Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (36 page)

 

 

The anniversary of Abuelo’s death several years ago fell on the day before I was to return home to New York City. After making the drive back from my attempt to imagine his final moments in the river at Roosevelt Park, over a breakfast of chorizo tacos and refried beans, I reminded my father it was the anniversary of his father’s death, and I asked him if he would like to visit his grave together later that day.

“I’m very busy today,” he answered, in a plaintive voice. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. You should maybe go without me.” I didn’t tell him where I had just come from. Dressed in a sweater, jeans, and workboots, he cleared his throat, got up slowly, leaving me at the table, and went off to the garage to begin his chores.

I didn’t want to push him to revisit the painful recollections of that morning fifty-six years before. Some members of the family had cautioned me about bringing it up with him at all. “He found his peace with it,” they said. “You’d best let him be.” For my father, in his late seventies, the memories of that day must have been a distant blur of fog and panic and searching, and then a glimpse of his father’s shape, seen from the street, fading in the unforgettable fog of that morning. All of that ensconced in a corona of silence for nearly six decades, which was his privilege. When he wasn’t sure about visiting the grave that morning, I thought to myself,
They were right, I will push no further with him.

Days before, at the wedding of a Garcia cousin, I had seen my uncle Chale, youngest brother to my father’s mother, who was reportedly with my father that morning in 1939 when they found Abuelo’s body. Since the death of his wife, Chale, now in his late eighties, had been in the care of one of his sons, shuttling between towns where the son had undefined “business” in Texas, California, and Oregon.

Uncle Chale had aged dramatically since the last time I had seen him. In old family photographs, he appeared in meticulous studio portraits, his hair perfectly slicked, his mustache precisely trimmed, smiling like Clark Gable. Having traveled the world in the navy, he had always been dashing, quick, and gifted with a natural ease around people that had made him the family’s cosmopolitan and bon vivant. Now, his eyes were bloodshot and drooping, his hair standing straight up, dressed in unkempt clothes, the waistline of his pants drawn together at the back with a great safety pin after recently losing a lot of weight. He was missing teeth and had been shy and uncertain of his words at first as we embraced and talked, standing outside of the church together while the ceremony was under way inside. But when I asked him about my grandfather, he suddenly became animated.

“Yes, he was like my second father! El Juan José. I loved him. Very, very much. I lived with them when I was young, and he treated me like a son. For that, I will always love him.”

I told him I was trying to learn more about the circumstances of Juan José’s death, and I had heard he was with my father when they first found his body in the Rio San Antonio. Did he still remember anything of that morning?

Uncle Chale paused, his hand shaking uncontrollably as he rubbed his unshaven cheeks, long-faded images of that distant day were returning to him in slow motion. His eyes began to well up with tears, but as he began to try to speak, his son intervened and said it would not be good for Uncle Chale to remember that. His health was fragile, his heart still broken over his wife’s death. My uncle looked at me, vexed and wordless.

“Maybe some other time, primo,” my cousin said, “maybe when he’s feeling a little better.” He put an arm around Chale, now seemingly as helpless as a dotard, and ushered him silently back into the sanctuary of the church. Uncle Chale looked back at me once, as if he still wanted to speak, but my cousin held his arm tightly and directed his shuffling steps into one of the back pews where they sat down.

In the days shortly after that, the two of them were off again, living in a Winnebago, headed west, and no one in the family has seen or spoken to Uncle Chale since. His story would remain untold.

The rest of the anniversary day was slow and gray. I gathered notes, video and audio tapes, letters, and photographs from the trips in Mexico. I had not been away from New York City for so long in eleven years, and I was traveling with an elaborate mobile headquarters. Late in the afternoon, while I was packing a suitcase, the Tex-Mex music of KEDA, Jalapeño Radio, coming through the walls from my father’s workshed outside, suddenly stopped. He stepped through the back door, wiping his hands on his jeans.

“If you want to go, let’s go,” he said quickly. I wasn’t sure of what he had said at first. “It’s getting late if you want to go to San Fernando,” he added.

“You want to go?” I asked.

“Let’s go, it’s getting late,” he replied.

We stayed off the expressways, taking Vance Jackson to Fredericksburg Road, past the old taco-doughnut shop, down Babcock to Wilson, turning on Culebra to Twenty-fourth, and on to the south, toward the Mexican cemetery of San Antonio, where the streets are lined with headstone engraving shops and vendors’ stands selling balloons and memorial blue chrysanthemum arrangements. There was a lot of traffic, since it was already rush hour in the neighborhoods of the far west side. We seemed to stop at every light, idling in an awkward silence.

“What happened that morning?” I finally asked him. “What happened the morning your father died?”

“John Phillip. It was too long ago! I don’t remember.”

“Do you want to remember? If we don’t tell these stories, we’ll forget them.”

“That’s okay,” he said, looking out the window. “That’s okay with me.”

We were nearing the cemetery, stopped at an intersection where the old Agudas Achim synagogue used to be on St. Cloud Street, and I continued, “Did you follow your father that morning?”

Taking a deep breath, he said, “Mama came and woke me up and asked me to follow him. My older brother was there. I don’t know why she asked me to go after him—instead of Raul.” At that moment, his voice sounded like a child’s, complaining about the privileged treatment of an elder brother. “She told me to go after him and watch him, and not to let him see me.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would embarrass him!”

“Why did she want you to follow him in the first place?”

“Because, he was sick. The night before, he kept talking about going away, going away. He had been sick for months already. He never really recovered from failing with the farm at the Belgian Gardens. So, the night before, he had been saying,
‘Ya es tiempo. Ya me voy. Ya es tiempo,’
and nobody knew what he was talking about.”

“But Uela did,” I added.

“She knew something was wrong with him.”

“And then what happened?”

“I tried to follow him, but the fog was very thick. I lost him. It was very hard for me with Mama after that, because I felt responsible, but I lost him. One minute he was there, walking by the old Alamo Iron Works, then he was gone. I looked everywhere but he was gone.”

“And then how did you find him later?”

“I went to his job, just in case he had been going there, but he was walking in the opposite direction, and no one there had seen him, so I ran home.”

“How did you find him in Roosevelt Park? Why there?”

“Uncle Chale and I drove around in the truck, thinking we might still find him walking along the streets. He liked to walk in that park, picking weeds from along the river. We thought we’d check for him there.”

“How did you spot him? Did you see him from the street? Was his body
in
the river?” All of the questions I had harbored secretly for so long came rushing out in a messy litany. The tall palms of Las Palmas shopping mall, across from San Fernando Cemetery, were already becoming visible on the far horizon in the pearly light of early Texas twilight.

“I don’t remember! In the water, I think,” he said. “It was a long time ago, John Phillip. It was a hard thing for me for a long time after that. It took me a long time just to deal with the guilt. It felt like it was all my fault. I had nightmares about it for years, when I was in the army. I couldn’t sleep. I just wanted to forget about it.”

“But there was nothing you could have done.”

“It didn’t feel like that then. I thought I could have saved him.”

“Do you think it was a suicide?”

“Of course! What else could it have been?”

Finally, we turned the corner at the Las Palmas mall, crowded with shoppers preparing for the feast day of the Three Kings,
el Día de los Magos,
the last celebration of the sacred calendar of Christmas in Mexican tradition. There were long shoals of low clouds, scalloped across the sky and illuminated in dark pinks, yellows, and blue. With darkness soon setting in, the first stars were visible over San Antonio as we turned into the entrance way to the great arches of San Fernando Cemetery. As we drove in, we saw the two Mexican caretakers locking down the bolts of the gates for the night. It was still ten minutes from the posted closing time, but, they said, the cemetery was on “holiday hours” and it was already empty—and they wanted to go home. Abuelo Juan José’s grave might as well have been a thousand miles away.

“Come back tomorrow!” one of them shouted from behind the gate. “We’ll be open all day long . . .”

 

 

My father grew silent, and we left off our talk about Abuelo and that day long ago. An amber waxing moon was now rising over the old city as we drove down Commerce Street, heading downtown. We turned onto Zarzamora Street, where the
tortillerías, panaderías,
Mexican restaurants, Tex-Mex clubs, and ice houses make it a thoroughfare of the Mexican west side of San Antonio. Before heading home, we stopped by Henry’s Puffy Tacos to share an order of puffy chicken tacos. I was nearly forty, my father nearly eighty. All that remained unspoken now could just as well be offered up to the sun and burned off once and for all, the way morning clouds disappear by noon in north Mexican sunlight.

And perhaps my father was right. It is okay to let go of the stories. In the end, they don’t really tell you anything. It is okay to move on and to forget, to seek the blessing of forgetting. Through the century, the family had kept moving, from the countryside of Mexico and south Texas to San Antonio, from the barrio to the suburbs, and from Texas outward to a myriad of places, around the world. I had already lived for more than ten years far from the bones of the ancestors.

The puffy tacos buoyed my father’s mood. After we returned home, he said that he was willing to sing a couple of songs, if I were still interested in taping him.

“If we’re gonna do it, let’s do it. I’m tired,” he said.

For the last several days, I had been asking him to let me videotape him singing a few of his original compositions. He had been reticent at first, complaining that he couldn’t sing anymore, that his fingers were stiff, he didn’t have a guitar pick—now he suddenly became determined, quickly setting up his kit in his study; first his microphone and stand, then plugging his guitar into a squat Marshall amplifier, plugged in under his desk. His swiveling desk chair squeaked, so he sat instead on a stool, in the formal posture of a
flamenquero,
leaning forward, cradling his guitar tenderly on his leg, one foot propped up on the amp. I set up some lights for better shooting, basting my father in an incandescent glow that made him squint at first.

Then his ritual began. He strummed through several chords to tune the guitar and then adjusted the volume to kill the tinny feedback. He cleared his throat while he picked a few quick arpeggia. With stereo headphones on, attached to the video camera, I could hear the crickets outside in the few moments of quiet.

“Ahora sí,” he said, with one last nervous cough and a quick shuffle on the stool.

After a long breath, as he began to sing, his face relaxed so completely that it was as if he had walked into another body, unfettered by everyday cares. He began with what has become his
Norteño
standard—the “Corrido de Los Generales,” his song about the ranch in Coahuila that he had debuted there long ago. The song began on a dulcet chord, shimmering as he held the first word,
Que . . . ,
singing it in a quavering tenor note that hung in the air until, at last, he began the song in a lazy polka time, with,

 

As he sang, the skin of his throat quivered, hitting all of the high notes with polish and innocence. His voice was still velvety, welling up from way down in his belly, with the slightest sense in every note that he is not far from weeping. He sang gazing forward, letting his eyes drift off to an imagined horizon when he sang about fences that ran like lines without ends. He sang in praise of beautiful cattle, in praise of bountiful water and trees, in praise of the blessed land, ending with a loud,
“¡Sí Señor!”

Excited by hearing his own voice again, his fingers moved lightly across the strings plotting out his next song. “Remember this?” Then he sang “Texas Born,” a twanging country-western song he wrote in my honor when I went off to study in England.

 

He followed with two love songs he’d written for my mother, “My Beautiful Wife” and “Si Yo Pudiera (If I Could Only),” with melodies that moved from the coloratura of romantic 1940s Mexican movie music to warbles and trills that sound almost Arabic. “Now, I’m going to do an old, old Mexican one,” he said, striking the first chord of “Noche de Ronda.” As he sang the old song by Agustín Lara, he seemed at complete peace, able to strike each note as if the song were just being written. He was surrounded by pictures on the walls of his parents, the last portrait of Juan José, taken months before he died, and Uela, wearing her stoic expression, a few years before she died. My father finished his concert with his “Corrido de Múzquiz,” a song for the Coahuila town at the edge of the sierra from where his great-grandfather Teofilo Garcia had been kidnapped by the Kikapu Indians. In that song, he sings of the town’s local waterfall, the renowned beautiful women of Múzquiz, and how, of all places in the world, he would choose to die there. When the song concluded with a fierce double strum, my father let the guitar echo his final notes. As the last chord faded, the quiet of the night returned and the room was still. He drew the guitar up from his lap and leaned on his stiff knees to get up from the stool.