Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation: A Memoir

John Phillip Santos

Viking, 284 pp., $24.95

“It sometimes seems as if the Mexicans are to forgetting what the Jews are to remembering. We have made forgetting a sacramental obligation,” John Phillip Santos writes in his memoir, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation. “Leave it all in the past, all that you were, and all that you could not be.”

“Memoir” is a misnomer, a word stuck on the book jacket possibly for lack of anything better. The book itself defies easy packaging. It is a history of forgetting that is part documentary, part fiction, mostly poetry, and ultimately prayer. Santos, a Rhodes Scholar, journalist, and documentarian who began his writing career as a poet, has said that Places is less a memoir — although his is the narrative voice — than an evocation.

Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation centers itself around the search for a lost ancestor. At 17, Santos discovered that his grandfather, Juan José Santos, committed suicide. Juan Santos, a Mexican citizen who emigrated to San Antonio during the Mexican Revolution, was discovered floating in the San Antonio river on a foggy January morning. Because the circumstances of his death were ambiguous, Juan Santos’ body was buried in consecrated ground. His memory was simply buried. Santos discovered that even decades later, the story was still too painful to be unearthed.

Places is a book about time that moves in spirals, with the greater history of a people — several peoples, really — surrounding and supporting the individual history of a family. The search for the facts behind his grandfather’s death leads Santos into the history of Mexico itself. The European conquest and the cultural erasure that followed become metaphors for the assimilation of the Santos family into Anglo culture. And the search for the grandfather that Santos never knew becomes a search for “the grandfather no Mexican wants to admit to,” Hernan Cortés. For Santos, the history of what he calls the Mestizo voice is one of unconsecrated burial, in which Spanish, Indio, and Anglo ancestors rest uneasily in often unmarked graves.

“The question,” Santos said during a recent visit to Austin, “became for me how did people begin to consecrate themselves, to see themselves as sacred?” Reconciliation lies in telling the story, and telling relies on remembering as completely as possible. Collective forgetting is like a mass grave, a place where history unravels. It isn’t a sacrament, but a sacrifice.

Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation doesn’t feel wholly complete. There is a surprising lack of anger that at times make the book seem detached. But there are mysteries beyond mystery in this book. It’s too big to fit in a review, and almost too big to fit in one heart.

Places is a book that only a journalist could dream, and only a poet could write.

This article appears in Carol Keeton Rylander.

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