John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

Pepe had to explain this awkwardness to the dump boss; Juan Diego would have had trouble telling el jefe that the “adopted boy” needed a new name.

“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.

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.