Avenue of Mysteries Read Online Free PDF Page A

never known the young American’s name; the antiwar boy had befriended Juan Diego and his seemingly retarded little sister, Lupe, but they knew him only as “the good gringo.” The dump kids had met el gringo bueno before Juan Diego became a cripple. At first, the young American seemed too friendly to be doomed, though Rivera had called him a “mescal hippie,” and the dump kids knew el jefe’s opinion of the hippies who came to Oaxaca from the United States at that time.
    The dump boss believed that the mushroom hippies were “the stupid ones”; he meant they were seeking something they thought was profound—in el jefe’s opinion, “something as ridiculous as the interconnectedness of all things,” though the dump kids knew that el jefe himself was a Mary worshiper.
    As for the mescal hippies, they were smarter, Rivera said, but they were “the self-destructive ones.” And the mescal hippies were the ones who were also addicted to prostitutes, or so the dump boss believed. The good gringo was “killing himself on Zaragoza Street,” el jefe said. The dump kids had hoped not; Lupe and Juan Diego adored el gringo bueno. They didn’t want the darling boy to be destroyed by his sexual desires or the intoxicating drink distilled from the fermented juice of certain species of agave.
    “It’s all the same,” Rivera had told the dump kids, darkly. “Believe me, you’re not exactly uplifted by what you end up with. Those low women and too much mescal—you’re left looking at that little worm!”
    Juan Diego knew the dump boss meant the worm at the bottom of the mescal bottle, but Lupe said that el jefe had also been thinking about his penis—how it looked after he’d been with a prostitute.
    “You believe all men are always thinking about their penises,” Juan Diego told his sister.
    “All men are always thinking about their penises,” the mind reader said. To a degree, this was the point past which Lupe would no longer allow herself to adore the good gringo. The doomed American had crossed an imaginary line—the penis line, perhaps, though Lupe would never have put it that way.
    One night, when the dump reader was reading aloud to Lupe, Rivera was with them in the shack in Guerrero, listening to the reading, too. The dump boss was probably building a new bookcase, or there was something wrong with the barbecue and Rivera was fixing it; maybe he had stopped by just to see if Dirty White (a.k.a. Saved from Death) had died.
    The book Juan Diego was reading that night was another discarded academic tome, a mind-numbing exercise in scholarship, which had been designated for burning by one or the other of those two old Jesuit priests Father Alfonso and Father Octavio.
    This particular work of unread academia had actually been written by a Jesuit, and its subject was both literary and historical—namely, an analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s writing on Thomas Hardy. As the dump reader had not read anything by Lawrence or Hardy, a scholarly examination of Lawrence’s writing on Hardy would have been mystifying—even in Spanish. And Juan Diego had selected this particular book because it was in English; he’d wanted more practice reading English, though his less-than-rapt audience (Lupe and Rivera and the disagreeable dog Dirty White) might have understood him better en español.
    To add to the difficulty, several pages of the book had been consumed by fire, and a vile odor from the basurero still clung to the burned book; Dirty White wanted to sniff it, repeatedly.
    The dump boss didn’t like Lupe’s saved-from-death dog any better than Juan Diego did. “I think you should have left this one in the milk carton,” was all el jefe told her, but Lupe (as always) was indignant in Dirty White’s defense.
    And just then Juan Diego read aloud to them an unrepeatable passage, concerning someone’s idea of the fundamental interrelatedness of all beings.
    “Wait, wait, wait—stop right there,” Rivera interrupted