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 wante
d 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.")
"And do you think Shapiro defames Freud?" Clark asked his adoring writing student, but poor Leslie was now afraid of him; she looked too small to speak.
Juan Diego would have sworn that was Miriam's long arm wrapped around poor Leslie's shaking shoulders.
"Self-analysis had enabled Freud, by extension, to analyze Shakespeare," Shapiro had written.
No one but Freud could imagine Freud's lust for his mother, or Freud's jealousy of his father, Clark was saying--and how, from self-analysis, Freud had concluded this was (as Freud put it) "a universal event in early childhood."
Oh, those universal events in early childhood! Juan Diego was thinking; he'd hoped Clark French would leave Freud out of the discussion. Juan Diego didn't want to hear what Clark French thought of the Freudian theory of penis envy.
"Just don't, Clark," said a stronger-sounding female voice in the audience--not Leslie's timid voice this time. It was Clark's wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana, a most impressive woman. She stopped Clark from telling the audience his impressions of Freud--the saga of the untold damage done to literature and to young Clark's vulnerable imagination at a formative age.
With a beginning of this oppressive kind, how could the onstage interview hope to achieve a spontaneous liftoff? It was a wonder that the audience didn't leave--except for Leslie, whose early exit was very visible. It was a mild success that the interview got a little better. There was some mention of Juan Diego's novels, and it registered as a small triumph that the issue of Juan Diego's being, or his not being, a Mexican-American writer was discussed without further reference to Freud, James, or Twain.
But poor Leslie hadn't left alone, not entirely. If not everyone's idea of a mother and her daughter, those two women with Leslie were certainly competent-looking, and the way they'd escorted Leslie up the aisle and out of the theater suggested they were used to taking charge. In fact, how Miriam and Dorothy had taken hold of the small, pretty woman might have caused some concern among the more observant members of the audience--if anyone even noticed, or had been paying attention. The unshakable grip Miriam and Dorothy had on poor Leslie could have meant they were comforting her or abducting her. It was hard to tell.
And where had Miriam and Dorothy gone? Juan Diego kept wondering. Why should he care? Hadn't he wished they would just disappear? Yet what did it mean when your angels of death departed--when your personal phantasms stopped haunting you?
THE DINNER AFTER THE onstage event was in the labyrinth of the Ayala Center. To an out-of-towner, the dinner guests were not discernible from one another. Juan Diego knew who his readers were--they announced themselves by their familiarity with the details of his novels--but the dinner guests Clark identified as "patrons of the arts" were aloof; their sympathies toward Juan Diego were unreadable.
You shouldn't generalize about those people who are patrons of the arts. Some of them have read nothing; they're often the ones who appear to have read everything. The other ones have an out-of-it expression; they seem disinclined to speak or, if they talk at all, it's only to make an offhand remark about the salad or the seating plan--and they're usually the ones who've read everything you've written, and everyone else you've ever read.
"You have to be careful around patron-des-arts types," Clark whispered in Juan Diego's ear. "They are not what they seem."
Clark was wearing thin on Juan Diego--Clark could grate on anyone. There were those known things Clark and Juan Diego disagreed about, but it was when Juan Diego most agreed with Clark that Clark grated on him more.
To be fair: Clark had prepared him to expect "a journalist or two" at the dinner party; Clark had also said he would warn Juan Diego about "the ones to watch out for." But Clark didn't know all the journalists.
One of the unknown journalists asked Juan Diego if the beer he was drinking was his first one, or his second.
"You want to know how many beers he's had?" Clark asked the young man aggressively. "Do you know how many novels this author has written?" Clark further asked the journalist, who was wearing an untucked white shirt. It was a dress shirt, but one that had known fresher days. By its bedraggled appearance and a melange of stains, the shirt--and the young man wearing it--signified, if only to Clark, a life of unclean disarray.
"Do you like San Miguel?" the journalist asked Juan Diego, pointing to the beer; he was deliberately ignoring Clark.
"Name two titles of novels this author has written--just two," Clark told the journalist. "Of the novels Juan Diego Guerrero has written, name one you've read--just one," Clark said.
Juan Diego could never (would never) behave like Clark, but Clark was redeeming himself with each passing second; Juan Diego was remembering what he liked best about Clark French--notwithstanding all the other ways in which Clark could be Clark.
"Yes, I like San Miguel," Juan Diego told the journalist, holding up his beer as if he were toasting the unread young man. "And I believe this is my second one."
"You don't have to talk to him--he hasn't done his homework," Clark said to his former teacher.
Juan Diego was thinking that his nice-guy assessment of Clark French was not quite correct; Clark is a nice guy, Juan Diego thought, provided you're not a journalist who hasn't done your homework.
As for the unprepared journalist, the young man who was not a reader, he had wandered off. "I don't know who he is," Clark muttered; he was disappointed in himself. "But I know that one--I know her," Clark told Juan Diego, pointing to a middle-aged woman who'd been eyeing them from afar. (She'd been waiting for the younger journalist to drift away.) "She is a horror of insincerity--imagine a venomous hamster," Clark hissed to Juan Diego.
"One of the ones to watch out for, I guess," Juan Diego said; he smiled knowingly at his former student. "I feel safe with you, Clark," Juan Diego suddenly said. This was verily spontaneous and heartfelt, but until he said it, Juan Diego hadn't realized how unsafe he had felt--and for how long! (Dump kids don't take feeling safe for granted; circus kids don't assume a safety net is there.)
For his part, Clark felt moved to wrap his big, strong arm around his former teacher's slender shoulders. "But I don't think you need my protection from this one," Clark whispered in Juan Diego's ear. "She's just a gossip."
Clark was talking about the middle-aged woman journalist, who was now approaching--the "venomous hamster." Had he meant her mind ran in place, making repetitive rotations on the going-nowhere wheel? But what was venomous about her? "All of her questions will be recycled--stuff she saw on the Internet, the reiteration of every stupid question you were ever asked," Clark was whispering in his former teacher's ear. "She will not have read a single novel you've written, but she'll have read everything about you. I'm sure you know the type," Clark added.
"I know, Clark--thank you," Juan Diego gently said, smiling at his former student. Mercifully, Josefa was there--the good Dr. Quintana was dragging her husband away. Juan Diego had not realized he'd been standing in the food line until he saw the buffet table; it was dead ahead.
"You should have the fish," the woman journalist told him. Juan Diego saw that she'd inserted herself in the food line beside him, possibly the way venomous hamsters do.
"That looks like a cheese sauce, on the fish," was all Juan Diego said; he helped himself to the Korean glass noodles with vegetables, and to something called Vietnamese beef.
"I don't think I've seen anyone actually eat the mangled beef here," the journalist said. She must have meant to say "shredded," Juan Diego was thinking, but he didn't say anything. (Maybe the Vietnamese mangled their beef; Juan Diego didn't know.)
"The small, pretty woman--the one who was there tonight," the middl
e-aged woman said, helping herself to the fish. "She left early," she added, after a long pause.
"Yes, I know who you mean--Leslie someone. I don't know her," was all Juan Diego said.
"Leslie someone told me to tell you something," the middle-aged woman told him, in a confiding (not quite motherly) tone.
Juan Diego waited; he didn't want to appear too interested. And he was looking everywhere for Clark and Josefa; he realized he wouldn't object if Clark bullied this woman journalist, just a little.
"Leslie said to tell you that the woman with Dorothy can't be Dorothy's mother. Leslie said the older woman isn't old enough to be Dorothy's mother--besides, they look nothing alike," the journalist said.
"Do you know Miriam and Dorothy?" Juan Diego asked the frumpy-looking woman. She was wearing a peasant-style blouse--the kind of loose shirt the American hippie women wore in Oaxaca, those women who didn't wear bras and put flowers in their hair.
"Well, I don't know them--I just saw they were very much with Leslie," the woman journalist said. "And they left early, too, with Leslie. For what it's worth, I thought the older of the two women wasn't old enough to be the younger one's mother. And they didn't look anything alike--not to me," she added.
"I saw them, too," was all Juan Diego said. It was hard to imagine why Miriam and Dorothy were with Leslie, Juan Diego thought. Perhaps harder to imagine was why poor Leslie was with them.
Clark must have gone to the men's room, Juan Diego was thinking; he was nowhere in sight. Yet an unlikely-looking savior was headed Juan Diego's way; she was dressed badly enough to be another journalist, but there was the recognizable glint of unexpressed intimacies in her eager eyes--as if reading him had changed her life. She had stories to share, of how he'd rescued her: maybe she'd been contemplating suicide; or she was pregnant with her first child, at sixteen; or she'd lost a child when she happened to read--well, these were the kind of intimacies glinting in her I-was-saved-by-reading-you eyes. Juan Diego loved his diehard readers. The details they'd cherished in his novels seemed to sparkle in their eyes.