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"That's not Nahuatl? She sure sounds Indian--" the taxi driver started to say, but there was a masked face pressed against the windshield in front of him; he blew his horn, but the masked marchers just stared into the taxi as they passed. They were wearing the masks of barnyard animals--cows, horses or donkeys, goats, and chickens.
"Nativity pilgrims--fucking creche crazies," the taxi driver muttered to himself; someone had also knocked out his upper and lower canines, yet he manifested a stoned superiority.
Music was blasting songs of praise to la virgen morena; children in school uniforms were banging drums. The taxi lurched forward, then stopped again. Blindfolded men in business suits were roped together; they were led by a priest, who made incantations. (No one could hear the priest's incantations over the music.)
In the backseat, Lupe sat scowling between her brother and Edward Bonshaw. Senor Eduardo, who could not refrain from glancing anxiously at the coffee can Juan Diego held in his lap, was no less anxious about the crazed pilgrims surrounding their taxi. And now the pilgrims were intermixed with vendors hawking cheap religious totems--Guadalupe figures, finger-size Christs (engaged in multifaceted suffering on the cross), even the hideous Coatlicue in her skirt of serpents (not to mention her fetching necklace of human hearts and hands and skulls).
Juan Diego could tell that Lupe was upset to see so many vulgar versions of the grotesque figurine the good gringo had given her. One shrill-voiced vendor must have had a hundred Coatlicue statuettes for sale--all dressed in writhing snakes, with flaccid breasts and rattlesnake-rattle nipples. Every figurine, like Lupe's, had hands and feet with ravening claws.
"Yours is still special, Lupe, because el gringo bueno gave it to you," Juan Diego told his little sister.
"Too much mind reading," was all Lupe said.
"I get it," the taxi driver said. "If she's not speaking Nahuatl, she's got something wrong with her voice--you're taking her to the 'breeder of coyotes' for a cure!"
"Let us out of your asshole-smelling taxi--we can walk faster than you drive, turtle penis," Juan Diego said.
"I've seen you walk, chico," the driver told him. "You think Guadalupe is going to cure your limp--huh?"
"Are we stopping?" Edward Bonshaw asked the dump kids.
"We were never moving!" Lupe cried. "Our driver has fucked so many prostitutes, his brains are smaller than his balls!"
Senor Eduardo was paying the taxi fare when Juan Diego told him, in English, not to tip the driver.
"!Hijo de la chingada!" the taxi driver said to Juan Diego. This was something Sister Gloria might have thought to herself about Juan Diego; Juan Diego thought the taxi driver had called him a "whore's son"--Lupe doubted this translation. She'd heard the girl acrobats use the chingada word; she thought it meant "motherfucker."
"!Pinche pendejo chimuelo!" Lupe shouted at the driver.
"What did the Indian say?" the driver asked Juan Diego.
"She said you are a 'miserable toothless asshole'--it's obvious someone beat the shit out of you before," Juan Diego said.
"What a beautiful language!" Edward Bonshaw remarked with a sigh--he was always saying this. "I wish I could learn it, but I don't seem to be making much progress."
After that, the dump kids and the Iowan were caught up in the pressing crowd. First they were stuck behind a slowly moving order of nuns who were walking on their knees--their habits were hiked halfway up their thighs, their knees bleeding on the cobblestones. Then the dump kids and the lapsed missionary were slowed down by a bunch of monks from an obscure monastery who were whipping themselves. (If they were bleeding, their brown robes hid the blood, but the lashing of their whips made Senor Eduardo cringe.) There were many more drum-banging children in school uniforms.
"Dear God," was all Edward Bonshaw managed to say; he'd stopped giving anxious looks at the coffee can Juan Diego was carrying--there were too many other appalling things to see, and they hadn't even reached the shrine.
In the Chapel of the Well, Senor Eduardo and the dump kids had to fight their way through the self-abusing pilgr
ims, who made a sickening display of themselves. One woman kept gouging at her face with fingernail clippers. A man had pockmarked his forehead with the point of a pen; the blood and ink had commingled, running into his eyes. Naturally, he couldn't stop blinking his eyes--he appeared to be crying purple tears.
Edward Bonshaw put Lupe on his shoulders, so she could see over the men in business suits; they'd taken their blindfolds off, so they could see Our Lady of Guadalupe on her deathbed. The dark-skinned virgin lay encased in glass, but the roped-together men in business suits would not move on--they wouldn't allow anyone else to see her.
The priest who'd led the blindfolded businessmen to this spectacle continued his incantations. The priest also held all the blindfolds; he resembled a badly dressed waiter who'd foolishly gathered the used napkins in an evacuated restaurant during a bomb scare.
Juan Diego had decided it was better when the blasting music made it impossible to hear the priest's incantations, because the priest seemed stuck in a groove of the most simplistic repetition. Didn't everyone who knew anything about Guadalupe already know by heart her most famous utterance?
"?No estoy aqui, que soy tu madre?" the priest holding the wrinkled blindfolds kept repeating. "Am I not here, for I am your mother?" It was truly a senseless thing for a man holding a dozen (or more) blindfolds to be saying.
"Put me down--I don't want to see this," Lupe said, but the Iowan couldn't understand her; Juan Diego had to translate for his sister.
"The banker-brained dickheads don't need blindfolds--they're blind without the blindfolds," Lupe also said, but Juan Diego didn't translate this. (The circus roustabouts called tent poles "dream dicks"; Juan Diego thought it was only a matter of time before Lupe's language lowered itself to the dream-dick level.)
What waited ahead for Senor Eduardo and the dump kids were the endless stairs leading to El Cerrito de las Rosas--truly an ordeal of devotion and endurance. Edward Bonshaw bravely began the ascent of the stairs with the crippled boy now on his shoulders, but there were too many stairs--the climb was too long and steep. "I can walk, you know," Juan Diego tried to tell the Iowan. "It doesn't matter that I limp--limping is my thing!"
But Senor Eduardo struggled onward; he gasped for breath, the bottom of the coffee can bumping against the top of his bobbing head. Of course no one would have guessed that the failed scholastic was carrying a cripple up the stairs; the flailing Jesuit looked like any other self-abusing pilgrim--he might as well have been carrying cinder blocks or sandbags on his shoulders.
