Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (20 page)

It wasn’t just our family that remained quiet to this past. It was as if all the Mexicanos had forgotten it.

The lands around the city seemed so new and raw, so forbidding and untrodden, even when I was a child. Driving out from San Antonio, within a half hour, rickety barbed wire fences ran the borders of land that looked wild and untameable. The landscape to the north was riven with rocky gorges and craggy hills that had slowed the inexorable extension of San Antonio’s border in that direction. Instead, for a century, the city had grown very slowly across the flatlands to the south, east, and west, as farms and ranches were replaced gradually with row houses and San Antonio’s first suburbs. It seemed impossible to imagine how people had lived before there was a settlement to protect them against the heat, the droughts, the floods, and the scarcity of food.

The Spanish conquistador, Cabeza de Vaca, passed through these riverlands on his shipwrecked odyssey from Florida to New Mexico in the 1530s. Searching for emissaries of New Spain, he found the Indians, Coahuiltecas and Xarames, living a meager life in the hardscrabble landscape where they fished, gathered roots and berries, and journeyed north to hunt scarce deer for venison—and still there was hunger.

The city emanated a deeply old feeling. It was partly the land on which the city was situated, the settled river plain, the countless springs, the open northern views to the hills, the terrain sloping southward to Mexico. But there was also something old about the people themselves. The earliest Spanish colonizers to arrive were a group of families from the Canary Islands, itself a place of great antiquity in the Old World. The ancient Canarios from the islands off the coast of Africa buried their dead in elaborate circular stone cairns on high ocean cliffs, and they practiced a form of mummification not unlike that developed in the time of Egypt’s great dynasties.

There were only a few
San Antonioenses
who could, with authentic documents and proper titles, trace their bloodlines to those original Canario families, although rumors of this noble lineage periodically swirled around successful Mexicans, like lawyers, doctors, and judges. The most well known were Don Demostenio and Doña Herlinda Zuniga, brother and sister. The last of their august line from the islands, which included some of the early governors of the Villa de San Fernando, they already were in their late eighties when I was receiving my First Communion. These two always seemed to be shipwrecked and abandoned in an alien century. The San Antonio they had known as children was gone.

The only sanctuary for their memories was in the limestone vault of the San Fernando Cathedral downtown, in the front pew on the left side of the aisle, near the giant marble baptistery. This was the place in the old church that had been vouchsafed to the Zunigas by the Creator at the beginning of time. From that perch, Doña Herlinda, petite but strong-boned, dressed in heavy black lace gowns with a silver chignon, wielded her cane against the ankles of Communioners who ventured too close to her prayer space.

Don Demostenio was pale, short, and bald, but very erect in posture and always in a white suit, Panama hat, and a white handlebar mustache. He looked like an Hispano Eric von Stroheim, wearing a gold-rimmed monocle, while he reviewed the lunch special menu at the Mexican Manhattan, a Tex-Mex diner on Soledad Street that was Uncle Lico’s favorite. Sitting together in a booth at that diner, Don Demostenio and Doña Herlinda looked as if they had walked out of an El Greco painting and were now stranded here, like two old Spanish angels.

In the early 1960s, it felt as if the long story of San Antonio, however old it might prove to be, was beginning to wane. Born as I was into the budding years of rock and roll, with its incipient electronically communicated international mass culture, the fragments of tales and characters, like the Zuniga siblings, were the few remaining remnants of the inconclusive myths of our city’s origin. Even as I was learning to speak and write English properly, listening to the Beatles in my father’s pickup truck, mourning JFK, watching
The Beverly Hillbillies,
going to Disneyland, and doing most of the things that made up a kid’s initiation into the secret sciences of the American way of life, the streets of San Antonio were an umbilical tether to a past that otherwise seemed to be disintegrating, memory by memory.

The world seemed poised at the gateway to an age when the earth itself might be abandoned, along with its millennial legacy of discord, war, and genocide. I was born in the year the sleek taper of a Russian rocket pierced a microthin vapor mist at the furthest edge of the stratosphere for the first time and set the Sputnik satellite in orbit, a whirling echo of our nomadic longing to see farther and farther across the next horizon.

San Antonio, and every city on the planet for that matter, might soon become merely the places from which we set out, into the vast reaches of space. My uncle Charles worked in Houston for the photographic lab at NASA, which developed all of the pictures from the Gemini and Apollo voyages. Over the years we accumulated an exhaustive snapshot album of the missions. We came to San Antonio after centuries of exploration and moving settlements. The image of an Apollo astronaut, dressed in silvery garments, like a seraph, suspended weightless in space against a backdrop of the planet itself, made the path of further exploration clear to me.

And perhaps this new migration would echo that of the past. All across the Americas, from the great Cahokia mound in Illinois to Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, ancient Teotihuacán, near Mexico City, and Machu Pichu in Peru, great cities had been built, sometimes over hundreds of years, only to be suddenly disinhabited, left intact, abandoned entirely to ghosts. They left their dead ancestors behind, elaborate buildings standing, painted pots unbroken, setting out for who knows where.

Walking once with a National Park Service archaeologist on a searing, chrome-sky day through the rooms of the crescent-shaped Pueblo Bonito ruins in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, I was told that there was no evidence anywhere in the canyon of war, famine, or disaster to explain why the Anasazi left their great city at Chaco behind in the eighth century of the present era. The petroglyphs that dot the length of the canyon’s stone walls, of whirling spirals, lightning bolts, handprints, deer, and people, offer no answers that we can read today. Neither do the ceremonial burials of birds, in hundreds of tiny ceramic boxes, the room-size caches of abalone shells, the great bundles of porcupine quills that had all been secreted away and forgotten after they left.

“Maybe that’s just how they saw things,” the archaeologist said. The place remains sacred today, and Indian people go there for rites and prayers, leaving behind small offerings wrapped in cloth of blue corn, falcon feathers, or red sand in the empty rooms of the ruins.

“Maybe they did what they were supposed to do here, during a certain time, then they just moved on,” she said, staring down into the great hollow of one of Chaco’s kivas, the sunken circular earth chambers used by the Anasazi for prayer and ceremonies. “They just moved on, to something else.”

Maybe it was just as well to be done with San Antonio. In the fifty years since the Santos had made their home there, most of our joys and griefs, private and shared, had been mapped onto the city’s streets and barrios, onto its downtown precinct, its hills, and its river. It was a half century of tales told to that place, but the city was a reticent witness.

 

 

At the founding of many American cities lurk unsavory tales of invasion and mayhem, usually whitewashed or forgotten. Whether it’s the hoary presence of old buildings or a nebula of run-down shacks and other ruins, the evidence of the past—raw, weathered, and scarred—raises accusatory questions. How did this all come about? What price was paid, by whom, and for whose sake? Who was here before the whole story began? Troubled by the wraiths of American history, our cities have been bled by the suburbs and washed in the waters of urban renewal. They have emerged cleansed of the taint of the sin, discord, and, in some cases, the ethnicity of the past.

Yet, the past is recorded, even if imperfectly. On a visit to San Antonio in 1854, Frederick Law Olmsted, architect of New York City’s Central Park, felt like an outsider there, writing in his journal of “the dirty, grim, old stuccoed stone cathedral, whose cracked bell is now clunking for vespers, in a tone that bids us no welcome, as more of the intruding race who have caused all this progress, on which its traditions, like its imperturbable dome, frown down.”

In the same year, the historian Timothy Matovina tells of a San Antonian who stormed the sanctuary of Mission San Juan and began to demolish the statues and images of Jesus and the saints with a hammer. As he smashed a figurine of St. Martin de Porres, he was stopped by other Tejanos. At the time of the conquest, for many of the Indios and Mestizos alike, the saints of the Catholic sacred pantheon became the focus of the devotions that had once been offered to the Pre-Columbian gods. These Mexican gods were no gods at all, the vandal told those who restrained him. If Mexicans worshipped the true God, he would never have let the Gringos take Texas.

We lived in the ruins of that time, when the faint echoes of the conquest had become mirages and spectacles. On Saturdays, all day long, with brothers, cousins, and friends, we watched Kung-Fu triple features at the Aztec Theater, a cinema palace in downtown San Antonio. The walls of the theater were decorated with colorful panels of Mayan and Aztecan glyphs, interspersed with the faces of various gods, all presided over by the Feathered Serpent God Quetzalcoatl, whose image surrounded the screen as Bruce Lee threw slow-motion aerial drop kicks. Coyolxauqhui, the moon-faced Mexica night goddess, her face pierced and gilded, stared down at us in the red light of the exit signs.

The theater was inaugurated in 1926, after a San Antonio architect sent assistants all over Mexico to collect images and ideas from the ruins of Maya, Zapoteca, Mixteca, Tolteca, and Azteca Indian cities. The curtain painting depicted the first meeting between Cortés and Motecuhzoma, the Aztec emperor. Thousands of people were turned away from that opening, according to one of my great-uncles who remembers being there, having sneaked in early in the afternoon. After the movie, he said, there was a grand Aztecan costume pageant called, “The Court of Montezuma,” where the performers enacted the scene on the curtain.

On Houston Street, the Majestic Theater specialized in Godzilla and race car movies. It had its own lavish stone proscenium decked with tableaux mort of stucco turkeys, Indian warriors, and feathered Cherubim. Part Bavaria, part American West, this theater was where we watched double features of
Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster
and
Mothra
beneath a ceiling lit by flickering evening stars, across which wispy desert clouds would slowly pass. Once, when Maria, Grandmother’s housemaid, accompanied us, she insisted the sky showed every sign of raining soon and urged us to leave.

The Texas Theater, a block up from the Majestic, belonged to John Wayne and Elvis. We went there on school field trips to see
Red River
,
The Alamo
, and, finally,
True Grit
, where a one-eyed John Wayne looked broken down and spent. On weekends, they let Grandmother Leandra in for free at the Texas. She had the reputation of being Elvis’s oldest fan in San Antonio. Grandmother liked how well behaved he was, even if he made a wrong decision in life, like in
King Creole
. According to Grandmother, he always saw the truth in the end—and he always had a good heart, which was the most important thing.

Further up Houston Street was the art deco Alameda Theater, with its three-story-high neon marquee in the shape of a feather. Here, mariachis on horseback would fill the stage, playing their instruments for a final encore performance of “Guadalajara” at the end of the three-hour-long stage shows, which capped off the day’s screening of Cantinflas movies. The audience whooped and sang along as each of the evening’s guest stars came out one more time and delivered a verse into the microphone.

We walked amid Moorish beehive towers hewn from red granite, through the shaded courtyard of the Spanish Governor’s Palace, past the turquoise and maroon walls of El Tenampa Bar. The wide sidewalks of Houston Street lit up like a Mexican carnival every Saturday night, crowded with strolling old folks, young lovers, cowboys, hippies, and the elegant
pachucos
in their baggy shirts and pants and pointed, black patent leather shoes.

Throughout my childhood, at the end of each day, my parents would pack us into the red Ford station wagon and drive us downtown, first along Houston Street, taking a right at the Alamo, stopping at the plaza in front of the old mission. A street musician named Bongo Joe, whom we heard had come from New Orleans, was usually there, playing two banged-up oil drums with rattle mallets, whistling sultry blues and singing in lower, raspier tones than Louis Armstrong in the hot Texas night. Sometimes he just let his rolling, melancholy beat go on forever, changing with the shifting warm breezes. The people who gathered to listen threw coins into the giant wheelbarrow Bongo used to carry his drums off at the end of the night.

We would drive up Commerce Street, then pause by the Plaza de las Islas in front of the cathedral to watch the circular colonnade of water of the old fountain that was illuminated in a battery of coruscating colored lights. Sometimes, as a special treat during the summer, we stopped at a watermelon stand out on Fredericksburg Road on the way home, eating great crescent-shaped slices over picnic benches under a corrugated tin roof, spitting our seeds out into the moonlit dirt.

That “San Anto” of memory, already a relic then of a more distant past, was destined, like its precursor, to be abandoned, lost, preserved only in old photographs and in our fragmentary remembrance. Houston Street today is an avenue of ghosts. The Texas Theater was torn down except for its limestone and colored tile facade and box office, left to adorn a telecommunications corporation headquarters. The Aztec Theater is condemned and falling to ruin, the gods’ faces marred with graffiti, the stone water fountains green with algae.