De la suerte y de la muerte no hay quien se escape.
From fate and from death, no one can escape.
It’s sunny and hot—and windy—as my daughter Jennifer and I find our way amid the gravestones in the campo santo in Potrero to locate the markers for our dearly departed. I’m teaching her how to locate even the oldest ones I know, repeating to her name after name, hoping she’s a faster learner than I have been. We stop first at the mysterious sepultura of Juanita Mestas, who died at the age of eleven and to whom I believe we’re distantly related, although I’m not sure how. The wooden railing along one side of her plot has finally collapsed. I’ve watched it lean slowly downward for years. Untangling the weathered railing from cholla stems and tumbleweeds, I prop it upright. No one else has touched this grave site in years.
We walk carefully around the cactus and barely recognizable remains of grave markers to the small iron fence and white headstone at the sepultura of my grandmother’s mother, Genoveva Archuleta Ortega. She died in 1919 while giving birth to the first boy among the nine children she “gave light to,” as they say in Spanish (a quien le dio luz). I cut at weeds with a shovel and rake them away. As I tell Jennifer the sad story of her great-great-grandmother’s death, she points to the grave beside Genoveva’s, a tiny plot surrounded by halved concrete blocks. She asks who is buried there, and I get down on my knees and sweep away grasses and dirt to look at letters impressed in the concrete slab: A. Ortega. With a start, I realize it’s the grave of Antonio, the last baby Genoveva birthed, who lived for about eight months after she died. I never noticed the grave before.
We wander to the newer part of the cemetery to find Grandpa Abedón’s last resting place. Surprisingly, the Siberian elm I dug out last year has not returned, and the grave site needs almost no maintenance. As we do at all the graves, we calculate from the dates on the marker the age of the deceased. For Genoveva it was a mere forty-one years; for Abedón, only forty-eight.
We wander just down the hill from Grandpa’s grave to that of his eldest son, Leo Chávez. Another sadly low number comes up when we do the math: forty-two years. He was one of my mother’s two younger brothers, and I remember well when he died, the same year Martin Luther King Junior and Bobby Kennedy were killed, the year of the My Lai massacre. It was a devastating year.
Uncle Leo was a wildly mischevious child, Mom has told me, and he carried his rambunctious sense of humor into adulthood. Like his grandfather, Juan Climaco Chávez, Leo finessed his way by wit and charm and grit to become a high-rolling businessman. He built his company in Los Angeles, and every time he returned home to Chimayó he was a celebrity—especially when he flew in his private plane, but also each time he showed up in a new Cadillac. Leo unabashedly bought my devotion; every time I saw him, he pulled out a roll of bills and peeled off a five-dollar note for me, handing it to me with a pat on the head. It worked. I worshiped Uncle Leo.
I’m telling Jennifer all this history as we linger at Leo’s grave, waiting for Mom and my brother Arturo, who are overdue for their planned meeting with us at the campo santo. A voice from a group of three people at a nearby grave calls out to me, “Can we borrow your rake?” and an elderly gentleman approaches me to get the tool, introducing himself as Rubén Montoya.
“Are you related to the Montoyas down the valley, Narciso and them?” I inquire.
“No, I’m not from here, but my wife is,” he says, gesturing toward the older of two women at the site he was working on. “That’s Nora, Nora Martínez. She grew up right over there,” he says, pointing with his chin, “and she knows everyone around here.”
“My mom has lots of relatives in this neighborhood,” I tell him as we head toward Nora, who with her daughter, Linda, is pulling up cheatgrass from around a well-kept plot ringed with a railed fence, marked with a handsome headstone. Nora smiles as she looks out at me from under a broad straw hat. The first order of business is kinship, of course, and she points to the name on the headstone beside her: Crisóstomo Martínez. “This is my dad,” she says, as if introducing the real person.
“Wow, that’s amazing,” I say. “Crisóstomo was my mother’s great-uncle. She called him Tío Choto. I never knew him, but Mom has spoken of him often, describing him as ‘muy travieso,’ very mischievous. In fact, just a few days ago she pointed his house out to me and told stories about him and his wife, Pablita.” Nora smilingly affirms yes, that was her dad. She is as delighted as I am to meet another cousin in Chimayó.
“Oh, sure, I know your mom,” Nora says when I tell her my mother’s name, “but I haven’t seen her in . . . forever. We were at Menaul High School in Albuquerque at the same time. My older brother, Elizardo, was best friends with your mom’s brother, Leo. They used to hang around and stir up trouble together. I remember one time when they said, ‘We’re not going to wash our socks anymore. We’ll just buy new ones,’ and they went to Española and did just that.”
Just as Nora introduces me to her daughter Linda, Mom and Arturo pull up and begin making their way toward us. Mom stops at Leo’s grave but doesn’t want to go the extra distance up to Tío Choto’s, so I lead Nora down to her.
The smiles sparked by my mom’s reunion with Nora are as bright as the spring day. They chatter on and on about the schools they both attended—John Hyson Elementary, just down the road, and Alison James Boarding School in Santa Fe, in addition to Menaul—and all their mutual friends and relatives, most of them gone.
Meanwhile, Rubén and Arturo and I chat beside the graves of Choto and Pablita, making occasional efforts to clean up the weeds. Rubén is a World War II vet, very active in veterans’ organizations. He worked at the lab in Los Alamos for many years. “I worked with uranium, milling it and handling it in all sorts of ways, and I got cancer. But I beat it, thank God,” he tells us.
“There was a lot of discrimination up there at the lab,” he continues, “and I was very involved with fighting it and helping people from the Valley to get a fair shake. It was bad, sometimes—and hey, are you going to pay me for all those pictures you’re taking?” he jokes.
I learn Linda is a photographer in Mesilla, and she and her parents have my books about Chimayó. “We love those books,” Rubén says enthusiastically. I could never receive any kind of accolade or endorsement more welcome.
Rubén goes over to find a seat to rest upon, on the railing of a nearby grave. Linda and I compare our experiences as summertime visitors to Chimayó in our youth, discovering that, for both of us, spending time with the old people—along with freedom to wander at our leisure throughout the valley—topped our list of favorite things about visiting Chimayó.
“I love to come here with my parents,” Linda says, affirming with the tone of her voice that we share the same kind of attachment to this place. “I love the smell of the rain in the summer and coming to the campo santo and checking on Grandma’s house.”
We look at her parents and my mom, sitting on the railing of the grave and chatting animatedly, and we know we will be here without them some day, as they lie behind these very railings or ones like them. We dread the day but will welcome the visits here, to place plastic flowers again and touch the earth of Chimayó.
The conversation goes on for a half hour, then a woman at a nearby grave calls out to me, “Can we borrow your rake?” I walk over and hand the rake to one of two sisters, who have already worked up a sweat and have quite a pile of grass, weeds, and spent plastic flowers left over from last year. I ask whose grave they’re cleaning. “Leo Chávez’s,” the older woman replies.
“But I’m cleaning Leo Chávez’s grave, too!” I say.
Amazingly, there are two gravestones bearing the name Leo Chávez, only a dozen feet apart, but none of us has ever noticed. I present my credentials—I drop a few names of relatives, that is—and, of course, Rosalie and Marcella and I are related. They are Nestor Chávez’s daughters. Nestor’s father was Manuel Chávez, who was married to Victoria, my great-grandfather Juan Climaco Chávez’s niece. (His brother, Miguel, was her father.) Discerning this crazy quilt pattern of relationship entertains us for some time, and resolving its intricacies requires that we pull in the big guns—Nora and my mom—to put it all together.
I mention to Rosalie and Marcella that Nora is Choto’s daughter. The two sisters light up and shout over to Nora, “Oh, so ¿mi tío Choto era su papá?—Oh, so my uncle Choto was your father?”
“O, sí!” Nora replies.
“Y era tío a mi mamá también.—And he was my mother’s uncle, too,” I chime in.
“Sí, pero más antes, everybody used to call everyone ‘tío,’” Marcella says.
“But this really was her tío,” I point out.
Nora looks at the sisters and muses, “Me acuerdo mucho de la mamá de . . .—I remember a lot about the mother of . . . ,” and she trails off, unable to recall the name. Suddenly more interested, everyone draws close to try to figure out whom she’s thinking of.
“Estaba . . . la tía . . . ¿cómo se llama? La que murió pronto.—She was . . . the aunt . . . what was her name? The one who died young,” Nora continues, building up the mystery.
“It was her mother,” she goes on, pointing across the campo santo in the direction of a hundred graves.
“Whose mother—La Nita?” Rosalie suggests. Nora nods no.
“La Epifania, or la Epimenia,” Mom throws in. Nora purses her lips, shakes her head, and says, “No, no está viva ella.—No, she’s not alive. Mi tío Juan era su . . . —My uncle Juan was her . . .”
“Juan Sandoval?” Marcella asks. “¿Él que vivía allá cerca del santuario?—The one who lived there, close to the santuario?”
“No, no. Mi tío Juan Chávez era el esposo de ella.—No, my uncle Juan Chávez was her husband.”
I’m suddenly elated, for I can actually come up with the name.
“Adelaida!” I say, and Nora brightens and repeats the name excitedly.
“Adelaida era mi bisabuela.—Adelaida was my great-grandmother,” I say.
After we talk about Adelaida a bit (how she suffered so when Juan lost everything in the Depression and they had to come home to Chimayó like beggars), the conversation winds down as the heat grows a bit too much to stand. Marcella and Rosalie hand me the rake, and Rosalie says, “Bueno, pues.—All right, then. Nice to meet you. I hope we didn’t break your camera.”
“Maybe I’ll see you here next year,” I reply.
“If we’re still here,” Rosalie says, laughing brightly.
“But if we’re not here,” I say, pointing to all of us in succession, “we’ll be here,” gesturing to the campo santo. Rosalie laughs again and says, “No, if we’re not here, we’ll be up there, at the new cemetery. There’s no room for us here!”
Mom and Arturo and I say our good-byes to the crowd of parientes at the campo santo in Potrero, ready to move on to the newer Catholic cemetery, just up the hill. There we park by the graves of Grandma, who died at 103; of my nephew Jeremy, who died at 21; and of my grandnieces, twins who died at one day old. All are equally remembered. Mom whispers a few words about her mother—“We love you, Mama!”—and tears well up. Arturo and I stare, still in disbelief, at Jeremy’s grave, right next to Grandma’s, dug the same year. The wind blows fiercely through the plastic flowers that we anchor in place with mounds of stones, knowing full well that they’ll be scattered in spite of our efforts.
It’s time to make our final stop, at the Presbyterian cemetery across the valley, on the land that once belonged to my great-grandfather Reyes Ortega. On the way, though, Mom insists we stop at Leona’s Restaurante for her favorite treat: a chicharrón burrito. This simple burrito should be the poster image for heart disease: a flour tortilla wrapped around nuggets of pig fat deep-fried in lard. Mom loves them, as Grandma did. Mom remains hale and hearty as she nears ninety, and Grandma lived with this kind of diet for over a century. (Seeing the dripping burrito reminds me of when I first moved in with my grandmother, after I returned as an adult from living in California. Determined to “clean up” her diet, I made her eggs in a Teflon pan, using no oil. She looked at them and then ordered me to melt a generous helping of lard on them.)
When we get to the Presbyterian cemetery, Mom, limping heavily because of an injured knee, just manages to climb up the hill to Grandpa Reyes’s stone. Reyes still holds a very special place in our hearts, even my brother’s and mine, though he and I never knew our great-grandfather. Beside him, his daughter Juanita’s stone notes she died on her birthday at the age of seventy-six years; I helped dig her grave, when I was a teen just out of high school. It was one of the last ones dug by hand in the cemetery. Next door on the sandy hillside lies another of Reyes’s daughters, Melita, whom we loved dearly, and beside her, her husband, Isaias. And then another daughter, Petrita, whose sorrowful and painful last years we remember with deep sadness.
As we mosey from grave to grave back down the hill, Mom tells stories about the deceased buried in each one. So many graves, so many stories. We pause to listen to every one.
A los bobos se les aparece la madre de Dios.
The mother of God appears to simpletons.
Dios dice,—Cuídate que yo te cuidaré.
God says, “Watch over yourself that I may watch over you.”
Dios no castiga con palo ni azote.
God doesn’t punish with a stick or a whip. (God has subtler ways to punish.)
Dios no cumple antojos ni endereza jorobados.
God does not fulfill whims nor straighten hunchbacks. (God does not concern himself with petty or selfish requests.)
Dios resiste a los soberbios y da gracia a los humildes.
God denies the wise and gives grace to the humble.
Dios tarda pero no olvida.
God might take his time, but he doesn’t forget.
El hombre propone y Dios dispone.
Man proposes and God decides.
El pan partido, Dios lo aumenta.
God multiplies bread that is shared.
Él que no habla, Dios no lo oye.
He who doesn’t speak, God doesn’t hear.
Él que por otro reza, por si aboga.
He who prays for another pleads for himself.
Él que sabe una oración, nomás se acuerda y la reza.
One who knows only one prayer has only to think of it and he recites it. (One who has a bad habit keeps repeating it.)
Esperando el bien de Dios sin saber por dónde viene.
Waiting for the grace of God, not knowing where it will come from.
La esperanza no engorda, pero mantiene.
Hope doesn’t fatten you, but it maintains you.
No se acuerdan de Santa Bárbara hasta que hacen los truenos.
They don’t think of Santa Bárbara until they hear the thunder. (Some people don’t remember to pray to Santa Bárbara—the patron saint of thunder and lightning—until they find themselves in trouble.)
Para el santo que es la misa, con un repique sobra.
You only need to ring the bell once for the saint the mass is being said for. (It is not important to dress up for a gathering that will be very casual.)
Si Dios no quiere, santos no pueden.
If God does not will it, saints can’t do it.
Ya aguantaron las velas, ¿cómo no aguantan los cabitos?
The candles lasted this far—why shouldn’t the stubs last? (If you have been able to bear your sufferings for a long period of time, you can bear them longer.)