Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Phillip Santos Page B

south Texas duquesa. She had virtually given up speaking by then, not due to any ailment, but simply because she seemed to believe she had spoken everything already. She seemed incessantly fatigued by our chatter.
    The room smelled of Grandmother’s Mexican talc and eucalyptus oil, which Grandmother’s maid, Maria Moya, left in a pan on the radiator to “purify” the air. With the television going in the background, Grandmother wielded her remote control like a whipcrack, continuously changing the channel before you could focus on an image. Then we would sit for long, tranquil pauses in the draped afternoon light with our gazes locked on one another, until she would eventually become annoyed and look away. Hers wasn’t a gaze of dearness. She had the indomitable mien of a witness, a grizzled bearer of knowledge which she had long ago left behind any particular need to pass on.
    Looking at Grandmother, who held her old quiet with such unyielding gravity and determination, I wondered how far back she thought we went in that long story whose ruins surrounded us in San Antonio, Texas. Through Uncle Lico’s work, we knew hers was an old family, and we could count generations of her family like rosary beads, as far back as 1767. But there are families that trace their lineage to ground zero of the conquest, like sacred genealogies of a second creation time.
    There are living descendants of Cortés and descendants of Motecuhzoma, and even descendants of la familia Cortés-Motecuhzoma, as Cortés fathered a child with Tecuichpotzín, the daughter of the defeated Aztec cacique, and who later came to be known simply as Doña Isabel. In this way, the Spanish set out to dissolve the royal Mexica bloodlines. New dynasties would not be allowed to form in their place.
    The conquistadores destroyed the pyramids and temples, stone by stone. They burned manuscripts and smelted basketfuls of golden idols in the flames. In this great carnal maelstrom, fathering children with Indian women was another way to break the tradition, to place fatal caesuras in the transmission of the Indian mind and soul through time. The children of these unions, these rapes, these romances, were mainly illegitimate, outsiders to the two worlds that had given them birth.
    Indian memory is Mexican memory. Their history is our history—implicit, silent, inevitable.
    Uncle Lico’s excavation of the Lopez and Vela family catacombs showed no trace of Indian ancestors. But such things are rarely recorded, as with my great-great-grandfather, who married a Kikapu Indian. No one now remembers anything about her Indian family. The Mestizos, with Spanish names and outward appearance, and Indian hearts, usually gave their allegiance to New Spain. They dropped their indigenous names and became Zeferino, Guillerma, Leocadio, Crescencio, Perfecta, and Ruperta. They became de la Garza, Reyna, Areval, Treviño, Adame, and Saldaña.
    In the time of the conquest, one of Motecuhzoma’s grandsons, Juan, the youngest son of Doña Isabel, and another Spanish officer left Mexico for Cáceres, Spain, where he married a Spanish woman and built the Motecuhzoma Palace, which allegedly still stands. According to their family history in the archives of the Indies in Seville, his offspring became titled nobility. The Count of Enjarada. The Duke of Abrantes. The Duke of Linares. Then, late in the sixteenth century, in the court of Philip II, the heirs of Motecuhzoma agreed to renounce all their natural rights in Mexico as descendants of the Mexica emperor in exchange for vast lands in Spain that would be theirs forever.
    Uncle Lico once signed a letter to me with a description of himself as “your Very Hispanic Mexican Uncle,” followed by his characteristically flamboyant signature that grew more filigrees as he grew older. Uncle Lico explained the meaning of that signature one day, while having lunch with me in a diner in downtown San Antonio called The Mexican Manhattan. He took off his