But Senor Eduardo struggled onward; he gasped for breath, the bottom of the coffee can bumping against the top of his bobbing head. Of course no one would have guessed that the failed scholastic was carrying a cripple up the stairs; the flailing Jesuit looked like any other self-abusing pilgrim--he might as well have been carrying cinder blocks or sandbags on his shoulders.
"Do you understand what happens if the parrot man drops dead?" Lupe asked her brother. "There goes your chance to get out of this mess, and this crazy country!"
The dump kids had seen for themselves the complications that could arise when a horse died--Manana had been a horse from out of town, right? If Edward Bonshaw keeled over, climbing the stairs to El Cerrito--well, the Iowan was from out of town, wasn't he? What would Juan Diego and Lupe do then? Juan Diego was thinking.
Naturally, Lupe had an answer for his thoughts. "We will have to rob Senor Eduardo's dead body--just to get enough money to pay a taxi to take us back to the circus site--or we will be kidnapped and sold to the brothels for child prostitutes!"
"Okay, okay," Juan Diego told her. To the panting, sweating Senor Eduardo, Juan Diego said: "Put me down--let me limp. I can crawl faster than you're carrying me. If you die, I'll have to sell Lupe to a children's brothel just to have money to eat. If you die, we'll never get back to Oaxaca."
"Merciful Jesus!" Edward Bonshaw prayed, kneeling on the stairs. He wasn't really praying; he knelt because he lacked the strength to lift Juan Diego off his shoulders--he dropped to his knees because he would have fallen if he'd tried to take another step.
The dump kids stood beside the gasping, kneeling Senor Eduardo while the Iowan strained to catch his breath. A TV crew climbed past them on the stairs. (Years later, when Edward Bonshaw was dying--when the dear man was similarly straining to breathe--Juan Diego would remember that moment when the television crew passed them on the stairs to the temple Lupe liked to call "Of the Roses.")
The on-camera TV journalist--a young woman, pretty but professional--was giving a cut-and-dried account of the miracle. It could have been a travel show, or a television documentary--neither highbrow nor sensational.
"In 1531, when the virgin first appeared to Juan Diego--an Aztec nobleman or peasant, according to conflicting accounts--the bishop didn't believe Juan Diego and asked him for proof," the pretty TV journalist was saying. She stopped her narration when she saw the foreigner on his knees; maybe the Hawaiian shirt had caught her eye, if not the worried-looking children attending to the apparently praying man. And it was here the cameraman shifted his attention: the cameraman clearly liked the image of Edward Bonshaw kneeling on the stairs, and the two children waiting with him. They drew the television camera to them, the three of them.
It was not the first time Juan Diego had heard of the "conflicting accounts," though he preferred thinking of himself as being named for a famous peasant; Juan Diego found it a little disturbing to think that he might have been named for an Aztec nobleman. That word didn't jibe with the prevailing image Juan Diego had of himself--namely, a standard-bearer for dump readers.
Senor Eduardo had caught his breath; now he was able to stand and to move unsteadily forward up the stairs. But the cameraman had zeroed in on the image of a crippled boy climbing to El Cerrito de las Rosas. Hence the TV crew moved slowly in step with the Iowan and the dump kids; they ascended the stairs together.
"When Juan Diego went back to the hill, the virgin reappeared and told him to pick some roses and carry them to the bishop," the TV journalist continued.
Behind the limping boy, as he and his sister reached the top of the hill, was a spectacular view of Mexico City; the TV camera captured the view, but neither Edward Bonshaw nor the dump kids ever turned around to see it. Juan Diego carefully held the coffee can in front of him, as if the ashes were a sacred offering he was bringing to the temple called "The Little Hill," which marked the spot where the miraculous roses grew.
"This time, the bishop believed him--the image of the virgin was imprinted on Juan Diego's cloak," the pretty TV journalist went on, but the cameraman had lost interest in Senor Eduardo and the dump kids; his attention had been seized by a group of Japanese honeymoon couples--their tour guide was using a megaphone to explain the Guadalupe miracle in Japanese.
Lupe was upset that the Japanese honeymooners were wearing surgical masks over their mouths and noses; she imagined the young Japanese couples were dying of some dread disease--she thought they'd come to Of the Roses to beg Our Lady of Guadalupe to save them.
"But aren't they contagious?" Lupe asked. "How many people have they infected between here and Japan?"
How much of Juan Diego's translation and Edward Bonshaw's explanation to Lupe was lost in the crowd noise? The proclivity of the Japanese to be "precautionary," to wear surgical masks to protect themselves from bad air or disease--well, it was unclear if Lupe ever understood what that was about.
More distracting, the nearby tourists and worshipers who'd heard Lupe speak had raised their own cries of faith-based excitement. One earnest believer pointed to Lupe and announced she'd been speaking in tongues; this had upset Lupe--to be accused of the ecstatic, unintelligible utterances of a messianic child.
A Mass was in progress inside the temple, but the rabble entering El Cerrito didn't seem conducive to the atmosphere for a Mass: the armies of nuns and uniformed children, the whipped monks and roped-together men in business suits--the latter were blindfolded again, which had caused them to trip and fall ascending the stairs (their pants were torn or scuffed at the knees, and two or three of the businessmen limped, if not as noticeably as Juan Diego).
Not that Juan Diego was the only cripple: the maimed had come--the amputees, too. (They'd come to be cured.) They were all there--the deaf, the blind, the poor--together with the sightseeing nobodies and the masked Japanese honeymooners.
At the threshold to the temple, the dump kids heard the pretty TV journalist say: "A German chemist actually analyzed the red and yellow fibers of Juan Diego's cloak. The chemist determined, scientifically, that the colors of the cloak were neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral."
"What do the Germans have to do with it?" Lupe asked. "Either Guadalupe is a miracle or she isn't. It's not about the cloak!"
The Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe was, in fact, a group of churches, chapels, and shrines all gathered on the rocky hillside where the miracle supposedly occurred. As it would turn out, Edward Bonshaw and the dump kids saw only the Chapel of the Well, where Guadalupe lay under glass on her deathbed, and El Cerrito de las Rosas. (They would never see the enshrined cloak.)
Inside El Cerrito, it's true that the Virgin of Guadalupe isn't tucked away in a side altar; she is elevated at the front of the chapel. But so what if they'd made her the main attraction? They had made Guadalupe at one with the Virgin Mary; they'd made them the same. The Catholic hocus-pocus was complete: the sacred Of the Roses was a zoo. The crazies far outnumbered the worshipers who were trying to follow the Mass-in-progress. The priests were performing by rote. While the megaphone was not permitted inside the temple, the tour guide continued in Japanese to the honeymooners in their surgical masks. The roped-together men in business suits--their blindfolds were once more removed--stared unseeing at the dark-skinned virgin, the way Juan Diego stared when he was dreaming.
"Don't touch those ashes," Lupe said to him, but Juan Diego was holding the lid tightly in place. "Not a speck gets sprinkled here," Lupe told him.
"I know--" Juan Diego started to say.
"Our mother would rather burn in Hell than have her ashes scattered here," Lupe said. "El gringo bueno would never sleep in El Cerrito--he was so beautiful when he slept," she said, remembering. It wasn't lost on Juan Diego that his sister had stopped calling the temple "Of the Roses." Lupe was content to call the temple "The Little Hill"; it wasn't so sacred to her anymore.
"I don't need a translation," Senor Eduardo told the dump kids. "This chapel is not holy. This whole place is not righ
t--it's all wrong, it's not the way it was meant to be."
"Meant to be," Juan Diego repeated.
"It's neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral--it's like the German said!" Lupe cried. Juan Diego thought he should translate this for Edward Bonshaw--it had a disturbing ring of truth to it.
"What German?" the Iowan asked, as they were descending the stairs. (Years later, Senor Eduardo would say to Juan Diego: "I feel I am still leaving The Little Hill of the Roses. The disillusion, the disenchantment I felt when I was descending those stairs, is ongoing; I am still descending," Edward Bonshaw would say.)
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 Basilica de Nuestra Senora 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 Senor 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 Senor 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 Senor 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 fac
e 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."