Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  It was Mother’s Day and we were visiting Uela’s grave. In San Antonio, Mother’s Day is like the Día de los Muertos in Mexico. It is a day when it is necessary and honorable to revere all of las Viejitas, whether living or departed. Earlier that week we had driven to Laredo, on the Texas border, where my mother’s mother and father were buried. We washed the cracked headstone, clipped the overgrown Bermuda grass, and pulled the weeds with dull flowers. I remembered a sunny autumn day many years before, seeing Grandmother Lopez, with a wry, almost pathetic little smile, standing proudly in a great caramel-colored fur coat next to that headstone with her name already etched into it, as Mother snapped her photograph. In that picture, Grandmother has an almost haughty expression on her face, as if to mock the death that awaited her, and to show that she had no fear about her destiny in that place.

  Back in San Antonio, standing by the graveside of my father’s parents at San Fernando Cemetery with my parents and two brothers, one scraggly mesquite tree offered sparse shade, and the scent of Mother’s Day chrysanthemums wafted across the grounds like a narcotic spell.

  It had been only nine months since “the great despedida,” as we all came to refer to that season of the sudden exodus of the family’s grandmothers. Despedida means a “fare thee well.” The September before, in the space of sixty days, just as if it were a scheduled embarkation, most of the remaining grandmothers from around the extended tribe took their leave from this world. Both my mother’s and father’s mothers. Uncle Richard’s mother. Aunt Minnie’s mother. For decades, they had known one another as comadres, sharing tamales and a discreet cerveza or two at Christmas parties—polite, regal, but aloof from each other.

  They left as a departing chorus would, each one carrying off their own veiled and unspoken secrets from the past with them. Their passing on left us that much further from all the Mexican stories, a little more engulfed by a world increasingly taken up by expressways, shopping malls, and the news of Vietnam and Watergate. In the end, resilient and fierce as each of them were, they had been vexed by this caterwauling century of revolutions and wars, and most of them died in fitful sleep, exhausted and confused by much of what they saw around them in their final years. In this way, they had joined los Abuelos.

  That afternoon, looking at the headstone on my grandparents’ grave, I noticed for the first time the dates of Abuelo Juan José’s life:

  1890-1939

  I was seventeen, and I thought I knew all there was to know about the family’s past in Mexico and Texas. I had gone to the dusty pueblitos in the Coahuila foothills of the Sierra Madre. I knew the stories of la Tía Fermina Ferguson, Mother’s clairvoyant albino aunt. On my father’s side, there was el Tío Santos Garcia, the evangelist, who had prophesied the end of the world would begin with a great tidal wave in the Gulf of Mexico. There was the Lopez dry goods store in Cotulla, where a young schoolteacher had listened to grandfather Leonides’s jokes and accepted gifts of cabbages and potatoes in exchange for giving Aunt Lydia English speech classes. The teacher was Lyndon Baines Johnson.

  All the faces, the few keepsakes, the shoeboxes of sepia-tinted photographs, were a Mexican Book of the Dead, with the shards of a story that had remained untold. Yet, the stories had always seemed to fit together like a brightly colored mural that, taken collectively, might tell the saga of a family. But I had never known that my father’s father, among so many others who lived to virtually biblical longevity, died at age forty-nine.

  I rehearsed what I knew.

  Abuelo Juan José was one of six children in his father’s second family. He had crossed the imaginary threshold of the Rio Grande, heading into Texas in the time of the revolution. Like the Garcias, he had come from the Serranía del Burro in the northwestern mountains of Coahuila. Settling in San Antonio, he had tended a network of subterranean floral greenhouses connected by tunnels on the large estate of Col. George W. Brackenridge, the onetime prince of the city’s business, social, and military gentry. Later my grandfather had worked in one of the local foundries, Alamo Iron Works, from which we still have two exquisitely crafted metal bookends in the shape of the Alamo and a polished bronze sculpture of two hands clasped in prayer, both of which he made.

  That day, I realized that no one had ever spoken about his death.

  I asked my father how his father had died.

  He fixed me with a quick, hard stare, strange for his usually gentle temperament. “He died too young,” he said, with a conclusive snap that told me he wasn’t going to say anything further.

  My brothers darted their eyes to me, and Mother gave a stern look. We had just come from a long Misa de las Madres, a “Mass for the Mothers,” and we were already getting uncomfortable in our church trappings in the bright Texas heat, but I asked again.

  Growing more exasperated, my father promised to tell me someday. His voice trailed off, indicating that this was the absolute last word on the matter, and burying the first secret we openly held from each other. I could tell he wasn’t really angry, though. It was more a feeling of a hidden sadness and fear, as if the act of forced remembering might bring with it an uncontrollable rush of despondency.

  I had seen this before in him.

  My father, usually a quiet man, often decorated his silences with his guitar. He could retreat into it for weeks. In the evenings, after dinner, off on his own, he sometimes strummed in a dream, staring distantly across the living room. At night, against sheets of cascading cicada song from outside, he leaned forward and down, with his head bowed, wrapping his arm around the instrument, throwing flamenco curls off the battered face of the guitar. In those evenings, he seemed to draw his breath from deep out of the lost world of his own past. Daddy slowly drew his hand up, backward against the strings, singing slowly.

  Ma-ala-gue-ña-a Sal-e-rosa-a-a . . .

  Days later, I still felt a gnawing curiosity about Grandfather’s death. Maybe it was a hunting mishap, I thought, or maybe an accident during one of the days I had heard about when the whole Santos-Garcia family had worked as pickers on one of the farms surrounding San Antonio.

  Then, Mother told me. She closed her bedroom door behind her, and spoke in a hushed, whispered voice. She wanted me to know my father’s outburst at his parents’ grave had come from a very deep place.

  Abuelo Juan José had committed suicide.

  She said that on one morning in 1939, Abuelo had been missing, and everybody was out looking for him. Uncles and aunts, even neighbors. Apparently, it was Daddy, along with his uncle Chale, who found him dead, floating, drowned in the San Antonio River where it crosses Roosevelt Park, near the old Lone Star brewery, on the south side of town. My father was twenty-two years old.

  Standing there with Mother, the windows bright with Texas sunlight, the air of the house chilled with air-conditioned calm, all the decades seemed to telescope into a moment. Perhaps my father, along with the rest of the family, felt it was their encargo to bear the story in silence, as if we might vanquish something dark in our hearts by breaking the webs of telling and retelling that told us who we were, where we came from, and why we were here.

  In that moment, I felt a pang of the fear of drowning I had always had deep inside of me. Suddenly, it swept through me like the shadow of an unknown memory. The first time I had felt it, I was swimming in the Guadalupe River, in New Braunfels, north of San Antonio. My legs had gotten tangled in the long, undulating plumes of weeds in the green water by the bank. I felt myself falling and falling, as if from an enormous tree that stretched up into the deep blue ether of the sky. I saw ribbons of vivid colors coming out from every part of my body, the faces of family members, Padrino Julín who saved me once from choking on a gumball, friends, and some faces I did not recognize.

  The Aztecs believed there was a separate part of paradise, Tlalocan, that was reserved for the souls of those who died by drowning. Now I was falling into that ageless heaven of the drowned. It was as if this trace of my grandfather had been left inside of me—a flash
of lightning behind my eyes, my brain hungry for air in the murky water. And before a friend pulled me out of that river, I had a glimpse of a borderless fog as old as night.

  I did not know then that Grandfather had dwelled there, that inside the fog was also a hidden time, a lost song, a secret archive of the soul of our family.

  Abuelo Juan José, like many others who were compelled to come north during the revolution, never seemed happy with life in the United States. He missed the dusty sierra towns of Coahuila, and he didn’t particularly like raising his children in San Antonio. He seldom allowed them to play with other kids anywhere but at the house. If he took his kids to the movies at the Texas Theater on Houston Street, with money short, he would not join them for the film, but he would wait on a bench outside until the film was over.

  He never spoke more than a little English, he felt awkward showing affection, and he generally communicated with his gaze. You always knew whether he meant approval or fury by the way he looked at you.

  There is a story of another time, just after coming to Texas, when he became deeply quiet, introspective, and preocupado. He had always been very serious and reserved—now he was grave. Great-uncle Gilbert remembers a conversation with him when he said, “I will die soon. Someone wants to kill me.” At first Gilbert though he was joking, but his eyes were fixed and steely. Then he gradually got better, and the family passed it off as a passing mood or distemper.

  In the last two years before his death, it seems he had grown quiet and sullen again, his attitude toward the world increasingly remote and fearful. Through those days, he would stand in front of the window at the house on Parsons Street, looking out across the calle, as if he were expecting someone.

  Uela and her sisters had taken him to see curanderos, Mexican faith healers, who treated him with teas, poultices, and prayers. They took him next door to see Doña Lupe, a spirit medium who performed healings when possessed by the soul of “el hermano Guanares,” a Coahuilteca Indian healer from north Mexico who had died several years before. On a backyard covered porch, hanging with drying herbs, and with the assistance of her daughter, Inez, she began the curación by projecting her own spirit into a large crystal goblet made of maroon and green glass. This left her free to receive the spirit of the healer, who would offer remedies to the sick and the troubled. On that day, el Hermano would not manifest himself for Grandfather, despite Doña Lupe’s tearful pleas.

  With another healer named Agustín, he sat in a chair in a hot, dark shed next to the San Antonio River, just outside downtown, as the old man brushed him with fragrant cedar branches, blowing tobacco smoke, and feverishly whispering the names of saints over him, complaining to Uela that he was suffering from a very bad case of the susto, the same kind of supernatural fright that had afflicted her sister, Madrina, years before.

  A heavy veil of forgetting has gradually fallen over much of what happened next. Over the years, from aunts and uncles, from some older cousins, a tale as confusing as a hall of mirrors has emerged. According to one of my aunts, weeks later, on the January morning of his death, he woke up, as he usually did, before dawn. The petroleum company where he worked as a manager was nearby. Uela watched him as he went to the front window once again, pulled the curtains back, and peered out onto the empty dark street. Then he went room to room, according to what Uela later said, as if he were taking one last look and giving the despedida to each of the children. As he left, the sun had not started to rise, and that morning there was also a niebla del año nuevo, a thick “New Year fog,” common in San Antonio at that time of the year. Then, he left the house.

  Later, the family learned that Abuelo never made it to his place of work, which had never happened before. What were they expecting? The younger children, an uncle and an aunt, were left next door with the curandera Doña Lupe, and the rest of the family went out to look for him.

  As another version of the story goes, it was Uncle Frank who first found him, after he had heard reports of someone jumping from a bridge and a body in the San Antonio River where it ran through Roosevelt Park. Aunt Margie remembers hearing Uela’s screams from next door as Doña Lupe watched through a crack in the curtains as police, relatives, and neighbors began to gather in the front yard, under the great sycamore tree.

  All of the city’s newspapers—Spanish and English—covered the story, but no clippings were kept. Uncle Roger, just a boy then, recalls seeing a newspaper account of his father’s death. Beneath a photograph of the body, he swears he remembers the caption read tersely,

  WELL-DRESSED BODY FOUND IN SAN ANTONIO RIVER

  He was found in the knee-shallow waters of the San Antonio River. According to one of my aunts, his clothes were soiled, his hair disheveled, but his eyeglasses were still on his face. Among the family, some saw in these spare details incontrovertible evidence of foul play.

  Others said there were no signs of a struggle, no blood or abrasions. His face apparently wasn’t even fully submerged in the water when he was found. Uncle Roger believes there should have been a murder investigation. Aunt Connie wonders whether, in a daze of deep depression, he walked and walked until he found himself on the banks of the creek. “I think his little heart just stopped, and he fell into the water. Mmm-hmmm. Already dead, that’s right.”

  As she describes her vision of his death of “a homesick heart,” I see the Mahasamadhi of the high Hindu yogis of India, or the practices of the Tolteca sorcerers of Mexico, who are said to be able to choose the transcendent moment of their death. Could Abuelo have chosen the moment of his death in this way? Why was there no water in his lungs? What about his long despondency? Where did it come from?

  I have had times of large, deep quiet and darkness in my own life. Despite a host of blessings that have come to me, I have nonetheless steadfastly expected some shapeless, postponed doom. I have seen a silence the size of an invisible continent overshadow aunts and uncles. Can the same old melancolía be handed down, wordlessly, through numberless generations, inscribed onto the helical codex of the DNA?

  After Abuelo Juan José’s death and prompt burial, he was rarely spoken of. The story became a family secret, held so close for so many decades that it faded and elapsed in the hearts of all those he had been dearest to. Uela became stoic. She was always noble and erect, but also guarded away, somber, and hidden to us. Though she wasn’t the pious type, she nevertheless gave you the feeling of seeming to be in silent prayer. Every week, she made her legendary fist cookies, baked with pan volador, which got its name—“bread that flies”—from when the family used to toss it to each other when they worked in the tomato fields of western Bexar County, where they once had a farm. Uela made them by tightly squeezing a dollop of the dense pecan-flecked dough until it carried a perfect imprint of her clenched hand, with every line and wrinkle of her palm etched into the toasted, crescent-shaped cookie. We bit into these ambrosial galletas, and in this way, we received the communion of all her buried grieving.

  The dead are always with us, but the dead can be lost, too.

  When a family secret emerges, it can come forth like a great island emerging from the sea, all its cliffs and mountains cascading salt water—and you realize you are confronted by new, uncharted geographies. But a secret can also appear like whispered fragments you’ve heard many times before, but never understood.

  Suddenly, the words become clear.

  3

  Valle de Silencio

  Valley of Silence

  His perfect, radiant grin scares me at first, when I remember the last time I had seen him six months before, dressed in a brown pinstriped suit with overly large lapels, looking tightlipped and uncomfortable with his arms folded across his chest inside the brushed copper coffin. As a ghost, he seems utterly content now, like a child, and the anguish and gravitas of his long illness has been lifted from his bones.

  The skin on Uncle Raul’s face is supple, the color of dark Mayan honey and as smooth as a mango. He looks like the neighborhood ice cre
am man, in a pair of white work pants and a well-starched white work shirt. He is wearing the old black round-toe lace boots he always wore. They are beautifully shined, and they look as soft as kidskin.

  When I discover him, he is standing in the bright amber afternoon light of my new study, looking out the window at the two giant bridges into Manhattan—the garish Triborough and the medieval stone bridge at Hellgate on the East River—that are visible from my window.

  “It’s a good thing to live some place where you can see a bridge—but two! That’s pretty damn good!” he says, with his cackling laugh.

  In life, Uncle Raul had the energy of a south Texas remolino, or whirlwind, and jokes rushed out of him as if they were being carried in fierce gusts, punctuated by an ear-piercing, rapid-fire laugh—part eagle shriek, part coyote song—that could shake the air. There was something about this energy that gave him enormous power over animals. He could exhort his dog, Stupid, to chase his tail until the terrier was in full churn, spinning like a proton, almost levitating over the patio. With the same powers, he taught his neighbor’s parrot Güero to sing “Volver” while wearing a tiny sombrero.

  As we stand in my new study, it grows quiet. The room is still empty, freshly painted the color of sand. I am speechless, still amazed to see my uncle, who had never visited New York City while he was alive. Time slows to a murmur as we sit down across from each other in the unchanging light. When I ask him first what he remembers of his life, his eyes close, his lips move in a whisper, and he reaches over to touch the back of my hand.