Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving

Author:John Irving
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, General, Political, Fiction
ISBN: 9781451664164
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2015-11-03T05:00:00+00:00

• 18 •

Lust Has a Way

For years after he’d left Oaxaca, Juan Diego would stay in touch with Brother Pepe. What Juan Diego knew about Oaxaca since the early seventies was largely due to Pepe’s faithful correspondence.

The problem was that Juan Diego couldn’t always remember when Pepe had passed along this or that important piece of information; to Pepe, every new thing was “important”—each change mattered, as did those things that hadn’t changed (and never would).

It was during the AIDS epidemic when Brother Pepe wrote to Juan Diego about that gay bar on Bustamante, but whether this was in the late eighties or early nineties—well, this was the kind of specificity that eluded Juan Diego. “Yes, that bar is still there—and it’s still gay,” Pepe had written; Juan Diego must have asked about it. “But it’s not La China anymore—it’s called Chinampa now.”

And, around that time, Pepe had written that Dr. Vargas was feeling the “hopelessness of the medical community.” AIDS had made Vargas feel it was “irrelevant” to be an orthopedist. “No doctor is trained to watch people die; we’re not in the holding-hands business,” Vargas had told Pepe, and Vargas wasn’t even dealing with infectious disease.

That sounded like Vargas, all right—still feeling left out because he’d missed the family plane crash.

Pepe’s letter about La Coronita came in the nineties, if Juan Diego remembered correctly. The transvestite “party place” had closed down; the owner, who was gay, had died. When The Little Crown reopened, it had expanded; there was a second floor, and it was now a place for transvestite prostitutes and their clients. There was no more waiting to dress up until you got to the bar; the cross-dressers were who they were when they arrived. They were women when they got there, or so Pepe implied.

Brother Pepe was doing hospice work in the nineties; unlike Vargas, Pepe was suited for the hand-holding business, and Lost Children was long gone by then.

Hogar de la Niña, “Home of the Girl,” had opened in 1979. It was an all-girls’ answer to City of Children—what Lupe had called City of Boys. Pepe had worked at Home of the Girl through the eighties and into the early nineties.

Pepe would never disparage an orphanage. Hogar de la Niña was not all that far from Viguera, where its all-boys’ counterpart, Ciudad de los Niños, was still open for business. Home of the Girl was in the neighborhood of Cuauhtémoc.

Pepe had found the girls unruly; he’d complained to Juan Diego that they could be cruel to one another. And Pepe hadn’t liked the girls’ adoration of The Little Mermaid, the 1989 Disney animated film. There were life-size decals of the Little Mermaid herself in the sleeping room—“larger than the portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe,” Pepe had complained. (As Lupe doubtless would have complained, Juan Diego thought.)

Pepe had sent a picture of some of the girls in their old-fashioned, hand-me-down dresses—the kind that buttoned up the back. In the photo, Juan Diego couldn’t see that

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