Big bouquets of flowers--seven of them!--surrounded the Mother Mary altar, but even these bouquets were dwarfed by the giant virgin herself. She didn't just tower--she seemed to menace everyone and everything. Even Esperanza, who adored her, thought the Virgin Mary statue was "too big."
"Hence domineering," Lupe would repeat.
" '?No estoy aqui, que soy tu madre?' " Juan Diego found himself repeating in the backseat of the snow-surrounded limousine, now approaching the Cathay Pacific terminal at JFK. The former dump reader murmured aloud, in both Spanish and English, this modest claim of Our Lady of Guadalupe--more modest than the penetrating stare of that overbearing giantess, the Jesuits' statue of the Virgin Mary. " 'Am I not here, for I am your mother?' " Juan Diego repeated to himsel
f.
His passenger's bilingual mutterings caused the contentious limo driver to look at Juan Diego in the rearview mirror.
It's a pity Lupe wasn't with her brother; she would have read the limo driver's mind--she could have told Juan Diego what the hateful man's thoughts were.
A successful wetback, the limo driver was thinking--that was his assessment of his Mexican-American passenger.
"We're almost at your terminal, pal," the driver said: the way he'd said the sir word hadn't been any nicer. But Juan Diego was remembering Lupe, and their time together in Oaxaca. The dump reader was daydreaming; he didn't really hear his driver's disrespectful tone of voice. And without his dear sister, the mind reader, beside him, Juan Diego didn't know the bigot's thoughts.
It wasn't that Juan Diego had never encountered a commonality with the Mexican-American experience. It was more a matter of his mind, and where it wandered--his mind was often elsewhere.
* 3 *
Mother and Daughter
The handicapped man had not anticipated that he would be stranded at JFK for twenty-seven hours. Cathay Pacific sent him to the first-class lounge of British Airways. This was more comfortable than what the economy-fare passengers had to deal with--the concessionaires ran out of food, and the public toilets were not properly attended to--but the Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong, scheduled to depart at 9:15 A.M. on December 27, did not take off till noon of the following day, and Juan Diego had packed his beta-blockers with his toilet articles in his checked bag. The flight to Hong Kong was some sixteen hours. Juan Diego would have to do without his medication for more than forty-three hours; he would go without the beta-blockers for almost two days. (As a rule, dump kids don't panic.)
While Juan Diego considered calling Rosemary to ask her if he was at risk being without his medication for an unknown period of time, he didn't do it. He remembered what Dr. Stein had said: that if he ever had to go off the beta-blockers, for any reason, he should stop taking them gradually. (Inexplicably, the gradually part made him think there was nothing risky about stopping or restarting the beta-blockers.)
Juan Diego knew he would get scant sleep as he waited in the British Airways lounge at JFK; he looked forward to catching up on his sleep whenever he eventually boarded the sixteen-hour flight to Hong Kong. Juan Diego didn't call Dr. Stein because he was looking forward to having a break from the beta-blockers. With any luck, he might have one of his old dreams; his all-important childhood memories might come back to him--chronologically, he hoped. (As a novelist, he was a little fussy about chronological order, a tad old-fashioned.)
British Airways did its best to make the crippled man comfortable; the other first-class passengers were aware of Juan Diego's limp and the misshapen, custom-made shoe on his damaged foot. Everyone was very understanding; though there were not enough chairs for all the stranded passengers in the first-class lounge, no one complained that Juan Diego had put two chairs together--he'd made a kind of couch for himself, so he could elevate that tragic-looking foot.
Yes, the limp made Juan Diego look older than he was--he looked at least sixty-four, not fifty-four. And there was something else: more than a hint of resignation gave him a faraway expression, as if the lion's share of excitement in Juan Diego's life had resided in his distant childhood and early adolescence. After all, he'd outlived everyone he'd loved--clearly, this had aged him.
His hair was still black; only if you were near him--and you had to look closely--could you see the intermittent flecks of gray. He'd not lost any hair, but it was long, which gave him the commingled appearance of a rebellious teenager and an aging hippie--that is, of someone who was unfashionable on purpose. His dark-brown eyes were almost as black as his hair; he was still a handsome man, and a slender one, yet he made an "old" impression. Women--younger women, especially--offered him help he didn't necessarily need.
An aura of fate had marked him. He moved slowly; he often appeared to be lost in thought, or in his imagination--as if his future were predetermined, and he wasn't resisting it.
Juan Diego believed he was not so famous a writer that many of his readers recognized him, and strangers to his work never did. Only those who could be called his diehard fans found him. They were mostly women--older women, certainly, but many college girls were among his books' ardent readers.
Juan Diego didn't believe it was the subject of his novels that attracted women readers; he always said that women were the most enthusiastic readers of fiction, not men. He would offer no theory to explain this; he'd simply observed that this was true.
Juan Diego wasn't a theorizer; he was not big on speculation. He was even a little bit famous for what he'd said in an interview when a journalist had asked him to speculate on a certain shopworn subject.
"I don't speculate," Juan Diego had said. "I just observe; I only describe." Naturally, the journalist--a persistent young fellow--had pressed the point. Journalists like speculation; they're always asking novelists if the novel is dead, or dying. Remember: Juan Diego had snatched the first novels he read from the hellfires of the basurero; he'd burned his hands saving books. You don't ask a dump reader if the novel is dead, or dying.
"Do you know any women?" Juan Diego had asked this young man. "I mean women who read," he said, his voice rising. "You should talk to women--ask them what they read!" (By now, Juan Diego was shouting.) "The day women stop reading--that's the day the novel dies!" the dump reader cried.
Writers who have any audience have more readers than they know. Juan Diego was more famous than he thought.
THIS TIME, IT WAS a mother and her daughter who discovered him--as only his most passionate readers did. "I would have recognized you anywhere. You couldn't disguise yourself from me if you tried," the rather aggressive mother said to Juan Diego. The way she spoke to him--well, it was almost as if he had tried to disguise himself. And where had he seen such a penetrating stare before? Without a doubt, that towering and most imposing statue of the Virgin Mary--she had such a stare. It was a way the Blessed Virgin had of looking down at you, but Juan Diego could never tell if Mother Mary's expression was pitying or unforgiving. (He couldn't be sure in the case of this elegant-looking mother who was one of his readers, either.)
As for the daughter who was also his fan, Juan Diego thought she was somewhat easier to read. "I would have recognized you in the dark--if you just spoke to me, even less than a complete sentence, I would have known who you were," the daughter told him a little too earnestly. "Your voice," she said, shivering--as if she couldn't continue. She was young and dramatic, but pretty in a kind of peasant way; there was a thickness in her wrists and ankles, a sturdiness in her hips and low-slung breasts. Her skin was darker than her mother's; her facial features were more prominent, or less refined, and--especially in her manner of speaking--she was more blunt, more coarse.
"More like one of us," Juan Diego could imagine his sister saying. (More indigenous-looking, Lupe would have thought.)
It unnerved Juan Diego that he suddenly imagined what tarted-up replications the virgin shop in Oaxaca might have made of this mother and her daughter. That Christmas-parties place would have exaggerated the slightly slipshod way the daughter dressed, but was it her clothes that looked a little slovenly or the careless way she wore them?
Juan Diego thought the virgin shop would have given the daughter's life-size mannequin a sluttish posture--a come-on appearance, as if the fullness of her hips couldn't possibly be contained. (Or was this Juan Diego's fantasizing about the daughter?)
That virgin shop, which the dump kids occasionally called The Girl, would have failed to come up with a mannequin to match the mother of this twosome. The mother had an air of sophistication and entitlement about her, and her beauty was the classical kind; the mother radiated expensiveness and superiority--her sense of privilege seemed inborn. If this mother, who was only momentarily delayed in a first-class lounge at JFK, had been the Virgin Mary, no one would have sent her to the manger; someone would h