Avenue of Mysteries (73 page)

It’s true that beta-blockers reduce blood circulation to the extremities. Juan Diego didn’t wake up until noon on Sunday, and his hands and feet were freezing. He wasn’t surprised that Miriam was gone, or that she hadn’t left him a note.

Women know when men don’t desire them: ghosts and witches, deities and demons, angels of death—even virgins, even ordinary women. They always know; women can tell when you have stopped desiring them.

Juan Diego felt so diminished; he wouldn’t remember how that Sunday, and Sunday night, slipped away. Even that extra half of a Lopressor tablet had been too much. On Sunday night, he flushed the unused half of the pill down the toilet; he took only the required dose of his Lopressor prescription. Juan Diego would still sleep till noon on Monday. If there was any news that weekend, he missed it.

The writing students at Iowa had called Clark French a “do-gooder Catholic,” an “übernerd,” and Clark had been busy with Leslie while Juan Diego slept. “I believe poor Leslie’s foremost concern is your well-being,” Clark’s first text message to Juan Diego began. There were more messages from Clark, of course—mostly to do with their onstage interview. “Don’t worry: I won’t ask you who wrote Shakespeare, and we’ll skirt the issue of autobiographical fiction as best we can!”

There was more about poor Leslie, too. “Leslie says she’s NOT jealous—she wants nothing to do with D.,” Clark’s text message declared. “I’m sure that Leslie is strictly concerned with what witchcraft, what violent sorcery, D. may unleash on you. Werner told his mom the water buffalo was INCITED to charge and trample—Werner said D. stuck a caterpillar up the buffalo’s nose!”

Someone is lying, Juan Diego was thinking. He didn’t put it past Dorothy to have stuck the caterpillar all the way up one nostril, as far as it would go. Juan Diego didn’t put it past young Werner, either.

“Was it a green and yellow caterpillar, with dark-brown eyebrows?” Juan Diego texted Clark.

“It WAS!” Clark answered him. I guess Werner got a good look at the caterpillar, Juan Diego was thinking.

“Definitely witchcraft,” Juan Diego texted Clark. “I’m not sleeping with Dorothy or her mother anymore,” he added.

“Poor Leslie will be at our onstage event tonight,” was Clark’s reply. “Will D. be there? With her MOTHER? Leslie says she’s surprised D. has a mother, living.”

“Yes, Dorothy and her mother will be there,” was Juan Diego’s last text message to Clark. It gave him some small pleasure to send it. Juan Diego was noticing it was less stressful to do mindless things when you were a little low on adrenaline.

Was this why retired men were content to putter around their backyards, or play golf, or do shit like that—like sending text messages, one tedious letter at a time? Juan Diego was wondering. Was trivia more tolerable when you were already feeling diminished?

He’d not anticipated that the news on TV, and in the newspaper the hotel delivered to his room, would be
all
about the Black Nazarene procession in Manila. The only news was local. He’d been so out of it on Sunday, he hadn’t noticed there was a drizzling rain all day—“a northeast monsoon,” the newspaper called it. Despite the weather, an estimated 1.7 million Filipino Catholics (many of them barefoot) turned out for the procession; the devotees were joined by 3,500 police officers. As in previous years, several hundred injuries were reported. Three devotees fell or jumped off the Quezon Bridge, the Coast Guard reported; the Coast Guard also said they’d deployed several intelligence teams in inflatable boats to patrol the Pasig River—“not only to provide security for the devotees, but to be on the lookout for any outsiders who might create an unusual scenario.”

What
“unusual scenario”? Juan Diego had wondered.

The procession always ended up back at Quiapo Church, where the practice called
pahalik
was performed—the act of kissing the statue of the Black Nazarene. Mobs of people waited in line, crowding the altar area, waiting for a chance to kiss the statue.

And now a doctor was on TV, speaking dismissively of the “minor injuries” suffered by 560 devotees at this year’s Black Nazarene procession. The doctor strongly suggested that all the lacerations were to be expected. “Typical crowd-type injuries, such as tripping—the bare feet are just asking for trouble,” the doctor said. He was young and impatient-looking. And the abdominal issues? the young doctor was asked. “Brought on by bad food choices,” the doctor said. What about all the sprains? “More crowd-type injuries—falls, from all the pushing and shoving,” the doctor answered, sighing. And all the headaches? “Dehydration—people don’t drink enough water,” the doctor said, with rising contempt. Hundreds of marchers had been treated for dizziness and difficulty breathing—some fainted, the doctor was told. “Unfamiliarity with marching!” the doctor cried, throwing up his hands; he reminded Juan Diego of Dr. Vargas.
(The young doctor seemed on the verge of crying out, “The problem is
religion
!”)

How about the incidences of back pain? “Could be caused by anything—definitely exacerbated by all the pushing and shoving,” the doctor replied; he had closed his eyes. And hypertension? “Could be caused by
anything,
” the doctor repeated—he kept his eyes closed. “More marching-related business is a likely cause.” His voice had all but trailed away when the young doctor suddenly opened his eyes and spoke directly to the camera. “I’ll tell you what the Black Nazarene procession is
good
for,” he said. “The procession is good for scavengers.”

Naturally, a dump kid would be sensitive to this derogatory-sounding use of the
scavengers
word. Juan Diego wasn’t only imagining los pepenadores from the basurero; in addition to the
professional
trash collectors of the dump-kid kind, Juan Diego was thinking sympathetically of dogs and seagulls. But the young doctor wasn’t speaking derogatorily; he was being
very
derogatory about the Black Nazarene procession, but in saying the procession was
good
for “scavengers,” he meant it was good for poor people—the ones who followed after the devotees, cashing in on all the discarded water bottles and plastic food containers.

Ah, well
—poor people,
Juan Diego thought. There was certainly a history that linked the Catholic Church to poor people. Juan Diego usually fought with Clark French about that.

Of course the Church was “genuine” in its love for poor people, as Clark always argued—Juan Diego didn’t dispute this. Why
wouldn’t
the Church love poor people? Juan Diego was in the habit of asking Clark. But what about birth control? What about abortion? It was the “social agenda” of the Catholic Church that made Juan Diego mad. The Church’s policies—in opposition to abortion, even in opposition to contraception!—not only
subjected
women to the “enslavement of childbirth,” as Juan Diego had put it to Clark; the Church’s policies kept the poor poor, or made them poorer. Poor people kept reproducing, didn’t they? Juan Diego kept asking Clark.

Juan Diego and Clark French had fought on and on about this. If the subject of the Church didn’t come up when the two of them were onstage tonight, or when they were out to dinner afterward, how could it
not
come up when they were together in a Roman Catholic church tomorrow morning? How could Clark and Juan Diego coexist in the Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Manila without a recurrence of their oh-so-familiar Catholic conversation?

Just thinking about this conversation made Juan Diego aware of his adrenaline—namely, needing it. It wasn’t only for sex that Juan Diego wanted the adrenaline release he’d been missing since he’d started the beta-blockers. The dump reader had first encountered a little Catholic history on the singed pages of books saved from burning; as a Lost Children kid, he thought he understood the difference between those unanswerable religious mysteries and the man-made rules of the Church.

If he was going to the Our Lady of Guadalupe church with Clark French in the morning, Juan Diego was thinking, maybe skipping a dose of his Lopressor prescription tonight wasn’t a bad idea. Given who Juan Diego Guerrero was, and where he came from—well, if
you
were Juan Diego, and you were going to Guadalupe Viejo with Clark French, wouldn’t you want as much adrenaline as you could get?

And there was the ordeal onstage, and the dinner afterward—there was tonight
and
tomorrow to get through, Juan Diego considered. To take, or not to take, the beta-blockers—that is the question, he was thinking.

The text message from Clark French was short but would suffice. “On second thought,” Clark had written, “let’s begin with my asking you who wrote Shakespeare—we know we agree about that. This will put the issue of personal experience as the only valid basis for fiction writing behind us—we know we agree about this, too. As for the types who believe Shakespeare was someone else: they underestimate the imagination, or they overesteem personal experience—their rationale for autobiographical fiction, don’t you think?” Clark French wrote to his former writing teacher. Poor Clark—still theoretical, forever juvenile, always picking fights.

Give me the adrenaline, all I can get, Juan Diego thought—once more not taking his beta-blockers.

•
32
•

Not Manila Bay

From Juan Diego’s point of view, the good thing about being interviewed by Clark French was that Clark did most of the talking. The difficult part was listening to Clark; he was such a pontificator. And if Clark was on your side, he could be more embarrassing.

Juan Diego and Clark had recently read James Shapiro’s
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
Both Clark and Juan Diego had admired the book; they’d been persuaded by Mr. Shapiro’s arguments—they believed that Shakespeare of Stratford was the one and only Shakespeare; they agreed that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were not written collaboratively, or by someone else.

Yet why, Juan Diego wondered, didn’t Clark French begin by quoting Mr. Shapiro’s most compelling statement—the one made in the book’s epilogue? (Shapiro writes, “What I find most disheartening about the claim that Shakespeare of Stratford lacked the life experience to have written the plays is that it diminishes the very thing that makes him so exceptional: his imagination.”)

Why did Clark begin by attacking Mark Twain? An assignment to read
Life on the Mississippi,
in Clark’s high school years, had caused “an almost lethal injury to my imagination”—or so Clark complained. Twain’s autobiography had nearly ended Clark’s aspirations to become a writer. And according to Clark,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
should have been one novel—“a short one,” Clark railed.

The audience, Juan Diego could tell, didn’t understand the
point
of this rant—no mention had been made of the
other
writer onstage (namely, Juan Diego). And Juan Diego, unlike the audience, knew what
was coming; he knew that the connection between Twain and Shakespeare had not yet been made.

Mark Twain was one of the culprits who believed that Shakespeare couldn’t have written the plays attributed to him. Twain had stated that his own books were “simply autobiographies”; as Mr. Shapiro wrote, Twain believed “great fiction, including his own, was necessarily autobiographical.”

But Clark hadn’t
connected
this to the who-wrote-Shakespeare debate, which Juan Diego knew was Clark’s point. Instead, Clark was going on and on about Twain’s lack of imagination. “Writers who have no imagination—writers who can
only
write about their own life experiences—simply can’t imagine that other writers can imagine
anything
!” Clark cried. Juan Diego wished he could disappear.

“But who wrote Shakespeare, Clark?” Juan Diego asked his former student, trying to steer him to the point.

“
Shakespeare
wrote Shakespeare!” Clark sputtered.

“Well, that settles it,” Juan Diego said. There was a small sound from the audience, a titter or two. Clark seemed surprised by the tittering, faint though it was—as if he’d forgotten there was an audience.

Before Clark could continue—venting about the other culprits in the camp of unimaginative scoundrels who subscribed to the heresy that Shakespeare’s plays had been written by someone else—Juan Diego tried to say a little about James Shapiro’s excellent book: how, as Shapiro put it, “Shakespeare did not live, as we do, in an age of memoir”; how, as Mr. Shapiro further said, “in his own day, and for more than a century and a half after his death, nobody treated Shakespeare’s works as autobiographical.”

“Lucky Shakespeare!” Clark French shouted.

A slender arm waved from the stupefied audience—a woman who was almost too small to be seen from the stage, except that her prettiness stood out (even seated, as she was, between Miriam and Dorothy). And (even from afar) the bracelets on her skinny arm were of the expensive-looking and attention-getting kind that a woman with a rich ex-husband would wear.

“Do you think Mr. Shapiro’s book defames Henry James?” Leslie timidly asked from the audience. (This was, without a doubt,
poor
Leslie.)

“Henry James!” Clark cried, as if James had caused Clark’s imagination another unspeakable wound in those vulnerable high school years. Poor Leslie, small as she was, seemed to grow smaller in her seat. And
was it only Juan Diego who noticed, or did Clark also see, that Leslie and Dorothy were holding hands? (So much for Leslie’s
saying
she wanted nothing to do with D.!)

“Pinning down Henry James’s skepticism about Shakespeare’s authorship isn’t easy,” Shapiro writes. “Unlike Twain, James wasn’t willing to confront the issue publicly or directly.” (Not exactly
defamatory,
Juan Diego was thinking—though he’d agreed with Shapiro’s description of “James’s maddeningly elliptical and evasive style.”)