Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  The longer I lived away from San Antonio, the more it seemed that, as a family, we had passed much of this century setting out. First from Mexico, where the rest of the past was left behind, hidden, then from San Antonio, where the lives and fortunes of the family took myriad paths. Abuelo Juan José set out still further, gradually losing contact with the world around him, carried off in a current of worries, suspicion, and melancholy impossible to resist. Arising on the foggy morning of his death, he must’ve known he was setting forth again into unknown lands.

  After Abuelo Juan José’s death, Uela went off deeper into her Rosicrucian studies, using the Bible as a divination tool to seek counsel for her great sadness. Her Bible, which survives, is stuffed with poplar leaves, strips of pink and yellow taffeta, and newspaper clippings about Pope John XXIII. In Genesis, she drew a thick line in pencil around the verses, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, shall not cease.”

  My father left behind his ambition to become a professional singer after his father’s death, taking jobs to help support the family, and eventually joining the army after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In those days, he had been professionally known as The Broadway Gondolier, appearing with Richard Cortez and his Gran Orquesta, always in his trademark tapered white suit and gold tie, singing the songs of Agustín Lara and Frank Sinatra in mainly Mexican clubs around San Antonio.

  While Uela’s family, the Garcias, remained close in San Antonio, they gradually lost contact with the far-flung Santos of Elgin and Hondo, and only seldom visited my grandfather’s sister Tía Chita in Nueva Rosita. No one could really bring themselves to speak about Juan José’s death, and it was easier if they just didn’t see one another, so, over the years, they drifted apart, and the days of several families living together in one large house passed. My aunts and uncles married and moved out into their own homes, and Uela continued to live on Parsons Street with Madrina and Uncle Manuel.

  San Antonio was so full of memory for Uela, she mainly stayed inside, visiting or reading, or she tended her garden in the backyard for hours. It was possible to endure, to leave everything painful behind. It was possible to imagine a shell made of quiet that would contain the entirety of the past.

  Eventually, for the Santos, there were no more places of origin, just the setting out, just the going forth into new territory, new time. Being in England those years only carried on that tale, even if it seemed a strange destination for a grandson of poor people from Coahuila, Mexico. Uela remembered that one of my Abuelo Juan José’s cousins was a professor or a traveling scholar of some kind, and once, a box of books he had sent to San Antonio for safekeeping was said to have arrived at the house on Parsons Street from Cairo, Egypt.

  After I read her my first poem, Uela announced that I would be the family’s poet, even though I told her the last thing I wanted to write about was the family. There had been inventors and dancers in the family. Uela had been forced by her father to forgo her aspiration to become an actress. And my father had been the singer in the family. But there had never before been a poet. She said she could tell it was my compromiso, an obligation that couldn’t be denied.

  I was already seeking out writers, sending them adoring letters of appreciation after reading their work, and they would almost always write back. I wrote to William Saroyan, Gabriel García Márquez, William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Ken Kesey, and Octavio Paz, and to poets, like Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder. One elder poet I wrote to, Laura (Riding) Jackson, whose strange abstract poems had made a strong impression on me, sent back a ten-page, single-spaced, manually typed letter angrily explaining to me that she had renounced poetry in 1939 for its failure to communicate what she called “basic human truth,” and she cautioned me sternly, lest I fall into the same error in which she had misspent her youth, of believing in the “truth of poetry.” Inevitably, she said, poetry was more concerned with artifice and elegance of language than with truth. She hadn’t failed poetry, she insisted to me in a later letter. Poetry itself had failed.

  I had a chance to meet Borges while I was at college in England, after seeing a poster at Blackwell’s Bookstore in Oxford announcing “Borges Tonight!” Though he was Argentine, through his fantastic earthly tales of space, time, and infinity, he had been a literary and spiritual mentor to me in San Antonio. In his story “El Aleph,” which I had once read aloud in Spanish to Uela, he had described a closet in a house in Buenos Aires where the entire cosmos was manifest in a cipher. He had described infinite archives of the planet’s past, enchanted maps that conversed with their cartographers.

  That night, he was to be talking about Walt Whitman, another literary idol. The old Sheldonian Theater in Oxford was full, the balcony creaking under capacity weight, and everyone was anxious to see the great Latin American master who rarely traveled. A total hush fell when he came out unannounced, his skin so white against his black wool suit he seemed an apparition at first, led by the arm by an amanuensis, walking cautiously across the wide stage to where a chair and table with his thick manuscript and a glass and carafe of water were awaiting him.

  After he sat down, it felt as if he suspended time itself, keeping his silence as water was slowly poured for him and carefully placed in his hand. The transparent skin of his face, tinged slightly with pink, seemed so delicate and tender. His ethereal expression, his eyes milky and palsied, were inexplicably fixed in what looked like the gentlest stare of commiseration I had ever seen, as if he had spent much of his life consoling others.

  In his talk, delivered in a brisk, poetic, sing-song diction that sounded like a Latin Mass being intoned, Borges argued that Whitman’s imagination had been gradually absorbed into American English. To speak the language itself was to echo Whitman’s radical ideas of democracy, humanity, and universality. In a tape I made that night, virtually indecipherable now with age, Borges’s voice booms and trembles in a muffled roar, the audience by turns rapt and laughing along with him, as he dazzled the crowd.

  After his talk, I stood to ask a question that seemed to cause him to gasp, and eventually to leave the stage. The question, in Spanish, had been innocent, asking only if by saying that Whitman had been absorbed into American English he meant to say there was no reason to still read great poems like “Song of Myself.” Wasn’t there something in the poetry itself, the long lines, the epic lists, the litanies and epiphanies, that could never be touched or understood by any other means?

  First, he asked me to repeat the question, already looking perturbed as one eye twitched warily. But before I could finish, he was already calling on his assistant to escort him from the stage. As I was only the second person called on to ask a question, the audience was stunned. Many turned to look at me with utter scorn. I was quickly set upon by the organizers of the event who angrily recounted how hard they had worked to bring Borges to England, only to have his journey end in this debacle. They insisted that I apologize to the great writer. He would be at a party later that evening, organized by the university. I was put into a car, to be taken there, like a prisoner on the way to the gallows.

  By the time I arrived at the fiesta, Borges was already surrounded by other undergraduates, sitting patiently as they read him poems and stories that had been inspired by his work. He looked pained and bored. When I finally found a moment when I could sit next to him, I told him that it was I who had asked the offending question at his talk, and I was sorry if it had insulted him in any way.

  Borges broke out laughing, “¡Es que tuve que mear!” he said, “I had to take a piss!”

  He had told his assistant in a rushed whisper at the very moment I was asking my question, but the assistant had misunderstood and he helped Borges leave the stage. He failed to tell the audience that Borges would return. Then it was too late as the audience quickly began to leave the hall.

  After he asked me to fetch potato chips and beer for him, we sat together and he explained that he could see only
dim light and colors around him. When he asked my name, it lit up his vast, archival memory. He replied unequivocally that I was Portuguese. Borges spoke in encyclopedic detail of a log from a certain ship from Lisbon in the late sixteenth century that, he claimed, recorded the first time a Santos set foot in the New World.

  “Also a Santander. But that Santos must’ve been your great-great-great-great-grandfather,” he declared, laughing more, as content with himself as if he had solved some esoteric ancient mystery. I didn’t tell him that, according to family stories, the name had originally been de los Santos, and that in all likelihood it was a pious name some Mexican Indians took for themselves or had placed upon them by zealous Spanish curas. Names like Cruz, Angel, Santamaria, Jesus, and Santos.

  But maybe he was right. There weren’t any records or documents of the family past of the Santos and Garcias—my father’s tribes—as there were for my mother’s family of Velas and Lopez, which Uncle Lico had traced back to the eighteenth century. Maybe their migrations had begun further south than any of us had thought possible.

  The pulsing, velvety waves were rounding the smooth concrete abutments at Southbank, then turning swiftly east toward the Isle of Dogs. After the great antinuclear march of that day ended, the sounds returned of all the revving cabs, the lumbering lorries, all the rattling tracks of passing red trains from the Underground, carried off in one surging current. From the bridge, the Thames was matte gunmetal gray in London’s sulfurous twilight.

  Looking down on the river, debris seemed to hover at its surface, held just above the waters by some eerie reverse magnetism; bags from Wimpy burgers spinning like Chinese fireworks, a sneaker moving like a torpedo, webs of tree branches in a whorl with a piece of a chair, Styrofoam, a dead dog. The lilting falsetto sounds of a Christmas children’s choir periodically rose above the din of the old river, and it felt as if I were standing in the middle of the bridge of exile.

  With Uncle Frank’s death, our family had lost the steady beacon that had guided us out of Mexico and helped create the life we had known in San Antonio. The family was different now, bigger, more spread out. Mexico, and San Antonio, too, had undergone enormous changes. But it was a time when poor people all over the world continued to leave their homes and countries because of joblessness, famine, and wars. Our family’s story in this century, of a migration of only two hundred and fifty miles from the mountains of Coahuila to the river plain surrounding San Antonio, was part of a much larger story, encompassing untold millions of lives, all of us setting out once and for all from our homelands—all of us exilios—perhaps never to return.

  In a journal from that time in England, I recorded a dream of Mexico:

  This one is the apocalypse at the well. I am in an old Mexican village, ancient looking, with long, hilly streets paved with cobblestones. With a plaza and a church in the middle. Hills in the distance. The village sits above the surrounding landscape, it is itself on a hill. I find myself at a small communal well in the center of the village, and around me are several older dark-skinned men. They are uneasy about something. They are telling me that the world is ending—that the Sun is dissolving. I notice the sky is dark, though it is afternoon.

  I look up at the sky and can see the Sun’s outline, but it is a black Sun, radiating little light and little heat. There is another source of light, but it is coming from an unidentifiable source, somewhere on the horizon.

  For awhile, I argue with the old men about what is happening. I have some scientific explanations. I am genuinely confused because I feel they have already jumped to rash conclusions. I say, “Maybe it’s an eclipse.”

  “Look, the Sun is dissolving!” they tell me, and one of them points into the well. I look down into the water, meeting the stone wall just below the rim.

  There, reflected on the surface of the water, is what looks like a night sky full of the bright stars. The whole density and ovoid shape of the cosmos seems to be mirrored there. But in one place, there is a star—a large star—our Sun, and it is dissolving, the way bread dissolves in water, only faster. And it is not matter that is disintegrating, it is light. I watch as this one brilliant disc diffuses, there in the water, into an ever-widening net of sparks. I remember walking away alone, leaving the others quietly weeping by the well, wondering blankly down one of the meandering streets, in the eerie 3 o’clock darkness of the afternoon . . .

  These dreams were not prophecies in the sense of prognostications or predictions. I received them instead as if they were dispatches from a story being told to time by all human lives. In a century so interrupted by conflagrations, deceit, destruction, and dislocation, our dreams would continue to echo these reports. As Uela and Tía Pepa had told me, by watching our dreams, especially if they were haunted, we could strengthen our spirits and prepare ourselves for whatever was to come. They were not to be feared or denied. Just watched, reflected on, and told to others as stories that we had lived.

  Larger objects were floating downstream in the Thames now. As I stood on that bridge late in the day, gazing down at the water, it suddenly looked as if a whole village had been flooded out upriver, carrying doors from houses, window frames, broken gables, a galaxy of wooden roof tiles. I remembered how such floods had once been common in San Antonio, periodically flushing out whatever buildings or shacks lacked a strong foundation in the downtown precinct. My broken suede Tony Lama boots had been stuffed with dried flowers and stones I had brought back from a trip to Spain, along with the notes, letters, drafts of poems, and essays from the year that I wanted to discard. The boots, whose squeal had only gotten worse, vexing several Oxford cobblers, were bound together by wire and twine, tightly bundled, and hanging from a rope handle. Then, at a moment when the passing traffic subsided and there were no other pedestrians nearby, I hurled them from the edge of the railing into the heavy air of the British evening, watching the long arc they traced downward, past all the lights of London, slipping finally into the rushing, murky Thames with barely a ripple.

  11

  La Ruta

  The Route

  As I drove south on the highway from Cholula to Cuernavaca, the clouds floated like a luminous crown over the volcano called Popocatépetl. This was the road Cortés’s army took, through fields of wild agave, marching weary, bloodied, and sullen toward Tenochtitlán after their massacre of hundreds of Nahua priests in Cholula the day before. They followed the old Mexica road, now the Paso de Cortés, which went up and over one of Popo’s desolate stony ridges. I would circle around the southern edge of the volcano.

  Accelerating to eighty-five miles per hour with the windows down in long, warm open stretches through red-dirt brush country, I slowly rounded the ancient volcano on the new autopista and saw its snow-covered peak bellowing to the south in a massive plume of silvery ash that seemed utterly motionless against the sky. The day before, mapless, I asked for directions to the highway to Cholula. An old, uniformed parking attendant in the oak-shaded plaza in Coatepec pointed in the direction of the volcano and warned me that Cholula wasn’t a safe place to be, and he said the gathering eruption had been foretold.

  “This volcano waking up now is a sign.”

  Yes, he said, there was a hole in the sky that was making the whole world heat up like a burning coal. He reported that the French were exploding atomic bombs deep below the Pacific Ocean, which he explained would unleash earthquakes across the globe. But Popocatépetl’s awakening was something else. This was not of man’s making. He said that was a part of Mexico’s story. Popo had erupted in the years before the arrival of the Spaniards. In this century, it had erupted during the revolution. The old parking officer said it meant now that we were in the time of the Azteca prophecy of this age’s end, the end of the Fifth World, the Fifth Sun.

  “La muerte del quinto sol,” he repeated, wearily.

  The night before, after another long day of driving, I had dreamed of the Voladores. I could barely hear the flute and tambor of the caporal, floating eerily i
n the dark. It was nighttime, and the wind was gusting from every direction, shaking the treetops and stirring up the dust in violent swirls. It was only in the instant of a lightning flash that I saw their profiles, high atop their braided pole. As the heavy sheets of rain began to fall and the lightning bolts began to thunder across the sky, the four flyers set off from their perch and began revolving upside down around the pole. I could hear the sound of the ropes stretching over the din of the downpour. The caporal, still atop the pole, spinning around, continued to beat the tambor and play the flute. As I watched the flyers descending toward the earth in wide scooping arcs, their arms outstretched, I hear a voice from behind me say calmly, as if to reassure me, “They are dancing to keep this world from falling apart. . . .”

  The old parking attendant said this was the time when the earth under Mexico would tremble to its core again, as it did in the beginning, shaking down all things man has made. That had been the Aztec prophecy for the end of this Sun called “Four Movement.” The ancient Mayans simply ended their great calendar in August of the year 2012, concluding a long count of days that reached back into the fourth millennium B.C.

  “That’s why nobody gives a goddamn about la política,” the viejito said. “The sign from the volcano, that’s what we still wait for. We act like everything has changed, like things could just go on like this forever. But it could happen any day, like a change in the weather. And then what?” Battered from the millennia of volcanoes, hurricanes, conquest, discordia, and revolución, at last, the fulfillment of our prophetic legacy: the end of Mexico.