Avenue of Mysteries - Page 152

"Be sure to tell Clark," he told her, but she might not have heard him--she seemed to be leaving in a hurry.

"Go away!" Juan Diego's avid reader called after the woman journalist. "She hasn't read anything," the new arrival announced to Juan Diego. "I'm your biggest fan."

To tell the truth, she was a big woman, easily 170 or 180 pounds. She wore baggy blue jeans, torn at both knees, and a black T-shirt with a fierce-looking tiger between her breasts. It was a protest T-shirt, expressing anger on behalf of an endangered species. Juan Diego was so out of it, he didn't know tigers were in trouble.

"Look at you--you're having the beef, too!" his new biggest fan cried, wrapping an arm as seemingly strong as Clark's around Juan Diego's smaller shoulders. "I'll tell you something," the big woman told Juan Diego, leading him to her table. "You know that scene with the duck hunters? When the idiot forgets to take off the condom, and he goes home and starts peeing in front of his wife? I love that scene!" the woman who loved tigers told him, pushing him ahead of her.

"Not everyone was fond of that scene," Juan Diego tried to point out to her. He was remembering a review or two.

"Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, right?" the big woman asked him, pushing him toward a seat.

"Yes, I think so," Juan Diego said warily. He was still looking all around for Clark and Josefa; he did love his diehard readers, but they could be a little overwhelming.

It was Josefa who found him, and took him to the table where she and Clark had been waiting. "The save-the-tiger woman is a journalist, too--one of the good ones," Clark told him. "One who actually reads novels."

"I saw Miriam and Dorothy at the onstage event," Juan Diego told Clark. "Your friend Leslie was with them."

"Oh, I saw Miriam with someone I didn't know," Josefa said.

"Her daughter, Dorothy," Juan Diego told the doctor.

"D.," Clark explained. (It was obvious Clark and Josefa had discussed Dorothy as D.)

"The woman I saw didn't look like Miriam's daughter," Dr. Quintana said. "She wasn't beautiful enough."

"I'm very disappointed in Leslie," Clark told his former teacher and his wife. Josefa said nothing.

"Very disappointed," was all Juan Diego could say. But all he could think about was Leslie someone. Why would she have gone anywhere with Dorothy and Miriam? Why would she even be with them? Poor Leslie wouldn't have been with them, Juan Diego thought--not unless she'd been bewitched.

IT WAS A TUESDAY morning in Manila--January 11, 2011--and the weekend news from Juan Diego's adopted country wasn't good. This had happened on Saturday: Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, had been shot in the head; she was given a fair chance to survive, if not with all her brain function. Six people were dead in the shooting rampage, including a nine-year-old girl.

The Arizona shooter was a twenty-two-year-old; he'd been firing a Glock semiautomatic pistol with a high-capacity magazine that held thirty rounds. The shooter's reported utterances made him sound illogical and incoherent--was he another whack-job anarchist? Juan Diego wondered.

Here I am in the faraway Philippines, Juan Diego was thinking, but my adopted country's home-grown hatreds and vigilante-minded divisiveness are never that far away.

As for the local news--at his breakfast table at the Ascott, Juan Diego was reading a Manila newspaper--he saw that the good journalist, his diehard reader, had done him no damage. The profile of Juan Diego Guerrero was informed and complimentary about his novels; the big journalist Clark had called the "save-the-tiger woman" was a good reader, and she'd been very respectful of Juan Diego. The photo the newspaper ran wasn't her fault, Juan Diego knew; an asswheel photo editor doubtlessly chose the photograph, nor could the woman who loved tigers be blamed for the caption.

In the photo of the visiting author--at the dinner table, with his beer and his mangled beef--Juan Diego's eyes were closed. He looked worse than asleep; he appeared to have passed out in an inebriated stupor. The caption read: HE LIKES SAN MIGUEL BEER.

Juan Diego's irritation at the caption might have been an early indication to him that his adrenaline was raring to go, but he didn't think twice about it. And whatever slight indigestion he'd been sensing--maybe his heartburn was acting up again--Juan Diego paid no attention to it. In a foreign country, it was easy to eat something that disagreed with your stomach. What he'd had for breakfast, or last night's Vietnamese beef, could have been the cause--or so Juan Diego assumed as he crossed the long lobby of the Ascott to the elevators, where he saw that Clark French was waiting.

"Well, I'm relieved to see your eyes are open this morning!" Clark greeted his former teacher. Clearly, Clark had seen the photo of Juan Diego with his eyes closed in the newspaper. Clark had a gift for conversation stoppers.

Unsurprisingly, Clark and Juan Diego didn't know what else to say to each other when they were descending in the elevator at the Ascott. The car, with Bienvenido in the driver's seat, was waiting for them at street level, where Juan Diego trustingly held out his hand to one of the bomb-sniffing dogs. Clark French, who'd never failed to do his homework, began lecturing as soon as they had gotten under way to Guadalupe Viejo.

The Guadalupe district of Makati City had been formed into a barrio and was named after the "patroness" of the first Spanish settlers--"friends of your old friends, and mine, from the Society of Jesus," was the way Clark put it to his former teacher.

"Oh, those Jesuits--how they get around," Juan Diego said; it was not a lot to say, but he was surprised by how hard it was to talk and breathe at the same time. Juan Diego was aware that his breathing no longer felt like a natural process. Something was sitting, most intractably, in his stomach; yet it weighed very heavily on his chest. It must have been the beef--definitely mangled, Juan Diego was thinking. His face felt flushed; he'd started to sweat. For someone who hated air-conditioning, Juan Diego was about to ask Bienvenido to make the car a little colder, but he stopped himself from asking--suddenly, with the effort it took to breathe, he doubted he could speak.

During World War II, the Guadalupe district had been the hardest-hit barrio in Makati City, Clark French was lecturing.

"Men, women, and children were massacred by the Japanese soldiers," Bienvenido had chimed in.

Of course Juan Diego could see where this was going--leave it to Our Lady of Guadalupe to protect everyone! Juan Diego knew how the so-called pro-life advocates had appropriated Guadalupe. "From the womb to the tomb," various prelates of the Church were ceaselessly intoning.

And what were the solemn-sounding lines from Jeremiah they were always quoting? Idiots held up signs in the end-zone seats at football games: JEREMIAH 1:5. How did it go? Juan Diego wanted to ask Clark. He knew Clark would know it by heart: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I set you apart." (It was something like that.) Juan Diego tried to tell Clark his thoughts, but the words wouldn't come; only his breathing mattered. His sweat now poured forth; his clothes clung to him. If he'd tried to speak, Juan Diego knew he would get no further than "Before I formed you in the womb--" at the womb word, he suspected he would vomit.

Maybe the car was making him sick--a kind of motion sickness? Juan Diego was wondering, as Bienvenido drove them slowly through the narrow streets of the slum on the hill above the Pasig River. In the soot-stained courtyard of the old church and monastery was a sign with a warning: BEWARE OF DOGS.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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