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"I'm sorry, I didn't mean you--I was speaking to those cats," Dorothy told him, but the young ghost had vanished.
Juan Diego hadn't heard Dorothy's apology to the quickly disappearing prisoner of war--he was one of the ghost guests. The emaciated young man was gray-skinned and dressed in prison-gray garb--one of the tortured captives of the North Vietnamese. And by his haunted, guilty-looking expression--as Dorothy would later explain to Juan Diego--she'd surmised he was one of the ones who'd broken down under torture. Maybe the young P.O.W. had capitulated under pain. Perhaps he'd signed letters that said he did things he never did. Some of the young Americans had made broadcasts, reciting Communist propaganda.
It wasn't their fault; they shouldn't blame themselves, Dorothy always tried to tell the ghost guests at El Escondrijo, but the ghosts had a way of vanishing before you could tell them anything.
"I just want them to know they're forgiven for whatever they did, or were forced to do," was how Dorothy would put it to Juan Diego. "But these young ghosts keep their own hours. They don't listen to us--they don't interact with us at all."
Dorothy would also tell Juan Diego that the captured Americans who'd died in North Vietnam didn't always dress in their gray prison garb; some of the younger ones wore their fatigues. "I don't know if they have a choice regarding what they wear--I've seen them in sportswear, Hawaiian shirts and shit like that," was the way Dorothy would put it to Juan Diego. "Nobody knows the rules for ghosts."
Juan Diego hoped he would be spared seeing the tortured P.O.W. ghosts in their Hawaiian shirts, but his first night at the old inn on the outskirts of Vigan, the ghostly appearances of the long-dead R&R clientele at El Escondrijo were as yet unseen by Juan Diego; he slept in the contentious company of his own ghosts. Juan Diego was dreaming--in this case, it was a loud dream. (It's no wonder Juan Diego didn't hear Dorothy speaking to those cats or apologizing to that ghost.)
Lupe had asked for the "whole hocus-pocus," and the Temple of the Society of Jesus had not held back. Brother Pepe did his best; he tried to persuade the two old priests to keep the service simple, but Pepe should have known there would be no restraining them. This was the Church's bread and butter, the death of innocents--the death of children didn't call for restraint. Lupe would get a no-holds-barred service--nothing simple about it.
Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had insisted on the open casket. Lupe was in a white dress, with a white scarf snug around her neck--hence no bite marks, no swelling, showed. (You were forced to imagine what the back of her neck must have looked like.) And there was so much incense-swinging, the unfamiliar-looking face of the broken-nosed Virgin Mary was obscured in a pungent haze. Rivera was worried about the smoke--as if Lupe were being consumed by the hellfires of the basurero, as she once would have wanted.
"Don't worry--we'll burn something later, like she said," Juan Diego whispered to el jefe.
"I've got my eye out for a dead puppy--I'll find one," the dump boss answered him.
They were both disconcerted by the Hijas del Calvario--the "Daughters of Calvary," the wailing nuns for hire.
"The professional weepers," as Pepe called them, seemed excessive. It was enough to have Sister Gloria leading the orphaned kindergartners in their oft-rehearsed responsive prayer.
"!Madre! Ahora y siempre," the children repeated, after Sister Gloria. "Mother! Now and forever, you will be my guide." But even to this repetitive plea, and to all else--to the cry-on-command Daughters of Calvary, to the incense wreathing the Mary Monster's towering presence--the darker-skinned Virgin Mary, with her boxer's nose, made no response (not that Juan Diego could see her clearly in the rising clouds of sacred smoke).
Dr. Vargas came to Lupe's service; he rarely took his eyes from the untrustworthy statue of the Virgin Mary, nor did he join the procession of mourners (and curious tourists, or other sightseers) who filed to the front of the Jesuit temple for a look at the lion girl in her open casket. That was what they were calling Lupe, in and around Oaxaca: the "lion girl."
Vargas had come to Lupe's service with Alejandra; these days, she seemed to be more than a dinner-party girlfriend, and Alejandra had liked Lupe, but Vargas wouldn't join his girlfriend for a look at Lupe in the open casket.
Juan Diego and Rivera couldn't help overhearing their conversation. "You're not looking?" Alejandra had asked Vargas.
"I know what Lupe looks like--I've seen her," was all Vargas said.
After that, Juan Diego and the dump boss didn't want to see Lupe all in white in the open casket. Juan Diego and el jefe had hoped that their memories of Lupe, when she was alive, would be how they always saw her. They sat unmoving in their pew, next to Vargas, thinking the way a dump kid and a dump boss think: of things to burn, of the ashes they would sprinkle at the Mary Monster's feet--"just sprinkle, don't throw," as Lupe had instructed them--"maybe not all the ashes, and only at her feet!" as Lupe had distinctly said.
The curious tourists and the other sightseers who'd seen the lion girl in her open casket rudely left the temple before the recession; apparently, they were disappointed not to see signs of the lion attack on Lupe's lifeless body. (There would be no open-casket viewing of Ignacio's body--as Dr. Vargas, who'd seen the lion tamer's remains, fully understood.)
The recessional hymn was "Ave Maria," unfortunately sung by an ill-chosen children's choir--also for hire, like the Daughters of Calvary. These were brats in uniforms from a superior-sounding school of music; their parents were taking snapshots during the departing procession of the clergy and the choir.
At this point, discordantly, the "Hail Mary" choir was met by the circus band. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had insisted that the circus band remain outside the Templo de la Compania de Jesus, but La Maravilla's brass-and-drum version of "Streets of Laredo" was difficult to suppress; their moribund and dirgelike distortion of the cowboy's lament was loud enough for Lupe herself to have heard it.
The music-school children's voices, straining to make their "Ave Maria" heard, were no match for the uproarious blare and percussion of the circus band. You could hear the piteous lamenting of La Maravilla's "Streets of Laredo" in the zocalo. Flor's friends--those prostitutes at work in the Hotel Somega--said the cowboy's histrionic death song reached them as far away from the Jesuit temple as Zaragoza Street.
"Perhaps the sprinkling of the ashes will be simpler," Brother Pepe said hopefully to Juan Diego, as they were leaving Lupe's service--the unholy hocus-pocus, the flat-out mumbo jumbo of a Catholic kind, which was exactly what Lupe had wanted.
"Yes--more spiritual, perhaps," Edward Bonshaw had chimed in.
He'd not at first understood the English translation of Hijas del Calvario, which indeed did mean "Daughters of Calvary," though in the pocket dictionary Senor Eduardo consulted, the Iowan seized upon the informal meaning of Calvario or Calvary, which could mean "a series of disasters."
Edward Bonshaw, whose life would be a series of disasters, had mistakenly imagined that the nuns who wept for hire were called "Daughters of a Series of Disasters." Given the lives of those orphans left at Lost Children, and given the awful circumstances of Lupe's death--well, one can appreciate the parrot man's misunderstanding of the Hijas del Calvario.
And one could sympathize with Flor--her appreciation of the parrot man was wearing a little thin. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Flor had been waiting for Edward Bonshaw to shit or get off the pot. Upon Senor Eduardo's confusing the Daughters of Calvary with an order of nuns dedicated to a series of disasters--well, Flor had just rolled her eyes.
When, if ever, would Edward Bonshaw find the balls to confess his love for her to the two old priests?
"The main thing is tolerance, right?" Senor Eduardo was saying, as they were leaving the Temple of the Society of Jesus; they passed the portrait of Saint Ignatius, who was ignoring them but looking to Heaven for guidance. Pajama Man was splashing his face in the fountain of holy water, and Soledad and the young-women acrobats bowed their heads there as Juan Diego limped by.
Paco and Beer Belly were standing outside the temple, where the brass-and-drum bombardment of the circus band was loudest.
