Avenue of Mysteries Read Online Free PDF Page B

a rough-spoken, hateful man, but he knew his way around Jamaica, Queens, where a wide street reminded the long-ago dump reader of Periférico—a street divided by train tracks in Oaxaca. Periférico was where el jefe used to take the dump kids shopping for food; the cheapest, closest-to-rotten produce was available in that market, in La Central—except in 1968, during the student revolts, when La Central was occupied by the military and the food market moved to the zócalo in the center of Oaxaca.
    That was when Juan Diego and Lupe were twelve and eleven, and they first became familiar with the area of Oaxaca around the zócalo. The student revolts didn’t last long; the market would move back to La Central, and Periférico (with that forlorn-looking footbridge over the train tracks). Yet the zócalo remained in the dump kids’ hearts; it had become their favorite part of town. The kids spent as much time away from the dump, in the zócalo, as they could.
    Why wouldn’t a boy and girl from Guerrero be interested in the center of things? Why wouldn’t two niños de la basura be curious to see allthe tourists in town? The city dump wasn’t on the tourist maps. What tourist ever went sightseeing in the basurero? One whiff of the dump, or the stinging in your eyes from the fires perpetually burning there, would send you running back to the zócalo; one look at the dump dogs (or the way those dogs looked at you) would do it.
    Was it any wonder—around this time, during the student riots in 1968, when the military took over La Central and the dump kids started hanging around the zócalo—that Lupe, who was only eleven, began her crazy and conflicted obsessions with Oaxaca’s various virgins? That her brother was the only one who could understand her babble cut Lupe off from any meaningful dialogue with adults. And of course these were religious virgins, miraculous virgins—of the kind who commanded a following, not only among eleven-year-old girls.
    Wasn’t it to be expected that Lupe would, at first, be drawn to these virgins? (Lupe could read minds; she knew no real-life counterpart who had her ability.) However, what dump kid wouldn’t be a little suspicious of miracles? What were these competing virgins doing to prove themselves in the here and now? Had these miraculous virgins performed any miracles lately ? Wasn’t Lupe likely to be super-critical of these highly touted but nonperforming virgins?
    There was a virgin shop in Oaxaca; the dump kids discovered it on one of their first outings in the area of the zócalo. This was Mexico: the country had been overrun by the Spanish conquistadors. Hadn’t the ever-proselytizing Catholic Church been in the virgin-selling business for years? Oaxaca had once been central to the Mixtec and Zapotec civilizations. Hadn’t the Spanish conquest been selling virgins to the indigenous population for centuries—beginning with the Augustinians and the Dominicans, and thirdly the Jesuits, all pushing their Virgin Mary?
    There was more than Mary to deal with now—so Lupe had noticed from the many churches in Oaxaca—but nowhere in the city were the warring virgins on such tawdry display as you could find them (for sale) in the virgin shop on Independencia. There were life-size virgins and virgins who were larger than life-size. To name only three who were featured, in a variety of cheap and tacky replicas, throughout the shop: Mother Mary, of course, but also Our Lady of Guadalupe, and naturally Nuestra Señora de la Soledad. La Virgen de la Soledad was the virgin whom Lupe disparaged as merely a “local hero”—the much-maligned Solitude Virgin and her “stupid burro story.” (The burro, a small donkey, was probably blameless.)
    The virgin shop also sold life-size (and larger than life-size) versions of Christ on the Cross; if you were strong enough, you could carry home a giant Bleeding Jesus, but the principal purpose of the virgin shop, which had been in business in