He felt a sharp nick from Dorothy's teeth when the impulsive girl spoke quickly, not pausing to take his penis out of her mouth: "In the Spanish Empire, this particular morning was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception--no coincidence, huh?"
"Yes, however--" Juan Diego started to say, but he stopped himself. Dorothy was now sucking him in a way that suggested the young woman would not bother to interject her points of clarification again. The novelist struggled ahead. "The peasant Juan Diego, for whom I was named, saw a vision of a girl. She was surrounded by light; she was only fifteen or sixteen, but when she spoke to him, this peasant Juan Diego allegedly understood--from her words, or so we're expected to believe--that this girl either was the Virgin Mary or was, somehow, like the Virgin Mary. And what she wanted was a church--a whole church, in her honor--to be built on the site where she appeared to him."
To which, in probable disbelief, Dorothy grunted--or she made a similarly noncommittal sound, subject to interpretation. If Juan Diego had to guess, Dorothy knew the story, and, regarding the prospect of the Virgin Mary (or someone like her) appearing as a young teenager and expecting a hapless peasant to build a whole church for her, Dorothy's nonverbal utterance conveyed more than a hint of sarcasm.
"What was the poor peasant to do?" Juan Diego asked--a rhetorical question if Dorothy had ever heard one, to judge by the young woman's sudden snort. This rude snorting sound made Juan Diego--not the peasant, the other Juan Diego--flinch. The novelist no doubt feared another sharp nick from the busy girl's teeth, but he was spared further pain--at least for the moment.
"Well, the peasant told his hard-to-believe story to the Spanish archbishop--" the novelist persevered.
"Zumarraga!" Dorothy managed to blurt out before she made a quickly passing gagging sound.
What an unusually well-informed young woman--she even knew the name of the doubting archbishop! Juan Diego was amazed.
Dorothy's apparent grasp of these specific details momentarily deterred Juan Diego from continuing his version of Guadalupe's history; he stopped short of the miraculous part of the story, either daunted by Dorothy's knowledge of a subject that had long obsessed him or (at last!) distracted by the blow job.
"And what did that doubting archbishop do?" Juan Dieg
o asked. He was testing Dorothy, and the gifted young woman didn't disappoint him--except that she stopped sucking his cock. Her mouth released his penis with an audible pop, once more making him flinch.
"The asshole bishop told the peasant to prove it, as if that were the peasant's job," Dorothy said with disdain. She moved up Juan Diego's body, sliding his penis between her breasts.
"And the poor peasant went back to the virgin and asked her for a sign, to prove her identity," Juan Diego went on.
"As if that were her fucking job," Dorothy said; she was all the while kissing his neck and nibbling the lobes of his ears.
At that point, it became confusing--that is, it's impossible to delineate who said what to whom. After all, they both knew the story, and they were in a rush to move past the storytelling process. The virgin told Juan Diego (the peasant) to gather flowers; that there were flowers growing in December possibly stretches the boundaries of credibility--that the flowers the peasant found were Castilian roses, not native to Mexico, is more of a stretch.
But this was a miracle story, and by the time Dorothy or Juan Diego (the novelist) got to the part of the narrative where the peasant showed the flowers to the bishop--the virgin had arranged the roses in the peasant's humble cloak--Dorothy had already produced a small marvel of her own. The enterprising young woman had brought forth her own condom, which she'd managed to put on Juan Diego while the two of them were talking; the girl was a multitasker, a quality the novelist had noticed and much admired in the young people he'd known in his life as a teacher.
The small circle of Juan Diego's sexual contacts did not include a woman who carried her own condoms and was an expert at putting them on; nor had he ever encountered a girl who assumed the superior position with as much familiarity and assertiveness as Dorothy did.
Juan Diego's inexperience with women--especially with young women of Dorothy's aggressiveness and sexual sophistication--had left him at a loss for words. It's doubtful that Juan Diego could have completed this essential part of the Guadalupe story--namely, what happened when the poor peasant opened his cape of roses for Bishop Zumarraga.
Dorothy, even as she settled herself so solidly on Juan Diego's penis--her breasts, falling forward, brushed the novelist's face--was the one who reiterated that part of the tale. When the flowers fell out of the cloak, there in their place, imprinted on the fabric of the poor peasant's rustic cape, was the very image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, her hands clasped in prayer, her eyes modestly downcast.
"It wasn't so much that the image of Guadalupe was imprinted on the stupid cloak," the young woman, who was rocking back and forth on top of Juan Diego, was saying. "It was the virgin herself--I mean, the way she looked. That must have impressed the bishop."
"What do you mean?" Juan Diego managed to say breathlessly. "How did Guadalupe look?"
Dorothy threw back her head and shook her hair; her breasts wobbled over him, and Juan Diego held his breath at the sight of a rivulet of sweat that ran between them.
"I mean her demeanor!" Dorothy panted. "Her hands were held in such a way that you couldn't even see her boobs, if she actually had boobs; her eyes looked down, but you could still see a spooky light in her eyes. I don't mean in the dark part--"
"The iris--" Juan Diego started to say.
"Not in her irises--in her pupils!" Dorothy gasped. "I mean in the center part--there was a creepy light in her eyes."
"Yes!" Juan Diego grunted; he'd always thought so--he'd just not met anyone who agreed with him until now. "But Guadalupe was different--not just her dark skin," he struggled to say; it was becoming harder and harder to breathe, with Dorothy bouncing on him. "She spoke Nahuatl, the local language--she was an Indian, not Spanish. If she was a virgin, she was an Aztec virgin."
"What did the dipshit bishop care about that?" Dorothy asked him. "Guadalupe's demeanor was so fucking modest, so Mary-like!" the hardworking young woman cried.
"!Si!" Juan Diego shouted. "Those manipulative Catholics--" he'd scarcely started to say, when Dorothy grabbed his shoulders with what felt like supernatural strength. She pulled his head and shoulders entirely off the bed--she rolled him over, on top of her.
Yet in that instant when she was still on top of him, and Juan Diego was looking up at her--into her eyes--he'd seen how Dorothy was regarding him.
What was it Lupe had said, so long ago? "If you want to worry about something, you ought to worry about how Guadalupe was looking at you. Like she's still making up her mind about you. Guadalupe hasn't decided about you," the clairvoyant child had told him.
Wasn't that how Dorothy was looking at Juan Diego in the half-second before she wrestled him over and pulled him on top of her? It had been, albeit briefly, a scary look. And now, beneath him, Dorothy resembled a woman possessed. Her head thrashed from side to side; her hips thrust against him with such a powerful, upward force that Juan Diego clung to her like a man in fear of falling. But falling where? The bed was huge; there was no danger of falling off it.