"Yes, that would be fun," Juan Diego answered her. He was still staring at the bathroom mirror when the little gecko came out from behind the mirror and stared back at him with its bright, unblinking eyes. There was no question that the gecko saw him, but, just to be sure, Juan Diego shrugged his shoulders and moved his head from side to side. The gecko darted behind the bathroom mirror; the little lizard hid itself in half a second.
"I'll be right there!" Juan Diego called to Dorothy; the outdoor shower (not to mention, Dorothy in it) looked very inviting. And the gecko had absolutely seen him--Juan Diego knew he was still alive, or at least visible. He was not some kind of ghost--not yet.
"I'm coming!" Juan Diego called to her.
"Promises, promises," Dorothy called back to him from the outdoor shower.
She liked to make his cock slippery with shampoo and rub herself against him under the water. Juan Diego wondered why he'd not known any girlfriends like Dorothy, but even as a younger man, he supposed there'd been a bookishness to his conversation, a seeming seriousness that had driven the good-time girls away. And was this why, in his imagination, Juan Diego would have been prone to make up a young woman like Dorothy?
"Don't worry about the ghosts--I just thought you should see them," Dorothy was telling him in the shower. "They don't expect anything from you--they're just sad, and there's nothing you can do about their sadness. You're an American. What they went through is part of you, or you're part of what they went through--or something." Dorothy went on and on.
But what part of them was truly part of him? Juan Diego wondered. People--even ghosts, if Dorothy was a kind of ghost--were always trying to make him "part of" something!
You cannot take the scavenging out of scavengers; los pepenadores will be foreigners wherever they go. What was Juan Diego part of? A kind of universal foreignness traveled with him; it was who he was, not only as a writer. Even his name was fictitious--not "Rivera" but "Guerrero." The American immigration lawyer had objected to Juan Diego's having Rivera's name. It didn't suffice that Rivera was "probably not" Juan Diego's father. Rivera was alive; it didn't look good that the adopted boy had Rivera's name.
Pepe had to explain this awkwardness to the dump boss; Juan Diego would have had trouble telling el jefe that the "adopted boy" needed a new name.
"How about 'Guerrero'?" Rivera had suggested, looking only at Pepe, not at Juan Diego.
"Are you okay with 'Guerrero,' jefe?" Juan Diego had asked the dump boss.
"Sure," Rivera said; he now allowed himself to look at Juan Diego, just a little. "Even a dump kid should know where he comes from," el jefe had said.
"I won't forget where I come from, jefe," was all Juan Diego said, his name already becoming something imagined.
Nine people had seen a miracle in the Templo de la Compania de Jesus in Oaxaca--tears had fallen from a statue's eyes. This was no less than a statue of the Virgin Mary, but the miracle was never recorded, and six of the nine witnesses had died. Upon the deaths of the surviving three--Vargas, Alejandra, and Juan Diego--the miracle itself would die, wouldn't it?
If Lupe were alive, she would have told Juan Diego that this crying statue wasn't the major miracle in his life. "We're the miraculous ones," Lupe had told him. And wasn't Lupe herself the major miracle? What she had known, what she had risked--how she had willed another future for him! These mysteries were what Juan Diego was part of. Next to these mysteries, his other experiences paled.
Dorothy was talking about something; she was still going on and on.
"About the ghosts," Juan Diego interrupted her, as casually as he could. "I guess there are ways to tell them apart from the other guests."
"The way they vanish when you look at them makes it pretty clear," Dorothy said.
At breakfast, Dorothy and Juan Diego would discover that El Escondrijo wasn't very crowded; there weren't many other guests. The ones who came to breakfast at the outdoor dining tables didn't vanish when you looked at them, but they did seem a little old and tired-looking to Juan Diego. Of course, he'd looked at himself in a mirror this morning--a little longer than he was used to doing--and he would have said that he seemed a little old and tired-looking, too.
After breakfast, Dorothy wanted Juan Diego to see the little church or chapel among the compound of old buildings; she thought the architecture might remind Juan Diego of the Spanish style he'd been accustomed to in Oaxaca. (Oh, those Spaniards--they really got around! Juan Diego was thinking.)
The interior of the chapel was very basic, not at all ornate or fancy. There was an altar like a small cafe table, one for two customers. There was a Christ on the Cross--this Jesus didn't appear to be suffering too greatly--and a Virgin Mary, not a towering but a merely life-size presence. The two of them could almost have been having a conversation with each other. But these familiar two, this mother and son, were not the two most commanding presences--this Mary and her Jesus weren't the two who got Juan Diego's immediate interest.
It was the two young ghosts in the foremost pew of the chapel who seized all of Juan Diego's attention. The young men were holding hands, and one of them rested his head on the other's shoulder. They seemed somehow more than former comrades-in-arms, though they were both wearing their fatigues. It was not that the long-dead American captives were (or had been) lovers that took Juan Diego by surprise. These ghosts had not seen Dorothy and Juan Diego enter the little church; not only did these two not vanish, but they continued to look beseechingly at Mary and Jesus--as if they believed they were alone and unobserved in the chapel.
Juan Diego would have thought that, when you were dead and you were a ghost, your countenance--especially, in a church--would be different. Wouldn't you
no longer be seeking guidance? Wouldn't you, somehow, know the answers?
But these two ghosts looked as clueless as any two troubled lovers who had ever stared uncomprehendingly at Mary and Jesus. These two, Juan Diego knew, didn't know anything. These two dead soldiers were no better informed than anyone living; these two young ghosts were still looking for answers.
"No more ghosts--I've seen enough ghosts," Juan Diego said to Dorothy, at which point the two former comrades-in-arms vanished.
Juan Diego and Dorothy would stay at The Hiding Place that day and night--a Friday. They would leave Vigan on a Saturday; they took another night flight from Laoag to Manila. Once more--except for the occasional ship--they flew over the unlit darkness, which was Manila Bay.
* 31 *
Adrenaline
Another nighttime arrival in another hotel, Juan Diego was thinking, but he'd seen the lobby of this one before--the Ascott, in Makati City, where Miriam had said he should stay when he returned to Manila. How strange: to be checking in with Dorothy, where he'd once imagined Miriam's attention-getting entrance.