Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (6 page)

 

By the time I was born in 1957, my grandfathers were already long gone. When their names were mentioned, once in a long while, by parents or aunts and uncles, it was always with great ceremony and formality. There were never disparaging words of any kind. My mother’s father, Leonides, owned a dry goods store in Cotulla, Texas, and my father’s father, Juan José, with the same name as my father, was a gardener and laborer in San Antonio. Both were remembered as men of few words, prone to meting out family justice in swift and unwavering fashion. I hadn’t seen pictures of Juan José, but in an old photograph of Leonides, taken when he was already in his early fifties, he is sitting next to a great desk in his store, stacked high with papers weighted by horseshoes. A big man with a bald head, and light-complexioned for a Mexicano, he is dressed in a suit and vest, with a shiny watch fob hanging, and his demeanor is serious, with a forceful gaze as direct and unyielding as an old judge’s. If the stories are to be believed, both grandfathers were exemplars of virtue, honesty, and integrity, beloved by their families and communities alike.
Los Abuelos
never indulged in alcohol. Both Juan José and Leonides were said to be teetotalers who rarely drank, even at weddings or during holidays. There are no tales of drunkenness or recklessness among them. Yet neither lived to meet a single one of their scores of grandchildren.

Did they leave anything behind? Was there anything of the memory of
los Abuelos
left for us, their progeny, to share? It felt as if their legacies had been completely extinguished, perpetually lost to their descendants.

Perhaps the answers lay in the words of Tundama, the powerful Chibcha Indian
cacique,
or king. In 1541, in the part of Latin America that is present-day Colombia, Tundama rejected a peace overture made by Quesada, the Spanish conquistador, with a warning that prophesied the invincibility of the past, even in the face of imminent defeat and death:

 

Grandfather Leonides used to help people in Cotulla by using his horse-drawn wagon to transport corpses from their homes to the undertaker to be prepared for their final rest. Many of the Mexican families of the town would ask him to speak at the funerals since he knew everyone and, as one of my aunts put it, “He always spoke so pretty.”

Once, just before he died, Grandfather Leonides awoke Uncles Leo, Lauro, and Lico in the middle of the night. Without telling them where they were going, he put their jackets on and led them down a side street until they were just out of town, where the railroad tracks passed through a large, flat, dry pasture. There were other people there, holding candles, singing and praying softly in the moonlit indigo evening. Uncle Lauro remembered how it felt as if hours went by before everyone heard the sound of a slowly approaching train, heading south for Laredo. The three-car procession was decked with brass torches and great ribbons of black bunting that waved in the warm night breeze like banners.

“It is the body of Anfitrio Mendiola!” Grandfather whispered to my uncles, who struggled through the crowd to get a clear sight of the funeral train.

Mendiola was one of the most acclaimed Mexican stage actors of the time, and Grandfather had seen him perform in classical Spanish plays on buying trips to Monterrey. He had died while working on a silent movie in California.

Now his body was being taken home to Nuevo León, and all along the route through south Texas his fans had come out to the tracks to offer their
despedida.
The glass-walled car, like a traveling shrine, passed them, and the candlelit, draped coffin was visible to the small group of the devoted from Cotulla who had been keeping vigil half of the night. They crossed themselves and waited until the train fell below the horizon. Then they made their way back home as dawn was coming on.

“Within a month, he was gone, too,” Uncle Lauro said, speaking of his own father.

“An ordinary day, working in the store, talking to everyone, then, in the afternoon, a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and he was gone.

“He was in his underwear, on his bed, and there was silver froth on his lips. And not a doctor to be found.”

Even in our own homelands, our traditions were fragile, and without
los Abuelos
to serve as their guarantors, many of them have been lost in the translation between the worlds of Mexico and Texas, Mexican and Anglo. Great-uncle Frank, Uela’s eldest brother Francisco, was like a grandfather to me. He lived with my grandmother for many years before her death. If
las Viejitas
showed me how the world of spirits worked amidst the world of the living, Uncle Frank, a naturally gifted inventor, engineer, and metallurgist, tried to teach something to all of us about how to act in the world, how to conduct ourselves in the proper Mexicano way that his father, great-grandfather Jacobo, had taught him.

He told me that Mexicans born in the United States were different from the Mexicans of Mexico. They acted differently. Uncle Frank felt they had lost the long-held Mexican traditions of courtesy and love for others. Worse, they had lost respect for their elders, and for the dead. If he was on a sidewalk in the middle of town and a chain of cars in a funeral cortege passed by, he would stop, even if he was the only one doing so, to stand erect, take off his hat, and cross himself, waiting until the procession went by. Uncle Frank worried that, once lost, these traditions would never again return.

“When we were on the other side, in Mexico, they taught us to respect the older ones. This is gone now. No one respects the old people.”

Whether we’re born north or south of the border, rich or poor, proud or contrite, we decide whether we will continue to abandon the often beautiful, sometimes terrifying stories of the past by small degrees, or, against the drift, to remember, to salvage—to conjure and resurrect them anew. Every Mexican lives this destiny out by either embracing, or falling further, from the sources of hidden light left behind in the past with
los Abuelos.

 

 

Great-grandfather Jacobo Garcia, Uela’s father, was a perfect twin, absolutely identical, except for a large brown mole, a
lunar,
in the middle of his brother Abrán’s cheek. A hand-painted photograph of the two hangs on a living room wall in Tía Pepa’s house, with the two of them looking like a mirrored reflection, their hands to their hearts, and crabbed expressions on their mustachioed faces. They looked so much alike that it is said that Jacobo once found himself holding a conversation in a full-size mirror when he thought he was talking to Abrán. And they stayed identical, until their deaths in their nineties.

In addition to Jacobo and his twin, there were twins in the next generations—Jacobo’s sons, Manuel and Valentín, now dead, and my brothers, George and Charles. There were other twins, elsewhere in the family, as if there was a regular doubling pulse in the bloodline. As the Garcias moved through time, this pulse resulted in the presence in every generation of people who lived with their mirror image. With so many doubles around the tribe, it made the rest of us more aware of our own solitariness.

Uncle Frank, like most of the Garcias, lived into his late nineties. His long, lanky frame and enormous hands could make him seem like an intimidating old gentleman, but his limpid eyes and gentle mien showed a tenderness that he shared with the rest of his siblings. He remained lean, disciplined, and active to the end. When Uela died, Frank was already in his late eighties. But on the way to the cemetery, we spotted him along Colorado Street, with his thumb out, hitchhiking. Somehow, everyone had left the funeral parlor without him.

By then, he had been alone almost twenty years. In the 1950s, his only son had died young, suddenly and mysteriously, in a motel in Laredo where he was on business. Uncle Frank’s wife never got over that loss, and she also died a few years after their son. As the eldest of the Garcias, Uncle Frank had been the one who came alone to Texas and eventually helped to bring the rest of the family north. The Garcias had left their life in Mexico behind. He saw his two greatest inventions—a dump truck and an industrial pecan sheller—stolen by dishonest business partners. Yet, despite all the sadness that he had experienced in his life, he was content. Years later, after being blind for nearly twenty years, he had a cataract operation, and suddenly he could see again. Living with Madrina and Uncle Manuel, he spent the last several years of his life reading historical novels about the time of Jesus, mowing the lawn, making drawings of new inventions, such as motorized drying racks for clothes and garage doors that opened sideways. When we frequently talked together, he saw all of the lives in our family as part of one continuous story, one mission, one journey.

Great-grandfather Jacobo’s father, el abuelo Teofilo Garcia, had lived to be one hundred years old, and Uncle Frank remembered him vividly from his youth in Coahuila. As a young child on a farm outside of Palaú in the middle of the nineteenth century, Teofilo was kidnapped and raised by the Kikapu Indians in the Coahuila sierra. By then, the Kikapu had been roaming in the nearby mountains for decades, occasionally raiding the Mexican frontier settlements when food was scarce in the wild. It was said they had once been a part of the Cherokee nation, but in the nineteenth century, when Texas Republicans expelled all the Indians to the nearest border, the Kikapu were repelled across the Rio Grande. President Benito Juárez later granted them a rich piece of territory on the headwaters of the Sabinas River high in the mountain range called the Serranía del Burro. The land was named
el Nacimiento,
“the birthplace,” where the Indians remain to this day.

Uncle Frank recalled that el abuelo Teofilo had grown up with the Kikapu, under the name Tibú. “
Qué curioso,
for a name, no?” he always began, as he prepared to tell the story again.

It was years later, on a dawn raid against the town of Múzquiz that Abuelo Teofilo was wounded and left behind. According to Uncle Frank, he was rescued and cared for by a couple who found him, shivering, hysterical, and bleeding from a gunshot wound to the leg, by the banks of the Rio Sabinas. While his wounds healed, he stayed in their home, eating and sleeping “like an animal” on the floor in the corner of a room, unable to speak Spanish or to communicate in any way.

Then, there came a day when the woman who had rescued the young man heard him singing after breakfast while he lay on the floor looking at the ceiling. It was a lullaby that she remembered teaching her own child eleven years before, when he had been kidnapped by the band of Indians. She began to sing along with him. Suddenly, from deep inside of himself, he recognized her voice from where it still burned for him as faint as starlight.

Uncle Frank relished telling the end of the story, sitting upright in his chair.

“And from this moment on, Abuelo Teofilo was reunited with his parents, and stayed thereafter in town with them, later bringing home a Kikapu woman he had already married, with whom he later fathered Jacobo, my father, and Abrán, my uncle—absolutely identical twins.

“Abuelos can be lost and found,” Frank would say about his grandfather Teofilo.

We are of the grandfathers lost, and of those found.

It was late afternoon one May day in 1974 when the distant voices of
los antepasados
were in the parched Texas scirocco wind that blew through San Fernando Cemetery, feeling like a breath the planet exhaled thousands of years before. It was the same wind that had always been blowing through our lives and the lives of all those we had brought there in so many long, slow automobile corteges down Culebra Street, past barrio
taquerías
and hubcap shops, to the great Mexicano necropolis of San Antonio. A wind of story, a wind of forgetting, a perpetual wind, through storms and droughts and
calorones
that is a blessing from our ancestors.

It was Mother’s Day and we were visiting Uela’s grave. In San Antonio, Mother’s Day is like the
Día de los Muertos
in Mexico. It is a day when it is necessary and honorable to revere all of
las Viejitas,
whether living or departed. Earlier that week we had driven to Laredo, on the Texas border, where my mother’s mother and father were buried. We washed the cracked headstone, clipped the overgrown Bermuda grass, and pulled the weeds with dull flowers. I remembered a sunny autumn day many years before, seeing Grandmother Lopez, with a wry, almost pathetic little smile, standing proudly in a great caramel-colored fur coat next to that headstone with her name already etched into it, as Mother snapped her photograph. In that picture, Grandmother has an almost haughty expression on her face, as if to mock the death that awaited her, and to show that she had no fear about her destiny in that place.

Back in San Antonio, standing by the graveside of my father’s parents at San Fernando Cemetery with my parents and two brothers, one scraggly mesquite tree offered sparse shade, and the scent of Mother’s Day chrysanthemums wafted across the grounds like a narcotic spell.

It had been only nine months since “the great
despedida,
” as we all came to refer to that season of the sudden exodus of the family’s grandmothers.
Despedida
means a “fare thee well.” The September before, in the space of sixty days, just as if it were a scheduled embarkation, most of the remaining grandmothers from around the extended tribe took their leave from this world. Both my mother’s and father’s mothers. Uncle Richard’s mother. Aunt Minnie’s mother. For decades, they had known one another as
comadres,
sharing tamales and a discreet cerveza or two at Christmas parties—polite, regal, but aloof from each other.