John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

I can live with dim, the writer thought. He couldn’t understand how he’d slept for fifteen hours on the plane and was already tired again. Perhaps the push-button panel was at fault, or was it his newfound lust? And the cruel maid had rearranged the items in his bathroom. The pill-cutting device was on the opposite side of the sink from where he’d so carefully placed his beta-blockers (with his Viagra).

Yes, he was aware that he was now long overdue for a beta-blocker; even so, he didn’t take one of the gray-blue Lopressor pills. He’d held the elliptical tablet in his hand but then had returned it to the prescription container. Juan Diego had taken a Viagra instead — a whole one. He’d not forgotten that half a pill was sufficient; he was imagining that he would need more than half a Viagra if Dorothy called him or knocked on his door.

As he lay awake, but barely, in the dimly lit hotel room, Juan Diego imagined that a visit from Miriam might also require him to have a whole Viagra. And because he was accustomed to only half a Viagra—50 milligrams, instead of 100—he was aware that his nose was stuffier than usual and his throat was dry, and he sensed the beginnings of a headache. Always deliberate, he’d drunk a lot of water with the Viagra; water seemed to lessen the side effects. And the water would make him get up in the night to pee, if the beer didn’t suffice. That way, if Dorothy or Miriam never made an appearance, he wouldn’t have to wait till the morning to take a diminishing Lopressor pill; it had been so long since he’d had a beta-blocker, maybe he should take two Lopressor pills, Juan Diego considered. But his confounding, adrenaline-driven desires had commingled with his tiredness, and with his eternal self-doubt. Why would either of those desirable women want to sleep with me ? the novelist asked himself. By then, of course, he was asleep. There was no one to notice, but, even asleep, he had an erection.

IF THE RUSH OF adrenaline had stimulated his desire for women — for a mother and her daughter, no less — Juan Diego should have anticipated that his dreams (the reenactment of his most formative adolescent experiences) might suffer a surge of detail.

In his dream at the Regal Airport Hotel, Juan Diego almost failed to recognize Rivera’s truck. Streaks of the boy’s blood laced the exterior of the windswept cab; barely more recognizable was the blood-flecked face of Diablo, el jefe’s dog. The gore-glazed truck, which was parked at the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús, got the attention of those tourists and worshipers who’d come to the temple. It was hard not to notice the blood-spattered dog.

Diablo, who’d been left in the flatbed of Rivera’s pickup, was fiercely territorial; he would not permit the bystanders to approach the truck too closely, though one bold boy had touched a drying streak of blood on the passenger-side door — long enough to ascertain that it was still sticky and, indeed, was blood.

“¡Sangre!” the brave boy said.

Someone else murmured it first: “Una matanza.” (This means “a bloodbath” or “a massacre.”) Oh, the conclusions a crowd will come to!

From a little blood spilled on an old truck, and a bloodstained dog, this crowd was leaping to conclusions — one after another. A splinter group of the crowd rushed inside the temple; there was talk that the victim of an apparent gang-style shooting had been deposited at the feet of the big Virgin Mary. (Who would want to miss seeing that ?)

It was on the heels of this rampant speculation, and the partial but sudden shift in the crowd — a mad dash leaving the scene of the crime (the truck at the curb) for the drama taking place inside the temple — that Brother Pepe found a parking place for his dusty red VW Beetle, next to the blood-smeared vehicle and the murderous-looking Diablo.

Brother Pepe had recognized el jefe’s truck; he saw the blood and assumed that the poor children, who were (Pepe knew) in Rivera’s care, might have come to some unmentionable harm.

“Uh-oh — los niños,” Pepe said. To Edward Bonshaw, Pepe said quickly: “Leave your things; there appears to be some trouble. ”

“Trouble?” the zealot repeated, in his eager way. Someone in the crowd had uttered the perro word, and Edward Bonshaw — hurrying after the waddling Brother Pepe — got a glimpse of the terrifying Diablo. “What about the dog?” Edward asked Brother Pepe.

“El perro ensangrentado,” Pepe repeated. “The bloodstained dog.”

“Well, I can see that!” Edward Bonshaw said, somewhat peevishly.

The Jesuit temple was thronged with stupefied onlookers. “Un milagro!” one of the gawkers shouted.

Edward Bonshaw’s Spanish was more selective than just plain bad; he knew the milagro word — it sparked in him an abiding interest.

“A miracle ?” Edward asked Pepe, who was pushing his way toward the altar. “ What miracle?”

“I don’t know — I just got here!” Brother Pepe panted. We wanted an English teacher and we have un milagrero, poor Pepe was thinking—“a miracle monger.”

It was Rivera who’d been audibly praying for a miracle, and the crowd of idiots — or some idiots in the crowd — had doubtless overheard him. Now the miracle word was on everyone’s lips.

El jefe had carefully placed Juan Diego before the altar, but the boy was screaming nonetheless. (In his dreams, Juan Diego downplayed the pain.) Rivera kept crossing himself and genuflecting to the overbearing statue of the Virgin Mary, all the while looking over his shoulder for the appearance of the dump kids’ mother; it was unclear if Rivera was praying for Juan Diego to be cured as much as the dump boss was hoping for a miracle to save himself from Esperanza’s wrath — namely, her blaming Rivera (as she surely would) for the accident.

“The screaming isn’t good,” Edward Bonshaw was muttering. He’d not yet seen the boy, but the sound of a child screaming in pain lacked miracle potential.

“A case of hopeful wishing,” Brother Pepe gasped; he knew his words weren’t quite right. He asked Lupe what had happened, but Pepe couldn’t understand what the crazed child said.

“What language is she speaking?” Edward eagerly asked. “It sounds a little like Latin. ”

“It’s gibberish, though she seems very intelligent — even prescient,” Brother Pepe whispered in the newcomer’s ear. “No one can understand her — just the boy.” The screaming was unbearable.

That was when Edward Bonshaw saw Juan Diego, prostrate and bleeding before the towering Virgin Mary. “Merciful Mother! Save the poor child!” the Iowan cried, silencing the murmuring mob but not the screaming boy.

Juan Diego hadn’t noticed the other people in the temple, except for what appeared to be two mourners; they knelt in the foremost pew. Two women, all in black — they wore veils, their heads completely covered. Strangely, it comforted the crying child to see the two women mourners. When Juan Diego saw them, his pain abated.

This was not exactly a miracle, but the sudden reduction of his pain made Juan Diego wonder if the two women were mourning him —if he were the one who’d died, or if he was going to die. When the boy looked for them again, he saw that the silent mourners had not moved; the two women in black, their heads bowed, were as motionless as statues.

Pain or no pain, it was no surprise to Juan Diego that the Virgin Mary hadn’t healed his foot; the boy wasn’t holding his breath for an ensuing miracle from Our Lady of Guadalupe, either.

“The lazy virgins aren’t working today, or they don’t want to help you,” Lupe told her brother. “Who’s the funny-looking gringo? What’s he want?”