Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (10 page)

Just above the last tier of the gorge, with the valley already in sight through the trees, Alejo stopped and crouched down on his haunches. Holding his fingers up to his lips to keep quiet, he pointed down the ravine to where a dark cloud appeared to be hovering around a stand of persimmon trees. As we fell to quiet, a low, modulating hum echoed along the walls of the gully. Through the undulating cloud, I could make out the shape of one, then two, then maybe five large beehives, hanging from low branches, loaded with honey. From a distance, the hives seemed to be glowing with an amber light, as if they were awaiting the daring harvest, which was about to begin.

 

 

Late in September, when summer’s
calorón
heat still made a desert of every day, and everyone at the rancho sought shelter from the oppressive sunlight indoors, the clear air would suddenly be filled with thousands of monarch butterflies, wafting dreamily south to Michoacán.

It was on one such day that I rode out alone, along the trail through the five pastures in which the herd of ivory Charolais cattle were spread out to graze. It was late afternoon, and I rode down one of the hills into a great valley on the rancho that is shaped like a perfect bowl. There, along the rock walls, the layers of epochs were exposed. An age of limestone. An age of ash and pumice. An age of alluvial pebbles and river sand.

Once we had descended to the valley floor, Pinto, the horse, broke into a full gallop, driving through the scattered, drifting clouds of monarcas, until we reached the center of the basin.

Alejo had called this valley
El Valle de los Ancianos,
“the Valley of the Ancestors.” All around the valley, the dozen or so hills were the same distance from each other, some massive and dignified, others ragged at the top, with cactus and mesquite dotting their peaks. From the middle of the valley, the halo of hills looked like a council of elders, sitting in quiet deliberation.

The light was familiar. The everlasting wind. The slow, far-off clanging of a few cow bells. Numberless shoals of pink clouds were tracing the edge of the western horizon. The entire scene felt like a memory of a time that was older than me, as if it were the memory of the land itself. My father taught me how to see places like this. He taught me awe, watching him silently looking out across the landscapes we were in together, almost overwhelmed, whether it was Texas or Mexico, by the richness, the intricate beauty, of what he saw before him. His gaze would grow distant, his breaths long and slow. Maybe he had learned this from his father, Abuelo Juan José, whose family was always said to have been
ranchera,
“of the ranch life.”

Maybe Abuelo Juan José had taught all of his children. In one photograph of my uncle Raul, he is standing on a craggy peak over a desolate Mexican mountain canyon, and a maguey cactus is at his feet. Unshaven, dressed in khakis and a cardigan, with a wool stocking cap on, he is wearing the telltale expression of Santos awe. The barely perceptible smile. The contemplative mien. With one leg perched on a stone, he stands with his arm outstretched, pointing into the hazy expanse of the canyon’s maw, like a veteran scout who has discovered his long-sought destination.

The Mexican earth is alive, but mute. Yielding its fruits, it clings to its secrets. All of the calendars that have ever been used across these lands were keeping time out there in the open pasture of the valley: the Julian, inside the Gregorian, the Mayan inside the Toltecan, inside the Aztecan—all of them overshadowed by what the Nahua Indian people of Mexico called the Fifth Sun, our time, which they called Four Movement. This age, it had been foretold, would end in famine and a violent shaking of the earth.

In the lulling summer breezes of that afternoon, I felt small, abandoned, waiting for the arrival of some wild wisdom in the same Coahuila silence that had nourished my ancestors. We can return and return to the places of our family’s origin and never hear the voices of the lost
ancianos,
never know the place in the great count of days they bequeathed to us.

But they are there.

Cuento Mestizo

 

Many years later, as I sit in a silent, dark, cold room in New York City, the faces are floating silently in midair. Their deep brown skin is as smooth as
leche quemada,
like caramel among the young, creased and coarse in the old. They are crowded at a bus stop on St. Mary’s Street, leaning against a stone bridge over the San Antonio River, walking in slow motion in front of the Alamo. Some have the broad, flat faces of the Maya, with profiles familiar from the stelae and friezes of Palenque. Some look like elders in an El Greco painting, carrying a Spanish weariness that seems ages old. I am watching them all, over and over for days, piecing together a montage of them for a film about how the Mexican Americans of San Antonio celebrate Easter.

In slow motion, an old man with a wispy goatee silently stares forward, unblinking. Chicano break dancers cavort in front of the statue commemorating Don Tenorio Navarro, one of the Spanish governors who ruled over that part of Nueva España. Then, in one long take, a Mexican kid stands in the mercado plaza playing the theme to
The Godfather
solo on his trumpet.

Looking at the rushes, you can see that the Mexicanos of San Antonio carry in their very bodies all the details of the long, forgotten history of those lands. It is ingrained in the way they hold their heads, almost imperially. In their flat, wide shoulders accustomed to heavy loads. In their dark-eyed gazes, focused faroff, lost in thought. Their faces shimmer in the electronic glow of the video monitors, and the spectacle takes on the feeling of a complex ceremony in some science fiction tale, a ritual to remember the last of the Mexicans of San Antonio.

 

 

The Franciscan Friar Bernardino de Sahagún was one of the most dogged chroniclers of the vanishing Azteca culture in the immediate aftermath of the conquest in 1521. Working with groups of friars whom he had trained, he interviewed the old priests, philosophers, and historians of the Azteca people, compiling the stories he gathered into both pictographic and written codices.

In the Florentine Codex, Sahagún tells us how the old Indian grandmothers he spoke to prized their lineages, yet also described the human body as a great unplumbable abyss, an opening into the infinite. Each body, they believed, was a crack in the universe, an infinite chasm that contained the entire
Inframundo:
the thirteen heavens of Tamoanchan and the nine underworlds of Tlalocan. When the Spaniards arrived in the New World, they brought their own Heaven and Hell with them. Since then, these two universes have been colliding and collapsing, one consuming the other, then being consumed anew in a whorl of endless creation.

At the time, if someone came from a noble Azteca family, it was said of them, “From someone’s entrails, from someone’s throat, he came forth.” If someone brought infamy to their family, it was said they were “of the garbage heap, of the crossroads.” The bones of the ancestors were believed to be part of the Mexican soil beneath their feet, and the dust contained this sacred essence of the
antepasados.
A family carries within itself this hidden memory as old as dust. The Azteca priests told Sahagún that the dust was to be as revered as
familia.

My body, my brothers’ bodies, the bodies of parents, cousins, uncles, aunts, great-uncles and -aunts, grandparents, are all vessels of the same ancient dust, exquisitely charged, polarized along the meridians of lands in the New World and the Old, destined always for some unnamable target further on in future time. For the Spanish, the Conquest of Mexico was another triumph on the irreversible path to the eventual reign of Christ on earth. For the Aztecas, whose voices are preserved in the Florentine Codex, time was circular: “What used to be done a long time ago and is done no longer will be done again. It will thus be once again as it was in the past. Those who live today will live again, and they will be anew.”

Mestizos carry both of these stories in those Mexican chromosomes that are inscribed on tightly braided corn husks, painted in vivid cochineal inks by the ancestors who handed these bodies down through an unimaginably vast cascada of time. Did our forgotten ancestors—Indio, Español, Mestizo—walk with the same dignified and upright carriage of the old Garcias I know? Where did the almost Asian lineaments of the Santos come from? How far back toward the beginning of Mexican time? Is there a meaning to all of our shared talents, our affinities, our vulnerabilities and repulsions? We carry these messages from the past about we know not what, marking out destinations in our own lives while our families make circles through an oceanic immensity of time.