was an opportunistic waiter who wanted a cut.

Lupe said she was superstitious about going to the Marqués del Valle, anyway; one of the tourists they’d nailed with the water pistol dived off a fifth-floor balcony into the zócalo. This suicide happened shortly after the unhappy-looking tourist had rewarded Lupe, very generously, for wiping the blood off his shoe. He was one of those sensitive souls who hadn’t listened to the dump kids’ claim that they weren’t begging; he’d spontaneously handed Lupe quite a lot of money.

“Lupe, the guy didn’t kill himself
because
his shoe started bleeding,” Juan Diego had explained to her, but Lupe didn’t feel right about it.

“I knew he was sad about something,” Lupe said. “I could tell he was having a bad life.”

Juan Diego didn’t mind avoiding the Marqués del Valle; he’d hated the hotel before he and Lupe had encountered the money-grubbing waiter. The hotel was named for the title Cortés took for himself (Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca), and Juan Diego was suspicious of everything to do with the Spanish conquest—Catholicism included. Oaxaca had once been central to the Zapotec civilization. Juan Diego thought of himself and Lupe as Zapotecs. The dump kids hated Cortés; they were Benito Juárez people, not Cortés people, Lupe liked to say—they were
indigenous
people, Juan Diego and Lupe believed.