The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (7 page)

Nothing infuriated my mom more than her children standing up to her. That really pissed her off, and for some reason I was the only one who would argue with her. Everybody else just tucked in and took it. I was getting bigger, but she still would try to beat me. She was right-handed, and by then I had figured out that when she grabbed the belt—or extension cord or anything she could find—to swing at me, if I ran toward the left she would hit nothing but air. My sisters and brothers would start cracking up, which only made her angrier. I would get out of her grip and get out the door like a jackrabbit.

I would run away—I did it three times in Autlán and at least seven times in Tijuana. Then my brother Tony would have to come find me and bring me back. “When are you going to stop doing this?” he would say.

“When she stops hitting me.”

“You just don’t know the stuff she’s going through.”

“Yeah, but she doesn’t have to take it out on me!”

I remember wandering around Tijuana after one fight. It was Christmastime, and I was looking at window displays—little trains and toys and puppets, all that stuff. For years after that, every time I saw Christmas decorations those feelings would come up. All that anger and frustration I had toward my mom stayed with me.

My mom had her own special relationship with God, her own
way of getting him on her side. When she needed something for the family, or when she thought something needed to happen, she would sit in a chair, cross her legs, fold her arms, and put all her focus on something far away. You could feel the determination. As kids, we got to know that look of supreme conviction. It was like, “Uh-oh, get out of the way—Mom’s doing that thing.” If we got close, we could hear her saying to herself, “God is going to give me this.” It was like she was willing a miracle to happen. “I
know
this will happen. God will make it happen.”

They weren’t big things: money for food, a better home for the family, health stuff. One time my youngest sister, Maria, was having trouble conceiving a baby. She had polio as a child, and her husband had just undergone an operation for testicular cancer. It looked like it was just not going to happen. Every time we would visit, my mom would be in her chair, folded in on herself, with that look of 100 percent determination, talking to God, until she told my sister, “You should adopt a baby, and as soon as you do you’re going to get pregnant.”

“Mom, what is wrong with you?” my sister said. “I can’t get pregnant—a bunch of doctors told me.”

“Yeah? What do they know? They’re not God. Do what I tell you.” Maria went ahead and adopted a baby boy, Erik, from a Mexican mother and German father.

A year later I was in Dallas at a festival with Buddy Guy and Miles Davis. We were all in the hotel lobby, and a phone call came in—“Paging Mr. Santana!” It was my wife, Deborah. “You’re not going to believe this, but your sister is pregnant.”

“Which one?”

“Maria!” She called her baby Adam—we all called him the miracle baby.

My mom would go to church in the middle of the week, when everybody was making confession, and bring a couple of big bottles of water. She patiently waited for the last person to finish, then she would go up to the confessional, and the priest would say, “Yes? Would you like to confess?”

“No, Padre, I’m all right now, but can you bless these bottles of water?”

“The holy water’s over there.”

My mom would say, “I’m sorry, Padre, I don’t want that water for my kids.
Está mugre
—that’s dirty. It’s filled with everybody’s germs and sins. No. Bless this for me. It’s for my kids.”

Then she would bring those blessed bottles home, and suddenly she was like, “
Mijo,
how you doing?” Touching us, running her hands over us. “Hey, Mom, you’re getting me all wet!” That’s the way she approached her beliefs and how she went through life. She did things that made sense to her, for the family, with no sense of doubt or shame. When she decided on something, we knew not to get in her way—we didn’t expect her to explain herself, and we didn’t expect her to get lovey-dovey.

I think my mom went through her life hiding a lot of pain. She had my dad to deal with, and she lost four babies. She rarely opened up, and I’m not sure she ever addressed those things consciously. In her solitude, when nobody was looking, she might have licked her wounds and cried for the children who died. But she never shared her suffering with us. She knew the difference between self-pity and its opposite—healing herself and moving on, restoring herself by looking at her suffering in the right light.

The last time my mom got pregnant in Tijuana she got really ill. I remember I was around eleven. We were living in a place where we used a packing crate as a front step to get into the house, and my mom slipped on that, fell down, and lost the baby. The ambulance came and took her away.

My mom told us later that when she woke up in the clinic there, she got the feeling that this was not a place to get better but a place to die. Nobody was paying attention to her or the other patients. People were dying to the left and right, and she could feel life leaving her. So she pulled out the lines and tubes and whatever they had in her, got up, walked home in her robe, and fucking fought for her life. She was not going to die in that place. She was not going to die at all.

My mom was alone through a lot of this. Because of the culture and who my dad was, she could not lean on him for help. In Spanish we say,
“Ser acomedido”
—be accommodating, make yourself useful. Don’t be a bump on a log. If you see that you can pitch in and help, do it. Even if you’re a man, it’s okay to wash your own dishes—you’re not gimped, you can help your partner. But that never happened. She was on her own.

It made her strong and independent. But I think it also made her harder than she needed to be. I remember not long after she lost the baby, she was outside talking to a neighbor, and I heard her mention my name. You know how you hear your name in the middle of someone else’s conversation and your ears prick up? I heard my mom say,
“Carlos es diferente.”
She saw me looking and told me to come to her.

She told me,
“Sentarte,”
so I sat down on her knee as she wanted me to. Suddenly—
pow!
—she smacked me right across the side of my head. She did it so hard my ear was going
eeeeeee,
just ringing! I jumped up and was glaring at her with my mouth open. I just looked at her and she looked at me, and she said, “If you could, you would, huh?” Which meant, “If you could slug me, you would, right?” I just looked at her like, “Don’t ever do that again.” Then she looked at the neighbor. “See? The other ones don’t do that.”

That was cruel
and
that was ignorant. I wasn’t a toddler anymore. Why would she do that? Just to make a point with the neighbor—am I a guinea pig or something? I think part of the reason for it may have been her anger against my dad, and she took it out on me. He showed a blatant favoritism toward me. Maybe she was jealous; I don’t know.

The ringing in my ear was still going on minutes later. Something had broken between my mom and me that would take years to heal. She and I became rivals. I would buy her a house, but I would not invite her to my wedding. Not until Salvador was born did I start letting my mom back inside my heart and my psyche.

Yes, I was hardheaded. Just as she was. I guess “hardheaded” is the best way to describe it, or you can call it conviction. I’ve read
that a person’s cells continue a pattern of emotion from one generation to another, that you can inherit a pattern of resentment or remorse. You can try to stop yourself from doing certain things, but you wind up asking yourself, “Why did I just say that? Why did I do that? Why can’t I stop myself?” That’s one reason I read spiritual books—to get answers that can help me separate the light, compassion, and wisdom from behavior patterns. It can be scary—it’s like letting go of something that is ugly, but it’s who you think you are.

When I became a dad, I let my kids know I loved them all the time. I still tell them, “You don’t need to audition for me. You passed the audition when you were born. I was there when you came out, all three of you, and you opened your eyes. You passed the audition.” The rest—how you’re going to use what has been given to you—is up to you. And I’m not afraid to say, “Come here, man, I need a big old juicy kiss and a hug. I need a second hug because the first one is just courtesy and the second one is long and
ahh
…” It can get mushy.

Everything changed with my mother when Salvador was born. All of a sudden, she was hugging him as a mother does. It surprised all of us. It changed me, too, and started to give me a stability that I didn’t know I had lost. I could be anywhere in the world at any time, and I would pick up the phone and call Mom: “Hey, how you doing? I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

“Yeah, I know,” she would say. “Because I was asking you to call me.”

Validating my parents was not easy, and it took a lot of work. Part of it is constantly correcting the psyche, freeing myself from what has been put upon me by other people, including my parents. There’s nothing like being in a moment of clarity to let all that stuff fall way. But the worst thing you can say is, “Hey, I forgive you.” I made that mistake just one time. My mom looked at me with this expression and said, “What do you have to forgive me about?”

“Oh, nothing,” I replied, and I changed the subject. In that one
look I got her point of view. I didn’t have anything to forgive her for. Not when I had so many things to thank her for.

Around 1956, just as my dad’s father did with him, my father decided it was time for me to learn an instrument. He never really told me what motivated him to get me started, but I knew. Part of it was a family tradition, and part of it was to have something else that could put food on the table. Also he loved keeping me busy. I know he had tried to get Tony to play an instrument, but it just wasn’t part of my brother’s constitution. Tony had a mechanical mind and was really good with numbers. Laura was not inclined that way, either. Irma liked to sing, and Dad was already teaching her songs. Now it was my turn.

I remember the first time my father pulled me away from my brothers and sisters to show me something about music.
“Ven aquí,”
he said, and he took me out to the backyard. The sun was setting, and everything looked golden. He very carefully opened his violin case, took the instrument out, and put it underneath his chin.
“Hijo, quiero mostrarte algo”
—I want to show you something.
“Estás viendo?”
—Are you watching?

“Sí, Papa.”

Then he started pulling the bow across the violin very slowly, playing these little sounds, and out of nowhere a bird flew down and landed on a branch right next to us. It was looking at my dad, twisting its head, and then it started singing with the violin!

I was thinking, “Damn!”—or whatever word I had in my head when I was nine years old. He kept playing and looking at me, watching my reaction, not looking at the bird. They traded some licks for a while, then he stopped, and the bird flew away. My mouth was just hanging open. It was as if I suddenly found out my father was a great wizard like Merlin, and now he was going to teach his son how to communicate with nature. Only this wasn’t magic—it was music.

“Si puedo hacer que un pájaro, puede hacerlo con la gente, sí?”
—If I can do this with a bird, you can do this with people—got it?

“Sí, Papa.”

I was nine when my dad put me in a music school that I went to every day after regular school. Originally I wanted to play saxophone—but I would have had to learn clarinet for a year first, and I was young and wanted to shout and scream! My dad tried to teach me to play violin, but it was too difficult. Then he tried to get me to learn the
córneo,
the same instrument my grandfather had played. I hated the taste of brass on my lips, but at the same time it was my dad. I couldn’t say no, so I tried to stick with it—I really did. After he finished teaching me what to do with my lips and the fingering, and how to clean the instrument with brass cleaner, eventually he realized that I didn’t have a love for the horn, so we went back to a small violin—three-quarter size.

My dad was my primary teacher. He would show me a melody and have me play it over and over. “Slow it down!” he would say. “Again, slower!” That used to drive me bananas, but it not only made me remember the mechanics, it also imprinted the music in me. I was learning tunes such as the
William Tell
overture, Beethoven’s Minuet in G, von Suppé’s
Poet and Peasant
overture, Hungarian gypsy music, Mozart, Brahms—all with sheet music. I was a clever fool. I learned to memorize a melody and pretend I was reading it. My dad would be busy shaving or doing something and see me looking at the paper. Years later I was in the studio, and Joe Zawinul saw me figuring out some music—“Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti…” He laughed. “Oh, you’re one of those!”

I would say to myself that I would show my dad how good I could be and practice a song so I knew it cold. “I’m going to learn this.” Stroke, stroke, stroke. Again—stroke, stroke. “Got it, here he comes…” I’d play it for him, and he’d say,
“Bueno, campeón.”
He’d call me “champion.” “You really know this one. Now here’s one for tomorrow.” Man. I thought I was going to get a reprieve, maybe some time to go play with the other kids, hang out with Tony, or play hide-and-seek with Rosa from down the street because I heard
she was okay with kissing and stuff like that. But I couldn’t get ahead of him. By the time I finished the lesson everyone had gone home.

My dad knew how to be effective with music, how to own it—and that was maybe the most valuable thing he taught me. It helped to realize on my own that the violin could be a very demonstrative instrument, very emotional. I realized how to put my finger on the string and how much pressure to put on the bow so it had personality—stroke, stroke—then add a little more tension, like you’re nudging somebody awake. “Mmm…” Nobody can teach you how to develop a personal expression. The only way is to work it out with yourself in your room. The most my parents were able to do was ask me to please just close the door.