Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (13 page)

From the time she was a young girl in Palaú, she had been a follower of the
Via Rosae Crucis,
the mystical Way of the Rosy Cross, an allegedly ancient occult movement that had nestled within the traditions of the Catholic Church since the Middle Ages. She never told me about it. It was Tía Pepa who remembered how the three sisters, Uela, Pepa, and Madrina, had all studied the Gnostic teachings of the Christian secret society by correspondence. The Rosicrucians sought to reconcile the pre-Christian traditions of magic and esoteric studies with the revelations of Christ. Madrina had left her studies very early, Tía Pepa much later. But Uela had reached the highest level of initiation, the Adeptus Major, which is said to involve powers of prophecy, tongues, and healing.

 

 

“What were you searching for?”

The question sounds awkward even as I ask it, and Tía Pepa looks confused.

“What was your father looking for?” I asked.

Tía Pepa is busy in her kitchen, making
masa
for tamales in two clay pots while preparing a compote of herbs for her renowned medicinal JTV suppositories in a third. “JTV” for her name, Josefa Talia Valdes. She makes the suppositories in stainless steel molds that her brother Gilbert designed and fabricated for her. She then packs them in boxes shaped like cigarette packs with her initials stenciled on the outside.

La Tía tosses a handful of finely chopped leaves into the bubbling pot of herbal paste with a flick of her wrist, saying that at ninety-three, she must concentrate or she will confuse the ingredients, with unsavory consequences. Then she steps back from the stove and wipes her hands, front and back, on her apron.

“We just wanted to live in peace, nothing else,” she says, starting to churn a large dollop of lard into the sandy-colored
masa.

“Mexico. Texas. It didn’t matter to Papá. He would’ve taken us to Chicago if he had to.”

What was it that he wanted to be left in peace to do?

“We really didn’t think about those things,
hijito.
In those times, it was enough to keep tortillas and frijoles on the table.”

I have just returned from a long trip in Mexico and I have brought Tía Pepa an obsidian arrow point, dug up from pasture land around the ruins of the ancient city of Tula. I explain to her that Tula had been the capital of the Tolteca Indian empire, which preceded the Aztecas, and, at one time, had been ruled by the man-god Quetzalcoatl.

The ruins of the city include pyramids, plazas, murals, and ball courts, and they lie forty minutes to the northwest of Mexico City. Long before the Aztecs arrived in the valley of Mexico, it was in Tula that Quetzalcoatl is said to have banished human sacrifice and cultivated a society devoted to creating ornately decorated monuments, learning, and feats of rhetoric and poetry which they called “the scattering of the jade.”

His brother, Tezcatlipoca, jealous of the esteem that people bestowed on his sibling, conspired against him by getting him drunk at a fiesta. In a delirious state, Quetzalcoatl made love to his own sister. Scandalized, humiliated, and broken, Quetzalcoatl and a group of his followers went into exile, prophesying that he would return someday to throw down all the kingdoms of Mexico. Tula was abandoned, and as fate would have it, the date that had been foretold for Quetzalcoatl’s return, the year known as “One Reed,” was the year that Cortés arrived in Mexico, leading Motecuhzoma, emperor of the Aztecas, to believe that the banished god had returned to fulfill his ominous prophecy.

Tía Pepa listens to the story while she cradles the arrow point in her hand.

“You are not like us,” she says, with a mischievous grin. “You are an adventurer.”

I describe for her the four massive Atlantes warriors, clutching butterfly-shaped shields, who stand as sentries, looking south from atop the great step pyramid in Tula. Like a host of other large ancient cities on this continent, at some point, the people of Tula just moved on. They abandoned the noble city they had taken generations to create. They disappeared into the ether of the past, leaving Tula behind like a relic with only the Atlantes to keep vigil over the sacred precinct through the ages.

What were they searching for? Why were all the old Mexicans always abandoning their cities, from Teotihuacán to Chichén Itzá? How much of that old wanderlust was left among us Mestizos, leaving behind Mexico, Coahuila, and the Texas that had been forged in the crucible of ancient Mexican time?

“There was nothing that ever scared me like when we left home,” Pepa remembers now. “Everyone in Texas looked different, like the Americanos who used to run the mines in Palaú. The Mexicanos were all poor, like us, and we kept to ourselves. For a long time, it didn’t seem like home at all.”

 

 

Uncle Frank remembered coming to San Antonio several times, as a child, around the turn of the century. He said the trip took five days each way, crossing the Rio Grande at the old Paso de Francia, near the present-day Piedras Negras, before there was a bridge there. His father, Abuelo Jacobo Garcia, had been traveling to San Antonio from Palaú, Coahuila, all his life. He had represented the miners of Palaú there at the 1888 International Fair. The event was inaugurated by Mexican President-for-Life Porfirio Díaz, who pressed a telegraph key in Mexico City that lit up the newly installed street lamps in Alamo Plaza.

“It didn’t really feel like we were leaving Mexico,” Uncle Frank told me once. “Except most of the streets were paved, and they were wider. And there was less dust.”

In those days, the Rio San Antonio was wider and messier than the regulated river and manicured tourists’ riverwalk of today. When Uncle Frank first saw it, it divided the city in a winding, muddy meridian. Branches of old oaks hung out over the water, draped with Spanish moss, mixed in with stands of bamboo and elephant ears. The water ran so sluggishly that lilies grew along the bank. Uncle Frank says he remembers how the San Antonio River was wider than the Rio Grande—fifty yards at its widest mark—and that the wealthy
patrones
had their houses right along the riverbank, with white picket fences encircling their property.

There were iron arches with gas lamps over the downtown streets, illuminating the city center at night as if it were the seat of a grand empire. Along with his father and his brother, Frank was dazzled by the first electric streetcar he had ever seen, hypnotized by all the clean, rapid movements of its perfectly synchronized, silent working parts. On that trip, he and his brother Manuel traded drawings of the streetcar and how they thought it worked; eventually Uncle Frank did work on train engines in Texas.

It seemed everyone, even many of the Gringos, spoke Spanish. Just as they had since the time of the missions in the early eighteenth century, the famous “chili queens” of San Antonio had their busy open-air food stands in Market Plaza and along other streets downtown, selling fresh tortillas, moles, and bowls of rich, spicy ground beef
picadillo,
the original Mexican dish from which Texas-style chili is derived. Just as in Mexico, there were religious processions and celebrations taking place around the downtown cathedral. On one of their trips, Uncle Frank remembers seeing a man crucified—for real, he insisted—in Main Plaza during easter observances, with a large crowd looking on.

Coahuila and Texas were a single state of the Mexican republic, and the viceroy who ruled the state sat in Monclova, Coahuila. San Antonio had always been a distant northern settlement, increasingly embattled as more and more Americanos settled there. Eventually, the Anglo Texans broke away from Mexico, and Texas formed their own republic, later becoming a state of the American Union. All the Mexicanos who had lived as Tejanos, as the longtime Mexican residents of Texas were known, became Americans overnight.

Visiting San Antonio in those days, Uncle Frank said, was like going to a museum. They city had been there almost two hundred years already. The missions, with their fallen walls and collapsed limestone aqueducts, or
acequias,
were just landmarks that they passed on the road north into the center of the city.

There, the modest limestone “palace” of the Spanish governor, with its cool, tree-shaded courtyard and fountain, was still standing from colonial times, when San Antonio and parts of southeastern Texas had been settled by los Canarios, eighteenth-century homesteaders from the Canary Islands. There had also been a wave of settlers from Cáceres, in the high plains of Spain. Also, many of the Indian tribes who had allied themselves with Cortés against the Aztecas, like the Totonacas and the Tlaxcaltecas, had long ago been given land in the northern reaches of Nueva España, in places like Monterrey, San Diego, in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and San Antonio.

On those early visits, Uncle Frank and Abuelo Jacobo stayed with my great-grandfather’s boyhood friend Tacho Carvajal, who had been a foreman at the Palaú mines and who moved north to supervise one of the quarries that were cutting stone to build the state’s new capitol building in Austin. Tacho and his family had a big house near the quarry, which stood on the northern edge of town.

Abuelo Jacobo would arrive bearing gifts,
piloncillo
and
rollos de nata,
sugar cane candy and goat’s milk caramel delicacies, from the sierra country where Tacho had been born. Tacho complained that nothing like that was available in San Antonio. Uncle Frank said it was also hard to find real
barbacoa,
made from the head of a cow, fire-roasted for hours, buried underground. And it was harder still to find decent
cabrito,
the succulent roasted young goat which was a staple of the
cocina norteña.

Abuelo Jacobo joked with his old friend Tacho about how long it would take him to have his fill of this new American way of life and come back to Palaú. Tacho’s mother was getting older, and she had refused to move with her son to San Antonio. His small farm in Palaú lay fallow. His brothers and sisters expected he would return, though as the years passed, several of them eventually moved north themselves, staying with Tacho before finding their own homes in the city. Uncle Frank hadn’t ever imagined that they, too, would soon leave Palaú for San Antonio. He never thought they would be anything but Mexican. Abuelo Jacobo was the administrator of las Minas de Hondo, an old mine in Palaú that seemed to be loaded with unlimited amounts of coal. He also owned a
granja,
his true passion. This small parcel of land was where he farmed the vegetables and herbs which his family of eleven children, three girls and eight boys, consumed by the bushel.