Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  He imagined what the ancestors might’ve looked like, how they might’ve spoken and dressed, where they lived. But for all the names that he had recovered from oblivion, he had never found a single photograph of any of the distant relations. The charts and discs he made of the family’s descent in time were always being reworked, sometimes in italics, sometimes in thick pencil, with a new name added here and there. He made numerous copies of his manuscripts and charts, bound them in legal size plastic loop binders with manila covers, and sent them in packages out to his nieces and nephews.

  I received them repeatedly as a university student in Indiana. The packages always appeared as the telltale fruits of his obsession—the same charts, transcripts, and copied letters, perhaps newly annotated—with breathless greetings on carbon-copy, pink onion-skin stationery. They usually ended with a question like,

  Circa 1750, Father of Capitán Antonio Sanchez:

  1st Royal Governor of Tamaulipas???

  And always included was a single, pristine San Judás prayer card.

  In Cotulla, Texas, when the Lopez family was young, my mother had a sister, Lily Amanda, who died as a child of two, and that experience left both of my grandparents, Leandra and Leonides, with a fascination with death and the spirits of the ancestors.

  On each of those expeditions with my grandmother to Laredo to visit the family graves, she would insist on yet another picture of herself being taken in front of all the headstones of her father and mother, and, of course, my grandfather’s grave, which would also someday be her own. Over the years, she kept a time-lapse image of herself against this timeless backdrop. She would regard the stones with careful attention, circling around the graves once before asking us to give it a sweeping and a good wash, while she arranged some newly purchased plastic irises in a vase.

  When Grandmother died on my birthday in 1974, she left detailed instructions to bury her in the grave in Laredo, alongside her husband, Leonides. Laredo, on the Texas-Mexico border, had also been her birthplace. Grandmother had stipulated that her burial would take place after a Mass in the downtown cathedral, during which a singer was to perform traditional funeral dirges in Latin with an accompanying organ.

  After setting out from San Antonio with Uncle Lauro early in the morning, following the black Cadillac hearse south down Interstate 35, we eventually entered Laredo. We went to a house near the cathedral to hire an old woman dressed in black whom the padre had told us could sing the songs Grandmother had requested.

  “You need one of the old-time professional mourners,” he said. “You need la señora Rosa, Queen of the Pésames.”

  Doña Rosa’s living room looked like a chapel, with an altar full of candles burning in votive jars and hundreds of small photographs of all the souls at whose funerals she had sung over the years. Many were already yellowed and cracked.

  “Of course I knew of your mother. I saw her sweet picture in the paper. How sad,” she told my uncle, touching his arm.

  “The Velas are a very fine family. A very great lady, your mother.”

  She pulled a large black cotton rebozo over her head and began moving more slowly, as if she were getting into the proper frame of mind before the funeral Mass. Her fee was to be thirty-five dollars, and she would play the organ herself.

  “Such a great lady, how sad,” she kept repeating and shaking her head, as we walked across the plaza back to the cathedral.

  Once the Mass had begun, her unfettered caterwaulings startled all the relatives and friends who had gathered in the church. Doña Rosa rattled the keys of the small electric church organ, singing “Te Deus” with an intensity that made her voice crack and her body shake. As sad as grandmother’s passing was, none of us could keep a straight face through Señora Rosa’s performance. The priest offering the Mass even lost his composure during the Communion as she wailed hallelujahs until the whole church reverberated in her doleful, piercing ululations.

  “Not quite what Mother intended,” Uncle Lauro said, dryly staring at the professional mourner.

  Later, most of the funeral party was diverted from the cortege when another uncle mistakenly followed a dark limousine off the expressway and took most of the line of cars with him. Only a small number of us in Grandmother’s family found the cemetery where the priest completed Leandra’s last rites on that wet, gray morning on a hillside overlooking the Rio Grande. She always liked serenatas, going back to when my father used to sing through an open window to my mother and her friends. My father stepped forward and sang her one last song, “Ave Maria,” with the rain beginning to fall.

  We left Grandmother there on the border, ate caldo de gallina on the Mexican side, and headed back for San Antonio.

  “All the old Mexicans are dying.”

  That’s what Uncle Lico said, shuffling through a pack of the funeral prayer cards of departed friends, which he kept together with a rubber band on the top of his desk. The walls of his study were crowded with photographs of the family. Tía Fermina, radiant with her ivory skin in bright sunlight. A newspaper clipping about Grandmother’s having sent the lone floral tribute that made it to the grave on the occasion of LBJ’s death. There was also a picture of LBJ, signed and dedicated to Grandmother, “WITH MANY HAPPY MEMORIES OF COTULLA.” The president is in a cowboy hat, holding his beagle under one arm while leaning on a cedar post fence on his ranch in Stonewall, Texas. And there were pictures of Henry Cisneros, and Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez, autographed for Uncle Lico.

  Holding up one faded prayer card of San Miguel, the archangel, Uncle Lico announced, “Gus Garcia. 1965. Greatest Mexican American attorney ever. First ‘Meskin’ to argue and win a case before the Supreme Court. A brilliant speaker. This cat had green eyes, man, just like a movie star.”

  My uncle turned the card over and looked at the picture of the archangel, from which most of the gold glitter had flecked off over the years.

  “Died a drunk in Market Plaza, under a bench, wrapped in newspapers.”

  That day, the last day I saw Uncle Lico alive, I told him the story of Gonzalo de Guerrero, the Spanish officer who had been shipwrecked in the Yucatán in the early sixteenth century and chose to remain with the Mayans after being found by Cortés at the beginning of his military campaign against the Aztecs. Guerrero had married a Mayan princess and they had four children.

  When he was discovered by his Spanish compatriots, he was tattooed and adorned with stones hanging from pierced earlobes. He had studied the sacred practice of Mayan astronomical timekeeping in the priestly schools of Chetumal, where he was living. He told Cortés’s delegation that he would stay and fight with his new people, which he did, dying in battle some years later battling against his own Spanish brethren.

  “You know, there were Guerreros in the Lopez family, back in the 1780s,” Uncle Lico remembered, opening one of his long wooden filing drawers to look for his eighteenth-century annals. “It could be we are related to that guy,” he added.

  In his diary, Guerrero confessed to never being anything but appalled by the bloody sacrifices to the Mayan god Kukulcán, which were at the center of Mayan ceremonial life. He had witnessed some of his comrades having their hearts pulled out, and laid, still beating, on the gory Chac Mool altar of the temple at Chetumal.

  When one of Guerrero’s children, a daughter, was going to be sacrificed, he stood up before his father-in-law, a Mayan cacique, and the gathered elders and made a speech to try to dissuade them from choosing her. Yes, it was an honor to be sacrificed, to give your life so that the world would not be destroyed. But he told them that in his own visions he had been told the old gods wanted only the pure blood of the “old” tribes—the Spanish and the Indian. These new children, born a part of both worlds, would serve new gods. Their blood was distasteful to the old gods who had ruled for ages and ages.

  It meant that, as more and more Mestizos were born, the old gods would go hungrier and hungrier. Eventually, the old gods would be abandoned.

  They, too, w
ould die.

  The elders nodded resolutely and Guerrero’s daughter was spared.

  “Sounds like he could’ve been a Lopez,” Uncle Lico said, laughing. “Very, very crafty. Puro Lopez.”

  5

  The Flowered Path

  El Sendero Florido

  Uela was a Rosicrucian.

  From the time she was a young girl in Palaú, she had been a follower of the Via Rosae Crucis, the mystical Way of the Rosy Cross, an allegedly ancient occult movement that had nestled within the traditions of the Catholic Church since the Middle Ages. She never told me about it. It was Tía Pepa who remembered how the three sisters, Uela, Pepa, and Madrina, had all studied the Gnostic teachings of the Christian secret society by correspondence. The Rosicrucians sought to reconcile the pre-Christian traditions of magic and esoteric studies with the revelations of Christ. Madrina had left her studies very early, Tía Pepa much later. But Uela had reached the highest level of initiation, the Adeptus Major, which is said to involve powers of prophecy, tongues, and healing.

  Their study books and pamphlets, still advertised in comic books and occult magazines, identify the origin of the Rosicrucian tradition of natural magic in “the ancient Egyptian Mystery Schools of Thoth.” Central to the teaching is the knowledge of a hidden wisdom in the world through which it is possible to learn, and live by, the secret essences of things:

  How the three spheres of paradise are contained within the head.

  How the heart is the seat of a universal blazing sun of love.

  How everything in the universe is inscribed with mystical invisible letters that could be read and understood.

  Uela held her secrets very close, whispering the rosary, praying silently with her lips moving, as she sat in her rocking chair in the front room of the house on Cincinnati Street in San Antonio. She was sitting in that rocking chair on a rainy Saturday morning when I read some of my first poems to her, explaining them to her afterward in Spanish. They were awful poems about lightning storms, first love, an adolescent’s dialogue with God. Uela was fond of poetry. She adored being read to or recited to, but she never told me she had searched for some of the same things—that both of our compasses had been set to the same imaginary direction.

  Before she died, she called my aunts into her hospital room and asked them for their promise to burn all of her Rosicrucian books and papers. They were to sign a certificate of witness that the material had been destroyed, and then send it to the Supreme Temple of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis in San José, California. The day she died, as Uela had instructed, my aunts burned two trunks full of Rosicrucian effects in the alley behind Uela’s house, on a bier of mesquite twigs and dry pecan tree leaves.

  All that survives of her library is a copy of the 1602 Valera Spanish translation of the Bible, which she gave to Madrina as a wedding present in May of 1944. Today, its spine is reinforced with silver duct tape. The worn blue-fabric cover bears the hermetic Rosicrucian insignia of a rose superimposed over the cross. Inside, on the title page, in her graceful handwriting, in Spanish: Hermana Tomasa 5/29/44

  Cherish this Holy book as a remembrance.

  You will find peace and tranquility in reading it,

  just like the divine balm which sweetens and strengthens

  our tired and hurting souls.

  Its words of wisdom show us

  the flowered path which leads us straight to the truth.

  Words of consolation from which

  Sister, comes all that is holy, good and just—

  the Divine love of God.

  Su hermana que te quiere,

  Margarita G. Santos

  “What were you searching for?”

  The question sounds awkward even as I ask it, and Tía Pepa looks confused.

  “What was your father looking for?” I asked.

  Tía Pepa is busy in her kitchen, making masa for tamales in two clay pots while preparing a compote of herbs for her renowned medicinal JTV suppositories in a third. “JTV” for her name, Josefa Talia Valdes. She makes the suppositories in stainless steel molds that her brother Gilbert designed and fabricated for her. She then packs them in boxes shaped like cigarette packs with her initials stenciled on the outside.

  La Tía tosses a handful of finely chopped leaves into the bubbling pot of herbal paste with a flick of her wrist, saying that at ninety-three, she must concentrate or she will confuse the ingredients, with unsavory consequences. Then she steps back from the stove and wipes her hands, front and back, on her apron.

  “We just wanted to live in peace, nothing else,” she says, starting to churn a large dollop of lard into the sandy-colored masa.

  “Mexico. Texas. It didn’t matter to Papá. He would’ve taken us to Chicago if he had to.”

  What was it that he wanted to be left in peace to do?

  “We really didn’t think about those things, hijito. In those times, it was enough to keep tortillas and frijoles on the table.”

  I have just returned from a long trip in Mexico and I have brought Tía Pepa an obsidian arrow point, dug up from pasture land around the ruins of the ancient city of Tula. I explain to her that Tula had been the capital of the Tolteca Indian empire, which preceded the Aztecas, and, at one time, had been ruled by the man-god Quetzalcoatl.

  The ruins of the city include pyramids, plazas, murals, and ball courts, and they lie forty minutes to the northwest of Mexico City. Long before the Aztecs arrived in the valley of Mexico, it was in Tula that Quetzalcoatl is said to have banished human sacrifice and cultivated a society devoted to creating ornately decorated monuments, learning, and feats of rhetoric and poetry which they called “the scattering of the jade.”

  His brother, Tezcatlipoca, jealous of the esteem that people bestowed on his sibling, conspired against him by getting him drunk at a fiesta. In a delirious state, Quetzalcoatl made love to his own sister. Scandalized, humiliated, and broken, Quetzalcoatl and a group of his followers went into exile, prophesying that he would return someday to throw down all the kingdoms of Mexico. Tula was abandoned, and as fate would have it, the date that had been foretold for Quetzalcoatl’s return, the year known as “One Reed,” was the year that Cortés arrived in Mexico, leading Motecuhzoma, emperor of the Aztecas, to believe that the banished god had returned to fulfill his ominous prophecy.

  Tía Pepa listens to the story while she cradles the arrow point in her hand.

  “You are not like us,” she says, with a mischievous grin. “You are an adventurer.”

  I describe for her the four massive Atlantes warriors, clutching butterfly-shaped shields, who stand as sentries, looking south from atop the great step pyramid in Tula. Like a host of other large ancient cities on this continent, at some point, the people of Tula just moved on. They abandoned the noble city they had taken generations to create. They disappeared into the ether of the past, leaving Tula behind like a relic with only the Atlantes to keep vigil over the sacred precinct through the ages.

  What were they searching for? Why were all the old Mexicans always abandoning their cities, from Teotihuacán to Chichén Itzá? How much of that old wanderlust was left among us Mestizos, leaving behind Mexico, Coahuila, and the Texas that had been forged in the crucible of ancient Mexican time?

  “There was nothing that ever scared me like when we left home,” Pepa remembers now. “Everyone in Texas looked different, like the Americanos who used to run the mines in Palaú. The Mexicanos were all poor, like us, and we kept to ourselves. For a long time, it didn’t seem like home at all.”

  Uncle Frank remembered coming to San Antonio several times, as a child, around the turn of the century. He said the trip took five days each way, crossing the Rio Grande at the old Paso de Francia, near the present-day Piedras Negras, before there was a bridge there. His father, Abuelo Jacobo Garcia, had been traveling to San Antonio from Palaú, Coahuila, all his life. He had represented the miners of Palaú there at the 1888 International Fair. The event was inaugurated by Mexican Pr
esident-for-Life Porfirio Díaz, who pressed a telegraph key in Mexico City that lit up the newly installed street lamps in Alamo Plaza.

  “It didn’t really feel like we were leaving Mexico,” Uncle Frank told me once. “Except most of the streets were paved, and they were wider. And there was less dust.”

  In those days, the Rio San Antonio was wider and messier than the regulated river and manicured tourists’ riverwalk of today. When Uncle Frank first saw it, it divided the city in a winding, muddy meridian. Branches of old oaks hung out over the water, draped with Spanish moss, mixed in with stands of bamboo and elephant ears. The water ran so sluggishly that lilies grew along the bank. Uncle Frank says he remembers how the San Antonio River was wider than the Rio Grande—fifty yards at its widest mark—and that the wealthy patrones had their houses right along the riverbank, with white picket fences encircling their property.

  There were iron arches with gas lamps over the downtown streets, illuminating the city center at night as if it were the seat of a grand empire. Along with his father and his brother, Frank was dazzled by the first electric streetcar he had ever seen, hypnotized by all the clean, rapid movements of its perfectly synchronized, silent working parts. On that trip, he and his brother Manuel traded drawings of the streetcar and how they thought it worked; eventually Uncle Frank did work on train engines in Texas.

  It seemed everyone, even many of the Gringos, spoke Spanish. Just as they had since the time of the missions in the early eighteenth century, the famous “chili queens” of San Antonio had their busy open-air food stands in Market Plaza and along other streets downtown, selling fresh tortillas, moles, and bowls of rich, spicy ground beef picadillo, the original Mexican dish from which Texas-style chili is derived. Just as in Mexico, there were religious processions and celebrations taking place around the downtown cathedral. On one of their trips, Uncle Frank remembers seeing a man crucified—for real, he insisted—in Main Plaza during easter observances, with a large crowd looking on.