Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  Yet, the past is recorded, even if imperfectly. On a visit to San Antonio in 1854, Frederick Law Olmsted, architect of New York City’s Central Park, felt like an outsider there, writing in his journal of “the dirty, grim, old stuccoed stone cathedral, whose cracked bell is now clunking for vespers, in a tone that bids us no welcome, as more of the intruding race who have caused all this progress, on which its traditions, like its imperturbable dome, frown down.”

  In the same year, the historian Timothy Matovina tells of a San Antonian who stormed the sanctuary of Mission San Juan and began to demolish the statues and images of Jesus and the saints with a hammer. As he smashed a figurine of St. Martin de Porres, he was stopped by other Tejanos. At the time of the conquest, for many of the Indios and Mestizos alike, the saints of the Catholic sacred pantheon became the focus of the devotions that had once been offered to the Pre-Columbian gods. These Mexican gods were no gods at all, the vandal told those who restrained him. If Mexicans worshipped the true God, he would never have let the Gringos take Texas.

  We lived in the ruins of that time, when the faint echoes of the conquest had become mirages and spectacles. On Saturdays, all day long, with brothers, cousins, and friends, we watched Kung-Fu triple features at the Aztec Theater, a cinema palace in downtown San Antonio. The walls of the theater were decorated with colorful panels of Mayan and Aztecan glyphs, interspersed with the faces of various gods, all presided over by the Feathered Serpent God Quetzalcoatl, whose image surrounded the screen as Bruce Lee threw slow-motion aerial drop kicks. Coyolxauqhui, the moon-faced Mexica night goddess, her face pierced and gilded, stared down at us in the red light of the exit signs.

  The theater was inaugurated in 1926, after a San Antonio architect sent assistants all over Mexico to collect images and ideas from the ruins of Maya, Zapoteca, Mixteca, Tolteca, and Azteca Indian cities. The curtain painting depicted the first meeting between Cortés and Motecuhzoma, the Aztec emperor. Thousands of people were turned away from that opening, according to one of my great-uncles who remembers being there, having sneaked in early in the afternoon. After the movie, he said, there was a grand Aztecan costume pageant called, “The Court of Montezuma,” where the performers enacted the scene on the curtain.

  On Houston Street, the Majestic Theater specialized in Godzilla and race car movies. It had its own lavish stone proscenium decked with tableaux mort of stucco turkeys, Indian warriors, and feathered Cherubim. Part Bavaria, part American West, this theater was where we watched double features of Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster and Mothra beneath a ceiling lit by flickering evening stars, across which wispy desert clouds would slowly pass. Once, when Maria, Grandmother’s housemaid, accompanied us, she insisted the sky showed every sign of raining soon and urged us to leave.

  The Texas Theater, a block up from the Majestic, belonged to John Wayne and Elvis. We went there on school field trips to see Red River, The Alamo, and, finally, True Grit, where a one-eyed John Wayne looked broken down and spent. On weekends, they let Grandmother Leandra in for free at the Texas. She had the reputation of being Elvis’s oldest fan in San Antonio. Grandmother liked how well behaved he was, even if he made a wrong decision in life, like in King Creole. According to Grandmother, he always saw the truth in the end—and he always had a good heart, which was the most important thing.

  Further up Houston Street was the art deco Alameda Theater, with its three-story-high neon marquee in the shape of a feather. Here, mariachis on horseback would fill the stage, playing their instruments for a final encore performance of “Guadalajara” at the end of the three-hour-long stage shows, which capped off the day’s screening of Cantinflas movies. The audience whooped and sang along as each of the evening’s guest stars came out one more time and delivered a verse into the microphone.

  We walked amid Moorish beehive towers hewn from red granite, through the shaded courtyard of the Spanish Governor’s Palace, past the turquoise and maroon walls of El Tenampa Bar. The wide sidewalks of Houston Street lit up like a Mexican carnival every Saturday night, crowded with strolling old folks, young lovers, cowboys, hippies, and the elegant pachucos in their baggy shirts and pants and pointed, black patent leather shoes.

  Throughout my childhood, at the end of each day, my parents would pack us into the red Ford station wagon and drive us downtown, first along Houston Street, taking a right at the Alamo, stopping at the plaza in front of the old mission. A street musician named Bongo Joe, whom we heard had come from New Orleans, was usually there, playing two banged-up oil drums with rattle mallets, whistling sultry blues and singing in lower, raspier tones than Louis Armstrong in the hot Texas night. Sometimes he just let his rolling, melancholy beat go on forever, changing with the shifting warm breezes. The people who gathered to listen threw coins into the giant wheelbarrow Bongo used to carry his drums off at the end of the night.

  We would drive up Commerce Street, then pause by the Plaza de las Islas in front of the cathedral to watch the circular colonnade of water of the old fountain that was illuminated in a battery of coruscating colored lights. Sometimes, as a special treat during the summer, we stopped at a watermelon stand out on Fredericksburg Road on the way home, eating great crescent-shaped slices over picnic benches under a corrugated tin roof, spitting our seeds out into the moonlit dirt.

  That “San Anto” of memory, already a relic then of a more distant past, was destined, like its precursor, to be abandoned, lost, preserved only in old photographs and in our fragmentary remembrance. Houston Street today is an avenue of ghosts. The Texas Theater was torn down except for its limestone and colored tile facade and box office, left to adorn a telecommunications corporation headquarters. The Aztec Theater is condemned and falling to ruin, the gods’ faces marred with graffiti, the stone water fountains green with algae.

  After virtually disintegrating by the turn of the century, the mission ruins were restored as national parks. The historic mercado district, all wood and painted plaster, was stripped of its minstrels and chili stands in the 1930s and finally torn down in the 1970s, only to be replaced with a theme-park version made from bricks the color of a Ramada Inn. San Antonio is a palimpsest of erasures, a thoroughly modern and robust Texas tourism and convention mecca, inhabited now by a pueblo of ghosts. It is a hidden-away Mexican city where a lot of old accounts are still being settled, where blood memory runs deep. Not too long ago, an Anglo killed a Mexican American after an evening of drinking at an ice house on the city’s western edge. According to the sheriff, “They got into an argument about whether the Anglos had stolen Texas from Mexico, and what happened at the battle of the Alamo.”

  Downtown bears little testimony to the legacy of conflagration, or for that matter, to the deep history of settlement lying just beneath the apparent face of this place that used to be called San Antonio de Valero. Even the restored Alamo, with its stone walls the color of pristine ivory linen, nestled alongside a sweetly manicured plaza with a gazebo, makes it hard to imagine a bloody battle could have happened there. But just in case you’ve forgotten the old story of the fight for Texas independence, the IMAX theater a block away runs continuous screenings of The Battle for Freedom, which retells the heroic tale and features Davy Crockett wearing a wristwatch.

  The newly opened Hard Rock Cafe in San Antonio is a virtual cantina, where conventioneers can sip Lone Star longnecks and hear Tex-Mex accordion virtuosi in secure, suburbanite environs. It sits near an old island in the San Antonio River where the city’s gentry once maintained an exclusive club in which no Mexicans were welcome. Across the street and down the Disneyesque riverwalk, a quaintly Spanish-styled Planet Hollywood is the other twin star of the city’s new downtown, more patronized by tourists than denizens of San Antonio.

  Yet, at Lerma’s on Zarzamora Street, you can still do the Aztec two-step to unadulterated live conjunto bands. The ancient aqueduct behind Mission Espada will still carry you back in time to the days when these lands were first written into the script of the conquest. Drive
the elevated expressways into town and there’s a bank office the shape of a Teotihuacán pyramid in your rearview mirror. The Tower of the Americas lies ahead, looking like a UFO hovering over downtown. Floating above the cicada songs and the dense canopy of trees in the barrio are the yellow poblano tile cupolas of Little Flower Church. This place casts a spell that makes the alien its own, that saturates the present and the future in the past, as if it were inescapable, as if the real and imaginary were meant to be swirled in the same timeless south Texas vortex.

  My father remained silent, but, over the years, more stories about Abuelo Juan José’s death began to emerge, poco a poco, in quiet conversations in garages, backyards, and kitchens with aunts and uncles.

  They tell me a Mexican circus came to San Antonio in the late fall of 1938. The ornately painted big top was installed in a large field on the eastern outskirts of town. The thick, acrid smell of the unwashed animals hung in the air across the grounds. As most of the crowd made its way into the tent, a surging tangle of spectators in one makeshift wooden arena nearby bet furiously on a pair of already bloodied roosters. Clouds of dust and confetti swirled around everyone’s heads.

  Juan José was disoriented that night. He hadn’t really wanted to go, but several families had planned to go together, so he had felt obliged. The noise seemed to annoy him, the smells of the crowded fairway left him dizzy. When the circus began, my aunt remembers he was nervous and fidgeting. There were bears dressed as Mexican farmers, spider monkeys dressed as nuns. One clown who rushed into the stands with a Chihuahua in his sombrero was made up like Pancho Villa with a big nose and a bigger belly. In the center ring, a phalanx of charros rode the paso de la muerte round and round, gaining speed, until an Indio boy made his way from one of the horses onto an unsaddled stallion galloping in the middle of the pack. Juan José seemed disturbed by the number of things going on simultaneously in the three rings. He became quiet. Some in the family say that was where he got the susto, the spiritual fright that made him want to take his own life. That was the night he began to grow silent again, distant, and grim.

  Soon, he became preoccupied with looking out the front porch window to see if anyone might be lurking on the sidewalk across the street, standing there in the lamplight. It had been a difficult year of mounting debts and worries for Juan José. The foundry missed pay-rolls. They had almost lost the house. The year was coming to an end and he alone knew a moment of decision was coming.

  By Christmas, he had been deeply quiet for many weeks. He constantly went to the front windows of the house at night, pulling away the curtain to look out and see if anyone was in the street. “Nada, nada, nada,” he muttered to himself.

  According to one of my aunts, on Christmas Eve my father and my uncle Raul together gave him a black leather aviator’s jacket as a present. The family watched him open the professionally wrapped package, nervous about how he would receive it. As he opened the box from Joske’s department store and pulled out the shiny leather jacket by the sleeves, he looked at it for a moment, brooding to himself, then threw it with disdain across the sofa and said he had no need for such a luxury. It should be returned.

  Uela told her sister Tía Pepa that Abuelo Juan José had spoken of having to go away, though he would never explain why, or to where. He had been sleepless for weeks. On that morning, he got up early, and started looking out the window again, as he dressed himself, as always in suit and tie, for his foreman’s job at the Petroleum company. Uela remembered how she had watched him go to the bed of each child before he left the house, bending over to kiss each of the younger ones on the forehead. That felt like a despedida, and that terrified her.

  Toward the end of his life, Colonel Brackenridge had fallen into a melancholy about the fate of San Antonio, and especially the river, which had suffered and dwindled as a result of the rise of the city. In a late letter to a friend, Colonel Brackenridge had written, “I have seen this bold, bubbling laughing river dwindle and fade away. This river is my child and it is dying and I cannot stay here to see its last gasps. . . . I must go.”

  The colonel had been a believer in life after death, and after his death in 1920, at the age of eighty-eight, his elderly sister Eleanor sought to keep the house and the large estate on Burr Road ready for his expected return. Yet, with her brother and all his loud delight gone, Eleanor lost the spirit for the socials and recitals that were the center of life at Fernridge. Soon, the beige paint began peeling off the endless porch grilles that encircled the main house, and the limestone columns developed dark splotches of mildew and fungus. The glass greenhouse conservatory that my grandfather tended was closed, and the Santos family moved out. Abuelo Juan José took his first job as a die-caster at a foundry—Alamo Iron Works, near downtown San Antonio.

  When Juan José visited the estate for the last time, in 1938, he found the once exquisite greenhouse conservatory in shambles. The stalks of elephant ears had collapsed under the weight of their giant leaves and lay dried, willy-nilly across the cobbled walks. Dried chrysanthemum petals were blowing in a warm breeze coming through a broken pane. One of my uncles remembered how his father quietly found one rose bush that was not yet entirely dead. He brought the pot onto the lawn outside, where he watered it with a bucket of spring water drawn fresh from the well.

  No photographic record of the house on Burr Road, the first the family lived in together after Mexico, has survived. But in one photograph taken in 1920 by an official photographer of the colonel’s, my grandparents stand side by side, their expressions solemn, each of them gripping the handle of a baby carriage where Aunt Connie sits wide-eyed. To one side, Uncle Raul sits astride his tricycle, wearing a white blouse with a harlequin collar and shorts, staring suspiciously at the photographer. My father, two years old, stands to the other side, in white smock and shorts, gripping his sister’s hand in the carriage, and looking afraid. They are all in the shade of an arbor of giant hanging grape leaves. But in the background, visible only in the shade of the vines, are the great white columns that ran along the house’s large wraparound porch. The house was torn down in the late 1930s, leaving only the foundation, covered in Johnson grass, to testify today to the place where the Santos and the Garcias had made one household together.

  The last house Abuelo Juan José lived in lies beneath the expressway downtown, somewhere underneath a massive embankment between the southeastern corner of Hemisfair Plaza and the new Alamodome. It was from this house, at 116 Parsons Street, that he had made his final journey on that morning in 1939.

  Driving toward town on South St. Mary’s Street, passing Roosevelt Park, where my father found his father’s body, always gave me a shiver of emptiness, as if the cold, colorless atmosphere of deep space somehow gathered and eddied there, in the middle of the city. Yet, his last walk from home to that place was etched, invisibly, into the earth, each footprint marked, every breath drawn that day was traced out in the atmosphere to its faintest curl. Accelerating into the curve onto the bridge over the San Antonio River, afraid to look, I caught only glimpses of the water, the old rail bridge, the tall grasses and reeds along the bank.

  I had a dream one night that I wrote in my journal back then: I’m in a San Antonio cemetery, decorated with Mexican paper flowers. I have the feeling I’m at my grandfather’s grave. The ground feels like a fabric stretched over an armature of taut twine and hard clay. I reach down and slowly press my hand through the easily parting ground. Underneath is air, cold air, as if for miles and miles, and I put my arm in all the way to my shoulder. I retrieve my hand, and it smells of nothing.

  After the family gradually married and moved out of the house on Parsons Street, Uela continued to live there until the late 1960s, with Madrina and Uncle Manuel, Madrina’s husband. By then it was a neighborhood of mostly old Mexican dowagers. Their well-kept houses were large and empty, nestled inside lush front yard gardens, and overhung by expansive, aged oak trees. When the city was preparing for the 1968 Hemisfair, this pocket settl
ement of Viejitas was an easy target for the developers’ plans to find a corridor to build an expressway straight into the heart of the city. Uela moved to one last home, on Cincinnati Street, on the west side of town. The Parsons Street neighborhood, which she never returned to, was razed.

  The old Mexican precincts downtown weren’t the only sanctuaries for ghosts. San Antonio’s suburbs were haunted, too. There were lots of new houses being built in the wooded northern hills of the city, out Vance Jackson Road, well beyond the onetime reach of the old missions. With the swarm of developers competing with each other to build quicker and cheaper, the houses were inexpensive. Bearing names like Colonial Hills, Colonial Oaks, and Colonies North, the subdivisions evoked a polite, generic image of the city’s Spanish past that had been, by then, all but erased in time and forgotten by most of us. Old barrio streets that were two hundred years old bore names like Morales, Ruiz, Guadalupe, and Colorado. In the neighborhood we moved to in the 1960s, the freshly named, newly laid streets were Marlborough, Hopeton, Dudley, Belvoir, and Tiffany.

  We were at the city’s northern frontier, already in the low, rising steppes of the hill country of central Texas. Deer, weasels, skunks, and rabbits ambled through the neighborhood on cool mornings at dawn. If there had been rain, they would go down to the wide limestone arroyo that cut the neighborhood in half.

  Once, while driving my great-uncle Frank home after a party at our house, he suddenly pointed at a lawn we were passing at the corner of Marlborough and Dudley, and said excitedly, “¡Tlacuaches! ¡Mira no mas!”