Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (23 page)

 

On my mother’s side, the Lopez and the Velas were from the small town of Cotulla, in south Texas. On Sundays, before Grandfather Leonides’s death, the families would join his brothers José and Blas, and take all the relatives out to a small ranch, a
granjita,
outside of town where a great lunch of barbecued goat was already being prepared. The closeness of the
rancho,
the size of the town, at under a thousand families, nestled Cotulla in a time that felt unchanging, and well away from the locomotion and bustle of the American cities.

After my grandfather Leonides’s death there in 1935, Grandmother moved her family to San Antonio for the schools, and to be closer to her sister, Fermina. In San Antonio, by then already a large city, no one knew her. She walked down Houston Street unnoticed by the myriad pedestrians, a widow from one of the oldest Mexican families in Texas, the Velas from Mier—now become invisible. In Cotulla she was widely known and deferred to throughout the town as Doña Leandra, the wife of Don Leonides, the grocer who always wore a suit. She hated being called Señora Lopez.

The
Norteños
of the family, the Santos and Garcias of north Mexico, always claimed to be ready to move back to the countryside, with a little land to farm, maybe a few head of cattle, but always delaying, always longing perhaps, but never really planning to leave San Antonio, ever. Instead, most weekends we retired to the ranches and the creeks, the rivers and the pastures surrounding San Antonio.

Paradise, for many
Norteños,
would be a modest ranch, even a dry, scrubby little piece of sandy land like the Pleasanton
ranchito,
to settle on for eternity. You hear this life sung about and celebrated, sweetly, bitterly, in Tex-Mex
corridos
, and
ranchero
music of north Mexico, and in the glossy, new Day-Glo Mexican colors of popular Tejano music. What is left of the
ranchero
life of south Texas and north Mexico is as old as the New World itself, no matter what its trappings today. Out of its origins in the fierce horsemanship of the Españoles, and the Indians’ knowledge of the terrain, a whole civilization emerged, built with mesquite, leather, rope, corrugated tin, and an infinitude of barbed wire.

That world began for me on a
ranchito
in Medina river valley sand, the flat, golden territory southeast of the city, where spindly live oaks grow alongside mesquite and huisache trees, and the whole landscape is dotted with dense clusters of flowering, scarlet-fruited cactus. On iridescent summer days, squeaky tin windmills churned so slowly in the sluggish Tejano breezes that the pumps only managed to pull enough water from the ground to produce a syrupy trickle into the large cement tank. Across cleared pastures, under an unquenchable, bleaching sun, a few cattle would huddle in the shade around a block of salt. And always the song of thousands upon thousands of cicadas, chirping in the hot, still air.

My father, a veteran of World War II, had bought the small ranch, which never really had a proper ranch name, with a loan from the Texas Veteran’s Land Board. It was near Pleasanton, Texas, just south of San Antonio’s outskirts. Most Friday afternoons, after school, we loaded up the station wagon and made the journey across town and out to the
rancho.
As we passed through the city in what seemed an interminable trek, it was always unfathomable to me that this world of crowded shopping-mall parking lots, busy railroad crossings, and stalling downtown traffic around the bustling mercado existed almost side by side with the silent, remote world of the ranch. From the sandy road that led to the entrance gate, I saw haunted, abandoned clapboard ranch houses dotting the horizon, over sprawling fields of dry grasses. We entered the ranch through a rusting wrought iron gate that creaked with the sound of an eagle’s cry, and the older oaks alongside the road formed a tunnel over us, a mosaic of sunlight. We drove the half-mile-long sandy road to where the house was.

My pressing concern was the garden. The sandy riverine loam there nurtured my watermelons, which blossomed and grew in a staggering abundance. In addition to uncles and aunts,
compadres y comadres,
cousins, and a pony called Brown Beauty, the weekend ranch society included white-tailed deer; armadillos; slithering, dreaded poisonous copperheads; hawks; and mockingbirds. My father and uncles would make a big fire as soon as we arrived, preparing for our hecatomb
parillada
of grilled goat, brisket, chicken, wieners, and roasting ears of corn. On special weekends, they dug a hole to bury a cow’s head with burning coals, to slow roast the Sunday-morning breakfast delicacy of tender tacos of the stringy head meat called
barbacoa.

Walking out from the spacious oak grove where we had a small army surplus Quonset hut into the dry brush country, I had the familiar, contradictory feeling that this was a place of great antiquity, and utter newness. It seemed age-old but untouched, with no signs of human presence there ever before. Years later, visiting a farm of a girlfriend’s grandmother in New Hampshire, I was taken aback by how handled the forests were—trees bearing crosses, X’s, circles, and arrows, moss-covered paths, stone walls half-fallen, mended, crisscrossing far into the woods, far from the nearest road.

One of the main attractions of the ranch was Brown Beauty, a squat, husky Shetland pony my father had bought for twenty-seven dollars at a livestock auction in Pleasanton. At these auctions and rodeos, Mexicans and Anglos met around mesquite corrals, iron pens, and sand-filled rings to haggle over prices. They did business then just as they had for the last two hundred years, trading heifers, mares, bulls—and mad ponies.

She was
“prieta,”
the ranchhand, Isác, had said. That was dark brown, like the color of tobacco resin. And she was ornery enough to acquire a reputation, after stomping toes and tossing children, for being downright mean. For a year, Brown Beauty stubbornly carried cedar posts, bucking and baring teeth, to build the fence around the ranch. Maybe it was that year of hard labor that made her wild.

While riding Brown Beauty, I could feel the whole world rush forward suddenly at a tilt, careening down a two-track sandy road, holding the reins like tethers, voices of family members screaming in the distance, a vague blur of familiar noise. She would take you deep into the woods in an unexpected whoosh and then, just as suddenly, leave you airborne, aiming for a stand of flowering cactus. One cold Sunday morning out on the Pleasanton ranch, so cold there had been ice on the inside panes of the windows in the bungalow, everyone was milling around the fire outside, talking and drinking coffee and hot chocolate. My cousin Robert was riding around the clearing on Brown Beauty when the pony bolted forward in a beautiful, short-legged curvetting leap and carried Robert off into the brush. We all envied him. All he could do was to grasp her neck and duck low, to keep from getting hit by branches. It happened so quickly, we all stood silently watching. It was an hour before we found Robert, bruised and scratched. Brown Beauty stayed missing for another week.

On Sunday evenings, we made our way back into the city, already lit up with Dairy Queen signs and multiplex marquees. Driving sleepily through downtown streets of San Antonio, we saw the strings of lights hanging from towering cypresses along the banks of the river. Bongo Joe was playing in front of the Alamo. On Broadway, we looked at the pedestrians along the sidewalk, snickering and trying to spot my father’s cousin Jimena, who had been a prostitute in San Antonio for thirty years. Gradually, we fell back under the spell of San Antonio de Bejar.

We didn’t have the ranch near San Antonio for very long. It was sold in the early ’60s so my parents could buy the house in the suburbs, where my brothers and I would be able to go to decent public schools. The deal for the ranch had one drawback. It included Brown Beauty.

 

 

Once you pass through the sierra town of Múzquiz, heading west on the highway, it’s all arroyos, canyons, and stands of pine, juniper, and mesquite mixed in with cactus. For nearly three hundred miles, the landscape surrounding the remote Mexican blacktop is all green pasture, burnt brown mountains, and a big blue sky. This is the road to the Rancho Los Generales, the Guerra family cattle ranch, near their home of Sabinas, Coahuila, which I visited most summers home from college. The Texas border is just one hundred and fifty miles north for most of its length, but the traditions of old Mexico remain strong here.

Even with industrial development encroaching, the road is still a window onto Mexico’s past, as it cuts a path through some of the most stunningly beautiful rugged wilderness I have ever seen anywhere. Eagles, hawks, and vultures trace invisible currents across the sky. Lions, deer, and bear are plentiful, as are the menacing javelinas and rattle-snakes. And the many ranches along the road are stocked with large herds of Black Angus, orange-and-cream-colored Hereford, and white Charolais cattle.

This is where my real life with ranches began. Along with Alejo, the chief
vaquero
of the ranch, and various cousins and uncles, we undertook the day-to-day chores and rigors of a working ranch. This could mean an early morning on horseback, out in a far pasture by seven, looking along the ground for the telltale puddles of a leaking pipe that must be dug up and mended with rubber-tire-tubing tourniquets. We gathered for roundups, sweeping through the hills to convene the herd, straggling pasture to pasture in a great looped circuit around the
rancho,
until all eight hundred head of white Charolais were accounted for and brought together, glowing in the moonlight, across a high plain.

The next day, we would descend to the pasture with the corrals in a tumult of dust and fur. Once in the corrals, the cattle were shuttled through baths and vaccinations, steers were castrated, and, if they were calves, branded with red-hot irons with an
A,
the ranch brand, which stands for Alejandro Guerra. The animals seemed so aware, so sentient, if unable to express themselves. Watching them in a pasture as three dozen stood, staring emptily at me, I had to shudder to think of their destiny. Many never made it to market. They were attacked by bears or pumas, or lacerated after getting tangled up in a barbed wire fence.

Once, a prized pregnant cow had been lost for several days, despite Alejo’s and my searches up and down the hills of two pastures where she was thought to be. My father was with me on the ranch, and on one ride together we noticed a hillside oak glen where the trees seemed to be covered in a canopy the color of tar. As we got closer, the canopy became a living thing, undulating and heaving as one, but revealed as a horde of expressionless
sopilotes,
“vultures,” which had congregated to consume the carcass of the lost cow and her unborn calf. She had been struck by lightning; a great burn mark was still evident on her neck. The
sopilotes
had left the singed flesh, but her ribs were so perfectly white they looked bleached. In that still, carrion air, some of the vultures shook out their old rugs of wings. My father and I sat in our saddles, uneasy with the utter silence of the desolate scene, dust motes hanging in the afternoon sunlight. It was as if we were in a church, the vultures perched in the trees like a choir all around us, a strange sanctuary devoted to the memory of an accidental death.

 

 

The time on the ranch also gave me a chance to read and write on my own. I knew these were bad times to be a poet. It was a time when no one listened to the poets anymore, when the words of poets went unheard by all, rich and poor, by politicians and judges, police and factory workers. But that was what I thought I was then, not by choice, but by some personal vocation. Out there on the ranch, it was De la Barca, Spenser, Sidney, Browne, and Traherne. After a long ride out, I read in the mesquite groves in the valley of
los Viejos,
or up on the hill with the great water tank, from where the burnt orange light of sunset made the pages look like they were on fire. On the screened patio, in the shade from the full bake of midafternoon, it was Smart, Blake, Lorca, Kerouac, Burroughs, Borges, and the gnawing idea of an unfortunate destiny. In a journal, I described myself then as “a laughing vaquero poet at the end of twentieth century.”