Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (22 page)

When I rode in my uncle Manuel’s 1954 pearl-colored, wing-finned Chevrolet, rumbling thunderously with its great, roaring
mofle
through the new, white neighborhood we lived in on the city’s north side, I ducked under the backseat window, fearful some of my new friends might see me in that hulking behemoth jalopy, which was very definitely an old Mexican’s car. I wasn’t ashamed of Uncle Manuel, but I knew the Anglo kids from my new public school did not understand the glories of these vehicles, decked with
conjunto
music radio, saints’ cards, dashboard religious statuary, and furry dice, and I was too young not to give a damn. For his part, Uncle Manuel was infinitely proud of his car.

At Mount Sacred Heart, the school where I had been before we moved to the new neighborhood, many of the kids were Mexicanos like me. When we took our First Communion, we had looked like campesinos in our pressed white suits and caramel brown skin. It hadn’t seemed odd that we were all Mexican since, although it was hardly ever hostile, segregation between whites and Mexicans was still common in San Antonio then.

Every year, during San Antonio’s annual Fiesta Week, the city celebrated the victory of the Texans over Mexico in the Battle of San Jacinto, known as the Battle of Flowers, the last battle in the war for Texas independence in 1836. We would be visited on the school grounds by the newly crowned King Antonio. He served as the regent for the two weeks of festivities and was elected from an exclusively white, century-old social organization in the city called The Cavaliers. We would all be assembled on both sides of a marching promenade as he was driven onto the campus in a polished powder blue Cadillac convertible.

With each year’s new king, I was always astounded at how white he looked, as if the skin of his face had been powdered with talcum. He was seated atop the backseat of the gleaming car, truly as a king would be, dressed in a military cap with a shiny patent leather visor, a turquoise and magenta military uniform, festooned with massive golden epaulets and braided roping, and a jaunty half cape slung over one shoulder. You could see that he was wearing shiny black equestrian boots that came all the way up to his knees. His driver held a microphone to his mouth, announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen, King Antonio, of the 1963 Battle of Flowers Fiesta!” From the slow-moving car, smiling distractedly, he would wave at us with one hand, tossing us gilded wooden nickels with his picture on them with the other.

One year, my friend Dennis Perez and I hatched a seditious plot to throw “speargrass” at King Antonio, to see if we could stick him as his car went slowly by, but we were caught after just a few attempts by the fearsome Sister Alfred Euthanasius and had to perform penance by staying after school, writing multiplication tables for weeks thereafter. But the struggle against the conquest was still alive.

 

 

I can remember feeling, since long ago, that my generation was destined to be the end of our ancient family lines. Maybe not in terms of offspring, but the end, once and for all, of that old life of rivers and ranchería, the life that began to ebb when we first left Mexico. Of knowing which stars were where and what that meant to rustling fields of corn. Of the Garcia knowledge of the strength of esoteric metal alloys by their timbre and weight. Of the smell of wild dove soup, con limón. Of freshly cooked
menudo
in the winter. Of all the properly starched collars and serious brown faces, dressed like Europeans for a wedding. Of the society of pecans and
cabrito.
Of river-cooled watermelon, eaten in a large circle of relations. Of the last of Mexico left inside of Texas.

We were born to begin the last chapter of a very old story.

It seemed conceivable when I was a kid that the whole world would end soon, as if the apocalypse we were taught about in catechism classes was going to erupt out of our south Texas dirt. The face of Jesus, with his crown of thorns, was reported to have appeared on a tortilla in Harlingen. At school, one of my friends showed me a picture of a woman in India who had been pregnant for fourteen months, and now the child inside her womb was reciting from the Koran daily and delivering strange prophecies of doom for the world.

My first-grade teacher at Mount Sacred Heart, Sister Alfred, a nun of the order of
El Sagrado Corazón,
showed our class a slide-show presentation about the visions of Mary at Fatima, Portugal, accompanied by a narration on a phonograph record. The faces of the three children who had seen the Virgin speaking to them out of a cloud looked as familiar as my cousins, their expressions warm but melancholic, with deep-set eyes. The eldest of the visionaries, Lucia, even had the surname dos Santos. But we all took notice when we learned that before their visions of the Mother of Jesus took place, the three were given Communion by an emissary angel, with hosts that dripped blood. The voice on the phonograph told how, during the six visions of Mary, which took place in 1917, she spoke to them of the World Wars of this century and warned humanity of the evil rise of a
Great Bear of the East,
which, we were told, was most assuredly the Holy Mother’s way of describing the godless communist Soviet Union. On the day of the last of the visions, in a wide valley near Fatima, thousands of onlookers were said to have seen the sun dance in the sky, and then it seemed to fall upon them.

I was frightened when Sister Alfred later spoke to us about the mysterious “third secret” of Fatima, a vision so horrible that Pope John XXIII was said to have collapsed after reading it, and it has remained hidden away in a Vatican vault since.

“They say it’s about the end of the world,” Sister Alfred added in a solemn whisper, as if she were sharing a company secret with us. “And, I will tell you, from my trip to Rome, there are only three more tombs for Popes underneath Saint Peter’s.”

Surely, I thought, the end of the world would come in our time.

 

 

Los Santos never wandered much once they settled in San Antonio. They never much needed or sought to know anything of the world that lay to the north of Elgin, east of Houston, west of Uvalde, in Texas, and south of Monclova, in Mexico.

“This is where I’m from, right here,” my father would say, surveying the live oak woods on the family’s small ranch just outside of San Antonio, near Pleasanton, Texas.

“This is the greatest place on the whole earth.”

I certainly couldn’t see any use in learning a language other than Spanish and English, thinking, if I didn’t become an astronaut, I, too, would always dwell in these same lands. Perhaps this was the family’s final migration. There had been stragglers among the Santos, vaguely remembered circles of the family who had stayed behind, scattered throughout towns along the old pilgrimage route out of Mexico during the migrations of 1914. In Mexico, there were a few cousins in Nava, Cloete, Allende, along the main road, Carretera 57, and other relations had settled in towns along Highway 90, on the way to San Antonio. One family Uela used to visit had taken refuge in Villita Unión in Coahuila, just south of the border, eventually building an adobe house alongside a small stream, with financial help from my grandmother and her sister, Madrina Tomasa.

Another part of the tribe had remained in Hondo, in the country on the south Texas plains dotted with towns like Dhanis, Knippa, Sabinal, and Uvalde. Hondo is one of those Texas towns suspended in time—run through the middle by the highway. On one side are the railroad tracks and the bank, with a large painted sign reading BANK, a red-brick dry goods store, an old hotel. On the other side, a strip of gas stations, hardware stores, taco stands and barbecue joints, and the townspeople’s homes.

Those Santos of Hondo were meant to be ornery, even though many were the offspring of the wandering prankster José León, my abuelo’s half-brother, he of the great resounding oversized cowboy boots, who could keep everybody in the old house on Burr Road howling with laughter well into the night. Maybe he didn’t spend enough time with his children, always moving between the houses of his brothers and sisters in Texas and Mexico for long visits—and that ended up making them ornery.

With the passing years, the ones who had been left behind along the
peregrinaje
road were mainly rumored about, since even Aunt Connie, the “keeper of contact” within the Santos family, had long ago lost touch with them. But we were all from this place, this long narrow homeland of stragglers scattered along an old pilgrimage road that stretched from San Felipe de las Minas in the south, through Palaú and Múzquiz, Piedras Negras, and Eagle Pass, all the way north to San Antonio. If it wasn’t possible to ever fully know my grandfather’s story, there was still this road, connecting our present to our past, north to south, a current running in reverse. If San Antonio contained the fading remnant of Mexico, what was Mexico itself ?

Rain of Stones
Lluvia de Piedras

The road into the Mata ranch in north Mexico had been washed out from recent heavy rains. We were going out to do a tally of the nearly four hundred head of cattle, some of which had reportedly been lost in flash floods through distant mountain pastures. We were also carrying supplies for the
vaquero,
lashed to a burro laden with food and provisions. We had been riding all day. My cousin Chickee from San Antonio was along on the journey. My friend Abrán Mata, son to Dr. Mata, a dear friend of my father’s, was leading the way into his family’s remote Coahuila spread. Don Tiburcio, the
vaquero
from the Mata ranch, was tending the burro tied to the horn of his saddle.

Rains that heavy were unusual in Coahuila. The night before, the
vaqueros
at the ranch we stayed at had spoken about how the rains had come as a result of a spell cast by
la Diosa de Maguey,
“the Goddess of the Maguey,” a sinewy blue-green Mexican cactus that grows to the size of a truck and mixes into the sierra in Coahuila alongside stands of ponderosa pines and juniper trees. Meticulously picking mites out of the flour we would use to make our tortillas, the
vaquero,
Tiburcio, insisted that the rains were the work of a goddess, “La Colorada,” as he called her, who had a reputation for appearing as a beautiful woman to
vaqueros
in the mountains, then seducing them, never to be seen again by their families.