Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  Then, in the late 1970s, during an excavation of an area in which to extend the Zócalo subway station, about twenty yards away from the perimeter of the cathedral, workers discovered an enormous circular stone which bore the engraved image of the Aztec goddess Coyolxauqhui, her body dismembered, mangled, and misshapen. The stone was known by anthropologists to have been associated with the cult of Huitzilopochtli and the complex of Templo Mayor. According to accounts from the period of the conquest, it was said to have been laid at the base of the pyramid, at the point where the flung-away bodies of the victims fell from the stone steps to the ground.

  The remains of the Templo Mayor had survived, and since their discovery have been excavated and exposed to the light of our century, at the very heart of Mexico City. What the Spaniards did not realize was that they had destroyed only the outermost evident pyramid, and left the others, from earlier in time, untouched, deeper in the ground. These, too, have now been returned to the light.

  When I arrived at the ruins of the Templo Mayor in Mexico City at the end of my Cortés journey, it was on the day known in Mexico as el Día de los Muertos, “the Day of the Dead,” the first day of November, when the souls of the ancestors are allowed to return to the realm of the living for one night. Mexico City was decked in the bright, fluorescent orange chrysanthemum flowers known as zempaxuchitl, traditional for that day, and throughout the Zócalo, children were dressed in the makeup and costumes of the calaveras, the comical skeleton figures that are the emblem of the holiday.

  Walking through the ruins, I passed a succession of slanted walls, each one the shell of another, more ancient pyramid. In the spaces in between, as each old pyramid had been buried, the Aztecas had left behind sacred stones, stacks of conch shells, battalions of stone warrior statues, their arms held stiffly at their sides, medallions of jade or obsidian implanted in their chests, over their sternums. Each wall was a barrier, falling further back in time—until I came to the innermost place of the excavation, where the pinnacle of a hoary pyramid is still visible. Here, the shrines to Huitzilopochtli and Tlalóc lay plainly before me, painted in bright blues, red, with patterns of black stripes and circles.

  According to the archaeologists, there is one more archaic pyramid still sheathed by this one, which perhaps will never be uncovered. At this stage of the excavation, the innermost pyramid is already surrounded by a moat of primeval water, the seepage of the ancient lake that still lies under the pavement and iron of Mexico City.

  Some archaeologists say the underlying pyramid awaits more advanced excavation techniques that will allow us to dig below the water table, revealing perhaps the first temple built by the Mexica after their great wandering, at Huitzilopochtli’s behest, from their homeland Aztlán, in the north. The Nahua priests who bless the pilgrims at the Templo’s perimeter say that water signifies the final threshold of our unknowing, and that the origin of the Mexica, their first sanctuary to their gods, will be withheld from us forever.

  The low morning clouds over Rancho Los Generales had burned away by seven. I awoke early again to the gaze of a spotted falcon, perched in the red rafters of the patio roof, staring in through the window at me as I stirred. The corrugated tin roof would offer sturdy shelter against the sometimes fierce sierra winds, but the speckled auburn bird was uncertain whether to build a nest so close to a slumbering human. For days, it had kept a vigil over my sleep, patiently assessing the risk of settling there.

  It had been a sleepless night, full of lightning and wind, but no rain: la tormenta sin agua. Such nights are the vaquero’s bane, wreaking havoc in the pastures—broken fences, missing cows—and the ground remained parched. All night, the winds had keened in slow, haunting arpeggios against the cables that supported the spindly shortwave radio tower over the house. At times, the gusts sounded like cathedral organ chimes rumbling the roof, then gathering to one great hovering tone, before suddenly falling to whispering wails.

  After a decade away, I had been back at the ranch for some weeks, returning from my trips in Puebla and Mexico City. A pair of my old boots, cracked, sandy-colored, high-necked Tony Lamas, were still in a cabinet waiting for me. The landscape, rough, unyielding, and sometimes treacherous, was more lush than when I had last seen it. The fences, the corrals, and the house on the hill had all taken on a worn quality. The sycamore tree we had planted twenty years ago now shaded the patio in a broad-leaf canopy, its trunk as wide as a barrel. There had been several years running of good rains, always a momentous blessing in the sierra—and the subject of a great deal of conversation among the vaqueros, for whom the lightest mist of a rain is reflected on for its value in keeping the land green. But there hadn’t been any rain since the day before I had arrived.

  “It was only a little rain, un aguita, just enough to hold the dust down,” the new vaquero, Fidencio, told me the night I arrived at Los Generales, about the previous day’s misting. “It didn’t even get the leaves wet underneath,” he said, helping me to unpack the truck. Fidencio lived on the ranch with his family, a wife and three kids, singlehandedly keeping track of every head of cattle, far-flung through the five pastures, tending the waterworks, mending the fences, setting out the salt blocks and the alfalfa bales across the ranch. He had been the first vaquero since Alejo, the first in fifteen years, to master the complicated obligations and esoteric knowledge of the rancho.

  I had come to the ranch to try to write about the trip I had just made. I barely saw Fidencio or his family. The cold December days were long, quiet, and solitary. Rising at dawn, I would set a fire in the potbelly stove and then jog out on any of the ranch roads to hills where I had endless vistas of the purple sierra, just as the sun was hitting their craggy peaks and ledges with golden beams. Back at the house, after making a plate of huevos rancheros and listening to the BBC World Service on the shortwave radio, I would turn everything off and sit down in the screened veranda with my notes, tapes, and readings. A few words might come each day, a piece of a poem, a paragraph. If I’d had a choice, I would have been a singer. I would have sung this story. Not as opera, not rock, not mariachismo, but the kind of singing that takes a thousand years to finish one song, a drum slowly beating, violins so soft they are almost inaudible. It would be sung in a low, worn, raspy voice like Agustín Lara’s, in 1948, when he sang those lines in his own rendition of his famous “Veracruz,”

  Yo nací en la luna de plata,

  y nací con alma de pirata.

  I was born under a moon of silver,

  and I was born with the soul of a pirate.

  But I am not the singer in the family. Uela had told me: I was to be a poet—the teller. That would be my role in this tale, not inventor, not singer, not the mystic, not the suicide, not the vaquero, not the Volador. I would be the teller in the family.

  What would I tell? What was worth telling? Could you tell a story about centuries of forgetting? I had thought, Maybe there would be a message, left somewhere in the deepest hold of old Mexican time, that would be revealed. I could walk anywhere in this world and I would still be numbered in the old counts of the days. At the edge of the dark Gregorian millennium, in the ebbing years of the Mayan calendar, we were all living under the prophecy of the Nahui Olin, the fifth sun of the Aztecas, in which the world would end in a great shaking out of the earth. But I couldn’t see how my family fit into that great story. And my wanderings around Mexico were a secret pursuit, unrelated to the work I had been doing back in New York City, making television programs for more than a decade. The story was always postponed, the writing put aside. Now, maybe I had lost the story, if I’d ever had it to begin with.

  I awoke the next morning staring into the eyes of the spotted falcon. There was a racket from down the hill near Fidencio’s house, where I saw the truck that belonged to Don Armando, my Tío Alejandro’s long-time assistant. It was my uncle’s birthday, and the day before, Fidencio and I had ridden out into a nearby pasture to fetch a grown lamb that would be slaughtered for the birthday f
east. The animal was now tied to the fence around Fidencio’s house, furiously bleating and clanging its bell.

  By the time I reached Fidencio’s house, he had already strung up the lamb, hindparts lifted, from the rafters of the porch. I greeted Don Armando, a portly man in his late sixties, with an abrazo, and said good morning to Fidencio, his wife, two daughters, and baby son. While his wife, dressed in a leather apron, gave me coffee with a matter-of-fact manner, Fidencio threw one swift upward stroke with his blade, and the lamb bled out into a basin in a torrent, dying in an instant. He began cleaning it and meticulously removing the skin in scrolls, while giving Don Armando an exhaustive account of the health of every pregnant cow on the ranch. Then Don Armando turned to me.

  “¿Y que hallaste por ese ruta de Cortés, y con los Voladores?” he said, laughing, and looking at Fidencio out of the corner of his eye, egging him on to join in. “What had I found on the Cortés route, and among the Voladores?”

  Cracking himself up, he asked, “Did you find Malinche?” referring to Cortés’s indigenous consort, Malintzín. Just as I was beginning to tell him about the great ceiba tree where Cortés’s ships were said to have been moored, across the pasture I saw a towering remolino, “a whirlwind,” suddenly appear near the corrals, pulling up dust, hay, and dry brush into its wobbly funnel. We all turned and watched it as it grew wider, taller, and darker, then began cutting a swath through the pasture toward us. The children and their mother ran into the house, but Fidencio continued to dress the lamb. With the roar of a storm, the remolino paused a few yards from us, at the fence around the house, drawing a whoop from Don Armando. Just as Fidencio looked up, we were all engulfed by the twister, which seemed to be stationary, as if it had found its magnetic center, and could not move on. In the middle of the whirlwind, Don Armando held his arms up, his belly stretched tight over his belt, eyes closed, with his lips moving, as in a prayer. Fidencio covered his eyes and held a cloth wrapped around the lamb. While the remolino churned over our heads, it felt as if the whole world grew incredibly silent. Amidst the wind, as if in slow motion, I saw a black and gray bee the size of my fist carefully land on my mouth. As it came to rest, it seemed entirely natural to offer a refuge in the heavy gust. Its front legs were perched on my top lip, its hind legs on my lower lip. The sound of the remolino faded, and in the quiet instant that followed, I heard words being spoken in my head, faintly, but steadily.

  Scintilla. Barricade. Santa Tierra. Helix inside of helix. Color of blood. Playa. Covenant. Indelible diaphanous light. Her words falling like sand. Battalion. Intaglio. Breathless.

  Just as the remolino suddenly disappeared, I spat out in one breath to shoo away the bee, amazed it had not stung me. We stood motionless for an instant, Don Armando’s arms still outstretched upward.

  “This is a very good sign,” he said chuckling. “A thousand baths cannot make you as clean as standing in one of those. It can wipe away sins!” That night, after returning to Sabinas, on my way back to San Antonio, I wrote the rest of the words I had heard spoken inside of the remolino,

  They have brought guns into the garden. The seam is endless, the weather impossible. Indistinct knowledge, as a Papaya. As Frijol. Eyes like mirrors. Heart like wind. Sangria by the gallons. River of souls. Songs pull toward the earth like a magnet. Lost friends. Dead grandfathers, grandmothers, uncles, and aunts. Holy. Holy. Mystical Revolutions. Five hundred years.

  12

  Una Canción

  A Song

  He must have walked out along these tracks, I thought. On a cold, pale gray morning, January 9, 1939, setting out from Parsons Street, Abuelo Juan José must have followed these railroad tracks into the dense fog bank that grew thicker and more opaque as he got closer to the river. In the cleared terrain of the railway corridor that morning, my father, following, would’ve had to linger far back so his father would not see him. As soon as he entered the fog, he was lost.

  Fifty-six years later, just past dawn, on the anniversary day of Abuelo’s death, I stood on the same rusted tracks in a desolate rail yard to the east of St. Mary’s Street in old San Antonio. Quietly, without anyone noticing, I had arisen and left our house on the northside of town just as the sun was rising on a chill, damp morning. The street lamps lit up the low-hanging clouds in a velvety orange glow. The January San Antonio fog was thinner that year, and as I drove the still-empty elevated expressway into town, a wispy neblina mantle hung on the treetops of the neighborhoods, pierced by electrical pylons, billboards, and the steeples and domes of barrio churches.

  Standing on those tracks, the cast-iron gates of the abandoned Lone Star brewery were chained shut before me, the portal through which trains had once carried countless gallons of beer made from San Antonio River water to the rest of the state. In the opposite direction, I could see the slow asymptotic curve of the rails moving farther off to the east. Following them back, the wide swath of railway lands abutted the back fences of family houses, where their inhabitants were just beginning to stir now—Chihuahuas yapping in the yards, sagging clothing lines hung with dew-soaked laundry left out overnight. And where the Santos homestead on Parsons Street used to be, visible from the tracks, now stood a concrete supporting colonnade of the McAllister Freeway.

  That morning, Juan José must have walked out from the house on Parsons, taking a left at Hoefgen Street. After two blocks, when he came to the railroad tracks, he would only have had to take a single right.

  From that point I walked alongside the weathered rails for less than fifteen minutes, and now stood over the San Antonio River where it still cuts a bright ribbon of viridian light through Roosevelt Park, one of the oldest parks in town. Little has changed since 1939. The same bridge is visible in the background of the newspaper photograph of his death. This is the same knotted earth, flecked with river grasses, under the shoes of the fireman who attended him.

  Looking down onto my reflection in the flowing water from the trestles of the train bridge, the river seemed so near, twelve feet away at most. There was a rumor that someone had seen Abuelo jump into the river. But it seemed impossible that anyone could manage to kill themselves by jumping from that height into such shallow waters.

  Down by the bank of this river the Indians had called Yanaguana, I crouched in the winter-dry grasses and listened to the ancient, unbroken, coursing trickle of the water. Except for arrow-point formations of ducks flying low and to the south, the city felt empty, evacuated, under a quieting spell. I thought I might sit there for hours and no one would see me. I remembered old Spanish maps, tracing the veins of this river in brown ink to where they decant into the Gulf of Mexico, and onward then, bleeding into cobalt blue, to where the gulf empties at last into the vast maw of the Atlantic Ocean. What elements of this place, bleached sand, cicada shells, pecan leaves, mimosa and yucca blossoms, were carried out from here to that final, farther home?

  We might never absolutely know how Juan José died, whether it was a suicide, a sudden heart attack—un infarto—or perhaps a murder. In this tale, even though it was written into this unchanging place alongside the river, that moment would remain perpetually shrouded. But here was Abuelo’s spirit path out of this life, the Rio San Antonio, surging from Roosevelt Park out beyond the city, merging with the crystalline Cibolo, the muddy Salado, all their alluvial clouds invisible under the tranquil surface, winding slowly through the green valley lands to the southeast, pushing out toward infinite waters, Juan José’s soul swift and bright as a sun perch, swimming unfettered, disappearing into the deep.

  ALL IN VAIN. Those were the words that appeared over the newspaper photograph from the San Antonio Light of the scene of my grandfather’s death in 1939. With one hand, the young fireman, Mr. Pompa, appears to be gently cradling Abuelo’s head beneath the thick woolen blankets. With the other, he holds a respirator over Juan José’s face. According to the report, the firemen tried for half an hour to revive him, without success. The caption reads: RESPIRATOR FAILS TO SAVE JUAN SANTOS.r />
  All in Vain.

  Since learning of the mystery of Juan José’s death during that graveside visit in San Fernando Cemetery—now twenty-five years ago—in journals, letters, poems, and stories, in conversations with family, journeys in Texas and throughout Mexico, I have sought to defy those three words, with little success. I wanted to tell a single story, bound together like an old amate codex, to carry the saga of Mexico into the story of Texas, and into the story of our family, walking like a tribe of pilgrims out of a tattered past of conquests, upheavals, revolutions, and migrations.

  I wanted to dispel the shame the family has held inside like a hidden wound, to burn off the silence that kept many of us from speaking Juan José’s name, except in whispers, for decades. I tell the story over and over again, but the momentum of forgetting is strong. The currents of fear unleashed in the family around his death run deep and long. Now there is another generation, the sons and daughters of cousins among the Santos and Garcias, many of whom like me have left San Antonio, traveling farther still from these mysteries and chimeras, farther from the places and details of our past in Mexico, and farther from the ghosts of Mexico left in Texas. They know even less than we did of the story of Abuelo Juan José and the Santos melancolía that was not extinguished with him.

  That old melancolía has returned several times, like an indelible song written into the blood that will be sung, regardless of the singer. In one unrestrainable leap, Uncle Roger had briefly spun down into that netherworld of chaos, panic, and illusions. He was convinced that slow, invisible fires were burning inside everything—trees, walls, sidewalks—gradually rendering the apparent world into ash. During a visit, he stared at me, wide-eyed, gripping the armrests of his chair, darting his eyes out the patio window to see how far along the inexorable process had moved.