Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  “It’s a matter of time, mmm-hmmm, a matter of time,” he kept repeating, while rocking back and forth in his chair. He believed he had become a leper and that the entire neighborhood he lived in had been abandoned and quarantined as a result. His eyes were full of apprehension, as if he were being forced to look at something he would have chosen never to see.

  That look was familiar to me, familiar from that inward place I have known since childhood, the infinitesimal tabernacle of the great void left inside of me too, something irreducible, left over after the body, the mind, the world, are all gone. I have always been able to go there, touching the formless cold of the place, the lonely emptiness, but always recoiling in terror, always returning to this world in an instant, when every insignificant detail observed, the smell of tea, the prattle of the radio, a light breeze, becomes a comfort and a beckoning.

  We had never spoken of it before, but it felt as if my uncle was there in that place, only he was stranded there, unable to return. All he could see around him was the inevitable ruin of everything. The rest of us learn how to ignore these notions, to forget how all of creation plunges through the frigid void in vast arcs and circuits that will fade, decay, and disappear in the unspeakable plethora of time. Eventually, Uncle Roger found his way back, but he knows now, despite all of the delusions he suffered there, the place he went to is real.

  How can we be healed?

  Aunt Connie, who fell into her own embrace of the void, was saved by tapioca. Ordinarily very spirited and loquacious, for some months, like a novice in a cloistered order, she had surrendered herself to a virtually complete silence, becoming more and more remote, sitting still, with an expressionless stare, or occupying herself with prayer books, fingering the black beads of an old onyx rosary. Instead of her usual rushing, melodic torrent of jokes and stories, punctuated by flurries of laughs and movements of her hands, she spoke in monotones and murmurs, as if she were resigned to an implacable secret fate that had been revealed to her.

  Aunt Connie was living with Madrina and Uncle Manuel, whom she thought of as her second parents, while she sought medical help, “from a real doctor,” my father said at the time, “not them quacks and curanderos.” Still, after months, the doctors had done little to help her regain her former state of mind. She continued to struggle, barely able to keep the elephant ear plants on the patio watered, and she swept only half of the kitchen at a time.

  While I was home visiting from college, Madrina had invited me over for lunch with her, Uncle Manuel, and Aunt Connie. Madrina, in her late seventies then, had never been known for her cooking. Her meals usually consisted of many dishes, somewhat overcooked, in extremely small portions, so that by the time the table was set, it looked like a galaxy of small bowls with salsas, guizadas, Doña Maria mole, beans, okra, and rice. On this day, my aunt sat across the table from me, so sullen and withdrawn that she seemed to be absorbing the oxygen out of the air around her, molecule by molecule. We ate in complete silence, and I was grateful for the way the sound of the silverware on the plates, and Uncle Manuel’s long, susurrated sips of beer, echoed in the dining room, breaking the pall.

  When the time for dessert arrived, Madrina brought in a large porcelain tureen which she proudly opened to reveal a pearly mass of tapioca that she had prepared that morning, still warm and smelling of cinnamon. As Madrina moved to serve everyone, she put the spoon into the tapioca, but it did not give easily. Uncle Manuel mischievously keened his eyes on me, as if he knew a secret about our dessert. Pressing down harder into the bowl, she pulled the spoon up, only to draw out a swatch of the tapioca in one long cord, as rubbery as mucilage. Aunt Connie’s attention, distracted throughout our meal, was suddenly gripped on this perilous maneuver.

  Madrina tried to act as if nothing were amiss. She held the thick bolt of tapioca, stretched from bowl to spoon, utterly still, for what seemed minutes. Balancing herself and straining to smile, she laboriously raised another small plate to serve onto, expecting in the meantime some of the pudding would fall away, back into the tureen. Instead, reaching its threshold of tension, the dollop of tapioca quivered first, then slipped off the spoon in a blinding instant, slamming back into the serving bowl with a thwap so loud it sounded like a pistol going off, instinctively causing Madrina to jump back and duck.

  As Uncle Manuel and I struggled to stay silent and pretend nothing had happened, Aunt Connie erupted in a burst of laughter, an explosion so strong it helped to dislodge her from that silent, hidden place she had been for months, and from there, she gradually returned to be fully among us.

  It had always seemed that over the last one hundred and fifty years—from the time Texas was separated from Mexico in the 1830s, among the Lopez and the Velas of my mother’s family, and then again during la Revolución, when the Garcias and the Santos crossed the border and left Coahuila behind—the story of Mexico had ceased to be a part of our family, and we had ceased to be a part of it. Separated by eighty years, there had been a double betrayal of Mexico, the negation of a negation, repeated and reversed, across these four families’ pasts. Mother’s family was abandoned by Mexico—left behind in Texas—while my father’s chose to abandon their country, la tierra madre, for Texas, during Mexico’s hour of greatest need.

  We became Americans, and as such, we were no longer a part of the ancient compromiso, no longer obligated to keep a solemn vigil over Mexico’s destiny, or, if necessary, to sacrifice ourselves for it. By leaving Mexico and being left by her, our forebears had meant to free us from that ceaseless cycle of sacred duties to dance and chant and make sacrifices and pilgrimages, so that the cosmos would continue to exist. The world we lived in now didn’t require anything of us to keep the great movements and cycles of the earth and the universe in perpetual order.

  This leave-taking from the homelands has been acted out repeatedly since the beginning of the Americas. In Cuzco, Peru, in 1561, the Mestizo historian Garcilaso de la Vega, called “El Inca” (because his mother was Inca royalty, his father a Spanish officer), described how he decided to seek his fortune in Spain. There, he stood to inherit some part of his father’s lands and there he could sue for the return of lands in Peru that had been taken from his mother’s family.

  Before leaving for Spain, he had heard of the recent discovery of a marvelous tomb containing the corpses of five Inca kings. Along with a friend, he went to bid farewell to the mummies of his ancestors. Once inside the chamber, he found the bodies were wrapped tightly in exquisite woolen shrouds, hands crossed over their chests, the skin of their faces pulled tight and smooth by the dry, alkaline mountain air. Over the eyes, the preparers of the bodies had placed small patches of woven gold. De la Vega, never to return to his native Peru again, wrote many years later in Spain of how he reached out to touch the hand of the great Inca Huayma Cápac, as a despedida, a farewell. He recoiled at once, feeling it cold and rough, and sinuous, like a vine. Already then, he felt a gulf between him and them that was unbridgeable.

  Nearing the end of the millennium, the old Mexicans are dying off in gusts now, some of them dazed and weary, worn out by a century of labor and strife. With each death of another of the old ones left among us, the echoes of Mexico grow ever fainter. Abuelo Juan José’s death had the opposite effect. Probably, it was his own decision to move on altogether from this world. He had had enough of the calamities, enough of the humiliations, the indignities visited on Mexicans in those times in Texas. Perhaps he had been disconsolate and confused that morning. But maybe he was not suicidal. Maybe, in a deep distress, wandering disoriented, he had been overtaken by a heart attack, and he threw himself into the shallow tepid waters of the San Antonio in the hope that the water would wash away his affliction. Or maybe he fell.

  And maybe it was murder. Maybe, heavy with trepidation, he had been off that morning to secretly meet with the notorious red-haired Irish foreman who had been abusing him for months at the foundry where he worked, and resented that the company had promoted Juan José, a
Mexican, before him. Maybe it had been a treacherous rendezvous, arranged by this nemesis under some false pretense, intending to lure Abuelo Juan José to a secluded place where he could be taken care of, once and for all.

  Left in the past as an abandoned tale, Abuelo Juan José’s unresolved end hid away all these questions that would awaken in me, two generations and nearly forty years later. I had the compromiso to try to complete his story, not because his life was important in history, but because his life was imparted to the lives he engendered, because his life was a missing arc between us and our incalculable origins.

  Even though it happened on a morning long ago in San Antonio, my grandfather’s walk along the tracks to the river, alone, confounded, into the thick San Antonio fog, left the question of our destiny in Mexico and Texas unresolved in all of us who were to follow.

  The anniversary of Abuelo’s death several years ago fell on the day before I was to return home to New York City. After making the drive back from my attempt to imagine his final moments in the river at Roosevelt Park, over a breakfast of chorizo tacos and refried beans, I reminded my father it was the anniversary of his father’s death, and I asked him if he would like to visit his grave together later that day.

  “I’m very busy today,” he answered, in a plaintive voice. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. You should maybe go without me.” I didn’t tell him where I had just come from. Dressed in a sweater, jeans, and workboots, he cleared his throat, got up slowly, leaving me at the table, and went off to the garage to begin his chores.

  I didn’t want to push him to revisit the painful recollections of that morning fifty-six years before. Some members of the family had cautioned me about bringing it up with him at all. “He found his peace with it,” they said. “You’d best let him be.” For my father, in his late seventies, the memories of that day must have been a distant blur of fog and panic and searching, and then a glimpse of his father’s shape, seen from the street, fading in the unforgettable fog of that morning. All of that ensconced in a corona of silence for nearly six decades, which was his privilege. When he wasn’t sure about visiting the grave that morning, I thought to myself, They were right, I will push no further with him.

  Days before, at the wedding of a Garcia cousin, I had seen my uncle Chale, youngest brother to my father’s mother, who was reportedly with my father that morning in 1939 when they found Abuelo’s body. Since the death of his wife, Chale, now in his late eighties, had been in the care of one of his sons, shuttling between towns where the son had undefined “business” in Texas, California, and Oregon.

  Uncle Chale had aged dramatically since the last time I had seen him. In old family photographs, he appeared in meticulous studio portraits, his hair perfectly slicked, his mustache precisely trimmed, smiling like Clark Gable. Having traveled the world in the navy, he had always been dashing, quick, and gifted with a natural ease around people that had made him the family’s cosmopolitan and bon vivant. Now, his eyes were bloodshot and drooping, his hair standing straight up, dressed in unkempt clothes, the waistline of his pants drawn together at the back with a great safety pin after recently losing a lot of weight. He was missing teeth and had been shy and uncertain of his words at first as we embraced and talked, standing outside of the church together while the ceremony was under way inside. But when I asked him about my grandfather, he suddenly became animated.

  “Yes, he was like my second father! El Juan José. I loved him. Very, very much. I lived with them when I was young, and he treated me like a son. For that, I will always love him.”

  I told him I was trying to learn more about the circumstances of Juan José’s death, and I had heard he was with my father when they first found his body in the Rio San Antonio. Did he still remember anything of that morning?

  Uncle Chale paused, his hand shaking uncontrollably as he rubbed his unshaven cheeks, long-faded images of that distant day were returning to him in slow motion. His eyes began to well up with tears, but as he began to try to speak, his son intervened and said it would not be good for Uncle Chale to remember that. His health was fragile, his heart still broken over his wife’s death. My uncle looked at me, vexed and wordless.

  “Maybe some other time, primo,” my cousin said, “maybe when he’s feeling a little better.” He put an arm around Chale, now seemingly as helpless as a dotard, and ushered him silently back into the sanctuary of the church. Uncle Chale looked back at me once, as if he still wanted to speak, but my cousin held his arm tightly and directed his shuffling steps into one of the back pews where they sat down.

  In the days shortly after that, the two of them were off again, living in a Winnebago, headed west, and no one in the family has seen or spoken to Uncle Chale since. His story would remain untold.

  The rest of the anniversary day was slow and gray. I gathered notes, video and audio tapes, letters, and photographs from the trips in Mexico. I had not been away from New York City for so long in eleven years, and I was traveling with an elaborate mobile headquarters. Late in the afternoon, while I was packing a suitcase, the Tex-Mex music of KEDA, Jalapeño Radio, coming through the walls from my father’s workshed outside, suddenly stopped. He stepped through the back door, wiping his hands on his jeans.

  “If you want to go, let’s go,” he said quickly. I wasn’t sure of what he had said at first. “It’s getting late if you want to go to San Fernando,” he added.

  “You want to go?” I asked.

  “Let’s go, it’s getting late,” he replied.

  We stayed off the expressways, taking Vance Jackson to Fredericksburg Road, past the old taco-doughnut shop, down Babcock to Wilson, turning on Culebra to Twenty-fourth, and on to the south, toward the Mexican cemetery of San Antonio, where the streets are lined with headstone engraving shops and vendors’ stands selling balloons and memorial blue chrysanthemum arrangements. There was a lot of traffic, since it was already rush hour in the neighborhoods of the far west side. We seemed to stop at every light, idling in an awkward silence.

  “What happened that morning?” I finally asked him. “What happened the morning your father died?”

  “John Phillip. It was too long ago! I don’t remember.”

  “Do you want to remember? If we don’t tell these stories, we’ll forget them.”

  “That’s okay,” he said, looking out the window. “That’s okay with me.”

  We were nearing the cemetery, stopped at an intersection where the old Agudas Achim synagogue used to be on St. Cloud Street, and I continued, “Did you follow your father that morning?”

  Taking a deep breath, he said, “Mama came and woke me up and asked me to follow him. My older brother was there. I don’t know why she asked me to go after him—instead of Raul.” At that moment, his voice sounded like a child’s, complaining about the privileged treatment of an elder brother. “She told me to go after him and watch him, and not to let him see me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it would embarrass him!”

  “Why did she want you to follow him in the first place?”

  “Because, he was sick. The night before, he kept talking about going away, going away. He had been sick for months already. He never really recovered from failing with the farm at the Belgian Gardens. So, the night before, he had been saying, ‘Ya es tiempo. Ya me voy. Ya es tiempo,’ and nobody knew what he was talking about.”

  “But Uela did,” I added.

  “She knew something was wrong with him.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I tried to follow him, but the fog was very thick. I lost him. It was very hard for me with Mama after that, because I felt responsible, but I lost him. One minute he was there, walking by the old Alamo Iron Works, then he was gone. I looked everywhere but he was gone.”

  “And then how did you find him later?”

  “I went to his job, just in case he had been going there, but he was walking in the opposite direction, and no one there had seen him, so
I ran home.”

  “How did you find him in Roosevelt Park? Why there?”

  “Uncle Chale and I drove around in the truck, thinking we might still find him walking along the streets. He liked to walk in that park, picking weeds from along the river. We thought we’d check for him there.”

  “How did you spot him? Did you see him from the street? Was his body in the river?” All of the questions I had harbored secretly for so long came rushing out in a messy litany. The tall palms of Las Palmas shopping mall, across from San Fernando Cemetery, were already becoming visible on the far horizon in the pearly light of early Texas twilight.

  “I don’t remember! In the water, I think,” he said. “It was a long time ago, John Phillip. It was a hard thing for me for a long time after that. It took me a long time just to deal with the guilt. It felt like it was all my fault. I had nightmares about it for years, when I was in the army. I couldn’t sleep. I just wanted to forget about it.”

  “But there was nothing you could have done.”

  “It didn’t feel like that then. I thought I could have saved him.”

  “Do you think it was a suicide?”

  “Of course! What else could it have been?”

  Finally, we turned the corner at the Las Palmas mall, crowded with shoppers preparing for the feast day of the Three Kings, el Día de los Magos, the last celebration of the sacred calendar of Christmas in Mexican tradition. There were long shoals of low clouds, scalloped across the sky and illuminated in dark pinks, yellows, and blue. With darkness soon setting in, the first stars were visible over San Antonio as we turned into the entrance way to the great arches of San Fernando Cemetery. As we drove in, we saw the two Mexican caretakers locking down the bolts of the gates for the night. It was still ten minutes from the posted closing time, but, they said, the cemetery was on “holiday hours” and it was already empty—and they wanted to go home. Abuelo Juan José’s grave might as well have been a thousand miles away.