Avenue of Mysteries

  To the guests in those hotels along Central Park South, the view of the pristine whiteness of the park--and of those few brave families with young children, at play in the newly fallen snow--contrasted strangely with the absence of any vehicular traffic on the broad avenues and smaller streets. In the brightly whitened morning, even Columbus Circle was eerily quiet and empty; at a normally busy intersection, such as the corner of West Fifty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue, not a single taxi was moving. The only cars in sight were stranded, half buried in the snow.

  The virtual moonscape, which Manhattan was that Monday morning, prompted the concierge at Juan Diego's hotel to seek special assistance for the handicapped man. This was not a day for a cripple to hail a cab, or risk riding in one. The concierge had prevailed upon a limousine company--not a very good one--to take Juan Diego to Queens, though there were conflicting reports regarding whether John F. Kennedy International Airport was open or not. On TV, they were saying that JFK was closed, yet Juan Diego's Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong was allegedly departing on time. As much as the concierge doubted this--he was certain that the flight would be delayed, if not canceled--he had nonetheless indulged the anxious and crippled guest. Juan Diego was agitated about getting to the airport on time--though no flights were departing, or had departed, in the aftermath of the storm.

  It was not Hong Kong he cared about; that was a detour Juan Diego could do without, but a couple of his colleagues had persuaded him that he shouldn't go all the way to the Philippines without stopping to see Hong Kong en route. What was there to see? Juan Diego had wondered. While Juan Diego didn't understand what "air miles" actually meant (or how they were calculated), he understood that his Cathay Pacific flight was free; his friends had also persuaded him that first class on Cathay Pacific was something he must experience--something else he was supposed to see, apparently.

  Juan Diego thought that all this attention from his friends was because he was retiring from teaching; what else could explain why his colleagues had insisted on helping him organize this trip? But there were other reasons. Though he was young to retire, he was indeed "handicapped"--and his close friends and colleagues knew he was taking medication for his heart.

  "I'm not retiring from writing!" he'd assured them. (Juan Diego had come to New York for Christmas at the invitation of his publisher.) It was "merely" the teaching he was leaving, Juan Diego said, though for years the writing and the teaching had been inseparable; together, they'd been his entire adult life. And one of his former writing students had become very involved with what Juan Diego now thought of as an aggressive takeover of his trip to the Philippines. This former student, Clark French, had made Juan Diego's mission in Manila--as Juan Diego had thought of it, for years--Clark's mission. Clark's writing was as assertive, or forced, as he'd been about taking over his former teacher's trip to the Philippines--or so Juan Diego thought.

  Yet Juan Diego had done nothing to resist his former student's well-intentioned assistance; he didn't want to hurt Clark's feelings. Besides, it wasn't easy for Juan Diego to travel, and he'd heard that the Philippines could be difficult--even dangerous. A little overplanning wouldn't hurt, he'd decided.

  Before he knew it, a tour of the Philippines had materialized; his mission in Manila had given rise to side trips and distracting adventures. He worried that the purpose of his going to the Philippines had been compromised, though Clark French would have been quick to tell his former teacher that the zeal to assist him was borne of Clark's admiration for what a noble cause (for so long!) had inspired Juan Diego to take this trip in the first place.

  As a very young teenager in Oaxaca, Juan Diego had met an American draft dodger; the young man had run away from the United States to evade the draft for the Vietnam War. The draft dodger's dad had been among the thousands of American soldiers who'd died in the Philippines in World War II--but not on the Bataan Death March, and not in the intense battle for Corregidor. (Juan Diego didn't always remember the exact details.)

  The American draft dodger didn't want to die in Vietnam; before he died, the young man told Juan Diego, he wanted to visit the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial--to pay his respects to his slain father. But the draft dodger didn't survive the misadventure of his running away to Mexico; he had died in Oaxaca. Juan Diego had pledged to take the trip to the Philippines for the dead draft dodger; he would make the journey to Manila for him.

  Yet Juan Diego had never known the young American's name; the antiwar boy had befriended Juan Diego and his seemingly retarded little sister, Lupe, but they knew him only as "the good gringo." The dump kids had met el gringo bueno before Juan Diego became a cripple. At first, the young American seemed too friendly to be doomed, though Rivera had called him a "mescal hippie," and the dump kids knew el jefe's opinion of the hippies who came to Oaxaca from the United States at that time.

  The dump boss believed that the mushroom hippies were "the stupid ones"; he meant they were seeking something they thought was profound--in el jefe's opinion, "something as ridiculous as the interconnectedness of all things," though the dump kids knew that el jefe himself was a Mary worshiper.

  As for the mescal hippies, they were smarter, Rivera said, but they were "the self-destructive ones." And the mescal hippies were the ones who were also addicted to prostitutes, or so the dump boss believed. The good gringo was "killing himself on Zaragoza Street," el jefe said. The dump kids had hoped not; Lupe and Juan Diego adored el gringo bueno. They didn't want the darling boy to be destroyed by his sexual desires or the intoxicating drink distilled from the fermented juice of certain species of agave.

  "It's all the same," Rivera had told the dump kids, darkly. "Believe me, you're not exactly uplifted by what you end up with. Those low women and too much mescal--you're left looking at that little worm!"

  Juan Diego knew the dump boss meant the worm at the bottom of the mescal bottle, but Lupe said that el jefe had also been thinking about his penis--how it looked after he'd been with a prostitute.

  "You believe all men are always thinking about their penises," Juan Diego told his sister.

  "All men are always thinking about their penises," the mind reader said. To a degree, this was the point past which Lupe would no longer allow herself to adore the good gringo. The doomed American had crossed an imaginary line--the penis line, perhaps, though Lupe would never have put it that way.

  One night, when the dump reader was reading aloud to Lupe, Rivera was with them in the shack in Guerrero, listening to the reading, too. The dump boss was probably building a new bookcase, or there was something wrong with the barbecue and Rivera was fixing it; maybe he had stopped by just to see if Dirty White (a.k.a. Saved from Death) had died.

  The book Juan Diego was reading that night was another discarded academic tome, a mind-numbing exercise in scholarship, which had been designated for burning by one or the other of those two old Jesuit priests Father Alfonso and Father Octavio.

  This particular work of unread academia had actually been written by a Jesuit, and its subject was both literary and historical--namely, an analysis of D. H. Lawrence's writing on Thomas Hardy. As the dump reader had not read anything by Lawrence or Hardy, a scholarly examination of Lawrence's writing on Hardy would have been mystifying--even in Spanish. And Juan Diego had selected this particular book because it was in English; he'd wanted more practice reading English, though his less-than-rapt audience (Lupe and Rivera and the disagreeable dog Dirty White) might have understood him better en espanol.

  To add to the difficulty, several pages of the book had been consumed by fire, and a vile odor from the basurero still clung to the burned book; Dirty White wanted to sniff it, repeatedly.

  The dump boss didn't like Lupe's saved-from-death dog any better than Juan Diego did. "I think you should have left this one in the milk carton," was all el jefe told her, but Lupe (as always) was indignant in Dirty White's defense.

  And just then Juan Diego read aloud to them an unrepeatable passage,
concerning someone's idea of the fundamental interrelatedness of all beings.

  "Wait, wait, wait--stop right there," Rivera interrupted the dump reader. "Whose idea is that?"

  "It could be the one called Hardy--maybe it's his idea," Lupe said. "Or, more likely, the Lawrence guy--it sounds like him."

  When Juan Diego translated what Lupe said for Rivera, el jefe instantly agreed. "Or the idea of the person writing the book--whoever that is," the dump boss added. Lupe nodded that this was also true. The book was tedious while remaining unclear; it was seemingly nitpicking scrutiny of a subject that eluded any concrete description.

  "What 'fundamental interrelatedness of all beings'--which beings are supposedly related?" the dump boss cried. "It sounds like something a mushroom hippie would say!"

  That got a laugh out of Lupe, who rarely laughed. Soon she and Rivera were laughing together, which was even more rare. Juan Diego would always remember how happy he was to hear both his sister and el jefe laughing.

  And now, so many years later--it had been forty years--Juan Diego was on his way to the Philippines, a trip he was taking in honor of the nameless good gringo. Yet not a single friend had asked Juan Diego how he intended to pay the dead draft dodger's respects to the slain soldier--like his lost son, the fallen father was without a name. Of course these friends all knew that Juan Diego was a novelist; maybe the fiction writer was taking a trip for el gringo bueno symbolically.

  As a young writer, he'd been quite the traveler, and the dislocations of travel had been a repeated theme in his early novels--especially in that circus novel set in India, the one with the elephantine title. No one had been able to talk him out of that title, Juan Diego remembered fondly. A Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary--what a cumbersome title it was, and what a long and complicated story! Maybe my most complicated, Juan Diego was thinking--as the limo navigated the deserted, snowbound streets of Manhattan, making its determined way to the FDR Drive. It was an SUV, and the driver was contemptuous of other vehicles and other drivers. According to the limo driver, other vehicles in the city were ill equipped for snow, and the few cars that were "almost correctly" equipped had the "wrong tires"; as for the other drivers, they didn't know how to drive in snow.

  "Where do you think we are--fuckin' Florida?" the driver yelled out his window to a stranded motorist who'd slid sideways and blocked a narrow crosstown street.

  Out on the FDR Drive, a taxi had jumped the guardrail and was stuck in the waist-deep snow of the jogging path that ran alongside the East River; the cabbie was attempting to dig out his rear wheels, not with a shovel but a windshield scraper.

  "Where are you from, you jerk-off--fuckin' Mexico?" the limo driver shouted to him.

  "Actually," Juan Diego said to the driver, "I'm from Mexico."

  "I didn't mean you, sir--you're gonna get to JFK on time. Your problem is, you're just gonna wait there," the driver told him, not nicely. "There's nothin' flyin'--in case you haven't noticed, sir."

  Indeed, Juan Diego hadn't noticed that no planes were flying; he just wanted to be at the airport, ready to leave, whenever his flight departed. The delay, if there was one, didn't matter to him. It was missing this trip that was unthinkable. "Behind every journey is a reason," he found himself considering--before he remembered that he'd already written this. It was something he'd stated most emphatically in A Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary. Now here I am, traveling again--there's always a reason, he thought.

  "The past surrounded him like faces in a crowd. Among them, there was one he knew, but whose face was it?" For a moment, shrouded by the surrounding snow and intimidated by the vulgar limo driver, Juan Diego forgot that he'd already written this, too. He blamed the beta-blockers.

  FROM THE SOUND OF him, Juan Diego's limo driver was a rough-spoken, hateful man, but he knew his way around Jamaica, Queens, where a wide street reminded the long-ago dump reader of Periferico--a street divided by train tracks in Oaxaca. Periferico was where el jefe used to take the dump kids shopping for food; the cheapest, closest-to-rotten produce was available in that market, in La Central--except in 1968, during the student revolts, when La Central was occupied by the military and the food market moved to the zocalo in the center of Oaxaca.

  That was when Juan Diego and Lupe were twelve and eleven, and they first became familiar with the area of Oaxaca around the zocalo. The student revolts didn't last long; the market would move back to La Central, and Periferico (with that forlorn-looking footbridge over the train tracks). Yet the zocalo remained in the dump kids' hearts; it had become their favorite part of town. The kids spent as much time away from the dump, in the zocalo, as they could.

  Why wouldn't a boy and girl from Guerrero be interested in the center of things? Why wouldn't two ninos de la basura be curious to see all the tourists in town? The city dump wasn't on the tourist maps. What tourist ever went sightseeing in the basurero? One whiff of the dump, or the stinging in your eyes from the fires perpetually burning there, would send you running back to the zocalo; one look at the dump dogs (or the way those dogs looked at you) would do it.

  Was it any wonder--around this time, during the student riots in 1968, when the military took over La Central and the dump kids started hanging around the zocalo--that Lupe, who was only eleven, began her crazy and conflicted obsessions with Oaxaca's various virgins? That her brother was the only one who could understand her babble cut Lupe off from any meaningful dialogue with adults. And of course these were religious virgins, miraculous virgins--of the kind who commanded a following, not only among eleven-year-old girls.

  Wasn't it to be expected that Lupe would, at first, be drawn to these virgins? (Lupe could read minds; she knew no real-life counterpart who had her ability.) However, what dump kid wouldn't be a little suspicious of miracles? What were these competing virgins doing to prove themselves in the here and now? Had these miraculous virgins performed any miracles lately? Wasn't Lupe likely to be super-critical of these highly touted but nonperforming virgins?

  There was a virgin shop in Oaxaca; the dump kids discovered it on one of their first outings in the area of the zocalo. This was Mexico: the country had been overrun by the Spanish conquistadors. Hadn't the ever-proselytizing Catholic Church been in the virgin-selling business for years? Oaxaca had once been central to the Mixtec and Zapotec civilizations. Hadn't the Spanish conquest been selling virgins to the indigenous population for centuries--beginning with the Augustinians and the Dominicans, and thirdly the Jesuits, all pushing their Virgin Mary?

  There was more than Mary to deal with now--so Lupe had noticed from the many churches in Oaxaca--but nowhere in the city were the warring virgins on such tawdry display as you could find them (for sale) in the virgin shop on Independencia. There were life-size virgins and virgins who were larger than life-size. To name only three who were featured, in a variety of cheap and tacky replicas, throughout the shop: Mother Mary, of course, but also Our Lady of Guadalupe, and naturally Nuestra Senora de la Soledad. La Virgen de la Soledad was the virgin whom Lupe disparaged as merely a "local hero"--the much-maligned Solitude Virgin and her "stupid burro story." (The burro, a small donkey, was probably blameless.)

  The virgin shop also sold life-size (and larger than life-size) versions of Christ on the Cross; if you were strong enough, you could carry home a giant Bleeding Jesus, but the principal purpose of the virgin shop, which had been in business in Oaxaca since 1954, was providing for the Christmas parties (las posadas).

  In fact, only the dump kids called the place on Independencia the virgin shop; everyone else referred to it as the Christmas-parties store--La Nina de las Posadas was the actual name of the ghoulish shop (literally, "The Girl of the Christmas Parties"). The eponymous Girl was whatever virgin you chose to take home with you; obviously, one of the life-size virgins for sale could liven up your Christmas party--more than an agonizing Christ on the Cross ever could.

  As serious as Lupe was about Oaxaca's virgins, the Christmas-parties place was a
joke to Juan Diego and Lupe. "The Girl," as the dump kids occasionally called the virgin shop, was where they went for a laugh. Those virgins for sale weren't half as realistic as the prostitutes on Zaragoza Street; the take-home virgins were more in the category of inflatable sex dolls. And the Bleeding Jesuses were simply grotesque.

  There was also (as Brother Pepe would have put it) a pecking order of virgins on display in various Oaxaca churches--alas, this pecking order and these virgins affected Lupe deeply. The Catholic Church had its own virgin shops in Oaxaca; for Lupe, these virgins were no laughing matter.

  Take the "stupid burro story," and how Lupe loathed la Virgen de la Soledad. The Basilica de Nuestra Senora de la Soledad was grandiose--a pompous eyesore between Morelos and Independencia--and the first time the dump kids visited it, their access to the altar was blocked by a caterwauling contingent of pilgrims, countryfolk (farmers or fruit pickers, Juan Diego had guessed), who not only prayed in cries and shouts but ostentatiously approached the radiant statue of Our Lady of Solitude on their knees, virtually crawling the length of the center aisle. The praying pilgrims put Lupe off, as did the local-hero aspect of the Solitude Virgin--she was occasionally called "Oaxaca's patron saint."

  Had Brother Pepe been present, the kindly Jesuit teacher might have cautioned Lupe and Juan Diego against a pecking-order prejudice of their own: dump kids have to feel superior to someone; at the small colony in Guerrero, los ninos de la basura believed that they were superior to countryfolk. By the behavior of the loudly praying pilgrims in the Solitude Virgin's basilica, and given their cloddishly rustic attire, Juan Diego and Lupe were left with little doubt: dump kids were definitely superior to these wailing and kneeling farmers or fruit pickers (whoever the uncouth countryfolk were).

  Lupe also had no love for how la Virgen de la Soledad was dressed; her severe, triangular-shaped robe was black, encrusted with gold. "She looks like an evil queen," Lupe said.

  "She looks rich, you mean," Juan Diego said.

  "The Solitude Virgin is not one of us," Lupe declared. She meant not indigenous. She meant Spanish, which meant European. (She meant white.)