Avenue of Mysteries - Page 68

"Do you mean a date?" Juan

Diego had asked. It was the most touching thing: women who wanted to meet men to talk about the books they'd read! He'd never heard of such a thing. "A kind of dating service?" Imagine matchmaking on the basis of what novels you liked! Juan Diego thought. But would these poor women find any men who read novels? (Juan Diego didn't think so.)

"Mail-order brides!" the young bookseller said dismissively; with a gesture toward the bulletin board, he expressed how these women were beneath his consideration.

Juan Diego's publisher and translator were back at his side, but not before Juan Diego looked longingly at one of the women's photographs--it was someone who'd put Juan Diego's name at the top of her list. She was pretty, but not too pretty; she looked a little unhappy. There were dark circles under her haunting eyes; her hair looked somewhat neglected. There was no one in her life to talk to about the wonderful novels she'd read. Her first name was Odeta; her last name must have been fifteen letters long.

"Mail-order brides?" Juan Diego asked Gintaras or Arvydas. "Surely they can't be--"

"Pathetic ladies with no lifes, coupling with characters in novels instead of meeting real mens!" the bookseller shouted.

That was it--the spark of a new novel. Mail-order brides advertising themselves by the novels they'd read--in a bookstore, of all places! The idea was born with a title: One Chance to Leave Lithuania. Oh, no, Juan Diego thought. (This was what he always thought when he thought of a new novel--it always struck him, at first, as a terrible idea.)

And, naturally, it was all a mistake--just a language confusion. Gintaras or Arvydas couldn't express himself in English. Juan Diego's publisher and translator were laughing as they explained the bookseller's error.

"It's just a bunch of readers--all women," Daiva told Juan Diego.

"They meet one another, other women, for coffee or beer, just to talk about the novelists they like," Rasa explained.

"Kind of an impromptu book club," Daiva told him.

"There are no mail-order brides in Lithuania," Rasa stated.

"There must be some mail-order brides," Juan Diego suggested.

The next morning, at his unpronounceable hotel, the Stikliai, Juan Diego was introduced to a policewoman from Interpol in Vilnius; Daiva and Rasa had found her and brought her to the hotel. "There are no mail-order brides in Lithuania," the policewoman told him. She didn't stay to have a coffee; Juan Diego didn't catch her name. The policewoman's grittiness could not be disguised by her hair, which was dyed a surfer-blond color, tinged with sunset-orange streaks. No amount or hue of dye could conceal what she was: not a good-time girl but a no-nonsense cop. No novels about mail-order brides in Lithuania, please; that was the stern policewoman's message. Yet One Chance to Leave Lithuania had endured.

"What about adoption?" Juan Diego had asked Daiva and Rasa. "What about orphanages or adoption agencies--there must be state services for adoptions, maybe state services for children's rights? What about women who want or need to put their children up for adoption? Lithuania is a Catholic country, isn't it?"

Daiva, the translator of many of his novels, understood Juan Diego very well. "Women who put their children up for adoption don't advertise themselves in a bookstore," she said, smiling at him.

"That was just the start of something," he explained. "Novels begin somewhere; novels undergo revision." He'd not forgotten Odeta's face on the bookstore bulletin board, but One Chance to Leave Lithuania was a different novel now. The woman who was putting up a child for adoption was also a reader; she was seeking to meet other readers. She didn't just love novels and the characters in them for themselves; she sought to leave her life in the past behind, her child included. She wasn't thinking about meeting a man.

But whose one chance to leave Lithuania was it? Hers, or her child's? Things can go wrong during the adoption process, Juan Diego knew--not only in novels.

AS FOR JEANETTE WINTERSON'S The Passion, Juan Diego loved that novel; he'd read it two or three times--he kept returning to it. It wasn't about an order of lesbian nuns. It was about history and magic, including Napoleon's eating habits and a girl with webbed feet--she was a cross-dresser, too. It was a novel about unfulfilled love and sadness. It was not uplifting enough for Clark French to have written it.

And Juan Diego had highlighted a favorite sentence in the middle of The Passion: "Religion is somewhere between fear and sex." That sentence would have provoked poor Clark.

It was almost five in the afternoon on New Year's Eve in Bohol when Juan Diego limped out of the ramshackle airport and into the mayhem of Tagbilaran City, which struck him as a squalid metropolis of motorcycles and mopeds. There were so many difficult names for places in the Philippines, Juan Diego couldn't keep them straight--the islands had names, and the cities, not to mention the names of the neighborhoods in the cities. It was confusing. And in Tagbilaran City, there were also plenty of the now-familiar religious jeepneys, but these were intermixed with homemade vehicles that resembled rebuilt lawnmowers or supercharged golf carts; there were lots of bicycles, too, not to mention the masses of people on foot.

Clark French had manfully lifted Juan Diego's enormous bag above his head--out of consideration for the women and small children who didn't come up to his chest. That orange albatross was a woman-and-child crusher; it could roll right over them. Yet Clark didn't hesitate to knife like a running back through the men in the mob--the smaller brown bodies got out of his way, or Clark muscled through them. Clark was a bull.

Dr. Josefa Quintana knew how to follow her husband through a crowd. She kept one of her small hands flat against Clark's broad back; with the other, she held tightly to Juan Diego. "Don't worry--we have a driver, somewhere," she told him. "Clark, notwithstanding his opinion to the contrary, doesn't have to do everything." Juan Diego was charmed by her; she was genuine, and she struck him as both the brains and the common sense in the family. Clark was the instinctual one--both an asset and a liability.

The beach resort had provided the driver, a feral-faced boy who looked too young to drive--but he was eager to do so. Once they were out of the city, there were smaller mobs of people walking along the road, although the vehicular traffic now careened at highway speeds. There were goats and cows tethered at the roadside, but their tethers were too long; occasionally, a cow's head (or a goat's) would reach into the road, causing the assorted vehicles to veer.

Dogs were chained near the shacks, or in the cluttered yards of those homesteads along the roadside; when the dogs' chains were too long, the dogs would attack the pedestrians passing by--hence people, not only the heads of cows and goats, would materialize in the road. The boy driving the resort's SUV relied heavily on his horn.

Such chaos reminded Juan Diego of Mexico--people spilling into the road, and the animals! To Juan Diego, the presence of improperly-cared-for animals was a telltale indication of overpopulation. So far, Bohol had made him think about birth control.

To be fair: Juan Diego's birth-control awareness was keener around Clark. They'd exchanged combative emails on the subject of fetal pain, inspired by a fairly recent Nebraska law preventing abortions after twenty weeks' gestation. And they'd fought about the use of the 1995 papal encyclical in Latin America, an effort by conservative Catholics to attack contraception as part of "the culture of death"--this was how John Paul II preferred to refer to abortion. (That Polish pope was a sore subject between them.) Did Clark French have a cork up his ass about sexuality--a Catholic cork?

But Juan Diego thought it was hard to say what kind of cork it was. Clark was one of those socially liberal Catholics. He said he was "personally opposed" to abortion--"it's distasteful," Juan Diego had heard Clark say--but Clark was politically liberal; he believed women should be able to choose an abortion, if that was what they wanted.

Clark had always supported gay rights, too; yet he defended the entrenched position of his revered Catholic Church--he found the Church's position on abortion, and on traditional marriage (that is, between a man and a woman), "consistent and to be expected." Clark had even said he believed the Church "should uphold" its views on abortion and marriage; Clark saw no inconsistency to his having personal views on "social subjects" that differed from the views upheld by his beloved Church. This exasperated Juan Diego no end.

But now, in the darkening twilight, as their boy driver dodged fleetingly appearing and instantly vanishing obstacles in the road, there was no talk of birth control. Clark French, befitting his self-sacrificing zeal, rode in the suicide seat--the one beside the boy driver--while Juan Diego and Josefa had buckled themselves into the seeming fortress that was the SUV's rear seat.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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