A jogger jogged by then stopped and doubled back. He gave us an inquiring little wave, said something we couldn’t hear. We paused our music, took down our headphones.
“Excusez,” he said, “Cigarette?”
“Of course,” we said and pulled out our pack, shook a smoke loose, and held it out to him.
“Light?,” he asked and mimed lighting his cigarette.
We offered him our lighter, but he made a face and gestured at his sweaty state. He must have been running for a while or suffered a sort of glandular condition. He was drenched. His black shorts and his t-shirt - white with LES ABYMES printed boldly in black across the chest - were soaked almost through.
We leaned forward and he leaned forward. We lit his cigarette.
“Thank you. I don’t have money to pay.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
He was still slightly out of breath, but taking long drags of the cigarette all the same.
“I can tell you a joke instead.”
“No, really, that’s ok.”
“Do you know about when Sherlock Holmes went camping?”
We shook our head.
“Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson once decided to go camping for the weekend. They went off to a large forest, hiked for a while, found a nice spot, cleared away some of the branches and leaves on the ground, you know, set up their tent. It was nice. Quiet. They had not had a chance to enjoy each other’s company for some time, to be together without worrying over hounds or cardboard boxes, you know.”
“Sure. Ok.”
“They told each other stories, laughed over solved cases, discussed still unsolved ones, ate dinner, and when it got dark they went to sleep. Hours later, in the middle of the night, something woke them. A little frightened, Watson turned to Sherlock.
‘What was that?” What happened?,’ Watson asked.
‘Just look, Watson, and tell me what you see.’
‘Well, I see the sky, Sherlock.’
‘And what can you deduce from that?’
‘Well, I suppose I see many, many stars so that means there are many, many planets. There is maybe one just like this one. I can also see that Mercury is in Pisces which means something about communication and intuition. Our subconscious is maybe more sensitive right now. We are better able to make tacit connections. The sky is also very clear, there are no clouds, which means we will probably have lovely weather tomorrow. I see many things, Sherlock, but what do you see?’
‘I see that someone has stolen our fucking tent, Watson.’”
The jogger laughed hard and coughed a little. We laughed, too.
“It’s good, no?”
“It is, yeah. Didn’t know Sherlock and Watson hung out outside work.”
“Oh, that’s just a premise. It sets up the punchline. It’s not a real story.”
“Right, yeah.”
“But maybe Sherlock and Watson going camping is the punchline of a different joke?,” he ventured, “Or maybe it is part of a different story?”
We shrugged. A silence hung for a second.
“Do you know the difference between a mystery and a story?”
“Is this another joke?,” we asked.
“Maybe,” he laughed, “I heard someone ask it once at Guadalupe - but I didn’t hear the answer.”
“It sounds like the premise of a joke.”
“Maybe,” he said a little more seriously, then tossed the cigarette butt to the ground and crushed it under his heel. “Thank you for the cigarette.”
“No problem,” we said, “Thank you for the jokes.”
‘The joke,” he said and got right back to running away.
Headed back indoors, we googled “Guadalupe” out of idle curiosity. We saw pictures of the Virgin Mary, a shroud in Mexico with her image miraculously imprinted on it. We read a little about Our Lady of Guadalupe, then still more curious about what the jogger had meant when he said he heard that question about mysteries and stories “at Guadalupe” we googled “Our Lady of Guadalupe Montreal.”
There’s a church, it turns out, not far from where we were. According to the website, it’s a Catholic church devoted to, as they put it, “caring pastorally for Latin American immigrants who live in the greater Montreal region and its surroundings.” We still hadn’t decided what we were going to write about today, so figured it couldn’t hurt to head over there. Maybe at Notre-Dame-de-Guadalupe we’d learn the difference between a mystery and a story.
It was late in the day. The doors were locked. We decided, though, to walk around the building. See if we could see anything that had anything to do with mysteries or stories.
Around the side of the building, there’s a side entrance. You, we imagine, can see that “Fuck Jesus” is scrawled on the door. It’s just chalk. Someone has evidently tried to rub out the “u” in “Fuck.” Why they didn’t, say, grab a damp sponge and have done with the whole thing is an open question. Why “F ck” might be less offensive or upsetting than “Fuck” likewise. We wondered, briefly, if maybe the author was the same person who tried to erase the “u” in the message. Maybe they regretted writing it immediately, maybe they came up with verb to do with or to Jesus but got interrupted mid-revision.
An elderly woman just then walked by with an enormous shaggy dog and looked at us suspiciously. Worried that we were going to be mistaken for the author of the message - caught photographing our own handiwork - we started to walk away. The elderly woman with the enormous shaggy dog, though, called out.
“She writes it even if they clean it!”
We looked back at her.
“She writes it all the time. If they clean it, she writes it again. It looks like it’s always there, but it’s always a new one. The same message, but the writing is different. She always writes it.”
“How do you know it’s always the same person?”
“The way she writes is always the same, but little changes. You can tell if you look. The J. The F. I can see it’s her. Always the same even when they clean it. People say they don’t know who it is, but they know. I know.”
“Who is she? Why does she write it?”
“I think because of Jesus,” she said, “but not Jesus Christ but a man named Jesus that she knows. That’s what I think. No one would write that about Jesus Christ. It’s unbelievable. Disgusting. It’s probably about a man called Jesus. She has troubles with Jesus, a man, so she writes it there so everyone can see. This I understand.”
“This is someone you know?”
“I have seen her. I don’t know her. I know she writes it. She lives above the Mexican restaurant,” she said and pointed east, “You know from looking that she has boy trouble.”
“Ok. Well, thank you. Oh, but - sorry, this is going to seem strange - do you know the difference between a mystery and a story?”
“Yes,” she said and looked almost insulted, “Of course. Who doesn’t?” Her dog, impatient now, tugged at the leash and she waved a confused little goodbye and went off back on her way down the street.
We walked a little while in the direction the elderly woman had pointed. We were skeptical that that graffiti had anything to do with a woman who may or may not live above a Mexican restaurant. Even if we weren’t skeptical, we weren’t confident that we could identify a woman who may have had strong feelings about a man named Jesus or Jesus Christ on sight. Maybe, though, we’d see someone with chalk on their hands or overhear a heated argument where Jesus (one or the other) came up loudly and that’d clue us in. This wouldn’t be much of a story, but it’d be something to write about.
Two or three blocks later, we arrived at a Mexican restaurant.
We shouldn’t have been as surprised as we were to see Guadalupe again. It’s probably no coincidence that on the same street, catering to the same neighborhood, Guadalupe shows up more than once. We wondered if it was at this Guadalupe that the jogger heard the question about mysteries and stories. It makes as much sense as anything else. We took a picture despite knowing that a Mexican restaurant named La Guadalupe wasn’t something we were going to write about. There was no story here.
We didn’t see the man on the balcony while taking the picture. We didn’t notice him watching us. It was only in checking to see that the picture looked half-decent that we saw him and by the time we looked back up he’d turned around and gone back inside. What, we wonder, did he think we were up to? Did he think we were photographing him? Or the restaurant? Or the building? Or maybe he thought that we, like others, were just looking for the woman with troubles with Jesus and chalk on her hands?
We crossed the street, curious about the menu and what the place looked like inside. There was a very pale, very bald man loading boxes into and out of the restaurant’s sidedoor. He told us that they were closed as if the interior darkness of the place hadn’t tipped us off. We asked the very pale, very bald man if he knew the difference between a mystery and a story.
“A mystery doesn’t have a resolution, but a story does,” he said without pausing from his work. He said it so matter of factly. He didn’t even need to think about it.
“But what about Sherlock Holmes?,” we asked, “Those are mysteries and they have resolutions.”
“They can’t be mysteries if they have resolutions. What’s the mystery, then? If a mystery has a resolution it’s just a story. If you see a box, but cannot see what’s in it - then that’s a mystery. If you see a box, open it, discover its contents - that’s a story.”
We genuinely didn’t know how to deal with how thorough this man’s answer was. It seemed incredible that he was humoring us at all. Maybe he was the exact person who had posed the question that our jogger had overheard. Maybe this was a schtick of his. He’d opine to customers about mysteries and stories, hold court, impress them with his strong grasp of genre.
“Someone told us that they heard people talking about the difference between mysteries and stories at Guadalupe,” we said.
“This is a restaurant. People talk about everything here. What did he say he heard?”
“He said at Guadalupe he heard someone ask ‘What’s the difference between a mystery and a story?’”
“So what? It’s a stupid question. Why does it matter? Are you here just for that?”
“Sort of. We were looking for a story for our blog.”
“And this is what you came up with? Your readers must be very patient.”
“We probably won’t write about this.”
“About mysteries and stories at Guadalupe.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not much of a story!,” he laughed, “But stories are easy! William James, you know William James, he said that all we do is to tell stories. We have experiences, look at things, then we tell ourselves stories about what those experiences mean, what the things we have seen are, and how it all fits together. He wrote once in a letter, I think, about scattering beans on a table. It’s a strange image. Probably dried beans. If you scatter beans on a table, he says, they mean nothing by themselves. They’re just there. If you look at them, though, and then have to describe them - well, then you have to tell a little story, you have to describe a pattern or some kind of relationship between the beans and the table and everything. The beans on the table are the facts without us while the story we tell about the beans are the facts with us, are the total facts. The facts without us, he says, are just as false as the stories we tell that comprise the facts with us. Funny, right? Either way we get things wrong. Or maybe we get things right either way?”
“Wouldn’t the beans on the table, then, be a mystery? Because they have no resolution? There’s no final way to describe them.”
There was a silence.
“Did William James say anything about why we tell stories? Why we can’t just leave the beans on the table without trying to make sense of them or how they fit into everything else?
He thought for a second.
“Maybe because mysteries are frustrating! We can’t just look at beans on a table! And imagine if we were talking about more than beans!,” he laughed, “And what about you? What is your story going to be? Do you know how it’s going to end? Maybe you’re writing a mystery and you don’t know it yet!”
We laughed and he laughed. He excused himself back to work. We apologized for having interrupted him and his boxes. We wished him a good night and he wished us the same.
We headed home wondering if we’d maybe be forced to talk about beans. We didn’t have much time left in the day. We took a slight detour, wondering if the city had gotten around to cleaning up all the wrecked trees strewn across parks from the ice storm.
They hadn’t. There were branches of varying sizes everywhere. Mixed in with all the branches was random garbage - old masks, garbage bags, receipts - and but also somehow mixed in with all that tangled and twisted wood we saw
“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes,” Arthur Conan Doyle once said maybe while camping or maybe at Guadalupe or in Guadaloupe or maybe in passing to a blogger just trying and failing to find a story to tell.
Omg!! wtf!! this STORY is a MYSTERY!!! 😲🤯😵💫
Another funny mysterious story. I grew up one block from a church called Notre Dame de La Guadeloupe in Hull QC, now known as Gatineau. It was not as mysterious and a bit boring since it had no graffiti at all. I did happen to see on occasion a lady with a stick of chalk wandering aimlessly… It is a small world.