Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (12 page)

The room smelled of Grandmother’s Mexican talc and eucalyptus oil, which Grandmother’s maid, Maria Moya, left in a pan on the radiator to “purify” the air. With the television going in the background, Grandmother wielded her remote control like a whipcrack, continuously changing the channel before you could focus on an image. Then we would sit for long, tranquil pauses in the draped afternoon light with our gazes locked on one another, until she would eventually become annoyed and look away. Hers wasn’t a gaze of dearness. She had the indomitable mien of a witness, a grizzled bearer of knowledge which she had long ago left behind any particular need to pass on.

Looking at Grandmother, who held her old quiet with such unyielding gravity and determination, I wondered how far back she thought we went in that long story whose ruins surrounded us in San Antonio, Texas. Through Uncle Lico’s work, we knew hers was an old family, and we could count generations of her family like rosary beads, as far back as 1767. But there are families that trace their lineage to ground zero of the conquest, like sacred genealogies of a second creation time.

There are living descendants of Cortés and descendants of Motecuhzoma, and even descendants of la familia Cortés-Motecuhzoma, as Cortés fathered a child with Tecuichpotzín, the daughter of the defeated Aztec
cacique,
and who later came to be known simply as Doña Isabel. In this way, the Spanish set out to dissolve the royal Mexica bloodlines. New dynasties would not be allowed to form in their place.

The conquistadores destroyed the pyramids and temples, stone by stone. They burned manuscripts and smelted basketfuls of golden idols in the flames. In this great carnal maelstrom, fathering children with Indian women was another way to break the tradition, to place fatal caesuras in the transmission of the Indian mind and soul through time. The children of these unions, these rapes, these romances, were mainly illegitimate, outsiders to the two worlds that had given them birth.

Indian memory is Mexican memory. Their history is our history—implicit, silent, inevitable.

Uncle Lico’s excavation of the Lopez and Vela family catacombs showed no trace of Indian ancestors. But such things are rarely recorded, as with my great-great-grandfather, who married a Kikapu Indian. No one now remembers anything about her Indian family. The Mestizos, with Spanish names and outward appearance, and Indian hearts, usually gave their allegiance to New Spain. They dropped their indigenous names and became
Zeferino, Guillerma, Leocadio, Crescencio, Perfecta,
and
Ruperta.
They became
de la Garza, Reyna, Areval, Treviño, Adame,
and
Saldaña.

In the time of the conquest, one of Motecuhzoma’s grandsons, Juan, the youngest son of Doña Isabel, and another Spanish officer left Mexico for Cáceres, Spain, where he married a Spanish woman and built the Motecuhzoma Palace, which allegedly still stands. According to their family history in the archives of the Indies in Seville, his offspring became titled nobility. The Count of Enjarada. The Duke of Abrantes. The Duke of Linares. Then, late in the sixteenth century, in the court of Philip II, the heirs of Motecuhzoma agreed to renounce all their natural rights in Mexico as descendants of the Mexica emperor in exchange for vast lands in Spain that would be theirs forever.

Uncle Lico once signed a letter to me with a description of himself as “your
Very Hispanic
Mexican Uncle,” followed by his characteristically flamboyant signature that grew more filigrees as he grew older. Uncle Lico explained the meaning of that signature one day, while having lunch with me in a diner in downtown San Antonio called The Mexican Manhattan. He took off his powder blue straw porkpie hat, drew his hand across his balding, gray-haired head, and declared, “I’m gonna find the grandfather that got off the boat—the one related to the King of Spain,” recalling one of his own genealogies of the Vela family that began with an unnamed Spanish monarch.

Long ago, Lico had interviewed Dionisio Alarcón, one of the older residents of the Lopez-Vela hometown of Cotulla, Texas, who told him the Velas were descended from the King of Spain, thereby igniting my uncle’s genealogical fever. As a child, Dionisio had known my great-grandfather Emeterio Vela and reported having once been shown a silver goblet with the name of some king or other inscribed on it, though he could not exactly remember which. It was also rumored, according to Don Dionisio, that when the family first came to New Spain, they were, in Dionisio’s words,
“maranos, conversos”
—Jewish converts to Christianity. And perhaps this wasn’t untrue. In one family portrait of Grandmother Leandra from the late 1940s, with all of her grown children, they look Basque, Andalusian, or North African. Their deeply set dark eyes, dark hair, their long features and limbs, carry a look of faces of the Pyrenees and of the Mediterranean littoral.

But Uncle Lico never found that first ancestor who made the Atlantic crossing. He was never able to put all of his research together into
“La Cronica de las Familias Lopez y Vela de Cotulla,”
the title for the historical book he spoke of writing of the families. He brooded over his research as if it were a disintegrating family relic that had been left uneasily in his care. It was, as he put it, “my calling in this world.” He knew and was in contact with others like him, dispossessed Mexicans scattered all over the United States, all of them piecing together the evidence of a south Texas world that had been lost in time.

He imagined what the ancestors might’ve looked like, how they might’ve spoken and dressed, where they lived. But for all the names that he had recovered from oblivion, he had never found a single photograph of any of the distant relations. The charts and discs he made of the family’s descent in time were always being reworked, sometimes in italics, sometimes in thick pencil, with a new name added here and there. He made numerous copies of his manuscripts and charts, bound them in legal size plastic loop binders with manila covers, and sent them in packages out to his nieces and nephews.

I received them repeatedly as a university student in Indiana. The packages always appeared as the telltale fruits of his obsession—the same charts, transcripts, and copied letters, perhaps newly annotated—with breathless greetings on carbon-copy, pink onion-skin stationery. They usually ended with a question like,

 

 

And always included was a single, pristine San Judás prayer card.

In Cotulla, Texas, when the Lopez family was young, my mother had a sister, Lily Amanda, who died as a child of two, and that experience left both of my grandparents, Leandra and Leonides, with a fascination with death and the spirits of the ancestors.

On each of those expeditions with my grandmother to Laredo to visit the family graves, she would insist on yet another picture of herself being taken in front of all the headstones of her father and mother, and, of course, my grandfather’s grave, which would also someday be her own. Over the years, she kept a time-lapse image of herself against this timeless backdrop. She would regard the stones with careful attention, circling around the graves once before asking us to give it a sweeping and a good wash, while she arranged some newly purchased plastic irises in a vase.

When Grandmother died on my birthday in 1974, she left detailed instructions to bury her in the grave in Laredo, alongside her husband, Leonides. Laredo, on the Texas-Mexico border, had also been her birthplace. Grandmother had stipulated that her burial would take place after a Mass in the downtown cathedral, during which a singer was to perform traditional funeral dirges in Latin with an accompanying organ.

After setting out from San Antonio with Uncle Lauro early in the morning, following the black Cadillac hearse south down Interstate 35, we eventually entered Laredo. We went to a house near the cathedral to hire an old woman dressed in black whom the padre had told us could sing the songs Grandmother had requested.

“You need one of the old-time professional mourners,” he said. “You need la señora Rosa, Queen of the
Pésames.
”

Doña Rosa’s living room looked like a chapel, with an altar full of candles burning in votive jars and hundreds of small photographs of all the souls at whose funerals she had sung over the years. Many were already yellowed and cracked.

“Of course I knew of your mother. I saw her sweet picture in the paper. How sad,” she told my uncle, touching his arm.

“The Velas are a very fine family. A very great lady, your mother.”

She pulled a large black cotton rebozo over her head and began moving more slowly, as if she were getting into the proper frame of mind before the funeral Mass. Her fee was to be thirty-five dollars, and she would play the organ herself.

“Such a great lady, how sad,” she kept repeating and shaking her head, as we walked across the plaza back to the cathedral.

Once the Mass had begun, her unfettered caterwaulings startled all the relatives and friends who had gathered in the church. Doña Rosa rattled the keys of the small electric church organ, singing “Te Deus” with an intensity that made her voice crack and her body shake. As sad as grandmother’s passing was, none of us could keep a straight face through Señora Rosa’s performance. The priest offering the Mass even lost his composure during the Communion as she wailed hallelujahs until the whole church reverberated in her doleful, piercing ululations.

“Not quite what Mother intended,” Uncle Lauro said, dryly staring at the professional mourner.

Later, most of the funeral party was diverted from the cortege when another uncle mistakenly followed a dark limousine off the expressway and took most of the line of cars with him. Only a small number of us in Grandmother’s family found the cemetery where the priest completed Leandra’s last rites on that wet, gray morning on a hillside overlooking the Rio Grande. She always liked
serenatas,
going back to when my father used to sing through an open window to my mother and her friends. My father stepped forward and sang her one last song, “Ave Maria,” with the rain beginning to fall.

We left Grandmother there on the border, ate
caldo de gallina
on the Mexican side, and headed back for San Antonio.

 

 

“All the old Mexicans are dying.”

That’s what Uncle Lico said, shuffling through a pack of the funeral prayer cards of departed friends, which he kept together with a rubber band on the top of his desk. The walls of his study were crowded with photographs of the family. Tía Fermina, radiant with her ivory skin in bright sunlight. A newspaper clipping about Grandmother’s having sent the lone floral tribute that made it to the grave on the occasion of LBJ’s death. There was also a picture of LBJ, signed and dedicated to Grandmother, “WITH MANY HAPPY MEMORIES OF COTULLA.” The president is in a cowboy hat, holding his beagle under one arm while leaning on a cedar post fence on his ranch in Stonewall, Texas. And there were pictures of Henry Cisneros, and Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez, autographed for Uncle Lico.

Holding up one faded prayer card of San Miguel, the archangel, Uncle Lico announced, “Gus Garcia. 1965. Greatest Mexican American attorney ever. First ‘Meskin’ to argue and win a case before the Supreme Court. A brilliant speaker. This cat had green eyes, man, just like a movie star.”

My uncle turned the card over and looked at the picture of the archangel, from which most of the gold glitter had flecked off over the years.

“Died a drunk in Market Plaza, under a bench, wrapped in newspapers.”

That day, the last day I saw Uncle Lico alive, I told him the story of Gonzalo de Guerrero, the Spanish officer who had been shipwrecked in the Yucatán in the early sixteenth century and chose to remain with the Mayans after being found by Cortés at the beginning of his military campaign against the Aztecs. Guerrero had married a Mayan princess and they had four children.

When he was discovered by his Spanish compatriots, he was tattooed and adorned with stones hanging from pierced earlobes. He had studied the sacred practice of Mayan astronomical timekeeping in the priestly schools of Chetumal, where he was living. He told Cortés’s delegation that he would stay and fight with his new people, which he did, dying in battle some years later battling against his own Spanish brethren.

“You know, there were Guerreros in the Lopez family, back in the 1780s,” Uncle Lico remembered, opening one of his long wooden filing drawers to look for his eighteenth-century annals. “It could be we are related to that guy,” he added.

In his diary, Guerrero confessed to never being anything but appalled by the bloody sacrifices to the Mayan god Kukulcán, which were at the center of Mayan ceremonial life. He had witnessed some of his comrades having their hearts pulled out, and laid, still beating, on the gory Chac Mool altar of the temple at Chetumal.

When one of Guerrero’s children, a daughter, was going to be sacrificed, he stood up before his father-in-law, a Mayan
cacique,
and the gathered elders and made a speech to try to dissuade them from choosing her. Yes, it was an honor to be sacrificed, to give your life so that the world would not be destroyed. But he told them that in his own visions he had been told the old gods wanted only the pure blood of the “old” tribes—the Spanish and the Indian. These new children, born a part of both worlds, would serve new gods. Their blood was distasteful to the old gods who had ruled for ages and ages.

It meant that, as more and more Mestizos were born, the old gods would go hungrier and hungrier. Eventually, the old gods would be abandoned.

They, too, would die.

The elders nodded resolutely and Guerrero’s daughter was spared.

“Sounds like he could’ve been a Lopez,” Uncle Lico said, laughing. “Very, very crafty.
Puro Lopez.
”