Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (8 page)

The dead are always with us, but the dead can be lost, too.

When a family secret emerges, it can come forth like a great island emerging from the sea, all its cliffs and mountains cascading salt water—and you realize you are confronted by new, uncharted geographies. But a secret can also appear like whispered fragments you’ve heard many times before, but never understood.

Suddenly, the words become clear.

In life, Uncle Raul had the energy of a south Texas
remolino,
or whirlwind, and jokes rushed out of him as if they were being carried in fierce gusts, punctuated by an ear-piercing, rapid-fire laugh—part eagle shriek, part coyote song—that could shake the air. There was something about this energy that gave him enormous power over animals. He could exhort his dog, Stupid, to chase his tail until the terrier was in full churn, spinning like a proton, almost levitating over the patio. With the same powers, he taught his neighbor’s parrot Güero to sing “Volver” while wearing a tiny sombrero.

It had been raining all morning in San Antonio on the day of Uncle Raul’s funeral, but the sun was breaking through as the afternoon Mass began. When my cousins and I first picked up the coffin as pallbearers, it seemed almost weightless, and it possessed its own orienting force, like a gyroscope. As we carried him down the aisle and outside across the plaza of Little Flower Church, a triple rainbow arched over Culebra Street, marking the way to San Fernando Cemetery. “That’s a sign!” Aunt Connie said. No purgatory for
el querido tío.
He would dwell forevermore with
el Padre Jesucristo, el Espíritu Santo, la Virgencita,
and all the saints.

“Mariposa. Canela. Atole. Huisache. Tortilla. Deseos. Enamorados. Alameda. Azulejos. Enemigo. Nubes. Terreno. Vaqueros. Granja. Arroyo. Acequia. Concepción. Tranquilidad. Bendiciones y bendiciones. Siempre. Siempre. Siempre.”

 

The Tarahumara Indian priests of northwestern Mexico say we are meant by the Creator to walk twenty-four miles a day, and that this is why our feet are shaped like a bridge. We are meant to walk through the lands that surround us. If we stand still, we become spiritually sick, and eventually, whether in the space of one life, or over the span of several generations, this sickness will overwhelm us.

The Aztecs and their descendants have always been sorcerers of the earth. They know the land is alive, a place of magic and awe that connects us to the panoramas of the unseen worlds, to geographies within geographies. This invisible topography of the dead is called
el Inframundo.
It includes Tlalocan, the place of the underworld, and the paradisal Tamoanchan.
El Inframundo
is not like Hell and Heaven, set apart from the world. It is more like a portal out of history and into eternity, encompassing all of the gradations of darkness and light, where all of the dead dwell, simultaneously beyond, and among, us. In the
Inframundo,
you communicate with the spirits of the dead, with the spirits of animals and all created things, and sometimes with the gods themselves.

You enter the
Inframundo
by several paths. There are places spread across the land that are like gateways into this dimension: caves and hills, streams and charcos, gorges and cañones, buttes and valleys.

The old brujos, or sorcerers, the fierce geomancers of the
Inframundo,
could enter directly, through a trance, looking without blinking at old maps or paintings of revered sacred places. Gradually the masses of color and lines would begin to undulate and swirl, spinning like a maelstrom, accelerating past north, south, east, and west, until whole continents were pinwheeling in the movement, fiery at their extremities, consuming everything—stone, cactus, wind, and sunlight—in a perfect equilibrium of chaotic energies. By these means, you could reach the place that lies at the end of the seen world, the lands that await beyond the walk of one thousand years. The whole landscape becomes a bridge into the empire of the spirits and the time of the ancestors.

This is the story I was told about the first journey.

El Tío Francisco, Uncle Frank, the eldest of the Garcias, made the trip, taking a train to the
frontera
and walking across the Rio Grande on a high, creaky swinging wooden bridge at the border with Texas which connected the towns of Eagle Pass on the American side and Piedras Negras on the Mexican. The only people there to greet him were some Kikapu Indians selling balls of white
asadero
string cheese and deerskin shoes and purses.

It was a cold February that year, and he remembered making the “four-day walk” to Uvalde, where he’d heard you could catch a freight train heading north to San Antonio. On those chilly nights he slept warily in the open country, having heard stories of Texas ranchers shooting Mexicanos they found on their property. To him, it all looked like high Coahuila desert land. There weren’t many fences then, so you could walk long flat stretches of the parched land with only bird shadows for shade in the daytime. It looked like home, only, he pointed out, there were more stones on the Texas side.

When Uncle Frank sent news back to Mexico of a big dam project on the Medina River near San Antonio, the rest of the Garcias followed the pilgrimage north. He had written to his brothers, all of them naturally gifted workers of metal and steel,

 

 

Abuelo Juan José and his brother Uvaldino came north with the Garcias, though my abuelo was reluctant. The revolution was making everyday life in Coahuila a struggle. The roads between towns were often blocked either by Villistas or Maderistas or Federalistas. And they sometimes conscripted the men of the region, young and old, to join their ranks on threat of death. Young women were in constant danger of assault and rape by the same roving bands, who didn’t seem to be under the control of any officers, and the troops, often without any provisions, looted supplies, food, and livestock, from the citizenry at gunpoint.

The Garcias didn’t particularly care for any of the warring factions. In fact, politics seemed to them little more than chicanery in fancy trappings. The brothers—Francisco, Santos, Juan, Jesse, Gilbert, Manuel, and Carlos, whom we called Chale—gravitated toward rectitude, simplicity, and things that worked, as evidenced by all of the machines and tools they would build throughout their lives. Abuelo Jacobo wasn’t going to wait until he saw his adored sons fighting each other across barricades for the benefit of good-for-nothing
pelados
and
charlatanes
in Monterrey and Mexico City.

They had heard that in
El Norte,
Mexicanos were needed for the demanding work of building the new Texas. Frank and the other Garcia brothers knew their talents as inventors, machinists, and engineers would be needed. Abuelo Juan José, like his future father-in-law, Jacobo, wanted more than anything else to work with the land, and he had heard there was rich sharecropper’s farmland in the Texas territory between the Colorado and Guadalupe Rivers, beginning north of San Antonio, stretching south into the San Fernando Valley. The time had come to leave Mexico and its
revolución de locuras
behind.

Madrina remembers how the train the family rode with all their belongings was attacked by Pancho Villa’s army as they approached the border town of Piedras Negras. The blistering volleys of bullets ricocheted off the sides of the cars, leaving all the passengers, goats and chickens included, scrambling inside for cover. Tía Pepa recalls a peaceful daylong ride to Piedras Negras, staying overnight with cousins in Villa Union, where they cooked a dinner of chicken with mole sauce and calabazas.

Once they were all in Texas, without even thinking about it, they began to cast their spells of forgetting across the new landscape. Many of them would not see Mexico again for many years. Others never returned again. The land of their birth, the
nacimiento,
seemed to become a memory of a dream of a lost world.

Mexico, to which some of us would later return and return, was gradually engulfed by the
Inframundo.

 

 

Old Abuelo Jacobo’s instructions had been simple. As my father remembers, they were to follow a small road north out of Jiménez, Coahuila, until you could not miss a big cliff on the right side that had the shape of an old man’s face. Then you leave the road there, walking to the left onto what looked like a boundless sierra plain, following the river for about an hour and a half, all the way back to the foothills, until you come to the place called
la Loma de los Muertos,
“the Hill of the Dead.” There was gold in that hill, Abuelo Jacobo had said. Lots of it.

“¡Esa fregada loma está bien llenita de oro!”
he had told them often back in San Antonio. “That damn hill is full of gold.”

Great-grandfather Jacobo and his twin brother, Abrán, were perpetually prospecting for gold, whether following legends of buried Spanish treasure and digging secretly in the middle of the night under the plaza in Palaú, or prospecting for the raw ore itself, using divining rods, seeking telltale “golden mirages” that were said to emanate from a deposit, or, in one case, an old swoop-backed hound from Palaú named Pipo, who was known to have a nose for the precious metal. It was with Pipo’s help that they had actually seen those veins of gold, as thick as rope, running through the stony outcroppings in
la Loma de los Muertos.
Without picks, they had left markers, but somehow, over the years, they never returned to prospect for the ore. Or so they said.

Now, decades later, Uncles Raul and Rudy and my father were back in Mexico, looking for the treasure. They were traveling in a new beige 1947 Hudson, with a massive glistening chrome grille and a pair of fenders that were polished like platinum, immaculate and inspiring awe from the Mexican onlookers. In one neighborhood in
la Villa de Juárez,
they had to park the metallic behemoth on a side street because it was wider than the pavement on the block of the aunt they were visiting.