Avenue of Mysteries (25 page)

As a graduate student, Clark French had needed defending, and Juan Diego had defended him. The young writer was unfashionably ebullient, an ever-optimistic presence; it wasn’t only his writing that suffered from an overuse of exclamation points.

“That’s definitely a moray,” Juan Diego told the hotel manager. “Name of Morales.”

“Ironic name for a biting eel—‘Morals,’ the moray,” the manager said. “The pet store sent a team to assemble the aquarium: two luggage carts to carry the jugs of seawater; the underwater thermometer is most delicate; the system that circulates the water had a water-bubble problem; the rubber bags with the individual creatures had to be carried by hand—an impressive production for a one-night visit. Maybe the moray was sedated for such a stressful trip.”

“I see,” Juan Diego repeated. Señor Morales did not appear to be under the influence of sedation at the moment; the eel was menacingly coiled in the farthest corner of the tank, calmly breathing, the yellowish eyes unblinking.

As a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—and later, as a published
novelist—Clark French eschewed an ironic touch. Clark was unstintingly earnest and sincere; naming a moray eel Morales was not his style. The irony must have been entirely Auntie Carmen’s, from the Filipino side of Clark’s family. It made Juan Diego anxious that all of them were waiting to meet him in Bohol; yet he was happy for Clark French—the seemingly friendless young writer had found a family. Clark French’s fellow students (would-be writers, all) had found him hopelessly naïve. What young writer is attracted to a sunny disposition? Clark was improbably positive; he had an actor’s handsome face, an athletic body, and he was as badly but conservatively dressed as a door-to-door Jehovah’s Witness.

Clark’s actual religious convictions (Clark was very Catholic) must have reminded Juan Diego of a young Edward Bonshaw. In fact, Clark French had met his Filipino wife—and her “whole family,” as he’d enthusiastically described them—during a Catholic do-gooder mission in the Philippines. Juan Diego couldn’t remember the exact circumstances. A Catholic charity, of one kind or another? Orphaned children and unwed mothers might have been involved.

Even Clark French’s novels exerted a tenacious and combative goodwill: his main characters, lost souls and serial sinners, always found redemption; the act of redeeming usually followed a moral low point; the novels predictably ended in a crescendo of benevolence. Quite understandably, these novels were critically attacked. Clark had a tendency to preach; he evangelized. Juan Diego thought it was sad that Clark French’s novels were scorned—in the same manner poor Clark himself had been mocked by his fellow students. Juan Diego truly liked Clark French’s writing; Clark was a craftsman. But it was Clark’s curse to be annoyingly
nice.
Juan Diego knew Clark meant it—the young optimist was genuine. But Clark was also a proselytizer—he couldn’t help it.

Crescendos of benevolence following moral low points—formulaic, but does this work with religious readers? Was Clark to be scorned for having readers? Could Clark help it that he was uplifting? (“
Terminally
uplifting,” a fellow grad student at Iowa had said.)

Yet the aquarium for one night was too much; this was more Clark than Clark—this was going too far. Or am I just too tired from all the traveling to appreciate the gesture? Juan Diego wondered. He hated to blame Clark for being Clark—or for having an eternal goodness. Juan Diego was sincerely fond of Clark French; yet his fondness for the young writer tormented him. Clark was
obdurately
Catholic.

A wild thrashing sent a sudden spray of warm seawater from the aquarium, startling Juan Diego and the hotel manager. Had an unlucky fish been eaten or killed? The strikingly clear, green-lit water revealed no traces of blood or body parts; the ever-watchful eel gave no outward indication of wrongdoing. “It’s a violent world,” the hotel manager remarked; it was a sentence, eschewing irony, one would find at a moral low point in a Clark French novel.

“Yes,” was all Juan Diego said. He’d been born a guttersnipe; he hated himself when he looked down on other people, especially when they were
good
people, like Clark, and Juan Diego was looking down on him the way every superior and condescending person in the literary world looked down on Clark French—for being
uplifting.

After the manager left him alone, Juan Diego wished he’d asked about the air-conditioning; it was too cold in the room, and the thermostat on the wall presented the tired traveler with a labyrinthine choice of arrows and numbers—what Juan Diego imagined he might encounter in the cockpit of a fighter plane. Why was he so
tired
? Juan Diego wondered. Why is it that all I want to do is sleep and dream, or see Miriam and Dorothy
again
?

He had another impromptu nap; he sat at the desk and fell asleep in the chair. He woke up shivering.

There was no point in unpacking his huge orange bag for a one-night stay. Juan Diego displayed his beta-blockers on the bathroom sink, to remind himself to take the usual dose—the
right
dose, not a double one. He put the clothes he’d been wearing on the bed; he showered and shaved. His traveling life without Miriam and Dorothy was very much like his
normal
life; yet it suddenly seemed empty and purposeless without them. And why was that? he wondered, along with wondering about his tiredness.

Juan Diego watched the news on TV in his hotel bathrobe; the chill of cold air was no less cold, but he’d fiddled with the thermostat and had managed to reduce the speed of the fan. The air-conditioning was no warmer—it just blasted less. (Weren’t those poor fish used to warm seas, the moray included?)

On the TV, there was an unclear video, captured on a surveillance camera, of the suicide bomber in Mindanao. The terrorist was not recognizable, but his limp bore a disquieting resemblance to Juan Diego’s. Juan Diego had been scrutinizing the slight differences—it was the same leg that was affected, the right one—when the explosion obliterated everything.
There was a click, and the TV screen showed a scratchy-sounding blackness. The video clip left Juan Diego with the upsetting feeling that he’d seen his own suicide.

He noted that there was enough ice in the bucket to keep the beer cold long after his dinner—not that the frigid air-conditioning wouldn’t suffice. Juan Diego dressed himself in the greenish glow cast from the aquarium. “Lo siento, Señor Morales,” he said, as he was leaving the hotel room. “I’m sorry if it’s not warm enough for you and your friends.” The moray appeared to be watching him as the writer stood uncertainly in the doorway; the eel’s stare was so steadfast that Juan Diego waved to the unresponsive creature before he closed the hotel room door.

At the family restaurant Bienvenido drove him to—“a well-kept secret” to some, perhaps—there was a screaming child at every table, and the families all seemed to know one another; they shouted from table to table, passing platters of food back and forth.

The decor defied Juan Diego’s understanding: a dragon, with an elephant’s trunk, was trampling soldiers; a Virgin Mary, with an angry-looking Christ Child in her arms, guarded the restaurant’s entrance. She was a menacing Mary—a Mary with a bouncer’s attitude, Juan Diego decided. (Leave it to Juan Diego to find fault with the Virgin Mary’s attitude. Didn’t that dragon with the elephant’s trunk, the one trampling the soldiers, have an attitude problem, too?)

“Isn’t San Miguel a Spanish beer?” Juan Diego asked Bienvenido in the limo; they were driving back to the hotel. Juan Diego must have had a few beers.

“Well, it’s a Spanish brewery,” Bienvenido said, “but their parent company is in the Philippines.”

Any version of colonialism—Spanish colonialism, in particular—was certain to set off Juan Diego. And then there was
Catholic
colonialism, as Juan Diego thought of it. “Colonialism, I suppose,” was all the writer said; in the rearview mirror, he could see the limo driver thinking this over. Poor Bienvenido: he’d imagined they were talking about beer.

“I suppose,” was all Bienvenido said.

I
T MUST HAVE BEEN
a saint’s day—which one, Juan Diego didn’t remember. The responsive prayer, beginning in the chapel, didn’t exist only in Juan Diego’s dream; the prayer had drifted upstairs on the morning the dump kids woke up with el gringo bueno in their room at Niños Perdidos.

“¡Madre!” one of the nuns called; it sounded like Sister Gloria’s voice. “Ahora y siempre, serás mi guía.”

“Mother!” the orphans in the kindergarten responded. “Now and forever, you will be my guide.”

The kindergartners were in the chapel, one floor below Juan Diego and Lupe’s bedroom. On saints’ days, the responsive prayers drifted upstairs before the kindergartners began their morning march. Lupe, either awake or half asleep, would murmur her own prayer in response to the kindergartners’ ode to the Virgin Mary.

“Dulce madre mía de Guadalupe, por tu justicia, presente en nuestros corazones, reine la paz en el mundo,” Lupe prayed—somewhat sarcastically. “My sweet mother Guadalupe, in your righteousness, present in our hearts, let peace reign in the world.”

But this morning, when Juan Diego was barely awake, with his eyes still closed, Lupe said, “
There’s
a miracle for you: our mother has managed to pass through our room—she’s taking a bath—without ever seeing the good gringo.”

Juan Diego opened his eyes. Either el gringo bueno had died in his sleep or he’d not moved; yet the bedsheet no longer covered him. The hippie and his Crucified Christ lay still and exposed—a tableau of an untimely death, of youth struck down—while the dump kids could hear Esperanza singing some secular ditty in the bathtub. “He’s a beautiful boy, isn’t he?” Lupe asked her brother.

“He smells like beer piss,” Juan Diego noted, bending over the young American to be sure he was breathing.

“We should get him out on the street—at least get him dressed,” Lupe said. Esperanza had already pulled the plug; the niños could hear the sound the tub made when it was draining. Esperanza’s singing was muffled—she was probably towel-drying her hair.

In the chapel, one floor below them, or perhaps in the poetic license taken in Juan Diego’s dream, the nun who sounded like Sister Gloria once more exhorted the children to repeat after her: “¡Madre! Ahora y siempre—”

“ ‘I want my arms and legs around you!’ ” Esperanza sang. “ ‘I want my tongue touching your tongue, too!’ ”

“ ‘I spied a young cowboy, all wrapped in white linen,’ ” the dead-asleep gringo was singing. “ ‘Wrapped up in white linen and cold as the clay.’ ”

“Whatever this mess is, it isn’t a miracle,” Lupe said; she got out of bed to help Juan Diego dress the helpless gringo.

“Whoa!” the hippie boy moaned; he was still asleep, or he’d completely passed out. “We’re all friends,
right
?” he kept asking. “You smell great, and you’re so beautiful!” he told Lupe, as she was trying to button his dirty shirt. But the good gringo’s eyes never opened; he couldn’t see Lupe. He was too hung over to wake up.

“I’ll marry him only if he stops drinking,” Lupe said to Juan Diego.

The good gringo’s breath smelled worse than all the rest of him, and Juan Diego tried to distract himself from the bad smell by thinking about what present the friendly hippie might give the dump kids—last night, when he’d been more lucid, the young draft dodger had promised them a present.

Naturally, Lupe knew what her brother was thinking. “I don’t believe the dear boy can afford to give us very extravagant presents,” Lupe said. “One day, in about five to seven years, a simple gold wedding band might be nice, but I wouldn’t count on anything special now—not when the hippie is spending his money on alcohol and prostitutes.”

As if summoned by the
prostitutes
word, Esperanza came out of the bathroom; she was wearing her customary two towels (her hair bound in one, her body scarcely covered by the other) and carrying her Zaragoza Street clothes.

“Look at him, Mom!” Juan Diego cried; he began unbuttoning the good gringo’s shirt, faster than Lupe had buttoned it up. “We found him on the street last night—he didn’t have a mark on him. But this morning,
look
at him!” Juan Diego pulled open the hippie boy’s shirt to reveal the Bleeding Jesus. “It’s a
miracle
!” Juan Diego cried.

“It’s el gringo bueno—he’s no miracle,” Esperanza said.

“Oh, let me die—she
knows
him! They’ve been naked together—she’s done
everything
to him!” Lupe cried.

Esperanza rolled the gringo over on his stomach; she pulled down his underpants. “You call
this
a miracle?” she asked her children. On the dear boy’s bare ass was a tattoo of the American flag, but the flag was purposely ripped in half; the crack of the hippie’s ass divided the flag. It was pretty much the opposite of a patriotic picture.

“Whoa!” the unconscious gringo said in a strangled voice; he was lying facedown on the bed, where he appeared in danger of suffocating.

“He smells like upchuck,” Esperanza said. “Help me get him into the bathtub—the water will bring him back to life.”

“The gringo put his thing in her mouth,” Lupe was babbling. “She put his thing in her—”

“Stop it, Lupe,” Juan Diego said.

“Forget what I said about marrying him,” Lupe said. “Not in five years
or
in seven—not
ever
!”

“You’ll meet someone else,” Juan Diego told his sister.

“Who has Lupe met? Who has upset her?” Esperanza asked. She held the naked hippie under his arms; Juan Diego took hold of the boy’s ankles, and they carried him into the bathroom.

“You have upset her,” Juan Diego told his mother. “Just the thought of you with the good gringo has upset her.”

“Nonsense,” Esperanza said. “Every girl loves the gringo kid, and he loves us. It would break your heart to be his mother, but the gringo kid makes all the other women in the world very happy.”

“The gringo kid has broken
my
heart!” Lupe was wailing.