I saw the Volador ritual performed many times that summer, imagining myself in all the falling spirals, the flying, the feather costumes, and the exquisite, silent speed of the flyers. The primal sounds of the old Mexican flutes and drums wafted out across the other pavilions of the sprawling fairgrounds. And after every time I saw the ritual, I felt as if I had been chosen for this blessing, as if this dance that came from deep in the Mexican past was harboring some secret intended especially for me.
One place I have felt the ineluctable pull of old Mexican time is at the Guerra ranch, Rancho Los Generales, in the Serranía del Burro, near where the Garcias and the Santos come from in Coahuila. As a child, when I went there, I would gather sticks and stones in the woods near our house in San Antonio and take them with me to leave out on the ranch. When I returned, I’d bring back some rocks and twigs and flowers from the ranch to toss out of the car windows onto Texas earth as we entered San Antonio. In this way, I thought I could begin to sew the two worlds together again.
To reach the ranch, you drive five hours south from San Antonio. At the mining town of Nueva Rosita, with its landmark towering sooty brick chimney bellowing black smoke, you turn off from Highway 57 and head west for the mountains, already visible in the distance. Passing the old Rosita Cemetery, el panteón, and the rushing turquoise water of the Rio Sabinas, the dusty road begins a slow steady climb into the sierra.
Rancho Los Generales lies along the road that runs first through Palaú and Múzquiz into the mountains, going all the way to the Texas border, and the remote fluorite mines called Las Boquillas del Carmen at the southern tip of Big Bend National Park. I would discover later it was territory my family had traveled for generations. Along that same road was the Nacimiento de los Indios, the land where the Kikapu Indians had lived for one hundred and fifty years, and where my kidnapped great-grandfather Teofilo had grown up among them more than one hundred years ago. When it was still unpaved, Tía Pepa remembers walking with her grandfather west out of Múzquiz along the road, picking the healing herb la gobernadora, wild mint, and oregano.
The land around Los Generales is a mix of the landscapes of many places. From the ranch, you can see distant grizzled gray peaks of the sierra, cleaving the clouds on the southwest horizon. To the east, the faintest blue apparition of the mountain pueblo of Las Esperanzas can be spotted flickering on a clear night in the notch of a nearby canyon. Alejo, the vaquero foreman who ran the ranch, once found the fossil of an old conch shell in one of the high prairies there, which he said meant the whole region must have lain at the bottom of an old ocean. Now, a palm tree sways next to a stand of pines and cedars at the top of one rocky hill. There are narrow gorges and hidden valleys that I spent those summers exploring, learning their secrets.
One morning, Alejo and I rode out together through three pastures to reach a long, deep gorge that descended from one of the big hills down to the floor of the valley below. Taking a path off from one of the pasture roads, cutting a swath through the scrubby bushes up the hillside, then taking several turns farther toward the mountain, we rounded a smooth stone wall and looked down into the deep blue shadows of the long dry notch. The rains usually create a flume of water here that washes everything into the valley. But after the recent rains, the gorge bed was overgrown with thorny saplings and cactus, a cascade of chipped stones that glowed like oyster shells in the half-light of early morning that filtered down through the thick brush canopy and the overhanging rock outcroppings.
In this cool, secluded sanctuary, Alejo said we would find the chile piquín, the wild Sierra chile, the size of a berry, that grows green, yellow, and red on the same plant and is prized across Mexico for its unforgiving burn. Uncle Beto used to carry a breast pocket full of the chiles when he went to restaurants, pulling one out and popping it in his mouth before biting into his barbecued brisket. The Kikapu say that it was in the tiny piquín chiles that God hid away the first fire that created the world, leaving it with us to remind us where everything came from.
As we cut and gathered large bundles of the shrubs, their branches speckled with gemlike chiles, the peppery smell of the capsaicin filled the air around us, as we moved slowly down the gorge. Along the cliffs on both sides, the water had carved out scalloped caves here and there where animals, gatos de monte, “mountain cats,” pumas, maybe even bears, had made their lairs. We stepped gingerly around each of the rough chambers, peering warily in from behind first to make sure no animal was sleeping there, though such beasts rarely linger in their dwellings during the day. With their beds of dirt and twigs, paw prints crisscrossing in all directions, but not hurriedly, the places seemed like private sanctuaries from the outside world. If the gatos began attacking cattle, as they sometimes, usually in drought, would suddenly begin to do, it was near this gorge that the vaqueros would hunt for them. More often, they lived unto themselves, rarely seen, almost in a parallel space and time.
Just above the last tier of the gorge, with the valley already in sight through the trees, Alejo stopped and crouched down on his haunches. Holding his fingers up to his lips to keep quiet, he pointed down the ravine to where a dark cloud appeared to be hovering around a stand of persimmon trees. As we fell to quiet, a low, modulating hum echoed along the walls of the gully. Through the undulating cloud, I could make out the shape of one, then two, then maybe five large beehives, hanging from low branches, loaded with honey. From a distance, the hives seemed to be glowing with an amber light, as if they were awaiting the daring harvest, which was about to begin.
Late in September, when summer’s calorón heat still made a desert of every day, and everyone at the rancho sought shelter from the oppressive sunlight indoors, the clear air would suddenly be filled with thousands of monarch butterflies, wafting dreamily south to Michoacán.
It was on one such day that I rode out alone, along the trail through the five pastures in which the herd of ivory Charolais cattle were spread out to graze. It was late afternoon, and I rode down one of the hills into a great valley on the rancho that is shaped like a perfect bowl. There, along the rock walls, the layers of epochs were exposed. An age of limestone. An age of ash and pumice. An age of alluvial pebbles and river sand.
Once we had descended to the valley floor, Pinto, the horse, broke into a full gallop, driving through the scattered, drifting clouds of monarcas, until we reached the center of the basin.
Alejo had called this valley El Valle de los Ancianos, “the Valley of the Ancestors.” All around the valley, the dozen or so hills were the same distance from each other, some massive and dignified, others ragged at the top, with cactus and mesquite dotting their peaks. From the middle of the valley, the halo of hills looked like a council of elders, sitting in quiet deliberation.
The light was familiar. The everlasting wind. The slow, far-off clanging of a few cow bells. Numberless shoals of pink clouds were tracing the edge of the western horizon. The entire scene felt like a memory of a time that was older than me, as if it were the memory of the land itself. My father taught me how to see places like this. He taught me awe, watching him silently looking out across the landscapes we were in together, almost overwhelmed, whether it was Texas or Mexico, by the richness, the intricate beauty, of what he saw before him. His gaze would grow distant, his breaths long and slow. Maybe he had learned this from his father, Abuelo Juan José, whose family was always said to have been ranchera, “of the ranch life.”
Maybe Abuelo Juan José had taught all of his children. In one photograph of my uncle Raul, he is standing on a craggy peak over a desolate Mexican mountain canyon, and a maguey cactus is at his feet. Unshaven, dressed in khakis and a cardigan, with a wool stocking cap on, he is wearing the telltale expression of Santos awe. The barely perceptible smile. The contemplative mien. With one leg perched on a stone, he stands with his arm outstretched, pointing into the hazy expanse of the canyon’s maw, like a veteran scout who has discovered his long-sought destination.
The Mexican earth is aliv
e, but mute. Yielding its fruits, it clings to its secrets. All of the calendars that have ever been used across these lands were keeping time out there in the open pasture of the valley: the Julian, inside the Gregorian, the Mayan inside the Toltecan, inside the Aztecan—all of them overshadowed by what the Nahua Indian people of Mexico called the Fifth Sun, our time, which they called Four Movement. This age, it had been foretold, would end in famine and a violent shaking of the earth.
In the lulling summer breezes of that afternoon, I felt small, abandoned, waiting for the arrival of some wild wisdom in the same Coahuila silence that had nourished my ancestors. We can return and return to the places of our family’s origin and never hear the voices of the lost ancianos, never know the place in the great count of days they bequeathed to us.
But they are there.
Mexico Viejo
4
Cuento Mestizo
Mestizo Tale
My mother’s brother, Ludovico, whom we called Uncle Lico, kept a private study that was an improvised archive of the Lopez and Vela families. That’s where he kept his curios and personal genealogical research. There were bricks from some of his favorite buildings that had been torn down over the years around downtown San Antonio, a collection of barbed wire, and oddly shaped stones from the Rio Grande Valley. He stored yellowed documents inside rotting ledgers, the deeds and county plat maps from the two families, going back to 1767, transcriptions of interviews with old relatives, and the many drawings he made over the years of his father Leonides’s grocery store in Cotulla. And in two large boxes he kept his lifetime supply of San Judás Tadeo prayer cards, of the patron saint of lost causes whom Uncle Lico had long ago adopted as his personal saint.
This study was also where he had his magnificent, ultra-modern, stereophonic reel-to-reel tape and record player, with speaker cabinets recessed into the wall and decorated with crisscross beveled woodwork that looked like it had been copied from furnishings of the Alhambra. With the air-conditioner chilling the room to an arctic cool, he would sit in matching burgundy pajamas and silk robe in his motorized recliner, listening to those Esquivel, space-age Muzak versions of mariachi standards, poring through the clippings and papers that made up his collection of the Lopez and Vela family chronicles.
To be invited to sit with Uncle Lico in his study was a rare privilege. He liked to read his genealogies out loud to me, which could sound like the litanies of lineages in the Book of Genesis.
“Antonio Lopez Bermudez, married Gertrudis Garcia, legitimate daughter of Don Bartolome Garcia and Doña Maria de la Luz Zamora, who had six children: José Julián, José Maria, Ana Maria, Maria del Pilar, Maria Rosalia, and Maria Yñes, all of them Lopez Garcia.” Then a long pause, staring at the document. And finally,
“The five children of Santos Lopez de Flores all died without family. Very sad.”
After Grandmother died, it was Uncle Lico who oversaw the tax payments on the parcel of land the viceroy had given to one of our ancestors, a dutiful scribe, near what is now the U.S.-Mexico border in south Texas. Lico used to say it was probably bursting with oil or uranium. It was probably full of buried treasure, since there had been a Spanish fortress nearby in Mier.
Over the centuries, the original land grant of four hundred acres had dwindled by parcel sales to eighty acres, and it had come to be land-locked by a large ranch. Now, the remaining Lopez patrimony was a plot of desolate scrub land, marked at its perimeter with ragged orange flag stakes, and the only evidence of our homestead claim was the beat-up trailer Uncles Lico and Lauro had left out there to reinforce the family’s deed. They used to joke about dressing up a caretaker as a conquistador and having him live in the trailer.
According to Lico, the original deed, which Grandmother had given him before she died, had been written in a fancy longhand script on stiff sheepskin vellum, and it was marked with the golden seal of Don Fernando de Palacio, viceroy of Nueva España. But years ago, Buster and Tito, Uncle Lico’s two Mexican pugs, had found it on the floor next to his desk and mauled it to tiny bits, thereby earning their banishment, forevermore, from his icy inner sanctum.
“You realize most of those first Mestizos—the ones with Indian mothers and Spanish fathers—didn’t know who their fathers were,” he said, looking up from his recliner in the middle of one of his recitals of the family marriages and births.
“That’s just the way it was then. But I tell you, your grandmother wouldn’t let us forget,” he muttered, pushing the bifocals up on his nose to begin the recitation where he had left off.
“That damn land in Mier wouldn’t let us forget.”
Many years later, as I sit in a silent, dark, cold room in New York City, the faces are floating silently in midair. Their deep brown skin is as smooth as leche quemada, like caramel among the young, creased and coarse in the old. They are crowded at a bus stop on St. Mary’s Street, leaning against a stone bridge over the San Antonio River, walking in slow motion in front of the Alamo. Some have the broad, flat faces of the Maya, with profiles familiar from the stelae and friezes of Palenque. Some look like elders in an El Greco painting, carrying a Spanish weariness that seems ages old. I am watching them all, over and over for days, piecing together a montage of them for a film about how the Mexican Americans of San Antonio celebrate Easter.
In slow motion, an old man with a wispy goatee silently stares forward, unblinking. Chicano break dancers cavort in front of the statue commemorating Don Tenorio Navarro, one of the Spanish governors who ruled over that part of Nueva España. Then, in one long take, a Mexican kid stands in the mercado plaza playing the theme to The Godfather solo on his trumpet.
Looking at the rushes, you can see that the Mexicanos of San Antonio carry in their very bodies all the details of the long, forgotten history of those lands. It is ingrained in the way they hold their heads, almost imperially. In their flat, wide shoulders accustomed to heavy loads. In their dark-eyed gazes, focused faroff, lost in thought. Their faces shimmer in the electronic glow of the video monitors, and the spectacle takes on the feeling of a complex ceremony in some science fiction tale, a ritual to remember the last of the Mexicans of San Antonio.
The Franciscan Friar Bernardino de Sahagún was one of the most dogged chroniclers of the vanishing Azteca culture in the immediate aftermath of the conquest in 1521. Working with groups of friars whom he had trained, he interviewed the old priests, philosophers, and historians of the Azteca people, compiling the stories he gathered into both pictographic and written codices.
In the Florentine Codex, Sahagún tells us how the old Indian grandmothers he spoke to prized their lineages, yet also described the human body as a great unplumbable abyss, an opening into the infinite. Each body, they believed, was a crack in the universe, an infinite chasm that contained the entire Inframundo: the thirteen heavens of Tamoanchan and the nine underworlds of Tlalocan. When the Spaniards arrived in the New World, they brought their own Heaven and Hell with them. Since then, these two universes have been colliding and collapsing, one consuming the other, then being consumed anew in a whorl of endless creation.
At the time, if someone came from a noble Azteca family, it was said of them, “From someone’s entrails, from someone’s throat, he came forth.” If someone brought infamy to their family, it was said they were “of the garbage heap, of the crossroads.” The bones of the ancestors were believed to be part of the Mexican soil beneath their feet, and the dust contained this sacred essence of the antepasados. A family carries within itself this hidden memory as old as dust. The Azteca priests told Sahagún that the dust was to be as revered as familia.
My body, my brothers’ bodies, the bodies of parents, cousins, uncles, aunts, great-uncles and -aunts, grandparents, are all vessels of the same ancient dust, exquisitely charged, polarized along the meridians of lands in the New World and the Old, destined always for some unnamable target further on in future time. For the Spanish, the Conquest of Mexico was another triumph on the irreversible path to the
eventual reign of Christ on earth. For the Aztecas, whose voices are preserved in the Florentine Codex, time was circular: “What used to be done a long time ago and is done no longer will be done again. It will thus be once again as it was in the past. Those who live today will live again, and they will be anew.”
Mestizos carry both of these stories in those Mexican chromosomes that are inscribed on tightly braided corn husks, painted in vivid cochineal inks by the ancestors who handed these bodies down through an unimaginably vast cascada of time. Did our forgotten ancestors—Indio, Español, Mestizo—walk with the same dignified and upright carriage of the old Garcias I know? Where did the almost Asian lineaments of the Santos come from? How far back toward the beginning of Mexican time? Is there a meaning to all of our shared talents, our affinities, our vulnerabilities and repulsions? We carry these messages from the past about we know not what, marking out destinations in our own lives while our families make circles through an oceanic immensity of time.
“Just be honest,” Uncle Gilbert, one Garcia great-uncle, said, standing in his impeccably tidy garage workshop. “Uh-huh, that’s what we were taught—just be honest, work hard, and you’ll do all right. It’s that simple.” But no one taught the Garcia brothers to be inventors. No one taught them how to dream, like the old pyramid builders of Mexico, in 3-D, allowing them to build their own cars, to make furniture and boats and machines.
In Mother’s family, Grandmother and her albino sister, Fermina Vela Ferguson, held the world at a studious distance, allowing them the time to gather a judgment so potent that when it finally poured out it was like a soporific aged brandy. Once pronounced, those judgments were meant to have almost divine authority. One time, after being quiet and lost in concentration for a while, Grandmother stirred in her big living-room La-Z-Boy chair, one arm held high, to announce her violent dislike for a Muzak version of “Hey Jude” that was playing on the radio, as if she expected the broadcast to suddenly stop short and fall silent.
Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation Page 7