Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t have to think about a problem. She just told you the answer that came into her mind, which was usually good counsel. This power, too, was said to come from the seizures. If Madrina was able to endure the driving emotional storms of her fits, everyday feelings must have appeared to her as if they were in slow motion. She was able to see deeper into the patterns of fleeting moments, to feel faint currents of the phenomena that shape our future. Now, Tía Pepa simply says that you must be extremely careful when the spirits are walking among you.
    In la Tierra de Viejitas, I always knew the ghosts of the ancestors—the Santos, the Garcias, and all the others—are still with us. If not prepared, one could be frightened by the sight of them. Dressed in their downtown Frank Brothers vintage suits and Joske’s department store dresses, they still stroll the wide sidewalks of San Antonio’s Houston Street, taking long, slow steps past the blue, yellow, red, and green tile walls of the old Alameda Theater and the brightly painted walls of El Tenampa Bar.
    The spirits stand dazed in front of the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe inside the door of the San Fernando Cathedral, exhausted and dirty from a long day of picking tomatoes. In pairs, the wraiths sometimes float on flat barges down the San Antonio River, past all the tourists, preparing for a long journey south, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and pouring yellow tequila into shot glasses. Los Muertos do not give up their homelands. We call it Texas. Some of them knew it as Tejas, or part of la Nueva Extremadura of New Spain. Others refer to it secretly as Aztlán, the mythical birthplace of the nomadic Mexica people who were to become the fierce Aztecs of central Mexico.
    Along with the ghosts, their old gods—from the time before the Europeans—still whisper their prophecies in the ageless sunlight that falls on the ancient earth of Texas, severed so long ago from its Mexican roots. Their old, abandoned calendars, already well spun out, are still counting off these years in the churning mill of the stars, in this, the age of the fifth sun the Aztecs called Cuatro Movimiento, Four Movement.
    “You will find your home,” says Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god whose name means “Hummingbird of the South”—just as he told the Mexica centuries ago when he sent them off to the south in search of a new home. On his instructions, they left behind their birthplace, where they had lived for so long—Aztlán—“the place of whiteness” in the ancient Nahuatl tongue.
    “You will receive many signs, and you will find the kingdom I have promised. But first you must make a very long journey.”
    All of these movements, north and south, follow maps left drawn in the blood, and the family stories carry their echo, from deep inside the past. The Mexica, who would become the Aztecs, were nomads across sprawling deserts, river plains, and mountain cordilleras for almost three hundred years before they saw the prophesied sign of an eagle consuming a serpent over a cactus. There, in the lake basin of the Valley of Mexico, they built the great imperial city of Tenochtitlán. Soon, though, they did not remember where Aztlán was—only that it lay to the north. They longed to abandon the memory of their centuries of hardship and wandering, replacing it with a glorious chronicle of victories, conquest, and oracles of a vast empire.
    Mexico was always an empire of forgetting. After the cataclysm of conquest in 1521, when Tenochtitlán fell to the army of Hernán Cortés, Mexico was cut off from the wellspring of its Indian genesis, a place forevermore of fog and mystery. For decades, as the stories tell, night skies glowed with Spanish bonfires burning the codices, parchments, and totems that preserved the sacred knowledge of the Indian past. José Martí, the Cuban patriot and writer, said that the conquistadores “stole a page from the universe.”
    Spain was just as distant and