Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (28 page)

Stirring the pot of bubbling
menudo
with a long wooden spoon, Uncle Beto ended with his traditional faux CB sign-off: “Obi-Wan Kenobi. Ten-four. Smokey at the front door, over and out!”

 

 

London was unnaturally quiet. You could hear birdsong in the trees along the mall by the Thames, as well as the big boats cutting the river water as they went by. All Saturday, downtown traffic was closed off while a giant campaign for nuclear disarmament demonstration snaked its way across the Southbank Bridge, coursing through Piccadilly, up to Oxford Circus, then down past Covent Garden Market, some of us stopping for eclairs and coffee, and then everyone spilling, for hours it seemed, into the great plaza at Trafalgar Square. It was a gray day under turbulent, roiling clouds and the myriad shifting flights of thousands of pigeons inhabiting the square.

This march was the culmination of months of other marches across the country in protest against the Americans placing nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on planes stationed at bases in Great Britain and Europe. As the throng of protesters listened to speeches, milled along the streets with their flasks, sitting on the steps of museums, or hanging from the arms of statues, a circle of orange-robed Buddhist monks drummed and chanted in a changeless solemn cadence. A constant, flat droning hum of far-off bagpipes was in the air as the punk band Killing Joke took the main stage at the demonstration with a paralyzing electric screech, beneath a massive banner with an image of the head of a screaming baby in a seething red mushroom cloud. The drum battery exploded and the crowd was already heaving forward as the caterwauling guitars began to shake the paving stones. I thought to myself: This is what the end of the world will feel like.

In that rumbling din, you could feel the tug of the universe expanding, aging by vast degrees, here, in a fragile world we were ourselves prepared to obliterate, all of it making the end of the world feel palpable and immanent. Some days earlier I had received the news from Texas that my great-uncle Frank had died in his sleep at ninety-five. Francisco was the eldest brother of my grandmother, the family scout in the 1914 migration out of Mexico, Texas homesteader, inventor, father, gentleman, who had once whispered to me, “The way is very simple. Do the good to other people and it shall be returned to you.”

His long, delicate hands were rough from caressing metal lathes, pulling apart motors and industrial latches, and hammering planks of white-hot alloyed steel. I had his hands, without the calluses and torn nails. I walked in the same body he had, long in the torso, bony knees, big ears. While he had invented that early version of the dump truck, and a widely used pecan shelling machine, he never became wealthy by any of his inventions. I complained to him that I had received none of the Garcia talent for inventing, engineering, and metalworking. But Uncle Frank disagreed and shook his finger at me, “Your stories and your poems—those are inventions, too!” and he laughed.

From England, he seemed as distant as starlight, as lost as wind. He was the first of the old ones to go after the great
despedida
of
las Viejitas
six years before. Before leaving, I had explained to him that I was going to study for two years in England, and I promised him a full account, as I always gave him after my journeys in Mexico. He nodded, grinning, and his long face lit up.

“¡Shahk-ess-peah-rrrreh! ¡Qué bravo!”
he shouted, and he showed me his old and yellowed paper copy, missing its cover, of a Spanish translation of the
Tragedies
, which he kept on his night table, next to his bed. Of all that was possible out of our past together, it seemed prophetic or ironic that those were the last words between us in this world. The fearless
abrazo
he gave me as a farewell that day remained a warm presence in a bitter time, far away from the gathered family in San Antonio, giving Uncle Frank his last
despedida.

The day I learned of Frank’s death I had already been scheduled to view the collection of Mexican pictorial manuscripts in the collection of the Bodleian at Oxford. I didn’t feel like spending that afternoon inside a library, but it had been difficult getting permission to see the old codices, and the two-hour session had been planned a month in advance. If I were to cancel now, it was unlikely I would have a chance to see them again soon.

All the denizens at their desks in the high-ceilinged reading room of the ancient Codrington Library of the Bodleian stirred as I entered. One of my Tony Lama pigskin suede cowboy boots, once as supple as chamois leather, now nearly rotten from the damp British climate, had developed a squeak in its sole. As I walked across the long chamber to the librarian’s desk, the boot let out a series of slow, high-pitched squeals that irritated the scholars and drew a volley of
shushes
and
tsks
from both sides of the aisle.

This was my favorite of all of Oxford’s libraries, where I spent a considerable amount of time in those years. There were small study cells with leaded glass windows that had the feeling of ancient cloistered monks’ quarters. From the reading room, stuffy from all the alkaline perspiration of scholarship, you could hear the rush of great torrents of water every half hour, sluicing the urinals of the men’s room downstairs, but sounding like a running mountain stream, charging the air throughout the old building. And since the library was part of a Fellows college at Oxford, made up of scholars and no students, the clientele at the Codrington tended to be old eccentric dons, a few in their academic gowns, surrounded by piles of yellowing notes, climbing ladders to high shelves, making notes from books while standing on the very top step.

The porter led me to the manuscript room, which was lit through high clerestory windows by the afternoon sun. The four codices, ancient painted books of the Mixteca Indians of Mexico, had already been laid out on a long, cantilevered viewing table, fanned out in narrow accordion swaths of the amatl paper and stiff deerskin on which the colored pictures, from the doorway, seemed to be glowing and spinning. These were among the few surviving documents that predate the conquest, and they had appeared in the Bodleian’s collection in 1659, as part of a bequest. How they first came out of Mexico, or where they came from exactly, was unknown.

In long chains of elaborately decorated panels, the manuscripts, painted in rusty ochre, cerulean blue, and cochineal red, depicted genealogies and migrations, battles and concordats, sacrifices and rituals. In some panels, figures in tunics were seated in profile, facing each other on a woven mat, curls of speech issuing and rising from their mouths. Most of the glyphs had been approximated into English.

“The marriage of Eight Flint and Thirteen Lizard, in a place named the Hill of Flowers.”

“There once was a lake with an island in the middle, surrounded by seven caves.” Then a journey was traced in trails of miniature footprints, from “Cloud Belching Hill to the River of the Lady Six Deer.” Beneath a glyph depicting a smoking mirror appeared the place name for the hill of the Intertwined Serpents.

In that room, full of scores of other old books and manuscripts, the velvety brown parchments looked like artifacts from another planet, still radiating the dust of someone else’s atmosphere. They were poignant, among the few survivors of the great bonfires that consumed a whole cosmos of known things painted in books just like these. There was a futile, ironic feeling because the books dealt repeatedly with the memory of a place of origin, and all the setting out and wandering in the world, guaranteeing that everything would be remembered, that the knowledge of the past would not be lost. Yet their testimonies were preserved but untranslatable, memories without a rememberer. They looked hijacked, stolen from their vanquished source, each one a broken oracle of a disappeared world.

The old librarian who tended the ancient texts sat at the far end of the table, dozing with his chin resting on his chest, his academic gown tattered and torn along the bottom hem. I thought I might just be able to quietly fold and carry out at least two of the books, the Selden roll and the Codex Bodley, without waking the deeply asleep minder of the manuscripts. I had imagined the plot for weeks. With luck, I would have enough time to mail them from the High Street postal station off to my cousins in Sabinas before the Bodleian Library detectives could catch me. The ancient books could be repatriated in Coahuila, in the
frontera
of Mexico. I had read how a Mexican graduate student in Paris had recently managed to smuggle several codices out of the Bibliothèque Nationale and back to Mexico, by hiding them in the seat of his underwear.

But as I mulled over the risks and rationale for my plot, I was distracted by an image off at the edge of one of the panels of one codex. I hadn’t noticed it before because it appeared upside down there, and the later afternoon light was casting long shadows in the stone room. Stepping nearer to it, craning my neck, in one corner of the manuscript, next to a panel of the goddess of maguey seated on a turtle, there was a small, simple painting of the
Voladores,
in the midst of their ritual. The four dancers, faces expressionless, were wearing eagle headdresses and feathers, perched on top of their decorated pole, preparing for the spiraling descent to the earth. Standing on the pinnacle, the
caporal
was speaking, telltale curls streaming from his mouth, chanting out loud the old count of the days, praying that the world would be saved from destruction again.

 

 

The longer I lived away from San Antonio, the more it seemed that, as a family, we had passed much of this century setting out. First from Mexico, where the rest of the past was left behind, hidden, then from San Antonio, where the lives and fortunes of the family took myriad paths. Abuelo Juan José set out still further, gradually losing contact with the world around him, carried off in a current of worries, suspicion, and melancholy impossible to resist. Arising on the foggy morning of his death, he must’ve known he was setting forth again into unknown lands.

After Abuelo Juan José’s death, Uela went off deeper into her Rosicrucian studies, using the Bible as a divination tool to seek counsel for her great sadness. Her Bible, which survives, is stuffed with poplar leaves, strips of pink and yellow taffeta, and newspaper clippings about Pope John XXIII. In Genesis, she drew a thick line in pencil around the verses, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, shall not cease.”

My father left behind his ambition to become a professional singer after his father’s death, taking jobs to help support the family, and eventually joining the army after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In those days, he had been professionally known as The Broadway Gondolier, appearing with Richard Cortez and his Gran Orquesta, always in his trademark tapered white suit and gold tie, singing the songs of Agustín Lara and Frank Sinatra in mainly Mexican clubs around San Antonio.

While Uela’s family, the Garcias, remained close in San Antonio, they gradually lost contact with the far-flung Santos of Elgin and Hondo, and only seldom visited my grandfather’s sister Tía Chita in Nueva Rosita. No one could really bring themselves to speak about Juan José’s death, and it was easier if they just didn’t see one another, so, over the years, they drifted apart, and the days of several families living together in one large house passed. My aunts and uncles married and moved out into their own homes, and Uela continued to live on Parsons Street with Madrina and Uncle Manuel.

San Antonio was so full of memory for Uela, she mainly stayed inside, visiting or reading, or she tended her garden in the backyard for hours. It was possible to endure, to leave everything painful behind. It was possible to imagine a shell made of quiet that would contain the entirety of the past.

Eventually, for the Santos, there were no more places of origin, just the setting out, just the going forth into new territory, new time. Being in England those years only carried on that tale, even if it seemed a strange destination for a grandson of poor people from Coahuila, Mexico. Uela remembered that one of my Abuelo Juan José’s cousins was a professor or a traveling scholar of some kind, and once, a box of books he had sent to San Antonio for safekeeping was said to have arrived at the house on Parsons Street from Cairo, Egypt.

After I read her my first poem, Uela announced that I would be the family’s poet, even though I told her the last thing I wanted to write about was the family. There had been inventors and dancers in the family. Uela had been forced by her father to forgo her aspiration to become an actress. And my father had been the singer in the family. But there had never before been a poet. She said she could tell it was my
compromiso,
an obligation that couldn’t be denied.

I was already seeking out writers, sending them adoring letters of appreciation after reading their work, and they would almost always write back. I wrote to William Saroyan, Gabriel García Márquez, William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Ken Kesey, and Octavio Paz, and to poets, like Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder. One elder poet I wrote to, Laura (Riding) Jackson, whose strange abstract poems had made a strong impression on me, sent back a ten-page, single-spaced, manually typed letter angrily explaining to me that she had renounced poetry in 1939 for its failure to communicate what she called “basic human truth,” and she cautioned me sternly, lest I fall into the same error in which she had misspent her youth, of believing in the “truth of poetry.” Inevitably, she said, poetry was more concerned with artifice and elegance of language than with truth. She hadn’t failed poetry, she insisted to me in a later letter. Poetry itself had failed.

I had a chance to meet Borges while I was at college in England, after seeing a poster at Blackwell’s Bookstore in Oxford announcing “Borges Tonight!” Though he was Argentine, through his fantastic earthly tales of space, time, and infinity, he had been a literary and spiritual mentor to me in San Antonio. In his story “El Aleph,” which I had once read aloud in Spanish to Uela, he had described a closet in a house in Buenos Aires where the entire cosmos was manifest in a cipher. He had described infinite archives of the planet’s past, enchanted maps that conversed with their cartographers.