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Bienvenido didn't say anything; he just drove. But by the way the young driver nodded his head, and in the manifest sympathy with which he regarded his dozing passenger in the rearview mirror, it was obvious that Bienvenido knew the nothing word--if not the whole story.
* 15 *
The Nose
"I'm not much of a believer," Juan Diego had once told Edward Bonshaw.
But that had been a fourteen-year-old talking; at first, it was easier for the dump kid to say he wasn't much of a believer than it would have been for him to articulate his distrust of the Catholic Church--especially to as likable a scholastic (in training to be a priest!) as Senor Eduardo.
"Don't say that, Juan Diego--you're too young to cut yourself off from belief," Edward Bonshaw had said.
In truth, it was not belief that Juan Diego lacked. Most dump kids are seekers of miracles. At least Juan Diego wanted to believe in the miraculous, in all sorts of inexplicable mysteries, even if he doubted the miracles the Church wanted everyone to believe--those preexisting miracles, the ones dulled by time.
What the dump reader doubted was the Church: its politics, its social interventions, its manipulations of history and sexual behavior--which would have been difficult for the fourteen-year-old Juan Diego to say in Dr. Vargas's office, where the atheist doctor and the Iowa missionary were squaring off against each other.
Most dump kids are believers; maybe you have to believe in something when you see so many discarded things. And Juan Diego knew what every dump kid (and every orphan) knows: every last thing thrown away, every person or thing that isn't wanted, may have been wanted once--or, in different circumstances, might have been wanted.
The dump reader had saved books from burning, and he'd actually read the books. Don't ever think a dump reader is incapable of belief. It takes an eternity to read some books, even (or especially) some books saved from burning.
The flight time from Manila to Tagbilaran City, Bohol, was only a little more than an hour, but dreams can seem an eternity. At fourteen, Juan Diego's transition from the wheelchair to walking on crutches, and (eventually) to walking with a limp--well, in reality, this transition had taken an eternity, too, and the boy's memory of that time was jumbled up. All that remained in the dream was the developing rapport between the crippled boy and Edward Bonshaw--their give-and-take, theologically speaking. The boy had backtracked about not being much of a believer, but he'd dug in his heels concerning his disbelief in the Church.
Juan Diego recalled saying, when he was still on the crutches: "Our Virgin of Guadalupe was not Mary. Your Virgin Mary was not Guadalupe. This is Catholic mumbo jumbo; this is papal hocus-pocus!" (The two of them had been down this road before.)
"I get your point," Edward Bonshaw had said, in his seemingly reasonable Jesuitical way. "I admit there was a delay; a lot of time passed before Pope Benedict the Fourteenth saw a copy of Guadalupe's image on the Indian's cloak and declared that your Guadalupe was Mary. That is your point, isn't it?"
"Two hundred years after the fact!" Juan Diego declared, poking Senor Eduardo's foot with one of the crutches. "Your evangelists from Spain got naked with the Indians, and the next thing you know--well, that's where Lupe and I come from. We're Zapotecs, if we're anything. We're not Catholics! Guadalupe isn't Mary--that imposter."
"And you're still burning dogs at the dump--Pepe told me," Senor Eduardo said. "I don't understand why you think burning the dead is of any assistance to them."
"It's you Catholics who are opposed to cremation," Juan Diego would point out to the Iowan. On and on they bickered, before and after Brother Pepe drove the dump kids to and from the dump to partake in the eternal dog-burning. (And all the while the circus beckoned the kids away from Ninos Perdidos.)
"Look what you did to Christmas--you Catholics," Juan Diego would say. "You chose December twenty-fifth as Christ's date of birth, simply to co-opt a pagan feast day. This is my point: you Catholics co-opt things. And did you know there might have been an actual Star of Bethlehem? The Chinese reported a nova, an exploding star, in 5 B.C."
"Where does the boy read this, Pepe?" Edward Bonshaw would repeatedly ask.
"In our library at Lost Children," Brother Pepe replied. "Are we supposed to stop him from reading? We want him to read, don't we?"
"And there's another thing," Juan Diego remembered saying--not necessarily in his dream. The crutches were gone; he was just limping. They were somewhere in the zocalo; Lupe was running ahead of them, and Brother Pepe was struggling to keep up with them. Even with the limp, Juan Diego could walk faster than Pepe. "What is so appealing about celibacy? Why do priests care about being celibate? Aren't priests always telling us what to do and think--I mean sexually?" Juan Diego asked. "Well, how can they have any authority on sexual matters if they don't ever have sex?"
"Are you telling me, Pepe, the boy has learned to question the sexual authority of a celibate clergy from our library at the mission?" Senor Eduardo asked Brother Pepe.
"I think about some stuff I don't read," Juan Diego remembered saying. "It just occurs to me, all by myself." His limp was relatively new; he remembered the newness of it, too.
The limp was still new on the morning Esperanza was dusting the giant Virgin Mary in the Templo de la Compania de Jesus. Esperanza couldn't come close to reaching the statue's face without using a ladder. Usually, Juan Diego or Lupe held the ladder. Not this morning.
The good gringo had fallen on hard times; Flor had told the dump kids that el gringo bueno had run out of money, or he was spending what he had left on alcohol (not on prostitutes). The prostitutes rarely saw him anymore. They couldn't look after someone they hardly saw.
Lupe had said that, somehow, Esperanza was "responsible" for the hippie boy's deteriorating situation; at least this was how Juan Diego had translated his sister's words.
"The war in Vietnam is responsible for him," Esperanza said; she may or may not have believed this. Esperanza accepted and repeated as gospel whatever she'd heard on Zaragoza Street--what the draft dodgers were saying in defense of themselves, or what the prostitutes said about those lost young men from America.
Esperanza had leaned the ladder against the Virgin Mary. The pedestal was elevated so that Esperanza stood at eye level with the Mary Monster's enormous feet. The Virgin, who was much larger than life-size, towered over Esperanza.
"El gringo bueno is fighting his own war now," Lupe mysteriously whispered. Then she looked at the ladder leaning against the towering Virgin. "Mary doesn't like the ladder," was all Lupe said. Juan Diego translated this, but not the bit about the good gringo fighting his own war.
"Just hold the ladder so I can dust her," Esperanza said.
"Better not dust the Mary Monster now--something's bugging the big Virgin today," Lupe said, but Juan Diego left this untranslated.
