Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  My father was ranchero, even though he had grown up as a city boy. The ranch off Pleasanton Road was a refuge where we could leave behind the San Antonio of expressways and shopping malls and return to the old time of Texas earth—something Abuelo Juan José had always aspired to.

  But the real rancheros had been the old Santos, the Santos before they came to Coahuila. My great-grandfather Juan Nepumencio Santos had worked around ranches of the region and was known as a keen-eyed roper. Visabuelo Nepumencio, as he was called, lost his first wife in the 1870s during a difficult childbirth before she was twenty-two, leaving him with four sons—Pedro, José León, Guadalupe, and Jesús María—to raise alone. As the sons grew up, they worked the cattle with him at the ranchos, and José León, in particular, is said to have become an adept cowboy.

  A distant cousin in Austin turned out to have been told some of these tatters of Abuelo Nepumencio’s story by her father. In those days, she said, the family lived in the remote dusty village of Espinazo, in the flat, dry countryside between Monclova and Monterrey, which was also the birthplace and home of José Fidencio Sintora Constantino, the famous and widely sought after Indian healer known as El Niño Fidencio, whose disciples still gather every year in the tiny town, reachable only by dirt roads and railway.

  It was there that Juan Nepumencio Santos apparently met my great-grandmother Paula Sandoval, a young midwife, who had come to visit the healer Fidencio along with her mother and other parteras, or “midwives,” who were interested in the wondrous works of the Indian miracle healer. She was about eighteen then, and Nepumencio already nearly forty. After marrying, he moved his four children and their few belongings by buggy to San Felipe, Coahuila, where Paula came from, and where he was able to find work on ranches near Sabinas, hoping someday to be able to afford to buy a small granja on which the family could live, keep a few goats and chickens, and grow its food, and still have enough to sell at the markets.

  In the diocesan baptismal registry of San Felipe, kept in Sabinas, just as Uncle Sid had reported, beginning in 1882, the names of my grandfather and his brothers and sisters are entered, in flowing ornamental script, one by one, over the next twelve years. There was Mariano, the deaf-mute, who became a barber in Texas and could fix watches, even though he had never received any formal training; and Tío Uvaldino. Then Juan José, my abuelo, followed by four sisters, Andrea; Francisca, known as “Panchita”; Jesusa, whom everyone would know as “Chita,” the prankster; and Manuela, known simply as “Nela.”

  It’s impossible to say where the haunting in that family began, the hidden-away distraction, the fearful despair, threading through my grandfather, uncles, and aunts. Impossible to say how far back in time it began, like a fossil of some tragic lost knowledge. Once ancient Mexicans had been gripped in a perpetual cycle of obligation to sacrifice to fend off the destruction of the world and the constant encroaching of the void. The French anthropologist Jacques Soustelle called this the “cosmic mission” of the Aztecs, “fighting off the incursions of nothingness day after day.” The shadows of that compromiso, that solemn duty, that fearful memory of nothingness, may have lasted long in the hearts of Mexicanos, for generations after the conquest, to the present day.

  Or it may just have been that my grandfather’s generation was deeply shaken by having to flee their home during the revolution, like so many others leaving behind the only way of life they had known in Mexico. No one today remembers any talk of Nepumencio or Paula being prone to complejos de nervios—nervous disorders, depression, or madness. But there were rumors about Nepumencio’s four sons by his first wife.

  As the elder half-siblings of Nepumencio’s first family, they always seemed like outsiders, renegados, often disappearing from the family home for intervals. Jesús María, the youngest, was a notorious llorón, a crybaby, prone to fits of weeping, often in public, at funerals, as well as weddings, baptisms, and later, strolling through the streets of San Felipe. These bouts of crying carried on well into his elder years, after he had come to Texas. The Santos have remained strangely quick to weep, and not just in moments of great sadness or joy. In the middle of singing a song, my father can suddenly be engulfed by tears, trying to persevere, but often having to stop in midverse to collect himself. The urge to weep can sweep into me like a wind, during a phone conversation, watching a close horse race, reading a newspaper article about a cataclysm abroad.

  Another half-brother was José León—remembered for his great resounding cowboy boots, a handlebar mustache, and telling hilarious yarns—whose nomadic ways kept him out of the family’s close embrace. He worked ranches throughout south Texas and later back in Mexico. José León was so restless he never stayed at home. His own family in Eagle Pass grew accustomed to living without him. Moving alone with his own haunting, he crossed the border between Texas and Mexico at Piedras Negras so often he said there was a rut in the bridge there from all of his walking.

  The last two half-brothers, Tíos Pedro and Guadalupe, are remembered least. When the family moved north across the border in the days of la Revolución, they stayed behind in Hondo, Texas, an hour south of San Antonio, on the road to Piedras Negras. They lost touch with the rest of the family, never answering letters, never visiting San Antonio or receiving visitors, and finally there were rumors, never confirmed, of a suicide.

  With Abuelo Juan José, the family’s long history in la vida ranchera became in him a desire to farm, even after the Santos had arrived in San Antonio. Amidst the new city, he still dreamed of the life the family had lived before. The work Abuelo had done in the greenhouse conservatory of Colonel Brackenridge, tending the ivory lilies, the crimson amaryllises, and the trellises draping with ivy, only deepened those desires, even if planting and minding flowers and ornamental plants was a caprice compared to the age-old cycle of planting and harvesting that drew at him like an ineluctable tide.

  In 1934, five years before his death, twenty-one years after coming to Texas, Abuelo was finally able to save enough money to buy a lease on some sharecropping land outside of San Antonio, in a large piece of acreage known as the Belgian Gardens. Great-grandfather Jacobo, Uela’s father, joined his son-in-law in the venture, contributing eight hundred dollars he had saved over the years to match Juan José’s investment.

  Abuelo quit the job he had held for nearly ten years at the Alamo Iron Works after the old colonel’s death. Great-uncle Gilbert remembers there were several good years for crops then, with plentiful rain to nourish big harvests of watermelons, cantaloupes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and green and yellow squash. The whole family, including uncles, aunts, and cousins in the Santos and Garcia clan, from the chavalillos to the ancianos, contributed to the work required to farm the fifty rich acres of leased land. During harvest, Great-grandfather Jacobo and his twin, Abrán, would sit on chairs set out in the middle of the fields, surrounded by the youngest of their progeny, brushing the dirt off the vegetables one by one, wrapping them in newspaper and arranging them neatly into boxes to take to the bustling produce truck bazaar in Haymarket Plaza, in downtown San Antonio.

  Uncle Frank had two trucks at his disposal from his machine shop in town, and after the harvest was complete, the men loaded them up at dawn for the drive to the market. But the produce cartels were strong, and it was difficult for smaller farmers to win an advantageous position in the wide plaza from which to sell their fruits and vegetables. Juan José and great-grandfather were consigned to a parking place well off from the busy precinct of the downtown market, selling their goods from the back of the trucks.

  “And people still didn’t have any money. That was the other thing,” recalled my great-uncle Gilbert, who had accompanied them. “In San Antonio, especially with the Mexicans, it was still the Depression and everybody was broke. We sold a few watermelons, maybe unos melones, but every day we came back with the truck full. It made my father, Jacobo, sad, and Juan José even sadder. They lost everything then. Everything.”

  Boxes of squash began to
stack up in the backyard of the house on Parsons Street, slowly starting to rot inside their newspaper wrapping. Eventually much of the harvest that wasn’t eaten by the family or given to friends had to be dumped. And when the same thing happened the second year, the family’s financial resources were finally depleted. Abuelo Juan José was left deeply in debt. They came close to losing the house, but Abuelo was able to get a loan from the officers of Colonel Brackenridge’s bank, who still remembered him from his time working at Fernridge and the way the old colonel had cared for him. But Abuelo was disconsolate about losing his father-in-law’s money in the venture at the Belgian Gardens. Despite finding another foundry job, the feeling of mounting calamity and chaos must have become insurmountable. It was then that he entered the first long spell of haunted silence that most who knew him thought he would never emerge from.

  There are two historic paths to the sanctuary of the Mexican soul—the one from the north and the one from the east. The road from the east is the route that Cortés and his army took from Veracruz on their march to Tenochtitlán in the conquest of the Azteca empire. The one from the north is the oldest one, the ancient road, the one said to have been traversed by the ancestors of the Aztecas, in search of their long-prophesied home.

  My family’s first journey south of Coahuila to the heart of Mexico was in 1976, along that road from the north, past Nueva Rosita and Sabinas, Monclova, Saltillo, San Luis Potosí and Querétaro, to la Capital, Mexico City. The road from Aztlán, the fabled homeland of the Aztecas, has been paved over and turned into a four-lane Mexican highway. Highway 57 is the way of the journey from Aztlán, “the place of whiteness,” as the Aztecas called it. This mysterious place of origin was also known as the place of the seven caves, also known as Chicomoztóc, also known as Zuyua. It was a preordained path, divined from the prophecies of a living god. For it was said that the god Huitzilopochtli lived among the people whom he had commanded to wander. They were the people who became the Mexica, the Aztecas, the people who built the imperial city of Tenochtitlán, which Cortés would lay waste to.

  In the codices, the “hummingbird of the south,” as their god was called, is pictured as a crowned head protruding from a tightly bound sacred bundle. He is carried, papoose-style, on the back of one of his elect priest-bearers. According to the codices, they lived in caves first, then in houses made of braided plant stalks and broad leaves, decorated with improbably brilliant plumes and feathers. At the place known as Culhuacán, or “curved mountain,” they walk along in a single file, heads bowed, their bodies wrapped in tunics. The god is talking, with the telltale curling glyphs for speech coming from his mouth.

  They had set out after years of famine and icy winters, and their wanderings through Mexico lasted hundreds of years. Our family was on a three-week summer-vacation trip. Along the highway in the desert before Querétaro, vendors selling iguanas, monkeys, and parrots held their animals aloft to entice buyers as the cars sped by. If you stopped, they would throw the animals into your car, the monkeys immediately crawling under the front seat, parrots flying back and forth, an iguana settling on the armrest. In the plaza at Potosí, a man would engrave your name on a grain of rice, confirming it with a magnifying glass. In Mexico City, you could have your fortune told by a parakeet, picking prophecies in scrolls out of a small teak box.

  I was astounded by how vast Mexico was, how many worlds it contained, from the baroque malachite city of Guanajuato, glowing green in the mountains, to the vertiginous, hazy megalopolis of Mexico City. The day we arrived there, I drove into the city, swept into the swiftly changing currents and eddies of capitalino traffic, circling the glorieta roundabouts, accelerating onto the wide, cypress-lined straightaways, passing the VW bug taxis, until, nearing our destination downtown, the movement on the boulevard was abruptly halted as thousands of students marched for hours into the evening, down Avenida de la Reforma, protesting recent hikes in their university fees.

  Before it got dark, we had to leave the car parked in the street to look for our lodgings, which were on the other side of the avenida. As we crossed Reforma, walking against the grain through the throng of demonstrators, all kinds of Mestizo faces were there—brown broad-cheeked Indios, paler thin-nosed Criollos of Spanish descent, and every permutation and pigment in between. When they weren’t chanting and shouting their slogans, the marchers were arrestingly quiet, and you heard mainly the sound of their breath, and shoes rasping against the pavement, like a parade of people lost in reflection. Inside this quiet there was the inexplicable feeling of some slowly gathering intent among them, as if something were about to erupt from their collective silence.

  I had never seen a Mexican metropolis before, only the towns and pueblitos of the north, only the secret, disappearing Mexican city inside of San Antonio. Like San Antonio, Mexico City was built over the ruins of an older settlement, only considerably older, in the case of Tenochtitlán, the seat of the Aztec empire that preceded la Capital of the modern era. The remains of temples, aqueducts, and the old roads of the Aztecs poke out of the earth, chipped and weathered, all over the city, inviting Mexico City’s inhabitants, the Chilangos, as they call themselves, to live with the constant reminder of that world that had existed before the arrival of the Europeans.

  On the grounds of the Museum of Anthropology, in a clearing in the verdant Chapultepec Park, we saw a group of Indian Voladores performing the same mesmerizing aerial ritual I had seen at the Hemisfair in San Antonio in 1968. As the five flyers climbed up the long, rope-braided pole, Helen Anthony, an old friend of my mother’s and our Mexico City guide, explained how the ancient dance was in fact a record of exact counts relating to the calendar of the ancient Mexican people. Within its very precise rotations and gestures, based on the numbers four, thirteen, fifty-two, were the counts corresponding to the number of days in a year, and the number of years in the great cycles, between which the world might be destroyed or reprieved.

  “It was a good way of tying that knowledge to the world, so we wouldn’t forget, no?” Helen said, looking overhead, as the four Indios pushed off from their perches and began their slow whirling around the pole, arms folded across their chests, in their upside-down spiraling descent. The fifth man kept beating his drum and blowing his flute, spinning around on the pinnacle.

  At the plaza at Tlatelolco, where Mexica ruins mingle with a colonial-era church and modern high-rises, Helen first told me how the old Mexicans had built their pyramids over old pyramids, just as those had been built over older pyramids before them. Every fifty-two years, the world was either to be destroyed or reprieved and continued, and a new pyramid would be built over the old to commemorate this passage.

  In our time, it was believed that the Templo Mayor, the Great Temple of the Aztecs, a double pyramid which had been destroyed by the Spaniards, lay underneath the downtown cathedral, which Helen explained on the day we went to visit the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, in the area of Mexico City known as Tepeyac. It was a hill where the Aztecas had long venerated the Goddess Tonantzín, and it was in the same place, ten years after the conquest, that the Indio Juan Diego reported seeing the apparition of the brown-skinned female who told him she had come to be mother to all of the people of those lands. Today, the hill at Tepeyac where the visions took place is littered with the smog-blackened shells of four abandoned church shrines, built by the faithful since 1535—the year of the apparition of La Virgen.

  These old churches were in the traditional Mexican style, with two spires, a nave, elaborately carved stone windows, and lintels. And, over the centuries since the vision, each one has been slowly reclaimed by the vast, ageless lake still lurking beneath Mexico City. As the stone chapels sank, crooked into the earth, their marble floors cracked and the granite walls pressed together like chalk, until they were inevitably condemned. The artworks and elaborate statuary of saints that could be salvaged from the old sanctuaries were carried out and stored, to be placed in the next shrine to be built nearby.


  The last of these historic shrines was ruined not by ground water, but by an anarchist’s bomb in 1926, left in a satchel behind a spray of white alcatraz lilies, near the altar and tabernacle, over which the mystical image of La Virgen was hung. The sacred tilma, the Indian cloak on which the image of the woman in a starry shawl appears, survived, but only because a massive, solid iron crucifix in front of the altar absorbed most of the fiery blast. The crucifix was found in the rubble, the Christ molten, entirely bent over backward on itself. Now, the misshapen debris is revered as a miraculous object in its own right and kept in a glass case where the peregrinos to La Virgen stop to pay homage and leave offerings of coins or flowers.

  The day we visited, there were campesinos praying and crawling on their hands and knees across the smooth stones of the plaza toward the new basilica, some of them with spiny cactus stems lashed to their backs with twine in a gesture of secret atonement. The new, ultra-modern, arena-style shrine, inaugurated in the 1960s, with its tentlike, unevenly fluted roof, looks like a golden space station set down in the middle of the paving stone plaza. There are Masses offered and prayers and confession said there around the clock. Among the pilgrims, even those who dislike the new building compared to the cherished old ruined churches of Tepeyac, admit that it is a wonder: it is possible from wherever you stand in the great domed circle to see the dun-colored sacred artifact, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on Juan Diego’s old Indian cloak, which, seen from afar, almost seems to glow and flicker through the clouds of incense as it hangs suspended high on a wall set back from the altar.

  Devotees seek to get as close as they can to the mysterious image, hoping that simply being in the physical presence of a divinely anointed object in this world will bring a powerful blessing. In the new shrine, this means going downstairs into the crypt, where you find the corridor that leads to three moving sidewalks, the kind you see between airline terminals, which carry the faithful, at a steady, if somewhat too rushed, pace for them, passing beneath an aperture in the ceiling with the closest view possible—twenty feet above—of the haunting, wistful image of the Virgin.