John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

Esperanza knew how clean the floors were in Lost Children; after all, she had cleaned them. She was barefoot when she came to visit her children; she could be more silent that way, and — given the hours she kept during her time not spent as a cleaning woman — almost everyone else in Niños Perdidos was asleep when Esperanza was creeping around. Yes, she came to kiss her niños when they were sleeping — in this single respect, Esperanza resembled other moms — but she also came to steal from them, or to leave them a little perfumed money under their pillows. Most of all, Esperanza made these silent visits in order to use the bathroom Juan Diego and Lupe shared. She must have wanted some privacy; either in the Hotel Somega or in the servants’ quarters of the orphanage, Esperanza probably had no privacy. She must have wanted, at least once a day, to bathe alone. And who knows how the other female servants at Lost Children treated Esperanza? Did those other women like sharing their communal bathroom with a prostitute?

Because Rivera had left his stick shift in reverse, he backed over Juan Diego’s foot; because of a broken side-view mirror, the dump kids slept in a small library, a former reading room, in the Jesuit orphanage. And because their mother was a cleaning woman for the Jesuits ( because she was also a prostitute), Esperanza haunted the same floor of Niños Perdidos where the new American missionary lived.

Wasn’t this an arrangement that might have endured? Doesn’t the deal they all had sound compatible enough to have worked? Why wouldn’t the dump kids have preferred, eventually, their life at Lost Children to their shack in Guerrero? As for the perishable beauty, which Esperanza surely was, and the perpetually bleeding Edward Bonshaw, who so tirelessly whipped himself — well, is it absurd to imagine they might have taught each other something?

Edward Bonshaw might have benefited from hearing Esperanza’s thoughts about celibacy and self-flagellation, and it’s certain she would have had something to say to him on the subject of sacrificing his life to prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night.

In turn, Señor Eduardo might have asked Esperanza why she was still working as a prostitute. Didn’t she already have a job and a safe place to sleep? Was it her vanity, perhaps? Was she so vain that being wanted was somehow better than being loved?

Weren’t both Edward Bonshaw and Esperanza going to extremes? Wouldn’t some middle ground have worked as well?

In one of their many late-night conversations, here is how Brother Pepe put it to Señor Eduardo: “Merciful Lord, there must be some middle ground where it is possible not to sacrifice your life and still prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night!” But they would not resolve this; Edward Bonshaw would never explore that middle ground.

They would not, all of them, live together long enough to learn what might have happened. It was Vargas who first said the circus word; the undying idea of the circus came from him.

Blame it on the atheist. Hold the secular humanist (the everlasting enemy of Catholicism) accountable for what happened next. It might not have been a bad life: to be slightly less than actual orphans, or to be orphans with unusual privileges, at Lost Children. It could have turned out all right.

But Vargas had planted the circus seed. What children don’t love the circus, or imagine that they do?

When the dump niños vacated the shack in Guerrero for Lost Children, they brought almost as many water pistols with them as they had clothes. Of course the nuns were going to confiscate the squirt guns, but Lupe let them find only the ones that didn’t work. The nuns never knew what the water pistols were for.

Juan Diego and Lupe had practiced on Rivera; if they could fool the dump boss with the stigmata trick, they thought they could make it work on anyone. They didn’t fool him for long. Rivera could tell real blood from fake, and Rivera bought the beets — Lupe was always asking el jefe to buy her beets.

The dump kids would fill a water pistol with a mixture of beet juice and water. Juan Diego liked to add a little of his own saliva to the mixture. He said his spit gave the beet juice a “bloodier texture.”

“Explain texture, ” Lupe had said.

The way the trick worked was that Juan Diego would conceal the loaded squirt gun under the waistband of his pants, beneath an untucked shirt. The safest target was someone’s shoe; the victims couldn’t feel the fake blood when it was squirted on their shoes. Sandals were a problem; you could feel the gunk against your bare toes.

With women, Juan Diego liked to squirt them from behind, on a bare calf. Before the woman could turn her head to look, the boy had time to hide the water pistol. That was when Lupe started babbling. She pointed first to the area of spontaneous bleeding, then to the sky; if the blood were Heaven-sent, surely the source was the everlasting abode of God (and of the blessed dead). “She says the blood is a miracle,” Juan Diego would translate for his sister.

Sometimes Lupe would equivocate, incomprehensibly. “No, sorry — it’s either a miracle or ordinary bleeding,” Juan Diego would then say. Lupe was already bending down, the rag in her small hand; she would wipe the blood, miraculous or not, off the shoe (or the woman’s bare calf) before the victim had time to react. If the money for this service was immediately forthcoming, the dump kids were prepared to protest; they always refused to accept payment for pointing out a miracle, or for wiping the holy (or unholy) blood away. Well, at least they refused the money at first ; dump kids weren’t beggars.

After the accident with Rivera’s truck, Juan Diego found that the wheelchair helped; he was usually the one to hold out his palm and reluctantly accept compensation, and the wheelchair offered more options for concealing the squirt gun. The crutches were a bit awkward — that is, letting go of one of them in order to extend his hand. When Juan Diego was on crutches, Lupe was usually the one who hesitantly took the money — never, of course, with the hand that had wiped the blood away.

In the jerkily limping stage of Juan Diego’s recovery — the category of limp that would endure, the one that was not a phase — the dump niños made more impromptu decisions. Generally, Lupe (in her disinclined way) yielded to the men who insisted on rewarding her. With the women victims of the stigmata trick, the limping Juan Diego discovered that a crippled boy was more persuasively sympathetic than an angry-looking girl. Or was it that the women sensed Lupe was reading their minds?

The dump kids reserved the actual stigmata word for those high-risk occasions when Juan Diego dared to aim for a direct hit on the potential customer’s hand; this was always a from-behind shot with the water pistol. When people allow their hands to rest at their sides, whether they are standing or walking, their palms face behind them.

When a sudden splash of diluted, beet-red blood appears in the palm of your hand — and there’s a girl kneeling at your feet, smearing her rapturous face with the blood in your palm — well, you might be more than usually vulnerable to religious belief. And that was when the crippled boy began screaming the stigmata word. With the tourists in the zócalo, Juan Diego would resort to bilingual screaming — both estigmas and stigmata .

The one time the dump kids fooled Rivera, they got him with the shoe shot. The dump boss had glanced at the sky, but he wasn’t looking for Heavenly evidence. “Maybe a bird is bleeding,” was all Rivera had said; nor did el jefe offer to tip the dump kids.