"I brought you some books that are more readable," Pepe said to Juan Diego. "Some novels, good storytelling--you know, fiction," the teacher said encouragingly.
"I don't know what I think of fiction," the thirteen-year-old Lupe said suspiciously. "Not all storytelling is what it's cracked up to be."
"Don't get started on that," Juan Diego said to her. "The dog story was just too grown-up for you."
"What dog story?" Brother Pepe asked.
"Don't ask," the boy told him, but it was too late; Lupe was groping around, pawing through the books on the shelves--there were books everywhere, saved from burning.
"That Russian guy," the intense-looking girl was saying.
"Did she say 'Russian'--you don't read Russian, do you?" Pepe asked Juan Diego.
"No, no--she means the writer. The writer is a Russian guy," the boy explained.
"How do you understand her?" Pepe asked him. "Sometimes I'm not sure if it's Spanish she's speaking--"
"Of course it's Spanish!" the girl cried; she'd found the book that had given her doubts about storytelling, about fiction. She handed the book to Brother Pepe.
"Lupe's language is just a little different," Juan Diego was saying. "I can understand it."
"Oh, that Russian," Pepe said. The book was a collection of Chekhov's stories, The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories.
"It's not about the dog at all," Lupe complained. "It's about people who aren't married to each other having sex."
Juan Diego, of course, translated this. "All she cares about is dogs," the boy told Pepe. "I told her the story was too grown-up for her."
Pepe was having trouble remembering "The Lady with the Dog"; naturally, he couldn't recall the dog at all. It was a story about an illicit relationship--that was all he could remember. "I'm not sure this is age-appropriate for either of you," the Jesuit teacher said, laughing uncomfortably.
That was when Pepe realized it was an English translation of Chekhov's stories, an American edition; it had been published in the 1940s. "But this is in English!" Brother Pepe cried. "You understand English?" he asked the wild-looking girl. "You can read English, too?" the Jesuit asked the dump reader. Both the boy and his younger sister shrugged. Where have I seen that shrug before? Pepe thought to himself.
"From our mother," Lupe answered him, but Pepe couldn't understand her.
"What about our mother?" Juan Diego asked his sister.
"He was wondering about the way we shrug," Lupe answered him.
"You have taught yourself to read English, too," Pepe said slowly to the boy; the girl suddenly gave him the shivers, for no known reason.
"English is just a little different--I can understand it," the boy told him, as if he were still talking about understanding his sister's strange language.
Pepe's mind was racing. They were extraordinary children--the boy could read anything; maybe there was nothing he couldn't understand. And the girl--well, she was different. Getting her to speak normally would be a challenge. Yet weren't they, these dump kids, precisely the kind of gifted students the Jesuit school was seeking? And didn't the woman worker at the basurero say that Rivera, el jefe, was "not exactly" the young reader's father? Who was their father, and where was he? And there was no sign of a mother--not in this unkempt shack, Pepe was thinking. The carpentry was okay, but everything else was a wreck.
"Tell him we are not Lost Children--he found us, didn't he?" Lupe said suddenly to her talented brother. "Tell him we're not orphanage material. I don't need to speak normally--you understand me just fine," the girl told Juan Diego. "Tell him we have a mother--he probably knows her!" Lupe cried. "Tell him Rivera is like a father, only better. Tell him el jefe is better than any father!"
"Slow down, Lupe!" Juan Diego said. "I can't tell him anything if you don't slow down." It was quite a lot to tell Brother Pepe, beginning with the fact that Pepe probably knew the dump kids' mother--she worked nights on Zaragoza Street, but she also worked for the Jesuits; she was their principal cleaning woman.
That the dump kids' mother worked nights on Zaragoza Street made her a likely prostitute, and Brother Pepe did know her. Esperanza was the Jesuits' best cleaning woman--no question where the children's dark eyes and their insouciant shrugs came from, though the origin of the boy's genius for reading was unclear.
Tellingly, the boy didn't use the "not exactly" phrase when he spoke of Rivera, el jefe, as a potential father. The way Juan Diego put it was that the dump boss was "probably not" his father, yet Rivera could be the boy's father--there was a "maybe" involved; that was how Juan Diego expressed it. As for Lupe, el jefe was "definitely not" her father. It was Lupe's impression that she had many fathers, "too many fathers to name," but the boy passed over this biological impossibility fairly quickly. He said simply that Rivera and their mother had "no longer been together in that way" when Esperanza became pregnant with Lupe.
It was quite a lengthy but calm manner of storytelling--the way the dump reader presented his and Lupe's impressions of the dump boss as "like a father, only better," and how the dump kids saw themselves as having a home. Juan Diego echoed Lupe that they were "not orphanage material." Embellishing, a little, the way Juan Diego put it was: "We're not present or future Lost Children. We have a home here, in Guerrero. We have a job in the basurero!"
But, for Brother Pepe, this raised the question of why these children weren't working in the basurero alongside los pepenadores. Why weren't Lupe and Juan Diego out there scavenging with the other dump kids? Were they treated better or worse than the children of the other families who worked in the basurero and lived in Guerrero?
"Better and worse," Juan Diego told the Jesuit teacher, without hesitation. Brother Pepe recalled the other dump kids' contempt for reading, and only God knew what those little scavengers made of the wild-looking, unintelligible girl who gave Pepe the shivers.
"Rivera won't let us leave the shack unless he's with us," Lupe explained. Juan Diego not only translated for her; he elaborated on this detail.
Rivera truly protected them, the boy told Pepe. El jefe was both like a father and better than a father because he provided for the dump kids and he watched over them. "And he doesn't ever beat us," Lupe interrupted him; Juan Diego dutifully translated this, too.
"I see," Brother Pepe said. But he was only beginning to see what the brother and sister's situation was: indeed, it was better than the situation for many children who separated the stuff they picked through and sorted in the basurero. And it was worse for them, too--because Lupe and Juan Diego were resented by the scavengers and their families in Guerrero. These two dump kids may have had Rivera's protection (for which they were resented), but el jefe was not exactly their father. And their mother, who worked nights on Zaragoza Street, was a prostitute who didn't actually live in Guerrero.
There is a pecking order everywhere, Brother Pepe thought sadly to himself.
"What's a pecking order?" Lupe asked her brother. (Pepe was now beginning to understand that the girl knew what he was thinking.)
"A pecking order is how the other ninos de la basura feel superior to us," Juan Diego said to Lupe.
"Precisely," Pepe said, a little uneasily. Here he'd come to meet the dump reader, the fabled boy from Guerrero, bringing him good books, as a good teacher would--only to discover that he, Pepe, the Jesuit himself, was the one with a lot to learn.
That was when the constantly complaining but unseen dog showed itself, if it was actually a dog. The weaselly little creature crawled out from under the couch--more rodential than canine, Pepe thought.
"His name is Dirty White--he's a dog, not a rat!" Lupe said indignantly to Brother Pepe.
Juan Diego explained this, but the boy added: "Dirty White is a dirty little coward--an ungrateful one."
"I saved him from death!" Lupe cried. Even as the skinny, hunched dog sidled toward the girl's outstretched arms, his lips involuntarily curled, baring his pointed teeth.
"He should be called Saved from Dea
th, not Dirty White," Juan Diego said, laughing. "She found him with his head caught in a milk carton."
"He's a puppy. He was starving," Lupe protested.
"Dirty White is still starving for something," Juan Diego said.
"Stop," his sister told him; the puppy shivered in her arms.
Pepe tried to repress his thoughts, but this was harder than he'd imagined it would be; he decided it would be best to leave, even abruptly, rather than allow the clairvoyant girl to read his mind. Pepe didn't want the thirteen-year-old innocent to know what he was thinking.
He started his VW Beetle; there was no sign of Rivera, or el jefe's "scariest-looking" dog, as the Jesuit teacher drove away from Guerrero. The spires of black smoke from the basurero were rising all around him, as were the good-hearted Jesuit's blackest thoughts.
Father Alfonso and Father Octavio looked upon Juan Diego and Lupe's mother--Esperanza, the prostitute--as the "fallen." In the minds of the two old priests, there were no fallen souls who had fallen further than prostitutes; there were no miserable creatures of the human kind as lost as these unfortunate women were. Esperanza was hired as a cleaning woman for the Jesuits in an allegedly holy effort to save her.
But don't these dump kids need saving, too? Pepe wondered. Aren't los ninos de la basura among the "fallen," or aren't they in danger of future falling? Or of falling further?
When that boy from Guerrero was a grown-up, complaining to his doctor about the beta-blockers, he should have had Brother Pepe standing beside him; Pepe would have given testimony to Juan Diego's childhood memories and his fiercest dreams. Even this dump reader's nightmares were worth preserving, Brother Pepe knew.
WHEN THESE DUMP KIDS were in their early teens, Juan Diego's most recurrent dream wasn't a nightmare. The boy often dreamed of flying--well, not exactly. It was an awkward-looking and peculiar kind of airborne activity, which bore little resemblance to "flying." The dream was always the same: people in a crowd looked up; they saw that Juan Diego was walking on the sky. From below--that is, from ground level--the boy appeared to be very carefully walking upside down in the heavens. (It also seemed that he was counting to himself.)
There was nothing spontaneous about Juan Diego's movement across the sky--he was not flying freely, as a bird flies; he lacked the powerful, straightforward thrust of an airplane. Yet, in that oft-repeated dream, Juan Diego knew he was where he belonged. From his upside-down perspective in the sky, he could see the anxious, upturned faces in the crowd.
When he described the dream to Lupe, the boy would also say to his strange sister: "There comes a moment in every life when you must let go with your hands--with both hands." Naturally, this made no sense to a thirteen-year-old--even to a normal thirteen-year-old. Lupe's reply was unintelligible, even to Juan Diego.
One time when he asked her what she thought of his dream about walking upside down in the heavens, Lupe was typically mysterious, though Juan Diego could at least comprehend her exact words.
"It's a dream about the future," the girl said.
"Whose future?" Juan Diego asked.
"Not yours, I hope," his sister replied, more mysteriously.
"But I love this dream!" the boy had said.
"It's a death dream," was all Lupe would say further.
But now, as an older man, since he'd been taking the beta-blockers, his childhood dream of walking on the sky was lost to him, and Juan Diego didn't get to relive the nightmare of that long-ago morning he was crippled in Guerrero. The dump reader missed that nightmare.
He'd complained to his doctor. "The beta-blockers are blocking my memories!" Juan Diego cried. "They are stealing my childhood--they are robbing my dreams!" To his doctor, all this hysteria meant was that Juan Diego missed the kick his adrenaline gave him. (Beta-blockers really do a number on your adrenaline.)
His doctor, a no-nonsense woman named Rosemary Stein, had been a close friend of Juan Diego's for twenty years; she was familiar with what she thought of as his hysterical overstatements.
Dr. Stein knew very well why she had prescribed the beta-blockers for Juan Diego; her dear friend was at risk of having a heart attack. He not only had very high blood pressure (170 over 100), but he was pretty sure his mother and one of his possible fathers had died of a heart attack--his mother, definitely, at a young age. Juan Diego had no shortage of adrenaline--the fight-or-flight hormone, which is released during moments of stress, fear, calamity, and performance anxiety, and during a heart attack. Adrenaline also shunts blood away from the gut and viscera--the blood goes to your muscles, so that you can run. (Maybe a dump reader has more need of adrenaline than most people.)
Beta-blockers do not prevent heart attacks, Dr. Stein had explained to Juan Diego, but these medications block the adrenaline receptors in the body and thus shield the heart from the potentially devastating effect of the adrenaline released during a heart attack.
"Where are my damn adrenaline receptors?" Juan Diego had asked Dr. Stein. ("Dr. Rosemary," he called her--just to tease her.)
"In the lungs, blood vessels, heart--almost everywhere," she'd answered him. "Adrenaline makes your heart beat faster. You breathe harder, the hair on your arms stands up, your pupils dilate, your blood vessels constrict--not good, if you're having a heart attack."
"What could be good, if I'm having a heart attack?" Juan Diego had asked her. (Dump kids are persistent--they're stubborn types.)
"A quiet, relaxed heart--one that beats slowly, not faster and faster," Dr. Stein said. "A person on beta-blockers has a slow pulse; your pulse cannot increase, no matter what."
There were consequences of lowering your blood pressure; a person on beta-blockers should be a little careful not to drink too much alcohol, which raises your blood pressure, but Juan Diego didn't really drink. (Well, okay, he drank beer, but only beer--and not too much, he thought.) And beta-blockers reduce the circulation of blood to your extremities; your hands and feet feel cold. Yet Juan Diego didn't complain about this side effect--he'd even joked to his friend Rosemary that feeling cold was a luxury for a boy from Oaxaca.
Some patients on beta-blockers bemoan the accompanying lethargy, both a weariness and a reduced tolerance for physical exercise, but at his age--Juan Diego was now fifty-four--what did he care? He'd been a cripple since he was fourteen; limping was his exercise. He'd had forty years of sufficient limping. Juan Diego didn't want more exercise!
He did wish he felt more alive, not so "diminished"--the word he used to describe how the beta-blockers made him feel, when he talked to Rosemary about his lack of sexual interest. (Juan Diego didn't say he was impotent; even to his doctor, the diminished word was where he began, and ended, the conversation.)
"I didn't know you were in a sexual relationship," Dr. Stein said to him; in fact, she knew very well that he wasn't in one.
"My dear Dr. Rosemary," Juan Diego said. "If I were in a sexual relationship, I believe I would be diminished."
She'd given him a prescription for Viagra--six tablets a month, 100 milligrams--and told him to experiment.
"Don't wait till you meet someone," Rosemary said.
He hadn't waited; he'd not met anyone, but he had experimented.
Dr. Stein had refilled his prescription every month. "Maybe half a tablet is sufficient," Juan Diego told her, after his experiments. He hoarded the extra tablets. He'd not complained about any of the side effects from the Viagra. It allowed him to have an erection; he could have an orgasm. Why would he mind a stuffy nose?
Another side effect of beta-blockers is insomnia, but Juan Diego found nothing new or particularly upsetting about that; to lie awake in the dark with his demons was almost comforting. Many of Juan Diego's demons had been his childhood companions--he knew them so well, they were as familiar as friends.
An overdose of beta-blockers can cause dizziness, even fainting spells, but Juan Diego wasn't worried about dizziness or fainting. "Cripples know how to fall--falling is no big deal to us," he told Dr. Stein.
; Yet, even more than the erectile dysfunction, it was his disjointed dreams that disturbed him; Juan Diego said that his memories and his dreams lacked a followable chronology. He hated the beta-blockers because, in disrupting his dreams, they had cut him off from his childhood, and his childhood mattered more to him than childhood mattered to other adults--to most other adults, Juan Diego thought. His childhood, and the people he'd encountered there--the ones who'd changed his life, or who'd been witnesses to what had happened to him at that crucial time--were what Juan Diego had instead of religion.
Close friend though she was, Dr. Rosemary Stein didn't know everything about Juan Diego; she knew very little about her friend's childhood. To Dr. Stein, it probably appeared to come out of nowhere when Juan Diego spoke with uncharacteristic sharpness to her, seemingly about the beta-blockers. "Believe me, Rosemary, if the beta-blockers had taken my religion away, I would not complain to you about that! On the contrary, I would ask you to prescribe beta-blockers for everyone!"
This amounted to more of her passionate friend's hysterical overstatements, Dr. Stein thought. After all, he'd burned his hands saving books from burning--even books about Catholic history. But Rosemary Stein knew only bits and pieces about Juan Diego's life as a dump kid; she knew more about her friend when he was older. She didn't really know the boy from Guerrero.
* 2 *
The Mary Monster
On the day after Christmas, 2010, a snowstorm had swept through New York City. The next day, the unplowed streets of Manhattan were strewn with abandoned cars and cabs. A bus had burned on Madison Avenue, near East Sixty-second Street; spinning in the snow, its rear tires caught fire and ignited the bus. The blackened hulk had dotted the surrounding snow with ashes.