Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (26 page)

I knew from Uela that she had once come here with her sister Tía Pepa in the late 1940s, to fulfill a promise they had made to La Virgen when their sons went off to World War II, and then came back safely. They spent several days praying the rosary together at the shrine before returning to San Antonio. Thirty years later, I had come to Tepeyac as a tourist, not as a believer in the cult of Guadalupe. She was the most powerful national symbol of the Mexican people, drawing Indio, Español, and Mestizo together in one embrace, but I saw the story of her apparitions as a story only—not a supernatural mystery. Mexicans believed in her because Mexicans, deep down, believed in their own, still unnameable, prophetic destiny. Hadn’t they always believed the gods were talking with them and living among them, guiding their steps?

But watching the old woman in her quiet ritual that day in Tepeyac, I realized that I had already been initiated into the Guadalupana cult numberless times before, among all the
Viejitas
of San Antonio, in their sitting rooms, their kitchens and backyards. I had felt the power of their faith when they were at their prayers, lighting a votive candle and reading in their Bibles. I was a student of analytic philosophy, trying to discern how language, politics, and culture created the world around us, and how everything was of this world, everything was of history—nothing was supernatural. Tepeyac may have been a part of the ancestors’ world, I believed, and now we lived in a plainer, more pragmatic era. Yet, there in the dark underground with hundreds of candles burning, it felt as if I had already been implicated in the stories of the old gods through the prayers my ancestors offered at Tepeyac. Whatever else I might become, our story had always been connected to this place, and I, too, might someday have to return there, to fulfill a secret promesa.

 

 

After our journey to Mexico City, my family returned to San Antonio, and I spent a few weeks back at Rancho Los Generales in Coahuila. It was late summer, the time of the year when the monarch butterflies are flying, filling the air with gamboling orange clouds, moving to the south. Alejo, the
vaquero,
and his family were in town preparing their children to begin school. For several long, quiet days, I was alone there, writing down my recollections of our trip to Tenochtitlán.

I began to watch my dreams. There were dreams of voluptuous women, enticing and elusive. Somewhere in an old red granite castle, maybe in Guanajuato, I think, a radiant, dark-haired woman I felt I recognized as someone once very dear to me kept appearing in the hallways, the courtyards, and the common room. But I could never reach her before she vanished.

I saw the end of the world, over and over, in numerous versions and sequelae. It is dark at midday. Doves and pigeons, their wings on fire, fell from the sky into the great, empty downtown plaza of the Zócalo in Mexico City. Hordes of shimmering lambs, in perfect tiers, descended slowly from the sky, passing like ghosts into the desert floor. An enormous crowd of people were gathered in a long, wide mountain valley. High above us, in a sky as black as obsidian, a sickly, snaking ribbon of crimson light, like a burning nebula, became an enormous angel, hovering over some unknown city. Finally, I rowed out in a flat boat onto a pitch-dark lake on a quiet summer night, knowing the angel had deemed our world unworthy of revelation.

Uncle Roger, my father’s brother, had always said these were the “end times.” He kept clippings of floods, sightings of flying saucers, apparitions of ghosts and saints, just to prove his point. I wondered whether all of the Santos weren’t obsessed with the end of the world, whether by the intecession of la Virgen, UFO’s, or the Beast of the 666. Out there on the ranch, up in la Serranía I was in the familiar light of the ancestors, at the latitude and longitude markings inscribed on our DNA. Maybe dreams come more easily in such a place. After the time in Mexico City, more than ever, the past and the present seemed permeable.

In another dream, I was on a beach. It was getting dark, but the pale sand was still glowing, and the rocks along the shoreline were silhouetted against the horizon. Out in the water there was a large, brilliantly painted galleon with great sails, braziers lit on deck, floating alone over the purple darkness of the sea. It was green and yellow and red, with elaborate curving wood designs all over it. There was no sign of life aboard, no other lights, no movement. In my sleep I asked myself: Is this what the Indios first saw when the Españoles arrived? Was this the dream memory of a shipwrecked Spaniard soul? A glimpse of the nighttime arrival of the ancestors? These questions could only be answered in Mexico, and I was convinced when I awoke that I should devote myself to finding out how far back our family memory could reach into the great Mexican story. There were many pilgrimages to make, many stories to exhume and recover, and time was short.

I awoke, and walked out onto the patio of the ranch house to do my morning exercises, just after dawn when the bright morning was still very quiet. Alejo and his family were returning from Múzquiz, their truck just coming into the pasture at the bottom of the hill, throwing up billowing clouds of dust. He waved from the driver’s seat, his hand tapping the top of the cab, his kids yelling at me from the back of the truck. Near the house, a whole field of wild red mano de león plants, the color of blood, had bloomed overnight. Standing on a carpet for my morning exercises, hands clasped above my head, I leaned slowly backward, arching my spine toward the ground, taking in one deep, clear breath of sierra air.

At that moment, I felt as if I never wanted to leave Mexico. It would be ten years before I would return.

The early afternoon light against the wet red-brick buildings was the color of the desert earth between Santa Fe and Taos. I felt like a
naufragio,
a shipwreck victim, landing in a place where I did not belong. I was a child of the Mundo Nuevo. I had never imagined even visiting Europe, much less preparing to live two years in the middle of England. I was eager to begin my studies at Oxford, but I felt that I would be an indelible outsider in the ancient university city.

I regretted the passage would take only six days. I could imagine spending weeks surrounded by the dull roar of the waves and all their shimmering, apparent desolation. Crossing the ocean, even on the
Queen Elizabeth 2,
you know in your bones, with every mile gained, that you have left your familiar world behind. You feel the full measure of the earth and the heavens. On the still nights, the sky glistened with icy blue light, reflecting out along the mirror surface of the seas so that the ship seemed suspended in a limitless expanse of space, heading in no discernible direction. But every day, on a vast nautical map posted on the deck, the thin black line of the ship’s track traced across the ocean a little farther.

 

 

“Todo se acaba. Todo se extermina.”
That’s what my uncle Beto had said a week before, cooking a great steaming vat of fresh
menudo,
Mexican tripe stew, his specialty, in the garage workshop behind his house in San Antonio, while leisurely quoting el filósofo Socratés in the middle of an autumn afternoon. “Everything finishes. Everything is extinguished.”

I was preparing to leave for England, feeling apprehensive about being away from San Antonio and the family for so long, and Uncle Beto was attempting to explain a broader perspective on the matter. He had come to San Antonio decades before from Nueva Rosita, in Coahuila, and married my aunt Margie, leaving Mexico behind forever, except for occasional visits. People move on. People die. Then, people move on even further. Eventually they die, too; eventually they are extinguished. You can be sad about this, but it wouldn’t change anything. The whole process will continue, just as it always has. The old Greek philosopher had gotten that right.