Avenue of Mysteries (38 page)

“What was the saint’s
name
?” the little girl with pigtails kept asking.

“Saint Ignatius Loyola,” Juan Diego heard Clark French tell the children.

The giant gecko moved as fast as a small one. Maybe Clark’s voice had been too confident, or just too loud. It was amazing how the big lizard could flatten itself out—how it managed to fit behind the painting, although it had moved the painting slightly. The painting now hung a little crookedly on the wall, but it was as if the gecko had never been there. Saint Ignatius himself had not seen the lizard, nor was Loyola even looking at the children and adults.

From all the portraits of Loyola that Juan Diego had seen—in the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús, at Lost Children, and elsewhere in Oaxaca (and in Mexico City)—he couldn’t recall the bald but bearded saint ever looking back at him. Saint Ignatius’s eyes looked
above
; Loyola was looking, ever-beseechingly, toward Heaven. The Jesuits’ founder was seeking a higher authority—Loyola wasn’t inclined to make eye contact with mere bystanders.

“Dinner is served!” an adult’s voice was calling.

“Thank you for the story, Mister,” Pedro said to Juan Diego. “I’m sorry about all the stuff you miss,” the little boy added.

Both Pedro and the little girl with pigtails wanted to hold Juan Diego’s hands when all three of them got back to the top of the stairs, but the
stairs were too narrow; it wouldn’t have been safe for a crippled man to go down those stairs holding hands with two little children. Juan Diego knew he should hold the railing instead.

Besides, he saw Clark French waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs—no doubt the new seating plan had given a few of the most senior family members fits. Juan Diego imagined there were women of a certain age who’d wanted to sit next to him; these older women were his most avid readers—at least they were usually the ones who weren’t shy about speaking to him.

All Clark enthusiastically said to him was: “I just love listening to how you tell a story.”

Maybe you wouldn’t love listening to my Virgin Mary story, Juan Diego was thinking, but he felt inordinately tired—especially for someone who’d slept on the plane
and
had a nap in the car. Young Pedro was right to feel sorry about “all the stuff” Juan Diego missed. Just thinking about all the stuff he missed made Juan Diego miss everyone
more
—he’d hardly scratched the surface with that dump story for the children.

The seating plan had been very carefully worked out; the children’s tables were at the perimeters of the dining room, the adults clustered together at the center tables. Josefa, Clark’s wife, would be seated to one side of Juan Diego, who saw that the other seat beside him was empty. Clark took a seat diagonally across the table from his former teacher. No one wore a party hat—not yet.

Juan Diego wasn’t surprised to see that the middle of his table was, for the most part, composed of those “women of a certain age”—the ones he’d been thinking about. They smiled knowingly at him, the way women who’ve read your novels (and assume they know everything about you) do; only one of these older women wasn’t smiling.

You know what they say about people who look like their pets. Before Clark commenced making a ringing sound with a spoon against his water glass, before Clark’s garrulous introduction of his former teacher to his wife’s family, Juan Diego saw in an instant who Auntie Carmen was. There was no one else in sight who even slightly resembled a brightly colored, sharp-toothed, voracious eel. And, in the flattering light at the dinner table, Auntie Carmen’s jowls might have been mistaken for a moray’s quivering gills. Like a moray, too, Auntie Carmen radiated distance and distrust—her aloofness disguising the biting eel’s renowned ability to launch a lethal strike from afar.

“I have something I want to say to
you two,
” Dr. Quintana said to her husband and Juan Diego, when their table had quieted down—Clark had
finally
stopped talking; the first course, a ceviche, had been served. “No religion, no Church politics, not a word about abortion or birth control—not while we’re eating,” Josefa said.

“Not while the children and teenagers are—” Clark started to say.

“Not while the
adults
are here, Clark—no talking about any of it unless you two are
alone,
” his wife told him.

“And no
sex,
” Auntie Carmen said; she was looking at Juan Diego. He was the one who wrote about sex—Clark didn’t. And the way the eel woman had said “no sex”—as if it left a bad taste in her wizened mouth—implied both talking about it
and
doing it.

“I guess that leaves literature,” Clark said truculently.

“That depends on
which
literature,” Juan Diego said. As soon as he’d sat down, he felt a little light-headed; his vision had blurred. This happened with Viagra—usually, the feeling soon passed. But when Juan Diego felt his right-front pocket, he was reminded that he hadn’t taken the Viagra; he could feel the tablet and the mah-jongg tile through the fabric of his trousers.

There was, of course, some seafood in the ceviche—what looked like shrimp, or perhaps a kind of crayfish. And wedges of mango, Juan Diego noticed; he’d slightly touched the marinade with the tines of his salad fork. Citrus, certainly—probably lime, Juan Diego thought.

Auntie Carmen saw him sneaking a taste; she brandished her salad fork, as if to demonstrate that she’d restrained herself long enough.

“I see no reason why we should wait for
her,
” Auntie Carmen said, pointing her fork at the empty chair next to Juan Diego. “She’s not
family,
” the eel woman added.

Juan Diego felt something or someone touch his ankles; he saw a small face looking up at him from under the table. The little girl with pigtails sat at his feet. “Hi, Mister,” she said. “The lady told me to tell you—she’s coming.”

“What lady?” Juan Diego asked the little girl; to everyone at the table, except for Clark’s wife, he must have looked like he was talking to his lap.

“Consuelo,” Josefa said to the little girl. “You’re supposed to be at your table—please go there.”

“Yes,” Consuelo said.

“
What
lady?” Juan Diego asked Consuelo again. The little girl had crawled out from under the table and now endured Auntie Carmen’s cruel stare.

“The lady who just appears,” Consuelo said; she tugged on both her pigtails, making her head bob up and down. She ran off. The waiters were pouring wine—one of them was the boy driver who’d brought Juan Diego from the airport in Tagbilaran City.

“You must have driven the mystery lady from the airport,” Juan Diego said to him, waving the wine away, but the boy seemed not to understand. Josefa spoke to him in Tagalog; even then, the boy driver looked confused. He gave Dr. Quintana what sounded like an overlong answer.

“He says he didn’t drive her—he says she just appeared in the driveway. No one saw her car or driver,” Josefa said.

“The plot thickens!” Clark French declared. “No wine for him—he drinks only beer,” Clark was telling the boy driver, who was a lot less confident as a waiter than he’d been behind the wheel.

“Yes, sir,” the boy said.

“You shouldn’t have provided your former teacher with all that
beer,
” Auntie Carmen said suddenly to Clark. “Were you
drunk
?” Auntie Carmen asked Juan Diego. “Whatever possessed you to turn off the air-conditioning? No one turns off the air-conditioning in Manila!”

“That’s enough, Carmen,” Dr. Quintana told her aunt. “Your precious aquarium is not dinner-table conversation. You say ‘no
sex,
’ I say ‘no
fish.
’ Got it?”

“It was
my
fault, Auntie,” Clark started in. “The aquarium was
my
idea—”

“I was freezing cold,” Juan Diego explained to the eel woman. “I
hate
air-conditioning,” he told everyone. “I probably
did
have too much beer—”

“Don’t apologize,” Josefa said to him. “They were just fish.”

“
Just
fish!” Auntie Carmen cried.

Dr. Quintana leaned across the table, touching Auntie Carmen’s leathery hand. “Do you want to hear how many vaginas I’ve seen in the last week—in the last
month
?” she asked her aunt.

“Josefa!” Clark cried.

“No fish, no sex,” Dr. Quintana told the eel woman. “You want to talk about
fish,
Carmen? Just watch out.”

“I hope Morales is okay,” Juan Diego said to Auntie Carmen, in an effort to be pacifying.

“Morales is different—the experience
changed
him,” Auntie Carmen said haughtily.

“No eels, either, Carmen,” Josefa said. “You just watch out.”

Women doctors—how Juan Diego loved them! He’d adored Dr. Marisol Gomez; he was devoted to his dear friend Dr. Rosemary Stein. And here was the wonderful Dr. Josefa Quintana! Juan Diego was fond of Clark, but did Clark
deserve
a wife like this?

She “just appears,” the little girl with pigtails had said about the mystery lady. And hadn’t the boy driver confirmed that the lady
just appeared
?

Yet the aquarium conversation had been intense; no one, not even Juan Diego, was thinking about the uninvited guest—not at that moment when the little gecko fell (or dropped) from the ceiling. The gecko landed in the untouched ceviche next to Juan Diego; it was as if the tiny creature knew this was an unguarded salad plate. The gecko appeared to drop into the conversation at the only empty seat.

The lizard was as slender as a ballpoint pen, and only half as long. Two women shrieked; one was a well-dressed woman seated directly opposite the mystery guest’s unoccupied seat—she had her eyeglasses spattered with the citrus marinade. A wedge of mango slipped off the salad plate in the direction of the older man who’d been introduced to Juan Diego as a retired surgeon. (He and Juan Diego sat on either side of the empty seat.) The surgeon’s wife, one of those readers of “a certain age,” had shrieked more loudly than the well-dressed woman, who was now calm and wiping her eyeglasses.

“
Damn
those things,” the well-dressed woman said.

“Just who invited
you
?” the retired surgeon asked the little gecko, who now crouched (unmoving) in the unfamiliar ceviche. Everyone but Auntie Carmen laughed; the anxious-looking little gecko was no laughing matter to her, apparently. The gecko looked ready to spring, but where?

Later everyone would say that the gecko had distracted all of them from the slender woman in the beige silk dress. She had
just appeared,
they would all think later; no one saw her approaching the table, though she was very watchable in that perfectly fitted, sleeveless dress. She seemed to glide unnoticed to the chair that was waiting for her—not
even the gecko saw her coming, and geckos are acutely alert. (If you’re a gecko and you want to stay alive, you’d better be alert.)

Juan Diego would remember seeing only the briefest flash of the woman’s slim wrist; he never saw the salad fork in her hand, not until she’d stabbed the gecko through its twig-size spine—pinning it to a wedge of mango on her plate.

“Got you,” Miriam said.

This time, only Auntie Carmen cried out—as if
she’d
been stabbed. You can always count on the children to see everything; maybe the kids had seen Miriam coming, and they’d had the good sense to watch her.

“I didn’t think human beings could be as fast as geckos,” Pedro would say to Juan Diego another day. (They were in the second-floor library, staring at the Saint Ignatius Loyola painting, waiting for the
giant
gecko to make an appearance, but that big gecko was never seen again.)

“Geckos are really,
really
fast—you can’t catch one,” Juan Diego would tell the little boy.

“But that lady—” Pedro started to say; he just stopped.

“Yes, she was fast,” was all Juan Diego would say.

In the hushed dining room, Miriam held the salad fork between her thumb and index finger, reminding Juan Diego of the way Flor used to hold a cigarette—as if it were a joint. “Waiter,” Miriam was saying. The lifeless gecko hung limply from the glistening tines of the little fork. The boy driver, who was a clumsy waiter, rushed to take the murder weapon from Miriam. “I’ll need a new ceviche, too,” she told him, taking her seat.

“Don’t get up, darling,” she said, putting her hand on Juan Diego’s shoulder. “I know it hasn’t been long, but I’ve missed you terribly,” she added. Everyone in the dining room had heard her; no one was talking.

“I’ve missed
you,
” Juan Diego said to her.

“Well, I’m here now,” Miriam told him.

So they
knew
each other, everyone was thinking; she wasn’t quite the mystery guest they’d been expecting. Suddenly, she didn’t look
uninvited.
And Juan Diego didn’t seem exactly
neutral
.

“This is
Miriam,
” Juan Diego announced. “And this is Clark—Clark French, the writer. My former student,” Juan Diego said.

“Oh, yes,” Miriam said, smiling demurely.

“And Clark’s wife, Josefa—Dr. Quintana,” Juan Diego went on.

“I’m so glad there’s a doctor here,” Miriam told Josefa. “It makes the Encantador seem less
remote
.”

A chorus of shouts greeted her—other doctors, raising their hands. (Mostly men, of course, but even the female doctors put up their hands.)

“Oh, wonderful—a
family
of doctors,” Miriam said, smiling to everyone. Only Auntie Carmen remained less than charmed; no doubt, she’d taken the gecko’s side—she was a pet person, after all.

And what about the children? Juan Diego was wondering. What did they make of the mystery guest?

He felt Miriam’s hand graze his lap; she rested it on his thigh. “Happy New Year, darling,” she whispered to him. Juan Diego thought he also felt her foot touch his calf, then his knee.