The traffic was at a standstill; the hubbub in the congested street had the sort of chaotic atmosphere Juan Diego associated with a bus station, not an airport. The sky was a dirty beige, the air damp and fetid, but the air-conditioning in the limo was too cold.
“It’s a matter of what you can believe, you know,” Bienvenido answered. “You hear everything.”
“That was my problem with the novel — believing it,” Juan Diego said.
“What novel?” Bienvenido asked.
“Shangri-La is an imaginary land in a novel called Lost Horizon. I think it was written in the thirties — I forget who wrote it,” Juan Diego said. (Imagine hearing someone say that about a book of mine! he was thinking; it would be like hearing you had died, Juan Diego thought.) He was wondering why the conversation with the limo driver was so exhausting, but just then there was an opening in the traffic, and the car moved swiftly ahead.
Even bad air is better than air-conditioning, Juan Diego decided. He opened a window, and the dirty-beige air blew on his face. The haze of smog suddenly reminded him of Mexico City, which he didn’t want to be reminded of. And the traffic-choked, bus-terminal atmosphere of the airport summoned Juan Diego’s boyhood memory of the buses in Oaxaca; proximity to the buses seemed contaminating. But, in his adolescent memories, those streets south of the zócalo were contaminated — Zaragoza Street particularly, but even those streets on the way to Zaragoza Street from Lost Children and the zócalo. (After the nuns were asleep, Juan Diego and Lupe used to look for Esperanza on Zaragoza Street.)
“Maybe one of the things I’ve heard about the Makati Shangri-La is imaginary,” Bienvenido ventured to say.
“What would that be?” Juan Diego asked the driver.
Cooking smells blew in the open window of the moving car. They were passing a kind of shantytown, where the traffic slowed; bicycles were weaving between the cars — children, barefoot and shirtless, darted into the street. The dirt-cheap jeepneys were packed with people; the jeepneys cruised with their headlights turned off, or the headlights were burned out, and the passengers sat close together on benches like church pews. Perhaps Juan Diego thought of church pews because the jeepneys were adorned with religious slogans.
GOD IS GOOD! one proclaimed. GOD’S CARE FOR YOU IS APPARENT, another said. He’d just arrived in Manila, but Juan Diego was already zeroing in on a sore subject: the Spanish conquerors and the Catholic Church had been to the Philippines before him; they’d left their mark. (He had a limo driver named Bienvenido, and the jeepneys — the lowest of low-income transportation — were plastered with advertisements for God!)
“There’s something wrong with the dogs,” Bienvenido said.
“The dogs? What dogs?” Juan Diego asked.
“At the Makati Shangri-La — the bomb-sniffing dogs,” the young driver explained.
“The hotel has been bombed?” Juan Diego asked.
“Not that I know of,” Bienvenido replied. “There are bomb-sniffing dogs at all the hotels. At the Shangri-La, people say the dogs don’t know what they’re sniffing for — they just like to sniff everything.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Juan Diego said. He liked dogs; he was always defending them. (Maybe the bomb-sniffing dogs at the Shangri-La were just being extra careful.)
“People say the dogs at the Shangri-La are untrained,” Bienvenido was saying.
But Juan Diego couldn’t focus on this conversation. Manila was reminding him of Mexico; he’d been unprepared for that, and now the talk had turned to dogs.
At Lost Children, he and Lupe had missed the dump dogs. When a litter of puppies was born in the basurero, the kids had tried to take care of the puppies; when a puppy died, Juan Diego and Lupe tried to find it before the vultures did. The dump kids had helped Rivera burn the dead dogs — burning them was a way to love the dogs, too.
At night, when they went looking for their mother on Zaragoza Street, Juan Diego and Lupe tried not to think about the rooftop dogs; those dogs were different — they were scary. They were mostly mongrels, as Brother Pepe had said, but Pepe was wrong to say that only some of the rooftop dogs were feral—most of them were. Dr. Gomez said she knew how the dogs ended up on the roofs, although Brother Pepe believed that no one knew how the dogs got there.
A lot of Dr. Gomez’s patients had been bitten by the rooftop dogs; after all, she was an ear, nose, and throat specialist, and that’s where the dogs tried to bite you. The dogs attacked your face, Dr. Gomez said. Years ago, in the top-floor apartments of those buildings south of the zócalo, people had let their pets run free on the roofs. But the pet dogs had run away, or they’d been scared away by wild dogs; many of those buildings were so close together that the dogs could run from roof to roof. People stopped letting their pet dogs up on the roofs; soon almost all the rooftop dogs were wild. But how had the first wild dogs ended up on the roofs?
At night, on Zaragoza Street, the headlights of passing cars were reflected in the eyes of the rooftop dogs. No wonder Lupe thought these dogs were ghosts. The dogs ran along the rooftops, as if they were hunting people in the street below. If you didn’t talk, or you weren’t listening to music, you could hear the dogs panting as they ran. Sometimes, when the dogs were jumping from roof to roof, a dog fell. The falling dogs were killed, of course, unless one landed on a person in the street below. The person passing by served to break the dog’s fall. Those lucky dogs usually didn’t die, but if they were injured from the fall, this made the dogs more likely to bite the people they’d fallen on.
“I guess you like dogs,” Bienvenido was saying.
“I do — I do like dogs,” Juan Diego said, but he was distracted by his thoughts of those ghost dogs in Oaxaca (if the rooftop dogs, or some of them, were truly ghosts).
“Those dogs aren’t the only ghosts in town — Oaxaca is full of ghosts,” Lupe had said, in her know-it-all way.
“I haven’t seen them,” was Juan Diego’s first response.
“You will,” was all Lupe would say.
Now, in Manila, Juan Diego was also distracted by an overloaded jeepney with one of the same religious slogans he’d already seen; evidently, it was a popular message: GOD’S CARE FOR YOU IS APPARENT. A contrasting sticker in the rear window of a taxi then caught Juan Diego’s eye. CHILD-SEX TOURISTS, the taxi sticker said. DON’T TURN AWAY. TURN THEM IN.
Well, yes — turn the fuckers in! Juan Diego thought. But for those children who were recruited to have sex with tourists, Juan Diego believed, God’s care for them wasn’t all that apparent.
“I’ll be interested to see what you think of the bomb-sniffers,” Bienvenido was saying, but when he glanced in the rearview mirror, he saw that his client was asleep. Or dead, the driver might have thought, except that Juan Diego’s lips were moving. Maybe the limo driver imagined that the not-so-famous novelist was composing dialogue in his sleep. The way Juan Diego’s lips were moving, he appeared to be having a conversation with himself — the way writers do, Bienvenido supposed. The young Filipino driver couldn’t have known the actual argument the older man was remembering, nor could Bienvenido have guessed where Juan Diego’s dreams would transport him next.
12. Zaragoza Street
“Listen to me, Mr. Missionary — these two should stick together,” Vargas was saying. “The circus will buy them clothes, the circus will pay for any medicine — plus three meals a day, plus a bed to sleep in, and there’s a family to look after them.”