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

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.
    “Somos de los abuelos perdidos y los hallados.”
    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.
    They left as a departing chorus would, each one carrying off their own veiled and unspoken secrets from the past with them. Their passing on left us that much further from all the Mexican stories, a little more engulfed by a world increasingly taken up by expressways, shopping malls, and the news of Vietnam and Watergate. In the end, resilient and fierce as each of them were, they had been vexed by this caterwauling century of revolutions and wars, and most of them died in fitful sleep, exhausted and confused by much of what they saw around them in their final years. In this way, they had joined los Abuelos.
    That afternoon, looking at the headstone on my grandparents’ grave, I noticed for the first time the dates of Abuelo Juan José’s life:
    1890-1939
     
    I was seventeen, and I thought I knew all there was to know about the family’s past in Mexico and Texas. I had gone to the dusty pueblitos in the Coahuila foothills of the Sierra