Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (30 page)

“That’s why nobody gives a goddamn about la política,” the
viejito
said. “The sign from the volcano, that’s what we still wait for. We act like everything has changed, like things could just go on like this forever. But it could happen any day, like a change in the weather. And then what?” Battered from the millennia of volcanoes, hurricanes, conquest, discordia, and revolución, at last, the fulfillment of our prophetic legacy: the end of Mexico.

 

New York City became my home in exile, less a homestead than a place to set out from into the world. I saw the Santos and Garcias of San Antonio less, and years passed between visits to Mexico. On visits home, my abuelo Juan José’s name was never mentioned, and for many years, I asked no questions. The long silence around his memory felt like an inviolable equilibrium.

There were other stories, other tales, other enigmas. All of the revolutions had failed, been infiltrated, assassinated, corrupted, or simply became vengeful and vindictive. In the Soviet Union, China, Iran, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, many others—and Mexico. In those times when all the ideals and fragile aspirations for Utopia were dying, I traveled to places all over the world, telling stories for television of poor people who, despite the states and empires crumbling around them, struggled to survive and gain control over their destinies. I’m not sure how or why that became the story I pursued as a journalist—a story no one was interested in hearing. It wasn’t intentional. It was more like sleep-walking through a house on fire.

I awoke suddenly in Khartoum when the window of my hotel room shattered in a clamor that left behind a deep, tranquil quiet. In that lacuna moment, the brick that had been thrown through the window rolled to a stop, and the curtains bellowed up with an almost cloyingly sweet breeze from the Nile. I got up from the bed to see there was a long demonstration passing by on the boulevard outside with thousands of Sudanese people marching across the bridge from dusty Omdurman, across the Nile, into downtown Khartoum. There had been a coup d’etat in the early hours of that morning and the hordes of people, jubilant and angry, were celebrating the ouster of the unpopular dictator Jafaar Nimeiry, who had made the tactical mistake of making a diplomatic journey to the United States, only to have a military council seize control of the government while he was away, prohibiting his return.

Some of the marchers were throwing more bricks and breaking windows in the hotel. Others ran into the elaborate marble lobby and took clubs to a large framed photograph of a smiling Nimeiry in sunglasses and blue military dress uniform, pulling it from the wall and shattering it on the ground while onlookers leapt up in approval, shaking their fists and cheering with jubilation. Then, all at once, a perfect quiet fell on the marchers, a caesura in time, in which the whole crowd seemed to think as one, running out from the hotel, rejoining the legions, turning and surging up a main avenue into Khartoum.

At the university, the professors lectured to one another in the shaded faculty garden about what to make of their bloodless revolution. The markets carried on as usual, with vendors meticulously stacking their fruits into perfect pyramids. The generals who had carried out the coup promised a transitional government of only one year, with elections for a civilian government to follow. That evening, a stadium full of people in Khartoum cheered,
“Islamiya-miya-miya! Islamiya-miya-miya!”
as they listened to an incantatory speech on Sudan’s future as a Muslim state by Imam Hassan Turabi, a previously imprisoned Muslim leader who had just been released from jail and would eventually become the prime mover in the Sudan. For days afterward, while huge Egyptian buzzards circled overhead, the streets of Khartoum were mostly abandoned, littered with burned-out cars, always feeling as if some conflagration were about to erupt again.

At the same time, all over the country, unrelated to the political upheaval in Khartoum, there were sprawling desert famine camps where thousands of Sudanese and Ethiopian people were starving and slowly dying. Life in the camps was a blend of the everyday and the apocalyptic. Children in tattered clothes played with toys made from baling wire and discarded tops from the large tin cans that contained the powdered infant formula that relief groups distributed to the families. The feeding stations opened three times a day to a frenzy of dust and clattering empty bowls. The Bedouins, abandoning a life thousands of years old, sold their camels, their swords, their silver bangles and bracelets made of colored Venetian glass to buy scraps of food from vendors set up at the edge of the camps. Ansar holy men, Muslim clerics dressed in pristine white djellabas with green sashes and scarlet turbans, roamed the camps, standing on little hills in the relentless sunlight and reciting Quranic scriptures into the wind—while the sound of voices, moaning, shrieking, and arguing, could be heard from tents in every direction.

After weeks among the camp dwellers crisscrossing the country, shooting video, doing interviews, I returned to my room in a hotel in Port Sudan, and along with my companions on that journey, drank bootleg bitter palm wine and wept. Steve, the cameraman, as a boy in Greece during World War II had been in hunger camps like those we had seen. He said he thought such things could never happen again. George, who was reporting the story with me, believed the debacle could be resolved with aid and assistance from Western governments, if only the political will could be mobilized. Many of the people we met in camps near Tokar, El Obeid, and in Mwelih, near Khartoum, were already beyond struggling against the tide of death engulfing them—keeping tallies of the names of the dead on scraps of paper that were guarded like precious ancient scrolls. The latest revolution in faraway Khartoum would mean little to them. One of the camps was within walking distance from a well-stocked market, but the refugees remained huddled in their tents, many too weak to move, others simply too weak to conspire to steal.

In Nicaragua, the people I saw could easily have been from south Texas or Mexico. On the tropical highway from Managua to the Honduran border, passing farmers with their donkey carts loaded with corn and women walking with small veils on their heads, I also saw teenage soldiers lazily thumbing for rides, hitchhiking back to the war with the Contras on the northern border with Honduras. Their stoic faces, the makeshift accommodations of the poor, the ubiquity of things oddly repaired, were as familiar as the denizens of my homelands to the north, and I wondered: How big is this homeland, the empire of the ill-starred progeny of la conquista, how far to the north and south can it stretch, and how many nations are encompassed by its ancient, unspoken accords?

In the dirt-street village of Somotillo, just south of the border with Honduras, there was a Mass commemorating the six-week anniversary of the deaths of a group of campesina women who had been killed along with a Swiss volunteer, in a Contra attack. In addition to the families of the campesinos, the mother of the volunteer was there from Switzerland, joined by the dead man’s wife. The two addressed the assembled throng in an open-air church, decorated with palms and white chrysanthemums, telling them how grateful their loved one had been to be received warmly into their community and how deeply they shared their loss with the families of the others killed in the ambush. Then, a host of campesinos stepped forward and offered elegies about the various victims of the deadly assault, while a trio played a dirge outside.

One old lady named Doña Rosa, whose daughter was among the casualties, was helped onto the dais, leaning back for support against the altar, from where she chastised those Nicaraguans who were waging the civil war against their own country. Wiping her hands on her burlap apron, she stood erect and pulled her hair back sternly, imitating the people she called traitors.

“They say: Things were better under Somoza! We should go back to the way things were under Somoza!” wagging her finger, her voice cracking. “Just like the people who complained to Moses when they were in the desert. We’re lost! We should go back! But we are in an exodus, just like them! We are on a pilgrimage! I have hope. I have hope because I have faith that we will triumph!” The villagers cheered the diminutive Doña Rosa, who pulled her shawl over her head and looked back at them solemnly over her eyeglasses, repeating
“¡Vamos a triunfar!”
raising her open palm overhead.

Watching their lives through video monitors in New York City made my life feel like a reverse refraction, remote, set loose in time, disconnected from the masses of people pursuing a daily struggle against hunger and chaos. Here, all their faces were traced out in shimmering scanlines in the stacks of monitors, in jumbled green loops on the waveform video corrector. Despite the squalor of the places I had visited, despite the desperation of the people, the video camera could make everything seem beautiful, or even fastidious—the cobbled streets of Somotillo, the pristine porcelain sand of the Sudanese desert in Tokar. But in one sequence, our jeep pulled up into the famine camp in Tokar, camera rolling, as we were surrounded by hundreds of the camp dwellers, young and old, many of whom were putting their hands to their mouth, then extending an empty palm to us for food. They crowded the jeep, leaning against the windows, pleading, “Give us food! We need food!”

I explained through a translator, shouting, that we had no food to give. We were there to tell a story only, to tell
their
story to Americans through television, so that they perhaps would then be compelled to act, to send relief to the beleaguered people of the Sudan. It felt like a pathetic answer to their request, and many dismissed us with a curse and walked away. Others continued to insist on food.

My family had extracted themselves from that world, extracted themselves from the world of the Mexican poor who are a part of the same struggle of the poor that has no origins or boundaries in place or time. Tía Pepa had said it took one hundred years to run our family out of Mexico. “First Santa Anna lost Texas, a piece of the Republic! Then with Guadalupe Hidalgo, another piece of Mexico was lost. Nuevo Mexico, Arizona, California. Then, we couldn’t get rid of the old dictator Porfirio Díaz for twenty years! Papa said he would fight if anyone invaded Mexico, but he wouldn’t stay while Mexico destroyed herself. So we came here to
El Norte.
” That move changed our family’s place in the old story of the poor, forever.

Now, as I watched the story unfolding, in sequences of playback and record, I realized that when asked for relief, all I could do was to offer to tell a story.

 

 

The first of the ghosts was the ghost of a city. After years of exile, already a decade of walking up and down the world in many lands far from home, it was the unexpected sign. An augur. A portent. It was on a summer night, tepid, dank, and hazy in the crowded thieves’ market along the sidewalk of Second Avenue in the East Village of New York City. It was an apparition, the ghost of one city suddenly taking shape, like someone long forgotten becoming incarnate again. Amid the clamor and panic of the avenue, at a Chinese bookseller’s stand, crouching over a carpet spread with yellow incense cones, old LP’s, and a pile of antique photographs, I looked through handfuls of tiny, brittle pictures of lost worlds in time. Many of the prints still had the old black card-paper borders that had once fixed them to the pages of an album. There was one small faded print, showing the obelisk and shadow of the Washington Monument, another showed the ruins of some Greek columns, a side view of Niagara Falls, a spaniel in snow, and a series of nondescript houses and buildings in unidentified American towns. On the back of one picture of a two-story house with a wraparound porch was written in pencil, “Sept 10, 1919, 216 E. Highland, St. Joseph, Mo.”

Then there was an image that seemed strangely familiar, but at first unnameable. At the edges, the print had faded to an indistinct silvery glow, but it showed a mysterious, shady pavilion with long, rough cobblestone pillars and a great overhanging thatched palm
palapa
-style roof. Another showed a tangle of narrow, winding walkways through a patchwork of ponds and barren dirt. On the back of one of these snapshots, a stamp in royal blue ink read: “Wagner’s Drug Store, East Houston & Ave. C., San Antonio Texas.”

I remembered then this place I had known as a child long ago in San Antonio—the cool, dark Japanese Sunken Gardens of Brackenridge Park, which had been built by prison labor on lands that once belonged to Colonel Brackenridge, near the Fernridge estate where my grandfather had worked. The lush, green lagoon garden had been planted in the abandoned pit of an old stone quarry. In these photographs, the gardens were still bare, the stones newly laid and untrodden, the fresh thatching thick and low hanging.

By the time I knew the place as a child, much later, these same stone paths had become well worn, traversing the overgrown lily ponds, leading up along the dripping cliffsides where purple orchids hung in long strands from the stone wall. It seemed to me then not like a man-made thing, but a hidden place that had been left behind since the beginning of the world, like the one true Garden of Eden.

How had these pictures come to this place? By whose hands? What was their story? How far along in the story were we now? And how far along in the oldest story? How deep into the tally of whirling novae, the annals of the world’s implicit tale, the one told over and over in glyphs, stelae, and alphabets? How far into
la crónica?
And where had San Antonio emerged, in the most secret chronicle of old Mexican time? Who knew the number of the suns? Who had kept a count of the days since the first light of this age?

There are few now, if any, who keep that oldest count of the days. Maybe they are hidden away, keeping lonely watches on the heavens in the Yucatán, in the remote hills of Chiapas and the mountains of Puebla. For the rest of us, by comparison, it seems the past has disappeared from view. So many of the old Mexicans are dying—the old Tejanos—the ancestors who left Mexico for Texas at the start of this century of grief. Their names had become beads on a rosary: Francisco, Margarita, Leandra, Lico, Isidro, and on, and on. For years now, as the memorial prayer cards have arrived, it reminds me: How long for me, in exile?