Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (35 page)

We might never absolutely know how Juan José died, whether it was a suicide, a sudden heart attack—
un infarto
—or perhaps a murder. In this tale, even though it was written into this unchanging place alongside the river, that moment would remain perpetually shrouded. But here was Abuelo’s spirit path out of this life, the Rio San Antonio, surging from Roosevelt Park out beyond the city, merging with the crystalline Cibolo, the muddy Salado, all their alluvial clouds invisible under the tranquil surface, winding slowly through the green valley lands to the southeast, pushing out toward infinite waters, Juan José’s soul swift and bright as a sun perch, swimming unfettered, disappearing into the deep.

 

ALL IN VAIN. Those were the words that appeared over the newspaper photograph from the
San Antonio Light
of the scene of my grandfather’s death in 1939. With one hand, the young fireman, Mr. Pompa, appears to be gently cradling Abuelo’s head beneath the thick woolen blankets. With the other, he holds a respirator over Juan José’s face. According to the report, the firemen tried for half an hour to revive him, without success. The caption reads: RESPIRATOR FAILS TO SAVE JUAN SANTOS.

Since learning of the mystery of Juan José’s death during that graveside visit in San Fernando Cemetery—now twenty-five years ago—in journals, letters, poems, and stories, in conversations with family, journeys in Texas and throughout Mexico, I have sought to defy those three words, with little success. I wanted to tell a single story, bound together like an old
amate
codex, to carry the saga of Mexico into the story of Texas, and into the story of our family, walking like a tribe of pilgrims out of a tattered past of conquests, upheavals, revolutions, and migrations.

I wanted to dispel the shame the family has held inside like a hidden wound, to burn off the silence that kept many of us from speaking Juan José’s name, except in whispers, for decades. I tell the story over and over again, but the momentum of forgetting is strong. The currents of fear unleashed in the family around his death run deep and long. Now there is another generation, the sons and daughters of cousins among the Santos and Garcias, many of whom like me have left San Antonio, traveling farther still from these mysteries and chimeras, farther from the places and details of our past in Mexico, and farther from the ghosts of Mexico left in Texas. They know even less than we did of the story of Abuelo Juan José and the Santos melancolía that was not extinguished with him.

That old melancolía has returned several times, like an indelible song written into the blood that will be sung, regardless of the singer. In one unrestrainable leap, Uncle Roger had briefly spun down into that netherworld of chaos, panic, and illusions. He was convinced that slow, invisible fires were burning inside everything—trees, walls, sidewalks—gradually rendering the apparent world into ash. During a visit, he stared at me, wide-eyed, gripping the armrests of his chair, darting his eyes out the patio window to see how far along the inexorable process had moved.

“It’s a matter of time,
mmm-hmmm,
a matter of time,” he kept repeating, while rocking back and forth in his chair. He believed he had become a leper and that the entire neighborhood he lived in had been abandoned and quarantined as a result. His eyes were full of apprehension, as if he were being forced to look at something he would have chosen never to see.

That look was familiar to me, familiar from that inward place I have known since childhood, the infinitesimal tabernacle of the great void left inside of me too, something irreducible, left over after the body, the mind, the world, are all gone. I have always been able to go there, touching the formless cold of the place, the lonely emptiness, but always recoiling in terror, always returning to this world in an instant, when every insignificant detail observed, the smell of tea, the prattle of the radio, a light breeze, becomes a comfort and a beckoning.

We had never spoken of it before, but it felt as if my uncle was there in that place, only he was stranded there, unable to return. All he could see around him was the inevitable ruin of everything. The rest of us learn how to ignore these notions, to forget how all of creation plunges through the frigid void in vast arcs and circuits that will fade, decay, and disappear in the unspeakable plethora of time. Eventually, Uncle Roger found his way back, but he knows now, despite all of the delusions he suffered there, the place he went to is real.

Aunt Connie, who fell into her own embrace of the void, was saved by tapioca. Ordinarily very spirited and loquacious, for some months, like a novice in a cloistered order, she had surrendered herself to a virtually complete silence, becoming more and more remote, sitting still, with an expressionless stare, or occupying herself with prayer books, fingering the black beads of an old onyx rosary. Instead of her usual rushing, melodic torrent of jokes and stories, punctuated by flurries of laughs and movements of her hands, she spoke in monotones and murmurs, as if she were resigned to an implacable secret fate that had been revealed to her.

Aunt Connie was living with Madrina and Uncle Manuel, whom she thought of as her second parents, while she sought medical help, “from a real doctor,” my father said at the time, “not them quacks and
curanderos.
” Still, after months, the doctors had done little to help her regain her former state of mind. She continued to struggle, barely able to keep the elephant ear plants on the patio watered, and she swept only half of the kitchen at a time.

While I was home visiting from college, Madrina had invited me over for lunch with her, Uncle Manuel, and Aunt Connie. Madrina, in her late seventies then, had never been known for her cooking. Her meals usually consisted of many dishes, somewhat overcooked, in extremely small portions, so that by the time the table was set, it looked like a galaxy of small bowls with salsas,
guizadas,
Doña Maria mole, beans, okra, and rice. On this day, my aunt sat across the table from me, so sullen and withdrawn that she seemed to be absorbing the oxygen out of the air around her, molecule by molecule. We ate in complete silence, and I was grateful for the way the sound of the silverware on the plates, and Uncle Manuel’s long, susurrated sips of beer, echoed in the dining room, breaking the pall.

When the time for dessert arrived, Madrina brought in a large porcelain tureen which she proudly opened to reveal a pearly mass of tapioca that she had prepared that morning, still warm and smelling of cinnamon. As Madrina moved to serve everyone, she put the spoon into the tapioca, but it did not give easily. Uncle Manuel mischievously keened his eyes on me, as if he knew a secret about our dessert. Pressing down harder into the bowl, she pulled the spoon up, only to draw out a swatch of the tapioca in one long cord, as rubbery as mucilage. Aunt Connie’s attention, distracted throughout our meal, was suddenly gripped on this perilous maneuver.

Madrina tried to act as if nothing were amiss. She held the thick bolt of tapioca, stretched from bowl to spoon, utterly still, for what seemed minutes. Balancing herself and straining to smile, she laboriously raised another small plate to serve onto, expecting in the meantime some of the pudding would fall away, back into the tureen. Instead, reaching its threshold of tension, the dollop of tapioca quivered first, then slipped off the spoon in a blinding instant, slamming back into the serving bowl with a thwap so loud it sounded like a pistol going off, instinctively causing Madrina to jump back and duck.

As Uncle Manuel and I struggled to stay silent and pretend nothing had happened, Aunt Connie erupted in a burst of laughter, an explosion so strong it helped to dislodge her from that silent, hidden place she had been for months, and from there, she gradually returned to be fully among us.

 

 

It had always seemed that over the last one hundred and fifty years—from the time Texas was separated from Mexico in the 1830s, among the Lopez and the Velas of my mother’s family, and then again during
la Revolución,
when the Garcias and the Santos crossed the border and left Coahuila behind—the story of Mexico had ceased to be a part of our family, and we had ceased to be a part of it. Separated by eighty years, there had been a double betrayal of Mexico, the negation of a negation, repeated and reversed, across these four families’ pasts. Mother’s family was abandoned by Mexico—left behind in Texas—while my father’s chose to abandon their country,
la tierra madre,
for Texas, during Mexico’s hour of greatest need.

We became Americans, and as such, we were no longer a part of the ancient
compromiso,
no longer obligated to keep a solemn vigil over Mexico’s destiny, or, if necessary, to sacrifice ourselves for it. By leaving Mexico and being left by her, our forebears had meant to free us from that ceaseless cycle of sacred duties to dance and chant and make sacrifices and pilgrimages, so that the cosmos would continue to exist. The world we lived in now didn’t require anything of us to keep the great movements and cycles of the earth and the universe in perpetual order.

This leave-taking from the homelands has been acted out repeatedly since the beginning of the Americas. In Cuzco, Peru, in 1561, the Mestizo historian Garcilaso de la Vega, called “El Inca” (because his mother was Inca royalty, his father a Spanish officer), described how he decided to seek his fortune in Spain. There, he stood to inherit some part of his father’s lands and there he could sue for the return of lands in Peru that had been taken from his mother’s family.

Before leaving for Spain, he had heard of the recent discovery of a marvelous tomb containing the corpses of five Inca kings. Along with a friend, he went to bid farewell to the mummies of his ancestors. Once inside the chamber, he found the bodies were wrapped tightly in exquisite woolen shrouds, hands crossed over their chests, the skin of their faces pulled tight and smooth by the dry, alkaline mountain air. Over the eyes, the preparers of the bodies had placed small patches of woven gold. De la Vega, never to return to his native Peru again, wrote many years later in Spain of how he reached out to touch the hand of the great Inca Huayma Cápac, as a
despedida,
a farewell. He recoiled at once, feeling it cold and rough, and sinuous, like a vine. Already then, he felt a gulf between him and them that was unbridgeable.

Nearing the end of the millennium, the old Mexicans are dying off in gusts now, some of them dazed and weary, worn out by a century of labor and strife. With each death of another of the old ones left among us, the echoes of Mexico grow ever fainter. Abuelo Juan José’s death had the opposite effect. Probably, it was his own decision to move on altogether from this world. He had had enough of the calamities, enough of the humiliations, the indignities visited on Mexicans in those times in Texas. Perhaps he
had
been disconsolate and confused that morning. But maybe he was
not
suicidal. Maybe, in a deep distress, wandering disoriented, he had been overtaken by a heart attack, and he threw himself into the shallow tepid waters of the San Antonio in the hope that the water would wash away his affliction. Or maybe he fell.

And maybe it was murder. Maybe, heavy with trepidation, he had been off that morning to secretly meet with the notorious red-haired Irish foreman who had been abusing him for months at the foundry where he worked, and resented that the company had promoted Juan José, a Mexican, before him. Maybe it had been a treacherous rendezvous, arranged by this nemesis under some false pretense, intending to lure Abuelo Juan José to a secluded place where he could be taken care of, once and for all.

Left in the past as an abandoned tale, Abuelo Juan José’s unresolved end hid away all these questions that would awaken in me, two generations and nearly forty years later. I had the
compromiso
to try to complete his story, not because his life was important in history, but because his life was imparted to the lives he engendered, because his life was a missing arc between us and our incalculable origins.

Even though it happened on a morning long ago in San Antonio, my grandfather’s walk along the tracks to the river, alone, confounded, into the thick San Antonio fog, left the question of our destiny in Mexico and Texas unresolved in all of us who were to follow.