"It's a nose for a nose--that's good enough for me. Translate everything I say," Lupe said to Juan Diego. "When I die, don't burn me. Give me the whole hocus-pocus," Lupe said, looking straight at Father Alfonso and Father Octavio. "If you want to burn something," she said to Rivera and Juan Diego, "you can burn my clothes--my few things. If a new puppy has died--well, sure, you can burn the puppy with my stuff. But don't burn me. Give me what she would want me to have," Lupe told them all--pointing to the Mary Monster with the boxer's nose. "And sprinkle--just sprinkle, don't throw--the ashes at the Virgin Mary's feet. Like you said the first time," Lupe said to the parrot man, "maybe not all the ashes, and only at her feet!"
As he translated her, word for word, Juan Diego could see that the two old priests were captivated by Lupe's speech. "Be careful of the little Jesus--don't get the ashes in his eyes," Lupe told her brother. (She was even being considerate of the shrunken Christ, suffering on the diminutive cross, bleeding at the big Virgin Mary's feet.)
Juan Diego didn't have to be a mind reader to know Brother Pepe's thoughts. Could this be a conversion, in Lupe's case? As Pepe had said on the occasion of the first scattering: "This is different. This represents quite a change in thinking."
This is what we think about in a monument to the spiritual world,
such as the Temple of the Society of Jesus. In such a place--in the towering presence of a giant Virgin Mary--we have religious (or irreligious) thoughts. We hear a speech like Lupe's, and we think of our religious differences or similarities; we hear only what we imagine are Lupe's religious beliefs, or her religious feelings, and we weigh her beliefs or feelings against our own.
Vargas, the atheist--the doctor who'd brought his own binoculars and a knife to investigate a miracle, or to examine an unmiraculous nose--would have said that, for a thirteen-year-old, Lupe's spiritual sophistication was "pretty impressive."
Rivera, who knew Lupe was special--in fact, the dump boss, who was a Mary worshiper and very superstitious, was afraid of Lupe--well, what can one say of el jefe's thoughts? (Rivera was probably relieved to hear that Lupe's religious beliefs were sounding less radical than those he'd heard her express before.)
And those two old priests, Father Alfonso and Father Octavio--surely they were congratulating themselves, and the staff at Lost Children, for having made such apparent progress in the case of a challenging and incomprehensible child.
The good Brother Pepe may have been praying there was hope for Lupe, after all; maybe she wasn't as "lost" as he'd first assumed she was--maybe, if only in translation, Lupe could make sense, or at least make sense religiously. To Pepe, Lupe sounded converted.
No burning--that was probably all that mattered to dear Senor Eduardo. Certainly, no burning was a step in the right direction.
This must have been what they all thought, respectively. And even Juan Diego, who knew his little sister best--even Juan Diego missed hearing what he should have heard.
Why was a thirteen-year-old girl thinking of dying? Why was this the time for Lupe to be making last requests? Lupe was a girl who could read what others were thinking--even lions, even lionesses. Why had none of them been able to read Lupe's mind?
* 28 *
Those Gathering Yellow Eyes
This time, Juan Diego was so deeply immersed in the past--or he was so removed from the present moment--that the sound of the landing gear dropping down, or even the jolt of their landing in Laoag, didn't instantly bring him back to Dorothy's conversation.
"This is where Marcos is from," Dorothy was saying.
"Who?" Juan Diego asked her.
"Marcos. You know Mrs. Marcos, right?" Dorothy asked him. "Imelda--she of the million shoes, that Imelda. She's still a member of the House of Representatives from this district," Dorothy told him.
"Mrs. Marcos must be in her eighties now," Juan Diego said.
"Yeah--she's really old, anyway," Dorothy concluded.
There was an hour's drive ahead of them, Dorothy had forewarned him--another dark road, another night, with quickly passing glimpses of foreignness. (Thatched huts; churches with Spanish architecture; dogs, or only their eyes.) And, befitting of the darkness surrounding them in their car--their innkeeper had arranged the driver and the limo--Dorothy described the unspeakable suffering of the American prisoners of war in North Vietnam. She seemed to know the terrible details of the torture sessions in the Hanoi Hilton (as the Hoa Lo prison in the North Vietnamese capital was called); she said the most brutal torture methods were used on the U.S. military pilots who'd been shot down and captured.
More politics--old politics, Juan Diego was thinking--in the passing darkness. It wasn't that Juan Diego wasn't political, but, as a fiction writer, he was wary of people who presumed they knew what his politics were (or should be). It happened all the time.
Why else would Dorothy have brought Juan Diego here? Just because he was an American, and Dorothy thought he should see where those aforementioned "frightened nineteen-year-olds," as she'd called them, came for their R&R--fearfully, as Dorothy had emphasized, in terror of the torture they anticipated if they were ever captured by the North Vietnamese.
Dorothy was sounding like those reviewers and interviewers who thought Juan Diego should somehow be more Mexican-American as a writer. Because he was a Mexican American, was he supposed to write like one? Or was it that he was supposed to write about being one? (Weren't his critics essentially telling him what his subject should be?)
"Don't become one of those Mexicans who--" Pepe had blurted out to Juan Diego, before stopping himself.
"Who what?" Flor had asked Pepe.
"One of those Mexicans who hate Mexico," Pepe had dared to say, before hugging Juan Diego to him. "You don't want to become one of those Mexicans who are always coming back, either--the ones who can't stay away," Pepe had added.
Flor had just stared at poor Pepe; she'd given him a withering look. "What else shouldn't he become?" she'd asked Pepe. "What other kind of Mexican is forbidden?"
Flor had never understood the writing part of it: how there would be expectations of what a Mexican-American writer should (or shouldn't) write about--how what was forbidden (in the minds of many reviewers and interviewers) was a Mexican-American writer who didn't write about the Mexican-American "experience."
If you accept the Mexican-American label, Juan Diego believed, then you accept performing to those expectations.