Avenue of Mysteries (14 page)

“Señor Eduardo,” Father Octavio repeated.

“Miraculous!”
Father Alfonso exclaimed, with distaste. These two old priests did not use the
milagroso
word lightly.

“Oh, you’ll see—you’ll see,” Brother Pepe said innocently.

“Does the American have other shirts, Pepe?” Father Octavio asked.

“Ones that fit him?” Father Alfonso added.

“Sí,
lots
more shirts—all Hawaiian!” Pepe replied. “And I think they’re all a little big for him, because he’s lost a lot of weight.”

“Why? Is he dying?” Father Octavio asked. The losing-weight part was no more appealing to Father Octavio and Father Alfonso than the hideous Hawaiian shirt; the two old priests were almost as overweight as Brother Pepe.

“
Is
he—that is,
dying
?” Father Alfonso asked Brother Pepe.

“Not that I know of,” Pepe replied, trying to repress his impish smile a little. “In fact, Edward seems very healthy—and most eager to be of use.”

“Of use,”
Father Octavio repeated, as if this were a death sentence. “How utilitarian.”

“Mercy,” Father Alfonso said.

“I’m following them,” Brother Pepe told the priests; he was waddling hurriedly to his dusty red VW Beetle. “In case anything happens.”

“Mercy,” Father Octavio echoed.

“Leave it to the Americans, to make themselves
of use,
” Father Alfonso said.

Rivera’s truck was pulling away from the curb, and Brother Pepe followed it into the traffic. Ahead of him, he could see Juan Diego’s little face, held protectively in his strange sister’s small hands. Diablo had once again put his forepaws on the pickup’s toolbox; the wind blew the dog’s unmatched ears away from his face—both the normal one and the ear that was missing a jagged-edged, triangular piece. But it was Edward Bonshaw who captured and held Brother Pepe’s attention.

“Look at him,” Lupe had said to Juan Diego. “At
him,
at the gringo—the parrot man!”

What Brother Pepe saw in Edward Bonshaw was a man who looked like he
belonged
—like a man who had never felt at home, but who’d suddenly found his place in the scheme of things.

Brother Pepe didn’t know if he was excited or afraid, or both; he saw now that Señor Eduardo was truly a man with a purpose.

It was the way Juan Diego felt in his dream—the way you feel when you know everything has changed, and that this moment heralds the rest of your life.

“Hello?” a young woman’s voice was saying on the phone, which Juan Diego only now realized he held in his hand.

“Hello,” the writer, who’d been fast asleep, said; only now was he aware of his throbbing erection.

“Hi, it’s
me
—it’s
Dorothy,
” the young woman said. “You’re alone, aren’t you? My mother isn’t with you, is she?”

•
8
•

Two Condoms

What can you believe about a fiction writer’s dreams? In his dreams, obviously, Juan Diego felt free to imagine what Brother Pepe was thinking and feeling. But in whose point of view were Juan Diego’s dreams? (Not in Pepe’s.)

Juan Diego would have been happy to talk about this, and about other aspects of his resurgent dream life, though it seemed to him that now was not the time. Dorothy was playing with his penis; as the novelist had observed, the young woman brought to this postcoital play the same unwavering scrutiny she tended to bring to her cell phone and laptop. And Juan Diego wasn’t much inclined to male fantasies, not even as a fiction writer.

“I think you can do it again,” the naked girl was saying. “Okay—maybe not immediately, but pretty soon. Just
look
at this guy!” she exclaimed. She’d not been shy the first time, either.

At his age, Juan Diego didn’t do a lot of looking at his penis, but Dorothy had—from the start.

What happened to foreplay? Juan Diego had wondered. (Not that he’d had much experience with foreplay
or
afterplay.) He’d been trying to explain to Dorothy the Mexican glorification of Our Lady of Guadalupe. They’d been cuddled together in Juan Diego’s dimly lit bed, where they were barely able to hear the muted radio—as if from a faraway planet—when the brazen girl had pulled back the covers and taken a look at his adrenaline-charged, Viagra-enhanced erection.

“The problem began with Cortés, who conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521—Cortés was
very
Catholic,” Juan Diego was saying to the young woman. Dorothy lay with her warm face against his stomach, staring at his penis. “Cortés came from Extremadura; the Extremadura Guadalupe, I mean a
statue
of the virgin, was supposedly carved by Saint Luke,
the evangelist. It was discovered in the fourteenth century,” Juan Diego continued, “when the virgin pulled one of her tricky apparitions—you know, an appearance before a humble-shepherd type. She commanded him to dig at the site of her apparition; the shepherd found the icon on the spot.”

“This is
not
an old man’s penis—this is one alert-looking guy you have here,” Dorothy said, not remotely apropos of the Guadalupe subject. Thus she’d begun; Dorothy didn’t waste time.

Juan Diego did his best to ignore her. “The Guadalupe of Extremadura was dark-skinned, not unlike most Mexicans,” Juan Diego pointed out to Dorothy, although it disconcerted him to be speaking to the back of the dark-haired young woman’s head. “Thus the Extremadura Guadalupe was the perfect proselytizing tool for those missionaries who followed Cortés to Mexico; Guadalupe became the ideal icon to convert the natives to Christianity.”

“Uh-huh,” Dorothy replied, slipping Juan Diego’s penis into her mouth.

Juan Diego was not, and had never been, a sexually confident man; lately, discounting his solo experiments with Viagra, he’d had no sexual relationships at all. Yet Juan Diego managed a cavalier response to Dorothy’s going down on him—he kept talking. It must have been the novelist in him: he could concentrate on the long haul; he’d never been much of a short-story writer.

“It was ten years after the Spanish conquest, on a hill outside Mexico City—” Juan Diego said to the young woman sucking his penis.

“Tepeyac,” Dorothy briefly interrupted herself; she pronounced the word perfectly before she slipped his cock back in her mouth. Juan Diego was nonplussed that such an unscholarly-looking girl knew the name of the place, but he tried to be as nonchalant about that as he was pretending to be about the blow job.

“It was an early morning in December 1531—” Juan Diego began again.

He felt a sharp nick from Dorothy’s teeth when the impulsive girl spoke quickly, not pausing to take his penis out of her mouth: “In the Spanish Empire, this particular morning was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception—no coincidence, huh?”

“Yes, however—” Juan Diego started to say, but he stopped himself. Dorothy was now sucking him in a way that suggested the young woman would not bother to interject her points of clarification again. The novelist
struggled ahead. “The peasant Juan Diego, for whom I was named, saw a vision of a girl. She was surrounded by light; she was only fifteen or sixteen, but when she spoke to him, this
peasant
Juan Diego allegedly understood—from her words, or so we’re expected to believe—that this girl either
was
the Virgin Mary or was, somehow,
like
the Virgin Mary. And what she wanted was a church—a whole church, in her honor—to be built on the site where she appeared to him.”

To which, in probable disbelief, Dorothy grunted—or she made a similarly noncommittal sound, subject to interpretation. If Juan Diego had to guess, Dorothy knew the story, and, regarding the prospect of the Virgin Mary (or someone
like
her) appearing as a young teenager and expecting a hapless peasant to build a whole church for her, Dorothy’s nonverbal utterance conveyed more than a hint of sarcasm.

“What was the poor peasant to do?” Juan Diego asked—a rhetorical question if Dorothy had ever heard one, to judge by the young woman’s sudden snort. This rude snorting sound made Juan Diego
—not
the peasant, the
other
Juan Diego—flinch. The novelist no doubt feared another sharp nick from the busy girl’s teeth, but he was spared further pain—at least for the moment.

“Well, the peasant told his hard-to-believe story to the Spanish archbishop—” the novelist persevered.

“Zumárraga!” Dorothy managed to blurt out before she made a quickly passing gagging sound.

What an unusually well-informed young woman—she even knew the name of the doubting archbishop! Juan Diego was amazed.

Dorothy’s apparent grasp of these specific details momentarily deterred Juan Diego from continuing his version of Guadalupe’s history; he stopped short of the
miraculous
part of the story, either daunted by Dorothy’s knowledge of a subject that had long obsessed him or (at last!) distracted by the blow job.

“And what did that doubting archbishop do?” Juan Diego asked. He was testing Dorothy, and the gifted young woman didn’t disappoint him—except that she stopped sucking his cock. Her mouth released his penis with an audible
pop,
once more making him flinch.

“The asshole bishop told the peasant to prove it, as if that were the peasant’s job,” Dorothy said with disdain. She moved up Juan Diego’s body, sliding his penis between her breasts.

“And the poor peasant went back to the virgin and asked her for a sign, to prove her identity,” Juan Diego went on.

“As if that were
her
fucking job,” Dorothy said; she was all the while kissing his neck and nibbling the lobes of his ears.

At that point, it became confusing—that is, it’s impossible to delineate who said what to whom. After all, they both knew the story, and they were in a rush to move past the storytelling process. The virgin told Juan Diego (the peasant) to gather flowers; that there were flowers growing in December possibly stretches the boundaries of credibility—that the flowers the peasant found were Castilian roses, not native to Mexico, is more of a stretch.

But this was a
miracle
story, and by the time Dorothy or Juan Diego (the novelist) got to the part of the narrative where the peasant showed the flowers to the bishop—the virgin had arranged the roses in the peasant’s humble cloak—Dorothy had already produced a small marvel of her own. The enterprising young woman had brought forth her own condom, which she’d managed to put on Juan Diego while the two of them were talking; the girl was a multitasker, a quality the novelist had noticed and much admired in the young people he’d known in his life as a teacher.

The small circle of Juan Diego’s sexual contacts did not include a woman who carried her own condoms and was an expert at putting them on; nor had he ever encountered a girl who assumed the superior position with as much familiarity and assertiveness as Dorothy did.

Juan Diego’s inexperience with women—especially with young women of Dorothy’s aggressiveness and sexual sophistication—had left him at a loss for words. It’s doubtful that Juan Diego could have completed this essential part of the Guadalupe story—namely, what happened when the poor peasant opened his cape of roses for Bishop Zumárraga.

Dorothy, even as she settled herself so solidly on Juan Diego’s penis—her breasts, falling forward, brushed the novelist’s face—was the one who reiterated that part of the tale. When the flowers fell out of the cloak, there in their place, imprinted on the fabric of the poor peasant’s rustic cape, was the very image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, her hands clasped in prayer, her eyes modestly downcast.

“It wasn’t so much that the image of Guadalupe was imprinted on the stupid cloak,” the young woman, who was rocking back and forth on top of Juan Diego, was saying. “It was the virgin herself—I mean, the way she
looked.
That must have impressed the bishop.”

“What do you mean?” Juan Diego managed to say breathlessly. “How did Guadalupe
look
?”

Dorothy threw back her head and shook her hair; her breasts wobbled over him, and Juan Diego held his breath at the sight of a rivulet of sweat that ran between them.

“I mean her
demeanor
!” Dorothy panted. “Her hands were held in such a way that you couldn’t even
see
her boobs, if she actually had boobs; her eyes looked down, but you could still see a spooky light in her eyes. I don’t mean in the dark part—”

“The iris—” Juan Diego started to say.

“
Not
in her irises—in her
pupils
!” Dorothy gasped. “I mean in the
center
part—there was a creepy light in her eyes.”

“Yes!” Juan Diego grunted; he’d always thought so—he’d just not met anyone who agreed with him until now. “But Guadalupe was different—not just her dark skin,” he struggled to say; it was becoming harder and harder to breathe, with Dorothy bouncing on him. “She spoke Nahuatl, the local language—she was an
Indian,
not Spanish. If she was a virgin, she was an
Aztec
virgin.”

“What did the dipshit bishop care about that?” Dorothy asked him. “Guadalupe’s demeanor was so fucking
modest,
so
Mary
-like!” the hardworking young woman cried.

“¡Sí!”
Juan Diego shouted. “Those manipulative Catholics—” he’d scarcely started to say, when Dorothy grabbed his shoulders with what felt like supernatural strength. She pulled his head and shoulders entirely off the bed—she rolled him over, on top of her.

Yet in that instant when she was still on top of him, and Juan Diego was looking up at her—into her eyes—he’d seen how Dorothy was regarding him.

What was it Lupe had said, so long ago? “If you want to worry about something, you ought to worry about how Guadalupe was looking at
you.
Like she’s still making up her mind about you. Guadalupe hasn’t
decided
about you,” the clairvoyant child had told him.