Juan Diego had meant to ask Dorothy, too, where exactly the doctrinaire certainty of her opinions came from--you know how Juan Diego was always wondering where everything came from--but he'd been unable to summon the strength to question the autocratic young woman.
Dorothy disapproved of the Japanese tourists at El Nido; she disliked how the resort catered to the Japanese, pointing out that there was Japanese food on the menu.
"But we're very near to Japan," Juan Diego reminded her. "And other people like Japanese food--"
"After what Japan did to the Philippines?" Dorothy asked him.
"Well, the war--" Juan Diego had started to say.
"Wait till you see the Manila
American Cemetery and Memorial--if you actually end up seeing it," Dorothy said dismissively. "The Japanese shouldn't come to the Philippines."
And Dorothy pointed out that the Australians outnumbered all the other white people in the dining hall at El Nido. "Wherever they go, they go as a group--they're a gang," she said.
"You don't like Australians?" Juan Diego asked her. "They're so friendly--they're just naturally gregarious." This was greeted by Dorothy's Lupe-like shrug.
Dorothy might as well have said: If you don't understand, I couldn't possibly have any success in explaining it to you.
There were two Russian families at El Nido, and some Germans, too. "There are Germans everywhere," was all Dorothy said.
"They're big travelers, aren't they?" Juan Diego had asked her.
"They're big conquerors," Dorothy had said, rolling her dark eyes.
"But you like the food here--at El Nido. You said the food is good," Juan Diego reminded her.
"Rice is rice," was all Dorothy would say--as if she'd never said the food was good. Yet, when Dorothy was in a this-guy mood, her focus was impressive.
Their last night at El Nido, Juan Diego woke with the moonlight reflecting off the lagoon; their earlier, intense attention to "this guy" must have distracted them from closing the curtains. The way the silvery light fell across the bed and illuminated Dorothy's face was a little eerie. Asleep, there was something as lifeless as a statue about her--as if Dorothy were a mannequin who, only occasionally, sprang to life.
Juan Diego leaned over her in the moonlight, putting his ear close to her lips. He could not feel the breath escaping her mouth and nose, nor did her breasts--lightly covered by the sheets--appear to rise and fall.
For a moment, Juan Diego imagined he could hear Sister Gloria saying, as she once had: "I don't want to hear another word about Our Lady of Guadalupe lying down." For a moment, it was as if Juan Diego were lying next to the sex-doll likeness of Our Lady of Guadalupe--the gift the good gringo had given him, from that virgin shop in Oaxaca--and Juan Diego had finally managed to saw the pedestal off the mannequin's imprisoned feet.
"Is there something you're expecting me to say?" Dorothy whispered in his ear, startling him. "Or maybe you were thinking of going down on me, and waking me up that way," the young woman indifferently said.
"Who are you?" Juan Diego asked her. But he could see in the silvery moonlight that Dorothy had fallen back to sleep, or she was pretending to be asleep--or else he'd only imagined her speaking to him, and what he'd asked her.
THE SUN WAS SETTING; it lingered long enough to cast a coppery glow over the South China Sea. Their little plane from Palawan flew on, toward Manila. Juan Diego was remembering the goodbye look Dorothy gave to that tourist-weary water buffalo at the airport, as they were leaving.
"That's a water buffalo on beta-blockers," Juan Diego had remarked. "The poor thing."
"Yeah, well--you should see him when there's a caterpillar up his nose," Dorothy had said, once more giving the water buffalo the evil eye.
The sun was gone. The sky was the color of a bruise. By the far-apart, twinkling lights onshore, Juan Diego could tell they were flying over ground--the sea was now behind them. Juan Diego was staring out the plane's little window when he felt Dorothy's heavy head make contact with his shoulder and the side of his neck; her head felt as solid as a cannonball.
"What you will see, in about fifteen minutes, are the city lights," Dorothy told him. "What comes first is an unlit darkness."
"An unlit darkness?" Juan Diego asked her; his voice sounded alarmed.
"Except for the occasional ship," she answered him. "The darkness is Manila Bay," Dorothy explained. "First the bay, then the lights."
Was it Dorothy's voice or the weight of her head that was putting him to sleep? Or did Juan Diego feel the unlit darkness beckoning?
The head that rested on him was Lupe's, not Dorothy's; he was on a bus, not a plane; the mountain road that snaked by in the darkness was somewhere in the Sierra Madre--the circus was returning to Oaxaca from Mexico City. Lupe slept as heavily against him as an undreaming dog; her little fingers had loosened their grip on the two religious totems she'd been playing with, before she fell asleep.
Juan Diego was holding the coffee can with the ashes--he didn't let Lupe pinch it between her knees when she was sleeping. With her hideous Coatlicue statuette and the Guadalupe figurine--the one Juan Diego had found on the stairs, descending from El Cerrito--Lupe had been waging a war between superheroes. Lupe made the two action figures knock heads, exchange kicks, have sex; the serene-looking Guadalupe seemed an unlikely winner, and one look at Coatlicue's rattlesnake-rattle nipples (or her skirt of serpents) left little doubt that, between the two combatants, she was the representative from the Underworld.