Space Between the Stars (32 page)

I looked through the book, noticing duplicate entries and no sense of order.
There must be a better way to keep a record of our fans.
“What do you send to the fans?” I asked.

“We mail them an order form for T-shirts.”

“Do you send photos?”

“Yes,” she said, “if they ask for one.”

I handed her back the binder. “Thanks.”

It seemed an inefficient system. I had been to many of the places Santana had toured, and I felt personally connected to the fans. I had watched their faces light up with the opening chords of “Welcome,” and had seen people leap in the air when Carlos hit a note on his guitar, his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth open in an inaudible scream. I had witnessed faces wet with
tears during “Europa,” and had watched women rip off their blouses and wave them over their heads when the recognizable chords of “Oye Como Va” rolled from the stage. The fans deserved a heartfelt response when they wrote to us, certainly a more personal touch than they were receiving. With time on my hands and a baby in my belly, I decided to take over the fan club. I bought a computer to set up a proper database and asked the manager to have the binder sent to me. With Mom's help, I entered each name, organized by city, state, and country. It took us weeks to type in every one. When we finished, we had three thousand fans registered in the database. Kitsaun volunteered to help, and with her background in merchandising and eye for color and design, we created the first newsletter. She also picked up the mail from the post office box so we could keep the mailing list current. We personally answered any letter by someone who was sick or in need. Within a few months, Kitsaun came to work at the Santana office and did all of the fan club business.

It was rewarding to read fans' letters; sometimes Kitsaun cried at the soulful comments they wrote about the experiences they had at shows. I clipped foreign stamps from envelopes and mounted them in a scrapbook. From just the first year, the postage represented fifty-one countries where people had been touched by Santana's music.

My body was changing inside and out. Having always been skinny, I watched with curiosity as padding grew on my hips and stomach and I expanded to make a home for the baby. I reconnected with my parents on a different level, asking questions about family history and genealogy: Dad's Louisiana
Creole heritage, and Mom's Irish-English roots. Carlos and I talked about our pasts and our future, debated names for the baby, and played Miles's “Concerto de Aranjuez” to educate the baby's musical cells as they developed.

Four months pregnant, I spent New Year's Eve of 1983 with Carlos, meditating in front of a fire, a picture of Jesus leaning on the mantel. The sky was filled with pinpoints of stars floating in navy vellum. I read from Paramahansa Yogananda: “Learn to discriminate in the new year. Examine every impulse that comes, to see if it is the right thing for you to act on. And when your reason tells you to do a certain thing, let neither the fates nor the gods stand in your way.” I carried this message with me, folded in my purse, and referred to it when I needed to know I could count on my own mind and heart to chart my course.

My stomach grew larger, and the baby kicked in rhythm, which made me suspect a musician was dwelling there. I shopped for tiny outfits, crib sheets, and baby towels soft as velvet. Carlos and I attended Lamaze classes so I could deliver naturally. When my labor started, I recalled each footstep in the New York City Marathon and kept telling myself that if I could run 26.2 miles, I could certainly get through childbirth. Carlos was a nervous wreck, and his pacing drove me crazy. My labor was long, and I sent him home on an imaginary errand so I could relax and concentrate on my breathing. He returned minutes before Salvador was born, a precious colicky wonder, and we thanked Spirit for the miracle of his life.

I worked to adjust my life from runner, former restaurant manager, and fan club administrator to full-time mom; and I assembled my schedule around Salvador's gurgles and smiles.
Many days I struggled to adapt to the little person in my care. I would call Mom to ask how often to bathe Salvador, when he could eat solid food, and “Can I bring him over so I can go for a long run?” Mom and Dad were ecstatic to have a grandchild. I never could figure out why he slept all night at their house and then awakened at eight in the morning—when he would wake up two or three times during the night at home.

When he was seven weeks old, Salvador went on the road with us to Tokyo, Japan, looking like a miniature sumo wrestler wearing his baseball cap and a kimono. In August we went to New York City for the Jones Beach Show, and Salvador visited museums and shops on Madison Avenue with me, charming everyone he met.

In the elevator at the Parker Meridien Hotel in Manhattan, a man said to me,
Estás cuidando el niño?

“No,” I replied.
“Es mí niño.”

My face heated up, and I was mad as hell that he had asked whether I was taking care of Salvador, as though the child could not be mine because our skin colors were different. I fought to accept the man's innocence. Because of Salvador's pale skin— like Mom's and Carlos's—the man did not know Salvador was my child. His eyes were blue, his fat little arms and toes not even brown in the creases. I instantly understood what my mom must have felt when she'd carried brown baby girls in her arms and people had asked whether she was taking care of them, or worse, had scorned her for marrying a black man. I felt strange realizing that I was repeating the life my mother had lived more than thirty years before. Times had changed—interracial marriage was no longer illegal in sixteen states, as it had
been in Mom and Dad's time—but people still could not see beyond color. Living with racism was painful, and struck a tender nerve in my core. Carlos and I had not experienced what Mom and Dad had as a couple, but with Salvador I saw a challenging road ahead.

Carlos also assessed his life in context of being a son and a father. He told me that when he was a boy he used to sit outside his Tijuana home, turning the wheel of a bicycle, hitting a stick against the spokes, hoping the spinning rhythm would drown the sadness he felt when his father walked from the house with his violin in hand to play mariachi music in distant towns.

Their family moved to the United States and lived in a small apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco. Carlos chased his own guitar aspirations, listening to blues players on records at his friends' houses when he cut school at Mission High. He wanted to play like B. B., T Bone, and Albert King.

“My dad told me to do anything but be a musician. I couldn't believe he would tell me that after he had spent his whole life playing music. In Mexico, I had worked so hard to learn the guitar and worked strip clubs in Tijuana to buy my first guitar. I was so mad at him that I became more determined to play my music,” Carlos said.

“Why did your dad say that? Didn't he want you to follow in his footsteps?”

“Mom was working in a Laundromat, and Dad was playing in Mexican restaurants that didn't pay much, in the Mission. He was frustrated and afraid I would have the same hard life. But when he said it, I didn't understand—I just thought he was trying to stop me from reaching the most important goal of my
life. One afternoon when I worked at Tick Tock's, the Grateful Dead pulled up in a limo and I told myself then that if they could make it, so could I. It was music or die.”

In December we traveled to Cihuatlan, México, with my mom and dad, Carlos's parents, and Salvador. At the Manzanillo airport, Carlos's maternal aunts,
Tías
Sylvie and Gollita, and
Tío
Cesar, together with many friends and relatives, waited for us. They were dancing with the thrill of having their sister Josefina and all of us in their land. We were taken by Volkswagen bus to Las Hadas, the resort where we stayed, nestled in front of mountains with a sparkling oceanfront beach and luscious magenta bougainvillea trailing along the white buildings. When we visited the
tías'
house, Salvador was the star—his feet never touched the ground. Gollita ran about the house waiting on us hand and foot as she chattered Spanish adorations at her grand-nephew.

The town was a shocking contrast to the hotel. When cars sped through the dirt streets, dust flew everywhere. Mrs. Santana had sent money to her sisters, so their house had two indoor bathrooms, nice furniture, and a washing machine. Sylvie told us another woman in town had a washing machine she had won in a contest, and how happy it made her because she had twenty-two children.

Dad and Carlos played tennis at the hotel and let me in for one Australian set, where we played two on a side, rotating around the court. I loved being on the side playing singles against the two powerhouse men, and I slid back and forth on the red clay to keep up with their forehand smashes and backhand cross-court slices. Afterward, we dined beside the pool under amber lights, Salvador asleep in my arms.
Carlos and his Dad wanted to travel to Autlán, the town where Carlos and most of his siblings had been born. A friend took us in a truck while Salvador stayed with Mom and Dad at Las Hadas. Mrs. Santana was content to stay and talk nonstop with her sisters about her children and what had changed in Ci-huatlan.

We drove through land lush with fruit-laden banana, coconut, and papaya trees. The road snaked through farmlands and valleys with thousands of palm trees as far as I could see—a breathtaking, tropical paradise. The sun baked us, and a thin film of perspiration lay like dew on my skin. Fields of sugarcane and corn drifted in and out of view. I asked what the yellow-breasted birds were swooping through the sky. “Garrionsillos,” Mr. Santana said.

Small, open-air casitas were situated on each farm, and speckled black chickens pecked the dusty road for morsels of food. I marveled at the beauty and simplicity of this life, where families could live richly off the land. Yet the poverty was so great that many houses were without roofs—brick casas left half finished, with pieces of plastic sheeting or tin covering their tops. Horses stood saddled up and tied to fence posts, and men's faces were weathered and hardened with weary expressions. Outside, in the dirt, toddlers played, watched by older children. I thought how easy my life was, how hard it must be to work this glorious land as a campesino. In fields of lavender flowers, Brahma bulls' muscles twitched to shake off flies; and farmers wearing yellow and white peasant shirts walked behind horses tilling the soft earth.

We passed El Tigre, and wound downhill into a desert of cactus, tall as trees, to Autlán. We parked and extracted our
cramped bodies from the cab of the truck, walking to the
zócalo
in the center of town. Carlos had not been there since he'd left at the age of ten. “I can't believe how small it is,” he said. “It seemed like a big city when we lived here. It was all I knew.”

We walked to the church where Carlos had been an altar boy. He kneeled before the Virgen at the door and touched his dad's shoulder, a poignant, bittersweet moment: Good memories and bad from his childhood and times of strife between his parents that haunted him; but to be home again was exorcising a giant shadow that he had spent years running away from.

We passed a restaurant, and men ran out to us. “Don José!” they exclaimed, and clapped Mr. Santana on the back, yelling across the street to their friends. Laughter. Then faces turned to Carlos, and they spilled out sentences in Spanish, pointing to Mr. Santana.

“Dad's like the mayor of Autlán,” Carlos said, smiling. “He's more famous here than I am.”

It was dark when we climbed into the truck to drive back to Salvador. I could not wait to get my arms around that chunky boy. I had learned about myself on this trip to Carlos's birthplace: how privileged my childhood seemed compared with Carlos's humble beginnings, and how I do not need material wealth to be happy. I saw how much we have that we do not need, and I wanted to remember Mexico to avoid being swayed by the competitive nature of American life.

Could I be happy on one of these farms in Mexico? I didn't think so. But I could keep my life real in homage to the weathered farmers and shoeless children I had seen and knew Carlos had once been.