John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

Esperanza, whatever her faults, had been “bumped off” by the Mary Monster, in Lupe’s view. The clairvoyant child believed the wrongness of the religious world would right itself — if, and only if, her sinful mother’s ashes were scattered at the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in Mexico City. Only there did the dark-skinned virgin, la virgen morena, draw busloads of pilgrims to her shrine. Lupe longed to see the Chapel of the Well — where Guadalupe, encased in glass, lay on her deathbed.

Even with his limp, Juan Diego looked forward to the long climb — the endless stairs leading to El Cerrito de las Rosas, the temple where Guadalupe wasn’t tucked away in a side altar. She was elevated at the front of the sacred El Cerrito, “The Little Hill.” (Lupe, instead of saying “El Cerrito,” liked to call the temple “Of the Roses”; she said this sounded more sacred than “The Little Hill.”) Either there or at the dark-skinned virgin’s deathbed in the Chapel of the Well, the dump kids would scatter the ashes, which they’d kept in a coffee can Rivera had found at the basurero.

The contents of the coffee can did not have Esperanza’s smell. They had a nondescript odor. Flor had sniffed the ashes; she’d said it wasn’t the good gringo’s smell, either.

“It smells like coffee,” Edward Bonshaw had said when he’d sniffed the coffee can.

Whatever the ashes smelled like, the dogs in the troupe tent weren’t interested. Maybe there was a medicinal odor; Estrella said anything that smelled like medicine would put off the dogs. Perhaps the unidentifiable smell was the Virgin Mary’s nose.

“It’s definitely not Dirty White,” was all Lupe would say about the smell; she sniffed the ashes in the coffee can every night before going to bed.

Juan Diego could never read her mind — he didn’t even try. Possibly Lupe liked to sniff the contents of the coffee can because she knew they would be scattering the ashes soon, and she wanted to remember the smell after the ashes were gone.

Shortly before Circus of The Wonder would travel to Mexico City — a long trip, especially in a caravan of trucks and buses — Lupe brought the coffee can to a dinner party they were invited to, at Dr. Vargas’s house in Oaxaca. Lupe told Juan Diego that she wanted a “scientific opinion” of the ashes’ smell.

“But it’s a dinner party, Lupe,” Juan Diego said. It was the first dinner party the dump kids had been invited to; in all likelihood, they knew, the invitation wasn’t Vargas’s idea.

Brother Pepe had discussed with Vargas what Pepe called Edward Bonshaw’s “test of the soul.” Dr. Vargas didn’t think Flor had presented the Iowan with a spiritual crisis. In fact, Vargas had offended Flor by suggesting to Señor Eduardo that the only reason to worry about his relationship with a transvestite prostitute might be a medical matter.

Dr. Vargas meant sexually transmitted diseases; he meant how many partners a prostitute had, and what Flor might have picked up from one of them. It didn’t matter to Vargas that Flor had a penis — or that Edward Bonshaw had one, too, and that the Iowan would have to give up his hope of becoming a priest because of it.

That Edward Bonshaw had broken his vow of celibacy didn’t matter to Dr. Vargas, either. “I just don’t want your dick to fall off — or turn green, or something,” Vargas had said to the Iowan. That was what offended Flor, and why she wouldn’t come to the dinner party at Casa Vargas.

In Oaxaca, anyone who had an ax to grind with Vargas called his house “Casa Vargas.” This included people who disliked him for his family wealth, or thought it was insensitive of him to have moved into his parents’ mansion after they’d been killed in a plane crash. (By now, everyone in Oaxaca knew the story of how Vargas was supposed to have been on that plane.) And among the people who played the “Casa Vargas” card were those who’d been offended by how brusque Vargas could be. He used science like a bludgeon; he was inclined to club you with a strictly medical detail — the way he’d relegated Flor to a potential sexually transmitted disease.

Well, that was Vargas — that was who he was. Brother Pepe knew him well. Pepe thought he could count on Vargas to be cynical about everything. Pepe believed the dump kids and Edward Bonshaw could benefit from some of Vargas’s cynicism. This was why Pepe had prevailed upon Vargas to invite the Iowan and the dump kids to the dinner party.

Pepe knew other scholastics who’d failed their vows. There could be doubts and detours on the road to the priesthood. When the most zealous students abandoned their studies, the emotional and psychological aspects of “reorientation,” as Pepe thought of it, could be brutal.

No doubt Edward Bonshaw had questioned whether or not he was gay, or if he was in love with this particular person who just happened to have breasts and a penis. No doubt Señor Eduardo had asked himself: Aren’t a lot of gay men not attracted to transvestites? Yet Edward Bonshaw knew that some gay men were attracted to trannies. But did that make him, Señor Eduardo must have wondered, a sexual minority within a minority?

Brother Pepe didn’t care about those distinctions within distinctions. Pepe had a lot of love in him. Pepe knew that the matter of the Iowan’s sexual orientation was strictly Edward Bonshaw’s business.

Brother Pepe didn’t have a problem with Señor Eduardo’s belatedly discovering his homosexual self (if that’s what was going on), or his abandoning the quest to become a priest; it was okay with Pepe that Edward Bonshaw was smitten by a cross-dresser with a penis. And Pepe didn’t dislike Flor, but Pepe had a problem with the prostitute part — not necessarily for Vargas’s sexually transmitted reasons. Pepe knew that Flor had always been in trouble; she’d lived surrounded by trouble (not everything could be blamed on Houston), while Edward Bonshaw had scarcely lived at all. What would two people like that do together in Iowa? For Señor Eduardo, in Pepe’s opinion, Flor was a step too far — Flor’s world was without boundaries.

As for Flor — who knew what she was thinking? “I think you’re a very nice parrot man,” Flor had said to the Iowan. “I should have met you when I was a kid,” she’d told him. “We might have helped each other get through some shit.”

Well, yes — Brother Pepe would have agreed to that. But wasn’t now too late for the two of them? As for Dr. Vargas — specifically, his “offending” Flor — Pepe might have put Vargas up to it. Yet no litany of sexually transmitted diseases was likely to scare Edward Bonshaw away; sexual attraction isn’t strictly scientific.

Brother Pepe had higher hopes of Vargas’s skepticism succeeding with Juan Diego and Lupe. The dump kids were disillusioned with La Maravilla — at least Lupe was. Dr. Vargas took a dim view of reading lions’ minds, as did Brother Pepe. Vargas had examined a few of the young-women acrobats; they’d been his patients, both before and after Ignacio got his hands on them. As a performer, being The Wonder — La Maravilla herself — could kill you. (No one had survived the fall from eighty feet without a net.) Dr. Vargas knew that the girl acrobats who’d had sex with Ignacio wished they were dead.

And Vargas had admitted to Pepe, somewhat defensively, that he’d first thought the circus would be a good prospect for the dump kids because he’d envisioned that Lupe, who was a mind reader, would have no contact with Ignacio. (Lupe wouldn’t be one of Ignacio’s girl acrobats.) Now Vargas had changed his mind; what Vargas didn’t like about Lupe’s reading the lions’ minds was that this put the thirteen-year-old in contact with Ignacio.