Avenue of Mysteries (19 page)

“Ducks swim better than they walk,” Lupe answered. “A flat thing grows over their toes, uniting them.”

When Juan Diego translated what Lupe had said, Dr. Gomez replied: “Ducks are web-footed. A membrane grows over their toes—it’s called a web. You have a web, Lupe—it’s called a congenital laryngeal web.
Congenital
means you were born with it; you have a web, a kind of membrane, across your larynx. It’s pretty rare, which means
special,
” Dr. Gomez told Lupe. “Only one in ten thousand births—that’s how special you are, Lupe.”

Lupe shrugged. “That web isn’t what’s special about me,” Lupe said, untranslatably. “I know stuff I’m not supposed to know.”

“Lupe can be psychic about things. She’s usually right about the past,” Juan Diego tried to explain to Dr. Gomez. “She doesn’t do the future as accurately.”

“What does Juan Diego mean?” Dr. Gomez asked Dr. Vargas.

“Don’t ask
Vargas
—he wants to have sex with you!” Lupe cried. “He
knows
you’re married, he
knows
you have kids—and you’re much too old for him—but he still thinks about doing it with you. Vargas is
always
thinking about having sex with you!” Lupe said.

“Tell me what that’s about, Juan Diego,” Dr. Gomez said. What the hell, Juan Diego thought. He told her—every word.

“The girl
is
a mind reader,” Vargas said, when Juan Diego had finished. “I was thinking of a way to tell you, Marisol, but more privately than this way—that is, if I ever got up the nerve to tell you.”

“Lupe knew what happened to his dog!” Brother Pepe said to Marisol Gomez, pointing at Edward Bonshaw. (Obviously, Pepe was trying to change the subject.)

“Lupe knows what’s happened to almost everyone, and what almost everybody is thinking,” Juan Diego told Dr. Gomez.

“Even if Lupe is asleep when you’re thinking it,” Vargas said. “I don’t think the laryngeal web has anything to do with this,” he added.

“The child is completely incomprehensible,” Dr. Gomez said. “A laryngeal web explains the
pitch
of her voice—her hoarseness, and the strain in her voice—but not that no one can understand her. Except
you,
” Dr. Gomez added to Juan Diego.

“Marisol is a nice name—tell her about our retarded mother,” Lupe said to Juan Diego. “Tell Dr. Gomez to have a look at our mother’s throat;
there’s more wrong with her than there is with me!” Lupe said. “
Tell
Dr. Gomez!” Juan Diego did.

“There’s nothing
wrong
with you, Lupe,” Dr. Gomez said to the girl, after Juan Diego had told the doctor about Esperanza. “A congenital laryngeal web isn’t
retarded
—it’s
special.
”

“Some of the things I know aren’t good things to know,” Lupe said, but Juan Diego left that untranslated.

“Ten percent of children with webs have associated congenital anomalies,” Dr. Gomez said to Dr. Vargas, but she wouldn’t look in his eyes when she spoke to him.

“Explain the
anomalies
word,” Lupe said.

“Lupe wants to know what
anomalies
are,” Juan Diego translated.

“Deviating from a general rule—irregularities,” Dr. Gomez said.

“Abnormalities,” Dr. Vargas said to Lupe.

“I’m not as abnormal as
you
are!” Lupe told him.

“I’m guessing I don’t need to know what
that’s
about,” Vargas said to Juan Diego.

“I’ll have a look at the mother’s throat,” Dr. Gomez said, not to Vargas but to Brother Pepe. “I should talk to the mother anyway. There are some options concerning Lupe’s web—”

Marisol Gomez, a pretty and young-looking mother, got no further; Lupe interrupted her. “It’s
my
web!” the girl cried. “Nobody touches my
abnormalities,
” Lupe said, glaring at Vargas.

When Juan Diego repeated this verbatim, Dr. Gomez said: “That’s one option. And I’ll have a look at the mother’s throat,” she repeated. “I’m not expecting her to have a web,” Dr. Gomez added.

Brother Pepe left Dr. Vargas’s office to look for Esperanza. Vargas had said he would also need to talk to Juan Diego’s mother about the boy’s situation. As the X-rays would confirm, there weren’t many options for Juan Diego’s foot, which was inoperable. It would heal as it was: crushed, but with a sufficient supply of blood, and twisted to one side. That was how it would be forever. No weight-bearing for a while, was how Vargas put it. First a wheelchair, then the crutches—last, the limp. (A cripple’s life is one of watching others do what he can’t do, not the worst option for a future novelist.)

As for Esperanza’s throat—well, that was a different story. Esperanza didn’t have a laryngeal web, but a throat culture tested positive for gonorrhea. Dr. Gomez explained to her that 90 percent of pharyngeal gonorrhea infections were undetectable—no symptoms.

Esperanza had wondered where and what her
pharynx
was. “The space, way back in your mouth, into which your nostrils, your esophagus, and your trachea open,” Dr. Gomez had told her.

Lupe was not present for this conversation, but Brother Pepe had permitted Juan Diego to be there; Pepe knew that if Esperanza became agitated or hysterical, only Juan Diego could understand her. But, in the beginning, Esperanza had been blasé about it; she’d had gonorrhea before, though she hadn’t known she had it in her throat. “Señor Clap,” Esperanza called it, shrugging; it was easy to see where Lupe’s shrug came from, though there was little else of Esperanza in Lupe—or so Brother Pepe hoped.

“Here’s the thing about fellatio,” Dr. Gomez said to Esperanza. “The tip of the urethra comes in contact with the pharynx; that’s asking for trouble.”

“Fellatio? Urethra?” Juan Diego asked Dr. Gomez, who shook her head.

“A blow job, the stupid hole in your penis,” Esperanza impatiently explained to her son. Brother Pepe was glad Lupe wasn’t there; the girl and the new missionary were waiting in another room. Pepe was also relieved that Edward Bonshaw wasn’t hearing this conversation, even in Spanish, though both Brother Pepe
and
Juan Diego would make sure that Señor Eduardo had a complete account of the details pertaining to Esperanza’s throat.

“
You
try getting a guy to wear a condom for a blow job,” Esperanza was saying to Dr. Gomez.

“A condom?” Juan Diego asked.

“A rubber!” Esperanza cried in exasperation. “What can your nuns possibly teach him?” she asked Pepe. “The kid knows nothing!”

“He can
read,
Esperanza. He’ll soon know everything,” Brother Pepe told her. Pepe knew that Esperanza couldn’t read.

“I can give you an antibiotic,” Dr. Gomez told Juan Diego’s mother, “but you’ll be infected again in no time.”

“Just give me the antibiotic,” Esperanza said. “Of course I’ll be infected
again
! I’m a prostitute.”

“Does Lupe read
your
mind?” Dr. Gomez asked Esperanza, who became agitated and hysterical, but Juan Diego said nothing. The boy liked Dr. Gomez; he wouldn’t tell her what unintelligible filth and vilification his mother was spewing.

“Tell the cunt doctor what I said!” Esperanza was screaming at her son.

“I’m sorry,” Juan Diego said to Dr. Gomez, “but I can’t understand my mom—she’s a raving, foul-mouthed lunatic.”

“
Tell
her, you little bastard!” Esperanza cried. She started to hit Juan Diego, but Brother Pepe got between them.

“Don’t touch me,” Juan Diego told his mother. “Don’t come anywhere near me—you’re infected. You’re
infected
!” the boy repeated.

This may have been the word that woke Juan Diego from his disjointed dream—either the
infected
word or the sound of the landing gear descending from the plane, because his Cathay Pacific flight was also descending. He saw he was about to land in Manila, where his real life—well, if not entirely
real,
at least what passed as his
present
life—awaited him.

As much as Juan Diego liked to dream, whenever he dreamed about his mother, he was not sorry to wake up. If the beta-blockers didn’t disjoint him, she did. Esperanza was not the kind of mother who should have been named for hope. “
Des
esperanza,” the nuns called her, albeit behind her back. “Hopelessness,” the sisters had named her, or they referred to her as despair itself—“Desesperación”—when that word made more sense. Even as a fourteen-year-old, Juan Diego felt he was the adult in the family—he and Lupe, too, who was an insightful thirteen. Esperanza was a child, not least in her children’s eyes—except sexually. And what mother would want to be the sexual presence in her children’s eyes that Esperanza was?

Esperanza never wore a cleaning woman’s clothes; she was always dressed for her other line of work. When she cleaned, Esperanza was dressed for Zaragoza Street and the Hotel Somega—the “whore hotel,” Rivera called it. The way Esperanza dressed was childish, or childlike, except for the sexually obvious part.

Esperanza was also a child when it came to money. The orphans at Lost Children weren’t allowed to have money, but Juan Diego and Lupe still hoarded it. (You cannot take the scavenging out of scavengers; los pepenadores carry their picking and sorting with them, long after they’ve stopped looking for aluminum or copper or glass.) The dump kids were very skillful at hiding their money in their room at Niños Perdidos; the nuns never found it.

But Esperanza could find their money, and she stole from them when
she needed to. Esperanza did repay the kids, in her fashion. Occasionally, after a successful night, Esperanza would put money under Lupe’s or Juan Diego’s pillow. The kids were lucky that they could
smell
the money their mother left them before the nuns found it. Esperanza’s perfume gave her (
and
the money) away.

“Lo siento, madre,” Juan Diego said softly to himself, as his plane was landing in Manila. “I’m sorry, Mother.” As a fourteen-year-old, he’d not been old enough to have sympathy for her—for either the child
or
the adult that she was.

T
HE
CHARITY
WORD WAS
a big one with the Jesuits—with Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, especially. It was out of charity that they’d hired a prostitute to clean for them; the priests referred to this act of kindness as giving Esperanza a “second chance.” (Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw would stay up late one night, discussing what kind of
first
chance Esperanza had been given—that is, before she’d become a prostitute and the Jesuits’ cleaning woman.)

Yes, it was clearly out of Jesuitical
charity
that los niños de la basura had been afforded the status of orphans; after all, they had a mother—irrespective of how fit or unfit (as a mother) Esperanza was. No doubt, Father Alfonso and Father Octavio believed they’d been exceptionally
charitable
in allowing Juan Diego and Lupe to have their own bedroom and bathroom—irrespective of how dependent the girl was on her brother. (That would be another late-night discussion between Brother Pepe and Señor Eduardo: namely, how Father Alfonso and Father Octavio imagined Lupe might have functioned without Juan Diego translating for her.)

The other orphans, including siblings, were divided by gender. The boys slept in a dormitory setting on one floor of Niños Perdidos, the girls on another floor; there was a communal bathroom for the boys, and a similar arrangement (but with better mirrors) for the girls. If the children had parents, or other relatives, these adults weren’t permitted to visit the children in their dormitories, but Esperanza was allowed to visit Juan Diego and Lupe in the dump kids’ bedroom, which had formerly been a small library, a so-called reading room for visiting scholars. (Most of the books were still on the shelves, which Esperanza regularly dusted; as everyone repeated, ad nauseam, she was actually a good cleaning woman.)

Of course it would have been awkward to keep Esperanza away from her own kids; she also had a bedroom at Lost Children, but in the servants’
quarters. Only female servants stayed in the orphanage, possibly to protect the children, though the servants themselves—Esperanza was the most vocal among them, not least on this subject—fervently imagined it was chiefly the priests (“those celibate weirdos,” Esperanza called them) whom the children needed protection from.

No one, not even Esperanza, would have accused Father Alfonso or Father Octavio of this particular, much-documented perversion among priests; no one believed the orphans at Niños Perdidos were in this particular danger. The conversation among the female servants concerning those children who were the sexual victims of allegedly celibate priests was very general; the talk was more about the “unnaturalness” of celibacy for men. As for the nuns—well, that was different. Celibacy was more imaginable for women; no one ever said it was “natural,” but not a few of the female servants expressed the feeling that the nuns were lucky not to have sex.

Only Esperanza said: “Well, just
look
at the nuns. Who would want to have sex with them?” But this was unkind, and—like much of what Esperanza said—not necessarily true. (Yes, the subject of celibacy and its
unnaturalness,
or not, was another of those late-night discussions between Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw—as you might imagine.)

Because he whipped himself, Señor Eduardo would try to joke to Juan Diego about it; the flagellating Iowan said it was a good thing he had his own bedroom in the orphanage. But Juan Diego knew the flagellant shared a bathroom with Brother Pepe; the boy used to wonder if poor Pepe found traces of Edward Bonshaw’s blood in the bathtub or on the towels. While Pepe was disinclined to mortifications of the body, he was amused that Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, who thought they were so superior to the Iowan in other ways, praised Edward Bonshaw for his painful self-castigations.

“How very twelfth-century!” Father Alfonso exclaimed admiringly.