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"The king of pigs," Lupe had suddenly said.
As for those statistics from the Serengeti, or other studies of lions, the only part the king of pigs might have understood was what took place in the wild after the lionesses had killed their prey. That was when the male lions asserted their dominance--they ate their fill before the lionesses were allowed to eat their share. Juan Diego was sure the king of pigs would have been okay with that.
That morning, no one saw what happened to Ignacio when he was feeding the lionesses, but lionesses know how to be patient; lionesses have learned to wait their turn. Las senoritas--Ignacio's young ladies--would have their turn. That morning, the beginning of the end of La Maravilla would be complete.
Paco and Beer Belly were the first to find the lion tamer's body; the dwarf clowns were waddling along the avenue of troupe tents, on their way to the outdoor showers. They must have wondered how it was possible that the lionesses could have killed Ignacio when his mangled body was outside their cage. But anyone familiar with how lionesses work could figure it out, and Dr. Vargas (naturally, Vargas was the one who examined Ignacio's body) had little difficulty reconstructing a likely sequence of events.
As a novelist, when Juan Diego talked about plot--specifically, how he approached plotting a novel--he liked to talk about the "teamwork of lionesses" as "an early model." In interviews, Juan Diego would begin by saying that no one saw what happened to the lion tamer; he would then say that he never tired of reconstructing a likely sequence of events, which was at least partially responsible for his becoming a novelist. And if you add together what happened to Ignacio with what Lupe might have been thinking--well, you can see what could have fueled the dump reader's imagination, can't you?
Ignacio put the meat for the lionesses on the feeding tray, as usual. He slid the feeding tray into the open slot in the cage, as usual. Then something unusual must have happened.
Vargas couldn't restrain himself from describing the extraordinary number of claw wounds on Ignacio's arms, his shoulders, the back of his neck; one of the lionesses had grabbed him first--then other paws, with claws, took hold of him. The lionesses must have hugged him close to the bars of their cage.
Vargas said the lion tamer's nose was gone, as were his ears, both cheeks, his chin; Vargas said the fingers of both hands were gone--the lionesses had overlooked one thumb. What killed Ignacio, Vargas said, was a suffocating throat bite--what the doctor described as a "messy one."
"This was no clean kill," as Vargas would put it. He explained that a lioness could kill a wildebeest or a zebra with a single suffocating throat bite, but the bars of the cage were too close together; the lioness who eventually killed Ignacio with a suffocating throat bite couldn't fit her head between the bars--she didn't get to open her jaws as widely as she wanted to before she got a good grip on the lion tamer's throat. (This was why Vargas used the messy word to describe the lethal bite.)
After the fact, the "authorities" (as Ignacio thought of them) would investigate the wrongdoings at La Maravilla. That was what always happened after a fatal accident at a circus--the experts arrived and told you what you were doing wrong. (The experts said the amount of meat that Ignacio was feeding the lions was wrong; the number of times the lions were fed was also wrong.)
Who cares? Juan Diego would think; he couldn't remember what the experts said would have been the correct number of times or the right amount. What was wrong with La Maravilla had been what was wrong with Ignacio himself. The lion tamer had been wrong! In the end, no one at La Maravilla needed experts to tell them that.
In the end, Juan Diego would think, what Ignacio saw were those gathering yellow eyes--the final looks, less than fond, from his senoritas--the unforgiving eyes of the lion tamer's last young ladies.
THERE'S A POSTSCRIPT TO every circus that goes under. Where do the performers go when a circus goes out of business? The Wonder herself, we know, went out of business fairly soon. But we also know, don't we, that the other performers at La Maravilla couldn't do what Dolores did? As Juan Diego had discovered, not everyone could be a skywalker.
Estrella would find homes for the dogs. Well, no one wanted the mongrel; Estrella had to take him. As Lupe had said, Perro Mestizo was always the bad guy.
And no other circus had wanted Pajama Man; his vanity preceded him. For a while, on the weekends, the contortionist could be seen contorting himself for the tourists in the zocalo.
Dr. Vargas would later say he was sorry the medical school had moved. The new medical school, which is opposite a public hospital, away from the center of town, is nowhere near the morgue and the Red Cross hospital, Vargas's old stomping grounds--where the old medical school was, when Vargas still taught there.
That was the last place Vargas saw Pajama Man--at the old medical school. The contortionist's cadaver was hoisted from the acid bath to a corrugated metal gurney; the fluid in Pajama Man's cadaver drained into a pail through a hole in the gurney, near the contortionist's head. On the sloped steel autopsy slab--with a deep groove running down the middle to a draining hole, also at Pajama Man's head--the cadaver was opened. Stretched out, forever uncontorted, Pajama Man was not recognizable to the medical students, but Vargas knew the onetime contortionist.
"There is no vacancy, no absence, like the expression on a cadaver's face," Vargas would write to Juan Diego after the boy had moved to Iowa. "The human dreams are gone," Vargas wrote, "but not the pain. And traces of a living person's vanity remain. You will remember Pajama Man's attention to sculpting his beard and trimming his mustache, which betrays the time the contortionist spent looking into a mirror--either admiring or seeking to improve his looks."
"Sic transit gloria mundi," as Father Alfonso and Father Octavio were fond of intoning, with solemnity.
"Thus passes the glory of this world," as Sister Gloria was always reminding the orphans at Lost Children.
The Argentinian flyers were too good at their job, and too happy with each other, not to find work at another circus. Fairly recently (anything after 2001, the new century, struck Juan Diego as recently), Brother Pepe had heard from someone who saw them; Pepe said the Argentinian flyers were flying for a little circus in the mountains, about an hour's drive from Mexico City. They may have since retired.
After La Maravilla went out of business, Paco and Beer Belly went to Mexico City--it was where those two dwarf clowns were from, and (according to Pepe) Beer Belly had stayed there. Beer Belly went into a different business, though Juan Diego couldn't remember what it was--Juan Diego didn't know if Beer Belly was still alive--and Juan Diego had a hard time imagining Beer Belly not being a clown. (Of course, Beer Belly would always be a dwarf.)
Paco, Juan Diego knew, had died. Like Flor, Paco couldn't stay away from Oaxaca. Like Flor, Paco loved to hang out at the old hanging-out places. Paco had always been a regular at La China, that gay bar on Bustamante, the place that would
later become Chinampa. And Paco was also a regular at La Coronita--the cross-dressers' party place that closed, for a while, in the 1990s (when La Coronita's owner, who was gay, died). Like Edward Bonshaw and Flor, both La Coronita's owner and Paco would die of AIDS.
Soledad, who'd once called Juan Diego "Boy Wonder," would long outlive La Maravilla. She was still Vargas's patient. There'd been stress on her joints, no doubt--as Dr. Vargas had observed of the former trapeze artist--but these joint injuries notwithstanding, Soledad was still strong. Juan Diego would remember that she'd ended her career as a catcher, which was unusual for a woman. She'd had strong enough arms and a strong enough grip for catching men who were flying through the air.
Pepe would tell Juan Diego (around the time of the dissolution of the orphanage at Lost Children) how Vargas had been one of several people Soledad mentioned as a reference when she'd adopted two of Lost Children's orphans, a boy and a girl.
Soledad had been a wonderful mother, Pepe reported. No one was surprised. Soledad was an impressive woman--well, she could be a little cold, Juan Diego remembered, but he'd always admired her.
There'd been a brief scandal, but this was after Soledad's adopted kids had grown up and left home. Soledad had found herself with a bad boyfriend; neither Pepe nor Vargas would elaborate on the bad word, which they'd both used to describe Soledad's boyfriend, but Juan Diego took the word to mean abusive.
After Ignacio, Juan Diego was surprised to hear that Soledad would have had any patience for a bad boyfriend; she didn't strike him as the type of woman who would tolerate abuse.
As it turned out, Soledad didn't have to put up with the bad boyfriend for very long. She came home from shopping one morning, and there he was, dead, with his head on his arms, still sitting at the kitchen table. Soledad said he'd been sitting where he was when she'd left that morning.
