As we had carried his coffin to the waiting hearse, there was a crescendo of Nashville gospel music from the minister’s suitcase-sized boom box, as my cousins and their born-again confreres began singing “How Great Is His Name!” At the graveside, after the funeral, Anastasio, a friend of Uncle Lico’s who wore a brown straw porkpie hat like Uncle Lico’s, just shook his head and turned to make his way back to his car.
“Just ain’t the way he would’ve wanted to say goodbye.”
Uncle Beto looked up from the big pot of menudo he was stirring, and asked about news of Sabinas. The day before, there had been bad news from Mexico. I had meant to spend that last weekend there, but had missed my ride south after returning late from another trip. Alejo, the ranch foreman, and his wife, Felipa, had a new daughter. They already had six children, but only one son, and Alejo was worried he would grow up effeminate with only sisters for siblings. So they kept having more children—four more—and every time a daughter. A big baptism party is a mainstay of Norteño tradition. And the party that night at their small house in town was already well under way, with a mariachi trio singing on the patio, when a group of local toughs, several brothers among them, crashed the fiesta and began menacing some of the guests. Alejo and others ejected them with little resistance, but an hour later they returned, with machetes. In the argument and altercation that followed, Alejo shot three of them, all brothers, killing one, and then went into hiding. After turning himself in several days later, it would take more than a year before Alejo was released on a local judge’s finding of self-defense, but he and his family had to leave Coahuila for fear of a vendetta by the surviving brothers of the dead man.
Earlier that same summer, during the long ride out from the stay at the remote ranch of Dr. Mata, far up in the mountains, there had been an eerie scene that had seemed like an augur of these times to come. The horse I had ridden in on had gone lame after our fall on the night of the stormy ride in, so my cousin Chickee and I, with some discomfort, were sharing a horse on the way out. By that time in the journey we all were irritating each other with every word and eccentricity, and Chickee and I let the others ride well out ahead, keeping our own silence, riding quietly through high mountain pastures and low swooping valley trails. Just past midday, as we came into a tree-circled clearing surrounding an earthen water tank, I pulled the horse’s reins to halt as we saw a medium-sized speckled doe stepping out of the bush just ahead of us, staring impassively in our direction. For a moment, we stared back, speechless.
The old vaquero from the Mata ranch, Don Tiburcio, had complained ceaselessly during our entire stay about the fact that we had lost the meat we had brought in on the night of the storm. After leaving it covered with tarpaulins, we had returned to the piney vale the next day to find the burro safe, but the provisions already looted by vultures or mountain cats. According to Don Tiburcio, he hadn’t had any fresh meat in two months, just damn beans, potatoes, some scraps of dried machacado beef—and mite-infested tortillas. For all of his cantankerousness about this, the night before we left he still managed to make a delicious fresh milk pudding for us, with sweet cream and aromatic wild mint from the mountains.
But game animals had been scarce all that summer, even the usually abundant rabbits, which were common Coahuila ranch fare. Tiburcio said the recent floods had carried them all away, leaving him hungry, desperate, and crotchety. During those weeks, on a couple of occasions, we had spotted deer, ambling distractedly, far off across a bare valley or standing on a small brushy plateau along a distant bluff. Both times, Tiburcio had taken a long bead and then fired his ancient rifle, only to have the animals jump off into cover, before the bullet was halfway to its target.
The doe was standing motionless, less than twenty yards in front of us. It wouldn’t affect Chickee or me if we let the deer go. We would be heading for San Antonio in the next days. Abrán, Dr. Mata’s son, would soon go back to university in Monterrey. But Tiburcio would be well stocked with meat for weeks. I wasn’t much of a hunter. Out on Rancho Los Generales, we shot rabbits now and then, to cook in very spicy stews with potatoes and fresh chile piquín. In east Texas, under the tutelage of one of our cousins’ husbands, my brothers and I had hunted bullfrogs with shotguns and raccoons with .22s. But I had never hunted for deer, and I had never had such an animal in a rifle sight. The only weapon I had with me now was a low-power, collapsible backpacking rifle that was so light it felt as if it was made out of aluminum foil. It had to be screwed together, like a billiards cue stick. And it was buried deep in my backpack.
“Get it!” Chickee whispered from the rump of the horse where he was riding. “We should get it now, while we can! For Tiburcio!”
“It’ll run,” I replied, reaching behind me, down into the backpack, feeling for the parts of the rifle.
“It’s standing still. Get it while it’s standing still!”
I pulled out the detached butt and barrel of the rifle from my bag and carefully assembled it. With each turn, the threads let out a slow, high-pitch squeak that sounded like fingernails scratching on a blackboard, amplified by the silence of the wilderness around us. But the doe did not move, did not seem to even blink. Sitting in the saddle with Chickee holding the reins, I loaded a single .22 caliber bullet into the chamber and cocked the firing pin back to fire. At the edge of the tree shade ahead, the doe stood, staring at us, and the cool air was scented with sweetgrass, oregano, and pine.
I took aim for the animal’s heart, nestled just beneath the tuft of white fur on its breast, and when the shot pierced the air with a fiery crack, the echoes bounded off in all directions, scattering birds and sending snakes into their holes. We watched the bullet hit its mark, leaving a small red smear on the breast. But the deer did not fall, only taking a few steps forward to continue staring forward at us. The sharp metallic scent of the scorched gunpowder hung in the air around us.
Chickee and I were both taken aback, disappointed that the doe hadn’t run, but now the small wound my shot had made would no doubt eventually be fatal. I reloaded and took aim again. The deer looked back at us as if utterly resigned to its own sacrifice, as if there were some inexorable outcome to our meeting. The second shot hit again, this time in the shoulder and the animal flinched and steadied its step, but still did not fall or run. It began to feel as if we had been unknowingly enlisted into a strange ritual execution, with everyone involved following through on some unspoken compromiso. As I loaded the next bullet, it looked like a shiny, opalescent pearl before falling into the firing chamber.
It took three more shots before the doe finally weakened at its knees, and then leaned over and fell into a thicket of brush to one side. Abrán and Tiburcio, who had heard the shots, were standing nearby, waiting for the hunt to finish. Tiburcio let out a giddy whoop and rode out from a copse, preparing to field dress the quarry to take back to the ranch.
“¡Bien hecho, compañeritos, bien hecho!” he shouted, trotting forward in a cloud of dust while the two of us were still quieted by the slow relay of shots I had just fired. We watched as Tiburcio quickly lashed the hind legs of the deer up onto the low branch of a tree and began to clean and skin it. He shouted praise for my feat of hunting and held back the neck to show the wounds, spaced like a perfect necklace.
I felt as if I had intruded into someone else’s sacrifice, knowing how close the vaqueros live to this land that I only visited during vacations. There was no remorse or guilt about taking a deer, especially when it meant Tiburcio eating meat after a long time without. I’d seen Alejo once torture a captured hawk that had been stealing eggs from the ranch henhouse for months, so deep had his personal enmity become for the predator bird. But even if my ancestors had once been of that world in north Mexico, I knew a part of that ranch life had ended for me. At the Rancho Los Generales, the cattle herd was gradually sold off and dwindled down to less than a hundred head. In the ten years that followed, a pageant of lackadaisical vaqueros let many of the fences and waterworks fall in
to disrepair, and the family from Sabinas and Texas didn’t visit much. With the news from Sabinas of the shootings at the baptism party, it seemed the life of the ranchos was ending everywhere.
Todo se acaba. Todo se extermina.
Uncle Beto dropped handfuls of diced onions and chopped oregano into the boiling stew that had the rusty magenta color of dried chiles de arbol. Stepping away from the hot plate where he cooks his menudo, he began one of the flowery oratorical expositions he frequently delivers, based in part on the American citizenship exam he was forced to memorize over forty years ago.
“If, in order to please the people, for the party of the first part, and to guarantee again the principles on which this nation was at one time forefounded, then how can we not, now, being of sound mind, alejamos de San Antonio, and the nation on which it stands, saying goodbye to—tamales, menudo, ranchitos—so that we may then, perhaps, in the party of the second part, choose henceforth to go to Inglaterra, or England, as we sometimes call it, just as our forefathers recommended?”
Stirring the pot of bubbling menudo with a long wooden spoon, Uncle Beto ended with his traditional faux CB sign-off: “Obi-Wan Kenobi. Ten-four. Smokey at the front door, over and out!”
London was unnaturally quiet. You could hear birdsong in the trees along the mall by the Thames, as well as the big boats cutting the river water as they went by. All Saturday, downtown traffic was closed off while a giant campaign for nuclear disarmament demonstration snaked its way across the Southbank Bridge, coursing through Piccadilly, up to Oxford Circus, then down past Covent Garden Market, some of us stopping for eclairs and coffee, and then everyone spilling, for hours it seemed, into the great plaza at Trafalgar Square. It was a gray day under turbulent, roiling clouds and the myriad shifting flights of thousands of pigeons inhabiting the square.
This march was the culmination of months of other marches across the country in protest against the Americans placing nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on planes stationed at bases in Great Britain and Europe. As the throng of protesters listened to speeches, milled along the streets with their flasks, sitting on the steps of museums, or hanging from the arms of statues, a circle of orange-robed Buddhist monks drummed and chanted in a changeless solemn cadence. A constant, flat droning hum of far-off bagpipes was in the air as the punk band Killing Joke took the main stage at the demonstration with a paralyzing electric screech, beneath a massive banner with an image of the head of a screaming baby in a seething red mushroom cloud. The drum battery exploded and the crowd was already heaving forward as the caterwauling guitars began to shake the paving stones. I thought to myself: This is what the end of the world will feel like.
In that rumbling din, you could feel the tug of the universe expanding, aging by vast degrees, here, in a fragile world we were ourselves prepared to obliterate, all of it making the end of the world feel palpable and immanent. Some days earlier I had received the news from Texas that my great-uncle Frank had died in his sleep at ninety-five. Francisco was the eldest brother of my grandmother, the family scout in the 1914 migration out of Mexico, Texas homesteader, inventor, father, gentleman, who had once whispered to me, “The way is very simple. Do the good to other people and it shall be returned to you.”
His long, delicate hands were rough from caressing metal lathes, pulling apart motors and industrial latches, and hammering planks of white-hot alloyed steel. I had his hands, without the calluses and torn nails. I walked in the same body he had, long in the torso, bony knees, big ears. While he had invented that early version of the dump truck, and a widely used pecan shelling machine, he never became wealthy by any of his inventions. I complained to him that I had received none of the Garcia talent for inventing, engineering, and metalworking. But Uncle Frank disagreed and shook his finger at me, “Your stories and your poems—those are inventions, too!” and he laughed.
From England, he seemed as distant as starlight, as lost as wind. He was the first of the old ones to go after the great despedida of las Viejitas six years before. Before leaving, I had explained to him that I was going to study for two years in England, and I promised him a full account, as I always gave him after my journeys in Mexico. He nodded, grinning, and his long face lit up.
“¡Shahk-ess-peah-rrrreh! ¡Qué bravo!” he shouted, and he showed me his old and yellowed paper copy, missing its cover, of a Spanish translation of the Tragedies, which he kept on his night table, next to his bed. Of all that was possible out of our past together, it seemed prophetic or ironic that those were the last words between us in this world. The fearless abrazo he gave me as a farewell that day remained a warm presence in a bitter time, far away from the gathered family in San Antonio, giving Uncle Frank his last despedida.
The day I learned of Frank’s death I had already been scheduled to view the collection of Mexican pictorial manuscripts in the collection of the Bodleian at Oxford. I didn’t feel like spending that afternoon inside a library, but it had been difficult getting permission to see the old codices, and the two-hour session had been planned a month in advance. If I were to cancel now, it was unlikely I would have a chance to see them again soon.
All the denizens at their desks in the high-ceilinged reading room of the ancient Codrington Library of the Bodleian stirred as I entered. One of my Tony Lama pigskin suede cowboy boots, once as supple as chamois leather, now nearly rotten from the damp British climate, had developed a squeak in its sole. As I walked across the long chamber to the librarian’s desk, the boot let out a series of slow, high-pitched squeals that irritated the scholars and drew a volley of shushes and tsks from both sides of the aisle.
This was my favorite of all of Oxford’s libraries, where I spent a considerable amount of time in those years. There were small study cells with leaded glass windows that had the feeling of ancient cloistered monks’ quarters. From the reading room, stuffy from all the alkaline perspiration of scholarship, you could hear the rush of great torrents of water every half hour, sluicing the urinals of the men’s room downstairs, but sounding like a running mountain stream, charging the air throughout the old building. And since the library was part of a Fellows college at Oxford, made up of scholars and no students, the clientele at the Codrington tended to be old eccentric dons, a few in their academic gowns, surrounded by piles of yellowing notes, climbing ladders to high shelves, making notes from books while standing on the very top step.
The porter led me to the manuscript room, which was lit through high clerestory windows by the afternoon sun. The four codices, ancient painted books of the Mixteca Indians of Mexico, had already been laid out on a long, cantilevered viewing table, fanned out in narrow accordion swaths of the amatl paper and stiff deerskin on which the colored pictures, from the doorway, seemed to be glowing and spinning. These were among the few surviving documents that predate the conquest, and they had appeared in the Bodleian’s collection in 1659, as part of a bequest. How they first came out of Mexico, or where they came from exactly, was unknown.
In long chains of elaborately decorated panels, the manuscripts, painted in rusty ochre, cerulean blue, and cochineal red, depicted genealogies and migrations, battles and concordats, sacrifices and rituals. In some panels, figures in tunics were seated in profile, facing each other on a woven mat, curls of speech issuing and rising from their mouths. Most of the glyphs had been approximated into English.
“The marriage of Eight Flint and Thirteen Lizard, in a place named the Hill of Flowers.”
“There once was a lake with an island in the middle, surrounded by seven caves.” Then a journey was traced in trails of miniature footprints, from “Cloud Belching Hill to the River of the Lady Six Deer.” Beneath a glyph depicting a smoking mirror appeared the place name for the hill of the Intertwined Serpents.
In that room, full of scores of other old books and manuscripts, the velvety brown parchments looked like artifacts from another planet, still radiating the dust of someone else’s atmosphere. They were poignant, among the few surviv
ors of the great bonfires that consumed a whole cosmos of known things painted in books just like these. There was a futile, ironic feeling because the books dealt repeatedly with the memory of a place of origin, and all the setting out and wandering in the world, guaranteeing that everything would be remembered, that the knowledge of the past would not be lost. Yet their testimonies were preserved but untranslatable, memories without a rememberer. They looked hijacked, stolen from their vanquished source, each one a broken oracle of a disappeared world.
The old librarian who tended the ancient texts sat at the far end of the table, dozing with his chin resting on his chest, his academic gown tattered and torn along the bottom hem. I thought I might just be able to quietly fold and carry out at least two of the books, the Selden roll and the Codex Bodley, without waking the deeply asleep minder of the manuscripts. I had imagined the plot for weeks. With luck, I would have enough time to mail them from the High Street postal station off to my cousins in Sabinas before the Bodleian Library detectives could catch me. The ancient books could be repatriated in Coahuila, in the frontera of Mexico. I had read how a Mexican graduate student in Paris had recently managed to smuggle several codices out of the Bibliothèque Nationale and back to Mexico, by hiding them in the seat of his underwear.
But as I mulled over the risks and rationale for my plot, I was distracted by an image off at the edge of one of the panels of one codex. I hadn’t noticed it before because it appeared upside down there, and the later afternoon light was casting long shadows in the stone room. Stepping nearer to it, craning my neck, in one corner of the manuscript, next to a panel of the goddess of maguey seated on a turtle, there was a small, simple painting of the Voladores, in the midst of their ritual. The four dancers, faces expressionless, were wearing eagle headdresses and feathers, perched on top of their decorated pole, preparing for the spiraling descent to the earth. Standing on the pinnacle, the caporal was speaking, telltale curls streaming from his mouth, chanting out loud the old count of the days, praying that the world would be saved from destruction again.
Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation Page 20