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"Yes," was all Juan Diego could manage to say. He saw that Auntie Carmen was no longer among the remaining adults in the vicinity of the newly emerging dance floor; either she'd been carried away with the dinner tables or she'd slipped off to bed before the little children. These Nocturnal Monkeys must not have won over Auntie Carmen with their charms. As for the actual nocturnal monkeys, the ones in the Chocolate Hills, Juan Diego imagined that Auntie Carmen might have liked them--if only to feed one to her pet moray.
"Yes," Juan Diego repeated. It was definitely time to slip away. He stood up from the table as if he didn't limp--as if he'd never limped--and because Miriam took immediate hold of his arm, Juan Diego almost didn't limp as he began to walk with her.
"Not staying to welcome in the New Year?" Clark French called to his former teacher.
"Oh, we're going to welcome it in, all right," Miriam called to him, once more with a languid wave of one bare arm.
"Leave them alone, Clark--let them go," Josefa said.
Juan Diego must have looked a little foolish, touching the top of his head as he limped (just slightly) away; he was wondering where his party hat had gone, not recalling how Miriam had removed it from his head with as little wasted motion as she'd expended in taking off hers.
By the time Juan Diego had climbed the stairs to the second floor, he and Miriam could hear the karaoke music from the beach club; the music was faintly audible from the outdoor balcony of the Encantador, but not for long. The distant karaoke music couldn't compete with the eviscerating sound of the Nocturnal Monkeys--the suddenly throbbing drum, the angrily combative guitar, the harmonica's piteous wail (an expression of feline pain).
Juan Diego and Miriam were still outside, on the balcony--he was opening the door to his hotel room--when the lead singer, that girl from the grave, began her lament. As the couple came inside the room and Juan Diego closed the door behind them, the sounds of the Nocturnal Monkeys were muted by the soft whir of the ceiling fan. There was another concealing sound: through the open windows--the breeze through the screens was offshore--the insipid karaoke song from the beach club was (mercifully) the only music that they could hear.
"That poor girl," Miriam said; she meant the lead singer for the Nocturnal Monkeys. "Someone should call an ambulance--she's either giving birth or being disemboweled."
These were exactly the words Juan Diego was going to say before Miriam said them. How was that possible? Was she a writer, too? (If so, surely not the same writer.) Whatever the reason, it seemed unimportant. Lust has a way of distracting you from mysteries.
Miriam had slipped her hand into Juan Diego's right-front pants pocket. She knew he'd already taken the Viagra tablet, and she wasn't interested in holding his mah-jongg tile; that pretty little game block wasn't her lucky charm.
"Darling," Miriam began, as if no one had ever used that old-fashioned endearment before--as if no one had ever touched a man's penis from inside his pants pocket.
In Juan Diego's case, in fact, no one had touched his penis in this way, though he'd written a scene where such a thing happened; it unnerved him, a little, that he'd already imagined it exactly this way.
It also unnerved him that he'd forgotten the context of a conversation he'd been having with Clark. Juan Diego couldn't remember if this had happened after or before Miriam's gecko-stabbing arrival at their dinner table. Clark had been elaborating about a recent writing student--she sounded to Juan Diego like a protegee-in-progress, though he could tell Josefa was skeptical about her. The writing student was a "poor Leslie"--a young woman who'd suffered, somehow, and of course there was a Catholic context. But lust has a way of distracting you, and suddenly Juan Diego was with Miriam.
* 19 *
Boy Wonder
Across the top of the troupe tent for the young-women acrobats was a ladder bolted horizontally to two parallel two-by-fours. The rungs were loops of rope; eighteen loops ran the length of the ladder. This was where the skywalkers practiced, because the ceiling of the acrobats' troupe tent was only twelve feet high. Even if you were hanging by your feet from the loops of rope, head down, you couldn't kill yourself if you fell off the ladder in the troupe tent.
In the main tent, where the circus acts were performed--well, that was another matter. The exact same ladder with the eighteen rope rungs was bolted across the top of the main tent, but if you fell from that ladder, you would fall eighty feet--without a net, you would die. There was no net for the skywalk at Circo de La Maravilla.
Whether you called it Circus of The Wonder or just The Wonder, an important part of the marvel was the no-net part. Whether you meant the circus (the whole circus) when you said La Maravilla, or if you meant the actual performer when you said The Wonder--meaning La Maravilla herself--what made her so special had a lot to do with the no-net part.
This was on purpose, and entirely Ignacio's doing. As a young man, the lion tamer had traveled to India and had first seen the skywalk at a circus there. That is where the lion tamer also got the idea of using children as acrobats. Ignacio acquired the no-net idea from a circus he saw in Junagadh, and from one he'd seen in Rajkot. No net, child performers, a high-risk act--the skywalk proved itself to be a real crowd-pleaser in Mexico, too. And because Juan Diego hated Ignacio, he had traveled to India--he wanted to see what the lion tamer had seen; he needed to know where Ignacio's ideas came from.
The came-from part was a major aspect of Juan Diego's life as a writer. A Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary, his India novel, had been about where everything "comes from"--in that novel, as in much of Juan Diego's childhood and adolescence, a lot came from the Jesuits or the circus. Yet no novel by Juan Diego Guerrero was set in Mexico; there were no Mexican (or Mexican-American) characters in his fiction. "Real life is too sloppy a model for good fiction," Juan Diego had said. "The good characters in novels are more fully formed than most of the people we know in our lives," he would add. "Characters in novels are more understandable, more consistent, more predictable. No good novel is a mess; many so-called real lives are messy. In a good novel
, everything important to the story comes from something or somewhere."
Yes, his novels came from his childhood and adolescence--that was where his fears came from, and his imagination came from everything he feared. This didn't mean he wrote about himself, or about what happened to him as a child and adolescent--he didn't. As a writer, Juan Diego Guerrero had imagined what he feared. You could not ever know enough about where real people came from.
Take Ignacio, the lion tamer--his depravity, in particular. He could not be blamed on India. No doubt he'd acquired his lion-taming skills at the Indian circuses, but taming lions wasn't an athletic ability--it definitely wasn't acrobatic. (Lion-taming is a matter of domination; this appears to be true in the case of male and female lion tamers.) Ignacio had mastered how to look intimidating, or he had that quality before he ever went to India. With lions, of course, the intimidation part was an illusion. And whether or not the domination worked--well, that depended on the individual lion. Or the individual lionesses, in Ignacio's case--the female factor.
The skywalk itself was mostly a matter of technique; for skywalkers, this entailed mastering a specific system. There was a way to do it. Ignacio had seen it, but the lion tamer wasn't an acrobat--he'd only married one. Ignacio's wife, Soledad, was the acrobat--or former acrobat. She'd been a trapeze artist, a flyer; physically, Soledad could do anything.
Ignacio had merely described how the skywalk looked; Soledad was the one who taught the young-women acrobats how to do it. Soledad had taught herself to skywalk on that safe ladder in the troupe tent; when she'd mastered it without falling, Soledad knew she could teach the girl acrobats how to do it.
At Circus of The Wonder, only young women--just the girl acrobats, of a certain age--were trained to be skywalkers (The Wonders themselves). This was also on purpose, and entirely Ignacio's doing. The lion tamer liked young women; he thought that prepubescent girls were the best skywalkers. Ignacio believed that if you were in the audience, you wanted to be worried about the girls falling, not thinking about them sexually; once women were old enough for you to have sexual thoughts about them--well, at least in the lion tamer's opinion, you weren't so worried about them dying if you could imagine having sex with them.
Naturally, Lupe had known this about the lion tamer from the moment she'd met him--Lupe could read Ignacio's mind. That first meeting, upon the dump kids' arrival at La Maravilla, had been Lupe's introduction to the lion tamer's thoughts. Lupe had never read a mind as terrible as Ignacio's mind before.
"This is Lupe--the new fortune-teller," Soledad was saying, introducing Lupe to the young women in the troupe tent. Lupe knew she was in foreign territory.
"Lupe prefers 'mind reader' to 'fortune-teller'--she usually knows what you're thinking, not necessarily what happens next," Juan Diego explained. He felt insecure, adrift.
