The dump boss didn't like Lupe's saved-from-death dog any better than Juan Diego did. "I think you should have left this one in the milk carton," was all el jefe told her, but Lupe (as always) was indignant in Dirty White's defense.
And just then Juan Diego read aloud to them an unrepeatable passage,
concerning someone's idea of the fundamental interrelatedness of all beings.
"Wait, wait, wait--stop right there," Rivera interrupted the dump reader. "Whose idea is that?"
"It could be the one called Hardy--maybe it's his idea," Lupe said. "Or, more likely, the Lawrence guy--it sounds like him."
When Juan Diego translated what Lupe said for Rivera, el jefe instantly agreed. "Or the idea of the person writing the book--whoever that is," the dump boss added. Lupe nodded that this was also true. The book was tedious while remaining unclear; it was seemingly nitpicking scrutiny of a subject that eluded any concrete description.
"What 'fundamental interrelatedness of all beings'--which beings are supposedly related?" the dump boss cried. "It sounds like something a mushroom hippie would say!"
That got a laugh out of Lupe, who rarely laughed. Soon she and Rivera were laughing together, which was even more rare. Juan Diego would always remember how happy he was to hear both his sister and el jefe laughing.
And now, so many years later--it had been forty years--Juan Diego was on his way to the Philippines, a trip he was taking in honor of the nameless good gringo. Yet not a single friend had asked Juan Diego how he intended to pay the dead draft dodger's respects to the slain soldier--like his lost son, the fallen father was without a name. Of course these friends all knew that Juan Diego was a novelist; maybe the fiction writer was taking a trip for el gringo bueno symbolically.
As a young writer, he'd been quite the traveler, and the dislocations of travel had been a repeated theme in his early novels--especially in that circus novel set in India, the one with the elephantine title. No one had been able to talk him out of that title, Juan Diego remembered fondly. A Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary--what a cumbersome title it was, and what a long and complicated story! Maybe my most complicated, Juan Diego was thinking--as the limo navigated the deserted, snowbound streets of Manhattan, making its determined way to the FDR Drive. It was an SUV, and the driver was contemptuous of other vehicles and other drivers. According to the limo driver, other vehicles in the city were ill equipped for snow, and the few cars that were "almost correctly" equipped had the "wrong tires"; as for the other drivers, they didn't know how to drive in snow.
"Where do you think we are--fuckin' Florida?" the driver yelled out his window to a stranded motorist who'd slid sideways and blocked a narrow crosstown street.
Out on the FDR Drive, a taxi had jumped the guardrail and was stuck in the waist-deep snow of the jogging path that ran alongside the East River; the cabbie was attempting to dig out his rear wheels, not with a shovel but a windshield scraper.
"Where are you from, you jerk-off--fuckin' Mexico?" the limo driver shouted to him.
"Actually," Juan Diego said to the driver, "I'm from Mexico."
"I didn't mean you, sir--you're gonna get to JFK on time. Your problem is, you're just gonna wait there," the driver told him, not nicely. "There's nothin' flyin'--in case you haven't noticed, sir."
Indeed, Juan Diego hadn't noticed that no planes were flying; he just wanted to be at the airport, ready to leave, whenever his flight departed. The delay, if there was one, didn't matter to him. It was missing this trip that was unthinkable. "Behind every journey is a reason," he found himself considering--before he remembered that he'd already written this. It was something he'd stated most emphatically in A Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary. Now here I am, traveling again--there's always a reason, he thought.
"The past surrounded him like faces in a crowd. Among them, there was one he knew, but whose face was it?" For a moment, shrouded by the surrounding snow and intimidated by the vulgar limo driver, Juan Diego forgot that he'd already written this, too. He blamed the beta-blockers.
FROM THE SOUND OF him, Juan Diego's limo driver was a rough-spoken, hateful man, but he knew his way around Jamaica, Queens, where a wide street reminded the long-ago dump reader of Periferico--a street divided by train tracks in Oaxaca. Periferico was where el jefe used to take the dump kids shopping for food; the cheapest, closest-to-rotten produce was available in that market, in La Central--except in 1968, during the student revolts, when La Central was occupied by the military and the food market moved to the zocalo in the center of Oaxaca.
That was when Juan Diego and Lupe were twelve and eleven, and they first became familiar with the area of Oaxaca around the zocalo. The student revolts didn't last long; the market would move back to La Central, and Periferico (with that forlorn-looking footbridge over the train tracks). Yet the zocalo remained in the dump kids' hearts; it had become their favorite part of town. The kids spent as much time away from the dump, in the zocalo, as they could.
Why wouldn't a boy and girl from Guerrero be interested in the center of things? Why wouldn't two ninos de la basura be curious to see all the tourists in town? The city dump wasn't on the tourist maps. What tourist ever went sightseeing in the basurero? One whiff of the dump, or the stinging in your eyes from the fires perpetually burning there, would send you running back to the zocalo; one look at the dump dogs (or the way those dogs looked at you) would do it.
Was it any wonder--around this time, during the student riots in 1968, when the military took over La Central and the dump kids started hanging around the zocalo--that Lupe, who was only eleven, began her crazy and conflicted obsessions with Oaxaca's various virgins? That her brother was the only one who could understand her babble cut Lupe off from any meaningful dialogue with adults. And of course these were religious virgins, miraculous virgins--of the kind who commanded a following, not only among eleven-year-old girls.
Wasn't it to be expected that Lupe would, at first, be drawn to these virgins? (Lupe could read minds; she knew no real-life counterpart who had her ability.) However, what dump kid wouldn't be a little suspicious of miracles? What were these competing virgins doing to prove themselves in the here and now? Had these miraculous virgins performed any miracles lately? Wasn't Lupe likely to be super-critical of these highly touted but nonperforming virgins?
There was a virgin shop in Oaxaca; the dump kids discovered it on one of their first outings in the area of the zocalo. This was Mexico: the country had been overrun by the Spanish conquistadors. Hadn't the ever-proselytizing Catholic Church been in the virgin-selling business for years? Oaxaca had once been central to the Mixtec and Zapotec civilizations. Hadn't the Spanish conquest been selling virgins to the indigenous population for centuries--beginning with the Augustinians and the Dominicans, and thirdly the Jesuits, all pushing their Virgin Mary?
There was more than Mary to deal with now--so Lupe had noticed from the many churches in Oaxaca--but nowhere in the city were the warring virgins on such tawdry display as you could find them (for sale) in the virgin shop on Independencia. There were life-size virgins and virgins who were larger than life-size. To name only three who were featured, in a variety of cheap and tacky replicas, throughout the shop: Mother Mary, of course, but also Our Lady of Guadalupe, and naturally Nuestra Senora de la Soledad. La Virgen de la Soledad was the virgin whom Lupe disparaged as merely a "local hero"--the much-maligned Solitude Virgin and her "stupid burro story." (The burro, a small donkey, was probably blameless.)
The virgin shop also sold life-size (and larger than life-size) versions of Christ on the Cross; if you were strong enough, you could carry home a giant Bleeding Jesus, but the principal purpose of the virgin shop, which had been in business in Oaxaca since 1954, was providing for the Christmas parties (las posadas).
In fact, only the dump kids called the place on Independencia the virgin shop; everyone else referred to it as the Christmas-parties store--La Nina de las Posadas was the actual name of the ghoulish shop (literally, "The Girl of the Christmas Parties"). The eponymous Girl was whatever virgin you chose to take home with you; obviously, one of the life-size virgins for sale could liven up your Christmas party--more than an agonizing Christ on the Cross ever could.
As serious as Lupe was about Oaxaca's virgins, the Christmas-parties place was a
joke to Juan Diego and Lupe. "The Girl," as the dump kids occasionally called the virgin shop, was where they went for a laugh. Those virgins for sale weren't half as realistic as the prostitutes on Zaragoza Street; the take-home virgins were more in the category of inflatable sex dolls. And the Bleeding Jesuses were simply grotesque.
There was also (as Brother Pepe would have put it) a pecking order of virgins on display in various Oaxaca churches--alas, this pecking order and these virgins affected Lupe deeply. The Catholic Church had its own virgin shops in Oaxaca; for Lupe, these virgins were no laughing matter.
Take the "stupid burro story," and how Lupe loathed la Virgen de la Soledad. The Basilica de Nuestra Senora de la Soledad was grandiose--a pompous eyesore between Morelos and Independencia--and the first time the dump kids visited it, their access to the altar was blocked by a caterwauling contingent of pilgrims, countryfolk (farmers or fruit pickers, Juan Diego had guessed), who not only prayed in cries and shouts but ostentatiously approached the radiant statue of Our Lady of Solitude on their knees, virtually crawling the length of the center aisle. The praying pilgrims put Lupe off, as did the local-hero aspect of the Solitude Virgin--she was occasionally called "Oaxaca's patron saint."