Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (31 page)

As I riffled through the old photographs, I found more images of San Antonio from the time my family first arrived, but there were many places my family would never have known. The distinctive stone houses of the wealthy on elegant tree-shaded streets of Olmos Heights. The tranquil poolside arbor of the San Antonio Country Club, where the city’s Anglo gentry gathered for iced drinks on hot afternoons. It was only in one picture, of the Alamo captured in bright sunlight, that you could make out the small figure of a mustachioed, dark-skinned Mexican, holding a hoe before him, with his face shadowed under a floppy cowboy hat.

Then, at the bottom of the pile, there were several more photographs that were familiar. They showed the wide water swath of the San Antonio River outside the old city, with the characteristic cypresses along its banks, in scrubby south Texas terrain. In one, where there is a big, still bend I thought I remembered fishing, a man in a suit and derby stared distractedly, hands in pocket, from the river’s edge into the standing water. Several others captured the river, already encompassed by the city, snapped on the same spot at different hours of the day from a bridge on Commerce Street, near the old entrance to the downtown mercado. It was as if the photographer had returned to the same place time and again to discern some unknown meaning from the many faces of the river in that place. One showed the river glistening with crystalline morning light. Another, taken at midday, had shadows as narrow as reeds, while still another captured the same scene in the darkening tones of an early evening.

As I stood there in the noise and tumult of Second Avenue, the distant, gurgling sound of that slow-running river seemed louder than the city around me. And as if possessing a voice, across the years and miles, this ghost whispered out a simple message:

 

 

I went back to San Antonio, having received a letter from the city’s fire department helping me locate Mr. A. G. Pompa, one of the two now long-retired firemen who had tried to revive my abuelo Juan José on that January morning in 1939. Their names, Rathke and Pompa, had appeared in all of the press accounts of his death, and Mr. Pompa was one of the figures in the photograph in the
San Antonio Light
, crouching alongside my grandfather’s body by the bank of the San Antonio River. Along with my father and Uncle Chale, Pompa was the last living witness of the circumstances of that day. The other fireman, a Mr. A. L. Rathke, had died in the early ’70s.

When I arrived in San Antonio, the front pages of the newspapers were announcing in banner headlines the report of a visitation of the Virgin Mary in the city, where she had appeared to a young witness in the illumination of a porchlight, reflected off the polished chrome fender of a 1975 Chevrolet Impala. It happened in an old barrio sub-development on the far south side of the city, off the Pleasanton Road, which had once been a stagecoach route but was now a long, faceless asphalt trail of strip malls, feed stores, and massage parlors. The houses there are flat and weathered from the tea-colored sandstorms that blow through that part of the San Antonio River plain in the summers.

The “Chevrolet Madonna” was first seen by a Chicano boy on his sixteenth birthday, after taking out the trash around ten that night. For some weeks, he had been having nightmares that he would be shot in a drive-by killing on his birthday. In his dream, he would be taking out the trash, walking across the dry, straw-colored carpet grass of the front yard, when he would notice a gray Ford Pinto coming around the corner toward his house. As he saw someone leaning out of the back window with a pistol in hand, he would try to run for his front door, but found he was suddenly paralyzed by a mysterious force. He turned toward the house, but the air was as dense as deep water. And each night, the dream would end just after he heard the explosion of the gun firing from behind him.

When he went out to empty the garbage the night of the vision, he said he saw a bright white light descend swiftly onto a neighbor’s lawn across the street. He watched as it moved down the street, zig-zagging between ash trees and pickup trucks like a spinning top, veering sharply in the middle of the street in front of his house and coming directly for him. Before he could move away, he screamed, as he felt what he called “the icy light” pass directly through him and float farther on the night air, finally coming to rest against the clapboard wall of the neighbor’s house.

When his mother and sister found him kneeling in the yard just minutes later, his hands were clasped in prayer and his gaze was fixed on the house next door. As he looked at the large, jagged splash of light before him, he recognized in it a clearly defined shape where the light was brighter.

“It’s our Holy Lady, kneeling, reading the Bible,” he told them.

They looked at the wall and saw the same shape there, and they were awestruck. There was a pool of light that might be a bowed head, one edge that could be a large book held open, a wavy glimmer toward the ground that could seem to some to be a kneeling torso. But you had to look deep into the light, deliberately unfocusing your eyes, to see any of this. After holding hands and saying prayers together, the family went inside and built an altar to receive the blessings the Divine Mother was bestowing on them.

Along with the cataclysms, natural and man-made, this has been a century of miracles and visions. The epic of magic remains incomplete.
Promesas
are still being fulfilled. Before an apocalyptic vortex of killing and recrimination descended on Bosnia-Herzegovina, there were daily visions of Mary taking place in the mountain village of Medjugorje. Three youths, two girls and a boy, carried on a years-long conversation with their vision, whom they described as the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. After the attending crowd for the punctual afternoon apparitions grew too large, the venue was moved by begrudging church authorities to the local church rectory, where only a few witnesses were allowed. Appearing so routinely, the Virgin was able to address herself to such otherwise quotidian matters as the inefficiency of public waterworks in the village and the penurious local property tax rates. An uncle went on a pilgrimage there and claimed, along with other followers, to have looked straight at the sun at midday without harming his eyes. Instead, he saw a rapid dance of many-colored light, as if filtered through a prism in the sky. The visions at Medjugorje ended without fanfare when one of the visionaries went off to join the Bosnian army. Another developed brain cancer. Then the war arrived, and it became too dangerous to even gather at the rectory for daily prayers.

The San Antonio papers reported that after the Chevrolet apparition, the family began a marathon of Rosaries devoted to the Virgin Mary. The son fainted and began speaking in a high-pitched voice, while his family held a minicorder to his mouth, recording his every utterance. When he declared the tapwater in the house was blessed, they placed roses in a vase filled with the water, and the entire house was filled with an intoxicating scent of the flowers.

As word spread through the neighborhood and the news media started to report the story, hundreds of people arrived every evening to see the light for themselves. It didn’t take the skeptics long to discern that the light of this apparition was nothing more than the reflection of the family’s porch light off the front bumper of a maroon Impala, parked in the driveway. On the second night of the apparition, a couple of
pachuco
homeboys who had been sniffing glue all afternoon, started rocking the car and howling with laughter as the apparition bobbed up and down against the beige house siding, startling the devoted onlookers.

Nonetheless, on crutches, in wheelchairs, and in large groups, the hopeful, the devout, the sick, and the curious kept coming. A man with acute colitis was rumored to have rid himself of crippling abdominal pain by touching the wall. Many swooned while just standing along the chain-link fence of the neighbor’s backyard.

Then, another neighbor caught a pilgrim urinating on his lawn. Another found a couple, in flagrante delicto, in their own parked car as they had come to attempt to conceive a child in the apparition’s glow, unable to do so before without divine intervention.

A local Bishop said the church was “cautiously skeptical” about the matter. “I see the Blessed Mother every day,” he told the newspaper. “But I don’t necessarily invite the whole community. If it isn’t from God, it will die a natural death.”

 

 

After uncovering his name in the microfilm archives of the newspapers, I had tried to find Mr. Pompa. It seemed he had left the city. For years the fire department had been unable to locate him, until they received a notification of a change of address through his insurance company. After several days’ more of inquiries with the San Antonio Fireman’s Benevolent Association, I learned he was living in Kerrville, Texas, about an hour and a half north of San Antonio, in the Texas hill country. Mr. Pompa was a patient at the State Hospital in Kerrville, the end-of-the-line facility in the Texas State mental health system. Identifying myself on the phone only as a friend of the family, the nurse I spoke to there would not discuss his condition with me, but said I was welcome to visit, with an appointment.

“You can come on up,” she said. “He has good days and bad days, but he don’t talk much with nobody.”

I dreaded that hospital from one summer during college, when I had a job there doing art therapy with the patients, many of whom are elderly, long-term internees of the state mental health system. The hospital grounds are nestled in the hills outside of Kerrville, and the campus is laid out like a little village unto itself, with its own streets, named after heroes of Texas Independence, and imitation shops meant to give the patients the reassuring feeling of being at home in a real place. After only two weeks of work there, I was haunted by the sounds and scenes from the hospital. While watching a movie, I’d hear the jagged laughter of one of the patients I had been with during the day. I recoiled when I saw the downy translucent flesh hanging from the underarms of patients who had taken prescriptions for decades that had that eerie side effect. I had quit shortly thereafter, and the doctor overseeing the arts program scolded me for leaving, telling me, “It’s not so easy to escape these things. You can’t quit
them.
”

When I was shown to the patio in the ward where Mr. Pompa was waiting, I remembered walking through that solarium years before, encountering a group of patients there who were watching the film
The Alamo,
with John Wayne and Richard Widmark, in reverse, after some lazy orderly had improperly spooled the projector. But none of the members of the audience seemed to mind, staring silently at the sheet that had been hung as a screen as John Wayne walked backward along the parapets of the fort under siege.

That afternoon, the cicadas were singing at an eardrum-piercing volume as a nurse led me to Mr. Pompa at one end of a covered patio, dressed only in a cotton robe and sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner, with his bare feet up on the raised footrest. The nurse pulled his seat back upright, and his old, unshaven face was round and freckled, his soft, dark eyes both blank and querulous. His hands were large and rough-scaled, quivering on his bare knees, protruding from his robe. He looked like Diego Rivera as an old man, his white hair standing up like plumes on the back of his head. At first, he took no notice as the nurse introduced me, taking pains to pronounce every syllable with a shout.

“He understands everything. He just mainly don’t want to talk. That’s all it is, right, Mr. Pompa?”

Mr. Pompa had two Q-Tips hanging from his nostrils, and two sticking out of his ears. The nurse gathered them quickly with a
tsk
and set off back for the ward. Alone on the patio, I pulled up a chair and introduced myself to Mr. Pompa again, which he responded to with only a blink in his wide open stare. I explained to him how I had gotten his whereabouts, and why I had looked for him in the first place. I told him he was one of the last living witnesses of that morning in 1939, when, as a young man of twenty-five, he had tried to revive my grandfather. I showed him the photograph from the January 1939
San Antonio Light
, where he was pictured.

“Juan—José—Santos. You are that A. G. Pompa, aren’t you?”

The Fireman’s Association said that, already twenty years retired, he had had a decorated career as a
bombero.
He had put out a lot of San Antonio fires. He had run into hundreds of burning houses to bring out the living. Maybe he had been able to revive untold others of the would-be drowned. But all of that was lost to him now, including the morning of January 9, 1939. Whatever faint echo of that day remained deep inside of him and was beyond his grasp. If he was aware of anything, he was unable or unwilling to let anyone else know. We sat staring at each other silently for another few moments. In his eyes, he seemed present, but abandoned, as if a fire had left only the shell of the building standing. Then he took a long, deep breath and began singing with a still-noticeable Spanish accent,
“The eyes of Texas are upon you . . . all the livelong day . . .”

On my way back, I thought I might drive past San Antonio, past Uvalde, Hondo, and La Pryor, past Piedras Negras and Nava, and on into the center of Mexico to where all the roads began.

The news from the radio was that it hadn’t mattered much to the faithful that the “Chevrolet Madonna” had a perfectly explicable source. Hundreds of believers were still coming to the simple neighborhood every night. Was it not a miracle that the lamplight from the porch had even caught the dented fender of the Impala in the first place? What was the probability of those few shafts of light reflecting off that long, curved chrome surface in precisely the way necessary to project the Madonna’s silhouette? Out of the million chance encounters in the ordinary running on of the everyday, this beam was a light breaking suddenly through a curtain, creating an aperture between worlds, showing just how incomplete our own world really was.