Avenue of Mysteries (71 page)

“How about ‘Guerrero’?” Rivera had suggested, looking only at Pepe, not at Juan Diego.

“Are you okay with ‘Guerrero,’ jefe?” Juan Diego had asked the dump boss.

“Sure,” Rivera said; he now allowed himself to look at Juan Diego, just a little. “Even a dump kid should know where he comes from,” el jefe had said.

“I won’t forget where I come from, jefe,” was all Juan Diego said, his name already becoming something
imagined.

Nine people had seen a miracle in the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús in Oaxaca—tears had fallen from a statue’s eyes. This was no less than a statue of the Virgin Mary, but the miracle was never recorded, and six of the nine witnesses had died. Upon the deaths of the surviving three—Vargas, Alejandra, and Juan Diego—the miracle itself would die, wouldn’t it?

If Lupe were alive, she would have told Juan Diego that this crying statue wasn’t the major miracle in his life. “We’re the miraculous ones,” Lupe had told him. And wasn’t Lupe herself the major miracle? What she had known, what she had risked—how she had
willed
another future for him! These mysteries were what Juan Diego was
part of
. Next to these mysteries, his other experiences paled.

Dorothy was talking about something; she was still going on and on.

“About the ghosts,” Juan Diego interrupted her, as casually as he could. “I guess there are ways to tell them apart from the other guests.”

“The way they vanish when you look at them makes it pretty clear,” Dorothy said.

At breakfast, Dorothy and Juan Diego would discover that El Escondrijo wasn’t very crowded; there weren’t many other guests. The ones who came to breakfast at the outdoor dining tables didn’t vanish when you looked at them, but they did seem a little old and tired-looking to Juan Diego. Of course, he’d looked at himself in a mirror this morning—a little longer than he was used to doing—and he would have said that
he
seemed a little old and tired-looking, too.

After breakfast, Dorothy wanted Juan Diego to see the little church or chapel among the compound of old buildings; she thought the architecture might remind Juan Diego of the Spanish style he’d been accustomed to in Oaxaca. (Oh, those Spaniards—they really got around! Juan Diego was thinking.)

The interior of the chapel was very basic, not at all ornate or fancy. There was an altar like a small café table, one for two customers. There was a Christ on the Cross—this Jesus didn’t appear to be suffering too greatly—and a Virgin Mary, not a towering but a merely life-size presence. The two of them could almost have been having a conversation with each other. But these familiar two, this mother and son, were not the two most commanding presences—this Mary and her Jesus weren’t the two who got Juan Diego’s immediate interest.

It was the two young ghosts in the foremost pew of the chapel who seized all of Juan Diego’s attention. The young men were holding hands, and one of them rested his head on the other’s shoulder. They seemed somehow more than former comrades-in-arms, though they were both wearing their fatigues. It was not that the long-dead American captives were (or had been) lovers that took Juan Diego by surprise. These ghosts had not seen Dorothy and Juan Diego enter the little church; not only did these two not vanish, but they continued to look beseechingly at Mary and Jesus—as if they believed they were alone and unobserved in the chapel.

Juan Diego would have thought that, when you were dead and you were a ghost, your countenance—especially, in a church—would be different. Wouldn’t you no longer be seeking guidance? Wouldn’t you, somehow, know the answers?

But these two ghosts looked as clueless as any two troubled lovers who had ever stared uncomprehendingly at Mary and Jesus. These two, Juan Diego knew, didn’t know anything. These two dead soldiers were no better informed than anyone living; these two young ghosts were still looking for answers.

“No more ghosts—I’ve seen enough ghosts,” Juan Diego said to Dorothy, at which point the two former comrades-in-arms vanished.

Juan Diego and Dorothy would stay at The Hiding Place that day and night—a Friday. They would leave Vigan on a Saturday; they took another night flight from Laoag to Manila. Once more—except for the occasional ship—they flew over the unlit darkness, which was Manila Bay.

•
31
•

Adrenaline

Another nighttime arrival in another hotel, Juan Diego was thinking, but he’d seen the lobby of this one before—the Ascott, in Makati City, where Miriam had said he should stay when he returned to Manila. How strange: to be checking in with Dorothy, where he’d once imagined Miriam’s attention-getting entrance.

As Juan Diego remembered, it was a long walk to the registration desk from where the elevators opened into the lobby. “I’m a little surprised my mother isn’t—” Dorothy started to say; she was looking all around the lobby when Miriam just appeared. It was no surprise to Juan Diego how the security guards never took their eyes off Miriam, all the way from the elevators to the registration desk. “What a surprise, Mother,” Dorothy laconically said, but Miriam ignored her.

“You poor man!” Miriam exclaimed to Juan Diego. “I would guess you’ve seen enough of Dorothy’s ghosts—frightened nineteen-year-olds aren’t everyone’s shot of tequila.”

“Are you saying it’s your turn, Mother?” Dorothy asked her.

“Don’t be crude, Dorothy—it’s never as much about sex as you seem to think it is,” her mother told her.

“You’re kidding, right?” Dorothy asked her.

“It’s that time—it’s Manila, Dorothy,” Miriam reminded her.

“I know what time it is—I know where we are, Mother,” Dorothy said to her.

“Enough sex, Dorothy,” Miriam repeated.

“Don’t people still have sex?” Dorothy asked her, but Miriam once again ignored her.

“Darling, you look tired—I’m worried about how tired you look,” Miriam was saying to Juan Diego.

He watched Dorothy as she was leaving the lobby. She had an irresistibly coarse allure; the security guards watched Dorothy coming toward them, all the way to the elevators, but they didn’t look at her in quite the same way they had looked at Miriam.

“For Christ’s sake, Dorothy,” Miriam muttered to herself, when she saw that her daughter had left in a huff. Only Juan Diego heard her. “Honestly, Dorothy!” Miriam called after her, but Dorothy didn’t appear to have heard; the elevator doors were already closing.

At Miriam’s request, the Ascott had upgraded Juan Diego to a suite with a full kitchen, on one of the uppermost floors. Juan Diego certainly didn’t need a kitchen.

“After El Escondrijo, which is about as sea-level and depressing as it gets, I thought you deserved a more
high-up
view,” Miriam told him.

The
high-up
part notwithstanding, the view from the Ascott of Makati City—the Wall Street of Manila, the business and financial center of the Philippines—was like many high-rise cityscapes at night: the variations on subdued lighting or the darkened windows of daytime offices were offset by the brightly lit windows of hotels and apartment buildings. Juan Diego didn’t want to sound unappreciative of Miriam’s efforts on behalf of his view, but there was a universal sameness (a void of national identity) to the cityscape he saw.

And where Miriam took him to dinner—very near the hotel, in the Ayala Center—the atmosphere of the shops and restaurants was refined but fast-paced (a shopping mall relocated to an international airport, or the other way around). Yet it may have been the anonymity of the restaurant in the Ayala Center, or the traveling-businessman atmosphere of the Ascott, that compelled Juan Diego to tell Miriam such a personal story: what had happened to the good gringo—not only the burning at the basurero but every verse of “Streets of Laredo,” the lyrics spoken in a morbid monotone. (Unlike the good gringo, Juan Diego couldn’t sing.) Don’t forget, Juan Diego had been with Dorothy for days. He must have thought that Miriam was a better listener than her daughter.

“Wouldn’t you cry if you never forgot how
your
sister was killed by a lion?” Miriam had asked the children at the Encantador. And then Pedro had fallen asleep with his head against Miriam’s breast, as if he had been bewitched.

Juan Diego decided he should talk to Miriam nonstop; if he never let her talk, maybe she wouldn’t bewitch
him.

He went on and on about el gringo bueno—not only how the
doomed hippie had befriended Lupe and Juan Diego, but the embarrassing business of Juan Diego’s not knowing the good gringo’s name. The Manila American Cemetery and Memorial had beckoned Juan Diego to the Philippines, but Juan Diego told Miriam he had no expectations that he would ever be able to locate the missing father’s actual grave—not among the eleven burial plots, not without knowing the dead father’s name.

“Yet a promise is a promise,” was the way Juan Diego put it to Miriam at the restaurant in the Ayala Center. “I promised the good gringo I would pay his respects to his dad. I imagine the cemetery is pretty overwhelming, but I
have
to go there—I should at least
see
it.”

“Don’t see it tomorrow, darling—tomorrow is a Sunday, and not just
any
Sunday,” Miriam said. (You can see how easily Juan Diego’s decision to talk nonstop was derailed; as so often happened with Miriam and Dorothy, these women knew something he didn’t know.)

Tomorrow, Sunday, was the annual procession known as the Feast of the Black Nazarene. “The thing came from Mexico—a Spanish galleon carried it to Manila from Acapulco. Early 1600s, I’m guessing—I think a bunch of Augustinian friars brought the thing,” Miriam told him.

“A
black
Nazarene?” Juan Diego asked her.

“Not racially black,” Miriam explained. “It’s a wooden, life-size figure of Jesus Christ, frozen in the act of bearing his cross to Calvary. Maybe it was made from some kind of dark wood, but it wasn’t supposed to be black—it was burned in a fire.”

“It was
charred,
you mean?” Juan Diego asked her.

“It was burned at least three times, the first time in a fire on board the Spanish galleon. The thing
arrived
charred, but there were two more fires after the Black Nazarene got to Manila. Quiapo Church was twice destroyed by fire—in the eighteenth century and in the 1920s,” Miriam said. “And there were two earthquakes in Manila—one in the seventeenth century, one in the nineteenth. The Church makes a big deal about the Black Nazarene’s ‘surviving’ three fires and two earthquakes,
and
the thing survived the Liberation of Manila in 1945—one of the worst bombings in the Pacific Theater of World War Two, by the way. But what’s the big deal about a wooden figure that ‘survives’—a wooden figure can’t die, can it? The thing just got burned a few times, and it turned blacker!” was the way Miriam put it. “The Black Nazarene was shot once, too—in the cheek, I think. The gun incident was fairly recent—in the 1990s,” Miriam said. “As if Christ didn’t suffer enough, on the way to
Calvary, the Black Nazarene has ‘survived’ six catastrophes—both the natural and the unnatural kind. Believe me,” Miriam said suddenly to Juan Diego, “you don’t want to leave the hotel tomorrow. Manila is a mess when the Black Nazarene’s devotees are having their crazy procession.”

“There are thousands of marchers?” Juan Diego asked Miriam.

“No,
millions,
” Miriam told him. “And many of them believe that
touching
the Black Nazarene will heal them of whatever ails them. Lots of people get hurt in the procession. There are male devotees of the Black Nazarene who call themselves Hijos del Señor Nazareno—‘Sons of the Lord Nazarene’—and their devotion to the Catholic faith causes them to ‘identify,’ as they put it, with the Passion of Christ. Maybe the morons want to suffer as much as Jesus suffered,” Miriam said; the way she shrugged gave Juan Diego a chill. “Who knows what true believers like that want?”

“Maybe I’ll go to the cemetery on
Monday,
” Juan Diego suggested.

“Manila will be a mess on Monday—it takes them a day to clean up the streets, and all the hospitals are still dealing with the injured,” Miriam said. “Go Tuesday—the afternoon is best. The most fanatical people do everything as early in the morning as they’re allowed—don’t go in the morning,” Miriam told him.

“Okay,” Juan Diego said. Just listening to Miriam made him feel as tired as he might have felt if he’d marched in the Black Nazarene procession, suffering the inevitable crowd injuries and dehydration. Yet as tired as he was, Juan Diego doubted what Miriam had told him. Her voice was always so authoritative, but this time what she said seemed exaggerated, even untrue. It was Juan Diego’s impression that Manila was huge. Could a religious procession in Quiapo really affect the Makati area?

Juan Diego drank too much San Miguel beer and ate something curious; any number of things could have been the cause of his not feeling well. He suspected the Peking duck lumpia. (Why did they put duck in a spring roll?) And Juan Diego didn’t know that lechon kawali was deep-fried pork belly, not until Miriam informed him; the sausage served with bagoong mayonnaise took him by surprise, too. Later, Miriam told him the mayonnaise was made with that fermented-fish condiment—the stuff Juan Diego thought gave him indigestion or heartburn.

In truth, it may not have been the Filipino food (or too much San Miguel beer) that upset his stomach and made him feel sick. The all-too-familiar craziness of the fervent followers of the Black Nazarene
upset him.
Of course
the burned Jesus and his charred-black cross had come from
Mexico
! Juan Diego was thinking, as he and Miriam navigated the escalators in the vast mall of the Ayala Center—as they rode the elevator, up and up, to their suite in the Ascott.

Once again, Juan Diego almost didn’t notice how his limp seemed to go away when he was walking anywhere with Miriam or Dorothy. And Clark French was assailing him with one text message after another. Poor Leslie had been texting Clark; she’d wanted Clark to know his former teacher was “in the clutches of a literary stalker.”