John Irving: Avenue of Mysteries

As a very young teenager in Oaxaca, Juan Diego had met an American draft dodger; the young man had run away from the United States to evade the draft for the Vietnam War. The draft dodger’s dad had been among the thousands of American soldiers who’d died in the Philippines in World War II — but not on the Bataan Death March, and not in the intense battle for Corregidor. (Juan Diego didn’t always remember the exact details.)

The American draft dodger didn’t want to die in Vietnam; before he died, the young man told Juan Diego, he wanted to visit the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial — to pay his respects to his slain father. But the draft dodger didn’t survive the misadventure of his running away to Mexico; he had died in Oaxaca. Juan Diego had pledged to take the trip to the Philippines for the dead draft dodger; he would make the journey to Manila for him.

Yet Juan Diego had never known the young American’s name; the antiwar boy had befriended Juan Diego and his seemingly retarded little sister, Lupe, but they knew him only as “the good gringo.” The dump kids had met el gringo bueno before Juan Diego became a cripple. At first, the young American seemed too friendly to be doomed, though Rivera had called him a “mescal hippie,” and the dump kids knew el jefe’s opinion of the hippies who came to Oaxaca from the United States at that time.

The dump boss believed that the mushroom hippies were “the stupid ones”; he meant they were seeking something they thought was profound — in el jefe’s opinion, “something as ridiculous as the interconnectedness of all things,” though the dump kids knew that el jefe himself was a Mary worshiper.

As for the mescal hippies, they were smarter, Rivera said, but they were “the self-destructive ones.” And the mescal hippies were the ones who were also addicted to prostitutes, or so the dump boss believed. The good gringo was “killing himself on Zaragoza Street,” el jefe said. The dump kids had hoped not; Lupe and Juan Diego adored el gringo bueno. They didn’t want the darling boy to be destroyed by his sexual desires or the intoxicating drink distilled from the fermented juice of certain species of agave.

“It’s all the same,” Rivera had told the dump kids, darkly. “Believe me, you’re not exactly uplifted by what you end up with. Those low women and too much mescal — you’re left looking at that little worm!”

Juan Diego knew the dump boss meant the worm at the bottom of the mescal bottle, but Lupe said that el jefe had also been thinking about his penis — how it looked after he’d been with a prostitute.

“You believe all men are always thinking about their penises,” Juan Diego told his sister.

“All men are always thinking about their penises,” the mind reader said. To a degree, this was the point past which Lupe would no longer allow herself to adore the good gringo. The doomed American had crossed an imaginary line — the penis line, perhaps, though Lupe would never have put it that way.

One night, when the dump reader was reading aloud to Lupe, Rivera was with them in the shack in Guerrero, listening to the reading, too. The dump boss was probably building a new bookcase, or there was something wrong with the barbecue and Rivera was fixing it; maybe he had stopped by just to see if Dirty White (a.k.a. Saved from Death) had died.

The book Juan Diego was reading that night was another discarded academic tome, a mind-numbing exercise in scholarship, which had been designated for burning by one or the other of those two old Jesuit priests Father Alfonso and Father Octavio.

This particular work of unread academia had actually been written by a Jesuit, and its subject was both literary and historical — namely, an analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s writing on Thomas Hardy. As the dump reader had not read anything by Lawrence or Hardy, a scholarly examination of Lawrence’s writing on Hardy would have been mystifying — even in Spanish. And Juan Diego had selected this particular book because it was in English; he’d wanted more practice reading English, though his less-than-rapt audience (Lupe and Rivera and the disagreeable dog Dirty White) might have understood him better en español.

To add to the difficulty, several pages of the book had been consumed by fire, and a vile odor from the basurero still clung to the burned book; Dirty White wanted to sniff it, repeatedly.

The dump boss didn’t like Lupe’s saved-from-death dog any better than Juan Diego did. “I think you should have left this one in the milk carton,” was all el jefe told her, but Lupe (as always) was indignant in Dirty White’s defense.

And just then Juan Diego read aloud to them an unrepeatable passage, concerning someone’s idea of the fundamental interrelatedness of all beings.

“Wait, wait, wait — stop right there,” Rivera interrupted the dump reader. “ Whose idea is that?”

“It could be the one called Hardy — maybe it’s his idea,” Lupe said. “Or, more likely, the Lawrence guy — it sounds like him.”

When Juan Diego translated what Lupe said for Rivera, el jefe instantly agreed. “ Or the idea of the person writing the book — whoever that is,” the dump boss added. Lupe nodded that this was also true. The book was tedious while remaining unclear; it was seemingly nitpicking scrutiny of a subject that eluded any concrete description.

“ What ‘fundamental interrelatedness of all beings’— which beings are supposedly related ?” the dump boss cried. “It sounds like something a mushroom hippie would say!”

That got a laugh out of Lupe, who rarely laughed. Soon she and Rivera were laughing together, which was even more rare. Juan Diego would always remember how happy he was to hear both his sister and el jefe laughing.

And now, so many years later — it had been forty years — Juan Diego was on his way to the Philippines, a trip he was taking in honor of the nameless good gringo. Yet not a single friend had asked Juan Diego how he intended to pay the dead draft dodger’s respects to the slain soldier — like his lost son, the fallen father was without a name. Of course these friends all knew that Juan Diego was a novelist; maybe the fiction writer was taking a trip for el gringo bueno symbolically.

As a young writer, he’d been quite the traveler, and the dislocations of travel had been a repeated theme in his early novels — especially in that circus novel set in India, the one with the elephantine title. No one had been able to talk him out of that title, Juan Diego remembered fondly. A Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary —what a cumbersome title it was, and what a long and complicated story! Maybe my most complicated, Juan Diego was thinking — as the limo navigated the deserted, snowbound streets of Manhattan, making its determined way to the FDR Drive. It was an SUV, and the driver was contemptuous of other vehicles and other drivers. According to the limo driver, other vehicles in the city were ill equipped for snow, and the few cars that were “almost correctly” equipped had the “wrong tires”; as for the other drivers, they didn’t know how to drive in snow.

“Where do you think we are — fuckin’ Florida ?” the driver yelled out his window to a stranded motorist who’d slid sideways and blocked a narrow crosstown street.

Out on the FDR Drive, a taxi had jumped the guardrail and was stuck in the waist-deep snow of the jogging path that ran alongside the East River; the cabbie was attempting to dig out his rear wheels, not with a shovel but a windshield scraper.

“Where are you from, you jerk-off — fuckin’ Mexico ?” the limo driver shouted to him.