John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

“Here they come — right on time,” Rivera said, joining the kids where they stood at some distance from the fire; it was very hot. They could see Brother Pepe’s dusty red VW racing into the basurero.

Later, Juan Diego thought that the Jesuits tumbling out of the little VW Beetle resembled a clown act at the circus. Brother Pepe, the two outraged priests — Father Alfonso and Father Octavio — and, of course, the dumbstruck Edward Bonshaw.

The funeral pyre spoke for the dump kids, who said nothing, but Lupe decided that singing was okay. “ ‘Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly,’ ” she sang. “ ‘Play the dead march as you carry me along—’ ”

“Esperanza wouldn’t have wanted a fire —” Father Alfonso started to say, but the dump boss interrupted him.

“It was what her children wanted, Father — that’s how it goes,” Rivera said.

“It’s what we do with what we love,” Juan Diego said.

Lupe was smiling serenely; she was watching the ascending columns of smoke drifting far away, and the ever-hovering vultures.

“ ‘Take me to the valley, and lay the sod o’er me,’ ” Lupe sang. “ ‘For I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.’ ”

“These children are orphans now,” Señor Eduardo was saying. “They are surely our responsibility, more than they ever were. Aren’t they?”

Brother Pepe didn’t immediately answer the Iowan, and the two old priests just looked at each other.

“What would Graham Greene say?” Juan Diego asked Edward Bonshaw.

“Graham Greene!” Father Alfonso exclaimed. “Don’t tell me, Edward, that this boy has been reading Greene —”

“How unsuitable!” Father Octavio said.

“Greene is hardly age-appropriate—” Father Alfonso began, but Señor Eduardo wouldn’t hear of it.

“Greene is a Catholic!” the Iowan cried.

“Not a good one, Edward,” Father Octavio said.

“Is this what Greene means by one moment?” Juan Diego asked Señor Eduardo. “Is this the door opening to the future — Lupe’s and mine?”

“This door opens to the circus,” Lupe said. “That’s what comes next — that’s where we’re going.”

Juan Diego translated this, of course, before he asked Edward Bonshaw: “Is this our only moment? Is this the one door to the future? Is this what Greene meant ? Is this how childhood ends?” The Iowan was thinking hard — as hard as he ever had, and Edward Bonshaw was a deeply thoughtful man.

“Yes, you’re right! That’s exactly right!” Lupe suddenly said to the Iowan; the little girl touched Señor Eduardo’s hand.

“She says you’re right — whatever you’re thinking,” Juan Diego said to Edward Bonshaw, who kept staring into the raging flames.

“He’s thinking that the poor draft dodger’s ashes will be returned to his homeland, and to his grieving mother, with the ashes of a prostitute,” Lupe said. Juan Diego translated this, too.

Suddenly there was a harsh spitting sound from the funeral pyre, and a thin blue flame shot up among the vivid oranges and yellows, as if something chemical had caught fire, or perhaps a puddle of gasoline had ignited.

“Maybe it’s the puppy — it was so wet,” Rivera said, as they all stared at the intense blue flame.

“The puppy!” Edward Bonshaw cried. “You burned a dog with your mother and that dear hippie child? You burned another dog in their fire!”

“Everyone should be so lucky as to be burned with a puppy,” Juan Diego told the Iowan.

The hissing blue flame had everyone’s attention, but Lupe reached up her arms and pulled her brother’s face down to her lips. Juan Diego thought she was going to kiss him, but Lupe wanted to whisper in his ear, although no one else could have understood her, not even if they’d heard.

“It’s definitely the wet puppy,” Rivera was saying.

“La nariz,” Lupe whispered in her brother’s ear, touching his nose. The second she spoke, the hissing sound stopped — the blue flame disappeared. The flaming blue hiss was the nose, all right, Juan Diego was thinking.

The jolt of Philippine Airlines 177 landing in Bohol didn’t even wake him up, as if there were nothing that could wake Juan Diego from the dream of when his future started.

Several passengers paused at the cockpit exit for Philippine Airlines 177, telling the flight attendant of their concerns about the older-looking, brown-skinned gentleman who was slumped over in a window seat. “He’s either dead to the world or just dead,” one of the passengers told the flight attendant, in a confounding combination of the vernacular and the laconic.

Juan Diego definitely looked dead, but his thoughts were far away, on high, in the spires of smoke funneling above the Oaxaca basurero; if only in his mind, he had a vulture’s view of the city limits — of Cinco Señores, where the circus grounds were, and the distant but brightly colored tents of Circo de La Maravilla.

The paramedics were notified from the cockpit; before all the passengers had left the plane, the rescuers rushed on. Various lifesaving methods were seconds away from being performed when one of the lifesavers realized that Juan Diego was very much alive, but by then the supposedly stricken passenger’s carry-on had been searched. The prescription drugs drew the most immediate attention. The beta-blockers signified there was a heart problem; the Viagra, with the printed warning not to take the stuff with nitrates, prompted one of the paramedics to ask Juan Diego, with no little urgency, if he’d been taking nitrates.

Juan Diego not only didn’t know what nitrates were; his mind was in Oaxaca, forty years ago, and Lupe was whispering in his ear.

“La nariz,” Juan Diego whispered to the anxious paramedic; she was a young woman, and she understood a little Spanish.

“Your nose?” the young paramedic asked; to make herself clear, she touched her own nose when she spoke.

“You can’t breathe? You’re having trouble breathing?” another of the paramedics asked; he also touched his nose, doubtless to signify breathing.

“Viagra can make you stuffy,” a third paramedic said.

“No, not my nose,” Juan Diego said, laughing. “I was dreaming about the Virgin Mary’s nose,” he told the team of paramedics.

This was not helpful; the insanity of mentioning the Virgin Mary’s nose distracted the medical personnel from the line of questioning they should have pursued — namely, if Juan Diego had been manipulating the dosage of his Lopressor prescription. Yet, to the team of paramedics, the passenger’s life signs were okay; that he’d managed to sleep through a turbulent landing (crying children, screaming women) was not a medical matter.

“He looked dead,” the flight attendant kept saying to anyone who would listen to her. But Juan Diego had been oblivious to the rocky landing, the sobbing children, the wails of the women who’d been certain they were going to die. The miracle (or not) of the Virgin Mary’s nose had completely captured Juan Diego’s attention, as it had so many years ago; all he’d heard was the hissing blue flame, which had disappeared as suddenly as it first appeared.

The paramedics didn’t linger with Juan Diego; they weren’t needed. Meawhile, the nose-dreamer’s friend and former student kept sending text messages, inquiring if his old teacher was all right.

Juan Diego didn’t know it, but Clark French was a famous writer — at least in the Philippines. It is too simplistic to say this was because the Philippines had a lot of Catholic readers, and uplifting novels of faith and belief were received in a more welcoming fashion there than such novels were greeted in the United States or in Europe. Partly true, yes, but Clark French had married a Filipino woman from a venerable Manila family — Quintana was a distinguished name in the medical community. This helped make Clark a more widely read author in the Philippines than he was in his own country.