Avenue of Mysteries

23. Neither Animal, Vegetable, nor Mineral

“The past surrounded him like faces in a crowd,” Juan Diego had written.

It was a Monday — January 3, 2011—and the young woman seated next to Juan Diego was worried about him. Philippine Airlines 174, from Tagbilaran City to Manila, was quite a rowdy flight for a 7:30 A.M. departure; yet the woman beside Juan Diego told the flight attendant that the gentleman had instantly fallen asleep, despite the clamor of their yammering fellow travelers.

“He totally conked out,” the woman said to the stewardess. But soon after falling asleep, Juan Diego began to speak. “At first, I thought he was speaking to me,” the woman told the flight attendant.

Juan Diego didn’t sound as if he were talking in his sleep — his speech wasn’t slurred, his thinking was incisive (albeit professorial).

“In the sixteenth century, when the Jesuits were founded, not many people could read—let alone learn the Latin necessary to preside at Mass,” Juan Diego began.

“What?” the young woman said.

“But there were a few exceptionally devoted souls — people who thought only of doing good — and they yearned to be part of a religious order,” Juan Diego went on.

“Why?” the woman asked him, before she realized his eyes were closed. Juan Diego had been a university professor; to the woman, it must have seemed like he’d been lecturing to her in his sleep.

“These dutiful men were called lay brothers, meaning they were not ordained,” Juan Diego lectured on. “Today, they typically work as cashiers or cooks — even as writers,” he said, laughing to himself. Then, still sleeping soundly, Juan Diego started to cry. “But Brother Pepe was dedicated to children — he was a teacher,” Juan Diego said, his voice breaking. He opened his eyes — he stared, unseeing, at the young woman beside him; she knew he was still conked out, as she would have put it. “Pepe just didn’t feel called to the priesthood, though he’d taken the same vows as a priest — thus he couldn’t marry,” Juan Diego explained; his eyes were closing as the tears ran down his cheeks.

“I see,” the woman said softly to him, slipping out of her seat; that was when she went to get the flight attendant. She tried to explain to the stewardess that the man was not bothering her; he seemed like a nice man, but he was sad, she said.

“Sad?” the flight attendant asked. The stewardess had her hands full: a bunch of drunks were onboard the early-morning flight — young men who’d been carousing all night. And there was a pregnant woman; she was probably too pregnant to fly safely. (She’d told the flight attendant that she either was in labor or had eaten an inadvisable breakfast.)

“He’s crying—weeping in his sleep,” the woman who’d been seated next to Juan Diego was trying to explain. “But his conversation is very high-level — like he’s a teacher talking to a class, or something.”

“He doesn’t sound threatening,” the stewardess said. (Their conversation was clearly at cross-purposes.)

“I said he was nice—he’s not threatening!” the young woman said. “The poor man is in trouble — he’s seriously unhappy!”

“Unhappy,” the flight attendant repeated — as if unhappy were part of her job! Yet, if only for relief from the young drunks and the pregnant idiot, the stewardess went with the woman to have a look at Juan Diego, who appeared to be sleeping peacefully in a window seat.

When he was asleep was the only time that Juan Diego looked younger than he was — his warm-brown skin, his almost all-black hair — and the flight attendant said to the young woman: “This guy isn’t ‘in trouble.’ He certainly isn’t weeping — he’s asleep!”

“What does he think he’s holding?” the woman asked the stewardess. Indeed, Juan Diego’s forearms were fixed at rigid right angles to his body — his hands apart, his fingers spread, as if he were holding something the approximate circumference of a coffee can.

“Sir?” the stewardess asked, leaning over his seat. She gently touched his wrist, where she could feel how taut the muscles in his forearm were. “Sir — are you all right?” the flight attendant asked, more forcefully.

“Calzada de los Misterios,” Juan Diego said loudly, as if he were trying to be heard over the din of a mob. (In his mind — in Juan Diego’s memory or dream — he was. He was in the backseat of a taxi, creeping through the Saturday-morning traffic on the Avenue of Mysteries — in a mob.)

“Excuse me—” the stewardess said.

“You see? This is how it goes — he’s not really talking to you,” the young woman told the flight attendant.

“Calzada, a wide road, usually cobbled or paved — very Mexican, very formal, from imperial times,” Juan Diego explained. “Avenida is less formal. Calzada de los Misterios, Avenida de los Misterios — it’s the same thing. Translated into English, you wouldn’t translate the article. You would just say ‘Avenue of Mysteries.’ Fuck the los,” Juan Diego added, somewhat less than professorially.

“I see,” the stewardess said.

“Ask him what he’s holding,” the young passenger reminded the flight attendant.

“Sir?” the stewardess asked sweetly. “What have you got in your hands?” But when she once more touched his taut forearm, Juan Diego clutched the imaginary coffee can to his chest.

“Ashes,” Juan Diego whispered.

“Ashes,” the flight attendant repeated.

“As in, ‘Dust to dust’—those kind of ashes. That’s my bet,” the woman passenger guessed.

“Whose ashes?” the stewardess whispered in Juan Diego’s ear, leaning closer to him.

“My mother’s,” he answered her, “and the dead hippie’s, and a dead dog’s — a puppy’s.”

The two young women in the aisle of the plane were speechless; they could both see that Juan Diego was starting to cry. “And the Virgin Mary’s nose—those ashes,” Juan Diego whispered.

The drunken young men were singing an inappropriate song — there were children onboard Philippine Airlines 174—and an older woman approached the flight attendant in the aisle.

“I think that very pregnant young woman is in labor,” the older woman said. “At least she thinks she is. Mind you: it’s her first child, so she really doesn’t know what labor is—”

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to sit down,” the stewardess said to the young woman who’d been seated next to Juan Diego. “The sleeper with the ashes seems harmless, and it’s only another thirty or forty minutes till we land in Manila.”

“Jesus Mary Joseph,” was all the young woman said. She saw that Juan Diego was weeping again. Whether he was sobbing for his mother or the dead hippie or a dead dog or the Virgin Mary’s nose — well, who knew what had made him weep?

It was not a long flight from Tagbilaran City to Manila, but thirty or forty minutes is a long time to dream about ashes.

THE HORDES OF PILGRIMS had assembled on foot and were marching in the middle of the broad avenue, though many of them had first arrived on the Avenue of Mysteries by the busload. The taxi inched forward, then stopped, then crept cautiously ahead again. The throng of pedestrians had brought the vehicular traffic to a standstill; the pedestrians were gathered in different groups, unified and purposeful. The marchers moved relentlessly forward, both blocking and passing the overwhelmed vehicles. The marching pilgrims were making better progress along the Avenue of Mysteries than the hot and claustrophobic taxi ever could.

The dump kids’ pilgrimage to Guadalupe’s shrine was not a solitary one — not on a Saturday morning in Mexico City. On weekends, the dark-skinned virgin — la virgen morena — drew a mob.

In the backseat of the sweltering taxi, Juan Diego sat holding the sacred coffee can in his lap; Lupe had wanted to hold it, but her hands were small. One of the fervent pilgrims could have jostled the car, causing her to lose her grip on the ashes.

Once more, the taxi driver braked; they were halted in a sea of marchers — the broad avenue approaching the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe was clogged.

“All this for an Indian bitch whose name means ‘breeder of coyotes’—Guadalupe means ‘breeder of coyotes’ in Nahuatl, or in one of those Indian languages,” their malevolent-looking driver said.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, you rat-faced shit-breath,” Lupe said to the driver.

“What was that — is she speaking Nahuatl or something?” the driver asked; he was missing his two front teeth, among others.

“Don’t give us the guidebook routine — we’re not tourists. Just drive,” Juan Diego told him.

As an order of nuns marched past the stopped taxi, one of them broke her string of rosary beads, and the loose beads bounced and rolled on the hood of the cab.

“Be sure you see the painting of the baptizing of the Indians — you can’t miss it,” their driver told them.

“The Indians had to give up their Indian names!” Lupe cried. “The Indians had to take Spanish names — that’s how the conversión de los indios worked, you mouse dick, you chicken-fucker sellout!”

“That’s not Nahuatl? She sure sounds Indian—” the taxi driver started to say, but there was a masked face pressed against the windshield in front of him; he blew his horn, but the masked marchers just stared into the taxi as they passed. They were wearing the masks of barnyard animals — cows, horses or donkeys, goats, and chickens.

“Nativity pilgrims — fucking crèche crazies,” the taxi driver muttered to himself; someone had also knocked out his upper and lower canines, yet he manifested a stoned superiority.

Music was blasting songs of praise to la virgen morena; children in school uniforms were banging drums. The taxi lurched forward, then stopped again. Blindfolded men in business suits were roped together; they were led by a priest, who made incantations. (No one could hear the priest’s incantations over the music.)

In the backseat, Lupe sat scowling between her brother and Edward Bonshaw. Señor Eduardo, who could not refrain from glancing anxiously at the coffee can Juan Diego held in his lap, was no less anxious about the crazed pilgrims surrounding their taxi. And now the pilgrims were intermixed with vendors hawking cheap religious totems — Guadalupe figures, finger-size Christs (engaged in multifaceted suffering on the cross), even the hideous Coatlicue in her skirt of serpents (not to mention her fetching necklace of human hearts and hands and skulls).

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.)

As the Iowan and the dump kids descended, more sweaty pilgrims pressed and bumped against them, climbing to the hilltop site of the miracle. Juan Diego stepped on something; it felt a little soft and a little crunchy at the same time. He stopped to look at it — then he picked it up.

The totem, slightly larger than the finger-size suffering Christs that were everywhere for sale, was not as thick as Lupe’s rat-size Coatlicue figurine — also everywhere for sale in the compound of buildings comprising the vast Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. The toy figure Juan Diego had stepped on was of Guadalupe herself — the subdued, passive body language, the downcast eyes, the no-breasts chest, the slight bulge where her lower abdomen was. The statuette radiated the virgin’s humble origins — she looked as if she spoke only Nahuatl, if she spoke at all.

“Someone threw it away,” Lupe said to Juan Diego. “Someone as disgusted as we are,” she said. But Juan Diego put the hard-rubber religious figure in his pocket. (It wasn’t as big as the Virgin Mary’s nose, but it still made his pocket bulge.)

At the bottom of the stairs, they passed through a gauntlet of snack and soft-drink salesmen. And there was a group of nuns, selling postcards to raise money for their convent’s relief of the poor. Edward Bonshaw bought one.

Juan Diego was wondering if Señor Eduardo was still thinking about the postcard of Flor with the pony, but this postcard was just another Guadalupe photo — la virgen morena on her deathbed, encased in glass, in the Chapel of the Well.

“A souvenir,” the Iowan said a little guiltily, showing the postcard to Lupe and Juan Diego.

Lupe looked only briefly at the photo of the dark-skinned virgin on her deathbed; then she looked away. “The way I feel right now, I would like her better with a pony’s penis in her mouth,” Lupe said. “I mean dead, but also with the pony’s penis,” Lupe added.

Yes, she’d been asleep — with her head in Señor Eduardo’s lap — when the Iowan told Juan Diego the story of that terrible postcard, but Juan Diego had always known that Lupe could nonetheless read minds when she was asleep.

“What did Lupe say?” Edward Bonshaw asked.

Juan Diego was looking for the best way to escape from the enormous flagstoned plaza; he was wondering where the taxis were.

“Lupe said she’s glad Guadalupe is dead — she thinks that’s the best part of the postcard,” was all Juan Diego said.

“You haven’t asked me about the new dog act,” Lupe said to her brother. She stopped, as she had before, waiting for him to catch up to her. But Juan Diego would never catch up to Lupe.

“Right now, Lupe, I’m just trying to get us out of here,” Juan Diego told her irritably.

Lupe patted the bulge in his pocket, where he’d put the lost or discarded Guadalupe figure. “Just don’t ask her for help,” was all Lupe said.

“Behind every journey is a reason,” Juan Diego would one day write. It had been forty years since the dump kids’ journey to the Guadalupe shrine in Mexico City, but — as Señor Eduardo would one day put it — Juan Diego felt he was still descending.