John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

Flor was smoking as she drove, holding her cigarette out the driver’s-side window, and Edward Bonshaw, who was nervous — he knew Flor was a prostitute; he didn’t know she was a transvestite — said, as casually as he could, “I used to smoke. I kicked the habit.”

“You think celibacy isn’t a habit ?” Flor asked him. Señor Eduardo was surprised that Flor’s English was so good. He knew nothing of the unmentionable Houston experience in her life, and no one had told him that Flor had been born a boy (or that she still had a penis).

Flor navigated her way through a wedding party that had exited a church into the street: the bride and groom, the guests, a nonstop mariachi band—“the usual imbeciles,” Flor called them.

“I’m worried about los niños at the circus,” Edward Bonshaw confided to the transvestite, choosing not to engage the celibacy subject, or tactfully allowing it to wait.

“Los niños de la basura are almost old enough to be getting married,” Flor said, as she made threatening gestures out the driver’s-side window to anyone (even children) in the wedding party, the cigarette now dangling from her lips. “If these kids were getting married, I would be worried about them,” Flor carried on. “At the circus, the worst that can go wrong is a lion kills you. There’s a lot more that can go wrong with a marriage.”

“Well, if that’s how you feel about marriage, I suppose celibacy isn’t such a bad idea,” Edward Bonshaw said, in his Jesuitical way.

“There’s only one actual lion at the circus,” Juan Diego interposed from the backseat. “All the rest are lionesses.”

“So that asshole Ignacio is a lioness tamer — is that what you’re saying?” Flor asked the boy.

She’d just managed to get around, or through, the wedding party, when Flor and the VW Beetle encountered a tilted burro cart. The cart was overloaded with melons, but all the melons had rolled to the rear end of the cart, hoisting the burro by its harness into the air; the melons outweighed the little donkey, whose hooves were flailing. The front end of the burro cart was also suspended in the air.

“Another dangling donkey,” Flor said. With surprising delicacy, she gave the finger to the burro-cart driver — using the same long-fingered hand that once again held her cigarette (between her thumb and index finger). About a dozen melons had rolled into the street, and the burro-cart driver had abandoned the dangling donkey because some street kids were stealing his melons.

“I know that guy,” Flor said, in her by-the-way fashion; no one in the little VW knew if she meant as a client or in another way.

When Flor drove into the circus grounds at Cinco Señores, the crowd for the matinee performance had gone home. The parking lot was almost empty; the audience for the evening show hadn’t begun to arrive.

“Watch out for the elephant shit,” Flor warned them, when they were carrying the dump kids’ stuff down the avenue of troupe tents. Edward Bonshaw promptly stepped in a fresh pile of it; the elephant shit covered his whole foot, up to his ankle.

“There’s no saving your sandals from elephant shit, honey,” Flor told him. “You’ll be better off barefoot, once we find you a hose.”

“Merciful God,” Señor Eduardo said. The missionary walked on, but with a limp; it was not as exaggerated a limp as Juan Diego’s, but enough of one to make the Iowan aware of the comparison. “Now everyone will think we’re related,” Edward Bonshaw good-naturedly told the boy.

“I wish we were related,” Juan Diego told him; he had blurted it out, too sincerely to have any hope of stopping himself.

“You will be related — all the rest of your lives,” Lupe said, but Juan Diego was suddenly unable to translate this; his eyes had welled with tears and he couldn’t speak, nor could he understand that, in this case, Lupe was being accurate about the future.

Edward Bonshaw had difficulty speaking, too. “That’s a very sweet thing to say to me, Juan Diego,” the Iowan haltingly said. “I would be proud to be related to you,” Señor Eduardo told the boy.

“Well, isn’t that great? You’re both very sweet,” Flor said. “Except that priests can’t have children — one of the downsides of celibacy, I suppose.”

It was twilight at Circo de La Maravilla, and the various performers were between shows. The newcomers were an odd foursome: a Jesuit scholastic who flagellated himself, a transvestite prostitute who’d had an unspeakable life in Houston, and two dump kids. Where the flaps of the troupe tents were open, the kids could see some of the performers fussing with their makeup or their costumes — among them, a transvestite dwarf. She was standing in front of a full-length mirror, putting on her lipstick.

“¡Hola, Flor!” the stout dwarf called, wiggling her hips and blowing Flor a kiss.

“Saludos, Paco,” Flor said, with a wave of her long-fingered hand.

“I didn’t know Paco could be a girl’s name,” Edward Bonshaw said politely to Flor.

“It isn’t,” Flor told him. “Paco is a guy’s name — Paco is a guy, like me,” Flor said.

“But you’re not—”

“Yes, I am,” Flor said, cutting him off. “I’m just more passable than Paco, honey,” she told the Iowan. “Paco isn’t trying to be passable — Paco is a clown. ”

They went on; they were expected at the lion tamer’s tent. Edward Bonshaw kept looking at Flor, saying nothing.

“Flor has a thing, like a boy’s thing,” Lupe said helpfully. “Does the parrot man get it that Flor has a penis?” Lupe asked Juan Diego, who didn’t translate her helpful tip to Señor Eduardo, although he knew his sister had trouble reading the parrot man’s mind.

“El hombre papagayo — that’s me, isn’t it?” the Iowan asked Juan Diego. “Lupe is talking about me, isn’t she?”

“I think you’re a very nice parrot man,” Flor said to him; she saw that the Iowan was blushing, and this had encouraged her to be more flirtatious with him.

“Thank you,” Edward Bonshaw said to the transvestite; he was limping more. Like clay, the elephant shit was hardening on his ruined sandal and between his toes, but something else was weighing him down. Señor Eduardo seemed to be bearing a burden; whatever it was, it appeared to be heavier than elephant shit — no amount of whipping would lessen the load. Whatever cross the Iowan had borne, and for how long, he couldn’t carry it a step farther. He was struggling, not only to walk. “I don’t think I can do this,” Señor Eduardo said.

“Do what ?” Flor asked him, but the missionary merely shook his head; his limp looked more like staggering than limping.

The circus band was playing somewhere — just the start of a piece of music, which stopped shortly after it began and then started up again. The band couldn’t overcome a hard part; the band was struggling, too.

There was a good-looking Argentinian couple standing in the open flap of their tent. They were aerialists, checking over each other’s safety harnesses, testing the strength of the metal grommets where the guy wires would be attached to them. The aerialists wore tight, gold-spangled singlets, and they couldn’t stop fondling each other while they checked out their safety gear.

“I hear they have sex all the time, even though they’re already married — they keep people in the nearby tents awake,” Flor said to Edward Bonshaw. “Maybe having sex all the time is an Argentinian thing,” Flor said. “I don’t think it’s a married thing,” she added.

There was a girl about Lupe’s age standing outside one of the troupe tents. The girl was wearing a blue-green singlet and a mask with a bird’s beak on it; she was practicing with a hula hoop. Some older girls, improbably costumed as flamingos, ran past the dump kids in the avenue between the tents; the girls wore pink tutus, and they were carrying their flamingo heads, which had long, rigid necks. Their silver anklets chimed.