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

two rabbits Rudy shot with his .22 caliber pistol, listening nervously for a train whistle on the horizon. But the only sounds were the warm wind and a few far off cattle, wearing bells, grazing on the grass that grew between the trestles of the railroad tracks. When the night sky came out, they lay awake for hours, staring upward counting the galaxies that dotted the heavens like archipelagos of frost.
    In the morning, the three were able to dislodge the Hudson from the tracks with the help of two vaqueros passing by on horseback, and they walked back to the main road for help. Watching the whole landscape recede in the rearview mirrors as they were towed by a pickup truck back to Múzquiz, the two brothers and their cousin resigned themselves to reporting back to Great-grandfather Jacobo and his brother, Abrán, that la Loma de los Muertos had been spotted, but remained unexplored.
     
     
    Madrina told the story of a valley in Coahuila, somewhere near their town of Palaú, in the Serranía del Burro. She said that in this valley, in a clearing by a large mesquite tree, there were places where no sound could penetrate. If you stood in particular clearings, or specific gullies and hills, no sound of birds could reach you, no sound of wind, no loud, coarse donkey’s bray. She remembered playing with her cousin Narciso in that valley, and watching him climb a tree and shout down at her—and she could see him screaming at her, but she couldn’t hear a thing.
    The world was deaf there.
    Because of this strange phenomenon, the place was called el Valle de Silencio, “the Valley of Silence.” As to where it lay exactly, she could only say that it was near la Loma de los Muertos, where my father had gone prospecting. Madrina said she was told by her grandfather Teofilo that this was one of many such places around the world that God had, for some unknown reason, left unfinished at the time of creation. For some reason, there were many such places in Coahuila. These were places, often completely unnoticed, with no sound, without color, dark places where no sunlight could penetrate, places where the world had no shape or substance.
    Just like us, Teofilo had explained, creation itself was incomplete. And forevermore, until the end of the world, there would be no sound in el Valle de Silencio.
     
     
    Breaking free of their Mexican past wasn’t as easy for the old ones as they thought it would be. The landscapes of south Texas, the chalk cliffs, the sandy river plains, the crystalline Rio Nueces that was once the border, the hill country, the abiding fertile river valleys; all of them crisscross a spiritual home that has no boundaries. The family maintained its calendar of the sacred year, the fasting at Lent, the feasting on the day of La Virgen de Guadalupe, Easter, Christmas—and the Diez y seis de Septiembre, the Sixteenth of September, celebrating Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821. In late October for the Día de los Muertos, we visited the cemeteries to pay homage to the ancestors. Beneath the increasing Americanization of San Antonio, many Mexicans kept the red glass votive candles burning on the old altars.
    In 1968 San Antonio hosted Hemisfair, which included everything from continuous performances of Czech avant-garde theater to presentations of the delicate protocols of the Japanese tea ceremony. With a high-speed, elevated monorail encircling the downtown fairgrounds, the Hemisfair was meant to be a celebration of humanity’s technological future, with the eight-hundred-foot-high Tower of the Americas as its centerpiece, which featured a rotating restaurant and bullet elevators that shot up from the ground like X-14 experimental rocket planes.
    Down below, the Mexican Pavilion showcased a troupe of Indian dancers dressed in crimson spandex outfits with feathered wings who performed the ancient ritual of the Volador, or flyer. It was said to be one of very few religious dances once performed across