During Holy Week at Easter, and in the week between Christmas and the New Year, we would join the entire Guerra family, up to thirty of us, at Los Generales for several days of cooking and eating, afternoon tequilas, horseback riding, and impromptu rodeos. Meals were served on one long wooden table, set in the shade of a sycamore tree we had planted some years before, next to the patio. Tacos de chorizo,
de machacado,
with beans was breakfast. A breast of dove in a clear lime soup, with rice and peas, might be lunch. Most evenings, Alejo would build a great mesquite fire in a vast cast-iron barbecue pit, and the steaks and
tripas
for dinner were grilled alongside onions, garlic, corn, and chiles for late suppers.
One Easter, after dinner, most of the adults retreated to the sitting room of the ranch house around ten o’clock, the women drinking limeades, the men sipping from snifters of El Presidente brandy. While the subject of discussion at the Guerra table back in Sabinas was usually Mexican politics, out at the
rancho
the talk ran to long Mexican jokes, old family tales, and, as it grew later, ghost stories.
“The old house in Sabinas was haunted, for many years,” Tía Bertha said, as I leaned in, listening from the kitchen. “Yes, it was in the closet in our room,” she added, pointing to her sister Beatriz sitting nearby. “Late at night, we heard slow footsteps inside the closet. Sometimes we could hear, like a whispering voice, saying
‘Dios mio . . .’
It was a very, very sad voice.”
“Tía, how terrifying!” my cousin Alejandra said, holding her hands to her face. “How could you even sleep there?”
“Ticha or I would tell it to shush, so we could sleep! And that’s all it took. An old woman who came from the church said it was a ghost of an old banker from town. In our closet! She said she saw his face in the grain of the wood on the door and brought the widow of the poor soul to stare at it and say prayers.”
“There was always praying going on in their room,” their elder sister Julieta offered, drawing snickers from the room.
“But do you know that Mama had to pay a spiritualista to lure that spirit to come out? The man was dressed in a big cloak, and he was a little, you know, ‘Forty-one,’ effeminate, and he kept screaming at the closet, ‘Now you come out of there right now! Naughty Spirit!’” Tío Alejandro erupted with laughter at his sister’s impersonation of the spirit medium.
“And did he get the ghost out?” Alejandra asked.
“That was beautiful.” Tía Beatriz, or Tía Ticha as she is known, had been silent as her sister told the story. Her face was serious, and she spoke in slow earnest tones. “It was in the middle of summer. From the closet door, through Julieta’s room, into the hallway and out onto the porch, and then across the plaza, this old
brujo
left behind a path of the orange petals of
zempaxuchitl
flowers. He said he guided the spirit through the streets of Sabinas back to its grave in the nearby cemetery. You could see the flower path for days.”
“And,
fijate,
that ghost never bothered us again,” Tía Bertha added with great pride.
Tío Alejandro told how once, as a child, on an old
rancho
near Múzquiz called Las Rusias, the family had been visiting friends on an ordinary Sunday afternoon in the summer. “We were playing in a pasture and the skies suddenly darkened. Then there was some rain, but it wasn’t water. It was small black stones that stung when they fell on us. We ran to the house, but I turned around and saw the rain of stones falling across the sierra, as far as you could see.
Bien curioso.
” Alejandro’s brother Miguel, along with his sisters, nodded in solemn agreement.
It was nearly midnight, and there was already a constellation of sleepers on cots spread out across the patio in the open night air. Tío Alejandro popped an old corroded bottle of Cognac Napoleon that he said had belonged to the emperor himself, and it looked as if it might have. As he chipped away at the tar-colored plaque on the bottle, he remembered with us how his father had come from Oaxaca City, in the south of Mexico, where his grandfather, who was puro Indio, had a livery company. Alejandro Senior had fought in
la Revolución
and had ridden into Mexico City with Pancho Villa’s Dorado army.
“And in that famous portrait, you know the one, of Villa and Zapata sitting together in the Presidential Palace, both of them in their grand thrones just after victory—off to the very far left of the picture, peeking into the frame, you can see Papá’s nose.”
As everyone laughed over my uncle’s protestations that it was the truth, he poured out thimble-size
copitas
of the aged cognac and passed them around the room. Seeing me in the doorway, he called me over and asked me to recite something I had performed for him earlier in the day. In high school Spanish class, I had learned a speech from
La Vida es Sueño,
a seventeenth-century Spanish play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca about a prince, Seguismundo, who is condemned to live in a tower after his father, the king, receives prophecies that the youth will bring great calamities to the kingdom. Deciding to give his son one chance, the king has the prince drugged, and, upon awakening, the prince is told he is king. The affairs of the kingdom are soon wrecked, and he is returned to the tower, where he makes a powerful speech.
As I recited in the quiet sitting room, I could hear the sound of crickets outside when I paused to take a breath. My voice sounded alien to me, more insistent than when I had rehearsed the words before, the Spanish more flamboyant and rhythmic. I saw Tía Maye, Alejandro’s wife, nodding in approval when I came to the last words which I nervously tried to deliver without stumbling,
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño:
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.
What is life? A frenzy.
What is life? An illusion,
a shadow, a fiction,
and the greatest good is small:
that life is a dream,
and dreams are dreams.
Amidst the whooping and applause which I acknowledged with a bow, Tío Alejandro offered me a copita of the rare cognac, which I raised in a toast to everyone in the room. When it went down my throat, it felt like an icy smoke that tasted of ancient oranges.
“Shhhh-shhh-shhh,”
Tía Bertha whispered, quieting the room.
“¡Ahora, Johnny!”
My father stood up and cleared his voice, lifting his hands for quiet with a nervous smile. He raised his copita up in the air, looking for a moment at me, and said to everyone with a sweep of his arm, “
Les voy a cantar una canción.
I’m going to sing you all a little song.”
Aside from an occasional wedding or funeral, he hadn’t wanted to sing among friends for a long time. Back in San Antonio, he liked to sing in a room of the house off on his own, when you could barely make out the lyrics of Agustín Lara’s song “Noche de Ronda” in the sweet falsetto section of the song where it says,
Lu-na que se quiebra sobre la tiniebla
de mi soledad.
¿Adónde vas?
Oh Moon that shatters over the storm
of my solitude.
Where are you going?
Out at Los Generales that night, in a room lit by lanterns and candles, he told the group with great formality that he had written a song he wanted to sing especially for them, a song in honor of the Rancho Los Generales, which he dedicated, cognac held aloft again, to my Tío Alejandro.
“You know how close our families are,” my father said, beginning to choke up.
“Somos familia,”
Tío Alejandro responded. “We are family.”
My father rushed out his words as his cheeks quivered with emotion, “And this is for everybody.” He sat down and brought the guitar onto his lap. He closed his eyes as he strummed the instrument gently, humming through a cascade of chord progressions and flowery pickings. Finally, he was ready to begin. My father was in his early sixties, and “El Corrido del Rancho Los Generales” was the first song he had written.
My father was
ranchero,
even though he had grown up as a city boy. The ranch off Pleasanton Road was a refuge where we could leave behind the San Antonio of expressways and shopping malls and return to the old time of Texas earth—something Abuelo Juan José had always aspired to.
But the real
rancheros
had been the old Santos, the Santos before they came to Coahuila. My great-grandfather Juan Nepumencio Santos had worked around ranches of the region and was known as a keen-eyed roper.
Visabuelo
Nepumencio, as he was called, lost his first wife in the 1870s during a difficult childbirth before she was twenty-two, leaving him with four sons—Pedro, José León, Guadalupe, and Jesús María—to raise alone. As the sons grew up, they worked the cattle with him at the
ranchos,
and José León, in particular, is said to have become an adept cowboy.
A distant cousin in Austin turned out to have been told some of these tatters of Abuelo Nepumencio’s story by her father. In those days, she said, the family lived in the remote dusty village of Espinazo, in the flat, dry countryside between Monclova and Monterrey, which was also the birthplace and home of José Fidencio Sintora Constantino, the famous and widely sought after Indian healer known as El Niño Fidencio, whose disciples still gather every year in the tiny town, reachable only by dirt roads and railway.
It was there that Juan Nepumencio Santos apparently met my great-grandmother Paula Sandoval, a young midwife, who had come to visit the healer Fidencio along with her mother and other
parteras,
or “midwives,” who were interested in the wondrous works of the Indian miracle healer. She was about eighteen then, and Nepumencio already nearly forty. After marrying, he moved his four children and their few belongings by buggy to San Felipe, Coahuila, where Paula came from, and where he was able to find work on ranches near Sabinas, hoping someday to be able to afford to buy a small
granja
on which the family could live, keep a few goats and chickens, and grow its food, and still have enough to sell at the markets.
In the diocesan baptismal registry of San Felipe, kept in Sabinas, just as Uncle Sid had reported, beginning in 1882, the names of my grandfather and his brothers and sisters are entered, in flowing ornamental script, one by one, over the next twelve years. There was Mariano, the deaf-mute, who became a barber in Texas and could fix watches, even though he had never received any formal training; and Tío Uvaldino. Then Juan José, my abuelo, followed by four sisters, Andrea; Francisca, known as “Panchita”; Jesusa, whom everyone would know as “Chita,” the prankster; and Manuela, known simply as “Nela.”
It’s impossible to say where the haunting in that family began, the hidden-away distraction, the fearful despair, threading through my grandfather, uncles, and aunts. Impossible to say how far back in time it began, like a fossil of some tragic lost knowledge. Once ancient Mexicans had been gripped in a perpetual cycle of obligation to sacrifice to fend off the destruction of the world and the constant encroaching of the void. The French anthropologist Jacques Soustelle called this the “cosmic mission” of the Aztecs, “fighting off the incursions of nothingness day after day.” The shadows of that
compromiso,
that solemn duty, that fearful memory of nothingness, may have lasted long in the hearts of Mexicanos, for generations after the conquest, to the present day.
Or it may just have been that my grandfather’s generation was deeply shaken by having to flee their home during the revolution, like so many others leaving behind the only way of life they had known in Mexico. No one today remembers any talk of Nepumencio or Paula being prone to
complejos de nervios—
nervous disorders, depression, or madness. But there were rumors about Nepumencio’s four sons by his first wife.
As the elder half-siblings of Nepumencio’s first family, they always seemed like outsiders,
renegados,
often disappearing from the family home for intervals. Jesús María, the youngest, was a notorious
llorón,
a crybaby, prone to fits of weeping, often in public, at funerals, as well as weddings, baptisms, and later, strolling through the streets of San Felipe. These bouts of crying carried on well into his elder years, after he had come to Texas. The Santos have remained strangely quick to weep, and not just in moments of great sadness or joy. In the middle of singing a song, my father can suddenly be engulfed by tears, trying to persevere, but often having to stop in midverse to collect himself. The urge to weep can sweep into me like a wind, during a phone conversation, watching a close horse race, reading a newspaper article about a cataclysm abroad.
Another half-brother was José León—remembered for his great resounding cowboy boots, a handlebar mustache, and telling hilarious yarns—whose nomadic ways kept him out of the family’s close embrace. He worked ranches throughout south Texas and later back in Mexico. José León was so restless he never stayed at home. His own family in Eagle Pass grew accustomed to living without him. Moving alone with his own haunting, he crossed the border between Texas and Mexico at Piedras Negras so often he said there was a rut in the bridge there from all of his walking.
The last two half-brothers, Tíos Pedro and Guadalupe, are remembered least. When the family moved north across the border in the days of
la Revolución,
they stayed behind in Hondo, Texas, an hour south of San Antonio, on the road to Piedras Negras. They lost touch with the rest of the family, never answering letters, never visiting San Antonio or receiving visitors, and finally there were rumors, never confirmed, of a suicide.
With Abuelo Juan José, the family’s long history in
la vida ranchera
became in him a desire to farm, even after the Santos had arrived in San Antonio. Amidst the new city, he still dreamed of the life the family had lived before. The work Abuelo had done in the greenhouse conservatory of Colonel Brackenridge, tending the ivory lilies, the crimson amaryllises, and the trellises draping with ivy, only deepened those desires, even if planting and minding flowers and ornamental plants was a caprice compared to the age-old cycle of planting and harvesting that drew at him like an ineluctable tide.