Avenue of Mysteries (13 page)

“Why is the Virgin Mary a fraud?” Edward Bonshaw asked the boy, who lay unmoving at the Holy Mother’s feet.

“Don’t ask—not now. There isn’t time,” Brother Pepe started to say, but Lupe was already babbling unintelligibly—pointing first to Mother Mary, then to the smaller, dark-skinned virgin, who was often unnoticed in her more modest shrine.

“Is that Our Lady of Guadalupe?” the new missionary asked. From where they were, at the Mary Monster altar, the Guadalupe portrait was small and off to one side of the temple—almost out of sight, purposely tucked away.

“¡Sí!” Lupe cried, stamping her foot; she suddenly spat on the floor, almost perfectly between the two virgins.

“Another probable fraud,” Juan Diego said, to explain his sister’s spontaneous spitting. “But Guadalupe isn’t entirely bad; she’s just a little corrupted.”

“Is the girl—” Edward Bonshaw started to say, but Brother Pepe put a cautionary hand on the Iowan’s shoulder.

“Don’t say it,” Pepe warned the young American.

“No, she’s
not,
” Juan Diego answered. The unspoken
retarded
word hovered there in the temple, as if one of the miraculous virgins had communicated it. (Naturally, Lupe had read the new missionary’s mind; she knew what he’d been thinking.)

“The boy’s foot isn’t right—it’s flattened, and it’s pointing the wrong way,” Edward said to Brother Pepe. “Shouldn’t he see a
doctor
?”

“¡Sí!” Juan Diego cried. “Take me to Dr. Vargas. Only the boss man was hoping for a miracle.”

“The boss man?” Señor Eduardo asked, as if this were a religious reference to the Almighty.

“Not
that
boss man,” Brother Pepe said.

“
What
boss man?” the Iowan asked.

“El jefe,” Juan Diego said, pointing to the anxious, guilt-stricken Rivera.

“
Aha!
The boy’s father?” Edward asked Pepe.

“No, probably not—he’s the
dump
boss,” Brother Pepe said.

“He was driving the truck! He’s too lazy to get his side-view mirror fixed! And look at his stupid mustache! No woman who isn’t a prostitute will ever want him with that hairy caterpillar on his lip!” Lupe raved.

“Goodness—she has her own language, doesn’t she?” Edward Bonshaw asked Brother Pepe.

“This is Rivera. He was driving the truck that backed over me, but he’s like a father to us
—better
than a father. He doesn’t leave,” Juan Diego told the new missionary. “And he never beats us.”

“Aha,” Edward said, with uncharacteristic caution. “And your
mother
? Where is—”

As if summoned by those do-nothing virgins, who were taking the day off, Esperanza rushed to her son at the altar; she was a ravishingly beautiful young woman who made an entrance of herself wherever and whenever she appeared. Not only did she
not
look like a cleaning woman for the Jesuits; to the Iowan, she most certainly didn’t look like anyone’s
mother
.

What is it about women with
chests
like that? Brother Pepe was wondering to himself. Why are their chests always
heaving
?

“Always late, usually hysterical,” Lupe said sullenly. The girl’s looks at the Virgin Mary and Our Lady of Guadalupe had been disbelieving—in her mother’s case, Lupe simply looked away.

“Surely she isn’t the boy’s—” Señor Eduardo began.

“Yes, she is—the girl’s, too,” was all Pepe said.

Esperanza was raving incoherently; it seemed she was beseeching the Virgin Mary, rather than be so mundane as to ask Juan Diego what had happened to him. Her incantations sounded to Brother Pepe like Lupe’s gibberish—possibly genetic, Pepe thought—and Lupe (of course) chimed in, adding
her
incoherence to the babble. Naturally, Lupe was pointing to the dump boss as she reenacted the saga of the multifaceted
mirror and the foot-flattening truck in reverse; there was no pity for the caterpillar-lipped Rivera, who seemed ready to throw himself at the Virgin Mary’s feet—or repeatedly bash his head against the pedestal where the Holy Mother so dispassionately stood. But was she dispassionate?

It was then that Juan Diego looked upward at the Virgin Mary’s usually unemotional face. Did the boy’s pain affect his vision, or did Mother Mary indeed
glower
at Esperanza—she who’d brought so little hope, her name notwithstanding, into her son’s life? And what exactly did the Holy Mother disapprove of? What had made the Virgin Mary glare so angrily at the children’s mother?

The low-cut neckline of Esperanza’s revealing blouse certainly showed a lot of the implausible cleaning woman’s cleavage, and from the Virgin Mary’s elevated position on her pedestal, the Holy Mother looked down upon Esperanza’s décolletage from an all-encompassing height.

Esperanza herself was oblivious to the towering statue’s implacable disapproval. Juan Diego was surprised that his mom understood what her vehement daughter was babbling about. Juan Diego was used to being Lupe’s interpreter—even for Esperanza—but not this time.

Esperanza had stopped wringing her hands imploringly in the area of the Virgin Mary’s toes; the sensual-looking cleaning woman was no longer beseeching the unresponsive statue. Juan Diego always underestimated his mother’s capacity for blame—that is, for blaming
others.
In this case, Rivera—el jefe, with his unrepaired side-view mirror, he who slept in the cab of his truck with his gear shift in reverse—was the recipient of Esperanza’s animated blame. She beat the dump boss with both her hands, in tightly clenched fists; she kicked his shins; she yanked his hair, her bracelets scratching his face.

“You have to help Rivera,” Juan Diego said to Brother Pepe, “or he’ll need to see Dr. Vargas, too.” The injured boy then spoke to his sister: “Did you see how the Virgin Mary looked at our mother?” But the seemingly all-knowing child simply shrugged.

“The Virgin Mary disapproves of everyone,” Lupe said. “No one is good enough for that big bitch.”

“What did she say?” Edward Bonshaw asked.

“God knows,” Brother Pepe said. (Juan Diego didn’t offer a translation.)

“If you want to worry about something,” Lupe said to her brother, “you ought to worry about how Guadalupe was looking at
you.
”

“How?” Juan Diego asked the girl. It hurt his foot to turn his head to look at the less noticed of the two virgins.

“Like she’s still making up her mind about you,” Lupe said. “Guadalupe hasn’t
decided
about you,” the clairvoyant child told him.

“Get me out of here,” Juan Diego said to Brother Pepe. “Señor Eduardo, you have to help me,” the injured boy added, grasping the new missionary’s hand. “Rivera can carry me,” Juan Diego continued. “You just have to rescue Rivera first.”

“Esperanza,
please,
” Brother Pepe said to the cleaning woman; he had reached out and caught her slender wrists. “We have to take Juan Diego to Dr. Vargas—we need Rivera, and his truck.”

“His
truck
!” the histrionic mother cried.

“You should pray,” Edward Bonshaw said to Esperanza; inexplicably, he knew how to say this in Spanish—he said it perfectly.

“Pray?”
Esperanza asked him. “Who
is
he?” she suddenly asked Pepe, who was staring at his bleeding thumb; one of Esperanza’s bracelets had cut him.

“Our new teacher—the one we’ve all been waiting for,” Brother Pepe said, as if suddenly inspired. “Señor Eduardo is from
Iowa,
” Pepe intoned. He made
Iowa
sound as if it were Rome.

“Iowa,”
Esperanza repeated, in her enthralled way—her chest heaving. “Señor Eduardo,” she repeated, bowing to the Iowan with an awkward but cleavage-revealing curtsy. “Pray
where
? Pray
here
? Pray
now
?” she asked the new missionary in the riotous, parrot-covered shirt.

“Sí,” Señor Eduardo told her; he was trying to look everywhere except at her breasts.

You have to hand it to this guy; he’s got a way about him, Brother Pepe was thinking.

Rivera had already lifted Juan Diego from the altar where the Virgin Mary imposingly stood. The boy had cried out in pain, albeit briefly—just enough to quiet the murmuring crowd.

“Look at him,” Lupe was telling her brother.

“Look at—” Juan Diego started to ask her.

“At
him,
at the gringo—the parrot man!” Lupe said. “
He’s
the miracle man. Don’t you see? It’s
him
. He came for us—for
you,
anyway,” Lupe said.

“What do you mean: ‘He came for us’—what’s that supposed to mean?” Juan Diego asked his sister.

“For
you,
anyway,” Lupe said again, turning away; she was almost indifferent,
as if she’d lost interest in what she was saying or she no longer believed in herself. “Now that I think of it, I guess the gringo isn’t
my
miracle—just yours,” the girl said, disheartened.

“The parrot man!” Juan Diego repeated, laughing; yet, as Rivera carried him, the boy could see that Lupe wasn’t smiling. Serious as ever, she appeared to be scanning the crowd, as if looking for who
her
miracle might be, and not finding him.

“You Catholics,” Juan Diego said, wincing as Rivera shouldered his way through the congested entranceway to the Jesuit temple; it was unclear to Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw if the boy had spoken to them. “You Catholics” could have meant the gawking crowd, including the shrill but unsuccessful praying of the dump kids’ mother—Esperanza always prayed out loud, like Lupe, and in Lupe’s language. And now, also like Lupe, Esperanza had stopped beseeching the Virgin Mary; it was the smaller, dark-skinned virgin who received the pretty cleaning woman’s earnest attention.

“Oh, you who were once disbelieved—you who were doubted, you who were asked to prove who you were,” Esperanza was praying to the child-size portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

“You Catholics,” Juan Diego began again. Diablo saw the dump kids coming and began to wag his tail, but this time the injured boy had clutched a handful of parrots on the new missionary’s overlarge Hawaiian shirt. “You Catholics stole our virgin,” Juan Diego said to Edward Bonshaw. “Guadalupe was
ours,
and you took her—you
used
her, you made her merely an acolyte to your Virgin Mary.”

“An
acolyte
!” the Iowan repeated. “This boy speaks English remarkably well!” Edward said to Brother Pepe.

“Sí,
remarkably,
” Pepe answered.

“But perhaps the pain has made him delirious,” the new missionary suggested. Brother Pepe didn’t think Juan Diego’s pain had anything to do with it; Pepe had heard the boy’s Guadalupe rant before.

“For a dump kid, he is
milagroso,
” was how Brother Pepe put it—
miraculous.
“He reads better than our students, and remember—he’s self-taught.”

“Yes, I know—that’s amazing.
Self-taught!
” Señor Eduardo cried.

“And God knows how and where he learned his English—not only in the basurero,” Pepe said. “The boy’s been hanging out with hippies and draft dodgers—an enterprising boy!”

“But everything ends up in the basurero,” Juan Diego managed to
say, between waves of pain. “Even books in English.” He’d stopped looking for those two women mourners; Juan Diego thought his pain meant he wouldn’t see them, because he wasn’t dying.

“I’m not riding with caterpillar lip,” Lupe was saying. “I want to ride with the parrot man.”

“We want to ride in the pickup part, with Diablo,” Juan Diego told Rivera.

“Sí,” the dump boss said, sighing; he knew when he’d been rejected.

“Is the dog friendly?” Señor Eduardo asked Brother Pepe.

“I’ll follow you, in the VW,” Pepe replied. “If you are torn to pieces, I can be a witness—make recommendations to the higher-ups, on behalf of your eventual sainthood.”

“I was being serious,” said Edward Bonshaw.

“So was I, Edward—sorry,
Eduardo
—so was I,” Pepe replied.

Just as Rivera had settled the injured boy in Lupe’s lap, in the bed of the pickup, the two old priests arrived on the scene. Edward Bonshaw had braced himself against the truck’s spare tire—the children between him and Diablo, who viewed the new missionary with suspicion, a perpetual tear oozing from the dog’s lidless left eye.

“What is happening here, Pepe?” Father Octavio asked. “Did someone faint or have a heart attack?”

“It’s those dump kids,” Father Alfonso said, frowning. “One could smell that garbage truck from the Hereafter.”

“What is Esperanza praying for
now
?” Father Octavio asked Pepe, because the cleaning woman’s keening voice could be heard from the Hereafter, too—or at least from as far away as the sidewalk in front of the Jesuit temple.

“Juan Diego was run over by Rivera’s truck,” Brother Pepe began. “The boy was brought here for a miracle, but our two virgins failed to deliver.”

“They’re on their way to Dr. Vargas, I presume,” Father Alfonso said, “but why is there a gringo with them?” The two priests were wrinkling their unusually sensitive and frequently condemning noses—not only at the garbage truck, but at the gringo with the Polynesian parrots on his tasteless tent of a shirt.

“Don’t tell me Rivera ran over a tourist, too,” Father Octavio said.

“That’s the man we’ve all been waiting for,” Brother Pepe told the priests, with an impish smile. “That is Edward Bonshaw, from Iowa—our new teacher.” It was on the tip of Pepe’s tongue to tell them that Señor
Eduardo was un milagrero—a miracle monger—but Pepe restrained himself as best he could. Brother Pepe wanted Father Octavio and Father Alfonso to discover Edward Bonshaw for themselves. The way Pepe put it was calculated to provoke these two oh-so-conservative priests, but he was careful to mention the
miracle
subject in only the most offhand manner. “Señor Eduardo es bastante milagroso,” was how Pepe put it. “Señor Eduardo is somewhat miraculous.”