The Solitude Virgin, Lupe said, was "a white-faced pinhead in a fancy gown." It further irked Lupe that Guadalupe got second-class treatment in the Basilica de Nuestra Senora de la Soledad; the Guadalupe altar was off to the left side of the center aisle--an unlit portrait of the dark-skinned virgin (not even a statue) was her sole recognition. And Our Lady of Guadalupe was indigenous; she was a native, an Indian; she was what Lupe meant by "one of us."
Brother Pepe would have been astonished at how much dump reading Juan Diego had done, and how closely Lupe had listened. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio believed they had purged the Jesuit library of the most extraneous and seditious reading matter, but the young dump reader had rescued many dangerous books from the hellfires of the basurero.
Those works that had chronicled the Catholic indoctrination of the indigenous population of Mexico had not gone unnoticed; the Jesuits had played a mind-game role in the Spanish conquests, and both Lupe and Juan Diego had learned a lot about the Jesuitical conquistadors of the Roman Catholic Church. While Juan Diego had at first become a dump reader for the purpose of teaching himself to read, Lupe had listened and learned--from the start, she'd been focused.
In the Solitude Virgin's basilica, there was a marble-floored chamber with paintings of the burro story: peasants were praying after they had met and were followed by a solitary, unaccompanied burro. On the little donkey's back was a long box--it looked like a coffin.
"What fool wouldn't have looked in the box right away?" Lupe always asked. Not these stupid peasants--their brains must have been deprived of oxygen by their sombreros. (Dumb countryfolk, in the dump kids' opinion.)
There was--there still exists--a controversy concerning what happened to the burro. Did it one day just stop walking and lie down, or did it drop dead? At the site where the little donkey either stopped in its tracks or just died, the Basilica de Nuestra Senora de la Soledad was erected. Because only then and there had the dumb peasants opened the burro's box. In it was a statue of the Solitude Virgin; disturbingly, a much smaller Jesus figure, naked except for a towel covering his crotch, was lying in the Solitude Virgin's lap.
"What is a shrunken Jesus doing there?" Lupe always asked. The discrepancy in the size of the figures was most disturbing: the larger Solitude Virgin with a Jesus half her size. And this was no Baby Jesus; this was Jesus with a beard, only he was unnaturally small and dressed in nothing but a towel.
In Lupe's opinion, the burro had been "abused"; the larger Solitude Virgin with a smaller, half-naked Jesus in her lap spoke to Lupe of "even worse abuse"--not to mention how "stupid" the peasants were, for not having the brains to look in the box at the beginning.
Thus did the dump kids dismiss Oaxaca's patron saint and most fussed-over virgin as a hoax or a fraud--a "cult virgin," Lupe called la Virgen de la Soledad. As for the proximity of the virgin shop on Independencia to the Basilica de Nuestra Senora de la Soledad, all Lupe would say was: "Fitting."
Lupe had listened to a lot of grown-up (if not always well-written) books; her speech might have been incomprehensible to everyone except Juan Diego, but Lupe's exposure to language--and, because of the books in the basurero, to an educated vocabulary--was beyond her years and her experience.
In contrast to her feelings for the Solitude Virgin's basilica, Lupe called the Dominican church on Alcala a "beautiful extravagance." Having complained about the gold-encrusted robe of the Solitude Virgin, Lupe loved the gilded ceiling in the Templo de Santo Domingo; she had no complaints about "how very Spanish Baroque" Santo Domingo was--"how very European." And Lupe liked the gold-encrusted shrine to Guadalupe, too--nor was Our Lady of Guadalupe overshadowed by the Virgin Mary in Santo Domingo.
As a self-described Guadalupe girl, Lupe was sensitive to Guadalupe being overshadowed by the "Mary Monster." Lupe not only meant that Mary was the most dominant of the Catholic Church's "stable" of virgins; Lupe believed that the Virgin Mary was also "a domineering virgin."
And this was the grievance Lupe had with the Jesuits' Templo de la Compania de Jesus on the corner of Magon and Trujano--the Temple of the Society of Jesus made the Virgin Mary the main attraction. As you entered, your attention was drawn to the fountain of holy water--agua de San Ignacio de Loyola--and a portrait of the formidable Saint Ignatius himself. (Loyola was looking to Heaven for guidance, as he is often depicted.)
In an inviting nook, after you passed the fountain of holy water, was a modest but attractive shrine to Guadalupe; special notice was paid to the dark-skinned virgin's most famous utterance, in large lettering easily viewed from the pews and kneeling pads.
" '?No estoy aqui, que soy tu madre?' " Lupe would pray there, incessantly repeating this. " 'Am I not here, for I am your mother?' "
Yes, you could say that this was an unnatural allegiance Lupe latched on to--to a mother and a virgin figure, which was a replacement for Lupe's actual mother, who was a prostitute (and a cleaning woman for the Jesuits), a woman who was not much of a mother to her children, an often absent mother, who lived apart from Lupe and Juan Diego. And Esperanza had left Lupe fatherless, save for the standin dump boss--and for Lupe's idea that she had a multitude of fathers.
But Lupe both genuinely worshiped Our Lady of Guadalupe and fiercely doubted her; Lupe's doubt was borne by the child's judgmental sense that Guadalupe had submitted to the Virgin Mary--that Guadalupe was complicitous in allowing Mother Mary to be in control.
Juan Diego could not recall a single dump-reading experience where Lupe might have learned this; as far as the dump reader could tell, Lupe both believed in and distrusted the dark-skinned virgin entirely on her own. No book from the basurero had led the mind reader down this tormented path.
And notwithstanding how tasteful and appropriate the adoration paid to Our Lady of Guadalupe was--the Jesuit temple in no way disrespected the dark-skinned virgin--the Virgin Mary unquestionably took center stage. The Virgin Mary loomed. The Holy Mother was enormous; the Mary altar was elevated; the statue of the Holy Virgin was towering. A relatively diminutive Jesus, already suffering on the cross, lay bleeding at Mother Mary's big feet.
"What is this shrunken-Jesus business?" Lupe always asked.
"At least this Jesus has some clothes on," Juan Diego would say.
Where the Virgin Mary's big feet were firmly planted--on a three-tiered pedestal--the faces of angels appeared frozen in clouds. (Confusingly, the pedestal itself was composed of clouds and angels' faces.)
"What is it supposed to mean?" Lupe always asked. "The Virgin Mary tramples angels--I can believe it!"
And to either side of the gigantic Holy Virgin were significantly smaller, time-darkened statues of two relative unknowns: the Virgin Mary's parents.
"She had parents?" Lupe always asked. "Who even knows what they looked like? Who cares?"
Without question, the towering statue of the Virgin Mary in the Jesuit temple was the "Mary Monster." The dump kids' mother complained about the difficulty she had cleaning the oversize virgin. The ladder was too tall; there was no safe or "proper" place to lean the ladder, except against the Virgin Mary herself. And Esperanza prayed endlessly to Mary; the Jesuits' best cleaning woman, who had a night job on Zaragoza Street, was an undoubting Virgin Mary fan.
Big bouquets of flowers--seven of them!--surrounded the Mother Mary altar, but even these bouquets were dwarfed by the giant virgin herself. She didn't just tower--she seemed to menace everyone and everything. Even Esperanza, who adored her, thought the Virgin Mary statue was "too big."
"Hence domineering," Lupe would repeat.
" '?No estoy aqui, que soy tu madre?' " Juan Diego found himself repeating in the backseat of the snow-surrounded limousine, now approaching the Cathay Pacific terminal at JFK. The former dump reader murmured aloud, in both Spanish and English, this modest claim of Our Lady of Guadalupe--more modest than the penetrating stare of that overbearing giantess, the Jesuits' statue of the Virgin Mary. " 'Am I not here, for I am your mother?' " Juan Diego repeated to himsel
f.
His passenger's bilingual mutterings caused the contentious limo driver to look at Juan Diego in the rearview mirror.
It's a pity Lupe wasn't with her brother; she would have read the limo driver's mind--she could have told Juan Diego what the hateful man's thoughts were.
A successful wetback, the limo driver was thinking--that was his assessment of his Mexican-American passenger.
"We're almost at your terminal, pal," the driver said: the way he'd said the sir word hadn't been any nicer. But Juan Diego was remembering Lupe, and their time together in Oaxaca. The dump reader was daydreaming; he didn't really hear his driver's disrespectful tone of voice. And without his dear sister, the mind reader, beside him, Juan Diego didn't know the bigot's thoughts.
It wasn't that Juan Diego had never encountered a commonality with the Mexican-American experience. It was more a matter of his mind, and where it wandered--his mind was often elsewhere.
* 3 *
Mother and Daughter
The handicapped man had not anticipated that he would be stranded at JFK for twenty-seven hours. Cathay Pacific sent him to the first-class lounge of British Airways. This was more comfortable than what the economy-fare passengers had to deal with--the concessionaires ran out of food, and the public toilets were not properly attended to--but the Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong, scheduled to depart at 9:15 A.M. on December 27, did not take off till noon of the following day, and Juan Diego had packed his beta-blockers with his toilet articles in his checked bag. The flight to Hong Kong was some sixteen hours. Juan Diego would have to do without his medication for more than forty-three hours; he would go without the beta-blockers for almost two days. (As a rule, dump kids don't panic.)
While Juan Diego considered calling Rosemary to ask her if he was at risk being without his medication for an unknown period of time, he didn't do it. He remembered what Dr. Stein had said: that if he ever had to go off the beta-blockers, for any reason, he should stop taking them gradually. (Inexplicably, the gradually part made him think there was nothing risky about stopping or restarting the beta-blockers.)
Juan Diego knew he would get scant sleep as he waited in the British Airways lounge at JFK; he looked forward to catching up on his sleep whenever he eventually boarded the sixteen-hour flight to Hong Kong. Juan Diego didn't call Dr. Stein because he was looking forward to having a break from the beta-blockers. With any luck, he might have one of his old dreams; his all-important childhood memories might come back to him--chronologically, he hoped. (As a novelist, he was a little fussy about chronological order, a tad old-fashioned.)
British Airways did its best to make the crippled man comfortable; the other first-class passengers were aware of Juan Diego's limp and the misshapen, custom-made shoe on his damaged foot. Everyone was very understanding; though there were not enough chairs for all the stranded passengers in the first-class lounge, no one complained that Juan Diego had put two chairs together--he'd made a kind of couch for himself, so he could elevate that tragic-looking foot.
Yes, the limp made Juan Diego look older than he was--he looked at least sixty-four, not fifty-four. And there was something else: more than a hint of resignation gave him a faraway expression, as if the lion's share of excitement in Juan Diego's life had resided in his distant childhood and early adolescence. After all, he'd outlived everyone he'd loved--clearly, this had aged him.
His hair was still black; only if you were near him--and you had to look closely--could you see the intermittent flecks of gray. He'd not lost any hair, but it was long, which gave him the commingled appearance of a rebellious teenager and an aging hippie--that is, of someone who was unfashionable on purpose. His dark-brown eyes were almost as black as his hair; he was still a handsome man, and a slender one, yet he made an "old" impression. Women--younger women, especially--offered him help he didn't necessarily need.
An aura of fate had marked him. He moved slowly; he often appeared to be lost in thought, or in his imagination--as if his future were predetermined, and he wasn't resisting it.
Juan Diego believed he was not so famous a writer that many of his readers recognized him, and strangers to his work never did. Only those who could be called his diehard fans found him. They were mostly women--older women, certainly, but many college girls were among his books' ardent readers.
Juan Diego didn't believe it was the subject of his novels that attracted women readers; he always said that women were the most enthusiastic readers of fiction, not men. He would offer no theory to explain this; he'd simply observed that this was true.
Juan Diego wasn't a theorizer; he was not big on speculation. He was even a little bit famous for what he'd said in an interview when a journalist had asked him to speculate on a certain shopworn subject.
"I don't speculate," Juan Diego had said. "I just observe; I only describe." Naturally, the journalist--a persistent young fellow--had pressed the point. Journalists like speculation; they're always asking novelists if the novel is dead, or dying. Remember: Juan Diego had snatched the first novels he read from the hellfires of the basurero; he'd burned his hands saving books. You don't ask a dump reader if the novel is dead, or dying.
"Do you know any women?" Juan Diego had asked this young man. "I mean women who read," he said, his voice rising. "You should talk to women--ask them what they read!" (By now, Juan Diego was shouting.) "The day women stop reading--that's the day the novel dies!" the dump reader cried.
Writers who have any audience have more readers than they know. Juan Diego was more famous than he thought.
THIS TIME, IT WAS a mother and her daughter who discovered him--as only his most passionate readers did. "I would have recognized you anywhere. You couldn't disguise yourself from me if you tried," the rather aggressive mother said to Juan Diego. The way she spoke to him--well, it was almost as if he had tried to disguise himself. And where had he seen such a penetrating stare before? Without a doubt, that towering and most imposing statue of the Virgin Mary--she had such a stare. It was a way the Blessed Virgin had of looking down at you, but Juan Diego could never tell if Mother Mary's expression was pitying or unforgiving. (He couldn't be sure in the case of this elegant-looking mother who was one of his readers, either.)
As for the daughter who was also his fan, Juan Diego thought she was somewhat easier to read. "I would have recognized you in the dark--if you just spoke to me, even less than a complete sentence, I would have known who you were," the daughter told him a little too earnestly. "Your voice," she said, shivering--as if she couldn't continue. She was young and dramatic, but pretty in a kind of peasant way; there was a thickness in her wrists and ankles, a sturdiness in her hips and low-slung breasts. Her skin was darker than her mother's; her facial features were more prominent, or less refined, and--especially in her manner of speaking--she was more blunt, more coarse.
"More like one of us," Juan Diego could imagine his sister saying. (More indigenous-looking, Lupe would have thought.)
It unnerved Juan Diego that he suddenly imagined what tarted-up replications the virgin shop in Oaxaca might have made of this mother and her daughter. That Christmas-parties place would have exaggerated the slightly slipshod way the daughter dressed, but was it her clothes that looked a little slovenly or the careless way she wore them?
Juan Diego thought the virgin shop would have given the daughter's life-size mannequin a sluttish posture--a come-on appearance, as if the fullness of her hips couldn't possibly be contained. (Or was this Juan Diego's fantasizing about the daughter?)
That virgin shop, which the dump kids occasionally called The Girl, would have failed to come up with a mannequin to match the mother of this twosome. The mother had an air of sophistication and entitlement about her, and her beauty was the classical kind; the mother radiated expensiveness and superiority--her sense of privilege seemed inborn. If this mother, who was only momentarily delayed in a first-class lounge at JFK, had been the Virgin Mary, no one would have sent her to the manger; someone would h
ave made room for her at the inn. That vulgar virgin shop on Independencia couldn't conceivably have replicated her; this mother was immune to being stereotyped--not even The Girl could have fabricated a sex-doll match for her. The mother was more "one of a kind" than she was "one of us." There was no place for the mother in the Christmas-parties store, Juan Diego decided; she would never be for sale. And you wouldn't want to bring her home--at least not to entertain your guests or amuse the children. No, Juan Diego thought--you would want to keep her, all for yourself.
Somehow, without his saying to this mother and her daughter a word about his feelings for them, the two women seemed to know everything about Juan Diego. And this mother and daughter, despite their apparent differences, worked together; they were a team. They quickly inserted themselves into what they believed was the utter helplessness of Juan Diego's situation, if not his very existence. Juan Diego was tired; without hesitation, he blamed the beta-blockers. He didn't put up much of a fight. Basically, he let these women take charge of him. Besides, this had happened after they'd been waiting for twenty-four hours in the first-class lounge of British Airways.
Juan Diego's well-meaning colleagues, all close friends, had scheduled a two-day layover for him in Hong Kong; now it appeared that he would have only one night in Hong Kong before he had to catch an early-morning connection to Manila.
"Where are you staying in Hong Kong?" the mother, whose name was Miriam, asked him. She didn't beat around the bush; in keeping with her penetrating stare, she was very direct.
"Where were you staying?" the daughter, whose name was Dorothy, said. You could see little of her mother in her, Juan Diego had noticed; Dorothy was as aggressive as Miriam, but not nearly as beautiful.
What was it about Juan Diego that made more aggressive people feel they had to manage his business for him? Clark French, the former student, had inserted himself into Juan Diego's trip to the Philippines. Now two women--two strangers--were taking charge of the writer's arrangements in Hong Kong.