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"Don't forget his sister," Consuelo said to Pedro. "A lion killed Mister's sister," Consuelo explained to Dr. Quintana, in case the doctor hadn't heard the litany of woes Juan Diego was suffering--and now, on top of everything, he'd stepped on sea urchins!
Dr. Quintana was gently touching Juan Diego's feet. "The trouble with sea urchins is their spines are movable--they don't get you just once," the doctor was saying.
"It's not my feet--it's not the sea urchins," Juan Diego tried to tell her quietly.
"What?" Josefa asked; she bent her head closer, to hear him.
"I should have married a woman doctor," he whispered to Josefa; Clark and the children couldn't hear him.
"Why didn't you?" Dr. Quintana asked, smiling at him.
"I didn't ask her soon enough--she said yes to someone else," Juan Diego said softly.
How could he have told Dr. Quintana more? It was impossible to tell Clark French's wife why he'd never married--why a lifetime partner, a companion till the end, was a friend he'd never made. Not even if Clark and the children hadn't been there on the beach could Juan Diego have told Josefa why he'd not dared to emulate the match Edward Bonshaw had made with Flor.
Casual acquaintances, even colleagues and close friends--including those students he'd befriended, and had seen a bit of socially (not only in class or in teacher-writer conferences)--all presumed that Juan Diego's adoptive parents had been a couple no one would have (or could have) sought to emulate. They'd been so queer--in every sense of the word! Surely, this was the commonplace version of why Juan Diego had never married anyone, why he'd not even made an effort to find that companion for life, the one so many people believed they wanted. (Surely, Juan Diego knew, this was the story Clark French would have imparted to his wife about his former teacher--an obdurate bachelor, in Clark's eyes, and a godless secular humanist.)
Only Dr. Stein--dear Dr. Rosemary!--understood, Juan Diego believed. Dr. Rosemary Stein didn't know everything about her friend and patient; she didn't understand dump kids--she hadn't been there when he'd been a child and a young adolescent. But Rosemary did know Juan Diego when he'd lost Senor Eduardo and Flor; Dr. Stein had been their doctor, too.
Dr. Rosemary, as Juan Diego thought of her--most fondly--knew why he'd never married. It wasn't because Flor and Edward Bonshaw had been a queer couple; it was because those two had loved each other so much that Juan Diego couldn't imagine ever finding a partnership as good as theirs--they'd been inimitable. And he'd loved them not only as parents, not to mention as "adoptive" parents. He'd loved them as the best (meaning, the most unattainable) couple he ever knew.
"He misses stuff," Pedro had said, citing geckos and the dump.
"Don't forget his sister," Consuelo had said.
More than a lion had killed Lupe, Juan Diego knew, but he could no more say that--to any of them, there on the beach--than he could have become a skywalker. Juan Diego could no more have saved his sister than he could have become The Wonder.
And if he had asked Dr. Rosemary Stein to marry him--that is, before she'd said yes to someone else--who knows if she would have accepted the dump reader's proposal?
"How was the swimming?" Clark French asked his former teacher. "I mean before the sea urchins," Clark needlessly explained.
"Mister likes to bob around in one place," Consuelo answered. "Don't you, Mister?" the little girl in pigtails asked.
"Yes, I do, Consuelo," Juan Diego told her.
"Treading water, a little dog-paddling--it's a lot like writing a novel, Clark," the dump reader told his former student. "It feels like you're going a long way, because it's a lot of work, but you're basically covering old ground--you're hanging out in familiar territory."
"I see," Clark said cautiously. He didn't see, Juan Diego knew. Clark was a world-changer; he wrote with a mission, a positive agenda.
Clark French had no appreciation for dog-paddling or treading water; they were like living in the past, like going nowhere. Juan Diego lived there, in the past--reliving, in his imagination, the losses that had marked him.
* 22 *
Manana
"If something in your life is wrong, or just unresolved, Mexico City is probably not the answer to your dreams," Juan Diego had written in an early novel. "Unless you're feeling in charge of your life, don't go there." The female character who says this isn't Mexican, and we never learn what happens to her in Mexico City--Juan Diego's novel didn't go there.
The circus site, in northern Mexico City, was adjacent to a graveyard. The sparse grass in the stony field, where they exercised the horses and walked the elephants, was gray with soot. There was so much smog in the air, the lions' eyes were watering when Lupe fed them.
Ignacio was making Lupe feed Hombre and the lionesses; the girl acrobats--the ones who were anticipating their periods--had revolted against the lion tamer's tactics. Ignacio had convinced the girl acrobats that the lions knew when the girls got their periods, and the girls were afraid of bleeding near the big cats. (Of course, the girls were afraid of getting their periods in the first place.)
Lupe, who believed she would never get her period, was unafraid. And because she could read the lions' minds, Lupe knew that Hombre and the lionesses never thought about the girls' menstruating.
"Only Ignacio thinks about it," Lupe had told Juan Diego. She liked feeding Hombre and the lionesses. "You wouldn't believe how much they think about meat," she'd explained to Edward Bonshaw. The Iowan wanted to watch Lupe feeding the lions--just to be sure the process was safe.
Lupe showed Senor Eduardo how the slot in the cage for the feeding tray could be locked and unlocked. The tray slid in and out, along the floor of the cage. Hombre would extend his paw through the slot, reaching for the meat Lupe put on the tray; this was more a gesture of desire on the lion's part than an actual attempt to grab the meat.
When Lupe slid the tray full of meat back inside the lion's cage, Hombre always withdrew his extended paw. The lion waited for the meat in a sitting position; like a broom, his tail swished from side to side across the floor of his cage.
