John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

“Uncle Clark!” the children were calling.

“What was the saint’s name ?” the little girl with pigtails kept asking.

“Saint Ignatius Loyola,” Juan Diego heard Clark French tell the children.

The giant gecko moved as fast as a small one. Maybe Clark’s voice had been too confident, or just too loud. It was amazing how the big lizard could flatten itself out — how it managed to fit behind the painting, although it had moved the painting slightly. The painting now hung a little crookedly on the wall, but it was as if the gecko had never been there. Saint Ignatius himself had not seen the lizard, nor was Loyola even looking at the children and adults.

From all the portraits of Loyola that Juan Diego had seen — in the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús, at Lost Children, and elsewhere in Oaxaca (and in Mexico City) — he couldn’t recall the bald but bearded saint ever looking back at him. Saint Ignatius’s eyes looked above ; Loyola was looking, ever-beseechingly, toward Heaven. The Jesuits’ founder was seeking a higher authority — Loyola wasn’t inclined to make eye contact with mere bystanders.

“Dinner is served!” an adult’s voice was calling.

“Thank you for the story, Mister,” Pedro said to Juan Diego. “I’m sorry about all the stuff you miss,” the little boy added.

Both Pedro and the little girl with pigtails wanted to hold Juan Diego’s hands when all three of them got back to the top of the stairs, but the stairs were too narrow; it wouldn’t have been safe for a crippled man to go down those stairs holding hands with two little children. Juan Diego knew he should hold the railing instead.

Besides, he saw Clark French waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs — no doubt the new seating plan had given a few of the most senior family members fits. Juan Diego imagined there were women of a certain age who’d wanted to sit next to him; these older women were his most avid readers — at least they were usually the ones who weren’t shy about speaking to him.

All Clark enthusiastically said to him was: “I just love listening to how you tell a story.”

Maybe you wouldn’t love listening to my Virgin Mary story, Juan Diego was thinking, but he felt inordinately tired — especially for someone who’d slept on the plane and had a nap in the car. Young Pedro was right to feel sorry about “all the stuff” Juan Diego missed. Just thinking about all the stuff he missed made Juan Diego miss everyone more —he’d hardly scratched the surface with that dump story for the children.

The seating plan had been very carefully worked out; the children’s tables were at the perimeters of the dining room, the adults clustered together at the center tables. Josefa, Clark’s wife, would be seated to one side of Juan Diego, who saw that the other seat beside him was empty. Clark took a seat diagonally across the table from his former teacher. No one wore a party hat — not yet.

Juan Diego wasn’t surprised to see that the middle of his table was, for the most part, composed of those “women of a certain age”—the ones he’d been thinking about. They smiled knowingly at him, the way women who’ve read your novels (and assume they know everything about you) do; only one of these older women wasn’t smiling.

You know what they say about people who look like their pets. Before Clark commenced making a ringing sound with a spoon against his water glass, before Clark’s garrulous introduction of his former teacher to his wife’s family, Juan Diego saw in an instant who Auntie Carmen was. There was no one else in sight who even slightly resembled a brightly colored, sharp-toothed, voracious eel. And, in the flattering light at the dinner table, Auntie Carmen’s jowls might have been mistaken for a moray’s quivering gills. Like a moray, too, Auntie Carmen radiated distance and distrust — her aloofness disguising the biting eel’s renowned ability to launch a lethal strike from afar.

“I have something I want to say to you two, ” Dr. Quintana said to her husband and Juan Diego, when their table had quieted down — Clark had finally stopped talking; the first course, a ceviche, had been served. “No religion, no Church politics, not a word about abortion or birth control — not while we’re eating,” Josefa said.

“Not while the children and teenagers are—” Clark started to say.

“Not while the adults are here, Clark — no talking about any of it unless you two are alone, ” his wife told him.

“And no sex, ” Auntie Carmen said; she was looking at Juan Diego. He was the one who wrote about sex — Clark didn’t. And the way the eel woman had said “no sex”—as if it left a bad taste in her wizened mouth — implied both talking about it and doing it.

“I guess that leaves literature,” Clark said truculently.

“That depends on which literature,” Juan Diego said. As soon as he’d sat down, he felt a little light-headed; his vision had blurred. This happened with Viagra — usually, the feeling soon passed. But when Juan Diego felt his right-front pocket, he was reminded that he hadn’t taken the Viagra; he could feel the tablet and the mah-jongg tile through the fabric of his trousers.

There was, of course, some seafood in the ceviche — what looked like shrimp, or perhaps a kind of crayfish. And wedges of mango, Juan Diego noticed; he’d slightly touched the marinade with the tines of his salad fork. Citrus, certainly — probably lime, Juan Diego thought.

Auntie Carmen saw him sneaking a taste; she brandished her salad fork, as if to demonstrate that she’d restrained herself long enough.

“I see no reason why we should wait for her, ” Auntie Carmen said, pointing her fork at the empty chair next to Juan Diego. “She’s not family, ” the eel woman added.

Juan Diego felt something or someone touch his ankles; he saw a small face looking up at him from under the table. The little girl with pigtails sat at his feet. “Hi, Mister,” she said. “The lady told me to tell you — she’s coming.”

“What lady?” Juan Diego asked the little girl; to everyone at the table, except for Clark’s wife, he must have looked like he was talking to his lap.

“Consuelo,” Josefa said to the little girl. “You’re supposed to be at your table — please go there.”

“Yes,” Consuelo said.

“ What lady?” Juan Diego asked Consuelo again. The little girl had crawled out from under the table and now endured Auntie Carmen’s cruel stare.

“The lady who just appears,” Consuelo said; she tugged on both her pigtails, making her head bob up and down. She ran off. The waiters were pouring wine — one of them was the boy driver who’d brought Juan Diego from the airport in Tagbilaran City.

“You must have driven the mystery lady from the airport,” Juan Diego said to him, waving the wine away, but the boy seemed not to understand. Josefa spoke to him in Tagalog; even then, the boy driver looked confused. He gave Dr. Quintana what sounded like an overlong answer.

“He says he didn’t drive her — he says she just appeared in the driveway. No one saw her car or driver,” Josefa said.

“The plot thickens!” Clark French declared. “No wine for him — he drinks only beer,” Clark was telling the boy driver, who was a lot less confident as a waiter than he’d been behind the wheel.

“Yes, sir,” the boy said.

“You shouldn’t have provided your former teacher with all that beer, ” Auntie Carmen said suddenly to Clark. “Were you drunk ?” Auntie Carmen asked Juan Diego. “Whatever possessed you to turn off the air-conditioning? No one turns off the air-conditioning in Manila!”