Avenue of Mysteries (4 page)

It was not Hong Kong he cared about; that was a detour Juan Diego could do without, but a couple of his colleagues had persuaded him that he shouldn’t go all the way to the Philippines without stopping to see Hong Kong en route. What was there to see? Juan Diego had wondered. While Juan Diego didn’t understand what “air miles” actually meant (or how they were calculated), he understood that his Cathay Pacific flight was free; his friends had also persuaded him that first class on Cathay Pacific was something he must experience—something else he was supposed to
see,
apparently.

Juan Diego thought that all this attention from his friends was because he was retiring from teaching; what else could explain why his colleagues had insisted on helping him organize this trip? But there were other reasons. Though he was young to retire, he was indeed “handicapped”—and his close friends and colleagues knew he was taking medication for his heart.

“I’m not retiring from
writing
!” he’d assured them. (Juan Diego had come to New York for Christmas at the invitation of his publisher.) It was “merely” the teaching he was leaving, Juan Diego said, though for years the writing and the teaching had been inseparable; together, they’d been his entire adult life. And one of his former writing students had become
very
involved with what Juan Diego now thought of as an aggressive takeover of his trip to the Philippines. This former student, Clark French, had made Juan Diego’s mission in Manila—as Juan Diego had thought of it, for years—
Clark’s
mission. Clark’s
writing
was as assertive, or forced, as he’d been about taking over his former teacher’s trip to the Philippines—or so Juan Diego thought.

Yet Juan Diego had done nothing to resist his former student’s well-intentioned assistance; he didn’t want to hurt Clark’s feelings. Besides, it wasn’t easy for Juan Diego to travel, and he’d heard that the Philippines could be difficult—even dangerous. A little overplanning wouldn’t hurt, he’d decided.

Before he knew it, a
tour
of the Philippines had materialized; his mission in Manila had given rise to side trips and distracting adventures. He worried that the purpose of his going to the Philippines had been compromised, though Clark French would have been quick to tell his former teacher that the zeal to assist him was borne of Clark’s admiration for what a noble cause (for so long!) had inspired Juan Diego to take this trip in the first place.

As a very young teenager in Oaxaca, Juan Diego had met an American
draft dodger; the young man had run away from the United States to evade the draft for the Vietnam War. The draft dodger’s dad had been among the thousands of American soldiers who’d died in the Philippines in World War II—but not on the Bataan Death March, and not in the intense battle for Corregidor. (Juan Diego didn’t always remember the exact details.)

The American draft dodger didn’t want to die in Vietnam; before he died, the young man told Juan Diego, he wanted to visit the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial—to pay his respects to his slain father. But the draft dodger didn’t survive the misadventure of his running away to Mexico; he had died in Oaxaca. Juan Diego had pledged to take the trip to the Philippines for the dead draft dodger; he would make the journey to Manila for him.

Yet Juan Diego had never known the young American’s name; the antiwar boy had befriended Juan Diego and his seemingly retarded little sister, Lupe, but they knew him only as “the good gringo.” The dump kids had met el gringo bueno before Juan Diego became a cripple. At first, the young American seemed too friendly to be doomed, though Rivera had called him a “mescal hippie,” and the dump kids knew el jefe’s opinion of the hippies who came to Oaxaca from the United States at that time.

The dump boss believed that the mushroom hippies were “the stupid ones”; he meant they were seeking something they thought was profound—in el jefe’s opinion, “something as ridiculous as the interconnectedness of all things,” though the dump kids knew that el jefe himself was a Mary worshiper.

As for the
mescal
hippies, they were smarter, Rivera said, but they were “the self-destructive ones.” And the mescal hippies were the ones who were also addicted to prostitutes, or so the dump boss believed. The good gringo was “killing himself on Zaragoza Street,” el jefe said. The dump kids had hoped not; Lupe and Juan Diego adored el gringo bueno. They didn’t want the darling boy to be destroyed by his sexual desires
or
the intoxicating drink distilled from the fermented juice of certain species of agave.

“It’s all the same,” Rivera had told the dump kids, darkly. “Believe me, you’re not exactly uplifted by what you end up with. Those low women and too much mescal—you’re left looking at that little worm!”

Juan Diego knew the dump boss meant the worm at the bottom of the mescal bottle, but Lupe said that el jefe had also been thinking about his penis—how it looked after he’d been with a prostitute.

“You believe all men are always thinking about their penises,” Juan Diego told his sister.

“All men
are
always thinking about their penises,” the mind reader said. To a degree, this was the point past which Lupe would no longer allow herself to adore the good gringo. The doomed American had crossed an imaginary line—the
penis
line, perhaps, though Lupe would never have put it that way.

One night, when the dump reader was reading aloud to Lupe, Rivera was with them in the shack in Guerrero, listening to the reading, too. The dump boss was probably building a new bookcase, or there was something wrong with the barbecue and Rivera was fixing it; maybe he had stopped by just to see if Dirty White (a.k.a. Saved from Death) had died.

The book Juan Diego was reading that night was another discarded academic tome, a mind-numbing exercise in scholarship, which had been designated for burning by one or the other of those two old Jesuit priests Father Alfonso and Father Octavio.

This particular work of unread academia had actually been written by a Jesuit, and its subject was both literary and historical—namely, an analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s writing on Thomas Hardy. As the dump reader had not read anything by Lawrence or Hardy, a scholarly examination of Lawrence’s writing on Hardy would have been mystifying—even in Spanish. And Juan Diego had selected this particular book because it was in English; he’d wanted more practice reading English, though his less-than-rapt audience (Lupe and Rivera and the disagreeable dog Dirty White) might have understood him better en español.

To add to the difficulty, several pages of the book had been consumed by fire, and a vile odor from the basurero still clung to the burned book; Dirty White wanted to sniff it, repeatedly.

The dump boss didn’t like Lupe’s saved-from-death dog any better than Juan Diego did. “I think you should have left this one in the milk carton,” was all el jefe told her, but Lupe (as always) was indignant in Dirty White’s defense.

And just then Juan Diego read aloud to them an unrepeatable passage, concerning someone’s idea of the fundamental interrelatedness of all beings.

“Wait, wait, wait—stop right there,” Rivera interrupted the dump reader. “
Whose
idea is that?”

“It could be the one called Hardy—maybe it’s his idea,” Lupe said. “Or, more likely, the Lawrence guy—it sounds like him.”

When Juan Diego translated what Lupe said for Rivera, el jefe instantly agreed. “
Or
the idea of the person writing the book—whoever that is,” the dump boss added. Lupe nodded that this was also true. The book was tedious while remaining unclear; it was seemingly nitpicking scrutiny of a subject that eluded any concrete description.

“
What
‘fundamental interrelatedness of all beings’—
which
beings are supposedly
related
?” the dump boss cried. “It sounds like something a mushroom hippie would say!”

That got a laugh out of Lupe, who rarely laughed. Soon she and Rivera were laughing together, which was even more rare. Juan Diego would always remember how happy he was to hear both his sister and el jefe laughing.

And now, so many years later—it had been
forty
years—Juan Diego was on his way to the Philippines, a trip he was taking in honor of the nameless good gringo. Yet not a single friend had asked Juan Diego how he intended to pay the dead draft dodger’s respects to the slain soldier—like his lost son, the fallen father was without a name. Of course these friends all knew that Juan Diego was a novelist; maybe the fiction writer was taking a trip for el gringo bueno
symbolically.

As a young writer, he’d been quite the traveler, and the dislocations of travel had been a repeated theme in his early novels—especially in that circus novel set in India, the one with the elephantine title. No one had been able to talk him out of that title, Juan Diego remembered fondly.
A Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary
—what a cumbersome title it was, and what a long and complicated story! Maybe my
most
complicated, Juan Diego was thinking—as the limo navigated the deserted, snowbound streets of Manhattan, making its determined way to the FDR Drive. It was an SUV, and the driver was contemptuous of other vehicles and other drivers. According to the limo driver, other vehicles in the city were ill equipped for snow, and the few cars that were “almost correctly” equipped had the “wrong tires”; as for the other drivers, they didn’t know how to drive in snow.

“Where do you think we are—fuckin’
Florida
?” the driver yelled out his window to a stranded motorist who’d slid sideways and blocked a narrow crosstown street.

Out on the FDR Drive, a taxi had jumped the guardrail and was
stuck in the waist-deep snow of the jogging path that ran alongside the East River; the cabbie was attempting to dig out his rear wheels, not with a shovel but a windshield scraper.

“Where are you from, you jerk-off—fuckin’
Mexico
?” the limo driver shouted to him.

“Actually,” Juan Diego said to the driver, “
I’m
from Mexico.”

“I didn’t mean you, sir—you’re gonna get to JFK on time. Your problem is, you’re just gonna
wait
there,” the driver told him, not nicely. “There’s nothin’ flyin’—in case you haven’t noticed, sir.”

Indeed, Juan Diego hadn’t noticed that no planes were flying; he just wanted to be at the airport, ready to leave, whenever his flight departed. The delay, if there was one, didn’t matter to him. It was missing this trip that was unthinkable. “Behind every journey is a reason,” he found himself considering—before he remembered that he’d already written this. It was something he’d stated most emphatically in
A
Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary.
Now here I am, traveling again—there’s
always
a reason, he thought.

“The past surrounded him like faces in a crowd. Among them, there was one he knew, but whose face was it?” For a moment, shrouded by the surrounding snow and intimidated by the vulgar limo driver, Juan Diego forgot that he’d already written this, too. He blamed the beta-blockers.

F
ROM THE SOUND OF
him, Juan Diego’s limo driver was a rough-spoken, hateful man, but he knew his way around Jamaica, Queens, where a wide street reminded the long-ago dump reader of Periférico—a street divided by train tracks in Oaxaca. Periférico was where el jefe used to take the dump kids shopping for food; the cheapest, closest-to-rotten produce was available in that market, in La Central—except in 1968, during the student revolts, when La Central was occupied by the military and the food market moved to the zócalo in the center of Oaxaca.

That was when Juan Diego and Lupe were twelve and eleven, and they first became familiar with the area of Oaxaca around the zócalo. The student revolts didn’t last long; the market would move back to La Central, and Periférico (with that forlorn-looking footbridge over the train tracks). Yet the zócalo remained in the dump kids’ hearts; it had become their favorite part of town. The kids spent as much time away from the dump, in the zócalo, as they could.

Why wouldn’t a boy and girl from Guerrero be interested in the center of things? Why wouldn’t two niños de la basura be curious to see all
the tourists in town? The city dump wasn’t on the tourist maps. What tourist ever went sightseeing in the basurero? One whiff of the dump, or the stinging in your eyes from the fires perpetually burning there, would send you running back to the zócalo; one look at the dump dogs (or the way those dogs looked at you) would do it.

Was it any wonder—around this time, during the student riots in 1968, when the military took over La Central and the dump kids started hanging around the zócalo—that Lupe, who was only eleven, began her crazy and conflicted obsessions with Oaxaca’s various virgins? That her brother was the only one who could understand her babble cut Lupe off from any meaningful dialogue with adults. And of course these were
religious
virgins,
miraculous
virgins—of the kind who commanded a following, not only among eleven-year-old girls.

Wasn’t it to be expected that Lupe would, at first, be drawn to these virgins? (Lupe could read minds; she knew no real-life counterpart who had her ability.) However, what dump kid wouldn’t be a little suspicious of miracles? What were these competing virgins doing to prove themselves in the here and now? Had these miraculous virgins performed any miracles
lately
? Wasn’t Lupe likely to be super-critical of these highly touted but nonperforming virgins?

There was a virgin shop in Oaxaca; the dump kids discovered it on one of their first outings in the area of the zócalo. This was Mexico: the country had been overrun by the Spanish conquistadors. Hadn’t the ever-proselytizing Catholic Church been in the virgin-selling business for years? Oaxaca had once been central to the Mixtec and Zapotec civilizations. Hadn’t the Spanish conquest been selling virgins to the indigenous population for centuries—beginning with the Augustinians and the Dominicans, and
thirdly
the Jesuits, all pushing their Virgin Mary?