Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  The Santos and Garcias were river people. Wherever they lived, they had always been close to agua dulce. They didn’t really know oceans, and there weren’t any lakes where they had come from in Mexico. But for some, the Gulf of Mexico held a certain mystique. Uncles Jesse and Gilbert, who built an amber-lacquered wooden boat, would fish in the Almagorda Bay, expressing something else, perhaps some tincture of Spanish mariner’s blood left in them.

  When you come from a land of wet-weather arroyos where water is scarce, you develop a special appreciation for fresh running streams. Arroyos crisscross all of northwestern Coahuila, and over the years most of them acquired names of endearment, referring back to sometimes only dimly remembered tales. On the road to the Rancho Los Generales, at Arroyo Pato Viejo, or old duck, someone once found a nearly featherless mallard, lost in the high Mexican desert on its migration back to El Norte. At Arroyo Papalote de Oro stood a battered, rusty tin windmill that had once drawn so much water it was deemed to be made of gold. These dry creeks run with water only once every few years when gulf storms stall against the eastern face of the Sierra Madre and drop all their rains in one curving flume on the sloping eastern face of the mountains. Then every bleached wash of alluvial gravel and rocks runs opalescent blue and jade green, eventually leaving behind finger-shaped tadpole pools with silvery guppies and perch the size of the palm of your hand.

  Back in Palaú, the Rio Sabinas, with its long bank-to-bank colonnade of giant arched cypresses, had run through the pueblo just one hundred yards from the Garcia house. It was the same clear river that rushed past el Nacimiento de los Indios, the settlement in the mountains where the Kikapu Indians lived, and further downstream it passed by Nueva Rosita and Sabinas, and the Villa de San Felipe, where, according to Uncle Sid, the familia Santos had originally come from.

  On Sunday afternoons, the Santos cooled their watermelons in the river and roasted cabrito near the bank, while my grandfather’s half-brother José León played the rapid flight of “La Negra” on a violin. On those later afternoons, their songs and voices went echoing off with the water, running to the west past Saltillo and Monclova. There, the spring that began at the Pozo del Centinela high and faraway in the Serranías del Burro, beyond the Rancho Los Generales, became a wide river, carrying the scorched ochre dust of Coahuila all the way to the Rio Bravo, then on out to the deep banks of the gulf. That was their world before la Revolución.

  Once the family arrived in San Antonio, they had made frequent Sunday picnics on the banks of the San Antonio River in Brackenridge park. Uncles fished for catfish and perch, keeping their beers cool in the water. They let the children play in the shallow waters of the streams that coursed through the burgeoning American city.

  The rivers give a bounty of fish and long afternoon spells of refreshment from the infernal heat of the summers, but eventually the rivers also take something back. That’s just the way of Nature, without malice, but incontrovertible. For the Santos, it would be the Rio San Antonio, many years later and farther to the north—across the frontera in the Estados Unidos—that would claim one of their own.

  When I was sixteen I pasted the last picture taken of my grandfather Juan José—a stiff, formal Immigration Service portrait—onto the back panel of the old wooden standup desk my uncle Lico had given me to write on. The portrait looks as if it had been taken against the background of a clear Texas afternoon sky, with the rest of the world stripped away. Abuelo’s refugee’s stare is ingrained, emotionally absent, a face already abandoned by the soul, revealing nothing of the man who was once inside, like the spent brown shell of a Texas cicada. The look in his eyes mixes a sullen desperate pleading with a subtler sense that nothing can be changed, that the course of things is fixed and inexorable.

  We have only to wait for the inevitable, he seems to be saying.

  Many years later, on a trip home, I discover the old desk which had been stored away in the attic of our old house. Next to the picture of Abuelo Juan José, I had taped an old Mexican drawing of the human body, incised and opened as in an antique surgeon’s manual, with each of the limbs and organs shown corresponding to a sign of the Zodiac. The legend below describes how the body itself is tied into the panorama of planetary, astrological forces. Aries rules the head. Gemini, the right shoulder. Cancer is the left breast; Scorpio, the sexual organs. The guts, which connect to Virgo, my sign and the sign of my parents, are exposed, with the skin of the belly pulled back in tightly wound scrolls.

  While that photograph of Juan José shows him implacable and remote, his gaze was always familiar and strangely beckoning to me. It seems miraculous that the pinstripes of the thick woolen suit he wore on that day should still be discernible, that of all things, he should leave such an improbable detail preserved for eternity. That the peculiar leftward skew, shirt button showing, of the tight knot in his black silk tie should still be as palpable as a broken compass. That one side of his face should seem hurt and sad, the other resolute and untouchable.

  Once I became aware of the mystery of Juan José’s death, it felt as if the source of the centripetal pull toward the past inside of me had been revealed, as if all of the stories that had been told of the family’s past were only meant to distract us from this one memory. After my grandfather’s death in 1939, the Santos and the Garcia families maintained their cult of secrets and forgetting around his demise. It was not a conspiracy. It was more a collective intuition.

  They did not fabricate tales to make people believe he had died in an accident or a murder or a mishap. They did not say that he had been sick. Many, I have found, were genuinely unsure themselves. Mainly, they simply did not speak of it. When asked, the answers were fleeting. If pressed, the long sighs of exasperation would quickly follow. Then silence. There were stories of much else, but this one tale, a bruised vein, had been extracted. So for a long time, no one asked.

  When you seek to forget something, as opposed to gradually forgetting, what is the difference between forgetting and remembering? Whether we remember or forget, we are conjuring around the same ineffable quantity. First, we reveal it. A suicide. A murder. An ambiguous death in a river. Then we erase it.

  It was as if the exact spiritual valence of Abuelo Juan José had been subtracted from this universe, leaving a cipher, a precise indentation in the shape of his body in the chill esparto grass by the river bank where he had been found. His bundle of years, his every abrazo and breath, were rendered a perfect absence, a photo negative of memory, a tear in the fabric of the world, impossible to mend. Sometimes, for me, it felt as if he had taken our entire past with him.

  Still, the more I was aware of that absence, and all that it touched, the unanswered questions, the rumors and contradictions—the more it seemed to conjure images and stories out of a mysterious, unnameable place in the past no one had ever spoken of.

  The waters of the San Antonio River must have been very warm that cold January morning in 1939, the morning of Abuelo’s death. They must have been so warm they were swathed in another river of fog, thicker than the fog that was enveloping the entire city. I’ve seen that happen before, when there is unusually dense fog, which the newspapers reported that year. The heavy misting conditions, breaking periodically during the day but returning in the evening, had persisted since the last week of December, shrouding the Christmas holidays in gray mists. Traffic accidents were blamed on the fog. A derailed train. And the suicides. In La Prensa, the city’s Spanish-language newspaper, there was a report that in response to the mysterious niebla, as fog is called in Spanish, a Mexican Evangelical church was holding prayer vigils, warning that such an unnatural fog would only aid the devil’s work of spreading evil and confusion. In Spanish, niebla is also used to refer to mental and spiritual confusion.

  Fog in the city is a knowing weather. It turns the traffic lights into ceremonial lamps, refracting the streetlight through the trees into sprays of glowing beams. San Antonio fogs are as old as the place itself, as much a part of the city
as the river. Each year, after the Texas earth has been chilled through several months of winter, a strong gulf breeze suddenly gusts to the northwest through the thickly planted orange orchards of the Rio Grande Valley, delighting cattle across the sandy plains, finally stalling over San Antonio like a dome of vapors released from a primeval ocean.

  In that foggy weather, with the city shrouded in cloud, it feels as if all the heavens have been stilled, the planets have stopped turning, and the cold, damp atmosphere hangs there, close and opaque. People stay at home. Every sound is amplified, every motion of the body seems laborious and futile. A quiet morning is shaken only by the sound of cars slashing long thin seams of rain along the wet street outside.

  Like the sluggish, light-absorbing mists of Britain I witnessed later, these Texas fogs reverse the polarities of the everyday—the body and its senses begin to retreat from the outside world—an unmoving wakefulness, usually unnoticed, is discovered there, overwhelmingly vivid. The smell of freshly cut carpet grass becomes too sweet to bear. Any light pierces the retina in fiery silk threads. As a child, I thought these fogs, the weather of ill humors, just gave me headaches.

  There are other, older fogs that do not roll or diffuse, that do not lift at midday to allow the sun to dry out the saturated earth. Such fogs are the weather of eternity in the world of the ancient Nahua culture, a legacy of the Azteca Indians. The nieblas of this world are believed to be gateways to those hidden realms of heaven and the underworld, Tamoanchan and Tlalocan, where the spirits of the ancestors dwell. This image of fogs as the entrance to other worlds wasn’t just a flight of fancy. In his account of the conquest of Mexico, Bernal Díaz de Castillo describes how Cortés’s army, marching across Mexico during their campaign toward the Aztec capital, was overtaken by a rapidly descending fog somewhere in the gulf coastal mountains—a fog so dense it seemed to transform day to twilight instantly, leaving the army frightened with superstition and cowering against possible attack.

  Traveling today through the same lands, these ancient fogs are still present. On my own journey retracing the fateful route of Cortés’s army, I stopped in a high-valley farming village called Ixhuacán, in the southern mountain region of the present-day state of Veracruz, Mexico. I was looking for directions to find the ruins of the Great Wall of Tlaxcala, a massive battlement that had been built as a defense by the fierce Tlaxcalteca Indian warriors.

  It was a bright afternoon. There were few customers in the mercado, the tiny village market, and the several vendors, who seemed to speak only the Indian Nahuatl language, were in a terrible hurry to close their stands, piling stacks of white corn and yellow squash into boxes they carried off with them. I thought I might have arrived too close to siesta hour.

  Then, when I asked again for directions, “¡Que ya viene la niebla!” one of the farmers said to me. The fog is coming, he said, pointing up toward the peaks of the hills just to the east of Ixhuacán. There, looking like an army with a sea of white banners, another ageless gulf fog was rolling down the hills in great clouds to the valley floor. I watched the fingers of canopy mist as they claimed every rocky promontory, every spindly stand of tall ponderosa pines, until the fog arrived in the village, filling the streets from east to west, leaving behind an overcast world that was suddenly desolate and abandoned. It was hard to tell what hour of day it was. In the distance, toward the village plaza, voices speaking softly in low tones seemed to hover, disembodied, en la niebla.

  Sitting down on a bench to wait until some of the haze lifted to continue driving, I thought the fog of Ixhuacán seemed a place outside of time, never ending, a changeless empire ruled by exhalations from the Gulf of Mexico that ranged from the Yucatán, up along Mexico’s curving belly in the east, into central Texas, all the way to San Antonio. I expected to see familiar spirits of ancestors walking in those cobbled streets. Uncles and aunts and grandfather spirits. In that domain of fog, dwelling in the old time of the land, we could all move freely between past, present, and future.

  I waited for them there in the quietist heart of the cloud.

  The year 1939 began under a pall of fear and foreboding.

  The Spanish civil war was in deadlock. Headlines spoke of ominous portents in faraway places: EUROPE AWAITS IMPORTANT EVENTS. San Antonio newspapers reported British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s impending journey to Rome to make a peace pact with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his Fascist Grand Council, hoping to complete the agreements begun in Munich—and thereby to avoid war. In Mexico, a series of mysterious monumental stone heads of the ancient Olmeca people had been discovered in the jungles of the gulf coast. While, for months, San Antonio had been the scene of numerous strikes that had been met with lockouts and violent clashes between the largely Mexican Pecan Shellers’ Union strikers and local police. Pecans were one of the city’s chief exports, along with traditional caramel pecan candies that had been transplanted from Mexico. For the Mexicans of San Antonio who still had jobs, the Depression had only worsened their predicament: working long and earning little. That year the pecan shellers complained they sometimes weren’t paid at all for work already done.

  Those were years of great seething and foment in the city, when the old Mexico that was left in San Antonio was dying, or being snuffed out, and everybody seemed to know it. San Antonio was being electrified, paved, the Texas sky knitted together with telegraph and telephone wires. The English-language newspapers, the Light and the Express, covered the story of the death of things Mexican with a jaunty, superior tone of labored nostalgia, like a drawn-out elegy for a primitive, antique, and outmoded world that was steadily disappearing. With no real regrets.

  In the clinic of the Discalced Sisters of Saint Teresa, an old Mexican Indian scout, Rafael Cantú, who had once guarded south Texas stagecoaches from menacing Comanche warrior bands, was dying. He showed the photographer a moon-shaped scar on his left thigh where he had been pierced by an arrow in a raid near the Frio River, to the south, in 1876. He told the reporter who went to visit him that, at ninety-six, it was enough now. He had seen too much, he was ready to go. When he was born, San Antonio de Bejar was Mexico. Then, for a while, it was just plain Texas.

  “We were Tejanos,” he was quoted saying, emphasizing the word Texas Mexicans used to refer to themselves. “Éramos Tejanos, then all of a sudden, the Gringos really came!” According to Cantú, they shrank the river and widened the streets. They closed the old cantinas and tore down the woods.

  “Now it’s Estados Unidos. Who knows what it will be next? It’s my time to go, I think.” In the photograph, grizzled-faced Cantú lies in bed, smoking a pipe, casting his haggard gaze straight into the camera while being tended to by a pair of ivory-wimpled nuns.

  The old Mexican mercado was declared a health hazard. The city’s new Department of Public Health began a campaign in the marketplace to close the public dining stands of the Chili Queens, the Mexicana street vendors whose homemade picadillo had long been one of the famous attractions of downtown San Antonio. The aromatic chili stands once stretched bench-to-bench the length of an entire block, ringing the grand square around Haymarket Plaza. Their long tables were covered in oilcloth, cluttered with bottles of oil and vinegar, wooden bowls of salt and ground cumin, and decorated with plates of tomatoes, cilantro, chiles, and avocados. Uncle Jesse remembers how, in the chilly winter months of January and February, long plumes of steam rose up over the large clay pots, and the women stirred their picadillo and beans with wooden spoons.

  In one corner of the plaza, on Commerce Street, my father would linger awhile on a curb, listening to Lydia Mendoza, the haunting singer of bittersweet Norteño ballads about deceitful men and treacherous love. On weekends, she would sit on a wooden basket next to a stand of tortilla makers, hunched over her guitar, intoning all her songs like dirges in a scabrous voice that sounded as if she had grains of an exquisite sand inside her throat.

  The Health Department also banned the noisy funeral processions that had been
one of the most visible public traditions of Mexican San Antonio and dated back to colonial times. When a Mexicano died, the body would remain at home for a night or two as family and friends streamed through, bringing tamales or tacos de chorizo, paying their respects, and joining in around-the-clock recitation of the rosary. Then, on the day of the funeral, mourners would be joined by a small band of musicians dressed in the white cotton garments of Mexican campesinos. The trumpet player would lead the way through the streets, followed by a violinist, an accordionist, and a bajo sexto player.

  In one old painting by the Swiss artist Theodore de Gentilz, who lived in San Antonio during the late nineteenth century, the funeral band is shown in front of the pallbearers. They hoist the coffin aloft on their shoulders as solemnly dressed loved ones trail out of a door and into the street. The small cortege is followed by a lone saxophone player whose brooding melodies are said to have intertwined with the plaints of the bereaved.

  Our family quickly established its own traditions in the city. Among the Garcias, simple, deliberate action was all that was required to hold the tormentas of the world at bay. You must always keep your word. And it is also good to be punctual. Once they had both settled in San Antonio, the old Garcia twins, my great-grandfather Jacobo and his brother, Abrán, religiously kept their weekly appointment to eat and visit together every Saturday at noon. Accustomed to crossing the plaza in Palaú before, they now lived at opposite ends of a city. Abuelito Jacobo continued to live with my grandparents and the family on Parsons Street on the southwest edge of downtown, and Tío Abrán lived on the near west side of the city on Montana Street.

  The weekly rendezvous of Abuelos Jacobo and Abrán was a family compromiso. It was carried out in a precise ritual, which was always the Garcia way. On the mornings of one of their visitas, Abuelito would first set my aunt Bea to rolling a pocketful of cornshuck cigarettes made from Cuerno Y Concha tobacco, which Jacobo would joyfully smoke and share with his brother over the course of the day. Another aunt ironed the old man’s shirt on a sheet laid across the long wooden kitchen table, making sure later that the top button was properly fastened before he knotted his tie, since his fingers were stiff with arthritis and calloused from a lifetime of manual labor.