Avenue of Mysteries

10. No Middle Ground

“We’ll see you sooner than you think,” Dorothy had told Juan Diego.

“We end up in Manila,” the young woman had said enigmatically.

In a moment of hysteria, Lupe had told Juan Diego that they would end up living in Lost Children — a half-truth, as it turned out. The dump kids — like everyone else, the nuns called them “los niños de la basura”—moved their things from Guerrero to the Jesuit orphanage. Life at the orphanage was different from life at the dump, where only Rivera and Diablo had protected them. The nuns at Niños Perdidos — together with Brother Pepe and Señor Eduardo — would look after Lupe and Juan Diego more closely.

It was heartbreaking to Rivera that he’d been replaced, but he was on Esperanza’s shit list for running over her only son, and Lupe was unforgiving on the subject of the unrepaired side-view mirror. Lupe said it was only Diablo and Dirty White she would miss, but she would miss the other dogs in Guerrero and the dump dogs — even the dead ones. With Rivera’s help or Juan Diego’s, Lupe had been in the habit of burning the dead dogs at the basurero. (And of course Rivera would be missed — both Juan Diego and Lupe would miss el jefe, despite what Lupe had said.)

Brother Pepe was right about the nuns at Lost Children: they could accept the kids, albeit grudgingly; it was their mother, Esperanza, who gave the nuns fits. But Esperanza gave everyone fits — including Dr. Gomez, the ENT specialist, who was a very nice woman. It wasn’t her fault that Dr. Vargas wanted to have sex with her.

Lupe had liked Dr. Gomez — even while the doctor was having a look at Lupe’s larynx, with Vargas hovering uncomfortably nearby. Dr. Gomez had a daughter Lupe’s age; the ENT specialist knew how to talk to young girls.

“Do you know what’s different about a duck’s feet?” Dr. Gomez, whose first name was Marisol, asked Lupe.

“Ducks swim better than they walk,” Lupe answered. “A flat thing grows over their toes, uniting them.”

When Juan Diego translated what Lupe had said, Dr. Gomez replied: “Ducks are web-footed. A membrane grows over their toes — it’s called a web. You have a web, Lupe — it’s called a congenital laryngeal web. Congenital means you were born with it; you have a web, a kind of membrane, across your larynx. It’s pretty rare, which means special,” Dr. Gomez told Lupe. “Only one in ten thousand births — that’s how special you are, Lupe.”

Lupe shrugged. “That web isn’t what’s special about me,” Lupe said, untranslatably. “I know stuff I’m not supposed to know.”

“Lupe can be psychic about things. She’s usually right about the past,” Juan Diego tried to explain to Dr. Gomez. “She doesn’t do the future as accurately.”

“What does Juan Diego mean?” Dr. Gomez asked Dr. Vargas.

“Don’t ask Vargas—he wants to have sex with you!” Lupe cried. “He knows you’re married, he knows you have kids — and you’re much too old for him — but he still thinks about doing it with you. Vargas is always thinking about having sex with you!” Lupe said.

“Tell me what that’s about, Juan Diego,” Dr. Gomez said. What the hell, Juan Diego thought. He told her — every word.

“The girl is a mind reader,” Vargas said, when Juan Diego had finished. “I was thinking of a way to tell you, Marisol, but more privately than this way — that is, if I ever got up the nerve to tell you.”

“Lupe knew what happened to his dog!” Brother Pepe said to Marisol Gomez, pointing at Edward Bonshaw. (Obviously, Pepe was trying to change the subject.)

“Lupe knows what’s happened to almost everyone, and what almost everybody is thinking,” Juan Diego told Dr. Gomez.

“Even if Lupe is asleep when you’re thinking it,” Vargas said. “I don’t think the laryngeal web has anything to do with this,” he added.

“The child is completely incomprehensible,” Dr. Gomez said. “A laryngeal web explains the pitch of her voice — her hoarseness, and the strain in her voice — but not that no one can understand her. Except you,” Dr. Gomez added to Juan Diego.

“Marisol is a nice name — tell her about our retarded mother,” Lupe said to Juan Diego. “Tell Dr. Gomez to have a look at our mother’s throat; there’s more wrong with her than there is with me!” Lupe said. “Tell Dr. Gomez!” Juan Diego did.

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Lupe,” Dr. Gomez said to the girl, after Juan Diego had told the doctor about Esperanza. “A congenital laryngeal web isn’t retarded—it’s special.”

“Some of the things I know aren’t good things to know,” Lupe said, but Juan Diego left that untranslated.

“Ten percent of children with webs have associated congenital anomalies,” Dr. Gomez said to Dr. Vargas, but she wouldn’t look in his eyes when she spoke to him.

“Explain the anomalies word,” Lupe said.

“Lupe wants to know what anomalies are,” Juan Diego translated.

“Deviating from a general rule — irregularities,” Dr. Gomez said.

“Abnormalities,” Dr. Vargas said to Lupe.

“I’m not as abnormal as you are!” Lupe told him.

“I’m guessing I don’t need to know what that’s about,” Vargas said to Juan Diego.

“I’ll have a look at the mother’s throat,” Dr. Gomez said, not to Vargas but to Brother Pepe. “I should talk to the mother anyway. There are some options concerning Lupe’s web—”

Marisol Gomez, a pretty and young-looking mother, got no further; Lupe interrupted her. “It’s my web!” the girl cried. “Nobody touches my abnormalities,” Lupe said, glaring at Vargas.

When Juan Diego repeated this verbatim, Dr. Gomez said: “That’s one option. And I’ll have a look at the mother’s throat,” she repeated. “I’m not expecting her to have a web,” Dr. Gomez added.

Brother Pepe left Dr. Vargas’s office to look for Esperanza. Vargas had said he would also need to talk to Juan Diego’s mother about the boy’s situation. As the X-rays would confirm, there weren’t many options for Juan Diego’s foot, which was inoperable. It would heal as it was: crushed, but with a sufficient supply of blood, and twisted to one side. That was how it would be forever. No weight-bearing for a while, was how Vargas put it. First a wheelchair, then the crutches — last, the limp. (A cripple’s life is one of watching others do what he can’t do, not the worst option for a future novelist.)

As for Esperanza’s throat — well, that was a different story. Esperanza didn’t have a laryngeal web, but a throat culture tested positive for gonorrhea. Dr. Gomez explained to her that 90 percent of pharyngeal gonorrhea infections were undetectable — no symptoms.

Esperanza had wondered where and what her pharynx was. “The space, way back in your mouth, into which your nostrils, your esophagus, and your trachea open,” Dr. Gomez had told her.

Lupe was not present for this conversation, but Brother Pepe had permitted Juan Diego to be there; Pepe knew that if Esperanza became agitated or hysterical, only Juan Diego could understand her. But, in the beginning, Esperanza had been blasé about it; she’d had gonorrhea before, though she hadn’t known she had it in her throat. “Señor Clap,” Esperanza called it, shrugging; it was easy to see where Lupe’s shrug came from, though there was little else of Esperanza in Lupe — or so Brother Pepe hoped.

“Here’s the thing about fellatio,” Dr. Gomez said to Esperanza. “The tip of the urethra comes in contact with the pharynx; that’s asking for trouble.”

“Fellatio? Urethra?” Juan Diego asked Dr. Gomez, who shook her head.

“A blow job, the stupid hole in your penis,” Esperanza impatiently explained to her son. Brother Pepe was glad Lupe wasn’t there; the girl and the new missionary were waiting in another room. Pepe was also relieved that Edward Bonshaw wasn’t hearing this conversation, even in Spanish, though both Brother Pepe and Juan Diego would make sure that Señor Eduardo had a complete account of the details pertaining to Esperanza’s throat.

“You try getting a guy to wear a condom for a blow job,” Esperanza was saying to Dr. Gomez.

“A condom?” Juan Diego asked.

“A rubber!” Esperanza cried in exasperation. “What can your nuns possibly teach him?” she asked Pepe. “The kid knows nothing!”

“He can read, Esperanza. He’ll soon know everything,” Brother Pepe told her. Pepe knew that Esperanza couldn’t read.

“I can give you an antibiotic,” Dr. Gomez told Juan Diego’s mother, “but you’ll be infected again in no time.”

“Just give me the antibiotic,” Esperanza said. “Of course I’ll be infected again! I’m a prostitute.”

“Does Lupe read your mind?” Dr. Gomez asked Esperanza, who became agitated and hysterical, but Juan Diego said nothing. The boy liked Dr. Gomez; he wouldn’t tell her what unintelligible filth and vilification his mother was spewing.

“Tell the cunt doctor what I said!” Esperanza was screaming at her son.

“I’m sorry,” Juan Diego said to Dr. Gomez, “but I can’t understand my mom — she’s a raving, foul-mouthed lunatic.”

“Tell her, you little bastard!” Esperanza cried. She started to hit Juan Diego, but Brother Pepe got between them.

“Don’t touch me,” Juan Diego told his mother. “Don’t come anywhere near me — you’re infected. You’re infected!” the boy repeated.

This may have been the word that woke Juan Diego from his disjointed dream — either the infected word or the sound of the landing gear descending from the plane, because his Cathay Pacific flight was also descending. He saw he was about to land in Manila, where his real life — well, if not entirely real, at least what passed as his present life — awaited him.

As much as Juan Diego liked to dream, whenever he dreamed about his mother, he was not sorry to wake up. If the beta-blockers didn’t disjoint him, she did. Esperanza was not the kind of mother who should have been named for hope. “Desesperanza,” the nuns called her, albeit behind her back. “Hopelessness,” the sisters had named her, or they referred to her as despair itself—“Desesperación”—when that word made more sense. Even as a fourteen-year-old, Juan Diego felt he was the adult in the family — he and Lupe, too, who was an insightful thirteen. Esperanza was a child, not least in her children’s eyes — except sexually. And what mother would want to be the sexual presence in her children’s eyes that Esperanza was?

Esperanza never wore a cleaning woman’s clothes; she was always dressed for her other line of work. When she cleaned, Esperanza was dressed for Zaragoza Street and the Hotel Somega — the “whore hotel,” Rivera called it. The way Esperanza dressed was childish, or childlike, except for the sexually obvious part.

Esperanza was also a child when it came to money. The orphans at Lost Children weren’t allowed to have money, but Juan Diego and Lupe still hoarded it. (You cannot take the scavenging out of scavengers; los pepenadores carry their picking and sorting with them, long after they’ve stopped looking for aluminum or copper or glass.) The dump kids were very skillful at hiding their money in their room at Niños Perdidos; the nuns never found it.

But Esperanza could find their money, and she stole from them when she needed to. Esperanza did repay the kids, in her fashion. Occasionally, after a successful night, Esperanza would put money under Lupe’s or Juan Diego’s pillow. The kids were lucky that they could smell the money their mother left them before the nuns found it. Esperanza’s perfume gave her (and the money) away.

“Lo siento, madre,” Juan Diego said softly to himself, as his plane was landing in Manila. “I’m sorry, Mother.” As a fourteen-year-old, he’d not been old enough to have sympathy for her — for either the child or the adult that she was.

THE CHARITY WORD WAS a big one with the Jesuits — with Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, especially. It was out of charity that they’d hired a prostitute to clean for them; the priests referred to this act of kindness as giving Esperanza a “second chance.” (Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw would stay up late one night, discussing what kind of first chance Esperanza had been given — that is, before she’d become a prostitute and the Jesuits’ cleaning woman.)

Yes, it was clearly out of Jesuitical charity that los niños de la basura had been afforded the status of orphans; after all, they had a mother — irrespective of how fit or unfit (as a mother) Esperanza was. No doubt, Father Alfonso and Father Octavio believed they’d been exceptionally charitable in allowing Juan Diego and Lupe to have their own bedroom and bathroom — irrespective of how dependent the girl was on her brother. (That would be another late-night discussion between Brother Pepe and Señor Eduardo: namely, how Father Alfonso and Father Octavio imagined Lupe might have functioned without Juan Diego translating for her.)

The other orphans, including siblings, were divided by gender. The boys slept in a dormitory setting on one floor of Niños Perdidos, the girls on another floor; there was a communal bathroom for the boys, and a similar arrangement (but with better mirrors) for the girls. If the children had parents, or other relatives, these adults weren’t permitted to visit the children in their dormitories, but Esperanza was allowed to visit Juan Diego and Lupe in the dump kids’ bedroom, which had formerly been a small library, a so-called reading room for visiting scholars. (Most of the books were still on the shelves, which Esperanza regularly dusted; as everyone repeated, ad nauseam, she was actually a good cleaning woman.)

Of course it would have been awkward to keep Esperanza away from her own kids; she also had a bedroom at Lost Children, but in the servants’ quarters. Only female servants stayed in the orphanage, possibly to protect the children, though the servants themselves — Esperanza was the most vocal among them, not least on this subject — fervently imagined it was chiefly the priests (“those celibate weirdos,” Esperanza called them) whom the children needed protection from.

No one, not even Esperanza, would have accused Father Alfonso or Father Octavio of this particular, much-documented perversion among priests; no one believed the orphans at Niños Perdidos were in this particular danger. The conversation among the female servants concerning those children who were the sexual victims of allegedly celibate priests was very general; the talk was more about the “unnaturalness” of celibacy for men. As for the nuns — well, that was different. Celibacy was more imaginable for women; no one ever said it was “natural,” but not a few of the female servants expressed the feeling that the nuns were lucky not to have sex.

Only Esperanza said: “Well, just look at the nuns. Who would want to have sex with them?” But this was unkind, and — like much of what Esperanza said — not necessarily true. (Yes, the subject of celibacy and its unnaturalness, or not, was another of those late-night discussions between Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw — as you might imagine.)

Because he whipped himself, Señor Eduardo would try to joke to Juan Diego about it; the flagellating Iowan said it was a good thing he had his own bedroom in the orphanage. But Juan Diego knew the flagellant shared a bathroom with Brother Pepe; the boy used to wonder if poor Pepe found traces of Edward Bonshaw’s blood in the bathtub or on the towels. While Pepe was disinclined to mortifications of the body, he was amused that Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, who thought they were so superior to the Iowan in other ways, praised Edward Bonshaw for his painful self-castigations.

“How very twelfth-century!” Father Alfonso exclaimed admiringly.

“A rite worth maintaining,” Father Octavio said. (Whatever else they thought of Edward Bonshaw, both priests found his whipping himself brave.) And while these two twelfth-century admirers continued to criticize Señor Eduardo’s Hawaiian shirts, Brother Pepe was also amused that the two old priests never connected Edward Bonshaw’s flagellations with the Polynesian parrots and jungles on his overlarge shirts. Pepe knew that Señor Eduardo was always oozing blood; he whipped himself hard. The riotous colors and overall confusion of the zealot’s Hawaiian shirts concealed the bleeding.

The bathroom they shared, and the close proximity of their separate bedrooms, made unlikely roommates out of Pepe and the Iowan, and their rooms were on the same floor of the orphanage as the former reading room the dump kids shared. No doubt Pepe and the Iowan were aware of Esperanza — she passed by in the late hours of the night, or in the wee hours of the morning, as if she were more the ghost of the dump niños’ mom than an actual mother. Because Esperanza was an actual woman, she might have been a disconcerting presence to these two celibate men; she must have occasionally heard Edward Bonshaw beating himself, too.

Esperanza knew how clean the floors were in Lost Children; after all, she had cleaned them. She was barefoot when she came to visit her children; she could be more silent that way, and — given the hours she kept during her time not spent as a cleaning woman — almost everyone else in Niños Perdidos was asleep when Esperanza was creeping around. Yes, she came to kiss her niños when they were sleeping — in this single respect, Esperanza resembled other moms — but she also came to steal from them, or to leave them a little perfumed money under their pillows. Most of all, Esperanza made these silent visits in order to use the bathroom Juan Diego and Lupe shared. She must have wanted some privacy; either in the Hotel Somega or in the servants’ quarters of the orphanage, Esperanza probably had no privacy. She must have wanted, at least once a day, to bathe alone. And who knows how the other female servants at Lost Children treated Esperanza? Did those other women like sharing their communal bathroom with a prostitute?

Because Rivera had left his stick shift in reverse, he backed over Juan Diego’s foot; because of a broken side-view mirror, the dump kids slept in a small library, a former reading room, in the Jesuit orphanage. And because their mother was a cleaning woman for the Jesuits (because she was also a prostitute), Esperanza haunted the same floor of Niños Perdidos where the new American missionary lived.

Wasn’t this an arrangement that might have endured? Doesn’t the deal they all had sound compatible enough to have worked? Why wouldn’t the dump kids have preferred, eventually, their life at Lost Children to their shack in Guerrero? As for the perishable beauty, which Esperanza surely was, and the perpetually bleeding Edward Bonshaw, who so tirelessly whipped himself — well, is it absurd to imagine they might have taught each other something?

Edward Bonshaw might have benefited from hearing Esperanza’s thoughts about celibacy and self-flagellation, and it’s certain she would have had something to say to him on the subject of sacrificing his life to prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night.

In turn, Señor Eduardo might have asked Esperanza why she was still working as a prostitute. Didn’t she already have a job and a safe place to sleep? Was it her vanity, perhaps? Was she so vain that being wanted was somehow better than being loved?

Weren’t both Edward Bonshaw and Esperanza going to extremes? Wouldn’t some middle ground have worked as well?

In one of their many late-night conversations, here is how Brother Pepe put it to Señor Eduardo: “Merciful Lord, there must be some middle ground where it is possible not to sacrifice your life and still prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night!” But they would not resolve this; Edward Bonshaw would never explore that middle ground.

They would not, all of them, live together long enough to learn what might have happened. It was Vargas who first said the circus word; the undying idea of the circus came from him.

Blame it on the atheist. Hold the secular humanist (the everlasting enemy of Catholicism) accountable for what happened next. It might not have been a bad life: to be slightly less than actual orphans, or to be orphans with unusual privileges, at Lost Children. It could have turned out all right.

But Vargas had planted the circus seed. What children don’t love the circus, or imagine that they do?