“It’s the lionesses the lion tamer should be afraid of,” Lupe had predicted.
That morning, the day after Ignacio shot and killed Hombre, the lion tamer must have made a mistake when he was feeding the lionesses. “They can’t fool me — I know what they’re thinking,” Ignacio had bragged about the lionesses. “The young ladies are obvious,” the lion tamer had told Lupe. “I don’t need a mind reader for las señoritas.”
Ignacio had told Lupe he could read the lionesses’ minds by the body parts they were named for.
That morning, the lionesses must not have been as easy to read as the lion tamer once thought. According to studies of lions in the Serengeti, as Vargas would later impart to Juan Diego, lionesses are responsible for the majority of the kills. Lionesses know how to hunt as a team; when stalking a herd of wildebeest or zebra, they encircle the herd, cutting off any escape routes, before they attack.
When the dump kids had just met Hombre for the first time, Flor whispered to Edward Bonshaw: “If you think you just saw the king of beasts, think again. You’re about to meet him now. Ignacio is the king of beasts.”
“The king of pigs,” Lupe had suddenly said.
As for those statistics from the Serengeti, or other studies of lions, the only part the king of pigs might have understood was what took place in the wild after the lionesses had killed their prey. That was when the male lions asserted their dominance — they ate their fill before the lionesses were allowed to eat their share. Juan Diego was sure the king of pigs would have been okay with that.
That morning, no one saw what happened to Ignacio when he was feeding the lionesses, but lionesses know how to be patient; lionesses have learned to wait their turn. Las señoritas — Ignacio’s young ladies — would have their turn. That morning, the beginning of the end of La Maravilla would be complete.
Paco and Beer Belly were the first to find the lion tamer’s body; the dwarf clowns were waddling along the avenue of troupe tents, on their way to the outdoor showers. They must have wondered how it was possible that the lionesses could have killed Ignacio when his mangled body was outside their cage. But anyone familiar with how lionesses work could figure it out, and Dr. Vargas (naturally, Vargas was the one who examined Ignacio’s body) had little difficulty reconstructing a likely sequence of events.
As a novelist, when Juan Diego talked about plot — specifically, how he approached plotting a novel — he liked to talk about the “teamwork of lionesses” as “an early model.” In interviews, Juan Diego would begin by saying that no one saw what happened to the lion tamer; he would then say that he never tired of reconstructing a likely sequence of events, which was at least partially responsible for his becoming a novelist. And if you add together what happened to Ignacio with what Lupe might have been thinking — well, you can see what could have fueled the dump reader’s imagination, can’t you?
Ignacio put the meat for the lionesses on the feeding tray, as usual. He slid the feeding tray into the open slot in the cage, as usual. Then something unusual must have happened.
Vargas couldn’t restrain himself from describing the extraordinary number of claw wounds on Ignacio’s arms, his shoulders, the back of his neck; one of the lionesses had grabbed him first — then other paws, with claws, took hold of him. The lionesses must have hugged him close to the bars of their cage.
Vargas said the lion tamer’s nose was gone, as were his ears, both cheeks, his chin; Vargas said the fingers of both hands were gone — the lionesses had overlooked one thumb. What killed Ignacio, Vargas said, was a suffocating throat bite — what the doctor described as a “messy one.”
“This was no clean kill,” as Vargas would put it. He explained that a lioness could kill a wildebeest or a zebra with a single suffocating throat bite, but the bars of the cage were too close together; the lioness who eventually killed Ignacio with a suffocating throat bite couldn’t fit her head between the bars — she didn’t get to open her jaws as widely as she wanted to before she got a good grip on the lion tamer’s throat. (This was why Vargas used the messy word to describe the lethal bite.)
After the fact, the “authorities” (as Ignacio thought of them) would investigate the wrongdoings at La Maravilla. That was what always happened after a fatal accident at a circus — the experts arrived and told you what you were doing wrong. (The experts said the amount of meat that Ignacio was feeding the lions was wrong; the number of times the lions were fed was also wrong.)
Who cares? Juan Diego would think; he couldn’t remember what the experts said would have been the correct number of times or the right amount. What was wrong with La Maravilla had been what was wrong with Ignacio himself. The lion tamer had been wrong! In the end, no one at La Maravilla needed experts to tell them that.
In the end, Juan Diego would think, what Ignacio saw were those gathering yellow eyes — the final looks, less than fond, from his señoritas — the unforgiving eyes of the lion tamer’s last young ladies.
THERE’S A POSTSCRIPT TO every circus that goes under. Where do the performers go when a circus goes out of business? The Wonder herself, we know, went out of business fairly soon. But we also know, don’t we, that the other performers at La Maravilla couldn’t do what Dolores did? As Juan Diego had discovered, not everyone could be a skywalker.
Estrella would find homes for the dogs. Well, no one wanted the mongrel; Estrella had to take him. As Lupe had said, Perro Mestizo was always the bad guy.
And no other circus had wanted Pajama Man; his vanity preceded him. For a while, on the weekends, the contortionist could be seen contorting himself for the tourists in the zócalo.
Dr. Vargas would later say he was sorry the medical school had moved. The new medical school, which is opposite a public hospital, away from the center of town, is nowhere near the morgue and the Red Cross hospital, Vargas’s old stomping grounds — where the old medical school was, when Vargas still taught there.
That was the last place Vargas saw Pajama Man — at the old medical school. The contortionist’s cadaver was hoisted from the acid bath to a corrugated metal gurney; the fluid in Pajama Man’s cadaver drained into a pail through a hole in the gurney, near the contortionist’s head. On the sloped steel autopsy slab — with a deep groove running down the middle to a draining hole, also at Pajama Man’s head — the cadaver was opened. Stretched out, forever uncontorted, Pajama Man was not recognizable to the medical students, but Vargas knew the onetime contortionist.
“There is no vacancy, no absence, like the expression on a cadaver’s face,” Vargas would write to Juan Diego after the boy had moved to Iowa. “The human dreams are gone,” Vargas wrote, “but not the pain. And traces of a living person’s vanity remain. You will remember Pajama Man’s attention to sculpting his beard and trimming his mustache, which betrays the time the contortionist spent looking into a mirror — either admiring or seeking to improve his looks.”
“Sic transit gloria mundi,” as Father Alfonso and Father Octavio were fond of intoning, with solemnity.
“Thus passes the glory of this world,” as Sister Gloria was always reminding the orphans at Lost Children.
The Argentinian flyers were too good at their job, and too happy with each other, not to find work at another circus. Fairly recently (anything after 2001, the new century, struck Juan Diego as recently), Brother Pepe had heard from someone who saw them; Pepe said the Argentinian flyers were flying for a little circus in the mountains, about an hour’s drive from Mexico City. They may have since retired.