Good evening, Amando Villarreal

By María Eugenia Guerra

I write this to bid farewell to Amando Villarreal, Jr., my father's cousin, a former Laredoan who died in Houston late last month. Over many years I had heard my father speak well of Amando, for they had been boyhood contemporaries, schoolmates roughly the same age who shared some of life's larger experiences, including World War II.

Though I had over the last decade published Amando's travelogues and photos in LareDOS, and though we'd corresponded in the formal snail mail way, I only recently had the pleasure to meet him and his beloved Elsa.

The travelogues were all business, lengthy stories that revealed his knack for organized thought and narrative that followed a trajectory, but it was his letters that bespoke an innate intelligence and erudition, and a warmth that regrettably we exchanged all too late in our respective lives.

I knew Amando in the way that writers know each other, by their words, the ones they write for a larger audience and the ones they exchange among themselves.

Of me in his first letter after he and Elsa and I met for the first time at El Tío Hut, he wrote, “I was afraid you'd be caustic, and ready to pounce on any of my pas if it were even the last bit faux. I regret I waited too long to forge a rewarding friendship with you.” Amando gave me far too much credit as an intellectual sophisticate and a crusading journalist who spoke languages other than English.

I loved his letters, which of late were addressed, “Dear Sobrina,” since at our initial luncheon I asked if I could call him “Tío.” He was a dead ringer for some of my uncles Guerra.

The letters were wry, self-deprecating, and revealing of how he felt about Elsa, his children, and his ranch land in Oilton. He called the earth “our blue marble” and said he loved nature to the point that he would get “mawkish” about his ranch. About everything else, he said, likening himself to Mr. Spock, science officer of the Starship Enterprise, he was “cold logic, no emotion.”

Not so, Amando.

Some of what he wrote made me laugh aloud. When we ran a review of the Mel Gibson movie The Passion of the Christ, a review that heated up the religious passions of local advertisers and readers alike, he wrote to encourage our reviewer, Tomás de los Santos, “Please tell Mr. De Los Santos, provided he has not already been burned at the stake a-la-Salem or cooked in oil a-la-Torquemada, that his Satanic thrusts at loyal Mel, sweet Jesus, and Big Daddy did not infuriate quite 100% of his readers for his review. We are too cowardly to step out of our closet to pledge support for him; so Give'em Heaven, Tomás.”

My son and I had lunch with Amando and Elsa at La India on October 9. Amando couldn't believe the menu prices (ridiculously low, he fussed.) Elsa loved finding an eatery like this in Laredo , a place with so much character. We covered a lot of ground as we visited -- there was no lack of topics to consider -- politics, ranches, children, the hereafter, their many good friends in Laredo .

It was the hereafter that caught Amando's and my attention. I told him that since my father died, I was trying mightily to understand what happens after death. I asked Amando if he thought of heaven as a comfortable place of reward for a life well-lived. He said, “I don't know, but if I get there, I'll tell Primo José you said hello.”

The last letter I received from Amando on October 14, 2004, a letter written on a five-columned Wilson Jones ledger sheet, told of a visit he attempted to his ranch property at Oilton to look at a new presa, hip-high grasses, high fencing, and remodeling on a ranch house. A sudden cloudburst had made the ranch roads impassable, and so he and Elsa went on to nearby Los Ojuelos, the ancestral home of the García Guerras. He said the ranch hand there welcomed them upon learning they were related to the founders of Los Ojuelos and that a dog there “frolicked around us, wagging his tail.” The vist to the old settlement of stone houses had obviously delighted him. He wrote, “Too bad that in passing through life I never stopped to smell the roses. I have such wonderful relatives I never got close to, including you and your Dad.”

He was dear, and there was something merry in the glee he took at his own jokes, many of which he lobbed at himself. He credited Elsa's “superior genes” for their intelligent and goodlooking children -- Marielsa V. Bailey, Patrick Villarreal, and Joseph Villarreal.

There is far more to tell of Amando, for others knew him far better than I. They would tell you he was a UT alum, his undergraduate degree was in chemistry and biology, he'd once begun studies to become a physician, he had served in the Navy during World War II, he taught at Martin High School in the 1950s, and he was an accountant. They would, as I would, tell you he was a good friend.

A little cryptically, he ended his letter of October 14 thus:

Rick to Ilsa in Casa Blanca: No matter what, we'll always have Paris.

Amando to MEG: No matter what, we'll always have LareDOS.