Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  From there you can see the round features of her face, a remote, contemplative, even melancholic expression on her face. She is wearing a turquoise blue rebozo, draped over her head and decked with golden stars. Her peach-colored smock is adorned with golden filigree in the shape of flowers, leaves, and interwoven stalks. Her hands are clasped and, under her garment, her left knee seems to be moving forward. All around her body there is a corona of fading ochre light, shot through with spear-shaped rays of brownish red. She stands on a crescent moon, and a winged cherub holds the hems of her garments.

  Some of the more frequent peregrinos have discovered a way to jam the gears that drive the moving sidewalk, using wooden doorstop wedges they bring to the shrine expressly for that purpose. That day, I watched as one pilgrim inserted a wedge into the rubber handrest belt track, and the sidewalk ground to a halt. At that moment, all of the pilgrims fell to their knees praying directly to the Virgen’s image, exalting in their fleeting intimacy with her until a security guard arrived to dislodge the wedge from the works and the sidewalk resumed its inexorable circuit.

  In a sooty, candlelit subterranean chapel further beneath the basilica, I kneeled before a simple statue of the Virgen. I watched an old Indian woman finish her devout prayers and then reach around her back to grab her long, rope-thick gray braid. In one swift stroke, her lips moving again in prayer, she cut it off with a large knife. Very slowly, she then laid it at the feet of the statue, crossing herself, thereby accomplishing some secret promise she had made for some intercession of powers in her life from “La Morenita,” as the Mexicans sometimes refer to the Virgin.

  I knew from Uela that she had once come here with her sister Tía Pepa in the late 1940s, to fulfill a promise they had made to La Virgen when their sons went off to World War II, and then came back safely. They spent several days praying the rosary together at the shrine before returning to San Antonio. Thirty years later, I had come to Tepeyac as a tourist, not as a believer in the cult of Guadalupe. She was the most powerful national symbol of the Mexican people, drawing Indio, Español, and Mestizo together in one embrace, but I saw the story of her apparitions as a story only—not a supernatural mystery. Mexicans believed in her because Mexicans, deep down, believed in their own, still unnameable, prophetic destiny. Hadn’t they always believed the gods were talking with them and living among them, guiding their steps?

  But watching the old woman in her quiet ritual that day in Tepeyac, I realized that I had already been initiated into the Guadalupana cult numberless times before, among all the Viejitas of San Antonio, in their sitting rooms, their kitchens and backyards. I had felt the power of their faith when they were at their prayers, lighting a votive candle and reading in their Bibles. I was a student of analytic philosophy, trying to discern how language, politics, and culture created the world around us, and how everything was of this world, everything was of history—nothing was supernatural. Tepeyac may have been a part of the ancestors’ world, I believed, and now we lived in a plainer, more pragmatic era. Yet, there in the dark underground with hundreds of candles burning, it felt as if I had already been implicated in the stories of the old gods through the prayers my ancestors offered at Tepeyac. Whatever else I might become, our story had always been connected to this place, and I, too, might someday have to return there, to fulfill a secret promesa.

  After our journey to Mexico City, my family returned to San Antonio, and I spent a few weeks back at Rancho Los Generales in Coahuila. It was late summer, the time of the year when the monarch butterflies are flying, filling the air with gamboling orange clouds, moving to the south. Alejo, the vaquero, and his family were in town preparing their children to begin school. For several long, quiet days, I was alone there, writing down my recollections of our trip to Tenochtitlán.

  I began to watch my dreams. There were dreams of voluptuous women, enticing and elusive. Somewhere in an old red granite castle, maybe in Guanajuato, I think, a radiant, dark-haired woman I felt I recognized as someone once very dear to me kept appearing in the hallways, the courtyards, and the common room. But I could never reach her before she vanished.

  I saw the end of the world, over and over, in numerous versions and sequelae. It is dark at midday. Doves and pigeons, their wings on fire, fell from the sky into the great, empty downtown plaza of the Zócalo in Mexico City. Hordes of shimmering lambs, in perfect tiers, descended slowly from the sky, passing like ghosts into the desert floor. An enormous crowd of people were gathered in a long, wide mountain valley. High above us, in a sky as black as obsidian, a sickly, snaking ribbon of crimson light, like a burning nebula, became an enormous angel, hovering over some unknown city. Finally, I rowed out in a flat boat onto a pitch-dark lake on a quiet summer night, knowing the angel had deemed our world unworthy of revelation.

  Uncle Roger, my father’s brother, had always said these were the “end times.” He kept clippings of floods, sightings of flying saucers, apparitions of ghosts and saints, just to prove his point. I wondered whether all of the Santos weren’t obsessed with the end of the world, whether by the intecession of la Virgen, UFO’s, or the Beast of the 666. Out there on the ranch, up in la Serranía I was in the familiar light of the ancestors, at the latitude and longitude markings inscribed on our DNA. Maybe dreams come more easily in such a place. After the time in Mexico City, more than ever, the past and the present seemed permeable.

  In another dream, I was on a beach. It was getting dark, but the pale sand was still glowing, and the rocks along the shoreline were silhouetted against the horizon. Out in the water there was a large, brilliantly painted galleon with great sails, braziers lit on deck, floating alone over the purple darkness of the sea. It was green and yellow and red, with elaborate curving wood designs all over it. There was no sign of life aboard, no other lights, no movement. In my sleep I asked myself: Is this what the Indios first saw when the Españoles arrived? Was this the dream memory of a shipwrecked Spaniard soul? A glimpse of the nighttime arrival of the ancestors? These questions could only be answered in Mexico, and I was convinced when I awoke that I should devote myself to finding out how far back our family memory could reach into the great Mexican story. There were many pilgrimages to make, many stories to exhume and recover, and time was short.

  I awoke, and walked out onto the patio of the ranch house to do my morning exercises, just after dawn when the bright morning was still very quiet. Alejo and his family were returning from Múzquiz, their truck just coming into the pasture at the bottom of the hill, throwing up billowing clouds of dust. He waved from the driver’s seat, his hand tapping the top of the cab, his kids yelling at me from the back of the truck. Near the house, a whole field of wild red mano de león plants, the color of blood, had bloomed overnight. Standing on a carpet for my morning exercises, hands clasped above my head, I leaned slowly backward, arching my spine toward the ground, taking in one deep, clear breath of sierra air.

  At that moment, I felt as if I never wanted to leave Mexico. It would be ten years before I would return.

  Volador

  10

  Exilio

  Exile

  As everyone disembarked from the ship across the steep, elevated gangway, I could see the crowded industrial horizon circling the port of Southampton, England, on a gray October day. Numberless chimneys trailed dark smoke across the chalky sky. The British air was thick and damp, and time seemed to pass slower there as a result.

  The early afternoon light against the wet red-brick buildings was the color of the desert earth between Santa Fe and Taos. I felt like a naufragio, a shipwreck victim, landing in a place where I did not belong. I was a child of the Mundo Nuevo. I had never imagined even visiting Europe, much less preparing to live two years in the middle of England. I was eager to begin my studies at Oxford, but I felt that I would be an indelible outsider in the ancient university city.

  Most of my classmates on board the ship were from European families. For them, I thought, this was a kind of homecoming.
If they weren’t British, they still found themselves at the gateway to their homeland continent. As a Chicano of Spanish and indigenous heritage, I was aware that part of my blood was new to these lands. I was entering a New World, just as the Spaniards under Cortés thought they were, when they made their conquest campaign from Veracruz, on the gulf coast, to the Azteca capital of Tenochtitlán in the valley of Mexico.

  For days, out in the middle of the Atlantic, the ocean had looked like windblown sand as far as I could see in every direction, sometimes seeming utterly still, sometimes like an endless hilly landscape that had suddenly come alive. Late at night, Russian and Japanese tankers would pass solemnly in the distance, festooned from stem to stern with hanging strands of glowing yellow, burgundy, and lime green lights.

  I regretted the passage would take only six days. I could imagine spending weeks surrounded by the dull roar of the waves and all their shimmering, apparent desolation. Crossing the ocean, even on the Queen Elizabeth 2, you know in your bones, with every mile gained, that you have left your familiar world behind. You feel the full measure of the earth and the heavens. On the still nights, the sky glistened with icy blue light, reflecting out along the mirror surface of the seas so that the ship seemed suspended in a limitless expanse of space, heading in no discernible direction. But every day, on a vast nautical map posted on the deck, the thin black line of the ship’s track traced across the ocean a little farther.

  From England, Texas and Mexico seemed infinitely remote. That day, on our way to Oxford by bus, passing through villages where people stood, talking at bus stops and factory gates, where laundry hung out on taut lines over well-trimmed gardens, I was thinking of the conquest. I remembered Bernal Díaz de Castillo’s description of the approach of Cortés’s army to Tenochtitlán:

  We saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land . . . we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream.

  As the bus came down Finchley Hill into the center of town, Oxford looked like a city made of primordial coral, left behind by a receding ocean. The Cherwell River was still and muddy. The stone towers bristled against a mesh of telephone and electrical cables. Jack-booted punks with orange mohawks and black leather jackets smoked cigarettes and sniffed glue outside a pub.

  At dusk, in the center of a pristine circular lawn, the cupola of the Radcliffe Camera in the Bodleian Library looked like the sun-bleached caracol dome of an ancient Mayan temple. I was entering one of the capitals of the immaterial empire of Western knowledge, where the natives would soon open their storehouses to me, as if the old conquest story were repeating, or rewinding, at some vertiginous tilt.

  This was not one of the destinations my family had in mind when they left Coahuila in 1914. I wasn’t sure whether, like a shipwreck, my real mission wasn’t to find the way back home, or, as an emissary of my tribe, I should seek to travel farther inland, in search of the seat of this civilization. I might reclaim the plunder of the conquest that was stashed away in the collections of museums and individuals across Europe: Motecuhzoma’s feathered cape in Vienna, the massive stone sculpture of a coiled plumed serpent in Frankfurt, painted calendars and codices in Rome, Paris, and Oxford.

  That night, there was a giant harvest moon over Oxford, and the streets were empty, in anticipation of an IRA march that would take place on High Street the next day. Later, in my rooms, alone, feeling fitful and lost, I read newspapers full of the reports of revolutions in Nicaragua and Iran, uprisings in Poland, Rhodesia, and El Salvador. It was like 1789 all over again, tyrannies were falling, and I wanted my time in the old city, my studies there, to be connected to that, even if it did seem an unlikely prospect as chapel bells chimed at midnight and two swans glided silently down the river outside my rooms. Still, I went to bed that night, thirsty for dreams, thinking that, nearly five hundred years on, maybe the conquest could be reversed. . . .

  “Todo se acaba. Todo se extermina.” That’s what my uncle Beto had said a week before, cooking a great steaming vat of fresh menudo, Mexican tripe stew, his specialty, in the garage workshop behind his house in San Antonio, while leisurely quoting el filósofo Socratés in the middle of an autumn afternoon. “Everything finishes. Everything is extinguished.”

  I was preparing to leave for England, feeling apprehensive about being away from San Antonio and the family for so long, and Uncle Beto was attempting to explain a broader perspective on the matter. He had come to San Antonio decades before from Nueva Rosita, in Coahuila, and married my aunt Margie, leaving Mexico behind forever, except for occasional visits. People move on. People die. Then, people move on even further. Eventually they die, too; eventually they are extinguished. You can be sad about this, but it wouldn’t change anything. The whole process will continue, just as it always has. The old Greek philosopher had gotten that right.

  In the years before, we had witnessed the great despedida, the deaths, all at once, of the grandmothers in our family. The elder Garcias, Uncle Frank, Pepa, Madrina, and the others, nearing their nineties now, were beginning to slow down. Even my uncles and aunts, and my parents, were beginning to show their age. On a recent morning, my father had opened one garage door and then promptly backed out the other.

  The world we had known growing up in San Antonio, the family that had been so accustomed to living together, would eventually be dispersed, swallowed up, along with San Antonio itself, in the always deeper well of time. Along with all of my cousins, my generation was moving out farther into the worlds beyond Texas, further off from the source of the old Mexican time.

  Uncle Beto’s dicho seemed right about how everything in this universe ends and is extinguished—except for the universe itself. An old Aztec song expresses the same sentiment,

  Can it be true that one lives on earth?

  Not forever on earth; only a little while here.

  Be it jade, it shatters.

  Be it gold, it breaks.

  Be it a quetzal feather, it tears apart.

  Not forever on earth; only a little while here.

  But this wasn’t just an earthly predicament. Astrophysicists had just discovered the existence of black holes—infinite tears in the fabric of the cosmos that sucked matter through churning maws of death to we know not where. Things appeared and perished in the heavens, just as they appeared and perished on earth. Our vast galaxy is itself in perpetual motion, spiraling further outward into the chill vacuum that creation first exploded into. We have left our past—the journeys, marriages, and deaths along the way, all the bowls of menudo—scattered randomly across those vast arcs and loops, traced through millions of years, spun out across the void. This was our invisible momentum, always carrying us further from the sources of our stirring.

  Uncle Lico died earlier that summer, but his story of our Mexican-ness had remained where he left it, gazing back into the abyss beyond 1770. Near the end of his life, he grew restless and urgent, as if he wanted to rage out of this world with all of his unanswered questions and unfinished family trees.

  He had grown thinner, more serious. After thirty years of marriage, he left my aunt Mary and moved in with his wartime sweetheart, Amalia, from sixty years before. He drove his Mercury at two miles an hour over the lawns of his neighborhood on West Magnolia Street. On one evening, in front of his house, he brandished a pistol in one hand and a cigar in the other, before falling into a deep, diabetic sleep at his own front door.

  After a couple of months of such raving, he returned home and my aunt took him back in. All he’d say about that time is that his damn diabetes prescriptions were all out of whack, and that his new doctor had things under control.

  When he died, suddenly one afternoon, from heart failure, his children, all from an earlier marriage, took over the funeral plans a
nd refused to allow a Catholic ceremony. Those cousins had all become born-again Christians, and they regarded the traditions of the Mexican velorio wake, with the long droning prayer chains of the rosary and the blessings and censing of the body, as little better than voodoo and pagan superstition.

  They removed the San Judás Tadeo cards that people had brought from packages or letters Uncle Lico had sent them over the years. As each friend paid final respects, they laid the cards on his body in an act of homage. Only the card of his brother, Uncle Lauro, escaped detection, when one of my brothers placed it discreetly in an inside breast pocket of el Tío’s jacket.

  As Uncle Lico lay in state in the funeral home chapel, a slick-haired Chicano minister from Laredo, dressed in a shiny black suit and a wide paisley tie, told us all that my uncle had secretly accepted Jesus as his personal savior. It had happened some weeks before in a private session with the minister.

  “He found his peace then. He found his salvation and his ticket to everlasting life with our Lord.

  “How many of you would now be prepared to do the same?”

  All the old Mexicans shifted uncomfortably in their seats while my mother stared the ancient Mexican mal ojo at the ebullient minister from Laredo. Uncle Lico had told me that those born-agains were a bunch of crazy fanatics, and he said it used to drive him nuts how they ended every sentence with “Praise the Lord!” Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe, feeling his death coming very near, he too embraced a new god.