Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation

by Santos, John Phillip

  “Come back tomorrow!” one of them shouted from behind the gate. “We’ll be open all day long . . .”

  My father grew silent, and we left off our talk about Abuelo and that day long ago. An amber waxing moon was now rising over the old city as we drove down Commerce Street, heading downtown. We turned onto Zarzamora Street, where the tortillerías, panaderías, Mexican restaurants, Tex-Mex clubs, and ice houses make it a thoroughfare of the Mexican west side of San Antonio. Before heading home, we stopped by Henry’s Puffy Tacos to share an order of puffy chicken tacos. I was nearly forty, my father nearly eighty. All that remained unspoken now could just as well be offered up to the sun and burned off once and for all, the way morning clouds disappear by noon in north Mexican sunlight.

  And perhaps my father was right. It is okay to let go of the stories. In the end, they don’t really tell you anything. It is okay to move on and to forget, to seek the blessing of forgetting. Through the century, the family had kept moving, from the countryside of Mexico and south Texas to San Antonio, from the barrio to the suburbs, and from Texas outward to a myriad of places, around the world. I had already lived for more than ten years far from the bones of the ancestors.

  The puffy tacos buoyed my father’s mood. After we returned home, he said that he was willing to sing a couple of songs, if I were still interested in taping him.

  “If we’re gonna do it, let’s do it. I’m tired,” he said.

  For the last several days, I had been asking him to let me videotape him singing a few of his original compositions. He had been reticent at first, complaining that he couldn’t sing anymore, that his fingers were stiff, he didn’t have a guitar pick—now he suddenly became determined, quickly setting up his kit in his study; first his microphone and stand, then plugging his guitar into a squat Marshall amplifier, plugged in under his desk. His swiveling desk chair squeaked, so he sat instead on a stool, in the formal posture of a flamenquero, leaning forward, cradling his guitar tenderly on his leg, one foot propped up on the amp. I set up some lights for better shooting, basting my father in an incandescent glow that made him squint at first.

  Then his ritual began. He strummed through several chords to tune the guitar and then adjusted the volume to kill the tinny feedback. He cleared his throat while he picked a few quick arpeggia. With stereo headphones on, attached to the video camera, I could hear the crickets outside in the few moments of quiet.

  “Ahora sí,” he said, with one last nervous cough and a quick shuffle on the stool.

  After a long breath, as he began to sing, his face relaxed so completely that it was as if he had walked into another body, unfettered by everyday cares. He began with what has become his Norteño standard—the “Corrido de Los Generales,” his song about the ranch in Coahuila that he had debuted there long ago. The song began on a dulcet chord, shimmering as he held the first word, Que . . . , singing it in a quavering tenor note that hung in the air until, at last, he began the song in a lazy polka time, with,

  Que—bonita es la vida,

  Que bonita es la vida en el rancho!

  How beautiful life is,

  How beautiful is life on the ranch.

  As he sang, the skin of his throat quivered, hitting all of the high notes with polish and innocence. His voice was still velvety, welling up from way down in his belly, with the slightest sense in every note that he is not far from weeping. He sang gazing forward, letting his eyes drift off to an imagined horizon when he sang about fences that ran like lines without ends. He sang in praise of beautiful cattle, in praise of bountiful water and trees, in praise of the blessed land, ending with a loud, “¡Sí Señor!”

  Excited by hearing his own voice again, his fingers moved lightly across the strings plotting out his next song. “Remember this?” Then he sang “Texas Born,” a twanging country-western song he wrote in my honor when I went off to study in England.

  I wear a pair of shiny boots—a big ten-gallon hat,

  and every time I go somewhere,

  there’s always someone who

  asks the same old question,

  “Mister, where’re you from?”

  And this is when I tell them

  that I was Texas born,

  and I come from San Antone . . .

  He followed with two love songs he’d written for my mother, “My Beautiful Wife” and “Si Yo Pudiera (If I Could Only),” with melodies that moved from the coloratura of romantic 1940s Mexican movie music to warbles and trills that sound almost Arabic. “Now, I’m going to do an old, old Mexican one,” he said, striking the first chord of “Noche de Ronda.” As he sang the old song by Agustín Lara, he seemed at complete peace, able to strike each note as if the song were just being written. He was surrounded by pictures on the walls of his parents, the last portrait of Juan José, taken months before he died, and Uela, wearing her stoic expression, a few years before she died. My father finished his concert with his “Corrido de Múzquiz,” a song for the Coahuila town at the edge of the sierra from where his great-grandfather Teofilo Garcia had been kidnapped by the Kikapu Indians. In that song, he sings of the town’s local waterfall, the renowned beautiful women of Múzquiz, and how, of all places in the world, he would choose to die there. When the song concluded with a fierce double strum, my father let the guitar echo his final notes. As the last chord faded, the quiet of the night returned and the room was still. He drew the guitar up from his lap and leaned on his stiff knees to get up from the stool.

  “That’s it!” he said, switching off the amp and the microphone, gathering his cords up into neat loops. And when I ask him why he says in the song he’d like to die in Múzquiz, and not San Antonio, where he has lived his entire life, he replies, “That’s just the story, John Phillip. That’s just the story in the song.”

  Epilogue

  Back in New York, I feel the city at once alien and familiar to me. The planted malls along Park Avenue could have been lining boulevards in Paris, Rome, or Barcelona. The weathered monument to Columbus on Central Park South became the angel of victory on the monument to La Independencia in Mexico City. Little seemed recognizable from my time before, as if my presence here for ten years had been excised from the city’s spiritual census.

  In the subways, the faces of the thousands of passengers—Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Mediterranean, East European, Latino, African American, and others—were mixed in now with faces more recognizable from my recent travels—Maya, Mexica, Zapoteca, Chichimeca. Never a significant presence here before, the people of Mexico had arrived in New York City. The city was unmoored in the ocean of humanity. Eventually, the entire world would come here, everyone bearing their old gods and their ancient obligations, silent and inevitable.

  I spent my days rearranging the notes, routines, and drafts for this book, moving them around daily in numerous kaleidoscopic arrays. I wondered, for the first time in a long time, if I shouldn’t be back living in my homeland, among the rivers, creeks, and hills—in San Antonio—the ruin city of my birth, where the ancestors are buried, and where the family’s past has settled over creation in the dust of a hundred years.

  There would be no conclusion to Abuelo Juan José’s story. Only Juan José knew what pact was being fulfilled there in Roosevelt Park on the last day of his life. The memories of those who remembered anything of that day would never be gathered into a single picture, a single tale. The old Mexicans who had secrets would eventually take them along on their own journeys out of this world.

  For all my obsession with telling the family story, my brothers and I, still childless, might yet be the end of our family line, the end of the story the ancestors have been telling to time for millennia. Perhaps it makes no difference that we have all left San Antonio, with one brother in Houston, the other in New York City. Like our forebears, we have moved on from our given homes, leaving the ancestors behind, setting out beyond the farther border, remembering and forgetting our origins, and always looking for signs.

  A brown eagle
hunted for days in the air over Central Park. For nights on end, I watched a comet from my terrace. Lightning struck an old tree in the park, hewing it in two in a single, resounding crack. It was in those days, newly back in Manhattan, when my uncle Raul visited me one more time. While I was away, several guests said they had seen a ghostly presence, like a silvery smoke, in my living room. An Indian friend, Tully Spotted Eagle Boy, said he had seen a man in my apartment, dressed in white work clothes as I had seen Uncle Raul once before, sitting quietly in the burgundy velvet reading chair.

  “Don’t worry,” Tully wrote in a note, “He’s friendly. He says he’s happy. He wants to help you. Very big blessing.”

  I hadn’t been dreaming since my return, only deep stony sleeps for weeks. Then, one night, I awoke with a start. When my eyes focused, I found myself suspended in a ball in midair in my living room, my knees pulled up to my chest. It felt as if I were being cradled from behind, when I suddenly was moved in a blur across the room, coming to a stop over a shelf cluttered with old family photographs—Uncle Frank, Uela and her sisters, the whole tribe, gathered one Easter in front of Uela’s house on Parsons Street. Then swiftly and silently, I was spun across the room again, stopping just in front of my bookshelves, long enough to glimpse an edition of Cortés’s Letters and the Velázquez Spanish dictionary. “This is not a dream,” a mischievous voice said from behind. I turned around to see Uncle Raul, standing before me, laughing. As when I had seen his spirit before, the skin of his face looked youthful, his body fit and energetic. When he touched me, wordlessly, I remembered many of the times we had shared together, playing with his dog, Stupid, eating a lunch of tacos in his kitchen, arguing politics at a wedding reception in Mexico.

  In a flash, we’re outside on the streets, and Uncle Raul has a car that is made of air. In it, he is able to drive with me into the nighttime skies high above Manhattan. Accelerating rapidly upward and spinning, the city below looks like a nebula in space, a swirl of moving lights and beacons, glowing far into the atmosphere in every direction. Swooping down, I see the illuminated pinnacle of the Chrysler Building. Heading south, the twin towers of the World Trade Center, blurred with speed, stand like dolmens at the river’s edge. Along the way, though he is inaudible over the rushing wind, Uncle Raul is talking continuously, laughing his tommy gun laugh, passing us so close to the stone arches of the Brooklyn Bridge that I can feel the chill of the cold, sooty granite on my cheek. Then we climb into clear sky again, and I can see a long queue of lights to the north from planes waiting to land at La Guardia airport. The streets of the city look empty.

  All at once we stop and hover, floating high above one building on the Upper East Side of the city. Looking far down, we see a door open on the rooftop. Uncle Raul points downward with a giggle as an old, tired-looking man dressed in the eagle warrior costume of the ancient Volador dance walks wearily out onto the roof. In one hand he has a drum, in the other a flute. Perched on top of a large platform, he begins to play the flute and beat the drum, starting a slow, methodical dance, bowing his shoulders to the north, to the west, to the south, to the east, and rocking from one leg to the next, lifting his knees in high steps.

  The old man’s mournful singsong melody, like the sound of lost birds, reaches us on the winds. Uncle Raul looks at me with a sad nod of recognition. “This is not a dream,” he says once more. Soon, the man below is joined by others, old and young, all of them dressed in tattered feathered suits and eagle headdresses, until the roof is crowded with the costumed dancers, each one facing out toward the city, keeping the same melancholic, mesmerizing cadence on their drums. In perfect synchrony, they all bow and spin, first to one side then to the next. The old man’s drumming grows louder, his flute screeching across the whole island. Then the music stopped, and all of the dancers remained perfectly still. In the night air, I can hear Uncle Raul’s breath next to me. We watch then as each of the dancers in sequence leaps from the roof’s edge and flies out over the city, tracing large arcs and loops over midtown, descending slowly, disappearing finally into the streets in small clusters.

  Cool gusts churn in the dark against my face. The Big Dipper flickers in and out of focus, one star at a time. As the faint, airy sound of the old man’s flute song wafts over us again, I look out over the brilliantly illuminated nighttime cityscape one last time, marveling silently with my uncle at how here, too, in Babylon-on-the-Hudson, Mexico’s invisible enchantment is already under way.

  Tent of Grief

  An Afterword

  Winter in San Antonio came on with an early frost in 1998, blighting my father’s backyard pecan crop. In good years, he gathered several tin wash-tubs of smallish, juicy pecans from his two forty-year-old trees, the pride of his garden. Invariably, a shoe box full of the nuts would arrive in New York, rattling like a maraca. But not this year.

  The blighting of the year’s pecan harvest wasn’t the only presagio of ill tidings. For months, Madrina, now ninety-nine years old, had been suddenly awaking in the middle of the night, screaming. She now lives with my aunt Bea in San Antonio. She no longer asks if all the Santos have died. Now, she asks Aunt Bea, “When am I going to die?” Then, one night, my aunt heard her scream and ran downstairs. She found Madrina in her pajamas, on all fours on the floor, her face taut with fear, weeping in a slow guttural growl while she clawed the dark air above her with one outstretched hand, in a furry pink glove. After calming down in Aunt Bea’s arms, she complained of being haunted by a mysterious bulto, which she described as a churning black mass, hovering in the middle of the room, threatening to engulf her.

  Five days after I finished this book in early December, my father was killed in a horrific automobile accident near our home in San Antonio, Texas. Mother barely survived, and continues to recover. It was late dusk and they had just gone to Mass, stopping at a grocery store on the way home to pick up a few things. They were making the last left turn to enter their neighborhood, a turn we have all made thousands of times. A nineteen-year-old kid in a Mitsubishi Eclipse was coming from the opposite direction. He hit my parents’ car broadside, in mid-turn. Weeks later, I saw the result in a car graveyard, a twisted wedge of torn blue metal. My father, who was sitting on the passenger side, must have been killed instantly.

  We had not known we were counting his breaths. He was eighty-one years old, enjoying every day with my mother, writing new songs, and as he liked to say “doing a little real estate on the side,” every now and then selling a house or a few acres in the countryside near San Antonio. The day before he died, I had been on the phone with him and he was strangely foggy, confusing me with one of my brothers, losing his train of thought, as his voice seemed to flicker with uncertainty. On the day of his death, we traded calls all day, failing to reach each other. In my last call, I had left them a message saying, “Y’all must be out on the town or something! I’m home.”

  Then, sitting in my apartment in New York City, a voice in my head said, “You’ll never speak to him again.” I dismissed the doleful thought and ate dinner alone. It was near midnight when my brother George called from Houston. “We’ve got a big problem,” he said, his voice grim and determined. “Mother and Daddy were in an accident tonight, and Daddy was killed.”

  We gave him a great despedida on a bitterly cold December day in San Antonio, a farewell that resounded with mariachis, Mexican trios, and a performance of one of his last songs, “Si Yo Pudiera.” In the months since his death, I have missed him greatly, longing still for the story he was never able to tell me about his father’s death. Likewise, he never read this book. I was always waiting until it was really done. He had read parts of it, and he had heard me read from it at the main San Antonio Public Library last May. “Sounds good,” he had said afterwards, “sounds real good.” In the weeks before his death, he had seen the book’s cover, with the photograph of his family in 1920. He had framed it, adoringly, in a gilded wooden frame.

  And the story I waited so long for him to tell me—the s
tory of the interrupted life of his father—has become mine.

  MARCH 1999

  NEW YORK CITY

  Acknowledgments

  So many have supported me through the years I have spent writing this book, none more than my parents and my brothers, Charles and George, and my sister-in-law, Cindy. Thanks also to Stephanie Brummer, who endured much of my soul wrestling while I tried to imagine the book. Mil gracias to toda la familia, living and gone, for sharing so many of their stories. I’m particularly indebted to my great-aunt Josefa Garcia Valdes, Tía Pepa, for the hours we spent together in the last years. As the Native Americans say: To all of my relations! And to la familia Guerra of Sabinas, Mexico, for giving me a family, and a home, in the old homelands—the Rancho Los Generales, where I wrote much of the first draft.

  Deep gratitude to Carina Courtright for all of her support throughout; she shared many of the outward, and inward, journeys in the book with me and listened to these tales told over and over. Naomi Shihab Nye, my poetic ally since creation time, read early drafts and spirited me on through many peaks and valleys over the years. I would never have tried to be a writer without the encouragement of my poet-mentor, Ernest Sandeen, who died two years ago. He first heard the story that was hidden inside all of the forgetting, and he and his wife, Eileen, created a home that nurtured a host of young poets. Another great mentor, Father Virgilio Elizondo of San Antonio, helped me to understand the profound implications of our heritage in the mestizaje of Mexico. Pamela Cadwallader Illott, my executive producer at CBS, first opened the entire world to me. Later, she gave me shelter on her ranch in Texas, where I wrote part of the book. And all honorifics to my theoretical conspirators for the whole saga: Tom Levin, James DerDerian, Adam Ashforth, Kendall Thomas, and Deborah Esch. My comrade Tom Keenan helped me find the book’s title, hidden inside one of its tales. An abrazo fuerte to mi compañera, Lisa Heller, for her patience and companionship through some of the darkest times along the way. And thanks to Pedro Lujan for his prophetic paintings and our many conversations over the years about the Inframundo. He and Leah Gitter opened their home to a rabble of Latino artists and writers, helping us to discover a common vision.