Avenue of Mysteries

"I don't have all day, you know," Esperanza was saying as she climbed the ladder. Juan Diego was reaching to hold the ladder when Lupe started screaming.

"Her eyes! Look at the giant's eyes!" Lupe screamed, but Esperanza couldn't understand; besides, the cleaning woman was flicking the tip of the Virgin Mary's nose with the feather duster.

That was when Juan Diego saw the Vir

gin Mary's eyes--they were angry-looking, and they darted from Esperanza's pretty face to her decolletage. Maybe, in the giant Virgin's estimation, Esperanza was showing a little too much cleavage.

"Madre--not her nose, perhaps," was all Juan Diego managed to say; he'd been reaching for the ladder but he suddenly stopped reaching. The big Virgin's angry eyes darted only once in his direction--enough to freeze him. The Virgin Mary quickly returned her condemning glare to Esperanza's cleavage.

Did Esperanza lose her balance, and attempt to throw her arms around the Mary Monster to stop herself from falling? Had Esperanza then looked into Mary's burning eyes, and let go--more afraid of the giant Virgin's anger than of falling? Esperanza did not fall that hard; she didn't even hit her head. The ladder itself did not fall--Esperanza appeared to push herself (or she was shoved) away from the ladder.

"She died before she fell," Lupe always said. "The fall had nothing to do with it."

Had the big statue itself ever moved? Did the Virgin Mary totter on her pedestal? No and no, the dump kids would say to anyone who asked. But how, exactly, was the Virgin Mary's nose broken off? How had the Holy Mother been rendered noseless? As she was falling, maybe Esperanza hit Mary in the face? Had Esperanza whacked the giant Virgin with the wooden handle of the feather duster? No and no, the dump kids said--not that they'd seen. Talk about someone's nose being "out of joint"; the Virgin Mary's nose had broken off! Juan Diego was looking all around for it. How could such a big nose just disappear?

The big Virgin's eyes were once again opaque and unmoving. No anger remained, only the usual obscurity--an opacity bordering on the bland. And now that the towering statue was without a nose, the giant's unseeing eyes were all the more lifeless.

The dump kids couldn't help but notice that there was more life in Esperanza's wide-open eyes, though the kids certainly knew their mother was dead. They'd known it the instant Esperanza had dropped off the ladder--"the way a leaf falls from a tree," Juan Diego would later describe it to that man of science Dr. Vargas.

It was Vargas who explained the findings of Esperanza's autopsy to the dump kids. "The most likely way to die from fright would be through an arrhythmia," Vargas began.

"You know she was frightened to death?" Edward Bonshaw had interjected.

"She was definitely frightened to death," Juan Diego told the Iowan.

"Definitely," Lupe repeated; even Senor Eduardo and Dr. Vargas understood her one-word utterance.

"If the conduction system of the heart is overwhelmed with adrenaline," Vargas continued, "the heart's rhythm will become abnormal--no blood gets pumped, in other words. The name of this most dangerous type of arrhythmia is 'ventricular fibrillation'; the muscle cells just twitch--there's no pumping action at all."

"Then you drop dead, right?" Juan Diego asked.

"Then you drop dead," Vargas said.

"And this can happen to someone as young as Esperanza--someone with a normal heart?" Senor Eduardo asked.

"Being young doesn't necessarily help your heart," Vargas replied. "I'm sure Esperanza didn't have a 'normal' heart. Her blood pressure was abnormally high--"

"Her lifestyle, perhaps--" Edward Bonshaw suggested.

"No evidence that prostitution causes heart attacks, except to Catholics," Vargas said, in that scientific-sounding way he had. "Esperanza didn't have a 'normal' heart. And you kids," Vargas said, "will have to watch your hearts. At least you will, Juan Diego."

The doctor paused; he was sorting out the business of Juan Diego's possible fathers, a seemingly manageable number, as opposed to a purportedly different and vastly greater cast of characters who numbered among Lupe's possible fathers. It was, even for an atheist, a delicate pause.

Vargas looked at Edward Bonshaw. "One of Juan Diego's possible fathers--I mean, maybe his most likely biological father--died of a heart attack," Vargas said. "Juan Diego's possible dad was very young at the time, or so Esperanza told me," Vargas added. "What do you know about this?" Vargas asked the dump kids.

"No more than you know," Juan Diego told him.

"Rivera knows something--he's just not saying," Lupe said.

Juan Diego couldn't explain what Lupe said much better. Rivera had told the dump kids that Juan Diego's "most likely" father died of a broken heart.

"A heart attack, right?" Juan Diego had asked el jefe--because that's what Esperanza had told her children, and everyone else.

"If that's what you call a heart that's permanently broken," was all Rivera had ever said to the kids.

As for the Virgin Mary's nose--ah, well. Juan Diego had spotted la nariz; it was lying near the kneeling pad for the second row of pews. He'd had some difficulty fitting the big nose in his pocket. Lupe's screams would soon bring Father Alfonso and Father Octavio on the run to the Temple of the Society of Jesus. Father Alfonso was already praying over Esperanza by the time that bitch Sister Gloria showed up. Brother Pepe, out of breath, was not far behind the forever-disapproving nun, who seemed irritated by the attention-getting way Esperanza had died--not to mention, even in death, the display of the cleaning woman's cleavage, of which the giant Virgin had been most dramatically condemning.

The dump kids just stood around, waiting to see how long it would take the priests--or Brother Pepe, or Sister Gloria--to notice that the monster Holy Mother was missing her big nose. For the longest time, they didn't notice.