Preparatory notes for fu.., p.1
Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces, page 1
Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces
A Novel
MACEO MONTOYA
UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA PRESS
Reno & Las Vegas
University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada 89557 USA
Copyright © 2021 Maceo Montoya
University of Nevada Press
All rights reserved
Design by Frederick Porter
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Montoya, Maceo, author.
Title: Preparatory notes for future masterpieces : a novel / Maceo Montoya.
Description: Reno ; Las Vegas : University of Nevada Press, [2021] | Summary: “In order to fulfill his creative ambitions, the unnamed narrator of Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces: A Novel battles a world unkind to artists as he recounts his descent into ignominy from the mountains of New Mexico to an insane asylum in California. A multi-layered work told through both image and word, the novel is a commentary on the Chicano literary canon and how the stories of outsiders fit into the larger context of Chicano literature”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020045103 (print) | LCCN 2020045104 (ebook) | ISBN 9781647790004 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781647790011 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3613.O54945 P74 2021 (print) | LCC PS3613.O54945 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045103
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045104
Manufactured in the United States of America
25 24 23 22 21 5 4 3 2 1
for Alejandra de Pilar
Dear Professor Pizarro,
By way of introduction, let me first explain how I came into possession of the materials you have before you. About a year ago, my uncle passed away. He’d been living in a rest home and his caregivers asked that we retrieve his belongings, but my mother told them to just discard everything. We heard nothing further and assumed the caregivers had followed through on her instructions. A few weeks later, though, we received a package in the mail containing a typed manuscript and a stack of drawings. The caregivers enclosed a note explaining that for the last years of his life my uncle had spent most of his days holed up in his room drawing and banging away at a typewriter, sometimes through the night. He hardly ever spoke to the other patients or the staff beyond yes or no answers, and he certainly never shared what he was working on. After his death, curiosity compelled them to take a closer look at the manuscript, and they quickly realized that my uncle had written an autobiography. They figured that a family member should be the one to decide its fate. My mother remained adamant that I throw the whole damn thing away. She told me, “Who has time to sort through the nonsensical ravings of a man who wanted nothing to do with his family?” But I really didn’t see the harm in holding on to it. I’m just a budget manager for the State of California, so I’m no judge of literary merit, but I have to say I found my uncle’s story interesting, even if just for the fact that it filled in the gaps of a life that, owing to family dynamics, I knew very little about.
I ended up sharing my uncle’s autobiography with my friend and colleague Lorraine Rios, who, in addition to being a number cruncher like myself, is also an avid collector of all things Chicano, or Chicanx, an updated version I’m sure you’re aware of, which she’s now adopted. I was telling her about my uncle’s manuscript, and she asked to read it. I gave it to her at 5pm on Friday and she called me at 6 the next morning. She’d read the whole thing in one sitting and declared my uncle the Chicano Forrest Gump. I was still half asleep and didn’t know what she meant by that, so she explained that my uncle had run into some of the most important figures in Chicano history. I was still confused. I hadn’t recognized anyone. “You realize,” she went on, “that your uncle claims to have killed Oscar Zeta Acosta?” It was only then that I admitted I hadn’t made it through the entire manuscript. That was easier than confessing I didn’t know who Oscar Zeta Acosta was. Well, long story short, Lorraine said this manuscript needed to be published and that I had to get it into the hands of “folks in the know,” which is a phrase she likes to use. I did a little research online and saw that you wrote a book about the Chicano Movement, and Lorraine approved of me sending it your way.
There are several factual errors in my uncle’s telling, which the accountant in me couldn’t let slide. I’ve included notes to point out those errors. Also, Lorraine felt it necessary to add historical context in case readers such as myself weren’t aware of the significance of the various figures who crossed my uncle’s path. Lorraine also suggested that the title of the manuscript be “The Chicano Forrest Gump,” explaining that having both Chicano and Forrest Gump in the title would be an effective marketing strategy. I’ll leave that up to you as someone with more experience with this kind of thing. Lastly, in the caregivers’ note that accompanied the manuscript, they said that in his last moments my uncle kept talking about prophets, specifically how he hadn’t followed them far enough or listened to them with the attention they deserved, and how his greatest mistake was to think that he too was a prophet because it meant for him a life of loneliness and misplaced ambition. I mention this only because it sheds a little light on the titles of each section. Beyond that, I can’t offer much more. I submit this manuscript and I hope that you find it worth your time.
Sincerely,
Ernie Lobato
Dear Profe,
Lorraine Rios here. First of all, let me congratulate you on your book, Introduction to the Chicano Movement—the next generation of raza has to know this historia, verdad? Heck, Ernie needs to know this historia! I told him right away, “Send your tío’s manuscript and drawings to Profe Pizarro, he’ll know what to do with them,” but Ernie likes to take his time, do his due diligence. He was reluctant, too, you know, because the Chicanx community doesn’t like to air its dirty laundry, especially when it comes to mental health issues. But mostly, he didn’t see why anyone would be interested in his uncle’s story. I told him, “Ernie, your tío kicked it with Reies López Tijerina, the King Tiger himself. Your tío killed Oscar Zeta Acosta!” Ernie says that he finds his uncle’s story “interesting”—that’s typical Ernie, I call him subDUDE—but in my humble opinion, Profe, this testimonio is pure gold.
So mira, I have a proposition. I consider myself a public historian, which some folks call amateur, but which I call keeping it real. I may have only minored in Chicano Studies, but my life is Chicanx hasta el hueso: my parents were just teenagers when they met in Denver at the 1969 Chicano Youth and Liberation Conference—9 months later I popped out, so you get where I’m coming from. Anyhow, I think this project has my name and your name written all over it. Let Ernie do his thing. He can note all the inaccuracies according to his mom that he finds, but let’s you and me create a scholarly edition of this work, properly contextualizing this protagonARTISTA (Ha! You see what I did there? A protagonist that’s an artist is a protagonartista—this is the kind of creativity that I bring to the table.)
You can hit me up at lorrainerios@xicanxaccountant.com. Let’s talk about this. Adelante!
En Solidaridad,
Lorraine Rios
A NOTE TO THE READER
The drawings that accompany this memoir arrived in a separate stack and in no particular order. I have taken the liberty of placing them within the text as close as possible to the scene depicted in the illustration. I have also, where appropriate, cited both Ernie Lobato’s and Lorraine Rios’s commentary, as I found their additions illuminating and thought provoking. So much so that I was inspired to include my own comments and reflections. However, readers wishing to lose themselves in the story should feel free to skip the notes.
Autobiographical narrative, whether labeled as fiction or nonfiction, has a strong and important presence in Chicano and other marginalized literatures. The “I” announces one’s existence, one’s will to be, a powerful statement for a population often without voice. The truth of what that “I” declares can be decided by the reader. For me, as a scholar of Chicanx1 narrative, the veracity of this story interests me less than the questions it poses.
—Dr. Samuel Pizarro
* * *
1. As the Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar pointed out in 1970, Mexican Americans “have always had difficulty making up their minds what to call themselves.” This is true. He also wrote that “Chicano is as difficult to define as soul.” Also true. Personally, I began identifying as Chicano in college, fully embracing its complexity and indefinableness. In the four decades since, I have used different versions of the term, including Chicana/o, Chican@, and now the ungendered Chicanx. Language, like identity, must evolve, and I fully support this important gesture of inclusivity, but habits of language are difficult to break and I must admit that the new “x” still causes me to stutter.
PROLOGUE
Before the Prophets
I was born in La Trampa, a small village nestled in the mountains of New Mexico, on a Spanish land grant that was overlooked by subsequent Mexican governments and then the United States government, and which somehow benefited my father enormously. I remember pine trees and brightly colored adobe houses and a schoolhouse where I learned nothing but was still forced to attend because it kept me out of my father’s way. In a school for the children of small farmers, shepherds, laborers, and poor merchants, I was the odd one born of privilege.2 As
My father was of medium height tending toward short. His face I can’t recall except it grew red when angry, usually with me, and usually because I was talking too much. He was a proud descendant of one of New Mexico’s oldest families, but whenever I expressed pride in being a descendant of that same family, he looked at me as if I had tarnished the very notion. Other than that, he wasn’t a religious man, he had no strong moral philosophies, and he wasn’t overly concerned with hard work or discipline or punctuality. I do remember, however, that he always professed that a man was defined by the quality of his shoes. He spoke often about shoes. He spoke to my mother about them, with the hired help and with friends who dropped by, and whenever he muttered to himself it was surely about shoes or something I’d done to annoy him. We even once traveled to a city and visited shoe shops where my father engaged in the deepest and most detailed conversations about footwear—from sole width and leather grade to sophisticated lacing patterns—so that all I remember of that trip are shoe shops and shelves lined with bluchers, oxfords, and brogues. So it’s a mystery to me, as much now as it was then, why my father, who loved a fine pair of shoes above all else, should have dedicated so much time and effort to making shoes as ugly and unstylish as they were painful to wear.
Eventually, he gave up the cultivation of crops and threw himself headlong into shoemaking, a far less lucrative venture. Having no buyers, he forced his remaining workers to wear his amateurish creations, and with tragic consequences. Sporting blisters the size of potatoes, the workers grew resentful, then bitter with hatred. I can still picture them: Pedro, Roberto, the twins Frederico and Ernesto, and the leader of the crew, Humberto, all five exhausted, unshaven, and glistening with sweat, sprawled out in the damp darkness of their one-room adobe shack, their feet soaking in ice, watching the blood slowly seep out of each popped blister. They hear a knock on the door, a shout, another knock, footsteps, another knock, then the door opens and in walks my father, manic-eyed, hair standing on end, his shirt and jacket disheveled, and in his arms he’s holding five pairs of newly stitched shoes. “These’ll be better!” he exclaims. “No need to pay me, I’ll take it out of your wages.” Then he drops the shoes to the floor and departs, slamming the door behind him. Is it any wonder they killed him?
What I take issue with is their subsequent desire to kill me. I’ll explain their faulty reasoning. At the time, I was a budding artist profoundly influenced by the French realist painters, in particular Millet and Corot and my absolute favorite, Gustave Courbet. It was a country boy’s infatuation, in no way an expert understanding of their work. My only knowledge of art history derived from The Great Book of French Painting, which I pilfered from the school bookshelf after my mother informed me that we possessed French ancestry—apparently my great-grandfather was a soldier in Emperor Maximilian’s army. I soon discovered in those pages that Courbet’s The Stone Breakers and The Corn Sifters were images that I related to, understood, and wished to emulate. Why? Because, like me, Courbet was a land-owner’s son. And like him, I was surrounded by workers, who though darker, shorter, and wearing shoes only found in one very specific part of the world, were still worthy of modern, unflinching, steely-eyed realism. It didn’t matter that Courbet was stunning and shocking the Parisian art world some ninety odd years before. For me, in 1943, he was the epitome of the artist. Only I wasn’t so good at the realism. I couldn’t get the perspective right, or proportions, or faces, and especially not hands, but if I’m going to critique my rendering of hands I might as well just throw in the entire human body. I was young, only seventeen, inexperienced. I had no formal training, but I sought practice and every practitioner needs models.
So I asked my father if it would be possible to set up a modeling session with his workers. At first, he turned red with anger, asked me if I was ever, for one moment, quiet, and would I ever for the love of God leave him in peace, and I thought I’d have to look for my subjects elsewhere. But my father, for all his faults and wrongheaded passions, must’ve understood the frustrated plight of an artist in the provincial backwoods of New Mexico, because several hours later one of the servants approached me in my bedroom, the walls covered in the black and white reproductions I carefully clipped from The Great Book of French Painting, where I sat at my desk planning future drawings, and told me that I could go out and draw the workers now. My father had talked to the foreman and they were waiting for me.
Now I don’t know how Courbet, Millet, and Corot did it, perhaps French stone breakers and farm laborers are better models than those of the New Mexican variety, but I tried for half an hour to get Frederico and his pickax to stay still, to move a little to his left, to lift his chin just a bit, to stay, stay, stay-right-there-just-like-that, but just as soon as I would set my charcoal to paper he would move. “You moved!” I exclaimed. “It’s hot,” he said, “and there’s a lot of work to do.” I cringed and spent the next five minutes explaining that what I was doing was also work, not as hard on the spine, but certainly a loftier and more inspired task than breaking dirt. I told him that no man ever became famous for wielding a common tool, but an artist may become famous for depicting the toolwielding common man.
“What about John Henry?” he asked.
“John Henry?”
“Yeah, he wielded a sledgehammer and they sing songs about him.”
“Yes, I know who John Henry is. But he’s just a myth. He didn’t really exist. You exist, however, and who knows, maybe one day you can show your children your picture in some museum.”
He seemed to like this idea, but once again he couldn’t keep his chin in the right position and he kept dropping his shoulder. So I dismissed him and called the next worker, Humberto, and I thought he’d be better off sitting and holding his pickax as though he were resting after endless toil. He told me he’d rather stand in a special position, and I told him he could stand in whatever special position he liked as long as he kept still. So he proceeded to hold the pickax between his legs and grimace as though in pain. I had no idea what was so special about this position until I was halfway through a rough outline and heard the cackles and squeals of his fellow laborers. I, of course, had depicted a man stroking his pole. I promptly dismissed Humberto and spent the next half hour trying to explain to the workers that this wasn’t a game of who-could-do-what with a pick or a hoe, and that they were free to smile, but when I arrived at their face they needed to look like workers stoically enduring their plight. “What’s that supposed to look like?” they asked. I explained that even though they were suffering, they still maintained their dignity. I was met with blank stares. I thought it easier to give them a demonstration. I set my drawing board down, grabbed a pickax, and gave my impersonation of Sisyphus rolling the rock up the mount. They howled with laughter. They followed with impersonations of their own, all at my expense, one more vulgar than the last.
I decided to tell on them. I went directly to my father, whom I found in good spirits as he sat in his favorite calfskin chair thumbing through a haberdashery catalog. Before he could tell me to get forever out of his face, I described the disastrous modeling session and how the workers were not only uncooperative but also saw fit to make a mockery of me and my creative vision. I digressed, including details about the long tradition I chose to inherit, descriptions of the work of Courbet, Millet, and Corot and even Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters as points of reference, and then I returned to the issue at hand and complained that all his workers cared about were phallic jokes. When I finished, my father’s face was almost purple. Through clenched teeth, he said, “Do you realize I’ve been trying to speak for ten minutes and yet you haven’t so much as paused to allow a word in edgewise?” I hadn’t. “Now,” he continued, “come with me and we’ll sort this out.” My chest swelled. My father was on my side.
