Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  Socorro Mendiola, from Alice, Texas. She and Grandmother had taught school together in a one-room schoolhouse in Cotulla in 1910. Then Socorro became a Franciscan nun, breaking the heart of Grandmother’s cousin, Emeterio Vela, whom, she noted with a sigh, had died just last year.

  And every year, by the degrees of each ended life, as the world grew older, our addressing marathons grew shorter—though Grandmother would change the subject if I pointed out this mortal ratio.

  Inside her rolltop writing desk, she kept a mysterious wooden polygonal star that had a different swatch of old Mexican fabrics glued on each facet. The multicolored curiosity smelled like Mexico, all cumin, wild honey, and smoky rose, and when you shook it, a small solitary object rattled inside. A stone? A marble? A gem? To me, it seemed like some magician’s puzzle, and locked inside were all of the secrets of old Mexico.

  During one of our annual Christmas-card sessions, I asked her if I could have that star, instead of the customary reward of a box of animal crackers and five dollars in change, which she laboriously fished out of her zippered, yellowing plastic coin purse. Grandmother was almost completely blind by then, so I put her hand to the last of the Hallmark Christmas cards in the place for her to sign her name. She slowly scratched out LEANDRA VELA LOPEZ, and told me no, I could not have the star.

  I never saw it again.

  My uncle, Lico Lopez, her son, ferreted out the past as a passionate genealogist who used research, fantasy, and spells of breathless diabetic madness to craft his ancestral charts of the Lopez and Vela families. Some are elaborate discs, in which each outward concentric ring represents a new generation. In these, as you delve closer to the center, you also go deeper into the past. In others, quickly dashed off as notes to himself, ragged trees and jagged lines are drawn between names like Evaristo, Viviano, Blas, and Hermenegilda. In one, going back to 1763, the capstone slot contains the cryptic entry, from whom, presumably, he believed we were descended. Subtle faculties and proclivities were passed, speechlessly, through the flesh of successive generations. The ghosts of Spanish royalty mingled with Indios, Negros, and people from every part of the world—in Uncle Lico’s secret genealogy of Mexico. Yet, despite the uninterest and ridicule of many, he managed to recover numerous family names and stories.

  “King of Spain,”

  Lico knew I had some of the same magnetic attraction to the past that fueled his manic genealogies, as if the molecules of our bodies were polarized in a way that drew us both back in time, back, inexorably, toward the ancestors. Before he died, suddenly, in San Antonio, of a heart attack, he sent me all of the notes and charts accumulated in his forty years of digging in the family root cellars. He also gave me a receipt, dated May 25, 1928, laminated and mounted on wood, from my grandfather’s grocery store, Leonides Lopez Groceries, in Cotulla, Texas. In my grandfather’s filigreed wrought iron pencil script, it details a sale on that day of harina (flour), azúcar (sugar), fideos (vermicelli), manteca (lard), papas (potatoes), and other assorted dry goods, for a total of $5.05.

  A relic like this is the exception, though. A trunkful of the Santos family photographs disappeared when Madrina moved out of the old house on Cincinnati Street. She swears she remembers seeing it fall off the truck near the corner of Zarzamora Street, where La Poblanita bakery was located. It was a pine box the size of a shipping trunk, stuffed with heirloom photographs. She can’t remember why she said nothing at the time. It fell off a truck onto the dusty streets of old San Antonio de Bejar one day and was left behind, abandoned, lost.

  In one photo that survived it is 1960, and the whole Santos tribe is standing on the porch of my grandmother’s house, in early evening shadows. It must have been Easter because my many cousins and I are in church clothes, standing in the yard around the trunk of a great sycamore tree. My aunts and uncles are there, partly old Mexican, partly new American, looking handsome, hopeful, proud of the brood standing in front of them. In the very middle of the scene, las Ancianas, Grandmother Santos, whom we called “Uela,” short for abuela, and Madrina, her sister, are standing regally in a perfect moment, radiating the indelible light of Mexico. On the porch, Mother and an aunt have my newborn twin brothers, George and Charles, wrapped in blankets in their arms. My father looks serious, with a distant gaze, in a dark suit and silky tie. To one side, standing apart from us, is one of my eldest cousins, René, who would be killed in Vietnam just seven years later.

  These are the memento mori of the Santos. There are a few photographs, rosary chains of half-remembered stories, carried out of another time by the old Mexicans I grew up with. In dreams, the ancestors who have passed on visit with me, in this world, and in a world that lies perhaps within, amidst, and still beyond this world—a mystical limbo dimension that the descendants of the Aztecs call el Inframundo. In the Inframundo, all that has been forgotten still lives. Nothing is lost. All remembrance is redeemed from oblivion.

  These ancestors, living and dead, have asked me the questions they were once asked: Where did our forebears come from and what have we amounted to in this world? Where have we come to in the span of all time, and where are we headed, like an arrow shot long ago into infinite empty space? What messages and markings of the ancient past do we carry in these handed-down bodies we live in today?

  With these questions swirling inside me, I have rediscovered some stories of the family past in the landscapes of Texas and Mexico, in the timeless language of stone, river, wind, and trees. Tío Abrán, twin brother to my great-grandfather Jacobo, was a master of making charcoal. He lived in the hill country, where the cedars needed to make charcoal were planted a century ago to supply the industry. Today, long after he worked there, walking in that central Texas landscape crowded with deep green cedar, I feel old Abrán’s presence, like the whisper of a tale still waiting to be told, wondering whether my intuition and the family’s history are implicitly intertwined. Even if everything else had been lost—photographs, stories, rumors, and suspicions—if nothing at all from the past remained for us, the land remains, as the original book of the family.

  It was always meant to be handed down.

  I am one of the late twentieth-century Santos, born in la Tierra de Viejitas, “the Land of Little Old Ladies,” a sun-drenched riverine empire in south Texas reigned over by a dynasty of Mexican doñas who held court in shady painted backyard arbors and parlors across the neighborhoods of San Antonio. To the uninitiated, las Viejitas might look fragile, with their bundled bluish hair, false teeth, and halting arthritic steps across the front porch. Their names were ciphers from the lost world: Pepa. Tomasa. Leandra. Margarita. Chita. Cuka. Fermina. They were grandmothers, great-aunts, sisters-in-law, and comadres.

  Their houses smelled of cinnamon tea, marigolds, burning church candles, Maja brand Spanish talcum powder, and Pine-Sol. They tended garden plots of geraniums, squash, tomatoes, cilantro, and chile, decorated with stones that were painted to look like Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Cantinflas. The chickens in their backyards sometimes seemed to cluck to the sound of the polkas coming from the transistor radio left on in the bathroom. They healed children, and animals, with their remedios, potions and poultices made with herbs that had names like el garrabato and la gobernadora. Asking Tía Pepa how she learned the old remedies, cures, and healing arts, she once answered, “It’s nothing special—just some little things I heard some people talking about when I was a little girl.”

  When she was fourteen, Pepa performed her first healing on a woman in her village of Palaú, Coahuila, in north Mexico. The woman was wasting away from a week of stomach cramps and nausea. She was empachada, afflicted by some alien spirit that had entered her body to block and torment her guts. Pepa explains how she laid the ailing señora on a large dining room table, rubbing her with freshly squeezed plant oils, tightly wrapping her in a blanket, “like an enchilada,” and praying by her side for hours, petitioning the evil spirit to come out. The cramps subsided and the lady quickly got better.

  Many years
later, my brothers and I would be left with my grandmother and her old sisters when we were sick with colds. They wrapped hot, wet towels around our clasped hands and had us pray, “to preserve and concentrate the warmth of your body.” The heat of the living rooms of las Viejitas was moist with the faint, burnt paraffin scent of the gas flames rising along the white-hot porcelain heating fixtures. While I lay dazed with the flu on a sofa, watching The Andy Griffith Show, Let’s Make a Deal, or The Mike Douglas Show, they made huevos rancheros and atole de arroz, read the Bible, planted a new cactus in the backporch garden, and in the afternoon, took a long, tranquil siesta.

  On their solo trips to Mexico, we heard how las Viejitas rode tough mares and swam in rushing rock-bed arroyos. After being dropped off across the border in Nuevo Laredo or Piedras Negras, they traveled by bus far into the old country to see sobrinos y comadres in Monterrey or Nueva Rosita, or deeper into Mexico to collect water from a spring in Querétaro said to have healing powers.

  Some traded small parcels of real estate, purchased originally with insurance money from their long-departed husbands. Some loved parades—some wore fur coats in the middle of summer. Others prayed with eyes closed, their hands held to the breast and clasped so tightly the blood ran out. They wore powders and pomades, with small handkerchiefs always modestly folded into their cuffs or bodices.

  Effortlessly, they seemed to know exactly what needed to be done. When a violent storm suddenly descended on the city, they pulled the windows closed and made crosses of lime on small cards, placing them under the beds, chairs, and tables.

  They rolled tortillas while cooking beans and carne guisada on fiery stoves—and ended most days with a shot of tequila and a little juice glass filled with beer.

  Then it was time for the rosary.

  That there were no men among las Viejitas didn’t seem strange at all. They seemed to have died so far in the past that no one ever spoke of them. The pictures of the grandfathers, and the great-grandfathers, were kept in loving regard in living room cabinets and bedroom bureaus—always with the claw mustaches, always unsmiling, stiff-spined in their heavy wool suits. In one old ivory frame, Uela and Abuelo Juan José, my father’s parents, were caught in brisk midstride, staring ahead, snapped by a strolling photographer on the downtown sidewalk of Houston Street, under the marquis of the Texas Theater. I marveled at my grandfather’s stance, with leg kicked out as if in a march. His expression was tender yet determined. But by the 1950s, most of the men were already distant memories. Las Viejitas had made it through without them, even if much of the century had been lonely.

  They had raised their tribes—las familias—in El Norte, virtually alone. Most of their men fell early in the century, at an epic age’s end when the memories and dreams of Old Mexico were receding quickly to the south like a tide falling back into an ancient inland sea, past Zarzamora Street in San Antonio, past the moonlit chalk bluffs of the Nueces River in south Texas, then farther south past the towns of Cotulla, Hondo, Eagle Pass, and the Rio Grande.

  After freely moving north and south for generations, the Santos were left on the north bank of this vanishing memory—naufragios—shipwrecked beyond the border. No one now remembered when Texas was Mexico, was Nueva España, was wilderness before the Europeans came.

  There was revolution in the old country when the family set out for the north in this century. In 1914 they were Mestizo settlers, part Spanish, part Indian, on the edge of the ruins of ancient Mexico and New Spain. Even though these lands had been Mexican for nearly three centuries—Texas had been taken over by los Americanos in 1836—it was a new world they settled in, less than three hundred miles from home. Mexicanos could easily keep to themselves, but back then, there were some places you just didn’t go. Mexicans knew to avoid completely the predominantly German Texas hill country towns of New Braunfels and Fredericksburg, where there had been trouble in the past with “esa gente con las cabezas quadradas,”—“those people with the square heads”—as Great-uncle Manuel Martinez, Madrina’s husband, used to say.

  There were outposts of the “pueblo Mexicano” in cities of the north like St. Louis and Chicago, in Detroit and Seattle, but the Mexican Americans mainly stayed in the lands we knew best, from California to Texas, not too far from el otro lado, “the other side,” as Mexico was often referred to.

  “The apple never falls too far from the tree,” Uela used to say. By leaving Mexico, the family had become exiles in what was really our own homeland. But under the all-knowing gazes of these Viejitas, we never felt oppressed or downtrodden.

  The world of the family in la Tierra de Viejitas was an echo of the worlds of families we knew in Mexico, where I spent a lot of time growing up. After the migration of the Santos and Garcias in 1914, during the time of the Mexican Revolution, only a few aunts and cousins had remained in Mexico, and many of them had died, or been lost by the time I was born. The Guerras of Sabinas, Coahuila, were such old family friends that they had become family, offering me a living root in the land the Santos had left behind fifty years before. I didn’t know it then, but my visits to Sabinas, growing more frequent as I grew older, were also journeys to my family’s former home in Mexico, there in that cluster of little-known northern towns in the coal-rich high desert country of Coahuila. These pilgrimages were almost involuntary, as if I had been pulled, inexplicably, in a strong Gulf undertow toward the ancestors. In towns such as Sabinas, Agujita, Palaú, and Múzquiz, I was in the company of our family’s Mexican ghosts.

  The Guerra family home in Sabinas, Coahuila, across the street from the church and the central plaza, was another matriarchy—ruled over by a Viejita, Abuelita Josefina, a widow already for more than thirty years, who was dutifully attended to by her daughters, sons, grandchildren, and a small coterie of India maids.

  During one of the first of many visits to the Guerras in Sabinas in the mid-1960s, I awoke with a sudden noise. Outside in the plaza, reservists, bedraggled from long Saturday night cantina vigils, had begun their drills in the plaza at dawn, blowing bugles and pounding their snares as if they wanted to crack the sky open, scaring the grackles and rattling the tin gutters of the house, sounding like clarions of the apocalypse. With the bedroom shutters open to the plaza, I started out of bed, fearing the end of the world had surely begun.

  Walking out onto the cold, green malachite floors of the hallway, utterly quiet now, and into the kitchen, old Zulema, whom everyone called “Zule,” the longtime head maid of the house, sat quietly on a stool in the early light, knitting her thick gray hair into one long braid, and afterward putting the water on to boil tomatoes for the breakfast salsa ranchera. She had the moon-shaped face of the Chichimeca Indians of the region. By then, her eyes were growing misty with cataracts, so most of the chopping she now left to the muchachitas, who were diligently at their work. Abuela Josefina, dressed in black with a mantle of starched lace chevrons around her collar, sat at a table with a cup of chocolate, sorting beans and chiles through her bifocals while orchestrating from across the room as Zule added the portions of salt, cumin, and cracked black pepper to the softly bubbling clay pot of salsa on the stove. She would narrate every step of the recipe to me—first burning the skins of the tomato, using a pumice stone metate to grind the spices, and always waiting until the very end for the cilantro—while interspersing stories of a specific overfiery salsa she had made for one of her daughter’s weddings thirty years before, or a philological aperçu on the origin of the word “tomato” in tomatl, from the Nahuatl tongue of ancient Mexico.

  Much of the breakfast came from the courtyard garden, scented with thickets of mint and mottled in the morning shade of lime trees with a nebula of low-hanging fruit. From high up in the leaf-draped branches of a primeval avocado tree there, I watched all of the comings and goings of the morning. The gas vendor who rolled his tanks through the streets shouting “Coahuila Gas!” came through the garden gate looking for one of the girls in the kitchen whom he had a crush on. Meanwhile, the man who s
old flowers rang and waited for Zule at the gate, crossing himself every time the church bell chimed in the plaza. Throughout the early morning, with the sound of clapping sandals on the stone floors, grandchildren would appear in small gaggles, looking for their abuela Josefina, who would let each one take a sip from her cup of steaming chocolate.

  Around the grand dining table, under an equestrian portrait of the family patriarch, Don Alejandro Guerra, Doña Josefina would gently steward the discussion during the meal, beginning by catching up on the family in San Antonio. If her eldest son, Tío Alejandro, was there, the talk would quickly move to news and politics of Mexico’s borderlands, the politics of El Norte, a joke about the new Mexican president, an assassination of a governor in the Yucatán—or about poor Mexico herself.

  Pobre Mexico.

  In these mealtime colloquies, over huevos and frijoles, Mexico was referred to in tones of pity and exasperation: all the poverty, all the corruption, all the dust. The idea of annexing Coahuila to Texas would receive a jubilant toast of watermelon juice.

  And I worried to myself secretly: What would be the destiny of Mexico?

  Once they arrived in Texas during the revolution, maybe the Santos and Garcia families simply wanted to forget their past in Mexico—the dusty streets, broken-down houses, and hunger. They wanted to burn away the memory of when the families came north across the Rio Grande. Northern Mexico became one of the most violent and chaotic battlefields of la Revolución of 1910, a revolution that was to last eleven years. But for the first years, the revolution was only distant thunder, more of a concern to Mexicans well to the south of Coahuila in states such as Guerrero, Puebla, and Mexico City. The family’s flight from Coahuila was in 1914, the year Pancho Villa, along with a myriad of other revolutionary bands, rose up to occupy the bare constellation of towns across the parched high Norteño desert where they had made their homes. San Antonio provided them a convenient escape from the fighting, and—despite other intentions—a shelter for memory, instead of its negation.