Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  Then together, we remember.

  It had been raining all morning in San Antonio on the day of Uncle Raul’s funeral, but the sun was breaking through as the afternoon Mass began. When my cousins and I first picked up the coffin as pallbearers, it seemed almost weightless, and it possessed its own orienting force, like a gyroscope. As we carried him down the aisle and outside across the plaza of Little Flower Church, a triple rainbow arched over Culebra Street, marking the way to San Fernando Cemetery. “That’s a sign!” Aunt Connie said. No purgatory for el querido tío. He would dwell forevermore with el Padre Jesucristo, el Espíritu Santo, la Virgencita, and all the saints.

  Maybe now, I thought to myself, my uncle has returned to earth as an angel.

  When I open my eyes, he seems to be praying, and periodically crossing himself.

  “Mariposa. Canela. Atole. Huisache. Tortilla. Deseos. Enamorados. Alameda. Azulejos. Enemigo. Nubes. Terreno. Vaqueros. Granja. Arroyo. Acequia. Concepción. Tranquilidad. Bendiciones y bendiciones. Siempre. Siempre. Siempre.”

  The Spanish words hang in the air: Butterfly. Cinnamon. Porridge. Huisache. Tortilla. Desires. Lovers. Boulevard. Tiles. Enemy. Clouds. Land. Cowboys. Farm. Creek. Aqueduct. Conception. Tranquility. Blessings and blessings. Always. Always. Always.

  “This is a prayer against our forgetting,” Uncle Raul says, with uncharacteristic seriousness. “But the prayer is as long as time, so you can never be done with it. It just goes on and on, forever.”

  Raul, my father’s elder brother, had died of cancer, and he was among the many Santos I never had a chance to ask about the family’s past. Along with Uvaldino, Chita, Andrea, Nela, Paulita, and all the others that had gone before. I wanted to ask him now—about the stories he had heard of Mexico, about the family’s early life in San Antonio, and about his father, Abuelo Juan José.

  “There were memories in the familia before there was anyone around to remember them,” he said, before I had a chance to ask. “So where do we begin?”

  Uncle Raul looks at me now with tears in his eyes, “There were the stars and the planets in the sky, the earth, the fire, and the wind. Why not ask them, John Phillip? Why not ask them?”

  The Tarahumara Indian priests of northwestern Mexico say we are meant by the Creator to walk twenty-four miles a day, and that this is why our feet are shaped like a bridge. We are meant to walk through the lands that surround us. If we stand still, we become spiritually sick, and eventually, whether in the space of one life, or over the span of several generations, this sickness will overwhelm us.

  The Aztecs and their descendants have always been sorcerers of the earth. They know the land is alive, a place of magic and awe that connects us to the panoramas of the unseen worlds, to geographies within geographies. This invisible topography of the dead is called el Inframundo. It includes Tlalocan, the place of the underworld, and the paradisal Tamoanchan. El Inframundo is not like Hell and Heaven, set apart from the world. It is more like a portal out of history and into eternity, encompassing all of the gradations of darkness and light, where all of the dead dwell, simultaneously beyond, and among, us. In the Inframundo, you communicate with the spirits of the dead, with the spirits of animals and all created things, and sometimes with the gods themselves.

  You enter the Inframundo by several paths. There are places spread across the land that are like gateways into this dimension: caves and hills, streams and charcos, gorges and cañones, buttes and valleys.

  The old brujos, or sorcerers, the fierce geomancers of the Inframundo, could enter directly, through a trance, looking without blinking at old maps or paintings of revered sacred places. Gradually the masses of color and lines would begin to undulate and swirl, spinning like a maelstrom, accelerating past north, south, east, and west, until whole continents were pinwheeling in the movement, fiery at their extremities, consuming everything—stone, cactus, wind, and sunlight—in a perfect equilibrium of chaotic energies. By these means, you could reach the place that lies at the end of the seen world, the lands that await beyond the walk of one thousand years. The whole landscape becomes a bridge into the empire of the spirits and the time of the ancestors.

  This is the story I was told about the first journey.

  El Tío Francisco, Uncle Frank, the eldest of the Garcias, made the trip, taking a train to the frontera and walking across the Rio Grande on a high, creaky swinging wooden bridge at the border with Texas which connected the towns of Eagle Pass on the American side and Piedras Negras on the Mexican. The only people there to greet him were some Kikapu Indians selling balls of white asadero string cheese and deerskin shoes and purses.

  It was a cold February that year, and he remembered making the “four-day walk” to Uvalde, where he’d heard you could catch a freight train heading north to San Antonio. On those chilly nights he slept warily in the open country, having heard stories of Texas ranchers shooting Mexicanos they found on their property. To him, it all looked like high Coahuila desert land. There weren’t many fences then, so you could walk long flat stretches of the parched land with only bird shadows for shade in the daytime. It looked like home, only, he pointed out, there were more stones on the Texas side.

  When Uncle Frank sent news back to Mexico of a big dam project on the Medina River near San Antonio, the rest of the Garcias followed the pilgrimage north. He had written to his brothers, all of them naturally gifted workers of metal and steel,

  Queridos Hermanos, there are pipes to fit in Medina, pipes to fit in Medina!

  Abuelo Juan José and his brother Uvaldino came north with the Garcias, though my abuelo was reluctant. The revolution was making everyday life in Coahuila a struggle. The roads between towns were often blocked either by Villistas or Maderistas or Federalistas. And they sometimes conscripted the men of the region, young and old, to join their ranks on threat of death. Young women were in constant danger of assault and rape by the same roving bands, who didn’t seem to be under the control of any officers, and the troops, often without any provisions, looted supplies, food, and livestock, from the citizenry at gunpoint.

  The Garcias didn’t particularly care for any of the warring factions. In fact, politics seemed to them little more than chicanery in fancy trappings. The brothers—Francisco, Santos, Juan, Jesse, Gilbert, Manuel, and Carlos, whom we called Chale—gravitated toward rectitude, simplicity, and things that worked, as evidenced by all of the machines and tools they would build throughout their lives. Abuelo Jacobo wasn’t going to wait until he saw his adored sons fighting each other across barricades for the benefit of good-for-nothing pelados and charlatanes in Monterrey and Mexico City.

  They had heard that in El Norte, Mexicanos were needed for the demanding work of building the new Texas. Frank and the other Garcia brothers knew their talents as inventors, machinists, and engineers would be needed. Abuelo Juan José, like his future father-in-law, Jacobo, wanted more than anything else to work with the land, and he had heard there was rich sharecropper’s farmland in the Texas territory between the Colorado and Guadalupe Rivers, beginning north of San Antonio, stretching south into the San Fernando Valley. The time had come to leave Mexico and its revolución de locuras behind.

  Madrina remembers how the train the family rode with all their belongings was attacked by Pancho Villa’s army as they approached the border town of Piedras Negras. The blistering volleys of bullets ricocheted off the sides of the cars, leaving all the passengers, goats and chickens included, scrambling inside for cover. Tía Pepa recalls a peaceful daylong ride to Piedras Negras, staying overnight with cousins in Villa Union, where they cooked a dinner of chicken with mole sauce and calabazas.

  Once they were all in Texas, without even thinking about it, they began to cast their spells of forgetting across the new landscape. Many of them would not see Mexico again for many years. Others never returned again. The land of their birth, the nacimiento, seemed to become a memory of a dream of a lost world.

  Mexico, to which some of us would later return
and return, was gradually engulfed by the Inframundo.

  Old Abuelo Jacobo’s instructions had been simple. As my father remembers, they were to follow a small road north out of Jiménez, Coahuila, until you could not miss a big cliff on the right side that had the shape of an old man’s face. Then you leave the road there, walking to the left onto what looked like a boundless sierra plain, following the river for about an hour and a half, all the way back to the foothills, until you come to the place called la Loma de los Muertos, “the Hill of the Dead.” There was gold in that hill, Abuelo Jacobo had said. Lots of it.

  “¡Esa fregada loma está bien llenita de oro!” he had told them often back in San Antonio. “That damn hill is full of gold.”

  Great-grandfather Jacobo and his twin brother, Abrán, were perpetually prospecting for gold, whether following legends of buried Spanish treasure and digging secretly in the middle of the night under the plaza in Palaú, or prospecting for the raw ore itself, using divining rods, seeking telltale “golden mirages” that were said to emanate from a deposit, or, in one case, an old swoop-backed hound from Palaú named Pipo, who was known to have a nose for the precious metal. It was with Pipo’s help that they had actually seen those veins of gold, as thick as rope, running through the stony outcroppings in la Loma de los Muertos. Without picks, they had left markers, but somehow, over the years, they never returned to prospect for the ore. Or so they said.

  Now, decades later, Uncles Raul and Rudy and my father were back in Mexico, looking for the treasure. They were traveling in a new beige 1947 Hudson, with a massive glistening chrome grille and a pair of fenders that were polished like platinum, immaculate and inspiring awe from the Mexican onlookers. In one neighborhood in la Villa de Juárez, they had to park the metallic behemoth on a side street because it was wider than the pavement on the block of the aunt they were visiting.

  Once they left the highway, the car’s oversized whitewalls handled the hardscrabble Norteño terrain well enough, occasionally scraping the oil pan on the lip of a gully, or scratching the enamel finish on the passenger’s side with low-hanging branches of thorny huisache. Cactus and mesquite dotted the otherwise wide open plain, which seemed flat in all directions. After an hour of untroubled roaming with the river in sight, with the afternoon growing late, the Hudson and its trio of would-be prospectors stalled in the middle of some railroad tracks. The only railroad tracks for two hundred miles. Since the invention of railroads, it has been like a supernatural curse. Mexicans walking, sleeping, or in their stalled cars are perpetually getting hit by trains after being unable to get off the tracks.

  A solitary hill off in the distance might just be la Loma de los Muertos, but the Hudson would not turn over, and the machine was so heavy the three together could not push it off the tracks. El Dorado was in reach, and their engine was flooded. Then, just before nightfall, when Uncle Rudy and my father walked off a mile and dug a few holes looking for gold, they found a giant geode. When they cracked it open, it took their breath away. It looked like a bowl full of light blue stars, glowing in the crimson sunset.

  They ended up camping there for the night, eating two rabbits Rudy shot with his .22 caliber pistol, listening nervously for a train whistle on the horizon. But the only sounds were the warm wind and a few far off cattle, wearing bells, grazing on the grass that grew between the trestles of the railroad tracks. When the night sky came out, they lay awake for hours, staring upward counting the galaxies that dotted the heavens like archipelagos of frost.

  In the morning, the three were able to dislodge the Hudson from the tracks with the help of two vaqueros passing by on horseback, and they walked back to the main road for help. Watching the whole landscape recede in the rearview mirrors as they were towed by a pickup truck back to Múzquiz, the two brothers and their cousin resigned themselves to reporting back to Great-grandfather Jacobo and his brother, Abrán, that la Loma de los Muertos had been spotted, but remained unexplored.

  Madrina told the story of a valley in Coahuila, somewhere near their town of Palaú, in the Serranía del Burro. She said that in this valley, in a clearing by a large mesquite tree, there were places where no sound could penetrate. If you stood in particular clearings, or specific gullies and hills, no sound of birds could reach you, no sound of wind, no loud, coarse donkey’s bray. She remembered playing with her cousin Narciso in that valley, and watching him climb a tree and shout down at her—and she could see him screaming at her, but she couldn’t hear a thing.

  The world was deaf there.

  Because of this strange phenomenon, the place was called el Valle de Silencio, “the Valley of Silence.” As to where it lay exactly, she could only say that it was near la Loma de los Muertos, where my father had gone prospecting. Madrina said she was told by her grandfather Teofilo that this was one of many such places around the world that God had, for some unknown reason, left unfinished at the time of creation. For some reason, there were many such places in Coahuila. These were places, often completely unnoticed, with no sound, without color, dark places where no sunlight could penetrate, places where the world had no shape or substance.

  Just like us, Teofilo had explained, creation itself was incomplete. And forevermore, until the end of the world, there would be no sound in el Valle de Silencio.

  Breaking free of their Mexican past wasn’t as easy for the old ones as they thought it would be. The landscapes of south Texas, the chalk cliffs, the sandy river plains, the crystalline Rio Nueces that was once the border, the hill country, the abiding fertile river valleys; all of them crisscross a spiritual home that has no boundaries. The family maintained its calendar of the sacred year, the fasting at Lent, the feasting on the day of La Virgen de Guadalupe, Easter, Christmas—and the Diez y seis de Septiembre, the Sixteenth of September, celebrating Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821. In late October for the Día de los Muertos, we visited the cemeteries to pay homage to the ancestors. Beneath the increasing Americanization of San Antonio, many Mexicans kept the red glass votive candles burning on the old altars.

  In 1968 San Antonio hosted Hemisfair, which included everything from continuous performances of Czech avant-garde theater to presentations of the delicate protocols of the Japanese tea ceremony. With a high-speed, elevated monorail encircling the downtown fairgrounds, the Hemisfair was meant to be a celebration of humanity’s technological future, with the eight-hundred-foot-high Tower of the Americas as its centerpiece, which featured a rotating restaurant and bullet elevators that shot up from the ground like X-14 experimental rocket planes.

  Down below, the Mexican Pavilion showcased a troupe of Indian dancers dressed in crimson spandex outfits with feathered wings who performed the ancient ritual of the Volador, or flyer. It was said to be one of very few religious dances once performed across Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica that has survived into the present. As a booming Spanish-accented man’s voice narrated the ritual from scratchy loudspeakers, every top of the hour the five dancers marched like wrestlers into a gladiatorial arena:

  “To appease their Gods . . . since the beginning of time . . . the people of the Sun, ancestors to all the children of Mexico, had to offer the hearts of young maidens to postpone the destruction of the world!”

  On an altar set on a dais, two barrel-chested priests in loincloths and sequined capes enacted a terrifying mock sacrifice of a young, bare-breasted woman to the fierce god Tezcatlipoca. As the priests lifted up the dripping fake heart to the sky, the five Voladores, themselves dressed in loincloths and plumed headdresses, climbed up a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot-long pole that had been braided with heavy ropes. At the top, in the strenuous heat, four of the Indians sat on the edges of a pivoting wooden frame attached to a rotating hub appended to the top of the pole. Then the leader, or caporal, would slowly stand up on the pole, poised in the gusting wind between the other four. As his compañeros watched while shaking their rattles, he blew into an eagle bone whistle while beating an old hide tambor, dancing on the narrow diameter
of the pole, gradually saluting and bowing to each of the four directions of creation. Then, while all of us in the crowd leaned back, gripping our seats, we watched the other four Indians lean off with a slow backward arch into the air, with the ropes tied to one ankle and threaded through the pivoting wooden frame they had been sitting on.

  Slowly, hanging upside down with their arms outstretched toward the ground, they began to spin earthward around the pole, gradually disentwining their tethers with each revolution, moving closer to the ground. I was hypnotized as the Voladores flew over me in giant descending circles, their graceful shadows dancing over the crowd, coming gradually nearer to us, in great, swooping, widening spirals. The fifth Indian always stayed on the top, his back against the rotating hub, staring upward at the sky, singing all the way through the ritual. The whole dance took forty minutes to perform.

  The Voladores had the power to make time stop, to make the rest of the world around me fall away. Staring up at the flyers, silhouetted against the silvery Texas sky, it was one thousand years ago, before empires and conquests, revolutions and borders. The Voladores were guardians of the old time, the time of the Maya, the time of the Aztecs. That summer, they unleashed it in San Antonio, reconnecting the city, and all of the Santos who lived there, to our most distant past.

  I did not know, then, why I always found the pageant of the Volador dance so magical. I did not know, then, what any of it meant or how to pronounce the names of the Nahua gods. It was said to have come from the mountains of Puebla, in central Mexico, far from any place my family had any memory of living. Maybe it reminded me of childhood tales of winged gods and angels descending to our world. Who had imagined such a dance in the first place, and what was it meant to signify? Was it a dance left behind to remember that we are descendants of the sky? Or was it just a dance to evoke the irresistible beauty of dynamic, balanced symmetry, effortlessly churning a small galaxy of synchronous movements?