Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  “It’s our Holy Lady, kneeling, reading the Bible,” he told them.

  They looked at the wall and saw the same shape there, and they were awestruck. There was a pool of light that might be a bowed head, one edge that could be a large book held open, a wavy glimmer toward the ground that could seem to some to be a kneeling torso. But you had to look deep into the light, deliberately unfocusing your eyes, to see any of this. After holding hands and saying prayers together, the family went inside and built an altar to receive the blessings the Divine Mother was bestowing on them.

  Along with the cataclysms, natural and man-made, this has been a century of miracles and visions. The epic of magic remains incomplete. Promesas are still being fulfilled. Before an apocalyptic vortex of killing and recrimination descended on Bosnia-Herzegovina, there were daily visions of Mary taking place in the mountain village of Medjugorje. Three youths, two girls and a boy, carried on a years-long conversation with their vision, whom they described as the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. After the attending crowd for the punctual afternoon apparitions grew too large, the venue was moved by begrudging church authorities to the local church rectory, where only a few witnesses were allowed. Appearing so routinely, the Virgin was able to address herself to such otherwise quotidian matters as the inefficiency of public waterworks in the village and the penurious local property tax rates. An uncle went on a pilgrimage there and claimed, along with other followers, to have looked straight at the sun at midday without harming his eyes. Instead, he saw a rapid dance of many-colored light, as if filtered through a prism in the sky. The visions at Medjugorje ended without fanfare when one of the visionaries went off to join the Bosnian army. Another developed brain cancer. Then the war arrived, and it became too dangerous to even gather at the rectory for daily prayers.

  The San Antonio papers reported that after the Chevrolet apparition, the family began a marathon of Rosaries devoted to the Virgin Mary. The son fainted and began speaking in a high-pitched voice, while his family held a minicorder to his mouth, recording his every utterance. When he declared the tapwater in the house was blessed, they placed roses in a vase filled with the water, and the entire house was filled with an intoxicating scent of the flowers.

  As word spread through the neighborhood and the news media started to report the story, hundreds of people arrived every evening to see the light for themselves. It didn’t take the skeptics long to discern that the light of this apparition was nothing more than the reflection of the family’s porch light off the front bumper of a maroon Impala, parked in the driveway. On the second night of the apparition, a couple of pachuco homeboys who had been sniffing glue all afternoon, started rocking the car and howling with laughter as the apparition bobbed up and down against the beige house siding, startling the devoted onlookers.

  Nonetheless, on crutches, in wheelchairs, and in large groups, the hopeful, the devout, the sick, and the curious kept coming. A man with acute colitis was rumored to have rid himself of crippling abdominal pain by touching the wall. Many swooned while just standing along the chain-link fence of the neighbor’s backyard.

  Then, another neighbor caught a pilgrim urinating on his lawn. Another found a couple, in flagrante delicto, in their own parked car as they had come to attempt to conceive a child in the apparition’s glow, unable to do so before without divine intervention.

  A local Bishop said the church was “cautiously skeptical” about the matter. “I see the Blessed Mother every day,” he told the newspaper. “But I don’t necessarily invite the whole community. If it isn’t from God, it will die a natural death.”

  After uncovering his name in the microfilm archives of the newspapers, I had tried to find Mr. Pompa. It seemed he had left the city. For years the fire department had been unable to locate him, until they received a notification of a change of address through his insurance company. After several days’ more of inquiries with the San Antonio Fireman’s Benevolent Association, I learned he was living in Kerrville, Texas, about an hour and a half north of San Antonio, in the Texas hill country. Mr. Pompa was a patient at the State Hospital in Kerrville, the end-of-the-line facility in the Texas State mental health system. Identifying myself on the phone only as a friend of the family, the nurse I spoke to there would not discuss his condition with me, but said I was welcome to visit, with an appointment.

  “You can come on up,” she said. “He has good days and bad days, but he don’t talk much with nobody.”

  I dreaded that hospital from one summer during college, when I had a job there doing art therapy with the patients, many of whom are elderly, long-term internees of the state mental health system. The hospital grounds are nestled in the hills outside of Kerrville, and the campus is laid out like a little village unto itself, with its own streets, named after heroes of Texas Independence, and imitation shops meant to give the patients the reassuring feeling of being at home in a real place. After only two weeks of work there, I was haunted by the sounds and scenes from the hospital. While watching a movie, I’d hear the jagged laughter of one of the patients I had been with during the day. I recoiled when I saw the downy translucent flesh hanging from the underarms of patients who had taken prescriptions for decades that had that eerie side effect. I had quit shortly thereafter, and the doctor overseeing the arts program scolded me for leaving, telling me, “It’s not so easy to escape these things. You can’t quit them.”

  When I was shown to the patio in the ward where Mr. Pompa was waiting, I remembered walking through that solarium years before, encountering a group of patients there who were watching the film The Alamo, with John Wayne and Richard Widmark, in reverse, after some lazy orderly had improperly spooled the projector. But none of the members of the audience seemed to mind, staring silently at the sheet that had been hung as a screen as John Wayne walked backward along the parapets of the fort under siege.

  That afternoon, the cicadas were singing at an eardrum-piercing volume as a nurse led me to Mr. Pompa at one end of a covered patio, dressed only in a cotton robe and sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner, with his bare feet up on the raised footrest. The nurse pulled his seat back upright, and his old, unshaven face was round and freckled, his soft, dark eyes both blank and querulous. His hands were large and rough-scaled, quivering on his bare knees, protruding from his robe. He looked like Diego Rivera as an old man, his white hair standing up like plumes on the back of his head. At first, he took no notice as the nurse introduced me, taking pains to pronounce every syllable with a shout.

  “He understands everything. He just mainly don’t want to talk. That’s all it is, right, Mr. Pompa?”

  Mr. Pompa had two Q-Tips hanging from his nostrils, and two sticking out of his ears. The nurse gathered them quickly with a tsk and set off back for the ward. Alone on the patio, I pulled up a chair and introduced myself to Mr. Pompa again, which he responded to with only a blink in his wide open stare. I explained to him how I had gotten his whereabouts, and why I had looked for him in the first place. I told him he was one of the last living witnesses of that morning in 1939, when, as a young man of twenty-five, he had tried to revive my grandfather. I showed him the photograph from the January 1939 San Antonio Light, where he was pictured.

  “Juan—José—Santos. You are that A. G. Pompa, aren’t you?”

  The Fireman’s Association said that, already twenty years retired, he had had a decorated career as a bombero. He had put out a lot of San Antonio fires. He had run into hundreds of burning houses to bring out the living. Maybe he had been able to revive untold others of the would-be drowned. But all of that was lost to him now, including the morning of January 9, 1939. Whatever faint echo of that day remained deep inside of him and was beyond his grasp. If he was aware of anything, he was unable or unwilling to let anyone else know. We sat staring at each other silently for another few moments. In his eyes, he seemed present, but abandoned, as if a fire had left only the shell of the building standing. Then he took a long, deep breath and began singing with
a still-noticeable Spanish accent, “The eyes of Texas are upon you . . . all the livelong day . . .”

  On my way back, I thought I might drive past San Antonio, past Uvalde, Hondo, and La Pryor, past Piedras Negras and Nava, and on into the center of Mexico to where all the roads began.

  The news from the radio was that it hadn’t mattered much to the faithful that the “Chevrolet Madonna” had a perfectly explicable source. Hundreds of believers were still coming to the simple neighborhood every night. Was it not a miracle that the lamplight from the porch had even caught the dented fender of the Impala in the first place? What was the probability of those few shafts of light reflecting off that long, curved chrome surface in precisely the way necessary to project the Madonna’s silhouette? Out of the million chance encounters in the ordinary running on of the everyday, this beam was a light breaking suddenly through a curtain, creating an aperture between worlds, showing just how incomplete our own world really was.

  But the neighbor on whose wall the apparition reflected was growing desperate as hordes of devotees trampled greater swaths of his lawn and carried on singing and chanting all night long. He decided to illuminate the apparition with two gigantic mercury floodlights, thereby bathing the amber-toned reflection in a fluorescent silver glare that erased any hint of the Virgin Mary’s outline and drew gasps and angry shouts from the crowd.

  One reporter heard a woman scream at the neighbor, “If you have any love in your heart you will let us see the Virgin!”

  “If you believe in Mary, the mother of God, you will turn out the light,” yelled another.

  The mother of the family of the young visionary collapsed.

  In the days that followed, the family repositioned their Impala in the driveway and used camping flashlights to try, without success, to cast the Virgin’s reflection against their own garage door. All they managed were jittery Rorschach blots of a shapeless milky light. Once the car was moved, the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary reading the Bible was to disappear forever. For several days, the devout and the nosy continued to come after sunset. For months after they stopped coming, the neighbor kept his modest house saturated in as much light as the Lincoln Memorial.

  She had not been a Virgin who had come with much to say. As always, she had chosen an obscure place under humble circumstances to manifest herself. This time there were no clouds, no cherubim, no starry mantle. As apparitions go, she was more of a chimera or a cipher rather than an interlocutor between worlds. For those who believed in her light, she brought the message that the interaction between the mortal and the divine in those lands has not ended.

  From her debut in the Americas on a sacred hill in Mexico City more than four hundred years ago, here at end of the twentieth century, she came to a parched, rundown Texas suburb. The faithful had congregated to see in the apparition’s low-wattage glow that the enchantment of the homelands is not over.

  On the night the miracle-busting floodlights were turned on, when the mother of the young seer of Pleasanton Road passed out, some of the devotees had gathered around her, holding hands, and improvised a song they sang over her as she lay unconscious, “Stay with me, Lord, stay with me, the spirit of the Lord is moving through my heart, stay with me, Lord, stay with me.”

  The air over Tenochtitlán was a brownish gray chemical mist. The chalky haze of fuel exhaust and smog made it hard to see anything but a blur of wet streets, low buildings, factories, and roadways. We spiraled down, drifting in a hush, into the ancient precints of the Valley of Mexico. I remembered one nineteenth-century painting by José Maria Velasco in which Mexico City is seen from the village of Amecameca, circa 1870. The sharply outlined white city is on the far horizon, across an expansive prairie dotted with cactus and maguey. Beyond are the volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Ixtahuitil. The air over the valley was so clear then you could see for a hundred miles.

  Now, we float in on the dirty clouds of our century, the nectar of Tlazolteotl, the Aztec deity who brings forth new creation out of the filth she consumes. The spattering rain on the airplane windows looks rusty, corrosive. This is zeitgeist weather for Mexico City in the time of la crisis.

  “It’s been like this since ‘la crisis,’” a cab driver says on the way into town. “Things are really screwed up. Nobody has any money.” He’s right. Later, in the Plaza Santo Domingo, no one has change for a fifty peso note, roughly the equivalent of ten dollars.

  “La crisis” is Mexico’s amazing, perpetually imploding economy. It is the peso, falling in a bottomless fiduciary abyss like a Siqueiros wraith on fire. But it’s also the unbreathable air, tracked daily in newspaper logs of the levels of toxic chemicals present in the air. The rot of political corruption, like an abscessed tooth, shakes the nation, from the heady personajes of state to shoe-shiner unions. Militares are shooting campesinos in Guerrero while politicians hurl recriminations of “Bad Spelling!” at one another.

  There are village uprisings of Indígenas in Tabasco, in Michoacán. The influence and power of los narcos, in tandem with the Colombian drug cartels, is fluorescing. Then, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre sparks a riot. Ex-president Carlos Gortari de Salinas is alleged in the press to be the “intellectual author” of the assassination of his successor, presidential candidate Colosio, and the present president, Ernesto Zedillo, may yet emerge as a central witness, probably never to be called. Meanwhile, the “postmodern” Zapatistas, the Mayan rebel army in Chiapas, are staging an ongoing natonal dialogue on political reform as an ersatz graduate seminar media event.

  “The wars of the conquest continue.” That was the bulletin that the Zapatistas had littered by the thousands around the village of San Cristobal de las Casas, in the first days of their New Year’s War,

  To the Mexican People: We are the product of 500 years of struggle! First against slavery; then in the War of Independence against Spain headed by our first revolutionaries; later for withstanding North American expansionism . . . again when the Porfirio dictatorship denied us the letter of the Laws of Reform and we selected Zapata and Villa as our own leaders. . . . We say enough! We are the descendants of the original conceivers of our common identity; we are the dispossessed mass and we call to each of you to join in this single cause. . . .

  By their own account, they were an army of indigenous peoples of southern Mexico, declaring war against the illegitimate government and army of Mexico.

  Then, more earthquakes, in Colima, in Chiapas. Hurricane Rachel strikes the gulf coast, then returns to sea, regathers storm force, and lashes the Mexican coast again. And Popocatépetl, the volcano outside Mexico City, which last erupted in the ’30s, is fuming. One of my aunts in Coahuila says, “It’s like the time of the plagues in Egypt.”

  “La crisis” is social apocalypse in extreme slow motion. And there is an erotic élan in how the Mexicanos manage to savor the inexpressible melancholy of it all. In a dark serendipity, the center of Mexico City is decked with elegant, somber banners advertising an exhibition of the torture machines of the Inquisition. Another taxista, part Greek chorus, part human barometers of la crisis, is quoted in the press saying, “Esto no se arregla.”

  “This cannot be fixed.”

  The year before, as I drove south along the coastal highway through western Oaxaca, the road had curved through burnished hills for miles without any evidence of civilization or settlement. On the right, the cliffs along Mexico’s spine dropped off to flat, chalky beaches. Crawling ocean waves glimmered under a heavy Pacific mist. On the left, countless tiers of large gray granite boulders stood craggy against the hillsides, the gnarled cedars glowing deep green against the scorched golden grasses, the entire landscape suspended in a rare effect of limpid afternoon light. I know this light. A tea-colored sunlight suffused the hills, as if the afternoon would dissolve slowly, infinitely, into every shadow, every creek bed, every gorge. I know this light on this land, in exactly this way.

  I had never been to Oaxaca before. I had never e
ven seen pictures of Oaxaca, except for photographs and drawings from Monte Alban, the ancient acropolis ruins of the Zapotecs, inland near Oaxaca City. It was Bedouin déjà vu—to be startled by sudden familiarity with a constituent quality of light in an unknown place. My blood has moved through here before, I thought.

  These were the journeys to the center of Mexico that I made:

  South from Aztlán, through a phalanx of crowded border checkpoints, bypassing Nueva Rosita on Cincuenta Siete, into the heart of Mexico via the two-lane highway of Huitzilopochtli, the first God of the Mexica.

  Following the western coast south along the spine, down the Pacific highway past the shrines of Resortlandia—Puertos Vallarta, Azul, Escondido—then Tehuantepéc and Tuxtla Gutierrez and on to Chiapas, where Mexico’s next revolution was erupting.

  The umbilical journey was that which the Mexicans called La Ruta, the erased journey. It is the route that Cortés, our secret, shameful grandfather, and his army took on their military campaign against the Aztec empire, from the sultry nights and sleazy cantinas of ancient Veracruz to the traffic-glutted streets around the ghost of the Great Temple of the Aztecas, next to the Zócalo plaza at the center of Mexico City.

  There wasn’t a single monument to Cortés left standing in la Capital after the 1910 Revolución. The record of the journey had been largely obliterated, excised from maps and commemorative plaques at roadside landmarks. But I had pieced together the route with my mother’s friend Helen Anthony, using a recent book by a French historical geographer that correlated the accounts of Cortés in his letters to the Spanish king Charles V and the narrative of the Spanish soldier Bernal Díaz de Castillo with the geography of contemporary Mexico. Sitting together in a booth, at a seafood café in the Mercado de la Ciudadela, Helen and I unfolded a large map based on satellite images of the Mexican landscape.