John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

As Lupe had complained, Perro Mestizo was “always the bad guy.” To judge the mongrel strictly by his farting — well, he was definitely the bad guy in the dogs’ troupe tent (unless the parrot man was also sleeping there).

As for Pastora, she was like Juan Diego — a worrier, an insomniac. When Pastora was awake, she panted and paced; she whined in her sleep, as if happiness were as fleeting for her as a good night’s rest.

“Lie down, Pastora,” Juan Diego said as quietly as he could — he didn’t want to wake the other dogs.

This morning, he’d easily singled out the breathing of each dog. Lupe was always the hardest to hear; she slept so quietly, she seemed to breathe scarcely at all. Juan Diego was straining to hear Lupe when his hand touched something under his pillow. He needed to grope around for the flashlight under his cot before he could see what his under-the-pillow hand had found.

The missing lid to the once-sacred coffee can of ashes was like any other plastic lid, except for its smell; there’d been more chemicals in those ashes than there were traces of Esperanza or the good gringo or Dirty White. And whatever magic might have been contained in the Virgin Mary’s old nose, it wasn’t something you could smell. There was more of the basurero on that coffee-can lid than there was anything otherworldly about it; yet Lupe had saved it — she’d wanted Juan Diego to have it.

Also tucked under Juan Diego’s pillow was the lanyard with the keys to the feeding-tray slots in the lion cages. There were two keys, of course — one for Hombre’s cage and the other for the lionesses’.

The bandmaster’s wife enjoyed weaving lanyards; she’d made one for her husband’s whistle when he was conducting the circus band. And the bandmaster’s wife had made another lanyard for Lupe. The strands of Lupe’s lanyard were crimson and white; Lupe wore the lanyard around her neck when she carried the keys to the lion cages at feeding time.

“Lupe?” Juan Diego asked, more quietly than he’d told Pastora to lie down. No one heard him — not even one of the dogs. “Lupe!” Juan Diego said sharply, shining the flashlight on her empty cot.

“I am where I always am,” Lupe was always saying. Not this time. This time, just as the dawn was breaking, Juan Diego found Lupe in Hombre’s cage.

Even when the feeding tray was removed from the slot at the floor of the cage, the slot wasn’t big enough for Hombre to escape through the opening.

“It’s safe,” Edward Bonshaw had told Juan Diego, when the Iowan first observed how Lupe fed the lions. “I just wanted to be sure about the size of the opening.”

But on their first night in Mexico City, Lupe had said to her brother: “I can fit through the slot where the feeding tray slides in and out. It’s not too small an opening for me to fit through.”

“You sound like you’ve tried it,” Juan Diego had said.

“Why would I try it?” Lupe asked him.

“I don’t know — why would you?” Juan Diego asked her.

Lupe hadn’t answered him — not that night in Mexico City, not ever. Juan Diego had always known that Lupe was usually right about the past; it was the future she didn’t do as accurately. Mind readers aren’t necessarily any good at fortune-telling, but Lupe must have believed she’d seen the future. Was it her future she imagined she saw, or was it Juan Diego’s future she was trying to change? Did Lupe believe she’d envisioned what their future would be if they stayed at the circus, and if things remained as they were at La Maravilla?

Lupe had always been isolated — as if being a thirteen-year-old girl isn’t isolating enough! We’ll never know what Lupe believed, but it must have been a terrifying burden at thirteen. (She knew her breasts weren’t going to grow any bigger; she knew she wouldn’t get her period.)

More broadly, Lupe had foreseen a future that frightened her, and she seized an opportunity to change it — dramatically. More than her brother’s future would be altered by what Lupe did. What she did would make Juan Diego live the rest of his life in his imagination, and what happened to Lupe (and to Dolores) would mark the beginning of the end of La Maravilla.

In Oaxaca, long after everyone had stopped talking about The Day of the Nose, the more talkative citizens of the city still gossiped over the lurid dissolution — the sensational demise — of their Circus of The Wonder. It is unquestionable that what Lupe did would have an effect, but that isn’t the question. What Lupe did was also terrible. Brother Pepe, who knew and loved orphans, said later it was the kind of thing that only an extremely distraught thirteen-year-old would have thought of. (Well, yes, but there’s not much anyone can do about what thirteen-year-olds think of, is there?)

Lupe must have unlocked the slot for the feeding tray in Hombre’s cage the night before — that way, she could leave the lanyard with the keys to the lion cages under Juan Diego’s pillow.

Maybe Hombre was agitated because Lupe had shown up to feed him when it was still dark outside — that was unusual. And Lupe had slid the feeding tray entirely out of the cage; furthermore, she didn’t put the meat on the tray for Hombre.

What happened next is anyone’s guess; Ignacio speculated that Lupe must have brought the meat to Hombre by crawling inside his cage. Juan Diego believed that Lupe may have pretended to eat Hombre’s meat, or at least she would have tried to keep the meat away from him. (As Lupe had explained the lion-feeding process to Señor Eduardo, you wouldn’t believe how much lions think about meat. )

And, from the first time she met him, hadn’t Lupe called Hombre “the last dog” —“the last one,” hadn’t she repeated? “El último perro,” she’d distinctly said of the lion. “El último.” (As if Hombre were the king of the rooftop dogs, the king of biters —the last biter.)

“It’ll be all right,” Lupe had repeated to Hombre, from the beginning. “Nothing’s your fault,” she’d told the lion.

That was not how the lion looked, when Juan Diego saw him sitting in a corner at the back of his cage. Hombre looked guilty. Hombre was sitting at the farthest possible distance from where Lupe lay curled in a ball — in the diagonally opposite corner of the lion’s cage. Lupe was curled up in the corner nearest the open slot for the feeding tray; her face was turned away from Juan Diego. At the time, he was grateful he’d been spared seeing Lupe’s expression. Later, Juan Diego would wish he’d seen her face — it might have spared him from imagining her expression for the rest of his life.

Hombre had killed Lupe with one bite—“a crushing bite to the back of the neck,” as Dr. Vargas would describe it after examining her body. There were no other wounds on Lupe’s body — not even a claw mark. There were scant traces of blood in the area of the bite marks on Lupe’s neck, and not a drop of Lupe’s blood anywhere in the lion’s cage. (Ignacio later said that Hombre would have licked up any blood — the lion had finished eating all the meat, too.)

After Ignacio shot Hombre — twice, in his big head — there was quite a lot of the lion’s blood in that corner of his cage, where Hombre had banished himself. Looking remorseful wouldn’t save the confused and sorrowful lion. Ignacio had taken a quick look at the placement of Lupe’s body near the open slot for the feeding tray, and at the diagonally opposite (almost submissive) position Hombre had chosen in the farthest corner of the lion’s cage. And when Juan Diego had come limping, on the run, to the lion tamer’s tent, Ignacio had brought his gun with him to the scene of the crime.