Avenue of Mysteries (5 page)

There was more than Mary to deal with now—so Lupe had noticed from the many churches in Oaxaca—but nowhere in the city were the warring virgins on such tawdry display as you could find them (for sale) in the virgin shop on Independencia. There were life-size virgins and virgins who were larger than life-size. To name only three who were featured, in a variety of cheap and tacky replicas, throughout the shop: Mother Mary, of course, but also Our Lady of Guadalupe, and naturally Nuestra Señora de la Soledad. La Virgen de la Soledad was the virgin whom Lupe disparaged as merely a “local hero”—the much-maligned Solitude Virgin and her “stupid burro story.” (The burro, a small donkey, was probably blameless.)

The virgin shop also sold life-size (and larger than life-size) versions of Christ on the Cross; if you were strong enough, you could carry home a giant Bleeding Jesus, but the principal purpose of the virgin shop, which had been in business in Oaxaca since 1954, was providing for the Christmas parties (las posadas).

In fact, only the dump kids called the place on Independencia the virgin shop; everyone else referred to it as the Christmas-parties store—La Niña de las Posadas was the actual name of the ghoulish shop (literally, “The Girl of the Christmas Parties”). The eponymous
Girl
was whatever virgin you chose to take home with you; obviously, one of the life-size virgins for sale could liven up your Christmas party—more than an agonizing Christ on the Cross ever could.

As serious as Lupe was about Oaxaca’s virgins, the Christmas-parties place was a joke to Juan Diego and Lupe. “The Girl,” as the dump kids occasionally called the virgin shop, was where they went for a laugh. Those virgins for sale weren’t half as realistic as the prostitutes on Zaragoza Street; the take-home virgins were more in the category of inflatable sex dolls. And the Bleeding Jesuses were simply grotesque.

There was also (as Brother Pepe would have put it) a
pecking order
of virgins on display in various Oaxaca churches—alas, this pecking order and
these
virgins affected Lupe deeply. The Catholic Church had its own virgin shops in Oaxaca; for Lupe,
these
virgins were no laughing matter.

Take the “stupid burro story,” and how Lupe loathed la Virgen de la Soledad. The Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad was grandiose—a pompous eyesore between Morelos and Independencia—and the first time the dump kids visited it, their access to the altar was blocked by a caterwauling contingent of pilgrims, countryfolk (farmers or fruit pickers, Juan Diego had guessed), who not only prayed in cries and shouts but ostentatiously approached the radiant statue of Our Lady of Solitude on their knees, virtually crawling the length of the center aisle. The praying pilgrims put Lupe off, as did the local-hero aspect of the Solitude Virgin—she was occasionally called “Oaxaca’s patron saint.”

Had Brother Pepe been present, the kindly Jesuit teacher might have cautioned Lupe and Juan Diego against a pecking-order prejudice of their own: dump kids have to feel superior to
someone
; at the small colony in Guerrero, los niños de la basura believed that they were superior to countryfolk. By the behavior of the loudly praying pilgrims in the Solitude Virgin’s basilica, and given their cloddishly rustic attire, Juan Diego and Lupe were left with little doubt: dump kids were definitely
superior to these wailing and kneeling farmers or fruit pickers (whoever the uncouth countryfolk were).

Lupe also had no love for how la Virgen de la Soledad was dressed; her severe, triangular-shaped robe was black, encrusted with gold. “She looks like an evil queen,” Lupe said.

“She looks
rich,
you mean,” Juan Diego said.

“The Solitude Virgin is not one of us,” Lupe declared. She meant not indigenous. She meant Spanish, which meant
European.
(She meant
white.
)

The Solitude Virgin, Lupe said, was “a white-faced pinhead in a fancy gown.” It further irked Lupe that Guadalupe got second-class treatment in the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad; the Guadalupe altar was off to the left side of the center aisle—an unlit portrait of the dark-skinned virgin (not even a statue) was her sole recognition. And Our Lady of Guadalupe
was
indigenous; she was a native, an Indian; she was what Lupe meant by “one of us.”

Brother Pepe would have been astonished at how much dump reading Juan Diego had done, and how closely Lupe had listened. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio believed they had purged the Jesuit library of the most extraneous and seditious reading matter, but the young dump reader had rescued many dangerous books from the hellfires of the basurero.

Those works that had chronicled the Catholic indoctrination of the indigenous population of Mexico had not gone unnoticed; the Jesuits had played a mind-game role in the Spanish conquests, and both Lupe and Juan Diego had learned a lot about the Jesuitical conquistadors of the Roman Catholic Church. While Juan Diego had at first become a dump reader for the purpose of teaching himself to read, Lupe had listened and learned—from the start, she’d been focused.

In the Solitude Virgin’s basilica, there was a marble-floored chamber with paintings of the burro story: peasants were praying after they had met and were followed by a solitary, unaccompanied burro. On the little donkey’s back was a long box—it looked like a coffin.

“What fool wouldn’t have looked in the box right away?” Lupe always asked. Not these stupid peasants—their brains must have been deprived of oxygen by their sombreros. (Dumb countryfolk, in the dump kids’ opinion.)

There was—there still exists—a controversy concerning what happened to the burro. Did it one day just stop walking and lie down, or
did it drop dead? At the site where the little donkey either stopped in its tracks or just died, the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad was erected. Because only then and there had the dumb peasants opened the burro’s box. In it was a statue of the Solitude Virgin; disturbingly, a much smaller Jesus figure, naked except for a towel covering his crotch, was lying in the Solitude Virgin’s lap.

“What is a shrunken Jesus doing
there
?” Lupe always asked. The discrepancy in the size of the figures was most disturbing: the larger Solitude Virgin with a Jesus half her size. And this was no Baby Jesus; this was Jesus with a
beard,
only he was unnaturally small and dressed in nothing but a towel.

In Lupe’s opinion, the burro had been “abused”; the larger Solitude Virgin with a smaller, half-naked Jesus in her lap spoke to Lupe of “even worse abuse”—not to mention how “stupid” the peasants were, for not having the brains to look in the box at the beginning.

Thus did the dump kids dismiss Oaxaca’s patron saint and most fussed-over virgin as a hoax or a fraud—a “cult virgin,” Lupe called la Virgen de la Soledad. As for the proximity of the virgin shop on Independencia to the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, all Lupe would say was: “Fitting.”

Lupe had listened to a lot of grown-up (if not always well-written) books; her speech might have been incomprehensible to everyone except Juan Diego, but Lupe’s exposure to language—and, because of the books in the basurero, to an educated vocabulary—was beyond her years and her experience.

In contrast to her feelings for the Solitude Virgin’s basilica, Lupe called the Dominican church on Alcalá a “beautiful extravagance.” Having complained about the gold-encrusted robe of the Solitude Virgin, Lupe loved the gilded ceiling in the Templo de Santo Domingo; she had no complaints about “how very Spanish Baroque” Santo Domingo was—“how very
European.
” And Lupe liked the gold-encrusted shrine to Guadalupe, too—nor was Our Lady of Guadalupe overshadowed by the Virgin Mary in Santo Domingo.

As a self-described Guadalupe girl, Lupe was sensitive to Guadalupe being
overshadowed
by the “Mary Monster.” Lupe not only meant that Mary was the most dominant of the Catholic Church’s “stable” of virgins; Lupe believed that the Virgin Mary was also “a
domineering
virgin.”

And this was the grievance Lupe had with the Jesuits’ Templo de la
Compañía de Jesús on the corner of Magón and Trujano—the Temple of the Society of Jesus made the Virgin Mary the main attraction. As you entered, your attention was drawn to the fountain of holy water—agua de San Ignacio de Loyola—and a portrait of the formidable Saint Ignatius himself. (Loyola was looking to Heaven for guidance, as he is often depicted.)

In an inviting nook, after you passed the fountain of holy water, was a modest but attractive shrine to Guadalupe; special notice was paid to the dark-skinned virgin’s most famous utterance, in large lettering easily viewed from the pews and kneeling pads.

“ ‘¿No estoy aquí, que soy tu madre?’ ” Lupe would pray there, incessantly repeating this. “ ‘Am I not here, for I am your mother?’ ”

Yes, you could say that this was an unnatural allegiance Lupe latched on to—to a mother
and
a virgin figure, which was a replacement for Lupe’s actual mother, who was a prostitute (
and
a cleaning woman for the Jesuits), a woman who was not much of a mother to her children, an often absent mother, who lived apart from Lupe and Juan Diego. And Esperanza had left Lupe fatherless, save for the stand-in dump boss—and for Lupe’s idea that she had a multitude of fathers.

But Lupe both genuinely worshiped Our Lady of Guadalupe and fiercely doubted her; Lupe’s doubt was borne by the child’s judgmental sense that Guadalupe had
submitted
to the Virgin Mary—that Guadalupe was
complicitous
in allowing Mother Mary to be in control.

Juan Diego could not recall a single dump-reading experience where Lupe might have learned this; as far as the dump reader could tell, Lupe both believed in and distrusted the dark-skinned virgin entirely on her own. No book from the basurero had led the mind reader down this tormented path.

And notwithstanding how tasteful and appropriate the adoration paid to Our Lady of Guadalupe was—the Jesuit temple in no way disrespected the dark-skinned virgin—the Virgin Mary unquestionably took center stage. The Virgin Mary
loomed.
The Holy Mother was enormous; the Mary altar was elevated; the statue of the Holy Virgin was towering. A relatively diminutive Jesus, already suffering on the cross, lay bleeding at Mother Mary’s big feet.

“What is this shrunken-Jesus business?” Lupe always asked.

“At least
this
Jesus has some clothes on,” Juan Diego would say.

Where the Virgin Mary’s big feet were firmly planted—on a three-tiered
pedestal—the faces of angels appeared frozen in clouds. (Confusingly, the pedestal itself was composed of clouds and angels’ faces.)

“What is it supposed to mean?” Lupe always asked. “The Virgin Mary tramples angels—I can believe it!”

And to either side of the gigantic Holy Virgin were significantly smaller, time-darkened statues of two relative unknowns: the Virgin Mary’s parents.

“She had
parents
?” Lupe always asked. “Who even knows what they looked like? Who
cares
?”

Without question, the towering statue of the Virgin Mary in the Jesuit temple
was
the “Mary Monster.” The dump kids’ mother complained about the difficulty she had
cleaning
the oversize virgin. The ladder was too tall; there was no safe or “proper” place to lean the ladder, except against the Virgin Mary herself. And Esperanza prayed endlessly to Mary; the Jesuits’ best cleaning woman, who had a night job on Zaragoza Street, was an undoubting Virgin Mary fan.

Big bouquets of flowers
—seven
of them!—surrounded the Mother Mary altar, but even these bouquets were dwarfed by the giant virgin herself. She didn’t just
tower
—she seemed to
menace
everyone and everything. Even Esperanza, who adored her, thought the Virgin Mary statue was “too big.”

“Hence
domineering,
” Lupe would repeat.

“ ‘¿No estoy aquí, que soy tu madre?’ ” Juan Diego found himself repeating in the backseat of the snow-surrounded limousine, now approaching the Cathay Pacific terminal at JFK. The former dump reader murmured aloud, in both Spanish and English, this modest claim of Our Lady of Guadalupe—more modest than the penetrating stare of that overbearing giantess, the Jesuits’ statue of the Virgin Mary. “ ‘Am I not here, for I am your mother?’ ” Juan Diego repeated to himself.

His passenger’s bilingual mutterings caused the contentious limo driver to look at Juan Diego in the rearview mirror.

It’s a pity Lupe wasn’t with her brother; she would have read the limo driver’s mind—she could have told Juan Diego what the hateful man’s thoughts were.

A successful wetback, the limo driver was thinking—that was his assessment of his Mexican-American passenger.

“We’re almost at your terminal, pal,” the driver said: the way he’d said the
sir
word hadn’t been any nicer. But Juan Diego was remembering Lupe, and their time together in Oaxaca. The dump reader was daydreaming;
he didn’t really hear his driver’s disrespectful tone of voice. And without his dear sister, the mind reader, beside him, Juan Diego didn’t know the bigot’s thoughts.

It wasn’t that Juan Diego had never encountered a commonality with the Mexican-American experience. It was more a matter of his mind, and where it wandered—his mind was often
elsewhere.

•
3
•

Mother and Daughter

The handicapped man had not anticipated that he would be stranded at JFK for twenty-seven hours. Cathay Pacific sent him to the first-class lounge of British Airways. This was more comfortable than what the economy-fare passengers had to deal with—the concessionaires ran out of food, and the public toilets were not properly attended to—but the Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong, scheduled to depart at 9:15
A
.
M
. on December 27, did not take off till noon of the following day, and Juan Diego had packed his beta-blockers with his toilet articles in his checked bag. The flight to Hong Kong was some sixteen hours. Juan Diego would have to do without his medication for more than forty-three hours; he would go without the beta-blockers for almost two days. (As a rule, dump kids don’t panic.)