Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving Read Free Book Online Page A

if his future were predetermined, and he wasn’t resisting it.
    Juan Diego believed he was not so famous a writer that many of his readers recognized him, and strangers to his work never did. Only those who could be called his diehard fans found him. They were mostly women—older women, certainly, but many college girls were among his books’ ardent readers.
    Juan Diego didn’t believe it was the subject of his novels that attracted women readers; he always said that women were the most enthusiastic readers of fiction, not men. He would offer no theory to explain this; he’d simply observed that this was true.
    Juan Diego wasn’t a theorizer; he was not big on speculation. He was even a little bit famous for what he’d said in an interview when a journalist had asked him to speculate on a certain shopworn subject.
    “I don’t speculate,” Juan Diego had said. “I just observe; I only describe.” Naturally, the journalist—a persistent young fellow—had pressed the point. Journalists like speculation; they’re always asking novelists if the novel is dead, or dying. Remember: Juan Diego had snatched the firstnovels he read from the hellfires of the basurero; he’d burned his hands saving books. You don’t ask a dump reader if the novel is dead, or dying.
    “Do you know any women ?” Juan Diego had asked this young man. “I mean women who read, ” he said, his voice rising. “You should talk to women—ask them what they read!” (By now, Juan Diego was shouting.) “The day women stop reading—that’s the day the novel dies!” the dump reader cried.
    Writers who have any audience have more readers than they know. Juan Diego was more famous than he thought.
    T HIS TIME , IT WAS a mother and her daughter who discovered him—as only his most passionate readers did. “I would have recognized you anywhere. You couldn’t disguise yourself from me if you tried,” the rather aggressive mother said to Juan Diego. The way she spoke to him—well, it was almost as if he had tried to disguise himself. And where had he seen such a penetrating stare before? Without a doubt, that towering and most imposing statue of the Virgin Mary —she had such a stare. It was a way the Blessed Virgin had of looking down at you, but Juan Diego could never tell if Mother Mary’s expression was pitying or unforgiving. (He couldn’t be sure in the case of this elegant-looking mother who was one of his readers, either.)
    As for the daughter who was also his fan, Juan Diego thought she was somewhat easier to read. “I would have recognized you in the dark—if you just spoke to me, even less than a complete sentence, I would have known who you were,” the daughter told him a little too earnestly. “Your voice, ” she said, shivering—as if she couldn’t continue. She was young and dramatic, but pretty in a kind of peasant way; there was a thickness in her wrists and ankles, a sturdiness in her hips and low-slung breasts. Her skin was darker than her mother’s; her facial features were more prominent, or less refined, and—especially in her manner of speaking—she was more blunt, more coarse.
    “More like one of us,” Juan Diego could imagine his sister saying. (More indigenous-looking, Lupe would have thought.)
    It unnerved Juan Diego that he suddenly imagined what tarted-up replications the virgin shop in Oaxaca might have made of this mother and her daughter. That Christmas-parties place would have exaggerated the slightly slipshod way the daughter dressed, but was it her clothes that looked a little slovenly or the careless way she wore them?
    Juan Diego thought the virgin shop would have given the daughter’slife-size mannequin a sluttish posture—a come-on appearance, as if the fullness of her hips couldn’t possibly be contained. (Or was this Juan Diego’s fantasizing about the daughter?)
    That virgin shop, which the dump kids occasionally called The Girl, would have failed to come up with a mannequin to match