Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (37 page)

“That’s it!” he said, switching off the amp and the microphone, gathering his cords up into neat loops. And when I ask him why he says in the song he’d like to die in Múzquiz, and not San Antonio, where he has lived his entire life, he replies, “That’s just the story, John Phillip. That’s just the story in the song.”

Back in New York, I feel the city at once alien and familiar to me. The planted malls along Park Avenue could have been lining boulevards in Paris, Rome, or Barcelona. The weathered monument to Columbus on Central Park South became the angel of victory on the monument to La Independencia in Mexico City. Little seemed recognizable from my time before, as if my presence here for ten years had been excised from the city’s spiritual census.

In the subways, the faces of the thousands of passengers—Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Mediterranean, East European, Latino, African American, and others—were mixed in now with faces more recognizable from my recent travels—Maya, Mexica, Zapoteca, Chichimeca. Never a significant presence here before, the people of Mexico had arrived in New York City. The city was unmoored in the ocean of humanity. Eventually, the entire world would come here, everyone bearing their old gods and their ancient obligations, silent and inevitable.

I spent my days rearranging the notes, routines, and drafts for this book, moving them around daily in numerous kaleidoscopic arrays. I wondered, for the first time in a long time, if I shouldn’t be back living in my homeland, among the rivers, creeks, and hills—in San Antonio—the ruin city of my birth, where the ancestors are buried, and where the family’s past has settled over creation in the dust of a hundred years.

There would be no conclusion to Abuelo Juan José’s story. Only Juan José knew what pact was being fulfilled there in Roosevelt Park on the last day of his life. The memories of those who remembered anything of that day would never be gathered into a single picture, a single tale. The old Mexicans who had secrets would eventually take them along on their own journeys out of this world.

For all my obsession with telling the family story, my brothers and I, still childless, might yet be the end of our family line, the end of the story the ancestors have been telling to time for millennia. Perhaps it makes no difference that we have all left San Antonio, with one brother in Houston, the other in New York City. Like our forebears, we have moved on from our given homes, leaving the ancestors behind, setting out beyond the farther border, remembering and forgetting our origins, and always looking for signs.

A brown eagle hunted for days in the air over Central Park. For nights on end, I watched a comet from my terrace. Lightning struck an old tree in the park, hewing it in two in a single, resounding crack. It was in those days, newly back in Manhattan, when my uncle Raul visited me one more time. While I was away, several guests said they had seen a ghostly presence, like a silvery smoke, in my living room. An Indian friend, Tully Spotted Eagle Boy, said he had seen a man in my apartment, dressed in white work clothes as I had seen Uncle Raul once before, sitting quietly in the burgundy velvet reading chair.

“Don’t worry,” Tully wrote in a note, “He’s friendly. He says he’s happy. He wants to help you. Very big blessing.”

I hadn’t been dreaming since my return, only deep stony sleeps for weeks. Then, one night, I awoke with a start. When my eyes focused, I found myself suspended in a ball in midair in my living room, my knees pulled up to my chest. It felt as if I were being cradled from behind, when I suddenly was moved in a blur across the room, coming to a stop over a shelf cluttered with old family photographs—Uncle Frank, Uela and her sisters, the whole tribe, gathered one Easter in front of Uela’s house on Parsons Street. Then swiftly and silently, I was spun across the room again, stopping just in front of my bookshelves, long enough to glimpse an edition of Cortés’s
Letters
and the Velázquez Spanish dictionary. “This is not a dream,” a mischievous voice said from behind. I turned around to see Uncle Raul, standing before me, laughing. As when I had seen his spirit before, the skin of his face looked youthful, his body fit and energetic. When he touched me, wordlessly, I remembered many of the times we had shared together, playing with his dog, Stupid, eating a lunch of tacos in his kitchen, arguing politics at a wedding reception in Mexico.

In a flash, we’re outside on the streets, and Uncle Raul has a car that is made of air. In it, he is able to drive with me into the nighttime skies high above Manhattan. Accelerating rapidly upward and spinning, the city below looks like a nebula in space, a swirl of moving lights and beacons, glowing far into the atmosphere in every direction. Swooping down, I see the illuminated pinnacle of the Chrysler Building. Heading south, the twin towers of the World Trade Center, blurred with speed, stand like dolmens at the river’s edge. Along the way, though he is inaudible over the rushing wind, Uncle Raul is talking continuously, laughing his tommy gun laugh, passing us so close to the stone arches of the Brooklyn Bridge that I can feel the chill of the cold, sooty granite on my cheek. Then we climb into clear sky again, and I can see a long queue of lights to the north from planes waiting to land at La Guardia airport. The streets of the city look empty.

All at once we stop and hover, floating high above one building on the Upper East Side of the city. Looking far down, we see a door open on the rooftop. Uncle Raul points downward with a giggle as an old, tired-looking man dressed in the eagle warrior costume of the ancient
Volador
dance walks wearily out onto the roof. In one hand he has a drum, in the other a flute. Perched on top of a large platform, he begins to play the flute and beat the drum, starting a slow, methodical dance, bowing his shoulders to the north, to the west, to the south, to the east, and rocking from one leg to the next, lifting his knees in high steps.

The old man’s mournful singsong melody, like the sound of lost birds, reaches us on the winds. Uncle Raul looks at me with a sad nod of recognition. “This is not a dream,” he says once more. Soon, the man below is joined by others, old and young, all of them dressed in tattered feathered suits and eagle headdresses, until the roof is crowded with the costumed dancers, each one facing out toward the city, keeping the same melancholic, mesmerizing cadence on their drums. In perfect synchrony, they all bow and spin, first to one side then to the next. The old man’s drumming grows louder, his flute screeching across the whole island. Then the music stopped, and all of the dancers remained perfectly still. In the night air, I can hear Uncle Raul’s breath next to me. We watch then as each of the dancers in sequence leaps from the roof’s edge and flies out over the city, tracing large arcs and loops over midtown, descending slowly, disappearing finally into the streets in small clusters.

Cool gusts churn in the dark against my face. The Big Dipper flickers in and out of focus, one star at a time. As the faint, airy sound of the old man’s flute song wafts over us again, I look out over the brilliantly illuminated nighttime cityscape one last time, marveling silently with my uncle at how here, too, in Babylon-on-the-Hudson, Mexico’s invisible enchantment is already under way.

Winter in San Antonio came on with an early frost in 1998, blighting my father’s backyard pecan crop. In good years, he gathered several tin wash-tubs of smallish, juicy pecans from his two forty-year-old trees, the pride of his garden. Invariably, a shoe box full of the nuts would arrive in New York, rattling like a maraca. But not this year.

The blighting of the year’s pecan harvest wasn’t the only presagio of ill tidings. For months, Madrina, now ninety-nine years old, had been suddenly awaking in the middle of the night, screaming. She now lives with my aunt Bea in San Antonio. She no longer asks if all the Santos have died. Now, she asks Aunt Bea, “When am I going to die?” Then, one night, my aunt heard her scream and ran downstairs. She found Madrina in her pajamas, on all fours on the floor, her face taut with fear, weeping in a slow guttural growl while she clawed the dark air above her with one outstretched hand, in a furry pink glove. After calming down in Aunt Bea’s arms, she complained of being haunted by a mysterious
bulto,
which she described as a churning black mass, hovering in the middle of the room, threatening to engulf her.

Five days after I finished this book in early December, my father was killed in a horrific automobile accident near our home in San Antonio, Texas. Mother barely survived, and continues to recover. It was late dusk and they had just gone to Mass, stopping at a grocery store on the way home to pick up a few things. They were making the last left turn to enter their neighborhood, a turn we have all made thousands of times. A nineteen-year-old kid in a Mitsubishi Eclipse was coming from the opposite direction. He hit my parents’ car broadside, in mid-turn. Weeks later, I saw the result in a car graveyard, a twisted wedge of torn blue metal. My father, who was sitting on the passenger side, must have been killed instantly.

We had not known we were counting his breaths. He was eighty-one years old, enjoying every day with my mother, writing new songs, and as he liked to say “doing a little real estate on the side,” every now and then selling a house or a few acres in the countryside near San Antonio. The day before he died, I had been on the phone with him and he was strangely foggy, confusing me with one of my brothers, losing his train of thought, as his voice seemed to flicker with uncertainty. On the day of his death, we traded calls all day, failing to reach each other. In my last call, I had left them a message saying, “Y’all must be out on the town or something! I’m home.”

Then, sitting in my apartment in New York City, a voice in my head said,
“You’ll never speak to him again.”
I dismissed the doleful thought and ate dinner alone. It was near midnight when my brother George called from Houston. “We’ve got a big problem,” he said, his voice grim and determined. “Mother and Daddy were in an accident tonight, and Daddy was killed.”

We gave him a great
despedida
on a bitterly cold December day in San Antonio, a farewell that resounded with mariachis, Mexican trios, and a performance of one of his last songs, “Si Yo Pudiera.” In the months since his death, I have missed him greatly, longing still for the story he was never able to tell me about his father’s death. Likewise, he never read this book. I was always waiting until it was really done. He had read parts of it, and he had heard me read from it at the main San Antonio Public Library last May. “Sounds good,” he had said afterwards, “sounds real good.” In the weeks before his death, he had seen the book’s cover, with the photograph of his family in 1920. He had framed it, adoringly, in a gilded wooden frame.

And the story I waited so long for him to tell me—the story of the interrupted life of his father—has become mine.

Acknowledgments

So many have supported me through the years I have spent writing this book, none more than my parents and my brothers, Charles and George, and my sister-in-law, Cindy. Thanks also to Stephanie Brummer, who endured much of my soul wrestling while I tried to imagine the book.
Mil gracias
to
toda la familia,
living and gone, for sharing so many of their stories. I’m particularly indebted to my great-aunt Josefa Garcia Valdes, Tía Pepa, for the hours we spent together in the last years. As the Native Americans say: To all of my relations! And to la familia Guerra of Sabinas, Mexico, for giving me a family, and a home, in the old homelands—the Rancho Los Generales, where I wrote much of the first draft.

Deep gratitude to Carina Courtright for all of her support throughout; she shared many of the outward, and inward, journeys in the book with me and listened to these tales told over and over. Naomi Shihab Nye, my poetic ally since creation time, read early drafts and spirited me on through many peaks and valleys over the years. I would never have tried to be a writer without the encouragement of my poet-mentor, Ernest Sandeen, who died two years ago. He first heard the story that was hidden inside all of the forgetting, and he and his wife, Eileen, created a home that nurtured a host of young poets. Another great mentor, Father Virgilio Elizondo of San Antonio, helped me to understand the profound implications of our heritage in the
mestizaje
of Mexico. Pamela Cadwallader Illott, my executive producer at CBS, first opened the entire world to me. Later, she gave me shelter on her ranch in Texas, where I wrote part of the book. And all honorifics to my theoretical conspirators for the whole saga: Tom Levin, James DerDerian, Adam Ashforth, Kendall Thomas, and Deborah Esch. My comrade Tom Keenan helped me find the book’s title, hidden inside one of its tales. An
abrazo fuerte
to
mi compañera,
Lisa Heller, for her patience and companionship through some of the darkest times along the way. And thanks to Pedro Lujan for his prophetic paintings and our many conversations over the years about the
Inframundo
. He and Leah Gitter opened their home to a rabble of Latino artists and writers, helping us to discover a common vision.