John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

He’d not anticipated that the news on TV, and in the newspaper the hotel delivered to his room, would be all about the Black Nazarene procession in Manila. The only news was local. He’d been so out of it on Sunday, he hadn’t noticed there was a drizzling rain all day—“a northeast monsoon,” the newspaper called it. Despite the weather, an estimated 1.7 million Filipino Catholics (many of them barefoot) turned out for the procession; the devotees were joined by 3,500 police officers. As in previous years, several hundred injuries were reported. Three devotees fell or jumped off the Quezon Bridge, the Coast Guard reported; the Coast Guard also said they’d deployed several intelligence teams in inflatable boats to patrol the Pasig River—“not only to provide security for the devotees, but to be on the lookout for any outsiders who might create an unusual scenario.”

What “unusual scenario”? Juan Diego had wondered.

The procession always ended up back at Quiapo Church, where the practice called pahalik was performed — the act of kissing the statue of the Black Nazarene. Mobs of people waited in line, crowding the altar area, waiting for a chance to kiss the statue.

And now a doctor was on TV, speaking dismissively of the “minor injuries” suffered by 560 devotees at this year’s Black Nazarene procession. The doctor strongly suggested that all the lacerations were to be expected. “Typical crowd-type injuries, such as tripping — the bare feet are just asking for trouble,” the doctor said. He was young and impatient-looking. And the abdominal issues? the young doctor was asked. “Brought on by bad food choices,” the doctor said. What about all the sprains? “More crowd-type injuries — falls, from all the pushing and shoving,” the doctor answered, sighing. And all the headaches? “Dehydration — people don’t drink enough water,” the doctor said, with rising contempt. Hundreds of marchers had been treated for dizziness and difficulty breathing — some fainted, the doctor was told. “Unfamiliarity with marching!” the doctor cried, throwing up his hands; he reminded Juan Diego of Dr. Vargas. (The young doctor seemed on the verge of crying out, “The problem is religion !”)

How about the incidences of back pain? “Could be caused by anything — definitely exacerbated by all the pushing and shoving,” the doctor replied; he had closed his eyes. And hypertension? “Could be caused by anything, ” the doctor repeated — he kept his eyes closed. “More marching-related business is a likely cause.” His voice had all but trailed away when the young doctor suddenly opened his eyes and spoke directly to the camera. “I’ll tell you what the Black Nazarene procession is good for,” he said. “The procession is good for scavengers.”

Naturally, a dump kid would be sensitive to this derogatory-sounding use of the scavengers word. Juan Diego wasn’t only imagining los pepenadores from the basurero; in addition to the professional trash collectors of the dump-kid kind, Juan Diego was thinking sympathetically of dogs and seagulls. But the young doctor wasn’t speaking derogatorily; he was being very derogatory about the Black Nazarene procession, but in saying the procession was good for “scavengers,” he meant it was good for poor people — the ones who followed after the devotees, cashing in on all the discarded water bottles and plastic food containers.

Ah, well —poor people, Juan Diego thought. There was certainly a history that linked the Catholic Church to poor people. Juan Diego usually fought with Clark French about that.

Of course the Church was “genuine” in its love for poor people, as Clark always argued — Juan Diego didn’t dispute this. Why wouldn’t the Church love poor people? Juan Diego was in the habit of asking Clark. But what about birth control? What about abortion? It was the “social agenda” of the Catholic Church that made Juan Diego mad. The Church’s policies — in opposition to abortion, even in opposition to contraception! — not only subjected women to the “enslavement of childbirth,” as Juan Diego had put it to Clark; the Church’s policies kept the poor poor, or made them poorer. Poor people kept reproducing, didn’t they? Juan Diego kept asking Clark.

Juan Diego and Clark French had fought on and on about this. If the subject of the Church didn’t come up when the two of them were onstage tonight, or when they were out to dinner afterward, how could it not come up when they were together in a Roman Catholic church tomorrow morning? How could Clark and Juan Diego coexist in the Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Manila without a recurrence of their oh-so-familiar Catholic conversation?

Just thinking about this conversation made Juan Diego aware of his adrenaline — namely, needing it. It wasn’t only for sex that Juan Diego wanted the adrenaline release he’d been missing since he’d started the beta-blockers. The dump reader had first encountered a little Catholic history on the singed pages of books saved from burning; as a Lost Children kid, he thought he understood the difference between those unanswerable religious mysteries and the man-made rules of the Church.

If he was going to the Our Lady of Guadalupe church with Clark French in the morning, Juan Diego was thinking, maybe skipping a dose of his Lopressor prescription tonight wasn’t a bad idea. Given who Juan Diego Guerrero was, and where he came from — well, if you were Juan Diego, and you were going to Guadalupe Viejo with Clark French, wouldn’t you want as much adrenaline as you could get?

And there was the ordeal onstage, and the dinner afterward — there was tonight and tomorrow to get through, Juan Diego considered. To take, or not to take, the beta-blockers — that is the question, he was thinking.

The text message from Clark French was short but would suffice. “On second thought,” Clark had written, “let’s begin with my asking you who wrote Shakespeare — we know we agree about that. This will put the issue of personal experience as the only valid basis for fiction writing behind us — we know we agree about this, too. As for the types who believe Shakespeare was someone else: they underestimate the imagination, or they overesteem personal experience — their rationale for autobiographical fiction, don’t you think?” Clark French wrote to his former writing teacher. Poor Clark — still theoretical, forever juvenile, always picking fights.

Give me the adrenaline, all I can get, Juan Diego thought — once more not taking his beta-blockers.

From Juan Diego’s point of view, the good thing about being interviewed by Clark French was that Clark did most of the talking. The difficult part was listening to Clark; he was such a pontificator. And if Clark was on your side, he could be more embarrassing.

Juan Diego and Clark had recently read James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Both Clark and Juan Diego had admired the book; they’d been persuaded by Mr. Shapiro’s arguments — they believed that Shakespeare of Stratford was the one and only Shakespeare; they agreed that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were not written collaboratively, or by someone else.

Yet why, Juan Diego wondered, didn’t Clark French begin by quoting Mr. Shapiro’s most compelling statement — the one made in the book’s epilogue? (Shapiro writes, “What I find most disheartening about the claim that Shakespeare of Stratford lacked the life experience to have written the plays is that it diminishes the very thing that makes him so exceptional: his imagination.”)