"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--Manana 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 Senor 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 Senor 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 Senor 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.
Senor 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 Senor 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."
"What do the Germans have to do with it?" Lupe asked. "Either Guadalupe is a miracle or she isn't. It's not about the cloak!"
The Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe was, in fact, a group of churches, chapels, and shrines all gathered on the rocky hillside where the miracle supposedly occurred. As it would turn out, Edward Bonshaw and the dump kids saw only the Chapel of the Well, where Guadalupe lay under glass on her deathbed, and El Cerrito de las Rosas. (They would never see the enshrined cloak.)
Inside El Cerrito, it's true that the Virgin of Guadalupe isn't tucked away in a side altar; she is elevated at the front of the chapel. But so what if they'd made her the main attraction? They had made Guadalupe at one with the Virgin Mary; they'd made them the same. The Catholic hocus-pocus was complete: the sacred Of the Roses was a zoo. The crazies far outnumbered the worshipers who were trying to follow the Mass-in-progress. The priests were performing by rote. While the megaphone was not permitted inside the temple, the tour guide continued in Japanese to the honeymooners in their surgical masks. The roped-together men in business suits--their blindfolds were once more removed--stared unseeing at the dark-skinned virgin, the way Juan Diego stared when he was dreaming.
"Don't touch those ashes," Lupe said to him, but Juan Diego was holding the lid tightly in place. "Not a speck gets sprinkled here," Lupe told him.
"I know--" Juan Diego started to say.
"Our mother would rather burn in Hell than have her ashes scattered here," Lupe said. "El gringo bueno would never sleep in El Cerrito--he was so beautiful when he slept," she said, remembering. It wasn't lost on Juan Diego that his sister had stopped calling the temple "Of the Roses." Lupe was content to call the temple "The Little Hill"; it wasn't so sacred to her anymore.
"I don't need a translation," Senor Eduardo told the dump kids. "This chapel is not holy. This whole place is not righ
t--it's all wrong, it's not the way it was meant to be."
"Meant to be," Juan Diego repeated.
"It's neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral--it's like the German said!" Lupe cried. Juan Diego thought he should translate this for Edward Bonshaw--it had a disturbing ring of truth to it.