by Alisa Valdes
“Morning, Yazzie,” said Kelsey, her voice bratty. She used the teacher’s last name - which was her middle name (no one knew her real last name) - as her only name, as everyone did. Yazzie was a well-known postmodern Native American painter from the San Juan Pueblo, of mixed Pueblo and Navajo ancestry, with her own studio and gallery in Old Town Albuquerque. She had once told me, during the oil painting workshop I took with her in the summers, that she had made millions through sales of her work; she taught because she said it was a moral obligation, “a way of giving medicine.”
“So annoying,” I whispered to Kelsey, of being singled out by Yazzie.
“You are the chosen one, Jedi warrior,” she replied, sarcastically.
Kelsey and I walked to the second row, and took our seats at the table we shared.
“By the way, I think Demetrio’s nice, too, in his own way,” I said, trying to keep my voice low enough to be discreet. “But he told me he was in a gang. He actually said that. He also said that he was in big trouble for killing someone or something.”
Kelsey, who was possibly the single most sheltered and rebellious person I knew, looked intrigued. “Really? That is so cool!”
“Yeah, okay, whatever.” I started to unload my notebook and pencil case onto the table.
Yazzie set down the slide she was inspecting, and flashed her airy-fairy smile at me, still ignoring my friend. She arose, and glided over to me.
“I had a dream about you,” Yazzie told me, in her new age, touchy-feely way. “I woke last night and spent hours on a sculpture that tells your story.”
I didn’t know how to answer this, so I just smiled awkwardly, aware that Yazzie had a reputation at Coronado Prep for being just a bit off her rocker, albeit talented. The reputation was justified as far as I could tell, though Yazzie’s sculptures - soft-looking little Storyteller-type people doing active things in miniature - were charming, if weird, and very valuable.
“Did it involve rabid coyotes tearing Maria’s limbs off?” asked Kelsey, trying to be funny but also, I realized, jockeying for validation from a teacher who didn’t care whether she existed.
Yazzie grew concerned, and stared me down, as she often did. I hated it because it felt as though she could read my mind. At least she hadn’t brought her pet crow to school today. Sometimes she did, and it stared me down, too.
“No,” Yazzie mused. “No coyotes.” Her eyes snapped over to Kelsey, for the first time today. “Why do you ask, miss, uhm...?”
“Conner. I’m Kelsey Conner. I’ve been in your class for four months.”
“What about the coyotes?” asked Yazzie.
“There are no coyotes in your class,” said Kelsey, obnoxiously.
“Maria’s dream, I meant,” said Yazzie, missing the humor.
Kelsey shrugged, and didn’t seem at all uncomfortable the way I did. “Maria’s been having a recurring nightmare since her car accident Friday, about coyotes eating her for lunch.”
“More like dinner,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. It didn’t work. Yazzie’s eyes burned through me again.
“That must be why your energy is off,” she told me thoughtfully. “It makes sense.”
“I’m just tired. And cold. Sick of the snow.”
“No, it’s not that.” She frowned at me, and felt my forehead the way a mother might if you told her you wanted to stay home from school sick. “There’s something else. Something in your etheric auric body feels agitated. You have brown in your aura for the first time. Are you confused about something? It feels tangled and unruly.”
“Nothing a little heavy-duty conditioner can’t cure,” deadpanned Kelsey.
“Conner, hush,” said Yazzie, holding up a hand to block her view of Kelsey altogether. “This is serious.”
“Wow! You know my name!”
“I’m fine,” I insisted to Yazzie. I didn’t know what an etheric auric body was, and did not feel like finding out.
“My dream,” Yazzie told me, her eyes widening. “I’ve only now remembered it. You were with Masewa, in the Cochiti story of the Arrow Boy.”
“Sounds kinky,” said Kelsey.
“Stop,” I said to Kelsey.
Yazzie instantly, crazily, switched moods, perking up and traipsing with girlish glee back toward her desk.
“We’ve got a fascinating topic today, Maria,” she called out to me. “Sin. You think it’ll go over well with high school kids?”
“Abso-diddly-lutely,” said Kelsey.
I said nothing because I was horrified to be singled out again, and was conscious of the sympathetic snickers and rolled eyes of my classmates.
Soon, all 14 students in the class were seated. Yazzie forgot to take attendance, as usual, and immediately began instead to “read the energy” of the room, floating on the balls of her feet between the rows of desks, chanting to herself, before closing the shades on the windows, lowering the overhead lights, firing up the projector, and flipping hastily through the slides until she landed on one she liked. Most of her classes were of this type, random slides and lectures on whatever she liked at the moment, with a flexible chronological thread connecting them.
“Class,” she said, “I’d like you to take a look at this oil painting. It’s pretty famous, some of you might be familiar with it if you’ve been reading ahead. The title of this painting - which is done on three wood panels and which hangs in the National Art Museum of Antiquities in Lisbon, Portugal - is, and you might want to jot this down, The Temptation of St. Anthony.”
I inhaled sharply at this, remembering the little laminated prayer card Demetrio had given me at the cafe. I’d stuffed it into the side pocket of my backpack. I dug for it now, pulled it out and checked the name. Yep. Saint Anthony of the Desert. I slid it over to Kelsey, who responded with a surprised face that seemed to echo my sense that it was a strange coincidence.
“That’s a little weird,” she whispered.
“This is like the third thing like this that’s happened since the crash,” I whispered back.
“Girls,” said Yazzie, looking at us. “Is there something you wish to contribute to our discussion?”
“No, ma’am,” I said, conditioned to use the honorific by my somewhat formal mother.
“Then may I continue without your help?” asked Yazzie. “And don’t ma’am me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Kelsey, mocking me.
“The artist,” continued Yazzie, ignoring Kelsey as usual, her eyes on fire with passion for art, “is Hieronymus Bosch. You might recall from previous discussions we’ve had that Bosch was a Dutch painter who worked in the 1400s and 1500s.
“Bosch often worked in a form known as the triptych, which is a painting in three panels, like the one we observe here now. The middle panel is usually the largest, with the side panels being smaller and related. It was a popular form for religious painters in the Middle Ages in Europe, given the obvious reference to the holy trinity. Of the painters from that time who used this form, Bosch is the best known.
“Now, it might surprise some of you here to know that yours is not the first generation to be concerned with sex and violence. A closer look at this painting reveals some pretty racy, horrible things. The panel on the left shows lots of physical pain and punishment. The one in the center is a black mass, while on the right we have the temptations and sins of food and sex.”
A few of my classmates giggled about this.
“The Bosch is notable,” Yazzie continued, “because like many of his paintings, it focused on the corruptible nature of human beings, and replaced cheerier earlier images of religious figures with highly troubling, even disturbing, images of the people those figures sought to save from themselves.
“The left wing of the painting is the Flight and Failure of St. Anthony. Here we see a desert, and demons within in. Horrible flying fish and strange monsters engaged in hideous acts. This all seems surreal to us now, but back then the Flemish told folk tales that featured all of these creatures, an
d they would have been as familiar to the average person then as stories about La Llorona are to New Mexicans today.”
Kelsey slid a piece of paper to me, with writing on it. I think it’s a sign that you need to apologize to the sexy gang-banger for treating him like crap.
I kept my eyes on the slide, and scribbled back as discreetly as I could: I don’t have any way to reach him. And he’s not sexy, though you’re probably right about Logan trying to one-up him. He’s very competitive. Which, I added to myself, was a good quality in a boy or man.
Kelsey responded by removing her iPhone from her jacket pocket, and Googling “Demetrio” and “Golden, NM”. I rolled my eyes at her in annoyance, and returned my attention to Yazzie’s lecture.
“The center panel tells of the saint’s actual temptation. Here again we see the flying ships and monsters, almost a sort of premonition of airplanes and flying machines. We see a village burning, people trapped and tortured. And in the middle of it all we see the saint himself, in a burst of light amid the darkness. The right wing, St. Anthony in meditation, also shows horrible things, stabbings, misery, naked women, but it also shows us a figure in the middle of it all, with a book in his hands, contemplating sorrowfully the sinful nature of his fellow man, removed from it but still surrounded by it, defined by it, his face showing that he is horribly, tragically aware.”
I looked closely at the painting, and felt goose bumps rise on my arms and legs. I didn’t know why, exactly, only that the piece moved me - and almost to tears. I loved art, and painting, but both of my parents thought of it as a hobby, not a way to make a living. In Yazzie’s classes, I always felt like art was more than a hobby, though I’d never admit this to anyone I respected.
Kelsey touched my arm, and when she had my attention, pointed to the screen on her iPhone. It was a white pages listing for a Demetrio X. Vigil, in Golden, New Mexico, a phone number and street address.
“Sexy gangsta,” she whispered, proud of herself.
I nodded, amazed that she’d found it, but I was not about to agree to his obvious and unsettling sexiness - not openly, anyway. Kelsey copied the information down on the sheet of paper we were using to communicate, folded it up, and stuffed it in the pocket of my jacket.
“At least get the dude a thank-you card,” she whispered in my ear. “Emily Post would approve of that.”
I tried to ignore the way my heart raced at the thought of calling Demetrio, hearing his voice again, maybe even seeing him again. There was no reason to be nervous, I reasoned. It must have been that I associated him with the crash, and all the drama of it. Maybe, I reasoned, it was like when you’re kidnapped and end up falling for you captor just because you’re dependent upon him for your survival the way a baby is dependent upon its mother. By that logic, we all loved our parents only because they were our original captors. Made sense.
Yazzie carried on. “The story of St. Anthony’s temptation has been a ripe subject for artists and writers for a long time. The basic story, for those of us who are not familiar with it, is that St. Anthony the Great made a lonely trip through the Egyptian desert, where he was tempted by many sinful things but through sheer will power and conscience, was able to transcend them. This idea that fallible human beings are able to rise above their own banal nature, to aspire to greater things and greater beauty in spite of their cravings, lusts, desires and wants, is an enduring theme.
“You see this same mythology play out in works by painter Salvador Dali, composer Paul Hindemith, Michelangelo. The famous French author Gustave Flaubert -”
“Ooh! Gussie Flubber,” whispered Kelsey, who thought calling Flaubert by this name was high comedy.
Yazzie continue, “...who many of you will be reading and discussing this year or next, wrote a novel about the temptation of St. Anthony, and it is said to be his best work, a book that took him his entire life to complete.
“It’s all there - the seven deadly sins, martyrdom, god, science, lust, death, monsters. And transcendence through self-denial and moral self-control. Incredible transcendence, through self-imposed isolation. Human beings have an unquenchable thirst for hope in the face of despair, for the faith that no matter how bad things get, there will always be a way to pull ourselves back toward the good, the just, and the right.”
Yazzie paused now, as she often did, and hummed a few notes of a melody that only she knew. She had explained to us that this was her way of connecting with her spirit guides on a higher plane. We’d grown used to it, and simply waited for her to flutter back to earth and resume her professorial duties.
Yazzie stared dreamily at the painting in silence for a moment, then carried on.
“As dreary and frightening as this Bosch is at first glance, it is ultimately a work of a man I believe had great hope for people, and for our ability to rise above greed, avarice, sin. It is an optimistic painting. Now, let’s hear what you think. I always love hearing your thoughts. This is a great group, with curious minds. Starting with the left panel, and the lower left corner. We see something hatching from an egg. What might this mean?”
And so the discussion with the class began. Thirty-five minutes later the bell rang. Kelsey and I were about to leave when Yazzie called me back.
“Yes?” I asked, standing at the side of her desk. Kelsey waited for me in the hall.
Yazzie burrowed through a desk drawer, and tugged out a yellowed, half-torn sheet of paper with pale photocopied text on it. Most of her notes looked like this. She handed it to me.
“Before I forget, I wanted you to read this when you have a moment. I would suggest you read it soon. Today. But I know how you girls are with your time. It’s busy.”
I looked at the paper. It was a Cochiti Indian myth. Yazzie was forever handing me things like this, myths from the 19 Indian Pueblos of the Rio Grande River valley in New Mexico, and I had long ago stopped reading them too carefully because most of them didn’t make any kind of sense to me.
“Thanks,” I said politely.
“I’ve been thinking,” she began, for no apparent reason, “that if you believe a thing matters, then it will, and if you don’t believe a thing matters, then it won’t. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, truthfully. I wondered if she’d overheard me and Kelsey talking about the coincidence.
“Well, maybe you’ll have some thoughts on that, eventually, and when you do, I want you to come tell me what they are. Come by whenever. Here, or at my studio downtown. Deal?”
Yazzie held her hand out for me to shake it. I did, tepidly. Her hand was strong and dry, the skin thick from working with clay.
“Have a great weekend,” she said, releasing my hand, and busying herself with her slides again.
“You too.”
I returned to Kelsey in the hall, and we giggled in spite of ourselves as we walked back down the hall, toward the exit.
“Yazzie’s freakin’ weird, and quite unhealthily obsessed with you, I might add,” said Kelsey. “I daresay the unattainable MILF is in love with you.”
“You’re a disgusting perv,” I said, looping my arm through hers as I wadded up the photocopied story and stuffed it in my pocket, next to the neatly folded paper bearing Demetrio’s contact information. “I think she means well.”
“Naive, like I said,” Kelsey told me. “You think everyone means well, except for me and Demetrio, and we’re the ones who actually do.”
♦
After classes ended for the day, I stood outside the dance studio at school, with a dozen other girls, and read the “dance troupe practice is canceled” note taped to the door with disappointment. I needed the release of a workout, and nothing calmed me or centered me better than dancing. I lived to dance. Oh well. The anxiety headache I was nursing would have to be remedied the old-fashioned way, with Tylenol. Prone to headaches since the crash, I now carried painkillers in my backpack, like an old woman. I felt overwhelmed, unlike myself, sleepy, and worried about the anxiety that I simply
couldn’t shake.
To clear my head, I walked across one of Coronado Prep’s many landscaped quads, to the gym complex. My father, who had gone to college back East, said the stately crimson brick buildings and towering trees on the grounds of my school reminded him of the way Ivy League schools looked in New England. It certainly required a lot of water to make anything in the desert look like a lush forest, and I figured a hefty chunk of our sizable tuition went to grounds maintenance and the water company.
The storm from earlier had wrung itself dry, and the afternoon sky blazed clear now, a bright cobalt blue. The angled rays of the lowering sun struck the snow in such a way as to make it twinkle like millions of diamonds had been sprinkled across the world. I stood for a moment, breath caught in my throat, admiring the work of nature. Snow, I thought, could be so many things. It could be peacefully sparkling jewels, or slippery claws of near-death. I’d heard that Eskimos had many words for snow, and now understood why. Snow was multifaceted, both a playful bringer of life-giving water and a dark messenger of slow and ruthless death. Nothing was simple, when you took the time to really examine it.
No wind blew now. I caught sight of three small bunnies, huddled together, perfectly still beneath a pine tree, watching me with their perfectly round, blinkless black eyes. How did they survive such harsh weather? I wanted to gather then into my arms and bring them inside. Perhaps humans had simply become too soft, incapable of surviving the elements. We must surely have been tougher in the past, when Native Americans lived on this same land 10,000 years ago without benefit of heat and electricity. How did they do it? Did they know something - or some things - that we’d forgotten now?
I crunched across the snow, opened a side door to the West campus athletic complex, walked into the soothing blast of heated air, and snuck into the basketball court where Logan was jousting with the fencing team. I liked to watch him do this because of the grace and skill involved; but I hated to watch him do this because it involved swords and stabbing. In his white suit and facemask, he was nimble and robust, a man who would protect me from all harm. Like everything else he did - shooting, swimming, skiing - he excelled at fencing, an obscure, testosterone-soaked art of gentlemanly sword fighting. He looked up, saw me, and nodded his acknowledgment. My presence seemed to galvanize him to perform harder, the way girls always seem to inspire the best in competitive boys. He went after his opponent with a vengeance now. I cringed and tried to understand the appeal of thrusting a weapon another human being. It was a guy thing for sure.
