Avenue of Mysteries (27 page)

To be fair: the hippie had submerged himself when he and Juan Diego were alone in the bathroom; the good gringo had no idea, when he rose out of the water, that he was emerging to a multitude—not to mention that most of them were five-year-olds who believed in Jesus. The fact that the little children were there was not
this
Jesus’s fault.

“Whoa!” cried the Crucified Christ—he looked more like the
Drowned
Christ at the moment, and the
whoa
word was a foreign-sounding one to the Spanish-speaking kindergartners.

Four or five of the terrified children instantly wet their pants; one little girl shrieked so loudly that several girls and boys bit their tongues. Those kindergartners nearest the door to the bedroom bolted through the bedroom, screaming, and raced into the hall. Those children who must have believed there was no escape from the gringo Christ fell to their knees, peeing and crying, and covered their heads with their hands; one little boy hugged a little girl so hard that she bit him in the face.

Sister Gloria had swooned, catching her balance by putting one hand on the bathtub, but the hippie Jesus, who feared that the nun was falling, wrapped his wet arms around her. “Whoa, Sister—” was all the young man managed to say, before Sister Gloria beat against the naked boy’s chest with both her fists. She landed several blows on the Heaven-beseeching and tortured face of the Jesus tattoo, but when she saw (with horror) what she was doing, Sister Gloria threw up her arms and lifted her eyes in her own most Heaven-beseeching manner.

“¡Madre!” Sister Gloria once more cried, as if Mother Mary were the nun’s single savior and confidante—truly, as the nun’s responsive prayer maintained, her one and only guide.

That was when el gringo bueno slipped and fell forward into the bathtub; the soapy water sloshed over the sides of the tub, drenching the bathroom floor. The hippie, now on his hands and knees, had enough presence of mind to turn off the running water. The tub, at last, could drain, but as the water quickly receded, those kindergartners still in the bathroom—for the most part, they’d been too afraid to run away—saw the emerging American flag (torn in two) on the gringo Christ’s bare ass.

Sister Gloria saw the flag, too—a tattoo of such secular certainty that it clashed with the tattoo of the Agonizing Jesus. To the instinctively disapproving nun, a satanic discord seemed to emanate from the naked boy in the emptying tub.

Juan Diego had not moved. He knelt on the bathroom floor, the spilled bathwater touching his thighs. Around him, the cringing kindergartners lay curled in wet balls. It must have been the future writer developing in him, but Juan Diego thought of the amphibious troops killed in recapturing Corregidor, some of them not much older than children. He thought of the wild promise he’d made to the good gringo, and he was thrilled—the way, at fourteen, you can be thrilled by an utterly unrealistic vision of the future.

“Ahora y siempre—now and forever,” one of the soaking-wet kindergartners was whimpering.

“Now and forever,” Juan Diego said, more confidently. He knew this was a promise to himself—to seize every opportunity that looked like the future, from this moment forward.

•
14
•

Nada

In the corridor outside Edward Bonshaw’s classroom at Niños Perdidos was a bust of the Virgin Mary with a tear on her cheek. The bust stood on a pedestal in a corner of the second-floor balcony. There was often a beet-red smudge on Mary’s other cheek; it looked like blood to Esperanza—every week she wiped it off, but the next week it was back. “Maybe it
is
blood,” she’d told Brother Pepe.

“It can’t be,” Pepe told her. “There have been no reported stigmata cases at Lost Children.”

On the landing between the first and second floors was the suffer-the-little-children statue of San Vicente de Paul with two infants in his arms. Esperanza reported to Brother Pepe that she’d also wiped blood off the hem of the saint’s cloak. “Every week I wipe it off, but it comes back!” Esperanza had said. “It must be
miraculous
blood.”

“It can’t be blood, Esperanza,” was all Pepe would say about it.

“You don’t know what I see, Pepe!” Esperanza said, pointing to her fiery eyes. “And whatever it is, it leaves a stain.”

They were both right. It was not blood, but every week it came back
and
it left a stain. The dump kids had had to lie low with the beet juice after the episode with the good gringo in their bathtub; they’d had to cut back on their nighttime visits to Zaragoza Street, too. Señor Eduardo and Brother Pepe—not to mention that witch Sister Gloria and the other nuns—were keeping a close eye on them. And Lupe was right about the gifts el gringo bueno could afford for them: they were less than outstanding presents.

The hippie had no doubt haggled over the cheap religious figures he’d bought from the Christmas-parties place, the virgin shop on Independencia.
One was a small totem, in the category of a statuette—more of a figurine than a lifelike figure—but the Guadalupe virgin was life-size.

The Guadalupe virgin was actually a little bigger than Juan Diego. She was his present. Her blue-green mantle—a kind of cloak or cape—was traditional. Her belt, or what looked like a black girdle, would one day give rise to the speculation that Guadalupe was pregnant. Long after the fact, in 1999, Pope John Paul II invoked Our Lady of Guadalupe as Patroness of the Americas and Protectress of Unborn Children. (“That Polish pope,” Juan Diego would later rail against him—and his unborn business.)

The virgin-shop Guadalupe didn’t look pregnant, but this Guadalupe mannequin appeared to be about fifteen or sixteen—and she had breasts. The boobs made her seem not religious at all. “She’s a sex doll!” Lupe immediately said.

Of course, that wasn’t strictly true; there was, however, a sex-doll aspect to the Guadalupe figure, though Juan Diego could not undress her and she didn’t have movable limbs (or recognizable reproductive parts).

“What’s
my
present?” Lupe asked the hippie boy.

The good gringo asked Lupe if she forgave him for sleeping with her mother. “Yes,” Lupe said, “but we can’t ever get married.”

“That sounds pretty final,” the hippie said, when Juan Diego translated Lupe’s answer to the forgiveness question.

“Show me the present,” was all Lupe said.

It was a Coatlicue figurine, as ugly as any replica of the goddess. Juan Diego thought it was a blessing that the hideous statuette was small—it was even smaller than Dirty White. El gringo bueno had no clue how to pronounce the name of the Aztec goddess; Lupe, in her hard-to-follow fashion, couldn’t manage to help him say it.

“Your mom said you
admired
this weird mother goddess,” the good gringo explained to Lupe; he didn’t sound so sure.

“I
love
her,” Lupe told him.

Juan Diego had always found it hard to believe that one goddess could have so many contradictory attributes attached to her, but it was easy for him to see why Lupe loved her. Coatlicue was an extremist—a goddess of childbirth
and
of sexual impurity and wrongful behavior. Several creation myths were connected to her; in one, she was impregnated by a ball of feathers that fell on her while she was sweeping a temple—enough to piss anyone off, Juan Diego thought, but Lupe said this was the kind of thing she could imagine happening to their mother, Esperanza.

Unlike Esperanza, Coatlicue wore a skirt of serpents. She was basically
dressed in writhing snakes; she wore a necklace of human hearts and hands and skulls. Coatlicue’s hands and feet had claws; her breasts were flaccid. In the figurine the good gringo gave to Lupe, Coatlicue’s nipples were made of rattlesnake rattles. (“Too much nursing, maybe,” Lupe observed.)

“But what do you
like
about her, Lupe?” Juan Diego had asked his sister.

“Some of her own children vowed to kill her,” Lupe had answered him. “Una mujer difícil.” A difficult woman.

“Coatlicue is a devouring mother; the womb and the grave coexist in her,” Juan Diego explained to the hippie boy.

“I can see that,” the good gringo said. “She looks
deadly,
man on wheels,” the hippie more confidently stated.

“Nobody messes with her!” Lupe proclaimed.

Even Edward Bonshaw (always looking on the bright side) found Lupe’s Coatlicue figurine frightening. “I understand there are repercussions that come from the ball-of-feathers mishap, but this goddess is not very sympathetic-looking,” Señor Eduardo said to Lupe, as respectfully as anyone possibly could.

“Coatlicue didn’t ask to be born who she was,” Lupe answered the Iowan. “She was sacrificed—supposedly to do with creation. Her face was formed by two serpents—after her head was cut off and the blood spurted from her neck in the form of two gigantic snakes. Some of us,” Lupe told the new missionary, pausing for Juan Diego’s translation to catch up, “don’t have a choice about who we are.”

“But—” Edward Bonshaw began.

“I am who I am,” Lupe said; Juan Diego rolled his eyes when he repeated this to Señor Eduardo. Lupe pressed the grotesque Coatlicue totem to her cheek; it was apparent that she didn’t just love the goddess because the good gringo had given her the statuette.

As for his gift from the gringo, Juan Diego would occasionally masturbate with the Guadalupe doll lying next to him on his bed, her enraptured face on the pillow alongside his face. The slight swell of Guadalupe’s breasts sufficed.

The impassive mannequin was made of a light but hard plastic, unyielding to the touch. Although the Guadalupe virgin was a couple of inches taller than Juan Diego, she was hollow—she weighed so little that Juan Diego could carry her under one arm.

There was a twofold awkwardness attached to Juan Diego’s attempts
to have sex with the life-size Guadalupe doll—better said, the awkwardness of Juan Diego’s
imagining
he was having sex with the plastic virgin. In the first place, it was necessary for Juan Diego to be alone in the bedroom he shared with his little sister—not to mention that Lupe knew her brother
thought
about having sex with the Guadalupe doll; Lupe had read his mind.

The second problem was the pedestal. The fetching feet of the Guadalupe virgin were affixed to a pedestal of chartreuse-colored grass, which was the circumference of an automobile tire. The pedestal was an impediment to Juan Diego’s desire to
snuggle
with the plastic virgin when he was lying next to her.

Juan Diego had thought about sawing off the pedestal, but this meant removing the virgin’s pretty feet at her ankles, which would mean the statue couldn’t stand. Naturally, Lupe had known her brother’s thoughts.

“I don’t
ever
want to see Our Lady of Guadalupe lying down,” Lupe told Juan Diego, “
or
leaning up against our bedroom wall. Don’t even
think about
standing her on her head in a corner, with the stumps of her amputated feet sticking up!”

“
Look
at her, Lupe!” Juan Diego cried. He pointed to the Guadalupe figure, standing by one of the bookshelves in the former reading room; the Guadalupe mannequin looked a little like a misplaced literary character, a woman who’d escaped from a novel—one who couldn’t find her way back to the book where she belonged. “
Look
at her,” Juan Diego repeated. “Does Guadalupe strike you as being even slightly interested in lying down?”

As luck would have it, Sister Gloria was passing by the dump kids’ bedroom; the nun peered into their room from the hall. Sister Gloria had objected to the life-size Guadalupe doll’s presence in the niños’ bedroom—more unmerited
privileges,
the sister had presumed—but Brother Pepe had defended the dump kids. How could the disapproving nun disapprove of a
religious
statue? Sister Gloria believed Juan Diego’s Guadalupe figure more closely resembled a dressmaker’s dummy—“a
suggestive
one,” was the way the nun put it to Pepe.

“I don’t want to hear another word about Our Lady of Guadalupe
lying down,
” Sister Gloria said to Juan Diego. The virgins from La Niña de las Posadas were not
proper
virgins, Sister Gloria was thinking. The proprietors of The Girl of the Christmas Parties and Sister Gloria did not see eye to eye concerning what Our Lady of Guadalupe looked like
—not
like a sexual temptation, Sister Gloria thought, not like a
seductress
!

• • •

I
T WAS
,
ALAS
,
THIS
memory—among all the others—that woke Juan Diego from his dream in the suddenly stifling heat of his hotel room at the Makati Shangri-La. But how was it possible for that refrigerator of a hotel room to be
hot
?

The dead fish floated on the surface of the green-lit water in the becalmed aquarium; the previously upright-swimming sea horse was no longer vertical, its lifeless prehensile tail signifying that it had joined (forever) those lost members of its family of pipefish. Had the aquarium’s water-bubble problem returned? Or had one of the dead fish clogged the water-circulation system? The fish tank had ceased gurgling; the water was unmoving and murky, yet a pair of yellowish eyes stared at Juan Diego from the clouded bottom of the aquarium. The moray—his gills gulping in the remaining oxygen—appeared to be the sole survivor of the disaster.

Uh-oh, Juan Diego was remembering: he’d returned from dinner to a freezing-cold hotel room; the air-conditioning was once more blasting. The hotel maid must have cranked it up—she’d also left the radio on. Juan Diego couldn’t figure out how to turn the relentless music off; he’d been forced to unplug the clock radio to kill the throbbing sound.

And the maid wasn’t easily satisfied: she’d seen how he’d prepared his beta-blockers for his proper dose; the maid had laid out
all
his medications (his Viagra, too)
and
the pill cutter. This both irritated and distracted Juan Diego—it didn’t help that he discovered the maid’s interfering attention to his toilet articles and his pills only after he’d unplugged the clock radio and had drunk one of the four
Spanish
beers in the ice bucket. Was San Miguel ubiquitous in Manila?