"Well, where is he?" Sister Gloria asked Juan Diego. "There's no naked boy here. What naked boy?" the nun repeated; she didn't notice the bubbles under the bathwater (not with all the shampoo suds), but one of the kindergartners pointed to the bubbles, and Sister Gloria suddenly looked where the alert child was pointing.
That was when the sea monster rose from the frothy water. One can only guess that this is what the tattooed hippie and the Crucified Christ (or a shampoo-covered convergence of the two) looked like to the indoctrinated kindergartners: a religious sea monster. And, in all probability, the good gringo thought that his emergence from the bathwater should be of some entertainment value; after he'd just to
ld Juan Diego such a heavy-hearted story, maybe the draft dodger sought to change the mood of the moment. We'll never know what the crazy hippie had intended by flinging himself upward from the bottom of the bathtub, spouting water like a whale and extending his arms to either side of the tub--as if he were as nailed-to-the-cross, and dying, as the Bleeding Jesus tattooed on the naked boy's heaving chest. And what possessed the tall boy--what made him decide to stand up in the bathtub, so that he towered over everyone and made his nakedness all the more apparent? Well, we'll never know what el gringo bueno was thinking, or even if he was thinking. (The young American runaway was not known on Zaragoza Street for rational behavior.)
To be fair: the hippie had submerged himself when he and Juan Diego were alone in the bathroom; the good gringo had no idea, when he rose out of the water, that he was emerging to a multitude--not to mention that most of them were five-year-olds who believed in Jesus. The fact that the little children were there was not this Jesus's fault.
"Whoa!" cried the Crucified Christ--he looked more like the Drowned Christ at the moment, and the whoa word was a foreign-sounding one to the Spanish-speaking kindergartners.
Four or five of the terrified children instantly wet their pants; one little girl shrieked so loudly that several girls and boys bit their tongues. Those kindergartners nearest the door to the bedroom bolted through the bedroom, screaming, and raced into the hall. Those children who must have believed there was no escape from the gringo Christ fell to their knees, peeing and crying, and covered their heads with their hands; one little boy hugged a little girl so hard that she bit him in the face.
Sister Gloria had swooned, catching her balance by putting one hand on the bathtub, but the hippie Jesus, who feared that the nun was falling, wrapped his wet arms around her. "Whoa, Sister--" was all the young man managed to say, before Sister Gloria beat against the naked boy's chest with both her fists. She landed several blows on the Heaven-beseeching and tortured face of the Jesus tattoo, but when she saw (with horror) what she was doing, Sister Gloria threw up her arms and lifted her eyes in her own most Heaven-beseeching manner.
"!Madre!" Sister Gloria once more cried, as if Mother Mary were the nun's single savior and confidante--truly, as the nun's responsive prayer maintained, her one and only guide.
That was when el gringo bueno slipped and fell forward into the bathtub; the soapy water sloshed over the sides of the tub, drenching the bathroom floor. The hippie, now on his hands and knees, had enough presence of mind to turn off the running water. The tub, at last, could drain, but as the water quickly receded, those kindergartners still in the bathroom--for the most part, they'd been too afraid to run away--saw the emerging American flag (torn in two) on the gringo Christ's bare ass.
Sister Gloria saw the flag, too--a tattoo of such secular certainty that it clashed with the tattoo of the Agonizing Jesus. To the instinctively disapproving nun, a satanic discord seemed to emanate from the naked boy in the emptying tub.
Juan Diego had not moved. He knelt on the bathroom floor, the spilled bathwater touching his thighs. Around him, the cringing kindergartners lay curled in wet balls. It must have been the future writer developing in him, but Juan Diego thought of the amphibious troops killed in recapturing Corregidor, some of them not much older than children. He thought of the wild promise he'd made to the good gringo, and he was thrilled--the way, at fourteen, you can be thrilled by an utterly unrealistic vision of the future.
"Ahora y siempre--now and forever," one of the soaking-wet kindergartners was whimpering.
"Now and forever," Juan Diego said, more confidently. He knew this was a promise to himself--to seize every opportunity that looked like the future, from this moment forward.
* 14 *
Nada
In the corridor outside Edward Bonshaw's classroom at Ninos Perdidos was a bust of the Virgin Mary with a tear on her cheek. The bust stood on a pedestal in a corner of the second-floor balcony. There was often a beet-red smudge on Mary's other cheek; it looked like blood to Esperanza--every week she wiped it off, but the next week it was back. "Maybe it is blood," she'd told Brother Pepe.
"It can't be," Pepe told her. "There have been no reported stigmata cases at Lost Children."
On the landing between the first and second floors was the suffer-the-little-children statue of San Vicente de Paul with two infants in his arms. Esperanza reported to Brother Pepe that she'd also wiped blood off the hem of the saint's cloak. "Every week I wipe it off, but it comes back!" Esperanza had said. "It must be miraculous blood."
"It can't be blood, Esperanza," was all Pepe would say about it.
"You don't know what I see, Pepe!" Esperanza said, pointing to her fiery eyes. "And whatever it is, it leaves a stain."
They were both right. It was not blood, but every week it came back and it left a stain. The dump kids had had to lie low with the beet juice after the episode with the good gringo in their bathtub; they'd had to cut back on their nighttime visits to Zaragoza Street, too. Senor Eduardo and Brother Pepe--not to mention that witch Sister Gloria and the other nuns--were keeping a close eye on them. And Lupe was right about the gifts el gringo bueno could afford for them: they were less than outstanding presents.
The hippie had no doubt haggled over the cheap religious figures he'd bought from the Christmas-parties place, the virgin shop on Independencia. One was a small totem, in the category of a statuette--more of a figurine than a lifelike figure--but the Guadalupe virgin was life-size.
The Guadalupe virgin was actually a little bigger than Juan Diego. She was his present. Her blue-green mantle--a kind of cloak or cape--was traditional. Her belt, or what looked like a black girdle, would one day give rise to the speculation that Guadalupe was pregnant. Long after the fact, in 1999, Pope John Paul II invoked Our Lady of Guadalupe as Patroness of the Americas and Protectress of Unborn Children. ("That Polish pope," Juan Diego would later rail against him--and his unborn business.)
The virgin-shop Guadalupe didn't look pregnant, but this Guadalupe mannequin appeared to be about fifteen or sixteen--and she had breasts. The boobs made her seem not religious at all. "She's a sex doll!" Lupe immediately said.
Of course, that wasn't strictly true; there was, however, a sex-doll aspect to the Guadalupe figure, though Juan Diego could not undress her and she didn't have movable limbs (or recognizable reproductive parts).
"What's my present?" Lupe asked the hippie boy.
The good gringo asked Lupe if she forgave him for sleeping with her mother. "Yes," Lupe said, "but we can't ever get married."
"That sounds pretty final," the hippie said, when Juan Diego translated Lupe's answer to the forgiveness question.
"Show me the present," was all Lupe said.
It was a Coatlicue figurine, as ugly as any replica of the goddess. Juan Diego thought it was a blessing that the hideous statuette was small--it was even smaller than Dirty White. El gringo bueno had no clue how to pronounce the name of the Aztec goddess; Lupe, in her hard-to-follow fashion, couldn't manage to help him say it.