Our Lady of Guadalupe

The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe fig­ures promi­nently in The Mys­tery of Things. Known to Catholics as “Mother of the Amer­i­cas”, her mirac­u­lous image, which was given in 1532 to the Aztec Chris­t­ian, St. Juan Diego, a mere decade after the cat­a­strophic con­quest of Mex­ico by the Span­ish, yearly draws mil­lions of vis­iters to her shrine in Mex­ico City, par­tic­u­larly around the time of her feast, Decem­ber 12.

For a larger close-up of Our Lady, click on the pic­ture to the right.

Here’s an excerpt from chap­ter two of the novel in which the image first appears:

James’s eyes had fal­tered on a large pic­ture on the wall behind him. It was the aston­ish­ing color that caught his eye first, the dusty but lumi­nes­cent turquoise of a floor length man­tle cov­er­ing the head and body of a dark haired young woman. Golden rays streamed out­wards from behind the woman’s back, as if she were block­ing out the noon­day sun. It was in the same instant that James real­ized that some­thing in the woman’s gen­tle face reminded him of Lupe Cruz tht he also real­ized, by the woman’s rev­er­ent pos­ture and folded hands, that he was look­ing at an icon of the Vir­gin Mary, painted in a style such as he had never seen.

Then James felt as if he couldn’t breathe, because he had seen this pic­ture before, or rather some­thing very much like it, in a wak­ing dream from his other life—a vision of beauty, glory and ter­ror, which he had spent the bet­ter part of the last three years try­ing to blot from his memory.

A bird­like tremolo war­bled in James’s mind, and his nos­trils filled with the for­got­ten scent of roses.