Avenue of Mysteries (54 page)

Juan Diego could tell that Lupe was upset to see so many vulgar versions of the grotesque figurine the good gringo had given her. One shrill-voiced vendor must have had a hundred Coatlicue statuettes for sale—all dressed in writhing snakes, with flaccid breasts and rattlesnake-rattle nipples. Every figurine, like Lupe’s, had hands and feet with ravening claws.

“Yours is still special, Lupe, because el gringo bueno gave it to you,” Juan Diego told his little sister.

“Too much mind reading,” was all Lupe said.

“I get it,” the taxi driver said. “If she’s not speaking Nahuatl, she’s got something wrong with her voice—you’re taking her to the ‘breeder of coyotes’ for a cure!”

“Let us out of your asshole-smelling taxi—we can walk faster than you drive, turtle penis,” Juan Diego said.

“I’ve seen you walk, chico,” the driver told him. “You think Guadalupe is going to cure your limp—huh?”

“Are we stopping?” Edward Bonshaw asked the dump kids.

“We were never
moving
!” Lupe cried. “Our driver has fucked so many prostitutes, his brains are smaller than his balls!”

Señor Eduardo was paying the taxi fare when Juan Diego told him, in English, not to tip the driver.

“¡Hijo de la chingada!” the taxi driver said to Juan Diego. This was something Sister Gloria might have thought to herself about Juan Diego; Juan Diego thought the taxi driver had called him a “whore’s son”—Lupe doubted this translation. She’d heard the girl acrobats use the
chingada
word; she thought it meant “motherfucker.”

“¡Pinche pendejo chimuelo!” Lupe shouted at the driver.

“What did the Indian say?” the driver asked Juan Diego.

“She said you are a ‘miserable toothless asshole’—it’s obvious someone beat the shit out of you before,” Juan Diego said.

“What a beautiful language!” Edward Bonshaw remarked with a sigh—he was always saying this. “I wish I could learn it, but I don’t seem to be making much progress.”

After that, the dump kids and the Iowan were caught up in the pressing crowd. First they were stuck behind a slowly moving order of nuns who were walking on their knees—their habits were hiked halfway up their thighs, their knees bleeding on the cobblestones. Then the dump kids and the lapsed missionary were slowed down by a bunch of monks from an obscure monastery who were whipping themselves. (If they were bleeding, their brown robes hid the blood, but the lashing of their whips made Señor Eduardo cringe.) There were many more drum-banging children in school uniforms.

“Dear God,” was all Edward Bonshaw managed to say; he’d stopped giving anxious looks at the coffee can Juan Diego was carrying—there were too many other appalling things to see, and they hadn’t even reached the shrine.

In the Chapel of the Well, Señor Eduardo and the dump kids had to fight their way through the self-abusing pilgrims, who made a sickening display of themselves. One woman kept gouging at her face with fingernail clippers. A man had pockmarked his forehead with the point of a pen; the blood and ink had commingled, running into his eyes. Naturally, he couldn’t stop blinking his eyes—he appeared to be crying purple tears.

Edward Bonshaw put Lupe on his shoulders, so she could see over the men in business suits; they’d taken their blindfolds off, so they could see Our Lady of Guadalupe on her deathbed. The dark-skinned virgin lay encased in glass, but the roped-together men in business suits would not move on—they wouldn’t allow anyone else to see her.

The priest who’d led the blindfolded businessmen to this spectacle continued his incantations. The priest also held all the blindfolds; he resembled a badly dressed waiter who’d foolishly gathered the used napkins in an evacuated restaurant during a bomb scare.

Juan Diego had decided it was better when the blasting music made it impossible to hear the priest’s incantations, because the priest seemed stuck in a groove of the most simplistic repetition. Didn’t everyone who knew
anything
about Guadalupe already know by heart her most famous utterance?

“¿No estoy aquí, que soy tu madre?” the priest holding the wrinkled blindfolds kept repeating. “Am I not here, for I am your mother?” It was truly a senseless thing for a man holding a dozen (or more) blindfolds to be saying.

“Put me down—I don’t want to see this,” Lupe said, but the Iowan couldn’t understand her; Juan Diego had to translate for his sister.

“The banker-brained dickheads don’t need blindfolds—they’re blind
without
the blindfolds,” Lupe also said, but Juan Diego didn’t translate this. (The circus roustabouts called tent poles “dream dicks”; Juan Diego thought it was only a matter of time before Lupe’s language lowered itself to the dream-dick level.)

What waited ahead for Señor Eduardo and the dump kids were the endless stairs leading to El Cerrito de las Rosas—truly an ordeal of devotion
and
endurance. Edward Bonshaw bravely began the ascent of the stairs with the crippled boy now on his shoulders, but there were too many stairs—the climb was too long and steep. “I can walk, you know,” Juan Diego tried to tell the Iowan. “It doesn’t matter that I limp—limping is my thing!”

But Señor Eduardo struggled onward; he gasped for breath, the bottom of the coffee can bumping against the top of his bobbing head. Of course no one would have guessed that the failed scholastic was carrying a cripple up the stairs; the flailing Jesuit looked like any other self-abusing pilgrim—he might as well have been carrying cinder blocks or sandbags on his shoulders.

“Do you understand what happens if the parrot man drops dead?”
Lupe asked her brother. “There goes your chance to get out of this mess, and this crazy country!”

The dump kids had seen for themselves the complications that could arise when a horse died—Mañana had been a horse from out of town, right? If Edward Bonshaw keeled over, climbing the stairs to El Cerrito—well, the Iowan was from out of town, wasn’t he? What would Juan Diego and Lupe do
then
? Juan Diego was thinking.

Naturally, Lupe had an answer for his thoughts. “We will have to rob Señor Eduardo’s dead body—just to get enough money to pay a taxi to take us back to the circus site—or we will be kidnapped and sold to the brothels for child prostitutes!”

“Okay, okay,” Juan Diego told her. To the panting, sweating Señor Eduardo, Juan Diego said: “Put me down—let me limp. I can
crawl
faster than you’re carrying me. If you die, I’ll have to sell Lupe to a children’s brothel just to have money to eat. If you die, we’ll never get back to Oaxaca.”

“Merciful Jesus!” Edward Bonshaw prayed, kneeling on the stairs. He wasn’t really praying; he knelt because he lacked the strength to lift Juan Diego off his shoulders—he dropped to his knees because he would have fallen if he’d tried to take another step.

The dump kids stood beside the gasping, kneeling Señor Eduardo while the Iowan strained to catch his breath. A TV crew climbed past them on the stairs. (Years later, when Edward Bonshaw was dying—when the dear man was similarly straining to breathe—Juan Diego would remember that moment when the television crew passed them on the stairs to the temple Lupe liked to call “Of the Roses.”)

The on-camera TV journalist—a young woman, pretty but professional—was giving a cut-and-dried account of the miracle. It could have been a travel show, or a television documentary—neither highbrow nor sensational.

“In 1531, when the virgin first appeared to Juan Diego—an Aztec nobleman
or
peasant, according to conflicting accounts—the bishop didn’t believe Juan Diego and asked him for proof,” the pretty TV journalist was saying. She stopped her narration when she saw the foreigner on his knees; maybe the Hawaiian shirt had caught her eye, if not the worried-looking children attending to the apparently praying man. And it was here the cameraman shifted his attention: the cameraman clearly liked the image of Edward Bonshaw kneeling on the stairs, and the two children waiting with him. They drew the television camera to them, the three of them.

It was not the first time Juan Diego had heard of the “conflicting accounts,” though he preferred thinking of himself as being named for a famous
peasant
; Juan Diego found it a little disturbing to think that he might have been named for an Aztec
nobleman.
That word didn’t jibe with the prevailing image Juan Diego had of himself—namely, a standard-bearer for dump readers.

Señor Eduardo had caught his breath; now he was able to stand and to move unsteadily forward up the stairs. But the cameraman had zeroed in on the image of a crippled boy climbing to El Cerrito de las Rosas. Hence the TV crew moved slowly in step with the Iowan and the dump kids; they ascended the stairs together.

“When Juan Diego went back to the hill, the virgin reappeared and told him to pick some roses and carry them to the bishop,” the TV journalist continued.

Behind the limping boy, as he and his sister reached the top of the hill, was a spectacular view of Mexico City; the TV camera captured the view, but neither Edward Bonshaw nor the dump kids ever turned around to see it. Juan Diego carefully held the coffee can in front of him, as if the ashes were a sacred offering he was bringing to the temple called “The Little Hill,” which marked the spot where the miraculous roses grew.

“This time, the bishop believed him—the image of the virgin was imprinted on Juan Diego’s cloak,” the pretty TV journalist went on, but the cameraman had lost interest in Señor Eduardo and the dump kids; his attention had been seized by a group of Japanese honeymoon couples—their tour guide was using a megaphone to explain the Guadalupe miracle in Japanese.

Lupe was upset that the Japanese honeymooners were wearing surgical masks over their mouths and noses; she imagined the young Japanese couples were dying of some dread disease—she thought they’d come to Of the Roses to beg Our Lady of Guadalupe to save them.

“But aren’t they
contagious
?” Lupe asked. “How many people have they infected between here and Japan?”

How much of Juan Diego’s translation
and
Edward Bonshaw’s explanation to Lupe was lost in the crowd noise? The proclivity of the Japanese to be “precautionary,” to wear surgical masks to protect themselves from bad air or disease—well, it was unclear if Lupe ever understood what that was about.

More distracting, the nearby tourists and worshipers who’d heard Lupe speak had raised their own cries of faith-based excitement. One
earnest believer pointed to Lupe and announced she’d been speaking in tongues; this had upset Lupe—to be accused of the ecstatic, unintelligible utterances of a messianic child.

A Mass was in progress inside the temple, but the rabble entering El Cerrito didn’t seem conducive to the atmosphere for a Mass: the armies of nuns and uniformed children, the whipped monks and roped-together men in business suits—the latter were blindfolded again, which had caused them to trip and fall ascending the stairs (their pants were torn or scuffed at the knees, and two or three of the businessmen limped, if not as noticeably as Juan Diego).

Not that Juan Diego was the only cripple: the maimed had come—the amputees, too. (They’d come to be cured.) They were all there—the deaf, the blind, the poor—together with the sightseeing nobodies and the masked Japanese honeymooners.

At the threshold to the temple, the dump kids heard the pretty TV journalist say: “A German chemist actually analyzed the red and yellow fibers of Juan Diego’s cloak. The chemist determined, scientifically, that the colors of the cloak were neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral.”

“What do the
Germans
have to do with it?” Lupe asked. “Either Guadalupe is a miracle or she isn’t. It’s not about the
cloak
!”

The Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe was, in fact, a group of churches, chapels, and shrines all gathered on the rocky hillside where the miracle supposedly occurred. As it would turn out, Edward Bonshaw and the dump kids saw only the Chapel of the Well, where Guadalupe lay under glass on her deathbed, and El Cerrito de las Rosas. (They would never see the enshrined cloak.)

Inside El Cerrito, it’s true that the Virgin of Guadalupe isn’t tucked away in a side altar; she is elevated at the front of the chapel. But so what if they’d made her the main attraction? They had made Guadalupe
at one
with the Virgin Mary; they’d made them the same. The Catholic hocus-pocus was complete: the sacred Of the Roses was a zoo. The crazies far outnumbered the worshipers who were trying to follow the Mass-in-progress. The priests were performing by rote. While the megaphone was not permitted inside the temple, the tour guide continued in Japanese to the honeymooners in their surgical masks. The roped-together men in business suits—their blindfolds were once more removed—stared unseeing at the dark-skinned virgin, the way Juan Diego stared when he was dreaming.

“Don’t touch those ashes,” Lupe said to him, but Juan Diego was
holding the lid tightly in place. “Not a speck gets sprinkled here,” Lupe told him.

“I know—” Juan Diego started to say.

“Our mother would rather burn in Hell than have her ashes scattered here,” Lupe said. “El gringo bueno would never sleep in El Cerrito—he was so beautiful when he slept,” she said, remembering. It wasn’t lost on Juan Diego that his sister had stopped calling the temple “Of the Roses.” Lupe was content to call the temple “The Little Hill”; it wasn’t so sacred to her anymore.

“I don’t need a translation,” Señor Eduardo told the dump kids. “This chapel is not holy. This whole place is not right—it’s all wrong, it’s not the way it was meant to be.”

“Meant to be,” Juan Diego repeated.

“It’s neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral—it’s like the German said!” Lupe cried. Juan Diego thought he should translate this for Edward Bonshaw—it had a disturbing ring of truth to it.

“
What
German?” the Iowan asked, as they were descending the stairs. (Years later, Señor Eduardo would say to Juan Diego: “I feel I am still leaving The Little Hill of the Roses. The disillusion, the disenchantment I felt when I was descending those stairs, is ongoing; I am still
descending,
” Edward Bonshaw would say.)