Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (15 page)

 

 

The Rosicrucian studies the Garcia sisters had done over the years taught them a way to live with proper attention to the signs and visions by which the unknown meaning of things could be discerned. Since all creation was part of the same manifestation of God, everything the world presented was part of the story of something larger taking place, revealing the ultimate meaning of the world. It was each initiate’s obligation to be able to discern the messages underlying whatever they saw.

A hawk seen in flight in fog was a warning: Your greatest efforts will be useless in the present web of circumstances.

A jug of wine with a drowned butterfly? The drunkenness of a loved one.

A silver halo doubled around the October moon was a sign of childbirth, probably twins.

Everything was connected.
Mal aires,
the evil airs, might enter your body through your uncovered mouth or head, wrapping themselves like a treacherous smoke around your bones. This could leave you with a rheum,
la gripa,
a life-threatening flu. As Madrina knew well, a frightful sight could paralyze you with
susto,
a fright that could freeze your emotions and leave you quivering and blank like a zombie. Worse, a malicious look from a stranger,
el mal ojo,
could kidnap your soul forever.

These ways of seeing had been second nature in Mexico. In the United States, even in Texas, which had been that part of New Spain known as
la Nueva Extremadura,
they began to feel like superstitions, especially to the men in the family. Yet, for the women, the power to see behind the face of things was even more important in this new world where the
pan dulce,
the universal sweet bread of Mexico, tasted so different. The pumpkin-filled
empanadas
tasted like mud. The roasted almond cookies, decorated with a pentagram, crumbled like dust in your mouth. It was the women who kept vigil over all of the knowledge that had been gathered across generations. In their blood was the book of the past. In their visions, they could read the book of the future.

It was years, Tía Pepa says, before she felt the family was finally safe and settled on the American side of the border. Great-grandfather left his work in the mines behind in Palaú and set out, with the help of his sons, to be a farmer. After arriving in Texas, the Garcias changed farms several times, in one case having to lose an entire crop after a quarrel with the farm owner. As Tía Pepa tells the story today, it was in those troubled days that she received a sign that she was where she was meant to be, and that the Garcias were on the right path.

It was a hot night in Creedmoor, Texas, and everyone had moved their beds outside onto a small grassy hill near the house, which always had cooling breezes, even on the most uncomfortable days. With her sisters asleep next to her, Pepa heard from far off the bass vibrato of her father’s snore, wreathed in the steady whistling of thousands of crickets. The mosquito netting drawn over her bed kept her from seeing many stars that night, but Venus and the moon were as bright as polished ivory.

“Then, as I watched, the moon seemed to open up, like a yucca flower throwing out its seeds.”

Pepa raises her hands above her head, spreading out and moving her fingers like a rain gently beginning to fall to the ground.

It was a slow-moving cascade of numberless luminous pears, glowing bright green against the midnight sky as they made their way down toward earth. As she watched the pears descending, Tía Pepa looked from bed to bed and saw her brothers and sisters sleeping, scattered across the small hill. The crickets and her father’s snoring had fallen silent.

The pears filled the air around them, bringing a sweet scent of the fruit as they drew closer. Then, one pear passed with a whisper through the netting above her, and when Pepa put her hand out to touch it, it passed through her hand as well. The immaterial fruit seemed to rotate slowly as it passed through her nightshirt and into her chest above her heart. She looked again to see her sisters and brothers, and the pears were descending out of the sky and passing into each of them as well.

“For a while, I just counted the pears as they passed into my heart. Some were bright green. Some were riper, with a little bit of red on them.”

Eventually, Tía Pepa says, she lost count near one hundred.

That was the night she slept her first real sleep since leaving Mexico.

Among the Garcias, several uncles and aunts, along with my father, tell the same tale as if it were their own, as if each had lived it and drawn from it their own unmistakable conclusion. It is a story about returning to Mexico, after the family had already been many years in the United States. Maybe it really did happen to each of them at different times, like the same vision, given to many, as a talisman for navigating the new life in
El Norte.

 

That was Uela’s favorite proverb, of which she had many.

“This, too, shall pass.”

“Esto, también, pasará,”
she said quietly to my uncle Raul who sat, with a distant expression, next to her. The room was warm and moist from the squat gas heater purring in the corner. The only light came from two oil lamps that were on the mantle, illuminating a ceramic Nativity scene. The whole house smelled of oil, orange rind, and brown sugar from the kitchen, where my aunts were making stacks of
buñuelos,
fried batter pastry florettes. These would be brought out and placed on the dining room table with all the rest of the Christmas delicacies—tamales, chiles rellenos, steaming hot
capirotada,
with its burnt, sugary scent.

Uela was dressed in a dark cotton, floral-print dress, with crisply pressed white scalloped collars. She was in mourning that year, and her starched posture was even more formal than usual. My cousin René had been killed some months before in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. Uncle Raul and Aunt Clara’s son had been eighteen years old. It was the first Christmas since his death and all the elders seemed morose. Uela knew that feeling well.

As his younger cousins, we had been aware that René had left to fight in the war, and before his death, whenever the television news had shown footage from Vietnam, we would compete to see who among us might be the first to spot our elder cousin warrior. He was part of a tradition of soldiers in the family that we regarded with awe. The hand-colored portraits in green, red, white, and blue of soldiers, living and dead, were a fixture of Mexicano households all over San Antonio. Most of our fathers had been in the army during World War II, and Uncle Raul, who had seen combat in Italy, had also been sent to Korea after rejoining the reserves to make a little extra money for his growing family.

At first, no one told us of René’s death, and our peals of delight at seeing Vietnam footage on TV were now met with an edgy silence. By the time we were told, months afterward, it already had the feeling of distant history, of a life arrested and taken back into the farthest recesses of time. I struggled then to remember my cousin’s face and his gangly Santos-Garcia body.

“It’s more than we should be asked to give, but it is just so, and we must accept it,” Uela had said quietly in her impeccably pronounced Spanish. Then she shrugged her shoulders and let out one of the characteristic sighs that used to issue slowly from her like the final note of a song, held pianissimo until the last vibration fell from the air.

As usual that year, Uela’s house was crowded with
viejos,
the old ones, for a Christmas fiesta. All of her brothers and sisters were there, along with my aunts and uncles. Most of my cousins were playing in the large backyard, lit up by a streetlamp Uncle Frank had installed just for the occasion. At these family
pachangas,
these gatherings of the tribe, I was always attracted to
los viejos
and the slow quiet that seemed to revolve around them.

Whether we were in one of our houses or encamped for an afternoon in one of San Antonio’s thick-gladed parks, their presence, confident and wise, made it feel as if we were all denizens of a secret Mestizo city, a world that existed parallel to the apparent physical lineaments of the city everyone else saw. There was a sense of ceremony around them: Uela; Madrina; Tía Pepa; Uncles Frank, Jesse, Manuel, Chale, and Gilbert. Plates of Aunt Minnie’s fresh Christmas bean and chicken tamales were especially prepared and set before
los viejos,
along with a Negra Modelo beer, poured into freezer-chilled fountain glasses. The tamales were delectable corn
masa
dumplings, some pork, some bean, some chicken, wrapped tightly in pale corn husks. A bowl was passed around with fresh jalapeños to be bitten raw, along with a mouthful of tamal. Among that generation, they ate chile into their nineties, impervious to the stomach ailments that force many middle-aged Mexicanos these days to renounce the “fire of the earth,” as one uncle calls it. The room was quiet, except for the sound of them eating and gently sipping their beers.

Time took on a different quality around them. There was never any alarm. All could be witnessed. Everything could be endured. Elsewhere in our lives, we were careening through a century of accelerating atrocities and wonders. The bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the tremors of the 1960s over civil rights struggles and the Vietnam war, even the Apollo landings on the moon passed before the Garcias as if they were watching a long movie.

“We have to admit we like things to be easier than they were before,” Uncle Frank once told me. “But there will always be pain.”

Around
los viejos,
it seemed time was spiraling in cycles that eventually brought us around the same curving nebula of tales and trials. The grief of a new widow. An uncle leaning heavily on the tequila. Famine brought on by war, revolution, or a change in the weather. A grandchild crazed on drugs, with no respect for anyone. They gave you the sense that the story was always longer than just the tale being told. It didn’t matter how desperate these times appeared to be to others. They knew how the world could spin through long spells of grief and solace, need and succor.

That Christmas, the Garcias had a message drawn from their long years of witness:

This too shall pass.

 

 

Abuelo Jacobo and the whole family, Madrina and six of her brothers, traveled from their sharecropping, hill pecan farm where they had lived since 1914. It was late in the afternoon and they arrived by train at the Missouri Pacific Railroad Depot downtown. The station was an aging majestic, Moorish temple-like structure with massive arches and a giant burnished bronze dome. As the train slowed to approach downtown, it loomed like a Spanish caliph’s palace over the city’s modern skyline. San Antonio had a rumbling sound Madrina had never heard before. Almost a roar. The street cars rushed alongside the train as they passed through town. Throngs of Mexicanos were busy buying produce and eating at taco stands in the mercado square, where the iron post gas lamps had already been lit.