John Irving - Avenue of Mysteries

“¿No estoy aquí, que soy tu madre?” the priest holding the wrinkled blindfolds kept repeating. “Am I not here, for I am your mother?” It was truly a senseless thing for a man holding a dozen (or more) blindfolds to be saying.

“Put me down — I don’t want to see this,” Lupe said, but the Iowan couldn’t understand her; Juan Diego had to translate for his sister.

“The banker-brained dickheads don’t need blindfolds — they’re blind without the blindfolds,” Lupe also said, but Juan Diego didn’t translate this. (The circus roustabouts called tent poles “dream dicks”; Juan Diego thought it was only a matter of time before Lupe’s language lowered itself to the dream-dick level.)

What waited ahead for Señor Eduardo and the dump kids were the endless stairs leading to El Cerrito de las Rosas — truly an ordeal of devotion and endurance. Edward Bonshaw bravely began the ascent of the stairs with the crippled boy now on his shoulders, but there were too many stairs — the climb was too long and steep. “I can walk, you know,” Juan Diego tried to tell the Iowan. “It doesn’t matter that I limp — limping is my thing!”

But Señor Eduardo struggled onward; he gasped for breath, the bottom of the coffee can bumping against the top of his bobbing head. Of course no one would have guessed that the failed scholastic was carrying a cripple up the stairs; the flailing Jesuit looked like any other self-abusing pilgrim — he might as well have been carrying cinder blocks or sandbags on his shoulders.

“Do you understand what happens if the parrot man drops dead?” Lupe asked her brother. “There goes your chance to get out of this mess, and this crazy country!”

The dump kids had seen for themselves the complications that could arise when a horse died — Mañana had been a horse from out of town, right? If Edward Bonshaw keeled over, climbing the stairs to El Cerrito — well, the Iowan was from out of town, wasn’t he? What would Juan Diego and Lupe do then ? Juan Diego was thinking.

Naturally, Lupe had an answer for his thoughts. “We will have to rob Señor Eduardo’s dead body — just to get enough money to pay a taxi to take us back to the circus site — or we will be kidnapped and sold to the brothels for child prostitutes!”

“Okay, okay,” Juan Diego told her. To the panting, sweating Señor Eduardo, Juan Diego said: “Put me down — let me limp. I can crawl faster than you’re carrying me. If you die, I’ll have to sell Lupe to a children’s brothel just to have money to eat. If you die, we’ll never get back to Oaxaca.”

“Merciful Jesus!” Edward Bonshaw prayed, kneeling on the stairs. He wasn’t really praying; he knelt because he lacked the strength to lift Juan Diego off his shoulders — he dropped to his knees because he would have fallen if he’d tried to take another step.

The dump kids stood beside the gasping, kneeling Señor Eduardo while the Iowan strained to catch his breath. A TV crew climbed past them on the stairs. (Years later, when Edward Bonshaw was dying — when the dear man was similarly straining to breathe — Juan Diego would remember that moment when the television crew passed them on the stairs to the temple Lupe liked to call “Of the Roses.”)

The on-camera TV journalist — a young woman, pretty but professional — was giving a cut-and-dried account of the miracle. It could have been a travel show, or a television documentary — neither highbrow nor sensational.

“In 1531, when the virgin first appeared to Juan Diego — an Aztec nobleman or peasant, according to conflicting accounts — the bishop didn’t believe Juan Diego and asked him for proof,” the pretty TV journalist was saying. She stopped her narration when she saw the foreigner on his knees; maybe the Hawaiian shirt had caught her eye, if not the worried-looking children attending to the apparently praying man. And it was here the cameraman shifted his attention: the cameraman clearly liked the image of Edward Bonshaw kneeling on the stairs, and the two children waiting with him. They drew the television camera to them, the three of them.

It was not the first time Juan Diego had heard of the “conflicting accounts,” though he preferred thinking of himself as being named for a famous peasant ; Juan Diego found it a little disturbing to think that he might have been named for an Aztec nobleman. That word didn’t jibe with the prevailing image Juan Diego had of himself — namely, a standard-bearer for dump readers.

Señor Eduardo had caught his breath; now he was able to stand and to move unsteadily forward up the stairs. But the cameraman had zeroed in on the image of a crippled boy climbing to El Cerrito de las Rosas. Hence the TV crew moved slowly in step with the Iowan and the dump kids; they ascended the stairs together.

“When Juan Diego went back to the hill, the virgin reappeared and told him to pick some roses and carry them to the bishop,” the TV journalist continued.

Behind the limping boy, as he and his sister reached the top of the hill, was a spectacular view of Mexico City; the TV camera captured the view, but neither Edward Bonshaw nor the dump kids ever turned around to see it. Juan Diego carefully held the coffee can in front of him, as if the ashes were a sacred offering he was bringing to the temple called “The Little Hill,” which marked the spot where the miraculous roses grew.

“This time, the bishop believed him — the image of the virgin was imprinted on Juan Diego’s cloak,” the pretty TV journalist went on, but the cameraman had lost interest in Señor Eduardo and the dump kids; his attention had been seized by a group of Japanese honeymoon couples — their tour guide was using a megaphone to explain the Guadalupe miracle in Japanese.

Lupe was upset that the Japanese honeymooners were wearing surgical masks over their mouths and noses; she imagined the young Japanese couples were dying of some dread disease — she thought they’d come to Of the Roses to beg Our Lady of Guadalupe to save them.

“But aren’t they contagious ?” Lupe asked. “How many people have they infected between here and Japan?”

How much of Juan Diego’s translation and Edward Bonshaw’s explanation to Lupe was lost in the crowd noise? The proclivity of the Japanese to be “precautionary,” to wear surgical masks to protect themselves from bad air or disease — well, it was unclear if Lupe ever understood what that was about.

More distracting, the nearby tourists and worshipers who’d heard Lupe speak had raised their own cries of faith-based excitement. One earnest believer pointed to Lupe and announced she’d been speaking in tongues; this had upset Lupe — to be accused of the ecstatic, unintelligible utterances of a messianic child.

A Mass was in progress inside the temple, but the rabble entering El Cerrito didn’t seem conducive to the atmosphere for a Mass: the armies of nuns and uniformed children, the whipped monks and roped-together men in business suits — the latter were blindfolded again, which had caused them to trip and fall ascending the stairs (their pants were torn or scuffed at the knees, and two or three of the businessmen limped, if not as noticeably as Juan Diego).

Not that Juan Diego was the only cripple: the maimed had come — the amputees, too. (They’d come to be cured.) They were all there — the deaf, the blind, the poor — together with the sightseeing nobodies and the masked Japanese honeymooners.

At the threshold to the temple, the dump kids heard the pretty TV journalist say: “A German chemist actually analyzed the red and yellow fibers of Juan Diego’s cloak. The chemist determined, scientifically, that the colors of the cloak were neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral.”