John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

In the late nineties, Brother Pepe went to work at the Albergue Josefino in Santa Lucía del Camino. The orphanage had opened in 1993, and the nuns looked after both boys and girls, though the boys weren’t allowed to stay past the age of twelve. Juan Diego didn’t understand who the nuns were, and Brother Pepe didn’t bother to explain. Madres de los Desamparados—“Mothers of the Forsaken,” Juan Diego would have translated this. (He thought forsaken sounded better than abandoned. ) But Pepe called the nuns “mothers of those who are without a place.” Of all the orphanages, Pepe believed the Albergue Josefino was the nicest. “The children hold your hands,” he wrote to Juan Diego.

There was a Guadalupe in the chapel, and another one in the schoolroom; there was even a Guadalupe clock, Pepe said. The girls could stay until they wanted to leave; a few girls were in their twenties before they left. But it wouldn’t have worked for Lupe and Juan Diego, since Juan Diego would have been too old.

“Don’t ever die,” Juan Diego had written to Brother Pepe from Iowa City. What Juan Diego meant was that he would die if he lost Pepe.

THAT NEW YEAR’S EVE, how many doctors must have been staying at the Encantador seaside resort? Ten or twelve? Perhaps more. Clark French’s Filipino family was full of doctors. Not one of these doctors — not Clark’s wife, Dr. Josefa Quintana, certainly — would have encouraged Juan Diego to skip another dose of the beta-blockers.

Maybe the men among those doctors — the ones who’d seen Miriam, especially the ones who’d witnessed her lightning-fast skewering of the gecko with a salad fork — would have agreed that the 100-milligram tablet of Viagra was advisable.

But as for alternating no doses with double doses (or half-doses) of a Lopressor prescription — absolutely not! Not even the men among those doctors celebrating New Year’s Eve at the Encantador would have approved of that.

When Miriam, albeit briefly, made Lupe’s death dinner-table conversation, Juan Diego had thought of Lupe — the way she’d scolded the noseless statue of the Virgin Mary.

“Show me a real miracle,” Lupe had challenged the giantess. “ Do something to make me believe in you — I think you’re just a big bully!”

Was that what triggered in Juan Diego his growing awareness of a puzzling similarity between the towering Virgin Mary in the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús and Miriam?

At this unresolved moment, Miriam touched him under the table — his thigh, the small lumps in his right-front pants pocket. “What’s here?” Miriam whispered to him. He quickly showed her the mah-jongg tile, the historic game block, but before he could begin the elaborate explanation, Miriam murmured, “Oh, not that —I know about the all-inspiring keepsake you carry with you. I mean what else is in your pocket?”

Had Miriam read about the mah-jongg tile in an interview with the author? Had Juan Diego piddled away the story of such a treasured memento to the ever-trivializing media? And Miriam seemed to know about the Viagra tablet without his telling her what it was. Had Dorothy told her mother that Juan Diego took Viagra? Surely, he hadn’t talked about taking Viagra in an interview — or had he?

His not knowing what Miriam knew (or didn’t) about the Viagra made Juan Diego remember the quickly passing dialogue upon his arrival at the circus — when Edward Bonshaw, who knew Flor was a prostitute, learned she was a transvestite.

It was an accident — through the open flaps of a troupe tent they’d seen Paco, the transvestite dwarf, and Flor had told the Iowan, “I’m just more passable than Paco, honey.”

“Does the parrot man get it that Flor has a penis?” Lupe (untranslated) had asked. It became clear that el hombre papagayo was thinking about Flor’s penis. Flor, who knew what Señor Eduardo was thinking, stepped up her flirting with the Iowan.

Fate is everything, Juan Diego was considering — he thought of the little girl in pigtails, Consuelo, and how she’d said “Hi, Mister.” How she reminded him of Lupe!

The way Lupe had repeated to Hombre, “It’ll be all right.”

“I hear you like whips,” Flor had said quietly to the hobbling missionary, who had elephant shit all over his sandals.

“The king of pigs, ” Lupe had suddenly said, when she saw Ignacio, the lion tamer.

Juan Diego wondered why it was coming back to him now; it couldn’t only be because Consuelo, that little girl in pigtails, had said “Hi, Mister.” What had Consuelo called Miriam? “The lady who just appears.”

“Wouldn’t you cry if you never forgot how your sister was killed by a lion?” Miriam had asked the children. And then Pedro had fallen asleep with his head against Miriam’s breast. It was as if the boy had been bewitched, Juan Diego was considering.

Juan Diego had been staring at his lap — at Miriam’s hand, which was pressing the Viagra tablet against his right thigh — but when he looked up at the dinner table (at all the dinner tables), he realized he’d missed the moment when everyone had put on a party hat. He saw that even Miriam wore a paper party hat, like a king’s or a queen’s crown — hers was pink, however. The party hats were all pastel colors. Juan Diego touched the top of his head and felt the party hat — a paper crown, ringing his hair.

“Mine is—” he started to say.

“Powder blue,” Miriam told him, and when he patted his right-front pants pocket, he felt the mah-jongg tile but not the Viagra tablet. He also felt Miriam’s hand cover his.

“You took it,” she whispered.

“I did?”

The dinner dishes had been cleared, though Juan Diego couldn’t remember eating — not even the ceviche.

“You look tired,” Miriam was telling him.

If he’d had more experience with women, wouldn’t Juan Diego have known that there was something strange, or a little “off,” about Miriam? What Juan Diego knew of women mostly came from fiction, from reading novels and writing them. The women in fiction were often alluring and mysterious; in Juan Diego’s novels, the women were intimidating, too. And wasn’t it normal — or not unusual, surely — for women in fiction to be a little bit dangerous?

If the women in Juan Diego’s real life lagged behind those women he’d met only in his imagination — well, that might explain why women like Miriam and Dorothy, who were far beyond Juan Diego’s experience with actual women, seemed so attractive and familiar to him. (Maybe he’d met them in his imagination many times. Was that where he’d seen them before?)

If the paper party hats had suddenly materialized on the heads of the New Year’s Eve revelers at the Encantador, there was a similar lack of explanation for the equally spontaneous appearance of the band, beginning with three scruffy-looking young men with intermittent facial hair and starvation-symptom physiques. The lead guitarist had a neck tattoo that resembled a scalding injury, a burn-scar facsimile. The harmonica player and the drummer liked the tank-top look, which revealed their tattooed arms; the drummer fancied an insect theme, whereas the harmonica player preferred reptiles — nothing but scaly vertebrates, snakes and lizards, could crawl on his bare arms.

Miriam’s comment on the young men was withering: “Lots of testosterone but few prospects.” Juan Diego could tell that Clark French heard this, but Clark had his back turned to the boys in the band — Clark’s slightly startled expression revealed that he thought Miriam had meant him.

“Those boys, behind you — the band, Clark,” Dr. Quintana told her husband.