John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

THE HORDES OF PILGRIMS had assembled on foot and were marching in the middle of the broad avenue, though many of them had first arrived on the Avenue of Mysteries by the busload. The taxi inched forward, then stopped, then crept cautiously ahead again. The throng of pedestrians had brought the vehicular traffic to a standstill; the pedestrians were gathered in different groups, unified and purposeful. The marchers moved relentlessly forward, both blocking and passing the overwhelmed vehicles. The marching pilgrims were making better progress along the Avenue of Mysteries than the hot and claustrophobic taxi ever could.

The dump kids’ pilgrimage to Guadalupe’s shrine was not a solitary one — not on a Saturday morning in Mexico City. On weekends, the dark-skinned virgin — la virgen morena — drew a mob.

In the backseat of the sweltering taxi, Juan Diego sat holding the sacred coffee can in his lap; Lupe had wanted to hold it, but her hands were small. One of the fervent pilgrims could have jostled the car, causing her to lose her grip on the ashes.

Once more, the taxi driver braked; they were halted in a sea of marchers — the broad avenue approaching the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe was clogged.

“All this for an Indian bitch whose name means ‘breeder of coyotes’—Guadalupe means ‘breeder of coyotes’ in Nahuatl, or in one of those Indian languages,” their malevolent-looking driver said.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, you rat-faced shit-breath,” Lupe said to the driver.

“What was that — is she speaking Nahuatl or something?” the driver asked; he was missing his two front teeth, among others.

“Don’t give us the guidebook routine — we’re not tourists. Just drive,” Juan Diego told him.

As an order of nuns marched past the stopped taxi, one of them broke her string of rosary beads, and the loose beads bounced and rolled on the hood of the cab.

“Be sure you see the painting of the baptizing of the Indians — you can’t miss it,” their driver told them.

“The Indians had to give up their Indian names!” Lupe cried. “The Indians had to take Spanish names — that’s how the conversión de los indios worked, you mouse dick, you chicken-fucker sellout!”

“That’s not Nahuatl? She sure sounds Indian—” the taxi driver started to say, but there was a masked face pressed against the windshield in front of him; he blew his horn, but the masked marchers just stared into the taxi as they passed. They were wearing the masks of barnyard animals — cows, horses or donkeys, goats, and chickens.

“Nativity pilgrims — fucking crèche crazies,” the taxi driver muttered to himself; someone had also knocked out his upper and lower canines, yet he manifested a stoned superiority.

Music was blasting songs of praise to la virgen morena; children in school uniforms were banging drums. The taxi lurched forward, then stopped again. Blindfolded men in business suits were roped together; they were led by a priest, who made incantations. (No one could hear the priest’s incantations over the music.)

In the backseat, Lupe sat scowling between her brother and Edward Bonshaw. Señor Eduardo, who could not refrain from glancing anxiously at the coffee can Juan Diego held in his lap, was no less anxious about the crazed pilgrims surrounding their taxi. And now the pilgrims were intermixed with vendors hawking cheap religious totems — Guadalupe figures, finger-size Christs (engaged in multifaceted suffering on the cross), even the hideous Coatlicue in her skirt of serpents (not to mention her fetching necklace of human hearts and hands and skulls).

Juan Diego could tell that Lupe was upset to see so many vulgar versions of the grotesque figurine the good gringo had given her. One shrill-voiced vendor must have had a hundred Coatlicue statuettes for sale — all dressed in writhing snakes, with flaccid breasts and rattlesnake-rattle nipples. Every figurine, like Lupe’s, had hands and feet with ravening claws.

“Yours is still special, Lupe, because el gringo bueno gave it to you,” Juan Diego told his little sister.

“Too much mind reading,” was all Lupe said.

“I get it,” the taxi driver said. “If she’s not speaking Nahuatl, she’s got something wrong with her voice — you’re taking her to the ‘breeder of coyotes’ for a cure!”

“Let us out of your asshole-smelling taxi — we can walk faster than you drive, turtle penis,” Juan Diego said.

“I’ve seen you walk, chico,” the driver told him. “You think Guadalupe is going to cure your limp — huh?”

“Are we stopping?” Edward Bonshaw asked the dump kids.

“We were never moving !” Lupe cried. “Our driver has fucked so many prostitutes, his brains are smaller than his balls!”

Señor Eduardo was paying the taxi fare when Juan Diego told him, in English, not to tip the driver.

“¡Hijo de la chingada!” the taxi driver said to Juan Diego. This was something Sister Gloria might have thought to herself about Juan Diego; Juan Diego thought the taxi driver had called him a “whore’s son”—Lupe doubted this translation. She’d heard the girl acrobats use the chingada word; she thought it meant “motherfucker.”

“¡Pinche pendejo chimuelo!” Lupe shouted at the driver.

“What did the Indian say?” the driver asked Juan Diego.

“She said you are a ‘miserable toothless asshole’—it’s obvious someone beat the shit out of you before,” Juan Diego said.

“What a beautiful language!” Edward Bonshaw remarked with a sigh — he was always saying this. “I wish I could learn it, but I don’t seem to be making much progress.”

After that, the dump kids and the Iowan were caught up in the pressing crowd. First they were stuck behind a slowly moving order of nuns who were walking on their knees — their habits were hiked halfway up their thighs, their knees bleeding on the cobblestones. Then the dump kids and the lapsed missionary were slowed down by a bunch of monks from an obscure monastery who were whipping themselves. (If they were bleeding, their brown robes hid the blood, but the lashing of their whips made Señor Eduardo cringe.) There were many more drum-banging children in school uniforms.

“Dear God,” was all Edward Bonshaw managed to say; he’d stopped giving anxious looks at the coffee can Juan Diego was carrying — there were too many other appalling things to see, and they hadn’t even reached the shrine.

In the Chapel of the Well, Señor Eduardo and the dump kids had to fight their way through the self-abusing pilgrims, who made a sickening display of themselves. One woman kept gouging at her face with fingernail clippers. A man had pockmarked his forehead with the point of a pen; the blood and ink had commingled, running into his eyes. Naturally, he couldn’t stop blinking his eyes — he appeared to be crying purple tears.

Edward Bonshaw put Lupe on his shoulders, so she could see over the men in business suits; they’d taken their blindfolds off, so they could see Our Lady of Guadalupe on her deathbed. The dark-skinned virgin lay encased in glass, but the roped-together men in business suits would not move on — they wouldn’t allow anyone else to see her.

The priest who’d led the blindfolded businessmen to this spectacle continued his incantations. The priest also held all the blindfolds; he resembled a badly dressed waiter who’d foolishly gathered the used napkins in an evacuated restaurant during a bomb scare.

Juan Diego had decided it was better when the blasting music made it impossible to hear the priest’s incantations, because the priest seemed stuck in a groove of the most simplistic repetition. Didn’t everyone who knew anything about Guadalupe already know by heart her most famous utterance?