Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  Since she was a child, Grandmother’s sister, Tía Fermina, loved to memorize lists of numbers and then recite them proudly, as if they described some underlying, unchanging mathematical understanding of the world—that only she was privy to. “Twenty-three. Seventeen. Eleven. One hundred and one. Sixty-eight and forty-seven,” she proclaimed, holding up the list with great pride for us to see over her cup of coffee, from across a blue Formica kitchen table in our old house in San Antonio on Eland Street.

  All of the Lopezes carried this stillness about them. Uncles Lico and Lauro were perpetually on the frantic verge of breaking a big deal, a land buy in Poteet, an investment in a downtown restaurant, or a big real estate contract with the city of San Antonio. Yet, underneath, there was unmoving Zen-like tranquility, sometimes aided by a couple of icy scotches, even when the deals, as they often did, went sour. Their smiles took up their entire faces, arching the cheeks, focusing the eyes in a sweet pout, and showing all their teeth, sideburn to sideburn. Uncle Lico once sent me a photograph of himself from 1946. He is wearing the classic Lopez Buddha smile, dressed in crisply pressed army khakis, and sitting on the edge of a Mexican fountain decorated with a mosaic of blue and white Poblano pottery.

  SUNNY MONTERREY! it is captioned, HOTEL BERMUDA—ON VACATION . . . and signed, LUDOVICO!, in an autograph framed with flowery serifs.

  Of the Santos lineage, some of the old Garcia uncles, suddenly growing very serious, will say the same thing.

  “There’s some kind of weakness in that family.”

  “It’s a weakness in that line,” Uncle Jesse says more gravely.

  Among the Garcias, there was a deeply practical way of seeing the world. What needed to be done? What kinds of tools would be necessary to complete the task at hand? Among the Santos, there was a restlessness, perhaps an exaggerated sensitivity, by turns taciturn and chaotic. In some of them it could be corrosively comical, as in my grandfather’s elder half brother, the wandering José León—who is said to have always slept in his boots, and who regularly told people with whom he was quarreling that they would be unwelcome at his funeral. In others, like my grandfather, the same inward quality could cast long shadows into their lives. Everyone knew there was depression in that family, even if it were never openly discussed. And rumors of other suicides besides my Abuelo Juan José’s.

  For the Santos, apparently, it wasn’t enough to leave Mexico. Some sought further refuge from the world itself. One of my grandfather’s half brothers hanged himself with an electrical cord in the basement of a bank in Hondo, Texas. One of his nephews leaped out a library window in downtown St. Louis. And my aunts think there may have been one other, a Santos relative who was living in Chicago, who had used a gun. These suicides were never openly spoken about, so I would ask about them, every once in a very long while—about Abuelo Juan José and “the weakness in the line.”

  After Abuelo Juan José’s death in San Antonio in 1939, the Spanish padre from San Fernando Cathedral came to visit Uela to offer his condolences, and he was deeply moved by her piety and resoluteness. After reading the Bible together through the afternoon, spending some time in quiet prayer, he told my grandmother, along with some of her gathered brothers and sisters in the house on Parsons Street, that Juan José’s had been an “ambiguous” death, with no suicide note, no eye-witness to testify conclusively that he had done himself in.

  Spanish Catholicism was unyielding in condemning the souls of suicides to Hell. Through the ages, those who took their own lives had been forbidden from being buried in Catholic cemeteries. In parts of Europe in the seventeenth century, their bodies were not buried at all, but had been left at the side of a crossroads, outside of town, as if to consign their souls to be forever lost en camino. If the circumstances had deemed it an indisputable suicide, the padre would’ve been compelled to banish my abuelo’s soul.

  An “ambiguous” death would mean he could be buried with a Mass at the Cathedral. From all the padre had heard—of the lungs without water, the absence of abrasions on the body—in the eyes of the Church, the mystery of Abuelo’s death would remain unsolved until Judgment Day. The Church funeral was allowed to go forward.

  Mexico is a land of Indian mothers. It always has been. Before the arrival of los Españoles, before the great Indian civilizations of the Maya, the Toltecas, and the Mexica-Aztecas, the mothers were already there. These ancestors who are most remote from us in time, the ancient Olmeca people of Mexico, Abuelos de los Abuelos, carved exquisite pear-shaped earth goddesses out of dark jade. They had folded arms, swollen breasts, and pregnant wombs, with implacable expressions, traced with three lines to create jaguarlike faces of stoic strength. These small stones are still being unearthed throughout the hills and plains of southern central Mexico.

  Indian mothers gave birth to the new race of Mestizos. Mestizos, literally meaning “the mixed ones,” combined the blood of the Old World and the New. Indian and Spanish, Indian and African, Indian and Asian. With the emergence of the Mestizo world, Mexico became obsessed with this mixing of the world races, finding exotic names for each racial combination. The child of the union of a white and an albino Indian was called a Saltatrás, or a “leap backward.” The child of the union of an Asian and an Indian was a Tente en el Aire, or “blowing in the wind.” The child of the union of an Indian and a Mestizo was a Coyote. There were more than fifty such names, a taxonomy of miscegenation.

  It was the mothers who created Mexico Mestizo. And long before the conquest, the Mexica priests of Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, had prophesied that this would be an age in which all the people of the world would mingle their blood. There are stories of the presagios, series of darkening augurs the Mexica wrestled with before the conquest, which were told to Padre Sahagún by Indians who had personally witnessed them.

  Ten years before the arrival of the Spanish, in the year Twelve House of the Azteca calendar, people saw fiery signs in the heavens for an entire year. Sometimes they were shaped like a spike pointed down, sometimes like a flame hanging from the middle of the midnight sky, sometimes like a tear. They said then that the sky was weeping fire.

  And then the fire fell to earth.

  At the Templo Mayor, in the center of Tenochtitlán, the House of Huitzilopochtli, the god who had led the Mexica on their long migration south, burst into flames and would not be extinguished.

  A swift, silent bolt of lightning is said to have destroyed the temple of old Xiuhtecuhtli, one of the most primeval and revered gods of the Mexica. His temple had always been made of straw. They would say later that it was struck by the sun.

  Then, one day, the sun reversed its course, streaming a tail across the sky like a comet coughing flames, rising in the west and rushing to the east, raining bright red sparks with the sound of thousands of tiny bells.

  Eventually, phantasmagorical beasts and men appeared in a mystical array among the Mexica.

  There was a two-headed man.

  Finally, an ash-colored bird was caught in a maguey net and taken to the House of Magic Studies, so that it could be shown to the supreme ruler, the cacique, Motecuhzoma. In the crown of its head, there was a mirror that seemed to be turning like a spiral. In that mirror, Motecuhzoma first saw a pageant of all the stars in the night sky, turning around the North Star. When that scene dissolved, in the distance he saw a vision of an approaching legion, raising battle against a herd of running deer.

  After the cacique had beheld the marvels that were brought before him, they are said to have disappeared before the attending priests could witness them. When they looked, they only saw themselves in the mirror. By then, Motecuhzoma had come to believe that the Aztecs, who spent so much of their lives doing rituals to keep their world from being destroyed, were now being warned their world would soon come to an end.

  This, too, had been prophesied.

  But of all these mystical presagios, these long-remembered premonitions of doom, the one that is most Mexican is the report that people had often
heard the sound of a woman’s voice, crying, letting out great peals, and screaming in the darkness. Fretful and plaintive, they heard her speak the words,

  My little children, now we must go far away!

  My little children, where will I take you?

  My mother’s family are Tejanos from the deep time of Nueva España, when San Antonio represented one of the northernmost outposts of civilization in the sprawling desert wilderness that reached all the way south to Querétaro, the colonial town to the northwest of Mexico City. The long history of the Lopez and Velas in south Texas and the borderlands left them with that aloof quality that comes from seeing many nations come and go as would-be masters of the land. The United States of America was only one incarnation. They knew there had been other worlds before this one, even if they might not be able to name all of them.

  When my grandmother Leandra drove her polished ebony Buick through the streets of San Antonio, it felt as if we were on a slow promenade through the shady boulevards of an ancient capital. She drove so slowly, always with her lights on, that a few old Mexicanos would stop along the streets, dip their heads, and wait for us to pass, thinking we were part of a funeral cortege. We were out collecting her rents, stopping at the curbside in front of the little tree-lined houses where her tenants called her Señora Lopez.

  Despite my pleas, Grandmother would honk the horn repeatedly until one of the occupants of the house would come out with an envelope full of cash, or with a sheepish look that led to an elaborate explanation of why the rent would be late again that month. And Grandmother never seemed to mind.

  She had started out in Laredo as a teacher, so she would always want to know if the kids were in school, if they were doing well in their studies, if they were eating well. Never budging from the driver’s seat of the enormous car, with her gloved hands on the steering wheel, she would then shut off the idling engine and ask about other members of the family, if she knew them—a husband whose leg had been badly mangled doing ranchwork, a brother who had been deported to Mexico the week before by the Immigration Service agents, who periodically swept through the neighborhoods looking for “wetbacks.”

  And then there would be a long silence. Grandmother and her tenants would wish each other well, and we would set off.

  On the way home, we drove past Mission San José, the largest of the old churches that date back to the late seventeenth century, when the Franciscan Fray Damian Massanet first offered a Mass in a cotton-wood arbor on the banks of the river the Payaya Indians called Yanaguana. It was after that Mass, which celebrated the feast day of Saint Anthony of Padua, that the river was renamed Rio San Antonio.

  From the road, you could see through the massive arched entrance to the mission and see a sprawling open courtyard and the little church in the distance. Grandmother said the church had been there forever, and where she came from in south Texas, missions were a common sight, forming a galaxy of ruins of the empire of Nueva España that stretched southward all the way to Mexico City.

  The trail that links the five old San Antonio missions and their network of aqueducts connects the city to that nearly forgotten past when the first Mestizos were still coming to terms with having been born of a Spanish father who came from one ancient world and an Indian mother who came from quite another. On cliffsides in the woods around San Antonio, there are petroglyphs where the Indians recorded their first impressions of the missions, los padres, and the Spaniard vaqueros on their horses. Drawn in thick lines with dark vegetable inks on stone, churches appear as little arched sanctuaries, crowned by a cross. A stick figure is recognizable as a priest by an exaggerated mitred hat, just as the vaquero can be distinguished by his cocked sombrero.

  But if it hadn’t been for the river, the Yanaguana, the Rio San Antonio, thickly lined for miles with palmettos and yuccas, willows, oak, and huisache, there would have been no missions; and if there had not been missions, there might never have been a city.

  By these threads, we could find our way back to the beginning.

  I used to sit silently with Grandmother in her bedroom, when she was already nearing her death. She received all of us from her bed with the expression of an exhausted, world-weary south Texas duquesa. She had virtually given up speaking by then, not due to any ailment, but simply because she seemed to believe she had spoken everything already. She seemed incessantly fatigued by our chatter.

  The room smelled of Grandmother’s Mexican talc and eucalyptus oil, which Grandmother’s maid, Maria Moya, left in a pan on the radiator to “purify” the air. With the television going in the background, Grandmother wielded her remote control like a whipcrack, continuously changing the channel before you could focus on an image. Then we would sit for long, tranquil pauses in the draped afternoon light with our gazes locked on one another, until she would eventually become annoyed and look away. Hers wasn’t a gaze of dearness. She had the indomitable mien of a witness, a grizzled bearer of knowledge which she had long ago left behind any particular need to pass on.

  Looking at Grandmother, who held her old quiet with such unyielding gravity and determination, I wondered how far back she thought we went in that long story whose ruins surrounded us in San Antonio, Texas. Through Uncle Lico’s work, we knew hers was an old family, and we could count generations of her family like rosary beads, as far back as 1767. But there are families that trace their lineage to ground zero of the conquest, like sacred genealogies of a second creation time.

  There are living descendants of Cortés and descendants of Motecuhzoma, and even descendants of la familia Cortés-Motecuhzoma, as Cortés fathered a child with Tecuichpotzín, the daughter of the defeated Aztec cacique, and who later came to be known simply as Doña Isabel. In this way, the Spanish set out to dissolve the royal Mexica bloodlines. New dynasties would not be allowed to form in their place.

  The conquistadores destroyed the pyramids and temples, stone by stone. They burned manuscripts and smelted basketfuls of golden idols in the flames. In this great carnal maelstrom, fathering children with Indian women was another way to break the tradition, to place fatal caesuras in the transmission of the Indian mind and soul through time. The children of these unions, these rapes, these romances, were mainly illegitimate, outsiders to the two worlds that had given them birth.

  Indian memory is Mexican memory. Their history is our history—implicit, silent, inevitable.

  Uncle Lico’s excavation of the Lopez and Vela family catacombs showed no trace of Indian ancestors. But such things are rarely recorded, as with my great-great-grandfather, who married a Kikapu Indian. No one now remembers anything about her Indian family. The Mestizos, with Spanish names and outward appearance, and Indian hearts, usually gave their allegiance to New Spain. They dropped their indigenous names and became Zeferino, Guillerma, Leocadio, Crescencio, Perfecta, and Ruperta. They became de la Garza, Reyna, Areval, Treviño, Adame, and Saldaña.

  In the time of the conquest, one of Motecuhzoma’s grandsons, Juan, the youngest son of Doña Isabel, and another Spanish officer left Mexico for Cáceres, Spain, where he married a Spanish woman and built the Motecuhzoma Palace, which allegedly still stands. According to their family history in the archives of the Indies in Seville, his offspring became titled nobility. The Count of Enjarada. The Duke of Abrantes. The Duke of Linares. Then, late in the sixteenth century, in the court of Philip II, the heirs of Motecuhzoma agreed to renounce all their natural rights in Mexico as descendants of the Mexica emperor in exchange for vast lands in Spain that would be theirs forever.

  Uncle Lico once signed a letter to me with a description of himself as “your Very Hispanic Mexican Uncle,” followed by his characteristically flamboyant signature that grew more filigrees as he grew older. Uncle Lico explained the meaning of that signature one day, while having lunch with me in a diner in downtown San Antonio called The Mexican Manhattan. He took off his powder blue straw porkpie hat, drew his hand across his balding, gray-haired head, and declared, “I’m gonna find the grandfat
her that got off the boat—the one related to the King of Spain,” recalling one of his own genealogies of the Vela family that began with an unnamed Spanish monarch.

  Long ago, Lico had interviewed Dionisio Alarcón, one of the older residents of the Lopez-Vela hometown of Cotulla, Texas, who told him the Velas were descended from the King of Spain, thereby igniting my uncle’s genealogical fever. As a child, Dionisio had known my great-grandfather Emeterio Vela and reported having once been shown a silver goblet with the name of some king or other inscribed on it, though he could not exactly remember which. It was also rumored, according to Don Dionisio, that when the family first came to New Spain, they were, in Dionisio’s words, “maranos, conversos”—Jewish converts to Christianity. And perhaps this wasn’t untrue. In one family portrait of Grandmother Leandra from the late 1940s, with all of her grown children, they look Basque, Andalusian, or North African. Their deeply set dark eyes, dark hair, their long features and limbs, carry a look of faces of the Pyrenees and of the Mediterranean littoral.

  But Uncle Lico never found that first ancestor who made the Atlantic crossing. He was never able to put all of his research together into “La Cronica de las Familias Lopez y Vela de Cotulla,” the title for the historical book he spoke of writing of the families. He brooded over his research as if it were a disintegrating family relic that had been left uneasily in his care. It was, as he put it, “my calling in this world.” He knew and was in contact with others like him, dispossessed Mexicans scattered all over the United States, all of them piecing together the evidence of a south Texas world that had been lost in time.