Avenue of Mysteries (55 page)

As the Iowan and the dump kids descended, more sweaty pilgrims pressed and bumped against them, climbing to the hilltop site of the miracle. Juan Diego stepped on something; it felt a little soft and a little crunchy at the same time. He stopped to look at it—then he picked it up.

The totem, slightly larger than the finger-size suffering Christs that were everywhere for sale, was not as thick as Lupe’s rat-size Coatlicue figurine—also everywhere for sale in the compound of buildings comprising the vast Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. The toy figure Juan Diego had stepped on was of Guadalupe herself—the subdued, passive body language, the downcast eyes, the no-breasts chest, the slight bulge where her lower abdomen was. The statuette radiated the virgin’s humble origins—she looked as if she spoke only Nahuatl, if she spoke at all.

“Someone threw it away,” Lupe said to Juan Diego. “Someone as disgusted as we are,” she said. But Juan Diego put the hard-rubber religious figure in his pocket. (It wasn’t as big as the Virgin Mary’s nose, but it still made his pocket bulge.)

At the bottom of the stairs, they passed through a gauntlet of snack
and soft-drink salesmen. And there was a group of nuns, selling postcards to raise money for their convent’s relief of the poor. Edward Bonshaw bought one.

Juan Diego was wondering if Señor Eduardo was still thinking about the postcard of Flor with the pony, but this postcard was just another Guadalupe photo—la virgen morena on her deathbed, encased in glass, in the Chapel of the Well.

“A souvenir,” the Iowan said a little guiltily, showing the postcard to Lupe and Juan Diego.

Lupe looked only briefly at the photo of the dark-skinned virgin on her deathbed; then she looked away. “The way I feel right now, I would like her
better
with a pony’s penis in her mouth,” Lupe said. “I mean
dead,
but also with the pony’s penis,” Lupe added.

Yes, she’d been asleep—with her head in Señor Eduardo’s lap—when the Iowan told Juan Diego the story of that terrible postcard, but Juan Diego had always known that Lupe could nonetheless read minds when she was asleep.

“What did Lupe say?” Edward Bonshaw asked.

Juan Diego was looking for the best way to escape from the enormous flagstoned plaza; he was wondering where the taxis were.

“Lupe said she’s glad Guadalupe is dead—she thinks that’s the best part of the postcard,” was all Juan Diego said.

“You haven’t asked me about the new dog act,” Lupe said to her brother. She stopped, as she had before, waiting for him to catch up to her. But Juan Diego would never catch up to Lupe.

“Right now, Lupe, I’m just trying to get us out of here,” Juan Diego told her irritably.

Lupe patted the bulge in his pocket, where he’d put the lost or discarded Guadalupe figure. “Just don’t ask
her
for help,” was all Lupe said.

“Behind every journey is a reason,” Juan Diego would one day write. It had been forty years since the dump kids’ journey to the Guadalupe shrine in Mexico City, but—as Señor Eduardo would one day put it—Juan Diego felt he was still
descending.

•
24
•

Poor Leslie

“I’m always meeting people in airports,” was the innocent-sounding way Dorothy began her fax to Juan Diego. “And, boy, did this young mother need help! No husband—the husband had already dumped her. And then the nanny abandoned her and the kids at the start of their trip—the nanny just disappeared at the airport!” was how Dorothy set the story in motion.

The long-suffering young mother sounds
familiar,
Juan Diego was thinking as he read and reread Dorothy’s fax. As a writer, Juan Diego knew there was a lot in Dorothy’s story; he suspected there might be more that was missing. Such as: how “one thing led to another,” as Dorothy would put it, and why she’d gone to El Nido with “poor Leslie,” and with Leslie’s little kids.

The
poor Leslie
part rang a bell with Juan Diego, even the first time he read Dorothy’s fax. Hadn’t he heard about a poor Leslie before? Oh, yes, he had, and Juan Diego didn’t need to read much more of Dorothy’s fax before he was reminded of what he’d heard about poor Leslie, and from whom.

“Don’t worry, darling—she’s not another writer!” Dorothy had written. “She’s just a writing student—she’s
trying
to be a writer. In fact, she knows your friend Clark—Leslie was in some sort of workshop at a writers’ conference where Clark French was her teacher.”

So she was
that
poor Leslie! Juan Diego had realized. This poor Leslie had met Clark before she’d taken a writing workshop with him. Clark had met her at a fund-raising event—as Clark had put it, one of several Catholic charities he and poor Leslie supported. Her husband had just left her; she had two little boys who were “a bit wild”; she thought
the “mounting disillusionments” in her young life deserved to be written about.

Juan Diego remembered thinking that Clark’s advice to Leslie was most unlike Clark, who hated memoirs
and
autobiographical fiction. Clark despised what he called “writing as therapy”; he thought the memoir-novel “dumbed down fiction and traduced the imagination.” Yet Clark had encouraged poor Leslie to pour out her heart on the page! “Leslie has a good heart,” Clark had insisted, when he’d told Juan Diego about her. “Poor Leslie has just had some bad luck with
men
!”

“Poor Leslie,” Clark’s wife had repeated; there’d been a pause. Then Dr. Josefa Quintana said: “I think Leslie likes women, Clark.”

“I don’t think Leslie’s a lesbian, Josefa—I think she’s just
confused,
” Clark French had said.

“Poor Leslie,” Josefa had repeated; it was the lack of conviction in the way she said it that Juan Diego would remember best.

“Is Leslie pretty?” Juan Diego had asked.

Clark’s expression was the model of indifference, as if he hadn’t noticed if Leslie were pretty or not.

“Yes,” was all Dr. Quintana said.

According to Dorothy, it was entirely Leslie’s idea that Dorothy come with her and the wild boys to El Nido.

“I’m not exactly nanny material,” Dorothy had written to Juan Diego. But Leslie was pretty, Juan Diego was thinking. And if Leslie liked women—whether or not Leslie was a lesbian, or just
confused
—Juan Diego didn’t doubt that Dorothy would have figured her out. Whatever Dorothy was, she wasn’t confused about it.

Naturally, Juan Diego didn’t tell Clark and Josefa that Dorothy had hooked up with poor Leslie—if, indeed, Dorothy had. (In her fax, Dorothy wasn’t exactly
saying
if she had.)

Given the disparaging way Clark had called Dorothy “D.”—not to mention with what disgust he’d referred to Dorothy as “the daughter,” or how turned off Clark had been by the whole mother-daughter business—well, why would Juan Diego have made Clark more miserable by suggesting that poor Leslie had hooked up with “D.”?

“What happened to those children wasn’t
my
fault,” Dorothy had written. As a writer, Juan Diego usually sensed when a storyteller was purposely changing the subject; he knew Dorothy hadn’t gone to El Nido out of her desire to be a
nanny.

He also knew that Dorothy was very
direct
—when she wanted to be, she could be very specific. Yet the details of exactly what happened to Leslie’s little boys were vague—perhaps purposely so?

This was what Juan Diego was thinking when his flight from Bohol landed in Manila, jolting him awake.

He couldn’t understand, of course, why the young woman seated beside him—she was in the aisle seat—was holding his hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said to him earnestly. Juan Diego waited, smiling at her. He hoped she would explain what she meant, or at least let go of his hand. “Your mother—” the young woman started to say, but she stopped, covering her face with both hands. “The dead hippie, a dead dog—a
puppy
—and all the rest!” she suddenly blurted out. (In lieu of saying “the Virgin Mary’s nose,” the young woman seated beside him touched the nose on her own face.)

“I see,” was all Juan Diego said.

Was he losing his mind? Juan Diego wondered. Had he talked the whole way to the stranger next to him? Was he somehow destined to meet mind readers?

The young woman was now scrutinizing her cell phone, which reminded Juan Diego to turn on his cell phone and stare at it. The little phone rewarded him by vibrating in his hand. He liked the vibration mode best. He disliked all the “tones,” as they called them. Juan Diego saw he had a text message from Clark French—not a short one.

Novelists aren’t at their best in the truncated world of text messages, but Clark was a persevering type—he was dogged, especially when he was indignant about something. Text messages were not meant for moral indignation, Juan Diego thought. “My friend Leslie has been seduced by your friend D.—the daughter!” Clark’s message began; he’d heard from poor Leslie, alas.

Leslie’s little boys were nine and ten—or seven and eight. Juan Diego was trying to remember. (Their names were impossible for him to remember.)

The boys had German-sounding names, Juan Diego thought; he was right about that. The boys’ father, Leslie’s ex-husband, was German—an international hotelier. Juan Diego couldn’t remember (or no one had told him) the German hotel magnate’s name, but that was what Leslie’s ex
did:
he owned hotels, and he bought out blue-ribbon hotels that were in financial straits. And Manila was a base of the German hotelier’s
Asian operations—or so Clark had implied. Leslie had lived everywhere, the Philippines included; her little boys had lived all over the world.

Juan Diego read Clark’s text message on the runway, following his flight from Bohol. A kind of Catholic umbrage—a feeling of pique—emanated from it, on Leslie’s behalf. After all, poor Leslie was a person of faith—a fellow Catholic—and Clark sensed that she’d been wronged, yet again.

Clark had texted the following message: “Watch out for the water buffalo at the airport—not as docile as it appears! Werner was trampled, but not seriously injured. Little Dieter says neither he nor Werner did anything to incite charge. (Poor Leslie says Werner and Dieter are ‘innocent of provoking buffalo.’) And then little Dieter was stung by swimming things—the resort called them ‘plankton.’ Your friend D. says stinging things were the size of human thumbnails—D., swimming with Dieter, says so-called plankton resembled ‘condoms for three-year-olds,’ hundreds of them! No allergic reaction to miniature stinging condoms yet. ‘Definitely not plankton,’ D. says.”

D. says,
Juan Diego thought to himself; Clark’s account of the water buffalo and the stinging things differed only slightly from Dorothy’s. The image of those “condoms for three-year-olds” was consistent, but Dorothy—in her vague way—had implied the water buffalo was provoked. She didn’t say how.

There was no water buffalo to be wary of at the airport in Manila, where Juan Diego changed planes for his connecting flight to Palawan. The new plane was a twin-engine prop—cigar-shaped, with only one seat on either side of the aisle. (Juan Diego would be in no danger of telling a total stranger the story of the ashes he and Lupe
didn’t
scatter at the Guadalupe shrine in Mexico City.)

But before the propeller plane taxied away from their gate, Juan Diego felt his cell phone vibrate again. Clark’s text message seemed hastier or more hysterical than before: “Werner, still sore from buffalo trampling, stung by pink jellyfish swimming vertically (like sea horses). D. says they were ‘semi-transparent and the size of index fingers.’ Necessary for poor Leslie and her boys to evacuate the island posthaste, due to Werner’s immediate allergic reaction to see-through finger things—swelling of lips, tongue, his poor penis. You will be alone with D. She is staying behind to settle cancellations of room reservations—poor Leslie’s, not yours! Avoid swimming. See you in Manila, I hope. Watch yourself around D.”

The prop plane had begun to move; Juan Diego turned off his cell phone. Regarding the second stinging episode—the pink jellyfish swimming vertically—Dorothy had sounded more like herself. “Who needs this shit? Fuck the South China Sea!” Dorothy had faxed Juan Diego, who was trying to imagine being alone with Dorothy on an isolated island, where he wouldn’t dare to swim. Why would he want to risk the stinging condoms for three-year-olds or the pink, penis-swelling jellyfish? (Not to mention the monitor lizards the size of dogs! How had Leslie’s wild boys managed to escape an encounter with the giant lizards?)

Wouldn’t he be happier returning to Manila? Juan Diego mused. But there was an in-flight brochure to look at; he looked longest at the map, with disquieting results. Palawan was the farthest westward of the Philippine islands. El Nido, the resort on Lagen Island—off the northwestern tip of Palawan—was the same latitude as Ho Chi Minh City and the mouths of the Mekong. Vietnam was due west across the South China Sea from the Philippines.

The Vietnam War was why the good gringo had run away to Mexico; el gringo bueno’s father had fallen in an earlier war—he lay buried not far from where his son could have died. Were these connections coincidental or predetermined? “Now
there’s
a question!” Juan Diego could hear Señor Eduardo saying—though, in his lifetime, the Iowan hadn’t answered the question himself.

When Edward Bonshaw and Flor died, Juan Diego would pursue the same subject with Dr. Vargas. Juan Diego told Vargas what Señor Eduardo had revealed to him about recognizing Flor in the postcard. “How about
that
connection?” Juan Diego would ask Dr. Vargas. “Would you call that coincidence or fate?” was how the dump reader put it to the atheist.

“What would you say to somewhere in between?” Vargas asked him.

“I would call that copping out,” Juan Diego answered. But he’d been angry; Flor and Señor Eduardo had just died—fucking doctors had failed to save them.

Maybe now Juan Diego would say what Vargas had said: the way the world worked was “somewhere in between” coincidence and fate. There were mysteries, Juan Diego knew; not everything came with a scientific explanation.