Preparatory notes for fu.., p.28
Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces, page 28
EPILOGUE
I never attempted to draw or paint again. I don’t count the chicken scratches found among these pages. They are just the scribbles of an old man trying to remember. No, I had finally learned from Oscar’s example, his tortured soul. He had said that he was tired, and I understood his exhaustion. Hadn’t I reached that point as well? Hadn’t I already learned that lesson once? Isn’t that what compelled me to commit myself to DeWitt so many years ago? So much turmoil and insecurity. It wasn’t worth the fight. I should’ve counseled Oscar better. I should’ve told him to let it go, his dreams and ambitions, to forget all this nonsense of masterpieces. Instead of jumping on his back, I should’ve invited him to Albuquerque to live in the little house with me. We could’ve spent our days watching game shows and soaps. Together we could’ve taken care of my mother in her waning years, kept her company while she brought us lunchmeat sandwiches and lemonade. It was too late for Oscar, but not for me. I vowed to find peace and never relinquish it until the end of my days, regardless of who stopped by.
And Enrique’s poems?
I tried, my friend. I tried.
I sent them to publishers large and small. I started in New York and moved west. I received one rejection after another. No comments. No encouragement. Nothing. Finally, some assistant editor offered me a tip, suggesting I send the manuscript to a publisher of Mexican American literature in Berkeley, California, which I did. Months later, the publisher wrote back, rejecting the work, saying that “although the work has clear literary merit, the insular nature of the poems doesn’t aspire to represent the true spiritual potential of the Chicano community.”23 I didn’t even have time to absorb what this might mean because the publisher also apologized for misplacing the copy of the manuscript. “A copy?” I screamed to the heavens. So certain that whoever held it in their hands would instantly know its value, I hadn’t even thought to make copies. I had failed Enrique once again. I had been entrusted with his work. He had sent me the poems, and I, the steward of his genius, had doomed him to a fate he didn’t deserve: oblivion. Say the word aloud, feel its wretchedness on your tongue, and know that he deserved so much better than a friend like me.
I kept expecting his poems to show up, that maybe someone someday would find the manuscript in a file box and know where to send it. I gave up on that possibility when my mother sold the house and moved to California, following my sister Lourdes, who convinced her to put me in a home for the old and sick but not sick enough to commit. Which, of course, is where I am now. Which is where I’ve been for a long time. Which is where I finally found the lasting peace, not to mention the typewriter, as well as the pens and the paper, to tell my story as I lived it, in bits and spurts, a rush of memories and then no memories, years fully lived followed by years that passed by without so much as a whimper or a dream or a hope of anything else. I have no regrets.
That’s not true. I regret everything, all of it, every single year of my life. How I wish it had been so different. But when I look back I can’t see it being any other way. My life, that is. I guess there’s something to be said for accepting that. I never became the great artist I thought I would be. Okay. I never made it to Paris. Fine. Courbet and Corot and Millet will be remembered, and I will not. As it should be. I abandoned Enrique, my only friend, and I couldn’t satisfy Ella, and I disappointed Reies, and I didn’t measure up to Martín, and clearly, I wasted my best years at DeWitt, and I killed Oscar, a man already hell-bent on destruction. Okay to all of it. I accept every last misstep and failing. But what still keeps me up at night, what disturbs the lasting peace I’ve found, is the sincere wish that somehow you—and by you I don’t mean humanity, I mean you, the reader of my story—could’ve glimpsed the masterpieces I held in my head. The masterful paintings only I could see. Because then it would all make sense, all of it, every preparatory note, every developmental sketch, every false start, every excuse, every failure to do what I was set on this earth to do. Just a glimpse, that’s all, and you would’ve understood.
But indulge me one last time. I will save you the tedium of my preparatory notes. I will save myself the embarrassment of another pathetic scribble. Just imagine. Imagine this as a painting. An old wrinkled man with thinning gray hair seated on a wobbly wooden chair, hunched over a typewriter that rests on his bed, tapping away. His form is lost in shadow as the day loses its light. The sky is visible through the window behind him, brilliant hues of pink and orange. Maybe he’s crazy. Maybe he’s a third crazy or a fourth crazy. Maybe he’s not crazy at all. What matters is the hope he had in him. The room grows dark, but still he types.24
* * *
23. I have addressed this point before, but it bears repeating until I’m blue in the face: we deprive our literature of its true potential whenever we expect it to fit or conform to our expectations. Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” that “the nationalists pretend to venerate the capacities of the Argentine mind but want to limit the poetic exercise of that mind to a few impoverished local themes, as if we Argentines could only speak of orillas and estancias and not of the universe.” Are there Chicano themes? Certainly, but can we not also speak of the universe? How many Enriques have we deprived or been deprived of because we couldn’t reconcile the themes of the work with the author’s surname and background. Borges, in the same essay, makes the argument that the reason English literature is dominated by the Irish is because of their very differences, their ability to know English culture while having enough distance from it to allow for innovation. Benjamin Alire Sáenz, in his essay “I Want to Write an American Poem,” also makes the connection between James Joyce’s ambivalence toward the English and Sáenz’s own Chicano ambivalence toward the language of this country. We are too often made to feel alienated from our language(s), ashamed of what truly makes us unique, when we should embrace our inner Joyce and turn literature on its head.
24. Ernie writes: “According to my mother, it became too difficult for my grandmother to take care of my uncle on her own. Putting him in a rest home was their only option. When I asked her why we never went to visit him, she said, ‘Your uncle was just a shell of a man. There was nothing to visit.’ I told her she should read the manuscript, but she refused. ‘Do you hate your brother?’ I asked her. ‘Hate is too strong of a word,’ she said. ‘When he disappeared, who do you think had to fill the void? One day he returns as if he’d just gone out for a carton of milk and I’m supposed to embrace him with open arms?’ I told her, ‘He’s family.’ She laughed at this. ‘Madmen only have themselves,’ she said.”
Lorraine writes in response: “If nothing else, in sharing your uncle’s story, Ernie, we get to share Enrique’s story, too. His poems might be lost, but he doesn’t have to be. Your uncle doesn’t have to be, either. These two kids, even Ella wherever she ended up, lived outside of history, they had no world to call their own. They wanted in, you know, they wanted their lives to matter. Maybe they didn’t exist then, but they exist now. I believe that.”
But do they exist, Lorraine? Will their story be heard? Will anybody care about an artist who hardly created, who spent the greater part of his life institutionalized, or about a long dead poet whose poems are lost to us?
I found myself thinking a lot about Ernie’s note, in particular what his mother said about madmen only having themselves. The first modern novel, Don Quixote, was about a madman trying to square his fantasies with reality. Rather, his fantasies became his reality; so it was the outside world that had to square their reality with his. Our narrator, too, had his fantasies, but he was very much aware that “reality” was inescapable. Could his story have been any different? In the 1940s and ’50s, could a Mexican American from the mountains of New Mexico really have made a life as an artist? How about now, in the 2020s, can a Chicano “gain entry,” as our narrator described it, into the art world? The literary world? Mainstream consciousness? He dreamed of Paris because he dared to dream big and had no other models to follow. What models and pathways do our young artists follow today? I don’t know; I am too far removed to have my finger on the pulse of today’s creatives. But I do know this: Ernie’s mother, Lourdes, is right. Madmen only have themselves, and to be an artist is to be part or maybe entirely mad, and to be a Chicanx artist is to exist on the periphery, the margins, which means we are all madmen dangling at ends of the earth. No, generalizations are risky and I have already offered too many. I will speak only for my younger self, who dreamed of becoming a great novelist: I have often if not always felt that my dreams were too big for the box granted me by fate.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MACEO MONTOYA is an author, artist, and educator who has published books in a variety of genres, including three works of fiction: The Scoundrel and the Optimist, The Deportation of Wopper Barraza, and You Must Fight Them: A Novella and Stories, which was a finalist for Foreword Review’s INDIEFAB Book of the Year award for short stories. Montoya has also published two works of nonfiction: Letters to the Poet from His Brother, a hybrid book combining images, prose poems, and essays, and Chicano Movement for Beginners, which he both wrote and illustrated.
Montoya’s paintings, drawings, and prints have been featured in exhibitions and publications throughout the country as well as internationally. He has collaborated with other writers on visual-textual projects, including Laurie Ann Guerrero’s A Crown for Gumecindo, Arturo Mantecón’s translation of Mexican poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro’s Poetry Comes Out of My Mouth, and David Campos’s American Quasars. Montoya is currently an associate professor in the Chicana/o Studies Department at UC Davis where he teaches courses on Chicanx culture and literature.
Maceo Montoya, Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces
