Avenue of Mysteries

"I can give you an antibiotic," Dr. Gomez told Juan Diego's mother, "but you'll be infected again in no time."

"Just give me the antibiotic," Esperanza said. "Of course I'll be infected again! I'm a prostitute."

"Does Lupe read your mind?" Dr. Gomez asked Esperanza, who became agitated and hysterical, but Juan Diego said nothing. The boy liked Dr. Gomez; he wouldn't tell her what unintelligible filth and vilification his mother was spewing.

"Tell the cunt doctor what I said!" Esperanza was screaming at her son.

"I'm sorry," Juan Diego said to Dr. Gomez, "but I can't understand my mom--she's a raving, foul-mouthed lunatic."

"Tell her, you little bastard!" Esperanza cried. She started to hit Juan Diego, but Brother Pepe got between them.

"Don't touch me," Juan Diego told his mother. "Don't come anywhere near me--you're infected. You're infected!" the boy repeated.

This may have been the word that woke Juan Diego from his disjointed dream--either the infected word or the sound of the landing gear descending from the plane, because his Cathay Pacific flight was also descending. He saw he was about to land in Manila, where his real life--well, if not entirely real, at least what passed as his pr

esent life--awaited him.

As much as Juan Diego liked to dream, whenever he dreamed about his mother, he was not sorry to wake up. If the beta-blockers didn't disjoint him, she did. Esperanza was not the kind of mother who should have been named for hope. "Desesperanza," the nuns called her, albeit behind her back. "Hopelessness," the sisters had named her, or they referred to her as despair itself--"Desesperacion"--when that word made more sense. Even as a fourteen-year-old, Juan Diego felt he was the adult in the family--he and Lupe, too, who was an insightful thirteen. Esperanza was a child, not least in her children's eyes--except sexually. And what mother would want to be the sexual presence in her children's eyes that Esperanza was?

Esperanza never wore a cleaning woman's clothes; she was always dressed for her other line of work. When she cleaned, Esperanza was dressed for Zaragoza Street and the Hotel Somega--the "whore hotel," Rivera called it. The way Esperanza dressed was childish, or childlike, except for the sexually obvious part.

Esperanza was also a child when it came to money. The orphans at Lost Children weren't allowed to have money, but Juan Diego and Lupe still hoarded it. (You cannot take the scavenging out of scavengers; los pepenadores carry their picking and sorting with them, long after they've stopped looking for aluminum or copper or glass.) The dump kids were very skillful at hiding their money in their room at Ninos Perdidos; the nuns never found it.

But Esperanza could find their money, and she stole from them when she needed to. Esperanza did repay the kids, in her fashion. Occasionally, after a successful night, Esperanza would put money under Lupe's or Juan Diego's pillow. The kids were lucky that they could smell the money their mother left them before the nuns found it. Esperanza's perfume gave her (and the money) away.

"Lo siento, madre," Juan Diego said softly to himself, as his plane was landing in Manila. "I'm sorry, Mother." As a fourteen-year-old, he'd not been old enough to have sympathy for her--for either the child or the adult that she was.

THE CHARITY WORD WAS a big one with the Jesuits--with Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, especially. It was out of charity that they'd hired a prostitute to clean for them; the priests referred to this act of kindness as giving Esperanza a "second chance." (Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw would stay up late one night, discussing what kind of first chance Esperanza had been given--that is, before she'd become a prostitute and the Jesuits' cleaning woman.)

Yes, it was clearly out of Jesuitical charity that los ninos de la basura had been afforded the status of orphans; after all, they had a mother--irrespective of how fit or unfit (as a mother) Esperanza was. No doubt, Father Alfonso and Father Octavio believed they'd been exceptionally charitable in allowing Juan Diego and Lupe to have their own bedroom and bathroom--irrespective of how dependent the girl was on her brother. (That would be another late-night discussion between Brother Pepe and Senor Eduardo: namely, how Father Alfonso and Father Octavio imagined Lupe might have functioned without Juan Diego translating for her.)

The other orphans, including siblings, were divided by gender. The boys slept in a dormitory setting on one floor of Ninos Perdidos, the girls on another floor; there was a communal bathroom for the boys, and a similar arrangement (but with better mirrors) for the girls. If the children had parents, or other relatives, these adults weren't permitted to visit the children in their dormitories, but Esperanza was allowed to visit Juan Diego and Lupe in the dump kids' bedroom, which had formerly been a small library, a so-called reading room for visiting scholars. (Most of the books were still on the shelves, which Esperanza regularly dusted; as everyone repeated, ad nauseam, she was actually a good cleaning woman.)

Of course it would have been awkward to keep Esperanza away from her own kids; she also had a bedroom at Lost Children, but in the servants' quarters. Only female servants stayed in the orphanage, possibly to protect the children, though the servants themselves--Esperanza was the most vocal among them, not least on this subject--fervently imagined it was chiefly the priests ("those celibate weirdos," Esperanza called them) whom the children needed protection from.

No one, not even Esperanza, would have accused Father Alfonso or Father Octavio of this particular, much-documented perversion among priests; no one believed the orphans at Ninos Perdidos were in this particular danger. The conversation among the female servants concerning those children who were the sexual victims of allegedly celibate priests was very general; the talk was more about the "unnaturalness" of celibacy for men. As for the nuns--well, that was different. Celibacy was more imaginable for women; no one ever said it was "natural," but not a few of the female servants expressed the feeling that the nuns were lucky not to have sex.

Only Esperanza said: "Well, just look at the nuns. Who would want to have sex with them?" But this was unkind, and--like much of what Esperanza said--not necessarily true. (Yes, the subject of celibacy and its unnaturalness, or not, was another of those late-night discussions between Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw--as you might imagine.)

Because he whipped himself, Senor Eduardo would try to joke to Juan Diego about it; the flagellating Iowan said it was a good thing he had his own bedroom in the orphanage. But Juan Diego knew the flagellant shared a bathroom with Brother Pepe; the boy used to wonder if poor Pepe found traces of Edward Bonshaw's blood in the bathtub or on the towels. While Pepe was disinclined to mortifications of the body, he was amused that Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, who thought they were so superior to the Iowan in other ways, praised Edward Bonshaw for his painful self-castigations.

"How very twelfth-century!" Father Alfonso exclaimed admiringly.

"A rite worth maintaining," Father Octavio said. (Whatever else they thought of Edward Bonshaw, both priests found his whipping himself brave.) And while these two twelfth-century admirers continued to criticize Senor Eduardo's Hawaiian shirts, Brother Pepe was also amused that the two old priests never connected Edward Bonshaw's flagellations with the Polynesian parrots and jungles on his overlarge shirts. Pepe knew that Senor Eduardo was always oozing blood; he whipped himself hard. The riotous colors and overall confusion of the zealot's Hawaiian shirts concealed the bleeding.

The bathroom they shared, and the close proximity of their separate bedrooms, made unlikely roommates out of Pepe and the Iowan, and their rooms were on the same floor of the orphanage as the former reading room the dump kids shared. No doubt Pepe and the Iowan were aware of Esperanza--she passed by in the late hours of the night, or in the wee hours of the morning, as if she were more the ghost of the dump ninos' mom than an actual mother. Because Esperanza was an actual woman, she might have been a disconcerting presence to these two celibate men; she must have occasionally heard Edward Bonshaw beating himself, too.

Esperanza knew how clean the floors were in Lost Children; after all, she had cleaned them. She was barefoot when she came to visit her children; she could be more silent that way, and--given the hours she kept during her time not spent as a cleaning woman--almost everyone else in Ninos Perdidos was asleep when Esperanza was creeping around. Yes, she came to kiss her ninos when they were sleeping--in this single respect, Esperanza resembled other moms--but she also came to steal from them, or to leave them a little perfumed money under their pillows. Most of all, Esperanza made these silent visits in order to use the bathroom Juan Diego and Lupe shared. She must have wanted some privacy; either in the Hotel Somega or in the servants' quarters of the orphanage, Esperanza probably had no privacy. She must have wanted, at least once a day, to bathe alone. And who knows how the other female servants at Lost Children treated Esperanza? Did those other women like sharing their communal bathroom with a prostitute?

Because Rivera had left his stick shift in reverse, he backed over Juan Diego's foot; because of a broken side-view mirror, the dump kids slept in a small library, a former reading room, in the Jesuit orphanage. And because their mother was a cleaning woman for the Jesuits (because she was also a prostitute), Esperanza haunted the same floor of Ninos Perdidos where the new American missionar

y lived.

Wasn't this an arrangement that might have endured? Doesn't the deal they all had sound compatible enough to have worked? Why wouldn't the dump kids have preferred, eventually, their life at Lost Children to their shack in Guerrero? As for the perishable beauty, which Esperanza surely was, and the perpetually bleeding Edward Bonshaw, who so tirelessly whipped himself--well, is it absurd to imagine they might have taught each other something?

Edward Bonshaw might have benefited from hearing Esperanza's thoughts about celibacy and self-flagellation, and it's certain she would have had something to say to him on the subject of sacrificing his life to prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night.

In turn, Senor Eduardo might have asked Esperanza why she was still working as a prostitute. Didn't she already have a job and a safe place to sleep? Was it her vanity, perhaps? Was she so vain that being wanted was somehow better than being loved?