Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Phillip Santos Read Free Book Online

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