Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  One of my uncles remembers how, on those mornings, Abuelo Jacobo would sing a rhyme to them in the high-pitched voice of the famous Mexican clown Don Fito:Mira la luna! Comiendo una tuna

  y tirando la cascara

  hasta la laguna!

  Look at the moon! Eating a cactus fruit

  and throwing the peel

  down into the lagoon!

  Well into their eighties, they each would still set off from home alone, around ten thirty, bound for the bridge over the San Antonio River at Commerce Street, which started near the circular pink granite tower that looked like a minaret, and which Abuelito called “that Arabic water tower.” Sometimes they would have lunch across the street at Schilo’s, a traditional German deli where the two old Mexicans always ordered the same thing: the specialty split pea and ham soup and corned beef sandwiches. According to my aunts, who accompanied the ancianos every now and then on their weekly paseos, people on the busy sidewalks of Houston Street would step to one side and make room for the two staggeringly identical twins, walking with a deliberate, synchronous gait.

  Jacobo and Abrán never ceased to relish the awe they could provoke from the city dwellers around them.

  According to La Prensa, by the ninth day of January there had already been three suicides in San Antonio. Surely, the paper reported, the year’s heavy fog was confounding people to their deaths. Then, on the tenth, it carried the banner headline at the top of the front page.

  MEXICANO AHOGADO EN EL RIO SAN ANTONIO

  (Mexican Drowned in the San Antonio River)

  El cuerpo inanimado de un mexicano fué encontrado el

  lunes en la mañana flotando en el rio San Antonio, cerca de la

  calle Simpson, en el Parque Roosevelt.

  The story tells how the inanimate body of Juan José Santos was found floating in the river near Simpson Street in Roosevelt Park. It says the body was identified by the deceased’s son, my father—also Juan José—and by Carlos Garcia, my great-uncle Chale, youngest brother to my grandmother. Two homicide detectives were reportedly present along with Coroner and Judge Raymond Gerhardt, and two greatcoated firemen, identified as A. L. Rathke and A. G. Pompa, who tried for a half hour to revive the forty-nine-year-old man before giving up. According to the San Antonio Express:At first, the police had believed it to be a death by accident, but after Judge Gerhardt investigated the case thoroughly, he concluded that it was a suicide. According to Gerhardt, “Death overcame Santos in the waters of the San Antonio River into which he had imprudently flung himself.” It is the fourth suicide of the year.

  The city’s official death certificate also makes their conclusions clear:

  Manner of Injury: Deceased jumped in river.

  Nature of Injury: Drowned.

  External Cause of Death: Suicide.

  The detectives, Fred Littlepage and Ed Amacker, told the San Antonio Light that Juan José left his house at 116 Parsons Street at six that morning, and the family had reported him missing at seven.

  The body was found at 8 A.M. floating in the San Antonio River. Santos was found by a son, Juan Santos, Jr., and a brother-in-law, Carlos Garcia, near Simpson Street. Santos Sr.’s wife had asked her son to follow his father as he left the house shortly after 6 A.M. She said he had suffered a nervous breakdown several months ago and had spoken Sunday night of “going away.”

  The newspaper’s account of the events leading up to Abuelo’s death ended abruptly by noting that,

  The pair followed Santos to the vicinity of the river but lost him in the fog.

  Had Uela accompanied my father on the morning of his death? The brief report then says his body was found by my father and great-uncle just an hour later. La Prensa reported that Abuelo was employed as a foreman at the Petroleum Machine and Foundry Company, and referred ominously to how he had recently been the victim of “una penosa y grave enfermedad,” “a tormenting, dangerous infirmity.”

  My aunt Connie still remembers with undimmed consternation how La Prensa reported her father’s death as a suicide.

  “It was not. I just know it!” she insists.

  In their version, the San Antonio Light carried a picture with the headline: “ALL IN VAIN.” The photograph shows the earnest young Mexicano fireman, A. G. Pompa, in a cap and heavy canvas peacoat crouched over my grandfather’s body, which is wrapped in a thick shroud of woolen blankets. A pair of respirator tubes run from a pump in the background, down into the long thick folds of the blanket, where the fireman’s right hand seems to lie gently on Abuelo Juan José’s forehead. The tousled salt-and-pepper hair at the very pate of his head is barely visible in the blanket’s inky shadow.

  8

  Aztec Theater

  El Teatro Aztec

  I braid the chain of beads on the old wooden rosary around the white-gloved fingers of one hand. As Padrino to my First Communion, my uncle Richard had just given me the rosary, which he said had been in his family a long time. Standing outside the chapel at Mount Sacred Heart Catholic School, my first grade classmates and I look like initiates in a religious training program for Mexican lounge singers, all of us dressed in immaculate white suits, white clip-on ties, and black shoes, our hair oiled and combed with a tiny wave.

  The aged nuns, who have names like Sister Alfred Euthanasius and Sister Cornelius Dolorosa, hover over us, primping ties and collars, and clasping our hands for prayer in front of us. As we prepare to march down the center aisle, the small chapel is already hazy with new incense.

  “Love, love me do! You know I love you!” sings my friend Dennis Perez nervously to himself, standing next to me in the double file we have formed after the offertory. We are all about to eat from the body of Christ for the first time in our lives, and most of us are dumb with fear.

  We had been preparing for weeks, using unconsecrated hosts, but we had been told that in this Mass, the bread would be magically transformed into the actual flesh of Christ, from the body he’d had nearly two thousand years ago. This, we were told, was the greatest mystery. The day before, we had all said our First Confession, reciting the precise phrasing of the opening petition from memory, and then delivering a litany of our misdeeds reaching back to when we were born. After receiving and fulfilling the penance of prescribed Hail Marys and Our Fathers, our souls were again as clean as the day we were born, except, that is, for the indelible blotch of original sin. We were prepared to receive the feast of the body of Christ.

  I approach the priest, standing before the altar. After the Communion wafer is laid on my tongue, I remember how we had been instructed not to chew it. That is blasphemy. Instead, I let it dissolve like a piece of lace made of ice as I kneel down in the very front pew. I wonder whether Jesus will return and the world will end in my lifetime. It’s a possibility, isn’t it? I figure that living through the Day of Judgment is probably better than dying, anyway.

  But as I close my eyes to pray the Our Father, as I had been taught, I see something I have never seen before. It is a place, but it has no color or shape. I open and close my eyes again, and it is still there. A place of nothing, as old as creation. To the extent that there is light there in the emptiness, it is present only in the faintest filaments and webs, and utterly still, silent and remote feeling, as if it were millions and millions of miles from everything and everyone I know. Tiny particles of dust seem to be suspended, motionless in front of me. It feels like a place beyond time and the world. It feels like the vacuum of outer space we’re launching the Gemini astronauts into, only now there is no planet to come back to. When everyone and everything of this world has passed away and all the light and heat of the universe has been extinguished, there would be only this. A cold, motionless Nada. An ocean without a shore. An infinitude of nothing.

  I feel a cold sweat run up my back and open my eyes to see the priest at the altar meticulously wiping the golden chalice clean. I look around me and everything I see is a consolation. My fellow novices are still at their prayers. Behind me, I see my par
ents and Uncle Richard looking on proudly. Even the polished wood of the pew seems intimate to me.

  The world had not passed away—but that place I had a glimpse of was still there, inside of me, beckoning like the true home I would someday return to.

  There are mysteries held within a family and there are mysteries held within the deeper soul of a nation. We were of a people that had seen the ground beneath our feet renamed several times over the last five hundred years, a Mestizo nation derived partly by intrepid travelers who had left their Spanish homeland far behind—across a formidable span of ocean—and people who believed they had been living in these lands since the time of the world’s creation.

  But apart from the mute testimony of the mission ruins, and the quiet, slowly ebbing presence of the ruins of old San Antonio, no one, either family or schoolteachers, had told me that the city we lived in was already nearly three hundred years old before I was born. It had been known for nearly two hundred years first as San Antonio de Bejar, named after the Duke of Bejar; then later renamed San Antonio de Valero, after the duke quarreled with his brother, the Viceroy of Mexico and Marquis de Valero. Over the entrance to the Spanish Governor’s Palace in downtown San Antonio, you can still see the Hapsburg coat of arms, colors and symbols of the Spanish royal family in the eighteenth century.

  And for centuries before the Europeans had arrived, Indians had lived in these same territories, migrating on foot with the cycle of seasons, following the circuits of the planets, the serpentine sky dance of the moon and Venus, awed by the majestic, incremental movements of the deeper, distant stars. They fished the same creeks, the ones we called Cibolo, the Salado, and the Coleta. The ones we fished with cane poles for gray catfish and sun perch.

  It wasn’t just our family that remained quiet to this past. It was as if all the Mexicanos had forgotten it.

  The lands around the city seemed so new and raw, so forbidding and untrodden, even when I was a child. Driving out from San Antonio, within a half hour, rickety barbed wire fences ran the borders of land that looked wild and untameable. The landscape to the north was riven with rocky gorges and craggy hills that had slowed the inexorable extension of San Antonio’s border in that direction. Instead, for a century, the city had grown very slowly across the flatlands to the south, east, and west, as farms and ranches were replaced gradually with row houses and San Antonio’s first suburbs. It seemed impossible to imagine how people had lived before there was a settlement to protect them against the heat, the droughts, the floods, and the scarcity of food.

  The Spanish conquistador, Cabeza de Vaca, passed through these riverlands on his shipwrecked odyssey from Florida to New Mexico in the 1530s. Searching for emissaries of New Spain, he found the Indians, Coahuiltecas and Xarames, living a meager life in the hardscrabble landscape where they fished, gathered roots and berries, and journeyed north to hunt scarce deer for venison—and still there was hunger.

  The city emanated a deeply old feeling. It was partly the land on which the city was situated, the settled river plain, the countless springs, the open northern views to the hills, the terrain sloping southward to Mexico. But there was also something old about the people themselves. The earliest Spanish colonizers to arrive were a group of families from the Canary Islands, itself a place of great antiquity in the Old World. The ancient Canarios from the islands off the coast of Africa buried their dead in elaborate circular stone cairns on high ocean cliffs, and they practiced a form of mummification not unlike that developed in the time of Egypt’s great dynasties.

  There were only a few San Antonioenses who could, with authentic documents and proper titles, trace their bloodlines to those original Canario families, although rumors of this noble lineage periodically swirled around successful Mexicans, like lawyers, doctors, and judges. The most well known were Don Demostenio and Doña Herlinda Zuniga, brother and sister. The last of their august line from the islands, which included some of the early governors of the Villa de San Fernando, they already were in their late eighties when I was receiving my First Communion. These two always seemed to be shipwrecked and abandoned in an alien century. The San Antonio they had known as children was gone.

  The only sanctuary for their memories was in the limestone vault of the San Fernando Cathedral downtown, in the front pew on the left side of the aisle, near the giant marble baptistery. This was the place in the old church that had been vouchsafed to the Zunigas by the Creator at the beginning of time. From that perch, Doña Herlinda, petite but strong-boned, dressed in heavy black lace gowns with a silver chignon, wielded her cane against the ankles of Communioners who ventured too close to her prayer space.

  Don Demostenio was pale, short, and bald, but very erect in posture and always in a white suit, Panama hat, and a white handlebar mustache. He looked like an Hispano Eric von Stroheim, wearing a gold-rimmed monocle, while he reviewed the lunch special menu at the Mexican Manhattan, a Tex-Mex diner on Soledad Street that was Uncle Lico’s favorite. Sitting together in a booth at that diner, Don Demostenio and Doña Herlinda looked as if they had walked out of an El Greco painting and were now stranded here, like two old Spanish angels.

  In the early 1960s, it felt as if the long story of San Antonio, however old it might prove to be, was beginning to wane. Born as I was into the budding years of rock and roll, with its incipient electronically communicated international mass culture, the fragments of tales and characters, like the Zuniga siblings, were the few remaining remnants of the inconclusive myths of our city’s origin. Even as I was learning to speak and write English properly, listening to the Beatles in my father’s pickup truck, mourning JFK, watching The Beverly Hillbillies, going to Disneyland, and doing most of the things that made up a kid’s initiation into the secret sciences of the American way of life, the streets of San Antonio were an umbilical tether to a past that otherwise seemed to be disintegrating, memory by memory.

  The world seemed poised at the gateway to an age when the earth itself might be abandoned, along with its millennial legacy of discord, war, and genocide. I was born in the year the sleek taper of a Russian rocket pierced a microthin vapor mist at the furthest edge of the stratosphere for the first time and set the Sputnik satellite in orbit, a whirling echo of our nomadic longing to see farther and farther across the next horizon.

  San Antonio, and every city on the planet for that matter, might soon become merely the places from which we set out, into the vast reaches of space. My uncle Charles worked in Houston for the photographic lab at NASA, which developed all of the pictures from the Gemini and Apollo voyages. Over the years we accumulated an exhaustive snapshot album of the missions. We came to San Antonio after centuries of exploration and moving settlements. The image of an Apollo astronaut, dressed in silvery garments, like a seraph, suspended weightless in space against a backdrop of the planet itself, made the path of further exploration clear to me.

  And perhaps this new migration would echo that of the past. All across the Americas, from the great Cahokia mound in Illinois to Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, ancient Teotihuacán, near Mexico City, and Machu Pichu in Peru, great cities had been built, sometimes over hundreds of years, only to be suddenly disinhabited, left intact, abandoned entirely to ghosts. They left their dead ancestors behind, elaborate buildings standing, painted pots unbroken, setting out for who knows where.

  Walking once with a National Park Service archaeologist on a searing, chrome-sky day through the rooms of the crescent-shaped Pueblo Bonito ruins in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, I was told that there was no evidence anywhere in the canyon of war, famine, or disaster to explain why the Anasazi left their great city at Chaco behind in the eighth century of the present era. The petroglyphs that dot the length of the canyon’s stone walls, of whirling spirals, lightning bolts, handprints, deer, and people, offer no answers that we can read today. Neither do the ceremonial burials of birds, in hundreds of tiny ceramic boxes, the room-size caches of abalone shells, the great bundles of porcupine qu
ills that had all been secreted away and forgotten after they left.

  “Maybe that’s just how they saw things,” the archaeologist said. The place remains sacred today, and Indian people go there for rites and prayers, leaving behind small offerings wrapped in cloth of blue corn, falcon feathers, or red sand in the empty rooms of the ruins.

  “Maybe they did what they were supposed to do here, during a certain time, then they just moved on,” she said, staring down into the great hollow of one of Chaco’s kivas, the sunken circular earth chambers used by the Anasazi for prayer and ceremonies. “They just moved on, to something else.”

  Maybe it was just as well to be done with San Antonio. In the fifty years since the Santos had made their home there, most of our joys and griefs, private and shared, had been mapped onto the city’s streets and barrios, onto its downtown precinct, its hills, and its river. It was a half century of tales told to that place, but the city was a reticent witness.

  At the founding of many American cities lurk unsavory tales of invasion and mayhem, usually whitewashed or forgotten. Whether it’s the hoary presence of old buildings or a nebula of run-down shacks and other ruins, the evidence of the past—raw, weathered, and scarred—raises accusatory questions. How did this all come about? What price was paid, by whom, and for whose sake? Who was here before the whole story began? Troubled by the wraiths of American history, our cities have been bled by the suburbs and washed in the waters of urban renewal. They have emerged cleansed of the taint of the sin, discord, and, in some cases, the ethnicity of the past.