Avenue of Mysteries

  "What about adoption?" Juan Diego had asked Daiva and Rasa. "What about orphanages or adoption agencies--there must be state services for adoptions, maybe state services for children's rights? What about women who want or need to put their children up for adoption? Lithuania is a Catholic country, isn't it?"

  Daiva, the translator of many of his novels, understood Juan Diego very well. "Women who put their children up for adoption don't advertise themselves in a bookstore," she said, smiling at him.

  "That was just the start of something," he explained. "Novels begin somewhere; novels undergo revision." He'd not forgotten Odeta's face on the bookstore bulletin board, but One Chance to Leave Lithuania was a different novel now. The woman who was putting up a child for adoption was also a reader; she was seeking to meet other readers. She didn't just love novels and the characters in them for themselves; she sought to leave her life in the past behind, her child included. She wasn't thinking about meeting a man.

  But whose one chance to leave Lithuania was it? Hers, or her child's? Things can go wrong during the adoption process, Juan Diego knew--not only in novels.

  AS FOR JEANETTE WINTERSON'S The Passion, Juan Diego loved that novel; he'd read it two or three times--he kept returning to it. It wasn't about an order of lesbian nuns. It was about history and magic, including Napoleon's eating habits and a girl with webbed feet--she was a cross-dresser, too. It was a novel about unfulfilled love and sadness. It was not uplifting enough for Clark French to have written it.

  And Juan Diego had highlighted a favorite sentence in the middle of The Passion: "Religion is somewhere between fear and sex." That sentence would have provoked poor Clark.

  It was almost five in the afternoon on New Year's Eve in Bohol when Juan Diego limped out of the ramshackle airport and into the mayhem of Tagbilaran City, which struck him as a squalid metropolis of motorcycles and mopeds. There were so many difficult names for places in the Philippines, Juan Diego couldn't keep them straight--the islands had names, and the cities, not to mention the names of the neighborhoods in the cities. It was confusing. And in Tagbilaran City, there were also plenty of the now-familiar religious jeepneys, but these were intermixed with homemade vehicles that resembled rebuilt lawnmowers or supercharged golf carts; there were lots of bicycles, too, not to mention the masses of people on foot.

  Clark French had manfully lifted Juan Diego's enormous bag above his head--out of consideration for the women and small children who didn't come up to his chest. That orange albatross was a woman-and-child crusher; it could roll right over them. Yet Clark didn't hesitate to knife like a running back through the men in the mob--the smaller brown bodies got out of his way, or Clark muscled through them. Clark was a bull.

  Dr. Josefa Quintana knew how to follow her husband through a crowd. She kept one of her small hands flat against Clark's broad back; with the other, she held tightly to Juan Diego. "Don't worry--we have a driver, somewhere," she told him. "Clark, notwithstanding his opinion to the contrary, doesn't have to do everything." Juan Diego was charmed by her; she was genuine, and she struck him as both the brains and the common sense in the family. Clark was the instinctual one--both an asset and a liability.

  The beach resort had provided the driver, a feral-faced boy who looked too young to drive--but he was eager to do so. Once they were out of the city, there were smaller mobs of people walking along the road, although the vehicular traffic now careened at highway speeds. There were goats and cows tethered at the roadside, but their tethers were too long; occasionally, a cow's head (or a goat's) would reach into the road, causing the assorted vehicles to veer.

  Dogs were chained near the shacks, or in the cluttered yards of those homesteads along the roadside; when the dogs' chains were too long, the dogs would attack the pedestrians passing by--hence people, not only the heads of cows and goats, would materialize in the road. The boy driving the resort's SUV relied heavily on his horn.

  Such chaos reminded Juan Diego of Mexico--people spilling into the road, and the animals! To Juan Diego, the presence of improperly-cared-for animals was a telltale indication of overpopulation. So far, Bohol had made him think about birth control.

  To be fair: Juan Diego's birth-control awareness was keener around Clark. They'd exchanged combative emails on the subject of fetal pain, inspired by a fairly recent Nebraska law preventing abortions after twenty weeks' gestation. And they'd fought about the use of the 1995 papal encyclical in Latin America, an effort by conservative Catholics to attack contraception as part of "the culture of death"--this was how John Paul II preferred to refer to abortion. (That Polish pope was a sore subject between them.) Did Clark French have a cork up his ass about sexuality--a Catholic cork?

  But Juan Diego thought it was hard to say what kind of cork it was. Clark was one of those socially liberal Catholics. He said he was "personally opposed" to abortion--"it's distasteful," Juan Diego had heard Clark say--but Clark was politically liberal; he believed women should be able to choose an abortion, if that was what they wanted.

  Clark had always supported gay rights, too; yet he defended the entrenched position of his revered Catholic Church--he found the Church's position on abortion, and on traditional marriage (that is, between a man and a woman), "consistent and to be expected." Clark had even said he believed the Church "should uphold" its views on abortion and marriage; Clark saw no inconsistency to his having personal views on "social subjects" that differed from the views upheld by his beloved Church. This exasperated Juan Diego no end.

  But now, in the darkening twilight, as their boy driver dodged fleetingly appearing and instantly vanishing obstacles in the road, there was no talk of birth control. Clark French, befitting his self-sacrificing zeal, rode in the suicide seat--the one beside the boy driver--while Juan Diego and Josefa had buckled themselves into the seeming fortress that was the SUV's rear seat.

  The resort hotel on Panglao Island was called the Encantador; to get there, they drove through a small fishing village on Panglao Bay. It grew darker there. The glimmer of lights on the water and the briny smell in the heavy air were the only hints that the sea was near. And reflected in the headlights, at every curve of the winding road, were the watchful, faceless eyes of dogs or goats; the taller pairs of eyes were cows or people, Juan Diego guessed. There were lots of eyes out there in the darkness. If you were that boy driver, you would have driven fast, too.

  "This writer is the master of the collision course," Clark French, ever the expert on Juan Diego's novels, was saying to his wife. "It is a fated world; the inevitable looms ahead--"

  "It's true that even your accidents are not coincidental--they're planned," Dr. Quintana said to Juan Diego, interrupting her husband. "I think the world is scheming against your poor characters," she added.

  "This writer is the doom master!" Clark French held forth in the speeding car.

  It irritated Juan Diego how Clark, albeit knowledgeably, often spoke of him in the third person while delivering a dissertation on his work--a la this writer--notwithstanding that Juan Diego was present (in this case, in the car).

  The boy driver suddenly veered the SUV away from a shadowy form--with startled-looking eyes, with multiple arms and legs--but Clark was carrying on as if they were in a classroom.

  "Just don't ask Juan Diego about anything autobiographical, Josefa--or the lack thereof," Clark continued.

  "I wasn't going to!" his wife protested.

  "India is not Mexico. What happens to those children in the circus novel is not what happened to Juan Diego and his sister in their circus," Clark went on. "Right?" Clark suddenly asked his former teacher.

  "That's right, Clark," Juan Diego said.

  He'd also heard Clark hold forth on the "abortion novel"--as many critics had called another of Juan Diego's novels. "A compelling argument for a woman's right to an abortion," Juan Diego had heard Clark describe that novel. "Yet it's a complicated argument, coming from a former Catholic," Clark always added.

  "I'm no
t a former Catholic. I never was a Catholic," Juan Diego not once failed to point out. "I was taken in by the Jesuits, which was neither my choice nor against my will. What choice or will do you have when you're fourteen?"

  "What I'm trying to say is," Clark went on in the swerving SUV--on the dark, narrow road that was everywhere dotted with bright, unblinking eyes--"in Juan Diego's world, you always know the collision is coming. Exactly what the collision is--well, this may come as a surprise. But you definitely know there's going to be one. In the abortion novel, from the moment that orphan is taught what a D and C is, you know the kid is going to end up being a doctor who does one--right, Josefa?"

  "Right," Dr. Quintana answered in the backseat of the car. She gave Juan Diego a difficult-to-read smile--or a faintly apologetic one. It was dark in the back of the jouncing SUV; Juan Diego couldn't tell if Dr. Quintana was apologizing for her husband's assertiveness, his literary bullying, or if she was smiling a little sheepishly in lieu of admitting she knew more about a dilation and curettage than anyone in the collisiondaring car.

  "I do not write about myself," Juan Diego had said in interview after interview, and to Clark French. He'd also explained to Clark, who adored Jesuitical disputation, that (as a former dump kid) he had greatly benefited from the Jesuits in his young life; he'd loved Edward Bonshaw and Brother Pepe. Juan Diego even wished, at times, he could engage in conversation with Father Alfonso and Father Octavio--now that the dump reader was an adult, and somewhat better equipped to argue with such formidably conservative priests. And the nuns at Lost Children had done him and Lupe no harm--notwithstanding what a bitch Sister Gloria had been. (Most of the other nuns had been okay to the dump kids.) In the case of Sister Gloria, Esperanza had been the disapproving nun's principal provocateur.

  Yet Juan Diego had anticipated that a part of being with Clark--devoted student though he was--would be once more to find himself under scrutiny for the anti-Catholicism charge. What got under Clark's oh-so-Catholic skin, Juan Diego knew, wasn't that his former teacher was an unbeliever. Juan Diego was not an atheist--he simply had issues with the Church. Clark French was frustrated by this conundrum; Clark could more easily dismiss or ignore an unbeliever.

  Clark's casual-sounding D&C remark--not the most relaxing subject for a practicing OB-GYN, Juan Diego imagined--seemed to turn Dr. Quintana away from further discussion of a literary kind. Josefa clearly sought to change the subject--much to Juan Diego's relief, if not to her husband's.

  "Where we're staying, I'm afraid, is all about my family--it's a family tradition," Josefa said, smiling more uncertainly than apologetically. "I can vouch for the place--I'm sure you'll like the Encantador--but I can't begin to be an advocate for every member of my family," she continued warily. "Who's married to whom, who never should have married--their many, many children," she said, her small voice trailing off.

  "Josefa, there's no need to apologize for anyone in your family," Clark chimed in from the suicide seat. "What we can't vouch for is the mystery guest--there's an uninvited guest. We don't know who it is," he added, disassociating himself from the unknown person.

  "My family generally takes over the whole place--every room at the Encantador is ours," Dr. Quintana explained. "But this year, the hotel booked one room to someone else."

  Juan Diego, his heart beating faster than he was used to--enough so he noticed it, in other words--stared out the window of the hurtling car at the myriad eyes bobbing along the roadside, staring back at him. Oh, God! he prayed. Let it be Miriam or Dorothy, please!

  "Oh, you'll see us again--definitely," Miriam had said to him.

  "Yeah, definitely," Dorothy had said.

  In the same conversation, Miriam had told him: "We'll see you in Manila eventually. If not sooner."

  "If not sooner," Dorothy had repeated.

  Let it be Miriam--just Miriam! Juan Diego was thinking, as if an enticing pair of eyes aglow in the darkness could possibly be hers.

  "I suppose," Juan Diego said slowly, to Dr. Quintana, "this uninvited guest must have booked a room before your family made your usual reservations?"

  "No! That's just it! That's not what happened!" Clark French exclaimed.

  "Clark, we don't know exactly what happened--" Josefa started to say.

  "Your family books the whole place every year!" Clark cried. "This person knew it was a private party. She booked a room anyway, and the Encantador took her reservation--even knowing all the rooms were fully booked! What kind of person wants to crash a private party? She knew she would be entirely isolated! She knew she would be absolutely alone!"

  "She," was all Juan Diego said, once again feeling his heart race. Outside, in the darkness, there were no eyes now. The road had narrowed, and turned to gravel, then to dirt. Perhaps the Encantador was a secluded place, but she would not be entirely isolated there. She, Juan Diego hoped, would be with him. If Miriam was the uninvited guest, she absolutely wouldn't be alone for long.

  That was when the boy driver must have noticed something odd in the rearview mirror. He spoke quickly in Tagalog to Dr. Quintana. Clark French only partially understood the driver, but there was an element of alarm in the boy's tone; Clark turned and peered into the rear seat, where he could see that his wife had unbuckled her seat belt and was looking closely at Juan Diego.

  "Is something wrong, Josefa?" Clark asked his wife.

  "Give me a second, Clark--I think he's just asleep," Dr. Quintana told her husband.

  "Stop the car--stop it!" Clark told the boy driver, but Josefa spoke sharply in Tagalog to the boy, and the kid kept driving.

  "We're almost there, Clark--it's not necessary to stop here," Josefa said. "I'm sure your old friend is sleeping--dreaming, if I had to guess, but I'm sure he's just asleep."

  *

  FLOR DROVE THE DUMP kids to Circo de La Maravilla, because Brother Pepe was already beginning to blame himself for los ninos taking such a risk; Pepe was too upset to go with them, although el circo had been his idea--his and Vargas's. Flor drove Pepe's VW Beetle, with Edward Bonshaw in the passenger seat and the kids in the back.

  Lupe had delivered a tearful challenge to the noseless statue of the Virgin Mary; this was seconds before they'd driven away from the Templo de la Compania de Jesus. "Show me a real miracle--anyone can scare a superstitious cleaning woman to death!" Lupe had shouted at the towering Virgin. "Do something to make me believe in you--I think you're just a big bully! Look at you! All you do is stand there! You don't even have a nose!"

  "You're not going to offer some prayers, too?" Senor Eduardo asked Juan Diego, who was disinclined to translate his sister's outburst for the Iowan--nor did the limping boy dare to tell the missionary his most dire fears. If anything happened to Juan Diego at La Maravilla--or if, for any reason, he and Lupe were ever separated--there would be no future for Lupe, because no one but her brother could understand her. Not even the Jesuits would keep her and care for her; Lupe would be put in the institution for retarded children, where she would be forgotten. Even the name of the place for retarded children was unknown or had been forgotten, and no one seemed to know where it was--or no one would say exactly where it was, nothing more than "out of town" or "up in the mountains."

  At that time, when Lost Children was relatively new in town, there was only one other orphanage in Oaxaca, and it was a little bit "out of town" and "up in the mountains." It was in Viguera, and everyone knew its name--Ciudad de los Ninos, "City of Children."

  "City of Boys" was what Lupe called it; they didn't take girls. Most of the boys were ages six to ten; twelve was the cut-off, so they wouldn't have taken Juan Diego.

  City of Children had opened in 1958; it had been around longer than Ninos Perdidos, and the all-boys' orphanage would outlast Lost Children, too.

  Brother Pepe would not speak ill of Ciudad de los Ninos; perhaps Pepe believed all orphanages were a godsend. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio said only that education was not a priority at City of Children. (The dump kids had mer
ely observed that the boys were bused to school--their school was near the Solitude Virgin's basilica--and Lupe had said, with her characteristic shrug, that the buses themselves were as beat to shit as you would expect for buses accustomed to transporting boys.)

  One of the orphans at Lost Children had been at Ciudad de los Ninos as a younger boy. He didn't bad-mouth the all-boys' orphanage; he never said he was mistreated there. Juan Diego would remember that this boy said there were shoe boxes stacked in the dining hall (this was said without any explanation), and that all the boys--twenty or so--slept in one room. The mattresses were unsheeted, and the blankets and stuffed animals had earlier belonged to other boys. There were stones in the soccer field, this boy said--you didn't want to fall down--and the meat was cooked on an outdoor wood fire.

  These observations were not offered as criticisms; they simply contributed to Juan Diego and Lupe's impression that City of Boys would not have been an option for them--even if Lupe had been the right sex for that place, and even if both kids hadn't been too old.

  If the dump kids went crazy at Lost Children, they would go back to the basurero before they would submit to the institution for the retarded, where Lupe had heard the children were "head-bangers," and some of the head-bangers had their hands tied behind their backs. This prevented them from gouging out the eyes of other kids, or their own eyes. Lupe would not tell Juan Diego her source.

  There's no explaining why the dump kids thought it was perfectly logical that Circo de La Maravilla was a fortunate option, and the only acceptable alternative to their returning to Guerrero. Rivera would have welcomed the Guerrero choice, but he was notably absent when Flor drove the dump kids and Senor Eduardo to La Maravilla. And it would have been a tight fit for the dump boss, had he tried to squeeze into Brother Pepe's VW Beetle. To the dump kids, it also seemed perfectly logical that they were driven to the circus by a transvestite prostitute.