John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

As for his gift from the gringo, Juan Diego would occasionally masturbate with the Guadalupe doll lying next to him on his bed, her enraptured face on the pillow alongside his face. The slight swell of Guadalupe’s breasts sufficed.

The impassive mannequin was made of a light but hard plastic, unyielding to the touch. Although the Guadalupe virgin was a couple of inches taller than Juan Diego, she was hollow — she weighed so little that Juan Diego could carry her under one arm.

There was a twofold awkwardness attached to Juan Diego’s attempts to have sex with the life-size Guadalupe doll — better said, the awkwardness of Juan Diego’s imagining he was having sex with the plastic virgin. In the first place, it was necessary for Juan Diego to be alone in the bedroom he shared with his little sister — not to mention that Lupe knew her brother thought about having sex with the Guadalupe doll; Lupe had read his mind.

The second problem was the pedestal. The fetching feet of the Guadalupe virgin were affixed to a pedestal of chartreuse-colored grass, which was the circumference of an automobile tire. The pedestal was an impediment to Juan Diego’s desire to snuggle with the plastic virgin when he was lying next to her.

Juan Diego had thought about sawing off the pedestal, but this meant removing the virgin’s pretty feet at her ankles, which would mean the statue couldn’t stand. Naturally, Lupe had known her brother’s thoughts.

“I don’t ever want to see Our Lady of Guadalupe lying down,” Lupe told Juan Diego, “ or leaning up against our bedroom wall. Don’t even think about standing her on her head in a corner, with the stumps of her amputated feet sticking up!”

“ Look at her, Lupe!” Juan Diego cried. He pointed to the Guadalupe figure, standing by one of the bookshelves in the former reading room; the Guadalupe mannequin looked a little like a misplaced literary character, a woman who’d escaped from a novel — one who couldn’t find her way back to the book where she belonged. “ Look at her,” Juan Diego repeated. “Does Guadalupe strike you as being even slightly interested in lying down?”

As luck would have it, Sister Gloria was passing by the dump kids’ bedroom; the nun peered into their room from the hall. Sister Gloria had objected to the life-size Guadalupe doll’s presence in the niños’ bedroom — more unmerited privileges, the sister had presumed — but Brother Pepe had defended the dump kids. How could the disapproving nun disapprove of a religious statue? Sister Gloria believed Juan Diego’s Guadalupe figure more closely resembled a dressmaker’s dummy—“a suggestive one,” was the way the nun put it to Pepe.

“I don’t want to hear another word about Our Lady of Guadalupe lying down, ” Sister Gloria said to Juan Diego. The virgins from La Niña de las Posadas were not proper virgins, Sister Gloria was thinking. The proprietors of The Girl of the Christmas Parties and Sister Gloria did not see eye to eye concerning what Our Lady of Guadalupe looked like —not like a sexual temptation, Sister Gloria thought, not like a seductress !

• • •

IT WAS, ALAS, THIS memory — among all the others — that woke Juan Diego from his dream in the suddenly stifling heat of his hotel room at the Makati Shangri-La. But how was it possible for that refrigerator of a hotel room to be hot ?

The dead fish floated on the surface of the green-lit water in the becalmed aquarium; the previously upright-swimming sea horse was no longer vertical, its lifeless prehensile tail signifying that it had joined (forever) those lost members of its family of pipefish. Had the aquarium’s water-bubble problem returned? Or had one of the dead fish clogged the water-circulation system? The fish tank had ceased gurgling; the water was unmoving and murky, yet a pair of yellowish eyes stared at Juan Diego from the clouded bottom of the aquarium. The moray — his gills gulping in the remaining oxygen — appeared to be the sole survivor of the disaster.

Uh-oh, Juan Diego was remembering: he’d returned from dinner to a freezing-cold hotel room; the air-conditioning was once more blasting. The hotel maid must have cranked it up — she’d also left the radio on. Juan Diego couldn’t figure out how to turn the relentless music off; he’d been forced to unplug the clock radio to kill the throbbing sound.

And the maid wasn’t easily satisfied: she’d seen how he’d prepared his beta-blockers for his proper dose; the maid had laid out all his medications (his Viagra, too) and the pill cutter. This both irritated and distracted Juan Diego — it didn’t help that he discovered the maid’s interfering attention to his toilet articles and his pills only after he’d unplugged the clock radio and had drunk one of the four Spanish beers in the ice bucket. Was San Miguel ubiquitous in Manila?

In the harsh light of the aquarium calamity, Juan Diego saw there was only one beer bobbing in the tepid water in the ice bucket. Did he drink three beers after dinner? And when had he turned the air-conditioning completely off ? Maybe he’d woken up with his teeth chattering, and (half frozen to death, and half asleep) he’d shivered his way to the thermostat on the bedroom wall.

Keeping a watchful eye on Señor Morales, Juan Diego quickly dipped an index finger in and out of the aquarium; the South China Sea was never this warm. The water in the fish tank was nearly as hot as a slowly simmering bouillabaisse.

Oh, dear — what have I done? Juan Diego wondered. And such vivid dreams! Not usual — not with the right dose of the beta-blockers.

Uh-oh, he was remembering — uh-oh, uh-oh! He limped to the bathroom. The power of suggestion would reveal itself there. He’d apparently used the pill-cutting device to cut a Lopressor tablet in half; he’d taken half the right dose. (At least he’d not taken half a Viagra instead!) A double dose of the beta-blockers the night before, and only a half-dose last night — what would Dr. Rosemary Stein have said to her friend about that?

“Not good, not good,” Juan Diego was muttering to himself when he walked back into the overheated bedroom.

The three empty bottles of San Miguel confronted him; they resembled small but inflexible bodyguards on the TV table, as if they were defending the remote. Oh, yes, Juan Diego remembered; he’d sat stupefied (for how long, after dinner?) watching the obliteration-to-blackness of the limping terrorist in Mindanao. By the time he’d gone to bed, after the three ice-cold beers and the air-conditioning, his brain must have been refrigerated; half a Lopressor tablet was no match for Juan Diego’s dreams.

He remembered how hot and humid it had been outside on the street when Bienvenido drove him back to the Makati Shangri-La from the restaurant; Juan Diego’s shirt had stuck to his back. The bomb-sniffing dogs had been panting in the hotel entranceway. It upset Juan Diego that the night-shift bomb-sniffers weren’t the dogs he knew; the security guards were different, too.

The hotel manager had described the aquarium’s underwater thermometer as “most delicate”; maybe he’d meant to say thermostat ? In an air-conditioned hotel room, wasn’t it the underwater thermostat’s job to keep the seawater warm enough for those former residents of the South China Sea? When Juan Diego had turned off the air-conditioning, the thermostat’s job had changed. Juan Diego had cooked an aquarium of Auntie Carmen’s exotic pets; only the angry-looking moray eel was clinging to life among his dead and floating friends. Couldn’t the thermostat also keep the seawater cool enough?