Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (9 page)

Once they left the highway, the car’s oversized whitewalls handled the hardscrabble Norteño terrain well enough, occasionally scraping the oil pan on the lip of a gully, or scratching the enamel finish on the passenger’s side with low-hanging branches of thorny huisache. Cactus and mesquite dotted the otherwise wide open plain, which seemed flat in all directions. After an hour of untroubled roaming with the river in sight, with the afternoon growing late, the Hudson and its trio of would-be prospectors stalled in the middle of some railroad tracks. The only railroad tracks for two hundred miles. Since the invention of railroads, it has been like a supernatural curse. Mexicans walking, sleeping, or in their stalled cars are perpetually getting hit by trains after being unable to get off the tracks.

A solitary hill off in the distance might just be
la Loma de los Muertos,
but the Hudson would not turn over, and the machine was so heavy the three together could not push it off the tracks. El Dorado was in reach, and their engine was flooded. Then, just before nightfall, when Uncle Rudy and my father walked off a mile and dug a few holes looking for gold, they found a giant geode. When they cracked it open, it took their breath away. It looked like a bowl full of light blue stars, glowing in the crimson sunset.

They ended up camping there for the night, eating two rabbits Rudy shot with his .22 caliber pistol, listening nervously for a train whistle on the horizon. But the only sounds were the warm wind and a few far off cattle, wearing bells, grazing on the grass that grew between the trestles of the railroad tracks. When the night sky came out, they lay awake for hours, staring upward counting the galaxies that dotted the heavens like archipelagos of frost.

In the morning, the three were able to dislodge the Hudson from the tracks with the help of two
vaqueros
passing by on horseback, and they walked back to the main road for help. Watching the whole landscape recede in the rearview mirrors as they were towed by a pickup truck back to Múzquiz, the two brothers and their cousin resigned themselves to reporting back to Great-grandfather Jacobo and his brother, Abrán, that
la Loma de los Muertos
had been spotted, but remained unexplored.

 

 

Madrina told the story of a valley in Coahuila, somewhere near their town of Palaú, in the Serranía del Burro. She said that in this valley, in a clearing by a large mesquite tree, there were places where no sound could penetrate. If you stood in particular clearings, or specific gullies and hills, no sound of birds could reach you, no sound of wind, no loud, coarse donkey’s bray. She remembered playing with her cousin Narciso in that valley, and watching him climb a tree and shout down at her—and she could see him screaming at her, but she couldn’t hear a thing.

The world was deaf there.

Because of this strange phenomenon, the place was called
el Valle de Silencio,
“the Valley of Silence.” As to where it lay exactly, she could only say that it was near
la Loma de los Muertos,
where my father had gone prospecting. Madrina said she was told by her grandfather Teofilo that this was one of many such places around the world that God had, for some unknown reason, left unfinished at the time of creation. For some reason, there were many such places in Coahuila. These were places, often completely unnoticed, with no sound, without color, dark places where no sunlight could penetrate, places where the world had no shape or substance.

Just like us, Teofilo had explained, creation itself was incomplete. And forevermore, until the end of the world, there would be no sound in
el Valle de Silencio.

 

 

Breaking free of their Mexican past wasn’t as easy for the old ones as they thought it would be. The landscapes of south Texas, the chalk cliffs, the sandy river plains, the crystalline Rio Nueces that was once the border, the hill country, the abiding fertile river valleys; all of them crisscross a spiritual home that has no boundaries. The family maintained its calendar of the sacred year, the fasting at Lent, the feasting on the day of
La Virgen de Guadalupe,
Easter, Christmas—and the
Diez y seis de Septiembre,
the Sixteenth of September, celebrating Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821. In late October for the
Día de los Muertos,
we visited the cemeteries to pay homage to the ancestors. Beneath the increasing Americanization of San Antonio, many Mexicans kept the red glass votive candles burning on the old altars.

In 1968 San Antonio hosted Hemisfair, which included everything from continuous performances of Czech avant-garde theater to presentations of the delicate protocols of the Japanese tea ceremony. With a high-speed, elevated monorail encircling the downtown fairgrounds, the Hemisfair was meant to be a celebration of humanity’s technological future, with the eight-hundred-foot-high Tower of the Americas as its centerpiece, which featured a rotating restaurant and bullet elevators that shot up from the ground like X-14 experimental rocket planes.

Down below, the Mexican Pavilion showcased a troupe of Indian dancers dressed in crimson spandex outfits with feathered wings who performed the ancient ritual of the
Volador,
or flyer. It was said to be one of very few religious dances once performed across Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica that has survived into the present. As a booming Spanish-accented man’s voice narrated the ritual from scratchy loudspeakers, every top of the hour the five dancers marched like wrestlers into a gladiatorial arena:

 

On an altar set on a dais, two barrel-chested priests in loincloths and sequined capes enacted a terrifying mock sacrifice of a young, bare-breasted woman to the fierce god Tezcatlipoca. As the priests lifted up the dripping fake heart to the sky, the five
Voladores,
themselves dressed in loincloths and plumed headdresses, climbed up a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot-long pole that had been braided with heavy ropes. At the top, in the strenuous heat, four of the Indians sat on the edges of a pivoting wooden frame attached to a rotating hub appended to the top of the pole. Then the leader, or
caporal,
would slowly stand up on the pole, poised in the gusting wind between the other four. As his
compañeros
watched while shaking their rattles, he blew into an eagle bone whistle while beating an old hide
tambor,
dancing on the narrow diameter of the pole, gradually saluting and bowing to each of the four directions of creation. Then, while all of us in the crowd leaned back, gripping our seats, we watched the other four Indians lean off with a slow backward arch into the air, with the ropes tied to one ankle and threaded through the pivoting wooden frame they had been sitting on.

Slowly, hanging upside down with their arms outstretched toward the ground, they began to spin earthward around the pole, gradually disentwining their tethers with each revolution, moving closer to the ground. I was hypnotized as the
Voladores
flew over me in giant descending circles, their graceful shadows dancing over the crowd, coming gradually nearer to us, in great, swooping, widening spirals. The fifth Indian always stayed on the top, his back against the rotating hub, staring upward at the sky, singing all the way through the ritual. The whole dance took forty minutes to perform.

The
Voladores
had the power to make time stop, to make the rest of the world around me fall away. Staring up at the flyers, silhouetted against the silvery Texas sky, it was one thousand years ago, before empires and conquests, revolutions and borders. The
Voladores
were guardians of the old time, the time of the Maya, the time of the Aztecs. That summer, they unleashed it in San Antonio, reconnecting the city, and all of the Santos who lived there, to our most distant past.

I did not know, then, why I always found the pageant of the
Volador
dance so magical. I did not know, then, what any of it meant or how to pronounce the names of the
Nahua
gods. It was said to have come from the mountains of Puebla, in central Mexico, far from any place my family had any memory of living. Maybe it reminded me of childhood tales of winged gods and angels descending to our world. Who had imagined such a dance in the first place, and what was it meant to signify? Was it a dance left behind to remember that we are descendants of the sky? Or was it just a dance to evoke the irresistible beauty of dynamic, balanced symmetry, effortlessly churning a small galaxy of synchronous movements?

I saw the
Volador
ritual performed many times that summer, imagining myself in all the falling spirals, the flying, the feather costumes, and the exquisite, silent speed of the flyers. The primal sounds of the old Mexican flutes and drums wafted out across the other pavilions of the sprawling fairgrounds. And after every time I saw the ritual, I felt as if I had been chosen for this blessing, as if this dance that came from deep in the Mexican past was harboring some secret intended especially for me.

 

 

One place I have felt the ineluctable pull of old Mexican time is at the Guerra ranch, Rancho Los Generales, in the Serranía del Burro, near where the Garcias and the Santos come from in Coahuila. As a child, when I went there, I would gather sticks and stones in the woods near our house in San Antonio and take them with me to leave out on the ranch. When I returned, I’d bring back some rocks and twigs and flowers from the ranch to toss out of the car windows onto Texas earth as we entered San Antonio. In this way, I thought I could begin to sew the two worlds together again.

To reach the ranch, you drive five hours south from San Antonio. At the mining town of Nueva Rosita, with its landmark towering sooty brick chimney bellowing black smoke, you turn off from Highway 57 and head west for the mountains, already visible in the distance. Passing the old Rosita Cemetery,
el panteón,
and the rushing turquoise water of the Rio Sabinas, the dusty road begins a slow steady climb into the sierra.

Rancho Los Generales lies along the road that runs first through Palaú and Múzquiz into the mountains, going all the way to the Texas border, and the remote fluorite mines called Las Boquillas del Carmen at the southern tip of Big Bend National Park. I would discover later it was territory my family had traveled for generations. Along that same road was the Nacimiento de los Indios, the land where the Kikapu Indians had lived for one hundred and fifty years, and where my kidnapped great-grandfather Teofilo had grown up among them more than one hundred years ago. When it was still unpaved, Tía Pepa remembers walking with her grandfather west out of Múzquiz along the road, picking the healing herb
la gobernadora,
wild mint, and oregano.

The land around Los Generales is a mix of the landscapes of many places. From the ranch, you can see distant grizzled gray peaks of the sierra, cleaving the clouds on the southwest horizon. To the east, the faintest blue apparition of the mountain pueblo of Las Esperanzas can be spotted flickering on a clear night in the notch of a nearby canyon. Alejo, the
vaquero
foreman who ran the ranch, once found the fossil of an old conch shell in one of the high prairies there, which he said meant the whole region must have lain at the bottom of an old ocean. Now, a palm tree sways next to a stand of pines and cedars at the top of one rocky hill. There are narrow gorges and hidden valleys that I spent those summers exploring, learning their secrets.

One morning, Alejo and I rode out together through three pastures to reach a long, deep gorge that descended from one of the big hills down to the floor of the valley below. Taking a path off from one of the pasture roads, cutting a swath through the scrubby bushes up the hillside, then taking several turns farther toward the mountain, we rounded a smooth stone wall and looked down into the deep blue shadows of the long dry notch. The rains usually create a flume of water here that washes everything into the valley. But after the recent rains, the gorge bed was overgrown with thorny saplings and cactus, a cascade of chipped stones that glowed like oyster shells in the half-light of early morning that filtered down through the thick brush canopy and the overhanging rock outcroppings.

In this cool, secluded sanctuary, Alejo said we would find the chile piquín, the wild Sierra chile, the size of a berry, that grows green, yellow, and red on the same plant and is prized across Mexico for its unforgiving burn. Uncle Beto used to carry a breast pocket full of the chiles when he went to restaurants, pulling one out and popping it in his mouth before biting into his barbecued brisket. The Kikapu say that it was in the tiny piquín chiles that God hid away the first fire that created the world, leaving it with us to remind us where everything came from.

As we cut and gathered large bundles of the shrubs, their branches speckled with gemlike chiles, the peppery smell of the capsaicin filled the air around us, as we moved slowly down the gorge. Along the cliffs on both sides, the water had carved out scalloped caves here and there where animals,
gatos de monte,
“mountain cats,” pumas, maybe even bears, had made their lairs. We stepped gingerly around each of the rough chambers, peering warily in from behind first to make sure no animal was sleeping there, though such beasts rarely linger in their dwellings during the day. With their beds of dirt and twigs, paw prints crisscrossing in all directions, but not hurriedly, the places seemed like private sanctuaries from the outside world. If the
gatos
began attacking cattle, as they sometimes, usually in drought, would suddenly begin to do, it was near this gorge that the
vaqueros
would hunt for them. More often, they lived unto themselves, rarely seen, almost in a parallel space and time.