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Perhaps the disc might have had some ceremonial function. It looks like a vision of the sky wrapped around the great tree of the world, alive with the spirits of familiar plants and animals of the region. Ramón says no one really knows what it means, but the parishioners of La Parroquia de San Juan Tzompántepec nonetheless regard it as an heirloom, fighting over the years with priests who sought to extract what they considered a pagan abomination.
    “Who put this here?” I ask Ramón.
He shrugs his shoulders. “Pues . . . ,” he says, “los Abuelos.”
The Grandfathers.
     
    By the time I was born in 1957, my grandfathers were already long gone. When their names were mentioned, once in a long while, by parents or aunts and uncles, it was always with great ceremony and formality. There were never disparaging words of any kind. My mother’s father, Leonides, owned a dry goods store in Cotulla, Texas, and my father’s father, Juan José, with the same name as my father, was a gardener and laborer in San Antonio. Both were remembered as men of few words, prone to meting out family justice in swift and unwavering fashion. I hadn’t seen pictures of Juan José, but in an old photograph of Leonides, taken when he was already in his early fifties, he is sitting next to a great desk in his store, stacked high with papers weighted by horseshoes. A big man with a bald head, and light-complexioned for a Mexicano, he is dressed in a suit and vest, with a shiny watch fob hanging, and his demeanor is serious, with a forceful gaze as direct and unyielding as an old judge’s. If the stories are to be believed, both grandfathers were exemplars of virtue, honesty, and integrity, beloved by their families and communities alike. Los Abuelos never indulged in alcohol. Both Juan José and Leonides were said to be teetotalers who rarely drank, even at weddings or during holidays. There are no tales of drunkenness or recklessness among them. Yet neither lived to meet a single one of their scores of grandchildren.
    Did they leave anything behind? Was there anything of the memory of los Abuelos left for us, their progeny, to share? It felt as if their legacies had been completely extinguished, perpetually lost to their descendants.
    Perhaps the answers lay in the words of Tundama, the powerful Chibcha Indian cacique, or king. In 1541, in the part of Latin America that is present-day Colombia, Tundama rejected a peace overture made by Quesada, the Spanish conquistador, with a warning that prophesied the invincibility of the past, even in the face of imminent defeat and death:
    You desecrate the sanctuaries of our Gods and sack the houses of men who haven’t offended you. Who would choose to undergo these insults? We now know that you are not immortal or descended from the sun. Note well the survivors who await you, to undeceive you that victory is always yours.
     
    Grandfather Leonides used to help people in Cotulla by using his horse-drawn wagon to transport corpses from their homes to the undertaker to be prepared for their final rest. Many of the Mexican families of the town would ask him to speak at the funerals since he knew everyone and, as one of my aunts put it, “He always spoke so pretty.”
    Once, just before he died, Grandfather Leonides awoke Uncles Leo, Lauro, and Lico in the middle of the night. Without telling them where they were going, he put their jackets on and led them down a side street until they were just out of town, where the railroad tracks passed through a large, flat, dry pasture. There were other people there, holding candles, singing and praying softly in the moonlit indigo evening. Uncle Lauro remembered how it felt as if hours went by before everyone heard the sound of a slowly approaching train, heading south for Laredo. The three-car procession was decked with brass torches and great ribbons of black bunting that waved in the warm night breeze like banners.
    “It is the body of Anfitrio Mendiola!”