"Where is that lovely child with the pigtails? Get her," Miriam said to Dr. Quintana.
"Consuelo!" Josefa called. The little girl ran up to them at the table; Pedro was right behind her.
"There you are, you two!" Miriam cried; she let go of Juan Diego's arm, hugging the children to her. "Don't be frightened," she told them. "Mr. Guerrero is sad about his sister--he's always thinking about her. Wouldn't you cry if you never forgot how your sister was killed by a lion?" Miriam asked the children.
"Yes!" Consuelo cried.
"I guess so," Pedro told her; he actually looked like he might forget about it.
"Well, that's how Mr. Guerrero feels--he just misses her," Miriam told the kids.
"I miss her--her name was Lupe," Juan Diego managed to tell the children. The boy driver, now a waiter, had brought him a beer; the awkward boy stood there, not knowing what to do with the beer.
"Just put it down!" Miriam told him, and he did.
Consuelo had climbed into Juan D
iego's lap. "It'll be okay," the little girl was saying; she was tugging on her pigtails--it made him cry and cry. "It'll be okay, Mister," Consuelo kept saying to him.
Miriam picked up Pedro and held him in her lap; the boy seemed somewhat uncertain about her, but Miriam quickly solved that. "What do you imagine you might miss, Pedro?" Miriam asked him. "I mean, one day--what would you miss, if you lost it? Who would you miss? Who do you love?"
Who is this woman? Where did she come from? all the adults were thinking--Juan Diego was thinking this, too. He desired Miriam; he was thrilled to see her. But who was she, and what was she doing here? And why were they all riveted by her? Even the children, despite the fact that she'd frightened them.
"Well," Pedro started to say, frowning seriously, "I would miss my father. I will miss him--one day."
"Yes, of course you will--that's very good. That's exactly what I mean," Miriam told the boy. A kind of melancholy seemed to descend on little Pedro; he leaned back against Miriam, who cradled him against her breast. "Smart boy," she whispered to him. He closed his eyes; he sighed. It was almost obscene how Pedro looked seduced.
The table--the entire dining room--seemed hushed. "I'm sorry about your sister, Mister," Consuelo said to Juan Diego.
"I'll be okay," he told the little girl. He felt too tired to go on--too tired to change anything.
It was the boy driver, the unsure-of-himself waiter, who said something in Tagalog to Dr. Quintana.
"Yes, naturally--serve the main course. What a question--serve it!" Josefa said to him. (Not a single person had put on one of the party hats. It was still not party time.)
"Look at Pedro!" Consuelo said; the little girl was laughing. "He's fallen asleep."
"Oh, isn't that sweet?" Miriam said, smiling at Juan Diego. The little boy was sound asleep in Miriam's lap, his head against her breast. How unlikely that a boy his age could just drop off to sleep in the lap of a total stranger--and she was such a scary one!
Who is she? Juan Diego wondered again, but he couldn't stop smiling back at her. Maybe all of them were wondering who Miriam was, but no one said anything or did the slightest thing to stop her.
* 18 *
Lust Has a Way
For years after he'd left Oaxaca, Juan Diego would stay in touch with Brother Pepe. What Juan Diego knew about Oaxaca since the early seventies was largely due to Pepe's faithful correspondence.
The problem was that Juan Diego couldn't always remember when Pepe had passed along this or that important piece of information; to Pepe, every new thing was "important"--each change mattered, as did those things that hadn't changed (and never would).
It was during the AIDS epidemic when Brother Pepe wrote to Juan Diego about that gay bar on Bustamante, but whether this was in the late eighties or early nineties--well, this was the kind of specificity that eluded Juan Diego. "Yes, that bar is still there--and it's still gay," Pepe had written; Juan Diego must have asked about it. "But it's not La China anymore--it's called Chinampa now."
And, around that time, Pepe had written that Dr. Vargas was feeling the "hopelessness of the medical community." AIDS had made Vargas feel it was "irrelevant" to be an orthopedist. "No doctor is trained to watch people die; we're not in the holding-hands business," Vargas had told Pepe, and Vargas wasn't even dealing with infectious disease.
That sounded like Vargas, all right--still feeling left out because he'd missed the family plane crash.
Pepe's letter about La Coronita came in the nineties, if Juan Diego remembered correctly. The transvestite "party place" had closed down; the owner, who was gay, had died. When The Little Crown reopened, it had expanded; there was a second floor, and it was now a place for transvestite prostitutes and their clients. There was no more waiting to dress up until you got to the bar; the cross-dressers were who they were when they arrived. They were women when they got there, or so Pepe implied.
Brother Pepe was doing hospice work in the nineties; unlike Vargas, Pepe was suited for the hand-holding business, and Lost Children was long gone by then.