Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  When Madrina asks now if all of the Santos have died, she’s really wondering whether a whole time has passed, her time, her age—and a generation with it—a generation with a living memory of the deep family bonds into Mexico’s past.

  All of the Santos have died.

  I am one of their survivors.

  2

  Códices de los Abuelos

  Grandfather Codices

  Just past dawn at the hilltop church in San Juan Tzompántepec, the morning in Puebla is already bright. Garlands of silvery fog left behind after a heavy storm the night before are still visible in the valley below, running sluggishly along the creeks, tattered in the treetops, swaddling other hills in the distance. I am here looking for faint traces of the grandfather no Mexican wants to admit to: Hernán Cortés.

  On its march to the Aztec capital, his army had fought a bloody battle with fearsome Tlaxcaltecan Indian warriors here. The Spaniards were nearly defeated. Legends tell how Cortés himself only survived a likely fatal chase by hiding in a hollow Tzompantle tree on this site. I came here to find a painting of the conquistador and his Indian consort, Malintzín, that is thought to be the only one painted by an Indian artist in Cortés’s lifetime. But it is inside the church and the church door is locked.

  On my father’s side, Madrina and Tía Pepa had always said the Garcias had Spanish blood, though no one remembered exactly how, or from where. The Santos knew still less of their heritage, Spanish or Indian. In my mother’s family, in the Lopez and Vela lines, Uncle Lico had found the deeds of Spanish land grants that had given our ancestors title to lands in Mier, Texas, near the Rio Grande, in the eighteenth century.

  Most Mexican families are Mestizo, mixtures of Spanish and Indian heritage. But, after the Revolution of 1910, after three centuries of Spanish disregard for the indigenous world, the Mexican soul became Indian. Officially, the revolution sought to exorcise the influence of all things Spanish. Monasteries and convents were closed. Royal land deeds were nullified. Monuments to conquerors and viceroys were destroyed. Artists, with government support, painted epic murals of the pre-Columbian world that had been wracked by the Spanish. Poets and writers celebrated the Mestizo world of the new Mexico, a fusion of Indian and Spanish cosmologies. Gradually, the Iberian light cast on us by our Spanish past was further eclipsed.

  But, I am back in Mexico, looking for traces of those first days in the age of Nueva España. From the doorstep of the church, I see an old man, unshaven, wearing two weathered denim jackets, meticulously shoveling soil into a bucket in the small cemetery that lay inside the walled churchyard. When he tells me his name is Ramón Lopez, I joke that we are parientes, or relatives, as Mexicans often call each other when they share a common family name. He asks me where my mother’s family came from, and when I reply, “Cotulla, Texas,” he whistles in amazement.

  “I don’t think any of my Lopez ever made it that far north!” Cotulla is only one hour north of the border.

  The heavy rains of the day before had sunken the dirt in the grave of his third wife, and Ramón has come there to fill it in for the third time since her death a month ago, at age seventy-eight. His earlier two wives are buried together in another grave, nearby. As to his age, Ramón says only he is older than the dirt, laughing with a coarse rasp through a toothless grin.

  “I don’t remember Cortés,” he says, “but I remember Zapata! My mother gave his soldiers chickens and avocados when they camped nearby, unknown to the dictator Porfirio’s army.”

  After I tell him of my morning’s quest, he says there is no such painting of Cortés in this church, and he should know. He has been the caretaker there for sixty-eight years, during which time he has dusted off the noses of every saint, scrubbed every chipped mosaic, and cleaned the gilded frame of every painting.

  “Maybe the padrecito has it in his bedroom, I don’t know, because I never went in there. Or maybe they took it to la Capitál. They take anything that’s worth money.”

  But there is something he wants to show me. Ramón wipes his hands on his pants and asks me to follow him to the rear of the church building. After we walk through the scrubby brush at the edge of the churchyard, Ramón stoops down on one knee and pulls away the high, grassy weeds near the bottom of one wall, exposing an old, elaborately carved stone disc, slightly larger than a garbage can lid, set into a circular niche in the wall. Ramón wipes it with his jacket sleeve.

  “You know what this is?”

  At first, the carved miasma I see there makes it hard to focus on any details. It isn’t one of the old stone calendar discs of the Indian time-keepers, calibrated and segmented in glyphic language, like the great Aztecan sun wheel of Tenochtitlán. It is exquisitely carved with interlocking stems and flowers, coursing around a central tree, and all around it are thistle heads, rabbits, frogs, scorpions, bees, conch shells, and an arc of stars and their rays. Around the entire border, the sleek, curved glyph for wind appears in an unbroken chain, making the whole circle look radiant and in flux, as if the stone were meant to capture the churning energy of a creation where all things are connected in a single great motion.

  While the wall has clearly been whitewashed hundreds of times, the stone is pristine, cherished, hidden away, and guarded by the people like a secret treasure. The Spanish often chose to build their churches over the Indian pyramids, as they did over the great ceremonial pyramid in Cholula, not too far away from here. Here, this old Indian disc is imbedded in the church wall like a cornerstone, anchoring the Christian sanctuary in the dark Mexican earth of the ancestors’ time. Perhaps the disc might have had some ceremonial function. It looks like a vision of the sky wrapped around the great tree of the world, alive with the spirits of familiar plants and animals of the region. Ramón says no one really knows what it means, but the parishioners of La Parroquia de San Juan Tzompántepec nonetheless regard it as an heirloom, fighting over the years with priests who sought to extract what they considered a pagan abomination.

  “Who put this here?” I ask Ramón.

  He shrugs his shoulders. “Pues . . . ,” he says, “los Abuelos.”

  The Grandfathers.

  By the time I was born in 1957, my grandfathers were already long gone. When their names were mentioned, once in a long while, by parents or aunts and uncles, it was always with great ceremony and formality. There were never disparaging words of any kind. My mother’s father, Leonides, owned a dry goods store in Cotulla, Texas, and my father’s father, Juan José, with the same name as my father, was a gardener and laborer in San Antonio. Both were remembered as men of few words, prone to meting out family justice in swift and unwavering fashion. I hadn’t seen pictures of Juan José, but in an old photograph of Leonides, taken when he was already in his early fifties, he is sitting next to a great desk in his store, stacked high with papers weighted by horseshoes. A big man with a bald head, and light-complexioned for a Mexicano, he is dressed in a suit and vest, with a shiny watch fob hanging, and his demeanor is serious, with a forceful gaze as direct and unyielding as an old judge’s. If the stories are to be believed, both grandfathers were exemplars of virtue, honesty, and integrity, beloved by their families and communities alike. Los Abuelos never indulged in alcohol. Both Juan José and Leonides were said to be teetotalers who rarely drank, even at weddings or during holidays. There are no tales of drunkenness or recklessness among them. Yet neither lived to meet a single one of their scores of grandchildren.

  Did they leave anything behind? Was there anything of the memory of los Abuelos left for us, their progeny, to share? It felt as if their legacies had been completely extinguished, perpetually lost to their descendants.

  Perhaps the answers lay in the words of Tundama, the powerful Chibcha Indian cacique, or king. In 1541, in the part of Latin America that is present-day Colombia, Tundama rejected a peace overture made by Quesada, the Spanish conquistador, with a warning that prophesied the invincibility of the past, even in the face of imminent defeat and death:You desecra
te the sanctuaries of our Gods and sack the houses of men who haven’t offended you. Who would choose to undergo these insults? We now know that you are not immortal or descended from the sun. Note well the survivors who await you, to undeceive you that victory is always yours.

  Grandfather Leonides used to help people in Cotulla by using his horse-drawn wagon to transport corpses from their homes to the undertaker to be prepared for their final rest. Many of the Mexican families of the town would ask him to speak at the funerals since he knew everyone and, as one of my aunts put it, “He always spoke so pretty.”

  Once, just before he died, Grandfather Leonides awoke Uncles Leo, Lauro, and Lico in the middle of the night. Without telling them where they were going, he put their jackets on and led them down a side street until they were just out of town, where the railroad tracks passed through a large, flat, dry pasture. There were other people there, holding candles, singing and praying softly in the moonlit indigo evening. Uncle Lauro remembered how it felt as if hours went by before everyone heard the sound of a slowly approaching train, heading south for Laredo. The three-car procession was decked with brass torches and great ribbons of black bunting that waved in the warm night breeze like banners.

  “It is the body of Anfitrio Mendiola!” Grandfather whispered to my uncles, who struggled through the crowd to get a clear sight of the funeral train.

  Mendiola was one of the most acclaimed Mexican stage actors of the time, and Grandfather had seen him perform in classical Spanish plays on buying trips to Monterrey. He had died while working on a silent movie in California.

  Now his body was being taken home to Nuevo León, and all along the route through south Texas his fans had come out to the tracks to offer their despedida. The glass-walled car, like a traveling shrine, passed them, and the candlelit, draped coffin was visible to the small group of the devoted from Cotulla who had been keeping vigil half of the night. They crossed themselves and waited until the train fell below the horizon. Then they made their way back home as dawn was coming on.

  “Within a month, he was gone, too,” Uncle Lauro said, speaking of his own father.

  “An ordinary day, working in the store, talking to everyone, then, in the afternoon, a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and he was gone.

  “He was in his underwear, on his bed, and there was silver froth on his lips. And not a doctor to be found.”

  Even in our own homelands, our traditions were fragile, and without los Abuelos to serve as their guarantors, many of them have been lost in the translation between the worlds of Mexico and Texas, Mexican and Anglo. Great-uncle Frank, Uela’s eldest brother Francisco, was like a grandfather to me. He lived with my grandmother for many years before her death. If las Viejitas showed me how the world of spirits worked amidst the world of the living, Uncle Frank, a naturally gifted inventor, engineer, and metallurgist, tried to teach something to all of us about how to act in the world, how to conduct ourselves in the proper Mexicano way that his father, great-grandfather Jacobo, had taught him.

  He told me that Mexicans born in the United States were different from the Mexicans of Mexico. They acted differently. Uncle Frank felt they had lost the long-held Mexican traditions of courtesy and love for others. Worse, they had lost respect for their elders, and for the dead. If he was on a sidewalk in the middle of town and a chain of cars in a funeral cortege passed by, he would stop, even if he was the only one doing so, to stand erect, take off his hat, and cross himself, waiting until the procession went by. Uncle Frank worried that, once lost, these traditions would never again return.

  “When we were on the other side, in Mexico, they taught us to respect the older ones. This is gone now. No one respects the old people.”

  Whether we’re born north or south of the border, rich or poor, proud or contrite, we decide whether we will continue to abandon the often beautiful, sometimes terrifying stories of the past by small degrees, or, against the drift, to remember, to salvage—to conjure and resurrect them anew. Every Mexican lives this destiny out by either embracing, or falling further, from the sources of hidden light left behind in the past with los Abuelos.

  Great-grandfather Jacobo Garcia, Uela’s father, was a perfect twin, absolutely identical, except for a large brown mole, a lunar, in the middle of his brother Abrán’s cheek. A hand-painted photograph of the two hangs on a living room wall in Tía Pepa’s house, with the two of them looking like a mirrored reflection, their hands to their hearts, and crabbed expressions on their mustachioed faces. They looked so much alike that it is said that Jacobo once found himself holding a conversation in a full-size mirror when he thought he was talking to Abrán. And they stayed identical, until their deaths in their nineties.

  In addition to Jacobo and his twin, there were twins in the next generations—Jacobo’s sons, Manuel and Valentín, now dead, and my brothers, George and Charles. There were other twins, elsewhere in the family, as if there was a regular doubling pulse in the bloodline. As the Garcias moved through time, this pulse resulted in the presence in every generation of people who lived with their mirror image. With so many doubles around the tribe, it made the rest of us more aware of our own solitariness.

  Uncle Frank, like most of the Garcias, lived into his late nineties. His long, lanky frame and enormous hands could make him seem like an intimidating old gentleman, but his limpid eyes and gentle mien showed a tenderness that he shared with the rest of his siblings. He remained lean, disciplined, and active to the end. When Uela died, Frank was already in his late eighties. But on the way to the cemetery, we spotted him along Colorado Street, with his thumb out, hitchhiking. Somehow, everyone had left the funeral parlor without him.

  By then, he had been alone almost twenty years. In the 1950s, his only son had died young, suddenly and mysteriously, in a motel in Laredo where he was on business. Uncle Frank’s wife never got over that loss, and she also died a few years after their son. As the eldest of the Garcias, Uncle Frank had been the one who came alone to Texas and eventually helped to bring the rest of the family north. The Garcias had left their life in Mexico behind. He saw his two greatest inventions—a dump truck and an industrial pecan sheller—stolen by dishonest business partners. Yet, despite all the sadness that he had experienced in his life, he was content. Years later, after being blind for nearly twenty years, he had a cataract operation, and suddenly he could see again. Living with Madrina and Uncle Manuel, he spent the last several years of his life reading historical novels about the time of Jesus, mowing the lawn, making drawings of new inventions, such as motorized drying racks for clothes and garage doors that opened sideways. When we frequently talked together, he saw all of the lives in our family as part of one continuous story, one mission, one journey.

  Great-grandfather Jacobo’s father, el abuelo Teofilo Garcia, had lived to be one hundred years old, and Uncle Frank remembered him vividly from his youth in Coahuila. As a young child on a farm outside of Palaú in the middle of the nineteenth century, Teofilo was kidnapped and raised by the Kikapu Indians in the Coahuila sierra. By then, the Kikapu had been roaming in the nearby mountains for decades, occasionally raiding the Mexican frontier settlements when food was scarce in the wild. It was said they had once been a part of the Cherokee nation, but in the nineteenth century, when Texas Republicans expelled all the Indians to the nearest border, the Kikapu were repelled across the Rio Grande. President Benito Juárez later granted them a rich piece of territory on the headwaters of the Sabinas River high in the mountain range called the Serranía del Burro. The land was named el Nacimiento, “the birthplace,” where the Indians remain to this day.

  Uncle Frank recalled that el abuelo Teofilo had grown up with the Kikapu, under the name Tibú. “Qué curioso, for a name, no?” he always began, as he prepared to tell the story again.

  It was years later, on a dawn raid against the town of Múzquiz that Abuelo Teofilo was wounded and left behind. According to Uncle Frank, he was rescued and cared for by a couple who found him, shivering
, hysterical, and bleeding from a gunshot wound to the leg, by the banks of the Rio Sabinas. While his wounds healed, he stayed in their home, eating and sleeping “like an animal” on the floor in the corner of a room, unable to speak Spanish or to communicate in any way.

  Then, there came a day when the woman who had rescued the young man heard him singing after breakfast while he lay on the floor looking at the ceiling. It was a lullaby that she remembered teaching her own child eleven years before, when he had been kidnapped by the band of Indians. She began to sing along with him. Suddenly, from deep inside of himself, he recognized her voice from where it still burned for him as faint as starlight.

  Uncle Frank relished telling the end of the story, sitting upright in his chair.

  “And from this moment on, Abuelo Teofilo was reunited with his parents, and stayed thereafter in town with them, later bringing home a Kikapu woman he had already married, with whom he later fathered Jacobo, my father, and Abrán, my uncle—absolutely identical twins.

  “Abuelos can be lost and found,” Frank would say about his grandfather Teofilo.

  “Somos de los abuelos perdidos y los hallados.”

  We are of the grandfathers lost, and of those found.

  It was late afternoon one May day in 1974 when the distant voices of los antepasados were in the parched Texas scirocco wind that blew through San Fernando Cemetery, feeling like a breath the planet exhaled thousands of years before. It was the same wind that had always been blowing through our lives and the lives of all those we had brought there in so many long, slow automobile corteges down Culebra Street, past barrio taquerías and hubcap shops, to the great Mexicano necropolis of San Antonio. A wind of story, a wind of forgetting, a perpetual wind, through storms and droughts and calorones that is a blessing from our ancestors.