The Journal of Antonio Montoya

by Rick Collignon

  After the death of their mother and after Ramona’s departure from Guadalupe, their father, who had always liked the taste of whiskey, began drinking in earnest. Blessed with a strong body and a mind that stayed calm even on windy days, he was able to consume vast amounts of alcohol and still hold his job at the copper mine. Flavio remembered his father during those years in much the way that one remembers a wall. Five years after Ramona returned to Guadalupe, their father dropped dead in Tito’s bar one afternoon while reaching into his pocket for change. The medical examiner in Las Sombras told Ramona and Flavio and José Sr. that their father’s heart had shrunk to the size of a large marble and was the color of old snow. The burial of her father eight years ago was the last funeral Ramona had attended, and at least, Ramona thought, her father had had the decency not to sit up in his coffin and converse with her.

  The wake for Loretta and José was being held at the home of Loretta’s parents, so the only vehicles in Flavio’s drive were his wife’s car and, beside it, Ramona’s pickup. Flavio pulled in next to the truck and parked. He shut off the engine and sat listening to the sound of the rain on the cab. He hoped that the tar he had spread around the base of his stovepipe last spring was keeping out the water. He looked over at Ramona and cleared his throat. When Ramona looked back at him, Flavio could suddenly see that his sister was aging. Lines like feathers branched away from her eyes, and there may have been more gray than black in her hair. Her eyes were red with a darkness below them, and Flavio was reminded of his mother when she would lie ill in bed and hold her arms out to him. She would say softly, “Mi hijo, come here to me.” Flavio suddenly felt sad again, and when Ramona spoke, the sound of her voice startled him.

  “Flavio,” she said.

  “Yes,” Flavio said too loudly.

  “Is little José here, or is he at his abuela’s?”

  “José is in the house,” Flavio said. “We’re to go over to Loretta’s family.”

  Ramona grunted. She pushed the truck door open, climbed out of the cab, and with long strides walked to the house. Flavio sat in the pickup for a moment watching his sister, and then he got out and trudged after her through the mud.

  Flavio’s wife, Martha, was in her kitchen wrapping the tortillas she had made in a warm towel. She had begun cooking the moment she received news of Loretta and José’s death. On the counter about her were platters of enchiladas in a sauce of thick red chile. Stacks of pork tamales that she had wrapped in cornhusks. Posole and menudo and chicharrónes. There was a bowl the size of a basin full to the brim with salsa with so much cilantro in it that it was the first thing Ramona smelled when she entered the house. José was standing at the side of the sink, cutting garlic that Martha would sprinkle over the enchiladas, when Ramona walked into the kitchen.

  “Hello Martha,” Ramona said. “Hello José.”

  Martha was a small, round woman who was at a loss as to what to say to nearly everyone. She knew she was this way because of her mother, who was also small and round, but who had been born mute and so never said anything to anyone. Martha had adored her sister-in-law, Loretta, for the simple reason that Loretta could talk and talk without any need of a response. When the two of them were together, Martha spoke only to prod Loretta into another long monologue, and then she would go on with what she was doing and listen to her sister-in-law as if the words Loretta spoke were woven with poetry. With Ramona, it was different. Ramona seldom spoke, and the silences that fell between them made Martha constantly uncomfortable in Ramona’s presence. Oddly enough, Ramona had always admired Martha and often wondered how her brother had come to marry a wife who cooked so well and kept the house neat and was never angry. When Martha saw Ramona enter the kitchen, she prayed that her husband would come soon.

  “It rained,” Martha said, laying more tortillas on a towel.

  “Yes,” Ramona said. “The mud was everywhere.” José had stopped what he was doing and was staring at her. Ramona could see Loretta’s wide eyes in his face and the darkness of his skin that had come from the Montoyas. “José,” she said softly, reaching out to touch his shoulder, “please go get your coat.” When he had left the room, she turned to Martha.

  “Loretta spoke with me once, and she told me that if anything ever happened to her and my brother, I was to take little José.”

  Martha turned to Ramona and felt that her mouth had opened. She closed it and tried to smile. She heard the front door open and the sound of her husband’s boots coming toward the kitchen.

  Flavio walked through the living room and came a few steps into the kitchen. “Flavio,” Martha said, “Ramona is here.”

  “Of course Ramona is here,” he said. “She came with me.” He felt awkward and irritable. He wished his sister would leave so he could feel comfortable in his own house. “Are you ready to go?” he asked his wife. “Yes,” Martha said, “in a moment,” and she went to the stove and took two towels from the oven that she had placed there to warm. She went back to the counter and draped the towels over the three stacks of tortillas.

  “José,” Flavio yelled. “Get your coat. It is almost time to go.”

  “Are his things here?” Ramona asked her sister-in-law.

  Martha realized there were two different conversations going on among three people about the same thing. She thought, not for the first time, how fortunate her mother was merely to listen good-naturedly and not be placed in such positions.

  “There’s a bag in the living room,” Martha said to Ramona. “Everything else is still in the trailer.”

  Ramona turned her head toward Flavio. “Maybe tomorrow you can bring the rest of his things.”

  Flavio had no idea what his sister was talking about. It wasn’t until the front door closed a few minutes later that his wife told him Ramona had taken little José.

  Neither Ramona nor José said a word as Ramona drove back to her house. José watched the rain and thought of the time when he was very little and had been outside his house during a lightning storm. His father had burst from the trailer and had grabbed him roughly around the waist and carried him inside. When his father put him down, he hit José hard on the butt and, with his face twisted in anger and fear, told his son to never again be outside during a lightning storm. There was evil in it. It would mess around all day up high, but when you weren’t looking—and here his father had slashed his hand through the air between them—it would strike as quickly as the snakes at the river and boil the blood in your body. José’s father had stood there breathing hard, and then he took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. He let the smoke out of his lungs slowly and then reached down and touched his son’s arm. “Let’s me and you have a soda, José,” he had said. “We can watch the storm from inside.”

  When Ramona turned off the dirt road onto the highway, José began to cry silently. Ramona looked at him out of the corner of her eye and thought that this had been a foolish idea. She should turn the truck around and return José to Flavio and Martha, who would care for him properly. Maybe it was true that Loretta had come back from the grave to ask a favor of Ramona, but it wasn’t necessarily true that just because Loretta was dead, she knew any better.

  Ramona drove through town and took the road behind the village office and pulled up to the front of her house. She shut off the engine and looked at her nephew. She would feed José some lunch, and then she would see. José looked over at her, and Ramona reached out her hand and brushed lightly at his hair.

  “Let’s go inside, José,” she said. “We’ll have some lunch and drink something warm.”

  The two of them climbed out of the truck. A slight breeze blew, and the water from the cottonwoods fell on them in large fat drops. Before they reached the house, the front door swung open and Ramona’s grandfather, Epolito Montoya, who had been dead for thirteen years, stood in the doorway. “Why are you out in the rain?” he said.

  Three

  RAMONA MONTOYA LIVED IN HER grandfather’s old adobe behind the village of
fice in Guadalupe. It was a small house with a sagging pitched roof and five dark rooms that were slowly caving in on themselves. The white plaster walls inside had cracks the size of miniature chasms that ran, in some places, from the smoke-stained vigas almost to the floor. The window frames had all twisted out of square and looked out on the world at odd angles. The wood floors seemed to be closer to the ceilings than they had just a few years ago, and Ramona, at forty-four, was quite sure it wasn’t because she was growing. She knew in her heart that her grandfather’s house was turning back to dirt.

  Ramona had lived for the past twelve years in her grandfather’s adobe. She lived in this house because when Epolito Montoya had died, just four days after the death of his wife, Rosa, he had left the house and his pasture and his pickup truck to Ramona. He had left his chickens and his geese and his three lambs to Flavio, and to José Sr. he had left one acre of dry land that sat on top of a hill. Epolito had done things this way because of all his grandchildren, Ramona was his favorite. José Sr., as a young boy, would visit only when forced to and even then would sit in the house and twitch his body and stare out the small windows so much that Epolito would have preferred the boy hadn’t bothered to come at all. He left José the one acre of dry land where the wind blew because he knew that when José stood there, his grandfather would not be far from his thoughts. To Flavio he left his lambs and chickens and geese because as a child, Flavio had once thrown a rock and killed his wife’s favorite cock, which had been named Pierre.

  Ramona became her grandparents’ favorite the year she was seven and lived with her grandparents while her mother and father and baby Flavio journeyed through Utah in search of work. Epolito had always thought of that year as the sweetest in his life. Ramona had been a shy girl and seldom left his wife’s side. In the kitchen, they would cook chile together and mend and, at Christmas, bake biscochitos. When Epolito came into the house at dark, his granddaughter, with her braided black hair and her large dark eyes, would sit beside him at the table and eat in silence. After eating, Epolito would sit in the living room, and he would sometimes hear his wife scold Ramona in hushed tones, and then he would hear the sound of Ramona trying to hide her laughter. His wife would say, “Hush, Ramona, you are too loud. You’ll disturb your grandfather.” Epolito loved his granddaughter in the way one loves something that he can never have.

  Ramona and little José sat at the small table in the kitchen while Ramona’s grandmother served them beans and chile and a fresh sopapilla each. Epolito was in the living room, sitting in the stuffed chair that looked out the window at the village office and, beyond that, the rain-drenched Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

  When Ramona and José had entered the kitchen, Ramona’s grandmother had been on her hands and knees scraping a spot of dried paint from the floor with the edge of a knife. Epolito had said, “Look at your abuela like that. You weren’t raised to throw your paints around our house like this,” and then he had grunted and turned and walked out of the room. Ramona and her grandmother had looked at each other until, finally, her grandmother had smiled and asked if they were hungry.

  Ramona ate slowly and watched her grandmother straighten up around the sink, her back humped slightly in the shoulders, her long hair gray and knotted in the back. To Ramona, her grandmother looked exactly the way she had forever.

  “Grandmother,” Ramona said, “what are you doing here?”

  Rosa Montoya wiped her hands on her apron and turned from the sink. “You always had a loud voice, Ramona,” she said. “You don’t want to disturb your grandfather.” She walked over to the table and stood next to José. She placed her hand on José’s head and moved it through his hair. “You’re such a big boy, hijo,” she said. “And smart too, I think.” José could feel her hand cold from the sink water on his scalp. He looked up at her.

  “Have you always been here?” he asked.

  “No, hijo, your grandfather and I have been away. But never too far away.” She looked at Ramona and smiled. Ramona could see that she was wearing her false teeth. Rosa looked back at José. “Do you think that if we were always here we would hide from such a boy as you?” Ramona heard her grandfather cough in the other room, then a groanlike noise as he rose from the chair and walked to the window.

  “I thought you were dead,” José said.

  “I am a little bit dead,” Rosa said. Ramona watched José nod and then take a bite from his sopapilla as if what his great-grandmother had said made perfect sense. “Take that into the other room, José,” Rosa said, “and go visit with your grandfather. And be careful, hijo, not to make a mess.”

  José pushed away from the table and walked out of the kitchen. Ramona heard her grandfather say his name and then the soft sound of José’s voice. Her grandmother sat down across from her. “There’s no food in this house,” she said.

  “It’s been just me,” Ramona told her.

  “That’s no matter. There’s a child now who needs to eat. And what if you had guests? And where are your babies?”

  “I’m too old for babies, Grandmother.”

  “You were going to marry that nice Trujillo boy.”

  “That was nearly thirty years ago, Grandmother,” Ramona said. She suddenly wanted her grandmother to leave her house. She did not want to talk about things she had forgotten. She did not want to sit in her kitchen and talk any longer to an old woman who had been buried years before. “Besides,” Ramona said, “this is what I wanted for my life.”

  “What? To sit alone by yourself in this house? To do nothing but paint those stupid pictures?”

  “You’ve seen my pictures?”

  Ramona had begun to draw as a child. She drew, with sharpened crayons on lined paper, pictures of all the saints. Saints lost on dusty, abandoned roads, dressed in robes that fell from their necks to their bare feet. Saints lost in deep arroyos or wandering through thick piñon and juniper forests. She drew six saints stranded atop a boulder in a rocky canyon, all of them crowded together, with startled eyes. Ramona drew saints as if the world were populated with them, and they were always in the wrong place.

  When Ramona grew a little older, she abandoned the saints and began to draw pictures of the people in Guadalupe as she thought they would appear naked. One day when Ramona was out of the house, Flavio crept into her room. He found under her bed a stack of drawings and spent a long time staring at the nude body of Horacio Medina, who was an old man and owned many head of cattle in Guadalupe. The picture under Horacio Medina was of Ramona herself. She was lying on her side, facing out, and Flavio could see her small breasts and the darkness between her legs. Flavio’s eyes widened in shock, and he felt his forehead grow hot. He put the drawings back where they had been, and after that, when passing the door to his sister’s room, he would stare at the floor and think of other things.

  Ramona had always thought that when she grew up she would be a great artist. She would live in New York City and in the winter take trips to Europe. She would paint cathedrals and fields of wheat. She would paint the sky over distant places and the brick streets of unknown cities. She would paint the sound of the wind over the hills of Spain. And when she was dead for a hundred years, her pictures would be in books and the marks of her brushes would still speak.

  When Ramona left Guadalupe after the death of her mother, she found that merely to exist was a difficult chore. She worked menial jobs that were always the same and met men who passed through her life as if they were no more than shadows. Through it all, she drew. She enrolled in art classes held late at night, and she sketched bowls of fruit and tired nudes, and she studied Picasso. Oddly enough, it was the art classes that gradually reduced her pencils to silence and made her feel that what she drew on her paper was of no worth. She didn’t draw for three years; then one day she picked up a brush and began to paint the village of Guadalupe. She painted the outside of the Guadalupe lumberyard in the heat of summer and Felix’s Café before dawn. She painted fields of sagebrush as the sun was setting bl
oodlike on the mountains. She painted trucks abandoned in arroyos in the midst of stunted piñon, and shovels spaded in the earth along irrigation ditches. She painted the Guadalupe church with its roof that swayed and bellied and its buttresses that grew from the ground and melded with the thick walls. Ramona painted the village of Guadalupe as if it lived in her bones, as if she and the village were haunted.

  She thought of these paintings as her “village period” and was surprised when they began to sell. She had tried often to break away from putting on canvas the place where she had been raised and which she thought too ordinary, but whenever she began to work, Guadalupe seemed to appear again and again. Her “village period” had now gone on for nineteen years.

  “How have you seen my paintings?” Ramona asked her grandmother again. The rain had finally stopped, and there was no noise in the kitchen other than the easy rasping of her grandmother’s breath. A sliver of sun came through the kitchen window and filled the sink.

  “How does anybody see things, Ramona?” Rosa said. “The shed is full to the ceiling with your paintings. You paint this village as if it were dead.”

  Ramona thought that of all people, her grandmother should have been the last person to make a statement like that. She also thought that what her grandmother said was true.

  “I’m going to lie down now,” Rosa said. “You should get out of those wet clothes.” She stood up slowly. It seemed to Ramona that her grandmother wasn’t much taller than the chair in which she had been sitting.

  “You’re going to stay here?” Ramona said.

  “This is our house. Where else would we stay?” Rosa walked around the table and stood behind her granddaughter. She touched her lips to Ramona’s hair. “For dinner,” she said, “we will have enchiladas.”

  Ramona stayed sitting in the kitchen. In the silence she could hear her grandfather’s voice from the other room.

  “When I was young,” Epolito said, “there wasn’t no mine here. There was nothing. Just the village. And the people. We kept our cows up high in the mountains in the summer, and before the first snow, we’d bring them back down for winter. If you needed something, you got it from your neighbor or went to the priest or to the man who kept the village records. Maybe you’d go to Las Sombras once or two times in a year. Sometimes in the spring to get seed, or in the summer when there was fiesta. People don’t know anything anymore. They get their paychecks from the mine, and they don’t care about nothing else. They buy whatever stupid thing comes into their mind. They sell their father’s land to these tourists for a few dollars, and what do they have? Nothing. A new pickup that breaks in a year.”