Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  That world began for me on a ranchito in Medina river valley sand, the flat, golden territory southeast of the city, where spindly live oaks grow alongside mesquite and huisache trees, and the whole landscape is dotted with dense clusters of flowering, scarlet-fruited cactus. On iridescent summer days, squeaky tin windmills churned so slowly in the sluggish Tejano breezes that the pumps only managed to pull enough water from the ground to produce a syrupy trickle into the large cement tank. Across cleared pastures, under an unquenchable, bleaching sun, a few cattle would huddle in the shade around a block of salt. And always the song of thousands upon thousands of cicadas, chirping in the hot, still air.

  My father, a veteran of World War II, had bought the small ranch, which never really had a proper ranch name, with a loan from the Texas Veteran’s Land Board. It was near Pleasanton, Texas, just south of San Antonio’s outskirts. Most Friday afternoons, after school, we loaded up the station wagon and made the journey across town and out to the rancho. As we passed through the city in what seemed an interminable trek, it was always unfathomable to me that this world of crowded shopping-mall parking lots, busy railroad crossings, and stalling downtown traffic around the bustling mercado existed almost side by side with the silent, remote world of the ranch. From the sandy road that led to the entrance gate, I saw haunted, abandoned clapboard ranch houses dotting the horizon, over sprawling fields of dry grasses. We entered the ranch through a rusting wrought iron gate that creaked with the sound of an eagle’s cry, and the older oaks alongside the road formed a tunnel over us, a mosaic of sunlight. We drove the half-mile-long sandy road to where the house was.

  My pressing concern was the garden. The sandy riverine loam there nurtured my watermelons, which blossomed and grew in a staggering abundance. In addition to uncles and aunts, compadres y comadres, cousins, and a pony called Brown Beauty, the weekend ranch society included white-tailed deer; armadillos; slithering, dreaded poisonous copperheads; hawks; and mockingbirds. My father and uncles would make a big fire as soon as we arrived, preparing for our hecatomb parillada of grilled goat, brisket, chicken, wieners, and roasting ears of corn. On special weekends, they dug a hole to bury a cow’s head with burning coals, to slow roast the Sunday-morning breakfast delicacy of tender tacos of the stringy head meat called barbacoa.

  Walking out from the spacious oak grove where we had a small army surplus Quonset hut into the dry brush country, I had the familiar, contradictory feeling that this was a place of great antiquity, and utter newness. It seemed age-old but untouched, with no signs of human presence there ever before. Years later, visiting a farm of a girlfriend’s grandmother in New Hampshire, I was taken aback by how handled the forests were—trees bearing crosses, X’s, circles, and arrows, moss-covered paths, stone walls half-fallen, mended, crisscrossing far into the woods, far from the nearest road.

  One of the main attractions of the ranch was Brown Beauty, a squat, husky Shetland pony my father had bought for twenty-seven dollars at a livestock auction in Pleasanton. At these auctions and rodeos, Mexicans and Anglos met around mesquite corrals, iron pens, and sand-filled rings to haggle over prices. They did business then just as they had for the last two hundred years, trading heifers, mares, bulls—and mad ponies.

  She was “prieta,” the ranchhand, Isác, had said. That was dark brown, like the color of tobacco resin. And she was ornery enough to acquire a reputation, after stomping toes and tossing children, for being downright mean. For a year, Brown Beauty stubbornly carried cedar posts, bucking and baring teeth, to build the fence around the ranch. Maybe it was that year of hard labor that made her wild.

  While riding Brown Beauty, I could feel the whole world rush forward suddenly at a tilt, careening down a two-track sandy road, holding the reins like tethers, voices of family members screaming in the distance, a vague blur of familiar noise. She would take you deep into the woods in an unexpected whoosh and then, just as suddenly, leave you airborne, aiming for a stand of flowering cactus. One cold Sunday morning out on the Pleasanton ranch, so cold there had been ice on the inside panes of the windows in the bungalow, everyone was milling around the fire outside, talking and drinking coffee and hot chocolate. My cousin Robert was riding around the clearing on Brown Beauty when the pony bolted forward in a beautiful, short-legged curvetting leap and carried Robert off into the brush. We all envied him. All he could do was to grasp her neck and duck low, to keep from getting hit by branches. It happened so quickly, we all stood silently watching. It was an hour before we found Robert, bruised and scratched. Brown Beauty stayed missing for another week.

  On Sunday evenings, we made our way back into the city, already lit up with Dairy Queen signs and multiplex marquees. Driving sleepily through downtown streets of San Antonio, we saw the strings of lights hanging from towering cypresses along the banks of the river. Bongo Joe was playing in front of the Alamo. On Broadway, we looked at the pedestrians along the sidewalk, snickering and trying to spot my father’s cousin Jimena, who had been a prostitute in San Antonio for thirty years. Gradually, we fell back under the spell of San Antonio de Bejar.

  We didn’t have the ranch near San Antonio for very long. It was sold in the early ’60s so my parents could buy the house in the suburbs, where my brothers and I would be able to go to decent public schools. The deal for the ranch had one drawback. It included Brown Beauty.

  Once you pass through the sierra town of Múzquiz, heading west on the highway, it’s all arroyos, canyons, and stands of pine, juniper, and mesquite mixed in with cactus. For nearly three hundred miles, the landscape surrounding the remote Mexican blacktop is all green pasture, burnt brown mountains, and a big blue sky. This is the road to the Rancho Los Generales, the Guerra family cattle ranch, near their home of Sabinas, Coahuila, which I visited most summers home from college. The Texas border is just one hundred and fifty miles north for most of its length, but the traditions of old Mexico remain strong here.

  Even with industrial development encroaching, the road is still a window onto Mexico’s past, as it cuts a path through some of the most stunningly beautiful rugged wilderness I have ever seen anywhere. Eagles, hawks, and vultures trace invisible currents across the sky. Lions, deer, and bear are plentiful, as are the menacing javelinas and rattle-snakes. And the many ranches along the road are stocked with large herds of Black Angus, orange-and-cream-colored Hereford, and white Charolais cattle.

  This is where my real life with ranches began. Along with Alejo, the chief vaquero of the ranch, and various cousins and uncles, we undertook the day-to-day chores and rigors of a working ranch. This could mean an early morning on horseback, out in a far pasture by seven, looking along the ground for the telltale puddles of a leaking pipe that must be dug up and mended with rubber-tire-tubing tourniquets. We gathered for roundups, sweeping through the hills to convene the herd, straggling pasture to pasture in a great looped circuit around the rancho, until all eight hundred head of white Charolais were accounted for and brought together, glowing in the moonlight, across a high plain.

  The next day, we would descend to the pasture with the corrals in a tumult of dust and fur. Once in the corrals, the cattle were shuttled through baths and vaccinations, steers were castrated, and, if they were calves, branded with red-hot irons with an A, the ranch brand, which stands for Alejandro Guerra. The animals seemed so aware, so sentient, if unable to express themselves. Watching them in a pasture as three dozen stood, staring emptily at me, I had to shudder to think of their destiny. Many never made it to market. They were attacked by bears or pumas, or lacerated after getting tangled up in a barbed wire fence.

  Once, a prized pregnant cow had been lost for several days, despite Alejo’s and my searches up and down the hills of two pastures where she was thought to be. My father was with me on the ranch, and on one ride together we noticed a hillside oak glen where the trees seemed to be covered in a canopy the color of tar. As we got closer, the canopy became a living thing, undulating and heaving as one, but revealed as
a horde of expressionless sopilotes, “vultures,” which had congregated to consume the carcass of the lost cow and her unborn calf. She had been struck by lightning; a great burn mark was still evident on her neck. The sopilotes had left the singed flesh, but her ribs were so perfectly white they looked bleached. In that still, carrion air, some of the vultures shook out their old rugs of wings. My father and I sat in our saddles, uneasy with the utter silence of the desolate scene, dust motes hanging in the afternoon sunlight. It was as if we were in a church, the vultures perched in the trees like a choir all around us, a strange sanctuary devoted to the memory of an accidental death.

  The time on the ranch also gave me a chance to read and write on my own. I knew these were bad times to be a poet. It was a time when no one listened to the poets anymore, when the words of poets went unheard by all, rich and poor, by politicians and judges, police and factory workers. But that was what I thought I was then, not by choice, but by some personal vocation. Out there on the ranch, it was De la Barca, Spenser, Sidney, Browne, and Traherne. After a long ride out, I read in the mesquite groves in the valley of los Viejos, or up on the hill with the great water tank, from where the burnt orange light of sunset made the pages look like they were on fire. On the screened patio, in the shade from the full bake of midafternoon, it was Smart, Blake, Lorca, Kerouac, Burroughs, Borges, and the gnawing idea of an unfortunate destiny. In a journal, I described myself then as “a laughing vaquero poet at the end of twentieth century.”

  During Holy Week at Easter, and in the week between Christmas and the New Year, we would join the entire Guerra family, up to thirty of us, at Los Generales for several days of cooking and eating, afternoon tequilas, horseback riding, and impromptu rodeos. Meals were served on one long wooden table, set in the shade of a sycamore tree we had planted some years before, next to the patio. Tacos de chorizo, de machacado, with beans was breakfast. A breast of dove in a clear lime soup, with rice and peas, might be lunch. Most evenings, Alejo would build a great mesquite fire in a vast cast-iron barbecue pit, and the steaks and tripas for dinner were grilled alongside onions, garlic, corn, and chiles for late suppers.

  One Easter, after dinner, most of the adults retreated to the sitting room of the ranch house around ten o’clock, the women drinking limeades, the men sipping from snifters of El Presidente brandy. While the subject of discussion at the Guerra table back in Sabinas was usually Mexican politics, out at the rancho the talk ran to long Mexican jokes, old family tales, and, as it grew later, ghost stories.

  “The old house in Sabinas was haunted, for many years,” Tía Bertha said, as I leaned in, listening from the kitchen. “Yes, it was in the closet in our room,” she added, pointing to her sister Beatriz sitting nearby. “Late at night, we heard slow footsteps inside the closet. Sometimes we could hear, like a whispering voice, saying ‘Dios mio . . .’ It was a very, very sad voice.”

  “Tía, how terrifying!” my cousin Alejandra said, holding her hands to her face. “How could you even sleep there?”

  “Ticha or I would tell it to shush, so we could sleep! And that’s all it took. An old woman who came from the church said it was a ghost of an old banker from town. In our closet! She said she saw his face in the grain of the wood on the door and brought the widow of the poor soul to stare at it and say prayers.”

  “There was always praying going on in their room,” their elder sister Julieta offered, drawing snickers from the room.

  “But do you know that Mama had to pay a spiritualista to lure that spirit to come out? The man was dressed in a big cloak, and he was a little, you know, ‘Forty-one,’ effeminate, and he kept screaming at the closet, ‘Now you come out of there right now! Naughty Spirit!’” Tío Alejandro erupted with laughter at his sister’s impersonation of the spirit medium.

  “And did he get the ghost out?” Alejandra asked.

  “That was beautiful.” Tía Beatriz, or Tía Ticha as she is known, had been silent as her sister told the story. Her face was serious, and she spoke in slow earnest tones. “It was in the middle of summer. From the closet door, through Julieta’s room, into the hallway and out onto the porch, and then across the plaza, this old brujo left behind a path of the orange petals of zempaxuchitl flowers. He said he guided the spirit through the streets of Sabinas back to its grave in the nearby cemetery. You could see the flower path for days.”

  “And, fijate, that ghost never bothered us again,” Tía Bertha added with great pride.

  Tío Alejandro told how once, as a child, on an old rancho near Múzquiz called Las Rusias, the family had been visiting friends on an ordinary Sunday afternoon in the summer. “We were playing in a pasture and the skies suddenly darkened. Then there was some rain, but it wasn’t water. It was small black stones that stung when they fell on us. We ran to the house, but I turned around and saw the rain of stones falling across the sierra, as far as you could see. Bien curioso.” Alejandro’s brother Miguel, along with his sisters, nodded in solemn agreement.

  It was nearly midnight, and there was already a constellation of sleepers on cots spread out across the patio in the open night air. Tío Alejandro popped an old corroded bottle of Cognac Napoleon that he said had belonged to the emperor himself, and it looked as if it might have. As he chipped away at the tar-colored plaque on the bottle, he remembered with us how his father had come from Oaxaca City, in the south of Mexico, where his grandfather, who was puro Indio, had a livery company. Alejandro Senior had fought in la Revolución and had ridden into Mexico City with Pancho Villa’s Dorado army.

  “And in that famous portrait, you know the one, of Villa and Zapata sitting together in the Presidential Palace, both of them in their grand thrones just after victory—off to the very far left of the picture, peeking into the frame, you can see Papá’s nose.”

  As everyone laughed over my uncle’s protestations that it was the truth, he poured out thimble-size copitas of the aged cognac and passed them around the room. Seeing me in the doorway, he called me over and asked me to recite something I had performed for him earlier in the day. In high school Spanish class, I had learned a speech from La Vida es Sueño, a seventeenth-century Spanish play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca about a prince, Seguismundo, who is condemned to live in a tower after his father, the king, receives prophecies that the youth will bring great calamities to the kingdom. Deciding to give his son one chance, the king has the prince drugged, and, upon awakening, the prince is told he is king. The affairs of the kingdom are soon wrecked, and he is returned to the tower, where he makes a powerful speech.

  As I recited in the quiet sitting room, I could hear the sound of crickets outside when I paused to take a breath. My voice sounded alien to me, more insistent than when I had rehearsed the words before, the Spanish more flamboyant and rhythmic. I saw Tía Maye, Alejandro’s wife, nodding in approval when I came to the last words which I nervously tried to deliver without stumbling,

  ¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.

  Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,

  una sombra, una ficción,

  y el mayor bien es pequeño:

  que toda la vida es sueño,

  y los sueños, sueños son.

  What is life? A frenzy.

  What is life? An illusion,

  a shadow, a fiction,

  and the greatest good is small:

  that life is a dream,

  and dreams are dreams.

  Amidst the whooping and applause which I acknowledged with a bow, Tío Alejandro offered me a copita of the rare cognac, which I raised in a toast to everyone in the room. When it went down my throat, it felt like an icy smoke that tasted of ancient oranges.

  “Shhhh-shhh-shhh,” Tía Bertha whispered, quieting the room. “¡Ahora, Johnny!”

  My father stood up and cleared his voice, lifting his hands for quiet with a nervous smile. He raised his copita up in the air, looking for a moment at me, and said to everyone with a sweep of his arm, “Les voy a cantar una canción. I’m going to sing you
all a little song.”

  Aside from an occasional wedding or funeral, he hadn’t wanted to sing among friends for a long time. Back in San Antonio, he liked to sing in a room of the house off on his own, when you could barely make out the lyrics of Agustín Lara’s song “Noche de Ronda” in the sweet falsetto section of the song where it says,

  Lu-na que se quiebra sobre la tiniebla

  de mi soledad.

  ¿Adónde vas?

  Oh Moon that shatters over the storm

  of my solitude.

  Where are you going?

  Out at Los Generales that night, in a room lit by lanterns and candles, he told the group with great formality that he had written a song he wanted to sing especially for them, a song in honor of the Rancho Los Generales, which he dedicated, cognac held aloft again, to my Tío Alejandro.

  “You know how close our families are,” my father said, beginning to choke up.

  “Somos familia,” Tío Alejandro responded. “We are family.”

  My father rushed out his words as his cheeks quivered with emotion, “And this is for everybody.” He sat down and brought the guitar onto his lap. He closed his eyes as he strummed the instrument gently, humming through a cascade of chord progressions and flowery pickings. Finally, he was ready to begin. My father was in his early sixties, and “El Corrido del Rancho Los Generales” was the first song he had written.