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

Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica that has survived into the present. As a booming Spanish-accented man’s voice narrated the ritual from scratchy loudspeakers, every top of the hour the five dancers marched like wrestlers into a gladiatorial arena:
    “To appease their Gods . . . since the beginning of time . . . the people of the Sun, ancestors to all the children of Mexico, had to offer the hearts of young maidens to postpone the destruction of the world!”
     
    On an altar set on a dais, two barrel-chested priests in loincloths and sequined capes enacted a terrifying mock sacrifice of a young, bare-breasted woman to the fierce god Tezcatlipoca. As the priests lifted up the dripping fake heart to the sky, the five Voladores, themselves dressed in loincloths and plumed headdresses, climbed up a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot-long pole that had been braided with heavy ropes. At the top, in the strenuous heat, four of the Indians sat on the edges of a pivoting wooden frame attached to a rotating hub appended to the top of the pole. Then the leader, or caporal, would slowly stand up on the pole, poised in the gusting wind between the other four. As his compañeros watched while shaking their rattles, he blew into an eagle bone whistle while beating an old hide tambor, dancing on the narrow diameter of the pole, gradually saluting and bowing to each of the four directions of creation. Then, while all of us in the crowd leaned back, gripping our seats, we watched the other four Indians lean off with a slow backward arch into the air, with the ropes tied to one ankle and threaded through the pivoting wooden frame they had been sitting on.
    Slowly, hanging upside down with their arms outstretched toward the ground, they began to spin earthward around the pole, gradually disentwining their tethers with each revolution, moving closer to the ground. I was hypnotized as the Voladores flew over me in giant descending circles, their graceful shadows dancing over the crowd, coming gradually nearer to us, in great, swooping, widening spirals. The fifth Indian always stayed on the top, his back against the rotating hub, staring upward at the sky, singing all the way through the ritual. The whole dance took forty minutes to perform.
    The Voladores had the power to make time stop, to make the rest of the world around me fall away. Staring up at the flyers, silhouetted against the silvery Texas sky, it was one thousand years ago, before empires and conquests, revolutions and borders. The Voladores were guardians of the old time, the time of the Maya, the time of the Aztecs. That summer, they unleashed it in San Antonio, reconnecting the city, and all of the Santos who lived there, to our most distant past.
    I did not know, then, why I always found the pageant of the Volador dance so magical. I did not know, then, what any of it meant or how to pronounce the names of the Nahua gods. It was said to have come from the mountains of Puebla, in central Mexico, far from any place my family had any memory of living. Maybe it reminded me of childhood tales of winged gods and angels descending to our world. Who had imagined such a dance in the first place, and what was it meant to signify? Was it a dance left behind to remember that we are descendants of the sky? Or was it just a dance to evoke the irresistible beauty of dynamic, balanced symmetry, effortlessly churning a small galaxy of synchronous movements?
    I saw the Volador ritual performed many times that summer, imagining myself in all the falling spirals, the flying, the feather costumes, and the exquisite, silent speed of the flyers. The primal sounds of the old Mexican flutes and drums wafted out across the other pavilions of the sprawling fairgrounds. And after every time I saw the ritual, I felt as if I had been chosen for this blessing, as if this dance that came from deep in the Mexican past was harboring some secret intended especially for me.
     
     
    One place I have felt the ineluctable pull of