Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  A jug of wine with a drowned butterfly? The drunkenness of a loved one.

  A silver halo doubled around the October moon was a sign of childbirth, probably twins.

  Everything was connected. Mal aires, the evil airs, might enter your body through your uncovered mouth or head, wrapping themselves like a treacherous smoke around your bones. This could leave you with a rheum, la gripa, a life-threatening flu. As Madrina knew well, a frightful sight could paralyze you with susto, a fright that could freeze your emotions and leave you quivering and blank like a zombie. Worse, a malicious look from a stranger, el mal ojo, could kidnap your soul forever.

  These ways of seeing had been second nature in Mexico. In the United States, even in Texas, which had been that part of New Spain known as la Nueva Extremadura, they began to feel like superstitions, especially to the men in the family. Yet, for the women, the power to see behind the face of things was even more important in this new world where the pan dulce, the universal sweet bread of Mexico, tasted so different. The pumpkin-filled empanadas tasted like mud. The roasted almond cookies, decorated with a pentagram, crumbled like dust in your mouth. It was the women who kept vigil over all of the knowledge that had been gathered across generations. In their blood was the book of the past. In their visions, they could read the book of the future.

  It was years, Tía Pepa says, before she felt the family was finally safe and settled on the American side of the border. Great-grandfather left his work in the mines behind in Palaú and set out, with the help of his sons, to be a farmer. After arriving in Texas, the Garcias changed farms several times, in one case having to lose an entire crop after a quarrel with the farm owner. As Tía Pepa tells the story today, it was in those troubled days that she received a sign that she was where she was meant to be, and that the Garcias were on the right path.

  It was a hot night in Creedmoor, Texas, and everyone had moved their beds outside onto a small grassy hill near the house, which always had cooling breezes, even on the most uncomfortable days. With her sisters asleep next to her, Pepa heard from far off the bass vibrato of her father’s snore, wreathed in the steady whistling of thousands of crickets. The mosquito netting drawn over her bed kept her from seeing many stars that night, but Venus and the moon were as bright as polished ivory.

  “Then, as I watched, the moon seemed to open up, like a yucca flower throwing out its seeds.”

  Pepa raises her hands above her head, spreading out and moving her fingers like a rain gently beginning to fall to the ground.

  It was a slow-moving cascade of numberless luminous pears, glowing bright green against the midnight sky as they made their way down toward earth. As she watched the pears descending, Tía Pepa looked from bed to bed and saw her brothers and sisters sleeping, scattered across the small hill. The crickets and her father’s snoring had fallen silent.

  The pears filled the air around them, bringing a sweet scent of the fruit as they drew closer. Then, one pear passed with a whisper through the netting above her, and when Pepa put her hand out to touch it, it passed through her hand as well. The immaterial fruit seemed to rotate slowly as it passed through her nightshirt and into her chest above her heart. She looked again to see her sisters and brothers, and the pears were descending out of the sky and passing into each of them as well.

  “For a while, I just counted the pears as they passed into my heart. Some were bright green. Some were riper, with a little bit of red on them.”

  Eventually, Tía Pepa says, she lost count near one hundred.

  That was the night she slept her first real sleep since leaving Mexico.

  6

  From Huisache to Cedar

  De Huisache a Cedro

  Among the Garcias, several uncles and aunts, along with my father, tell the same tale as if it were their own, as if each had lived it and drawn from it their own unmistakable conclusion. It is a story about returning to Mexico, after the family had already been many years in the United States. Maybe it really did happen to each of them at different times, like the same vision, given to many, as a talisman for navigating the new life in El Norte.

  Invariably, the scene is an isolated road in a Coahuila town. Sometimes it is in Nueva Rosita. Sometimes Palaú. Or San Felipe. Or Ciudad Juárez. The time is the 1940s. It is an unbearably hot, dusty day, which is everyday weather in the desert highlands of Coahuila. It is a visit to the house of one of the few relatives who stayed behind.

  The car is stalled. It has a flat tire. The travelers—and usually there is more than one family member present—are stuck, trying to push their big American car up a steep, unpaved, and rocky hillside road. As they noisily work to make the car go, a Mexicano walks by, offering a quiet saludo, leading his heavy-laden burro down the road.

  “He was an old, old Mexicanito farmer,” my father recalls, “like a scene in an old Mexican movie. Wearing a sombrero, white pants, and blouse, and a beat-up pair of huaraches, with tire treads for soles. The burro was loaded with bags of dried corn cobs. His feet and his clothes were filthy.”

  “He was a Kikapu Indian,” Uncle Rudy remembers in his version. “In those days, they used to come through the towns, selling their gamusa deer skins, dried comino seeds, and the hot chile pequín from the sierra.”

  In Uncle Gilbert’s version, the man and the burro walked with several children at his side. While most of the onlookers in the village had been fascinated with his car, peppering him with questions about how fast it went and how long it had taken them to make the long journey from San Antonio, this man just kept his eyes down and walked past in silence.

  “He was very, very quiet,” Uncle Gilbert explains.

  As the story goes, they all watched after the Mexicano as he slowly made his way down the road, and the same thought went through all of their minds. In each tale, they end by turning to one of their traveling companions, whether brother, sister, cousin, uncle, or aunt.

  “If we hadn’t moved to Texas,” they say, pointing at the old Mexicano, “that would be you!”

  “There but for the grace of God, go the Garcias.”

  “Esto, también, pasará.”

  That was Uela’s favorite proverb, of which she had many.

  “This, too, shall pass.”

  “Esto, también, pasará,” she said quietly to my uncle Raul who sat, with a distant expression, next to her. The room was warm and moist from the squat gas heater purring in the corner. The only light came from two oil lamps that were on the mantle, illuminating a ceramic Nativity scene. The whole house smelled of oil, orange rind, and brown sugar from the kitchen, where my aunts were making stacks of buñuelos, fried batter pastry florettes. These would be brought out and placed on the dining room table with all the rest of the Christmas delicacies—tamales, chiles rellenos, steaming hot capirotada, with its burnt, sugary scent.

  Uela was dressed in a dark cotton, floral-print dress, with crisply pressed white scalloped collars. She was in mourning that year, and her starched posture was even more formal than usual. My cousin René had been killed some months before in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. Uncle Raul and Aunt Clara’s son had been eighteen years old. It was the first Christmas since his death and all the elders seemed morose. Uela knew that feeling well.

  As his younger cousins, we had been aware that René had left to fight in the war, and before his death, whenever the television news had shown footage from Vietnam, we would compete to see who among us might be the first to spot our elder cousin warrior. He was part of a tradition of soldiers in the family that we regarded with awe. The hand-colored portraits in green, red, white, and blue of soldiers, living and dead, were a fixture of Mexicano households all over San Antonio. Most of our fathers had been in the army during World War II, and Uncle Raul, who had seen combat in Italy, had also been sent to Korea after rejoining the reserves to make a little extra money for his growing family.

  At first, no one told us of René’s death, and our peals of delight at seeing Vietnam footage on T
V were now met with an edgy silence. By the time we were told, months afterward, it already had the feeling of distant history, of a life arrested and taken back into the farthest recesses of time. I struggled then to remember my cousin’s face and his gangly Santos-Garcia body.

  “It’s more than we should be asked to give, but it is just so, and we must accept it,” Uela had said quietly in her impeccably pronounced Spanish. Then she shrugged her shoulders and let out one of the characteristic sighs that used to issue slowly from her like the final note of a song, held pianissimo until the last vibration fell from the air.

  “Esto, también, pasará.”

  As usual that year, Uela’s house was crowded with viejos, the old ones, for a Christmas fiesta. All of her brothers and sisters were there, along with my aunts and uncles. Most of my cousins were playing in the large backyard, lit up by a streetlamp Uncle Frank had installed just for the occasion. At these family pachangas, these gatherings of the tribe, I was always attracted to los viejos and the slow quiet that seemed to revolve around them.

  Whether we were in one of our houses or encamped for an afternoon in one of San Antonio’s thick-gladed parks, their presence, confident and wise, made it feel as if we were all denizens of a secret Mestizo city, a world that existed parallel to the apparent physical lineaments of the city everyone else saw. There was a sense of ceremony around them: Uela; Madrina; Tía Pepa; Uncles Frank, Jesse, Manuel, Chale, and Gilbert. Plates of Aunt Minnie’s fresh Christmas bean and chicken tamales were especially prepared and set before los viejos, along with a Negra Modelo beer, poured into freezer-chilled fountain glasses. The tamales were delectable corn masa dumplings, some pork, some bean, some chicken, wrapped tightly in pale corn husks. A bowl was passed around with fresh jalapeños to be bitten raw, along with a mouthful of tamal. Among that generation, they ate chile into their nineties, impervious to the stomach ailments that force many middle-aged Mexicanos these days to renounce the “fire of the earth,” as one uncle calls it. The room was quiet, except for the sound of them eating and gently sipping their beers.

  Time took on a different quality around them. There was never any alarm. All could be witnessed. Everything could be endured. Elsewhere in our lives, we were careening through a century of accelerating atrocities and wonders. The bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the tremors of the 1960s over civil rights struggles and the Vietnam war, even the Apollo landings on the moon passed before the Garcias as if they were watching a long movie.

  “We have to admit we like things to be easier than they were before,” Uncle Frank once told me. “But there will always be pain.”

  Around los viejos, it seemed time was spiraling in cycles that eventually brought us around the same curving nebula of tales and trials. The grief of a new widow. An uncle leaning heavily on the tequila. Famine brought on by war, revolution, or a change in the weather. A grandchild crazed on drugs, with no respect for anyone. They gave you the sense that the story was always longer than just the tale being told. It didn’t matter how desperate these times appeared to be to others. They knew how the world could spin through long spells of grief and solace, need and succor.

  That Christmas, the Garcias had a message drawn from their long years of witness:

  This too shall pass.

  Abuelo Jacobo and the whole family, Madrina and six of her brothers, traveled from their sharecropping, hill pecan farm where they had lived since 1914. It was late in the afternoon and they arrived by train at the Missouri Pacific Railroad Depot downtown. The station was an aging majestic, Moorish temple-like structure with massive arches and a giant burnished bronze dome. As the train slowed to approach downtown, it loomed like a Spanish caliph’s palace over the city’s modern skyline. San Antonio had a rumbling sound Madrina had never heard before. Almost a roar. The street cars rushed alongside the train as they passed through town. Throngs of Mexicanos were busy buying produce and eating at taco stands in the mercado square, where the iron post gas lamps had already been lit.

  As the train braked and squealed into the station, with bellowing gusts of dust and steam swirling around her window, Madrina looked up and saw the statue of a lone Indian perched on the peak of the dome of the train station. He wore a small headdress of feathers and a loin-cloth. He stood in perfect balance on one foot, with his other outstretched behind him. With his arms, he grasped a bow and arrow at the very moment of release, aiming east toward the city.

  She knew it was a statue, but it reminded her of the Kikapu she used to see in the mercado in Múzquiz, selling their leather crafts and dry shredded beef for machacado. It seemed such an odd place for an Indio, as if his arrow was aimed at her, bringing forth a torrent of memories of the Mexican home they had left behind. He was a sentinel of memory, greeting every visitor as an emissary of a vanished world. It gave San Antonio the eerie feeling of a city frozen in time.

  “Y el pobrecito, tan solitario,” Madrina adds—“Poor thing, so alone up there.”

  The poor Indian had been abandoned on the dome, keeping a lonely vigil over San Antonio de Bejar.

  The whole Garcia family moved to San Antonio because Uela and Juan José had found a house big enough to reunite the whole familia. From the days in Palaú, when they had first worked together on the family granja, my grandfather and his father-in-law had nurtured a dream of starting a commercial produce farm closer to a city, giving them access to bigger markets than they could find in the villages or towns of north Mexico. Abuelo Jacobo treasured his son-in-law’s honesty and tireless labors, and the old man was one of the few people with whom my otherwise taciturn grandfather could pass hours talking. Now, it might be possible to realize that long-held dream. Uncle Frank, Abuelo Jacobo’s oldest son, had been married and living in San Antonio for several years. Two of his brothers, Santos and José, who had their own families, worked with him in a machine shop he had opened on Guadalupe Street. Slowly, the Garcias were making their new home in the south Texas city.

  The new Santos-Garcia home on Burr Road was just beyond what were then the northern outskirts of the city, near where the stream of the Rio San Antonio grows into a wider river from a large network of underground springs. The sprawling wooden house, shaded with big furry-leafed Chinese elm trees, was part of Fernridge, the large estate of Col. George Brackenridge, a prominent banker, city father, and scion of an old family of early San Antonio settlers. The house, big enough to accommodate several families, came with Juan José’s new job as caretaker for the complex of submerged greenhouses that were the colonel’s passionate amusement.

  The Santos and Garcias remember the house on Burr Road in San Antonio as the first real home for the family since Palaú. Mexico was still swept up in violent whirlwinds of bloody change. Presidents changed with the seasons. Local government officials were more corrupt and vengeful than ever. Tía Pepa, who had moved back to Mexico with her husband, Anacleto, wrote them often of the politically motivated hijackings on the roads of Coahuila. As a foreman of the mines at Barroterrán, Anacleto had been threatened several times by various unionists who sometimes wanted the mines closed in strikes, sometimes wanted them kept open to draw out coal to sell for arms.

  “Puras locuras mexicanas,” old Abuelo Jacobo would say with disgust, listening to Pepa’s letters read aloud to him by Uela. “Pure Mexican madness.”

  But finally, here was a lasting respite from the revolution and all the wandering it had cost them. The daily calendar of the household revolved around an interminable pageant of meals, all of which were served in two sittings, for the young ones first and the elders last. My father woke up to the same sound every morning. With a rapid battery of ear-piercing slaps, Uela’s hands patted the flour masa into dozens of tortillas for the dawn breakfast that sent her brothers and Juan José off to their work or school.

  The house slowly filled up with the soothing roasted-flour aroma of tortillas on the heavy iron comal. Breakfast was tacos with egg and potatoes with chile. Usually, dinner was fideos, a spicy Mexica
n pasta cooked with cilantro, cumin, and, once or twice a week, some cuts of beef for extra flavor. Today, my father cannot bear the sight of fideos.

  There weren’t many Mexicans in that part of the city. They were mainly downtown and on the west side. Many older Anglo families, along with a new and growing business class, had long ago settled in the verdant north side neighborhoods of Alamo Heights, near the Fernridge estate. Most of the Mexicans to be seen in the streets there were domestic help.

  Uncles Jesse and Gilbert began the new academic year at Alamo Heights Public High School and they were the first and only Mexicans enrolled, which Uncle Jesse remembers helped to toughen them up early in life. “We didn’t even speak one word of English,” he tells me, laughing, as we sit together in his living room in San Antonio, decorated with laminated homages to some of his most memorable catches: a red snapper, a bass, a marlin.

  “We couldn’t understand a single thing the teacher was saying.”

  There were fights. Their bicycle tires, already patchworks of plugs, were slashed. Once, Uncle Jesse found the word Meskin scratched into his school desk.

  “But he made friends with all the girls!” my aunt Fela says of Uncle Jesse, her husband, speaking of a time long before they met. “That’s how he got through that school!” Uncle Jesse runs his leathery hand through his short-cropped gray hair, smiling.

  When I ask, Jesse says Abuelo Juan José loved to spend early evenings on Burr Road in the greenhouse, when the tea-colored light from the lamps cast webs of shadows and made the whole glass enclosure glow green. From down the hill on the porch of their house, you could see Juan José’s shadow moving across the glass, which looked pearly because of the condensation.

  In sepia-colored pictures of the greenhouse from the estate archive, long braids of orchids hang like garlands in a column in the middle of the room. Great palms line the sidewalks like standards. There are Japanese plum trees in full flower, ivory-barked persimmon, miniature china berry. Taped to the back of one photograph of a stand of lilies is a sketch in my grandfather’s hand of where those flowers were to be planted that year. Plano de azucenas, it says, tracing a cross that went from one end of the frosted glass walls to the other, connecting the two doors in the middle of the hall with purple irises mixed in with the lilies.