Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (19 page)

In one corner of the plaza, on Commerce Street, my father would linger awhile on a curb, listening to Lydia Mendoza, the haunting singer of bittersweet
Norteño
ballads about deceitful men and treacherous love. On weekends, she would sit on a wooden basket next to a stand of tortilla makers, hunched over her guitar, intoning all her songs like dirges in a scabrous voice that sounded as if she had grains of an exquisite sand inside her throat.

The Health Department also banned the noisy funeral processions that had been one of the most visible public traditions of Mexican San Antonio and dated back to colonial times. When a Mexicano died, the body would remain at home for a night or two as family and friends streamed through, bringing tamales or tacos de chorizo, paying their respects, and joining in around-the-clock recitation of the rosary. Then, on the day of the funeral, mourners would be joined by a small band of musicians dressed in the white cotton garments of Mexican campesinos. The trumpet player would lead the way through the streets, followed by a violinist, an accordionist, and a
bajo sexto
player.

In one old painting by the Swiss artist Theodore de Gentilz, who lived in San Antonio during the late nineteenth century, the funeral band is shown in front of the pallbearers. They hoist the coffin aloft on their shoulders as solemnly dressed loved ones trail out of a door and into the street. The small cortege is followed by a lone saxophone player whose brooding melodies are said to have intertwined with the plaints of the bereaved.

Our family quickly established its own traditions in the city. Among the Garcias, simple, deliberate action was all that was required to hold the
tormentas
of the world at bay. You must always keep your word. And it is also good to be punctual. Once they had both settled in San Antonio, the old Garcia twins, my great-grandfather Jacobo and his brother, Abrán, religiously kept their weekly appointment to eat and visit together every Saturday at noon. Accustomed to crossing the plaza in Palaú before, they now lived at opposite ends of a city. Abuelito Jacobo continued to live with my grandparents and the family on Parsons Street on the southwest edge of downtown, and Tío Abrán lived on the near west side of the city on Montana Street.

The weekly rendezvous of Abuelos Jacobo and Abrán was a family
compromiso.
It was carried out in a precise ritual, which was always the Garcia way. On the mornings of one of their visitas, Abuelito would first set my aunt Bea to rolling a pocketful of cornshuck cigarettes made from Cuerno Y Concha tobacco, which Jacobo would joyfully smoke and share with his brother over the course of the day. Another aunt ironed the old man’s shirt on a sheet laid across the long wooden kitchen table, making sure later that the top button was properly fastened before he knotted his tie, since his fingers were stiff with arthritis and calloused from a lifetime of manual labor.

One of my uncles remembers how, on those mornings, Abuelo Jacobo would sing a rhyme to them in the high-pitched voice of the famous Mexican clown Don Fito:

 

Well into their eighties, they each would still set off from home alone, around ten thirty, bound for the bridge over the San Antonio River at Commerce Street, which started near the circular pink granite tower that looked like a minaret, and which Abuelito called “that Arabic water tower.” Sometimes they would have lunch across the street at Schilo’s, a traditional German deli where the two old Mexicans always ordered the same thing: the specialty split pea and ham soup and corned beef sandwiches. According to my aunts, who accompanied the
ancianos
every now and then on their weekly
paseos,
people on the busy sidewalks of Houston Street would step to one side and make room for the two staggeringly identical twins, walking with a deliberate, synchronous gait.

Jacobo and Abrán never ceased to relish the awe they could provoke from the city dwellers around them.

 

 

According to
La Prensa,
by the ninth day of January there had already been three suicides in San Antonio. Surely, the paper reported, the year’s heavy fog was confounding people to their deaths. Then, on the tenth, it carried the banner headline at the top of the front page.

The story tells how the inanimate body of Juan José Santos was found floating in the river near Simpson Street in Roosevelt Park. It says the body was identified by the deceased’s son, my father—also Juan José—and by Carlos Garcia, my great-uncle Chale, youngest brother to my grandmother. Two homicide detectives were reportedly present along with Coroner and Judge Raymond Gerhardt, and two greatcoated firemen, identified as A. L. Rathke and A. G. Pompa, who tried for a half hour to revive the forty-nine-year-old man before giving up. According to the
San Antonio Express
:

 

The city’s official death certificate also makes their conclusions clear:

 

Manner of Injury:
Deceased jumped in river.

Nature of Injury:
Drowned.

External Cause of Death:
Suicide.

The detectives, Fred Littlepage and Ed Amacker, told the
San Antonio Light
that Juan José left his house at 116 Parsons Street at six that morning, and the family had reported him missing at seven.

 

The newspaper’s account of the events leading up to Abuelo’s death ended abruptly by noting that,

 

Had Uela accompanied my father on the morning of his death? The brief report then says his body was found by my father and great-uncle just an hour later.
La Prensa
reported that Abuelo was employed as a foreman at the Petroleum Machine and Foundry Company, and referred ominously to how he had recently been the victim of
“una penosa y grave enfermedad,”
“a tormenting, dangerous infirmity.”

My aunt Connie still remembers with undimmed consternation how
La Prensa
reported her father’s death as a suicide.

“It was not. I just know it!” she insists.

In their version, the
San Antonio Light
carried a picture with the headline: “ALL IN VAIN.” The photograph shows the earnest young Mexicano fireman, A. G. Pompa, in a cap and heavy canvas peacoat crouched over my grandfather’s body, which is wrapped in a thick shroud of woolen blankets. A pair of respirator tubes run from a pump in the background, down into the long thick folds of the blanket, where the fireman’s right hand seems to lie gently on Abuelo Juan José’s forehead. The tousled salt-and-pepper hair at the very pate of his head is barely visible in the blanket’s inky shadow.

Aztec Theater

“Love, love me do! You know I love you!”
sings my friend Dennis Perez nervously to himself, standing next to me in the double file we have formed after the offertory. We are all about to eat from the body of Christ for the first time in our lives, and most of us are dumb with fear.

But as I close my eyes to pray the Our Father, as I had been taught, I see something I have never seen before. It is a place, but it has no color or shape. I open and close my eyes again, and it is still there. A place of nothing, as old as creation. To the extent that there is light there in the emptiness, it is present only in the faintest filaments and webs, and utterly still, silent and remote feeling, as if it were millions and millions of miles from everything and everyone I know. Tiny particles of dust seem to be suspended, motionless in front of me. It feels like a place beyond time and the world. It feels like the vacuum of outer space we’re launching the Gemini astronauts into, only now there is no planet to come back to. When everyone and everything of this world has passed away and all the light and heat of the universe has been extinguished, there would be only this. A cold, motionless
Nada.
An ocean without a shore. An infinitude of nothing.

 

There are mysteries held within a family and there are mysteries held within the deeper soul of a nation. We were of a people that had seen the ground beneath our feet renamed several times over the last five hundred years, a Mestizo nation derived partly by intrepid travelers who had left their Spanish homeland far behind—across a formidable span of ocean—and people who believed they had been living in these lands since the time of the world’s creation.

But apart from the mute testimony of the mission ruins, and the quiet, slowly ebbing presence of the ruins of old San Antonio, no one, either family or schoolteachers, had told me that the city we lived in was already nearly three hundred years old before I was born. It had been known for nearly two hundred years first as San Antonio de Bejar, named after the Duke of Bejar; then later renamed San Antonio de Valero, after the duke quarreled with his brother, the Viceroy of Mexico and Marquis de Valero. Over the entrance to the Spanish Governor’s Palace in downtown San Antonio, you can still see the Hapsburg coat of arms, colors and symbols of the Spanish royal family in the eighteenth century.

And for centuries before the Europeans had arrived, Indians had lived in these same territories, migrating on foot with the cycle of seasons, following the circuits of the planets, the serpentine sky dance of the moon and Venus, awed by the majestic, incremental movements of the deeper, distant stars. They fished the same creeks, the ones we called Cibolo, the Salado, and the Coleta. The ones we fished with cane poles for gray catfish and sun perch.