Page 146 of Avenue of Mysteries


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As Juan Diego remembered, it was a long walk to the registration desk from where the elevators opened into the lobby. "I'm a little surprised my mother isn't--" Dorothy started to say; she was looking all around the lobby when Miriam just appeared. It was no surprise to Juan Diego how the security guards never took their eyes off Miriam, all the way from the elevators to the registration desk. "What a surprise, Mother," Dorothy laconically said, but Miriam ignored her.

"You poor man!" Miriam exclaimed to Juan Diego. "I would guess you've seen enough of Dorothy's ghosts--frightened nineteen-year-olds aren't everyone's shot of tequila."

"Are you saying it's your turn, Mother?" Dorothy asked her.

"Don't be crude, Dorothy--it's never as much about sex as you seem to think it is," her mother told her.

"You're kidding, right?" Dorothy asked her.

"It's that time--it's Manila, Dorothy," Miriam reminded her.

"I know what time it is--I know where we are, Mother," Dorothy said to her.

"Enough sex, Dorothy," Miriam repeated.

"Don't people still have sex?" Dorothy asked her, but Miriam once again ignored her.

"Darling, you look tired--I'm worried about how tired you look," Miriam was saying to Juan Diego.

He watched Dorothy as she was leaving the lobby. She had an irresistibly coarse allure; the security guards watched Dorothy coming toward them, all the way to the elevators, but they didn't look at her in quite the same way they had looked at Miriam.

"For Christ's sake, Dorothy," Miriam muttered to herself, when she saw that her daughter had left in a huff. Only Juan Diego heard her. "Honestly, Dorothy!" Miriam called after her, but Dorothy didn't appear to have heard; the elevator doors were already closing.

At Miriam's request, the Ascott had upgraded Juan Diego to a suite with a full kitchen, on one of the uppermost floors. Juan Diego certainly didn't need a kitchen.

"After El Escondrijo, which is about as sea-level and depressing as it gets, I thought you deserved a more high-up view," Miriam told him.

The high-up part notwithstanding, the view from the Ascott of Makati City--the Wall Street of Manila, the business and financial center of the Philippines--was like many high-rise cityscapes at night: the variations on subdued lighting or the darkened windows of daytime offices were offset by the brightly lit windows of hotels and apartment buildings. Juan Diego didn't want to sound unappreciative of Miriam's efforts on behalf of his view, but there was a universal sameness (a void of national identity) to the cityscape he saw.

And where Miriam took him to dinner--very near the hotel, in the Ayala Center--the atmosphere of the shops and restaurants was refined but fast-paced (a shopping mall relocated to an international airport, or the other way around). Yet it may have been the anonymity of the restaurant in the Ayala Center, or the traveling-businessman atmosphere of the Ascott, that compelled Juan Diego to tell Miriam such a personal story: what had happened to the good gringo--not only the burning at the basurero but every verse of "Streets of Laredo," the lyrics spoken in a morbid monotone. (Unlike the good gringo, Juan Diego couldn't sing.) Don't forget, Juan Diego had been with Dorothy for days. He must have thought that Miriam was a better listener than her daughter.

"Wouldn't you cry if you never forgot how your sister was killed by a lion?" Miriam had asked the children at the Encantador. And then Pedro had fallen asleep with his head against Miriam's breast, as if he had been bewitched.

Juan Diego decided he should talk to Miriam nonstop; if he never let her talk, maybe she wouldn't bewitch him.

He went on and on about el gringo bueno--not only how the doomed hippie had befriended Lupe and Juan Diego, but the embarrassing business of Juan Diego's not knowing the good gringo's name. The Manila American Cemetery and Memorial had beckoned Juan Diego to the Philippines, but Juan Diego told Miriam he had no expectations that he would ever be able to locate the missing father's actual grave--not among the eleven burial plots, not without knowing the dead father's name.

"Yet a promise is a promise," was the way Juan Diego put it to Miriam at the restaurant in the Ayala Center. "I promised the good gringo I would pay his respects to his dad. I imagine the cemetery is pretty overwhelming, but I have to go there--I should at least see it."

"Don't see it tomorrow, darling--tomorrow is a Sunday, and not just any Sunday," Miriam said. (You can see how easily Juan Diego's decision to talk nonstop was derailed; as so often happened with Miriam and Dorothy, these women knew something he didn't know.)

Tomorrow, Sunday, was the annual procession known as the Feast of the Black Nazarene. "The thing came from Mexico--a Spanish galleon carried it to Manila from Acapulco. Early 1600s, I'm guessing--I think a bunch of Augustinian friars brought the thing," Miriam told him.

"A black Nazarene?" Juan Diego asked her.

"Not racially black," Miriam explained. "It's a wooden, life-size figure of Jesus Christ, frozen in the act of bearing his cross to Calvary. Maybe it was made from some kind of dark wood, but it wasn't supposed to be black--it was burned in a fire."

"It was charred, you mean?" Juan Diego asked her.

"It was burned at least three times, the first time in a fire on board the Spanish galleon. The thing arrived charred, but there were two more fires after the Black Nazarene got to Manila. Quiapo Church was twice destroyed by fire--in the eighteenth century and in the 1920s," Miriam said. "And there were two earthquakes in Manila--one in the seventeenth century, one in the nineteenth. The Church makes a big deal about the Black Nazarene's 'surviving' three fires and two earthquakes, and the thing survived the Liberation of Manila in 1945--one of the worst bombings in the Pacific Theater of World War Two, by the way. But what's the big deal about a wooden figure that 'survives'--a wooden figure can't die, can it? The thing just got burned a few times, and it turned blacker!" was the way Miriam put it. "The Black Nazarene was shot once, too--in the cheek, I think. The gun incident was fairly recent--in the 1990s," Miriam said. "As if Christ didn't suffer enough, on the way to Calvary, the Black Nazarene has 'survived' six catastrophes--both the natural and the unnatural kind. Believe me," Miriam said suddenly to Juan Diego, "you don't want to leave the hotel tomorrow. Manila is a mess when the Black Nazarene's devotees are having their crazy procession."

"There are thousands of marchers?" Juan Diego asked Miriam.

"No, millions," Miriam told him. "And many of them believe that touching the Black Nazarene will heal them of whatever ails them. Lots of people get hurt in the procession. There are male devotees of the Black Nazarene who call themselves Hijos del Senor Nazareno--'Sons of the Lord Nazarene'--and their devotion to the Catholic faith causes them to 'identify,' as they put it, with the Passion of Christ. Maybe the morons want to suffer as much as Jesus suffered," Miriam said; the way she shrugged gave Juan Diego a chill. "Who knows what true believers like that want?"

"Maybe I'll go to the cemetery on Mond

ay," Juan Diego suggested.

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