Avenue of Mysteries

ALSO BY JOHN IRVING

Setting Free the Bears

The Water-Method Man

The 158-Pound Marriage

The World According to Garp

The Hotel New Hampshire

The Cider House Rules

A Prayer for Owen Meany

Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

A Son of the Circus

The Imaginary Girlfriend

A Widow for One Year

My Movie Business

The Cider House Rules: A Screenplay

The Fourth Hand

A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound

Until I Find You

Last Night in Twisted River

In One Person

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

Copyright © 2015 Garp Enterprises, Ltd.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2015 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

Alfred A. Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Irving, John,

Avenue of mysteries / John Irving.

ISBN 978-0-307-36181-3

eBook ISBN 978-0-307-36183-7

I. Title.

PS3559.R8A95 2015        813′.54        C2015-902866-3

Title page image © STILLFX /
Shutterstock.com

Cover design adapted by CS Richardson from an original by Emily Pracher

Cover photo © Karina Juárez

v3.1

For Martin Bell and

Mary Ellen Mark.

What we began together,

let us finish together.

Also for Minnie Domingo and

Rick Dancel, and their

daughter, Nicole Dancel,

for showing me the Philippines.

And for my son Everett,

my interpreter in Mexico,

and Karina Juárez,

our guide in Oaxaca

—dos abrazos muy fuertes.

Journeys end in lovers meeting.

—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
,
Twelfth Night

•
CHAPTERS
•

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

  1. Lost Children

  2. The Mary Monster

  3. Mother and Daughter

  4. The Broken Side-view Mirror

  5. Yielding Under No Winds

  6. Sex and Faith

  7. Two Virgins

  8. Two Condoms

  9. In Case You Were Wondering

10. No Middle Ground

11. Spontaneous Bleeding

12. Zaragoza Street

13. Now and Forever

14. Nada

15. The Nose

16. King of Beasts

17. New Year’s Eve at the Encantador

18. Lust Has a Way

19. Boy Wonder

20. Casa Vargas

21. Mister Goes Swimming

22. Mañana

23. Neither Animal, Vegetable, nor Mineral

24. Poor Leslie

25. Act 5, Scene 3

26. The Scattering

27. A Nose for a Nose

28. Those Gathering Yellow Eyes

29. One Single Journey

30. The Sprinkling

31. Adrenaline

32. Not Manila Bay

Acknowledgments

About the Author

•
1
•

Lost Children

Occasionally, Juan Diego would make a point of saying, “I’m a Mexican—I was born in Mexico, I grew up there.” More recently, he was in the habit of saying, “I’m an American—I’ve lived in the United States for forty years.” Or, in an effort to defuse the nationality issue, Juan Diego liked to say, “I’m a midwesterner—in fact, I’m an Iowan.”

He never said he was a Mexican American. It wasn’t only that Juan Diego disliked the label, though he thought of it as such and he
did
dislike it. What Juan Diego believed was that people were always seeking a commonality with the Mexican-American experience, and he could find no common ground in his own experience; more truthfully, he didn’t look for it.

What Juan Diego said was that he’d had two lives—two separate and distinctly different lives. The Mexican experience was his first life, his childhood and early adolescence. After he left Mexico—he’d never gone back—he had a second life, the American or midwestern experience. (Or was he also saying that, relatively speaking, not a whole lot had happened to him in his second life?)

What Juan Diego always maintained was that, in his mind—in his memories, certainly, but also in his dreams—he lived and relived his two lives on “parallel tracks.”

A dear friend of Juan Diego’s—she was also his doctor—teased him about the so-called parallel tracks. She told him he was either a kid from Mexico or a grown-up from Iowa all the time. Juan Diego could be an argumentative person, but he agreed with her about that.

B
EFORE THE BETA
-
BLOCKERS HAD
disturbed his dreams, Juan Diego told his doctor friend that he used to wake up to the “gentlest” of his
recurrent nightmares. The nightmare he had in mind was really a memory of the formative morning he became a cripple. In truth, only the beginning of the nightmare or the memory was
gentle,
and the origin of this episode was something that happened in Oaxaca, Mexico—in the neighborhood of the city dump, in 1970—when Juan Diego was fourteen.

In Oaxaca, he was what they called a dump kid (un niño de la basura); he lived in a shack in Guerrero, the colony for families who worked in the dump (el basurero). In 1970, there were only ten families living in Guerrero. At that time, about a hundred thousand people lived in the city of Oaxaca; many of them didn’t know that the dump kids did most of the picking and sorting through stuff at the basurero. The children had the job of separating the glass, aluminum, and copper.

People who knew what the dump kids did called them los pepenadores—“the scavengers.” At fourteen, that was who Juan Diego was: a dump kid and a scavenger. But the boy was also a reader; the word got around that un niño de la basura had taught himself to read. Dump kids weren’t the biggest readers, as a rule, and young readers of any origin or background are rarely self-taught. That was why the word got around, and how the Jesuits, who put such a high priority on education, heard about the boy from Guerrero. The two old Jesuit priests at the Temple of the Society of Jesus referred to Juan Diego as the “dump reader.”

“Someone should bring the dump reader a good book or two—God knows what the boy finds to read in the basurero!” either Father Alfonso or Father Octavio said. Whenever one of these two old priests said “someone should” do anything, Brother Pepe was always the one who did it. And Pepe was a big reader.

In the first place, Brother Pepe had a car, and, because he’d come from Mexico City, getting around Oaxaca was relatively easy for him. Pepe was a teacher at the Jesuit school; it had long been a successful school—everyone knew the Society of Jesus was good at running schools. On the other hand, the Jesuit orphanage was relatively new (it had been less than ten years since they’d remodeled the former convent as an orphanage), and not everyone was crazy about the orphanage’s name—to some, Hogar de los Niños Perdidos was a long name that sounded a little severe.

But Brother Pepe had put his heart into the school
and
the orphanage; over time, most of those tender souls who objected to the
sound
of “Home of the Lost Children” would certainly admit that the Jesuits ran a
pretty good orphanage, too. Besides, everyone had already shortened the name of the place—“Lost Children,” people called it. One of the nuns who looked after the children was more blunt about it; to be fair, Sister Gloria must have been referring to a couple of misbehaving kids, not to
all
the orphans, when she muttered, occasionally, “los perdidos”—surely “the lost ones” was a name the old nun intended for only a few of the more exasperating children.

Luckily, it was not Sister Gloria who brought the books to the basurero for the young dump reader; if Gloria had chosen the books and been their deliverer, Juan Diego’s story might have ended before it began. But Brother Pepe put reading on a pedestal; he was a Jesuit because the Jesuits had made him a reader
and
introduced him to Jesus, not necessarily in that order. It was best not to ask Pepe if reading or Jesus had saved him, or which one had saved him more.

At forty-five, he was too fat—a “cherubic-looking figure, if not a celestial being,” was how Brother Pepe described himself.

Pepe was the epitome of goodness. He embodied that mantra from Saint Teresa of Ávila: “From silly devotions and sour-faced saints, good Lord, deliver us.” He made her holy utterance foremost among his daily prayers. No wonder children loved him.

But Brother Pepe had never been to the Oaxaca basurero before. In those days, they burned everything they could in the dump; there were fires everywhere. (Books were useful fire starters.) When Pepe stepped out of his VW Beetle, the smell of the basurero and the heat of the fires were what he’d imagined Hell would be like—only he hadn’t imagined children working there.

There were some very good books in the backseat of the little Volkswagen; good books were the best protection from evil that Pepe had actually held in his hands—you could not hold faith in Jesus in your hands, not in quite the same way you could hold good books.

“I’m looking for the reader,” Pepe told the dump workers, both the adults and the children. Los pepenadores, the scavengers, gave Pepe a look full of contempt. It was evident that they did not value reading. One of the adults spoke first—a woman, perhaps Pepe’s age or a little younger, probably the mother of one or more of the scavengers. She told Pepe to look for Juan Diego in Guerrero—in el jefe’s shack.

Brother Pepe was confused; maybe he’d misunderstood her. El jefe was the dump boss—he was the head of the basurero. Was the reader el jefe’s child? Pepe asked the woman worker.

Several dump kids laughed; then they turned away. The adults didn’t think it was funny, and the woman said only: “Not exactly.” She pointed in the direction of Guerrero, which was nestled into a hillside below the basurero. The shacks in the colony had been assembled from materials the workers had found in the dump, and el jefe’s shack was the one at the periphery of the colony—at the edge nearest to the dump.

Black columns of smoke stood high above the basurero, pillars of blackness reaching into the sky. Vultures circled overhead, but Pepe saw that there were carrion eaters above
and
below; dogs were everywhere in the basurero, skirting the hellfires and grudgingly giving ground to the men in trucks but to almost no one else. The dogs were uneasy company around the children, because both were scavenging—if not for the same stuff. (The dogs weren’t interested in glass or aluminum or copper.) The dump dogs were mostly strays, of course, and some were dying.