Avenue of Mysteries - Page 129

* 27 *

A Nose for a Nose

The nighttime flight from Manila to Laoag was packed with crying children. They weren't in the air for more than an hour and a quarter, but the wailing kids made the flying time seem longer.

"Is it a weekend?" Juan Diego asked Dorothy, but she told him it was a Thursday night. "A school night!" Juan Diego declared; he was dumbfounded. "Don't these kids go to school?" (He knew, before she did it, that Dorothy was going to shrug.)

Even the nonchalance of Dorothy's shrug--it was such a slight gesture--was sufficient to dislocate Juan Diego from the present time. Not even the crying children could keep him in the moment. Why was he so easily (and repeatedly) carried back to the past? Juan Diego wondered.

Was it all to do with the beta-blocker business, or was his footing in the Philippines of an insubstantial or transient nature?

Dorothy was saying something about her inclination to talk more when there were children around--"I would rather listen to myself than the kids, you know?"--but Juan Diego found it difficult to listen to Dorothy. Though it had happened forty years ago, the conversation with Dr. Vargas at Cruz Roja--on the occasion of Vargas's stitching the thumb and index finger of Rivera's left hand--was more present in Juan Diego's mind than Dorothy's monologue en route to Laoag.

"You don't like children?" was all Juan Diego had asked her. After that, he didn't say a word for the rest of the flight. He'd listened to more of what Vargas and Rivera and Lupe were saying--over the stitches, that long-ago morning at the Red Cross hospital--than he actually heard (or would remember) of Dorothy's discursive soliloquy.

"I'm okay if people have children--I mean other people. If other adults want kids, that's fine with me," Dorothy stated. Not quite in chronological order, she began her lecture on local history; Dorothy must have wanted Juan Diego to know at least a little about where they were going. But Juan Diego missed most of what Dorothy would tell him; he was paying closer attention to a conversation at Cruz Roja, one he should have listened to more closely forty years ago.

"Jesus, jefe--were you in a sword fight?" Vargas was asking the dump boss.

"It was just a chisel," Rivera told Vargas. "I tried the bevel chisel first--it has a cutting edge that makes an oblique angle--but it wasn't working."

"So you changed chisels," Lupe prompted el jefe. Juan Diego translated this.

"Yeah, I changed chisels," Rivera said. "The problem was the object I was working on--it doesn't lie flat. It's hard to hold at the base--the object doesn't really have a base."

"It's hard to stabilize the object with one hand while you cut, or chip away, with the chisel in your other hand," Lupe explained. Juan Diego translated this clarifying point, too.

"Yeah--the object is hard to stabilize, all right," the dump boss agreed.

"What kind of object is it, jefe?" Juan Diego asked.

"Think of a doorknob--or the latch to a door, or to a window," the dump boss answered him. "Kind of like that."

"Tricky business," Lupe said. Juan Diego also translated this.

"Yeah," was all Rivera said.

"You cut the shit out of yourself, jefe," Vargas told the dump boss. "Maybe you should stick to the basurero business."

At the time, everyone had laughed--Juan Diego could still hear their laughter, as Dorothy rambled on and on. She was saying something about the northwestern coast of Luzon. Laoag was a trading port and a fishing site in the tenth and eleventh centuries--"one sees the Chinese influence," Dorothy was saying. "Then Spain invaded, with their Mary-Jesus business--your old friends," Dorothy said to Juan Diego. (The Spanish came in the 1500s; they were in the Philippines for more than three hundred years.)

But Juan Diego wasn't listening. There was other dialogue that weighed on him, a moment when he might have (could have, should have) seen something coming--a moment when he might have diverted the course of things to come.

Lupe stood near enough to touch the stitches, watching Vargas close the wounds in Rivera's thumb and index finger; Vargas told Lupe he was in danger of attaching her inquisitive little face to el jefe's hand. That was when Lupe asked Vargas what he knew about lions and rabies. "Can lions get rabies? Let's start with that," Lupe began. Juan Diego translated, but Vargas was the kind of guy who wouldn't readily admit there was something he didn't know.

"An infected dog can transmit rabies when the virus reaches the dog's salivary glands, which is about a week--or less--before the dog dies from rabies," Vargas replied.

"Lupe wants to know about a lion," Juan Diego told him.

"The incubation period in an infected human is usually about three to seven weeks, but I've had patients who developed the disease in ten days," Vargas was saying, when Lupe interrupted him.

"Let's say a rabid dog bites a lion--you know, like a rooftop dog, or like one of those perros del basurero. Does the lion get sick? What happens to the lion?" Lupe asked Vargas.

"I'm sure there have been studies--I'll have to look at what research has been done on rabies in lions," Dr. Vargas said, sighing. "Most people who get bitten by lions probably aren't worried about rabies. That wouldn't be the first worry you would have, in the case of a lion bite," he told Lupe.

Juan Diego knew there was no translation for Lupe's shrug.

Dr. Vargas was bandaging the thumb and index finger of Rivera's left hand. "You have to keep this clean and dry, jefe," Vargas was telling the dump boss. But Rivera was looking at Lupe, who looked away from him; el jefe knew when Lupe was keeping something to herself.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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