John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

The beach resort had provided the driver, a feral-faced boy who looked too young to drive — but he was eager to do so. Once they were out of the city, there were smaller mobs of people walking along the road, although the vehicular traffic now careened at highway speeds. There were goats and cows tethered at the roadside, but their tethers were too long; occasionally, a cow’s head (or a goat’s) would reach into the road, causing the assorted vehicles to veer.

Dogs were chained near the shacks, or in the cluttered yards of those homesteads along the roadside; when the dogs’ chains were too long, the dogs would attack the pedestrians passing by — hence people, not only the heads of cows and goats, would materialize in the road. The boy driving the resort’s SUV relied heavily on his horn.

Such chaos reminded Juan Diego of Mexico — people spilling into the road, and the animals! To Juan Diego, the presence of improperly-cared-for animals was a telltale indication of overpopulation. So far, Bohol had made him think about birth control.

To be fair: Juan Diego’s birth-control awareness was keener around Clark. They’d exchanged combative emails on the subject of fetal pain, inspired by a fairly recent Nebraska law preventing abortions after twenty weeks’ gestation. And they’d fought about the use of the 1995 papal encyclical in Latin America, an effort by conservative Catholics to attack contraception as part of “the culture of death”—this was how John Paul II preferred to refer to abortion. (That Polish pope was a sore subject between them.) Did Clark French have a cork up his ass about sexuality — a Catholic cork?

But Juan Diego thought it was hard to say what kind of cork it was. Clark was one of those socially liberal Catholics. He said he was “personally opposed” to abortion—“it’s distasteful,” Juan Diego had heard Clark say — but Clark was politically liberal; he believed women should be able to choose an abortion, if that was what they wanted.

Clark had always supported gay rights, too; yet he defended the entrenched position of his revered Catholic Church — he found the Church’s position on abortion, and on traditional marriage (that is, between a man and a woman), “consistent and to be expected.” Clark had even said he believed the Church “should uphold” its views on abortion and marriage; Clark saw no inconsistency to his having personal views on “social subjects” that differed from the views upheld by his beloved Church. This exasperated Juan Diego no end.

But now, in the darkening twilight, as their boy driver dodged fleetingly appearing and instantly vanishing obstacles in the road, there was no talk of birth control. Clark French, befitting his self-sacrificing zeal, rode in the suicide seat — the one beside the boy driver — while Juan Diego and Josefa had buckled themselves into the seeming fortress that was the SUV’s rear seat.

The resort hotel on Panglao Island was called the Encantador; to get there, they drove through a small fishing village on Panglao Bay. It grew darker there. The glimmer of lights on the water and the briny smell in the heavy air were the only hints that the sea was near. And reflected in the headlights, at every curve of the winding road, were the watchful, faceless eyes of dogs or goats; the taller pairs of eyes were cows or people, Juan Diego guessed. There were lots of eyes out there in the darkness. If you were that boy driver, you would have driven fast, too.

“This writer is the master of the collision course,” Clark French, ever the expert on Juan Diego’s novels, was saying to his wife. “It is a fated world; the inevitable looms ahead—”

“It’s true that even your accidents are not coincidental — they’re planned,” Dr. Quintana said to Juan Diego, interrupting her husband. “I think the world is scheming against your poor characters,” she added.

“This writer is the doom master!” Clark French held forth in the speeding car.

It irritated Juan Diego how Clark, albeit knowledgeably, often spoke of him in the third person while delivering a dissertation on his work—à la this writer —notwithstanding that Juan Diego was present (in this case, in the car).

The boy driver suddenly veered the SUV away from a shadowy form — with startled-looking eyes, with multiple arms and legs — but Clark was carrying on as if they were in a classroom.

“Just don’t ask Juan Diego about anything autobiographical, Josefa — or the lack thereof,” Clark continued.

“I wasn’t going to!” his wife protested.

“India is not Mexico. What happens to those children in the circus novel is not what happened to Juan Diego and his sister in their circus,” Clark went on. “Right?” Clark suddenly asked his former teacher.

“That’s right, Clark,” Juan Diego said.

He’d also heard Clark hold forth on the “abortion novel”—as many critics had called another of Juan Diego’s novels. “A compelling argument for a woman’s right to an abortion,” Juan Diego had heard Clark describe that novel. “Yet it’s a complicated argument, coming from a former Catholic,” Clark always added.

“I’m not a former Catholic. I never was a Catholic,” Juan Diego not once failed to point out. “I was taken in by the Jesuits, which was neither my choice nor against my will. What choice or will do you have when you’re fourteen?”

“What I’m trying to say is,” Clark went on in the swerving SUV — on the dark, narrow road that was everywhere dotted with bright, unblinking eyes—“in Juan Diego’s world, you always know the collision is coming. Exactly what the collision is — well, this may come as a surprise. But you definitely know there’s going to be one. In the abortion novel, from the moment that orphan is taught what a D and C is, you know the kid is going to end up being a doctor who does one — right, Josefa?”

“Right,” Dr. Quintana answered in the backseat of the car. She gave Juan Diego a difficult-to-read smile — or a faintly apologetic one. It was dark in the back of the jouncing SUV; Juan Diego couldn’t tell if Dr. Quintana was apologizing for her husband’s assertiveness, his literary bullying, or if she was smiling a little sheepishly in lieu of admitting she knew more about a dilation and curettage than anyone in the collisiondaring car.

“I do not write about myself,” Juan Diego had said in interview after interview, and to Clark French. He’d also explained to Clark, who adored Jesuitical disputation, that (as a former dump kid) he had greatly benefited from the Jesuits in his young life; he’d loved Edward Bonshaw and Brother Pepe. Juan Diego even wished, at times, he could engage in conversation with Father Alfonso and Father Octavio — now that the dump reader was an adult, and somewhat better equipped to argue with such formidably conservative priests. And the nuns at Lost Children had done him and Lupe no harm — notwithstanding what a bitch Sister Gloria had been. (Most of the other nuns had been okay to the dump kids.) In the case of Sister Gloria, Esperanza had been the disapproving nun’s principal provocateur.

Yet Juan Diego had anticipated that a part of being with Clark — devoted student though he was — would be once more to find himself under scrutiny for the anti-Catholicism charge. What got under Clark’s oh-so-Catholic skin, Juan Diego knew, wasn’t that his former teacher was an unbeliever. Juan Diego was not an atheist — he simply had issues with the Church. Clark French was frustrated by this conundrum; Clark could more easily dismiss or ignore an unbeliever.

Clark’s casual-sounding D&C remark — not the most relaxing subject for a practicing OB-GYN, Juan Diego imagined — seemed to turn Dr. Quintana away from further discussion of a literary kind. Josefa clearly sought to change the subject — much to Juan Diego’s relief, if not to her husband’s.