Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  For my cousins, as for my brothers and me, the homes of las Viejitas were sanctuaries where Coahuila was still alive, and places where the inhibitions and proprieties of the Gringo world of San Antonio, Texas, outside did not apply. Those were days when the taco and the tamal were stigmatized in public, and Spanish was seldom heard on downtown streets. The old tíos had to speak English, often haltingly, to get along in the working world. Most of las Viejitas, staying in their homes, spoke only Spanish, or at least pretended not to speak English. When Uela spoke Spanish, her sentences moved in one steady arc, like a bow across a violin, and her words were delicately pronounced, so that you could hear every tinkle of an old chandelier, every gust of a Coahuila wind falling to a hush, and the grain of a rustling squash blossom.

  The migrations continued through the century. In the 1960s, my parents moved us from one of the old neighborhoods of the city to a new suburb at the city’s northwestern edge, in order to get us into the better public schools in San Antonio. We were the first Mexicans in the neighborhood, in a two-floor house with a two-car garage, a built-in dishwasher, central air-conditioning, and intercom consoles in every room. We spoke English to each other, and Spanish to the old ones in the family. When the mariachis played in our backyard, the rapid plucking of the bajo sexto and the shimmering trumpet lines echoed off the neighbors’ houses and drew them out to listen. Out there in that virgin neighborhood, it always felt as if we were closer to the iridescent Texas sky, stripped of the protective canopy of sycamore, wisteria, china berry, and live oak that arched over so many of the streets of our old, secret Mexican city, San Antonio de Bejar.

  That old San Antonio was part of the hoary earth of the ancestors. Out there in the suburb at the edge of the city, following the early Gemini and Apollo space missions, I read books about space and prepared for the day in the future, which would undoubtedly come, when I would leave this planet in a rocket of my own.

  Today, in New York City, I live in a world las Viejitas never visited, very far from the land they knew well. I have been to places they never imagined, like England, Europe, Turkey, Peru, and the Sudan. Yet, wherever I go, there is a ribbon of primordial Mexican night, the color of obsidian, snaking in a dream through the skies high over my head. Sometimes it is easily visible to me, like a burning galaxy, sometimes it is not. Sometimes it drizzles a fine rain of voices, images, and stories. And las Viejitas are here now, too, as they have always been, invisible yet abiding. They are keeping a vigil over the stories they told to me as if they are a compromiso, a promise that has been handed on. I have always felt connected, oriented, and imparted to by them, but unsure how I fit into a story that was never meant to be told.

  Tía Pepa has an old polished silver pistol with a pearl handle which she often brings out when she’s in the mood to tell her stories of Mexico. It was given to her by her father, my great-grandfather Jacobo, as a wedding present. Her husband, great-uncle Anacleto, was the foreman of the large coal mine in Agujita, Coahuila, which in those days, could be a dangerous place. Anacleto, who later served as mayor of the small cluster of towns that included Cloete, Sabinas, and Barroterán, is still fondly remembered as the only man to serve in that office without ending up a rich man.

  According to la tía, she only had to use that sidearm once, when some bandidos tried to rob their modest house and steal a week’s payroll. Hearing them outside, Pepa yelled a warning to them, then fired one shot through the front door, and the hombres malos fled. Years later, when she and Anacleto came to the United States, the pistol was confiscated in its metal Gamesa cookie box by the American customs agents at the border town of Eagle Pass, and it took my mother a year of legal wrangles to help Tía Pepa to get it back.

  Along with Uela, her sister Tía Pepa, and several aunts, Mother drove to the border after submitting all the required gun-permit papers and notarized letters of reference necessary to establish the weapon in the category of an “irreplaceable family heirloom.” After a morning of shopping in Piedras Negras on the Mexican side of the river, visits with cousins in Villa Union, and bowls of caldo de pollo at a restaurant in the marketplace, they crossed the international bridge and kept their appointment with the chief Immigration Service officer. After receiving from the ladies a gift of tamales, along with the required documents, yet still puzzled by this delegation of nattily dressed Mexican, and Mexican American, women, the agent warily opened the vault and brought out a cloth bag that contained the pistol. Pepa thanked the agent and put the gun in her purse. As she tells the story of its return today, Pepa looks down at the old gun on her lap as if it were the last talisman of all the old Mexican time.

  For years after arriving in Texas, Madrina missed their home village of Palaú, leaving her feeling perpetually displaced and homesick. She had brought little from Mexico, and today she has few things that go back to that time. In her room in Aunt Connie’s house she shows me a photograph of her father Jacobo and his twin brother Abrán, taken in a studio in Palaú, with a map of the Santa Rosa sierra in the background. It sits on top of her 27-inch television, which she keeps tuned to one of the Spanish channels at stentorian volume. Another portrait, of Uela, looking stern, yet consoling, hangs over her bed.

  Year-round, she bundles up now like an Inuit elder, with a furry wool stocking cap pulled down around her ears, a pink and turquoise flowery house robe, and embroidered slippers made of blonde Scottish lambskin. With one gloved hand, she clutches the dainty glass of beer she takes every day with lunch.

  In those long-ago days of the revolution and the migration, she knew a part of old Mexico was dying in the lives of all those who were displaced. That life the Garcias had known in Palaú was soon to be vanquished, and with it a way of living that had been changeless since no one can remember when. It was a way of life that had carried them out of the past like an undetectable current through all the plantings and harvests, the births, marriages, and deaths.

  Madrina remembers how many of the families that had left Mexico with them arrived in Texas with nowhere to go and no one to help them. They were los perdidos, the lost ones. If there was nobody to vouch for them at the border in Piedras Negras, they were put on federal freight trains manned by Army soldiers and Texas Rangers, bound for the sprawling desert refugee camp at Fort Bliss, which quickly became known among the Mexicanos as “Fort Misery.”

  “We were always going to go back when things got better—but then they never did. So we stayed in San Antonio,” Madrina recalls now.

  Yet, there wasn’t much homesickness among the old Garcia brothers. They were not much given over to sentimentality about anything, even Mexico. They simply kept to their practical ways, and by doing so, they remained connected to the feeling of that old Mexican time inside of them. Where las Viejitas maintained something of the knowledge and meaning of that time, their brothers kept and passed down the practices, the daily routines of tasks and chores. Uncle Frank helped me plant a patch of watermelon plants in the beige sand of our ranch in Pleasanton, Texas—moving slowly around the plot, stringing a network of twine from an elaborate frame he had constructed to hang cheesecloth to keep out the greedy dark purple grackles. In that garden, we planted both the round watermelons and the longer, dirigible-shaped ones. Uncle Frank pursued his gardening as if he had done the same thing a thousand times, anticipating the evenings when we would stand over the same garden, spitting watermelon seeds into the bright moonlight.

  Despite Madrina’s early unease, the family gradually became anchored in the ancient soil of Texas and in the streets of San Antonio. But all of those ghost geographies in the family: the Mexico de Mexico, the Mexico de Tejas, pulled at me like an invisible magnet whenever I spent time with the Garcias.

  Where their brothers were all good with lathes, gears, and engines, the three Garcia sisters, Margarita (Uela), Tomasa (Madrina), and Josefa (Tía Pepa), were more inclined to the immaterial realm, where the saints could intercede with God on behalf of humans—seres humanos—and from where huma
ns could draw the power to heal, or, to hurt one another. Many of las Viejitas in the family knew these things, and the Garcia hometown of Palaú in Mexico has always been known as a town of gifted healers.

  This was the knowledge that had been handed down, usually mother to daughter, since the time of the conquest, cloaking old Indian sabiduría, or wisdom, in the trappings of a pious Roman Catholicism. If someone possessed these arts and wanted to, they could do harm to you with el mal ojo, a gaze so jarring your soul would be shaken, leaving you listless, desperate, or crazy.

  Most illnesses were believed to be carried in the winds, so you had to take precautions that unfavorable breezes did not enter your mouth, your ears, or the top of your head. And then there was susto, a kind of supernatural fright, that ensued when you inadvertently allowed yourself to be invaded by unfriendly spirits. Above all, spirits were real.

  Pepa was with Uela when she went to a medium in Monterrey, and they watched the old Indian man pass slowly into a deep, slurring, closed-eye trance. Suddenly, in a distinguished voice, speaking in the crisp, proper Spanish of a metropolitano, he called out to my grandmother by her first name.

  “Margarita! Margarita! How I have looked for your across the centuries!” The medium’s face was pursed in a grimace. Uela was terrified.

  “Who are you?” Uela asked, gripping her sister Pepa’s hand.

  “It is I, Juan de Dios Pesa.”

  It was the spirit of the nineteenth-century poet of Mexico City, whose verses Uela adored. When she was young in Palaú, she had wanted to be an actress, and she used to recite one particular poem of Pesa’s about a rose pleading for rain from a cloud that was always in too much of a hurry to grant the wish. One day, when the cloud finally returned looking for the rose, it was already dead and dried up. Many years later, in San Antonio, she still recited that poem for her grandchildren.

  The ghost of the poet promised Uela it was written in the annals of heaven they would be together someday, and that occult prophecy became a secret the sisters kept until my grandmother’s death.

  “And what would you do with your husband, Juan José?” Pepa asked her sister, leaving the medium’s studio.

  “Don’t even ask such a question, hermana!” she answered, full of consternation.

  As the youngest daughter, Pepa was devoted to all of her brothers and sisters, but especially to her eldest sister, Uela, my grandmother, and in subtle ways she shared some part of each of their powers, the earthly and the ethereal.

  Tía Pepa had been there when her middle sister had gotten the susto that changed her forever: Madrina hadn’t always been so ethereal, so helpless, so pampered as we knew her when we were growing up. As a child and a young woman in Mexico, she had been mischievous and quick to anger. Then, suddenly one day, she changed. It was on a ranch where the family was living in Marion, Texas, near Austin, when Madrina was about fourteen years old. It was a beautiful, clear Texas day, but it had been raining for days before, and everywhere puddles reflected the yellow sunlight, making the whole landscape shimmer like a mirage.

  That morning, a young Anglo woman had died of tuberculosis at a nearby ranch, and the body was being taken to town to be prepared for burial. Pepa and Madrina were playing together on the porch in front of the house when the small buggy carrying the body passed by. The dead woman had been seated upright on the bench, supported by her two sisters, when they hit a bump crossing a small creekbed that sent the corpse flying forward. The shroud that had covered the deceased fell away and the young woman’s ravaged body was revealed, with all her hair gone, her face shrunken, and her raked cheeks painfully contorted with teeth showing, her arms clutched tightly to her chest.

  The sisters in the buggy screamed and cried out her name, “Adelle!” cradling the body as they sobbed.

  According to Tía Pepa, she looked away but Madrina kept staring. At that very instant, Pepa says, Madrina saw the poor woman’s spirit leave her body and spiral upward like smoke toward the morning moon, which caused her to fall into a violent seizure, writhing on the floor of the porch and foaming at the mouth. It was the first of many such spells she would have for the next twenty years.

  Pepa says the seizures made her sister extremely attentive to others, grateful for how they, in turn, took care of her. Madrina was also highly regarded for her intuitions. She didn’t have to think about a problem. She just told you the answer that came into her mind, which was usually good counsel. This power, too, was said to come from the seizures. If Madrina was able to endure the driving emotional storms of her fits, everyday feelings must have appeared to her as if they were in slow motion. She was able to see deeper into the patterns of fleeting moments, to feel faint currents of the phenomena that shape our future. Now, Tía Pepa simply says that you must be extremely careful when the spirits are walking among you.

  In la Tierra de Viejitas, I always knew the ghosts of the ancestors—the Santos, the Garcias, and all the others—are still with us. If not prepared, one could be frightened by the sight of them. Dressed in their downtown Frank Brothers vintage suits and Joske’s department store dresses, they still stroll the wide sidewalks of San Antonio’s Houston Street, taking long, slow steps past the blue, yellow, red, and green tile walls of the old Alameda Theater and the brightly painted walls of El Tenampa Bar.

  The spirits stand dazed in front of the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe inside the door of the San Fernando Cathedral, exhausted and dirty from a long day of picking tomatoes. In pairs, the wraiths sometimes float on flat barges down the San Antonio River, past all the tourists, preparing for a long journey south, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and pouring yellow tequila into shot glasses. Los Muertos do not give up their homelands. We call it Texas. Some of them knew it as Tejas, or part of la Nueva Extremadura of New Spain. Others refer to it secretly as Aztlán, the mythical birthplace of the nomadic Mexica people who were to become the fierce Aztecs of central Mexico.

  Along with the ghosts, their old gods—from the time before the Europeans—still whisper their prophecies in the ageless sunlight that falls on the ancient earth of Texas, severed so long ago from its Mexican roots. Their old, abandoned calendars, already well spun out, are still counting off these years in the churning mill of the stars, in this, the age of the fifth sun the Aztecs called Cuatro Movimiento, Four Movement.

  “You will find your home,” says Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god whose name means “Hummingbird of the South”—just as he told the Mexica centuries ago when he sent them off to the south in search of a new home. On his instructions, they left behind their birthplace, where they had lived for so long—Aztlán—“the place of whiteness” in the ancient Nahuatl tongue.

  “You will receive many signs, and you will find the kingdom I have promised. But first you must make a very long journey.”

  All of these movements, north and south, follow maps left drawn in the blood, and the family stories carry their echo, from deep inside the past. The Mexica, who would become the Aztecs, were nomads across sprawling deserts, river plains, and mountain cordilleras for almost three hundred years before they saw the prophesied sign of an eagle consuming a serpent over a cactus. There, in the lake basin of the Valley of Mexico, they built the great imperial city of Tenochtitlán. Soon, though, they did not remember where Aztlán was—only that it lay to the north. They longed to abandon the memory of their centuries of hardship and wandering, replacing it with a glorious chronicle of victories, conquest, and oracles of a vast empire.

  Mexico was always an empire of forgetting. After the cataclysm of conquest in 1521, when Tenochtitlán fell to the army of Hernán Cortés, Mexico was cut off from the wellspring of its Indian genesis, a place forevermore of fog and mystery. For decades, as the stories tell, night skies glowed with Spanish bonfires burning the codices, parchments, and totems that preserved the sacred knowledge of the Indian past. José Martí, the Cuban patriot and writer, said that the conquistadores “stole a page from the universe.”

  Spain w
as just as distant and ineffable, try as the conquistadors might to build a “New Spain” on Mexican earth. For better or worse, all the progeny of the conquest, Indios, Españoles, and mixed-blood Mestizos alike, shared the destiny of being irreversibly separated from their origins. That was the beginning of the Mexican Diaspora. To be Mexican American, Chicano, is to be further removed from those origins.

  As a raza, a “nation,” we are a Diaspora within a Diaspora.

  Yet, something miraculous happened that marked the destiny of every Mexican to be born out of the crucible of the conquest. Ten years after the fall of the Aztec empire, on a hill outside of Tenochtitlán where the Indians had worshipped their goddess Tonantzín, a brown-skinned woman dressed simply as an Indian appeared to an Aztec man, Juan Diego, and told him in Nahuatl that she had come to be Mother to all the peoples of this land. By legend, she appeared in a shimmering cloud and made a field of roses bloom in the middle of winter.

  Later, her winsome, cloaked image mysteriously appeared in a painting on Juan Diego’s cloak. She would come to be known as la Morenita, the Virgin of Guadalupe, part Indian, part Spanish, a living emblem of the union of opposing worlds in the new Mexico, and the supreme Mother whose spirit forged the watchful presence of all of the generations of Viejitas who were to come.

  Las Viejitas were born in the Virgin’s magic.

  They grew up in a twilight time and geography, poised between those ancient Indio origins from the south, Spain’s grand utopian designs, and our Mestizo future in the north. The world they remember from their youth is not the modern Mexico ruled over by a rough-trade priestly elite of Ivy league, pedigreed technocrats, orchestrating Mexico’s extreme slow-motion collapse. Their legacy is from the time that the Spanish language, theology, and science were first thrown across the Mexican geography like an enormous net, from a vision of the land enmeshed within the cosmos. That vision, with all of its mystical powers, has been almost lost.