Hogar de la Nina, "Home of the Girl," had opened in 1979. It was an all-girls' answer to City of Children--what Lupe had called City of Boys. Pepe had worked at Home of the Girl through the eighties and into the early nineties.
Pepe would never disparage an orphanage. Hogar de la Nina was not all that far from Viguera, where its all-boys' counterpart, Ciudad de los Ninos, was still open for business. Home of the Girl was in the neighborhood of Cuauhtemoc.
Pepe had found the girls unruly; he'd complained to Juan Diego that they could be cruel to one another. And Pepe hadn't liked the girls' adoration of The Little Mermaid, the 1989 Disney animated film. There were life-size decals of the Little Mermaid herself in the sleeping room--"larger than the portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe," Pepe had complained. (As Lupe doubtless would have complained, Juan Diego thought.)
Pepe had sent a picture of some of the girls in their old-fashioned, hand-me-down dresses--the kind that buttoned up the back. In the photo, Juan Diego couldn't see that the girls hadn't bothered to button up the backs of their dresses, but Brother Pepe had complained about that, too; apparently, leaving themselves unbuttoned was just one of the "unruly" things those girls did.
Brother Pepe (notwithstanding his small complaints) would go on being "one of Christ's soldiers," as Senor Eduardo had been fond of calling himself and his Jesuit brethren. But, in truth, Pepe was a servant of children; that had been his calling.
More orphanages had come to town; when Lost Children was gone, there were replacements--maybe not with the educational priorities that had once mattered to Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, but they were orphanages nonetheless. Oaxaca, one day, would have several.
In the late nineties, Brother Pepe went to work at the Albergue Josefino in Santa Lucia del Camino. The orphanage had opened in 1993, and the nuns looked after both boys and girls, though the boys weren't allowed to stay past the age of twelve. Juan Diego didn't understand who the nuns were, and Brother Pepe didn't bother to explain. Madres de los Desamparados--"Mothers of the Forsaken," Juan Diego would have translated this. (He thought forsaken sounded better than abandoned.) But Pepe called the nuns "mothers of those who are without a place." Of all the orphanages, Pepe believed the Albergue Josefino was the nicest. "The children hold your hands," he wrote to Juan Diego.
There was a Guadalupe in the chapel, and another one in the schoolroom; there was even a Guadalupe clock, Pepe said. The girls could stay until they wanted to leave; a few girls were in their twenties before they left. But it wouldn't have worked for Lupe and Juan Diego, since Juan Diego would have been too old.
"Don't ever die," Juan Diego had written to Brother Pepe from Iowa City. What Juan Diego meant was that he would die if he lost Pepe.
THAT NEW YEAR'S EVE, how many doctors must have been staying at the Encantador seaside resort? Ten or twelve? Perhaps more. Clark French's Filipino family was full of doctors. Not one of these doctors--not Clark's wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana, certainly--would have encouraged Juan Diego to skip another dose of the beta-blockers.
Maybe the men among those doctors--the ones who'd seen Miriam, especially the ones who'd witnessed her lightning-fast skewering of the gecko with a salad fork--would have agreed that the 100-milligram tablet of Viagra was advisable.
But as for alternating no doses with double doses (or half-doses) of a Lopressor prescription--absolutely not! Not even the men among those doctors celebrating New Year's Eve at the Encantador would have approved of that.
When Miriam, albeit briefly, made Lupe's death dinner-table conversation, Juan Diego had thought of Lupe--the way she'd scolded the noseless statue of the Virgin Mary.
"Show me a real miracle," Lupe had challenged the giantess. "Do something to make me believe in you--I think you're just a big bully!"
Was that what triggered in Juan Diego his growing awareness of a puzzling similarity between the towering Virgin Mary in the Templo de la Compania de Jesus and Miriam?
At this unresolved moment, Miriam touched him under the table--his thigh, the small lumps in his right-front pants pocket. "What's here?" Miriam whispered to him. He quickly showed her the mah-jongg tile, the historic game block, but before he could begin the elaborate explanation, Miriam murmured, "Oh, not that--I know about the all-inspiring keepsake you carry with you. I mean what else is in your pocket?"
Had Miriam read about the mah-jongg tile in an interview with the author? Had Juan Diego piddled away the story of such a treasured memento to the ever-trivializing media? And Miriam seemed to know about the Viagra tablet without his telling her what it was. Had Dorothy told her mother that Juan Diego took Viagra? Surely, he hadn't talked about taking Viagra in an interview--or had he?
His not knowing what Miriam knew (or didn't) about the Viagra made Juan Diego remember the quickly passing dialogue upon his arrival at the circus--when Edward Bonshaw, who knew Flor was a prostitute, learned she was a transvestite.
It was an accident--through the open flaps of a troupe tent they'd seen Paco, the transvestite dwarf, and Flor had told the Iowan, "I'm just more passable than Paco, honey."
"Does the parrot man get it that Flor has a penis?" Lupe (untranslated) had asked. It became clear that el hombre papagayo was thinking about Flor's penis. Flor, who knew what Senor Eduardo was thinking, stepped up her flirting with the Iowan.
Fate is everything, Juan Diego was considering--he thought of the little girl in pigtails, Consuelo, and how she'd said "Hi, Mister." How she reminded him of Lupe!
The way Lupe had repeated to Hombre, "It'll be all right."
"I hear you like whips," Flor had said quietly to the hobbling missionary, who had elephant shit all over his sandals.
"The king of pigs," Lupe had suddenly said, when she saw Ignacio, the lion tamer.
Juan Diego wondered why it was coming back to him now; it couldn't only be because Consuelo, that little girl in pigtails, had said "Hi, Mister." What had Consuelo called Miriam? "The lady who just appears."
"Wouldn't you cry if you never forgot how your sister was killed by a lion?" Miriam had asked the children. And then Pedro had fallen asleep with his head against Miriam's breast. It was as if the boy had been bewitched, Juan Diego was considering.
Juan Diego had been staring at his lap--at Miriam's hand, which was pressing the Viagra tablet against his right thigh--but when he look
ed up at the dinner table (at all the dinner tables), he realized he'd missed the moment when everyone had put on a party hat. He saw that even Miriam wore a paper party hat, like a king's or a queen's crown--hers was pink, however. The party hats were all pastel colors. Juan Diego touched the top of his head and felt the party hat--a paper crown, ringing his hair.
"Mine is--" he started to say.
"Powder blue," Miriam told him, and when he patted his right-front pants pocket, he felt the mah-jongg tile but not the Viagra tablet. He also felt Miriam's hand cover his.