To Chapter 2.
Onyx City Index.
HE STILL CANNOT BELIEVE it is gone; but it has vanished. Broken walls of burnt houses have crumbled under assault from agricultural machines. The last traces of shattered city waterfront are fading into mud, sand and salt on the coast of Baja California. Even the name - San Miguel - has changed back to San Quintín. No one remembers the onyx city, no one except him; and now he is the last.
Jack Delano should have known it would blow away like dust off the dry salt flats. But only the change could show him the truth. Ruins he knew as a child are almost gone. The land is irrigated in blood of Oaxaca Indians who slave under a Mexican sun raising vegetables for American salad. This final transformation ended after his last aunts and uncles died, went back in time, and were reborn to live different lives. History itself was undone when they passed, until Jack can only write these few pages, hoping you will resurrect the onyx city with your eyes, your ears, your mind.
But without evidence, who will believe? Even that day in 1980, when he began to hunt the hard deer of truth, he should have known it would all disappear. He sat with his last surviving ancestors around the plastic table in the courtyard of their motel on the shore near the ruins of the old mill. Outside the walls, a station wagon of gringo fishermen scrunched across the gravel parking lot, to begin backing their outboard boat down the dirt ramp, pushing its trailer into the waters of the bay. Jack's aunts and uncles silently sipped their ice tea, listening to the Yankees calling, "...a little more... a little more... that's it!"
Finally, his tia Juanita Margaret Dubois Delano looks at him and asks, "Pues... ¿cuando supiste, mi'jo?" (Well, when did you find out, my child?).
"When my mother explained to me how it was that she had not actually married her half-brother."
"Ah..." Uncle Miguel, the oldest, clears his throat, "tu padre, entonces, ¿eh, hermano?" (Your father, then; yes, brother?).
"Sí." Jack looks at his ice, then raises his glance, "Sí, tio, mi padre, su hermano." (Yes, uncle, my father, your brother.)
"Y mí tio también." (And my uncle, too.)
That was the beginning of the unfolding of the truth.
To Chapter 2. |
Onyx City Index. |
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