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"Don't," Dorothy warned her mother.
"A statue of the Virgin Mary falls from a pedestal and crushes her! She is killed on the spot," Miriam continued.
Dorothy could feel Juan Diego shudder against her breasts. "Now you've done it, Mother," the disapproving daughter said. "Are you trying to make him more unhappy?"
"You miss the point, Dorothy," her mom quickly said. "As the story says: 'At least she was happy. It is not every Christian who is fortunate enough to be instantly killed by the Blessed Virgin.' It's a funny scene, for Christ's sake!"
But Juan Diego was shaking his head (again), this time against young Dorothy's breasts. "That wasn't your mom--that wasn't what happened to her, was it?" Dorothy asked him.
"That's enough with the autobiographical insinuations, Dorothy," her mother said.
"Like you should talk," Dorothy said to Miriam.
No doubt, Juan Diego had noticed that Miriam's breasts were also attractive, though her nipples were not visible through her sweater. Not such a contemporary kind of bra, Juan Diego was thinking as he struggled to answer Dorothy's question about his mother, who hadn't been crushed to death by a falling statue of the Virgin Mary--not exactly.
Yet, again, Juan Diego couldn't speak. He was emotionally and sexually overcharged; there was so much adrenaline surging through his body, he couldn't contain his lust or his tears. He was missing everyone he ever knew; he was desiring both Miriam and Dorothy, to the degree that he could not have articulated which of these women he wanted more.
"Poor baby," Miriam whispered in Juan Diego's ear; he felt her kiss the back of his neck.
All Dorothy did was inhale. Juan Diego could feel her chest expand against his face.
What was it Edward Bonshaw used to say in those moments when the zealot felt that the world of human frailties must yield to God's will--when all we mere mortals could do was listen to whatever God's will was, and then do it? Juan Diego could still hear Senor Eduardo saying this: "Ad majorem Dei gloriam--to the greater glory of God."
Under the circumstances--cuddled against Dorothy's bosom, kissed by her mother--wasn't that all Juan Diego could do? Just listen to whatever God's will was, and then do it? Of course, there was a contradiction in this: Juan Diego wasn't exactly in the company of a couple of God's-will kind of women. (Miriam and Dorothy were "Spare me God's will!" kind of women.)
"Ad majorem Dei gloriam," the novelist murmured.
"It must be Spanish," Dorothy told her mom.
"For Christ's sake, Dorothy," Miriam said. "It's fucking Latin."
Juan Diego could feel Dorothy shrug. "Whatever it is," the rebellious daughter said, "it's about sex--I know it is."
* 7 *
Two Virgins
There was a panel of push-buttons on the night table in Juan Diego's hotel room. Confusingly, these buttons dimmed--or turned on and off--the lights in Juan Diego's bedroom and bathroom, but the buttons had a bewildering effect on the radio and TV.
The sadistic maid had left the radio on--this perverse behavior, often below levels of early detection, must be ingrained in hotel maids the world over--yet Juan Diego managed to mute the volume on the radio, if not turn it off. Lights had indeed dimmed; yet these same lights faintly endured, despite Juan Diego's efforts to turn them off. The TV had flourished, briefly, but was once more dark and quiet. His last resort, Juan Diego knew, would be to extract the credit card (actually, his room key) from the slot by the door to his room; then, as Dorothy had warned him, everything electrical would be extinguished, and he would be left to grope around in the pitch-dark.
I can live with dim, the writer thought. He couldn't understand how he'd slept for fifteen hours on the plane and was already tired again. Perhaps the push-button panel was at fault, or was it his newfound lust? And the cruel maid had rearranged the items in his bathroom. The pill-cutting device was on the opposite side of the sink from where he'd so carefully placed his beta-blockers (with his Viagra).
Yes, he was aware that he was now long overdue for a beta-blocker; even so, he didn't take one of the gray-blue Lopressor pills. He'd held the elliptical tablet in his hand but then had returned it to the prescription container. Juan Diego had taken a Viagra instead--a whole one. He'd not forgotten that half a pill was sufficient; he was imagining that he would need more than half a Viagra if Dorothy called him or knocked on his door.
As he lay awake, but barely, in the dimly lit hotel room, Juan Diego imagined that a visit from Miriam might also require him to have a whole Viagra. And because he was accustomed to only half a Viagra--50 milligrams, instead of 100--he was aware that his nose was stuffier than usual and his throat was dry, and he sensed the beginnings of a headache. Always deliberate, he'd drunk a lot of water with the Viagra; water seemed to lessen the side effects. And the water would make him get up in the night to pee, if the beer didn't suffice. That way, if Dorothy or Miriam never made an appearance, he wouldn't have to wait till the morning to take a diminishing Lopressor pill; it had been so long since he'd had a beta-blocker, maybe he should take two Lopressor pills, Juan Diego considered. But his confounding, adrenaline-driven desires had commingled with his tiredness, and with his eternal self-doubt. Why would either of those desirable women want to sleep with me? the novelist asked himself. By then, of course, he was asleep. There was no one to notice, but, even asleep, he had an erection.
IF THE RUSH OF adrenaline had stimulated his desire for women--for a mother and her daughter, no less--Juan Diego should have anticipated that his dreams (the reenactment of his most formative adolescent experiences) might suffer a surge of detail.
In his dream at the Regal Airport Hotel, Juan Diego almost failed to recognize Rivera's truck. Streaks of the boy's blood laced the exterior of the windswept cab; barely more recognizable was the blood-flecked face of Diablo, el jefe's dog. The gore-glazed truck, which was parked at the Templo de la Compania de Jesus, got the attention of those tourists and worshipers who'd come to the temple. It was hard not to notice the blood-spattered dog.
Diablo, who'd been left in the flatbed of Rivera's pickup, was fiercely territorial; he would not permit the bystanders to approach the truck too closely, though one bold boy had touched a drying streak of blood on the passenger-side door--long enough to ascertain that it was still sticky and, indeed, was blood.
"!Sangre!" the brave boy said.
Someone else murmured it first: "Una matanza." (This means "a bloodbath" or "a massacre.") Oh, the conclusions a crowd will come to!
From a little blood spilled on an old truck, and a bloodstained dog, this crowd was leaping to conclusions--one after another. A splinter group of the crowd rushed inside the temple; there was talk that the victim of an apparent gang-style shooting had been deposited at the feet of the big Virgin Mary. (Who would want to miss seeing that?)
