Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez

Annotations from "Anita de Monte Laughs Last" by Xochitl Gonzalez

This was not Brooklyn.This was Brown. Here was a place of measured tones and intellectual rivalries. Here was not a place where necks were rolled, nor teeth sucked, nor fucks flung around willy-nilly. Here was not, he just reminded her, a place for girls who worked concessions at the Met.

Oh!” Lee, in jeans, exclaimed. “You’re an artist too. That’s amazing!” “Why is that amazing?” I asked. White men loved to use words that implied astonishment whenever women of color accomplished anything they deemed their “terrain.” “I just meant,” Lee now attempted to correct, “that two artists in one home is remarkable. That must be challenging.”

Had I allowed him to shit in my mouth in the public square, Jack couldn’t elicit the kind of shame my own acquiescence cultivated in me. His abuses, his infidelities, his acts of violence—big and small—they shaved away the epidermis of my soul, layer by layer, leaving me raw and rough and unrecognizable.

I said something about how easy it was for him to turn me into a talentless nobody in his mind because it allowed him to abuse me more easily. And as soon as I said it, I was sorry it had taken me seven years to figure out.

That was the gift of all this hard work, the chance to shed the skins you never liked too much in the first place.

How American the Americans among us were! Constantly wanting and taking more: food, wine, information. Myself included; maybe me most of all! All this fucking time, thumping my chest about my Cuban-ness only to discover that I’d not been impervious to twenty-five years of America.

Like I said, I make them for me,” he said. “It’s worth the paint to tell my truth.” Ah! I couldn’t sleep that night. Or for many nights afterward. This casual remark by Marco having exposed the fraud of my very self! My work had not been about my truth for a very long time. New York, I realized, made a liar out of me

Oh, had I been pretty and blond like towering Ingrid, it’s not that he wouldn’t have killed me, but the “sisterhood”—that lily-white sisterhood that cared about nothing but themselves, the things that benefited themselves—would never allow me to be forgotten. Discarded! No, the Tillys of the world were complicit in it! Midwives! They burned their bras and then they stopped giving a fuck about anyone’s tits but their own.

He was very handsome and very full of himself. Good-looking, but common. Light eyes that made me feel distrust because they reminded me of Jack and the way he’d looked at me just before he pushed me out the window. But I realized that was silly and prejudiced and you can’t hate everyone with light blue eyes just because someone with light blue eyes happened to kill you—I mean, it’s a pretty good excuse, but I hate that kind of laziness. No, when I looked in his eyes, what I saw was the most dangerous thing of all in a man: insecurity. Because they will crawl over and push down anyone around them in their desperate thrashing to find themselves comfortably affirmed at the top

The more generous attributed Jack’s heavy footedness to the rumored injuries sustained from years of lifting rods of iron and setting down plates of steel. “Each and every piece of art that’s ever bore my name,” he will tell you within breaths of meeting him, “was installed by me and me alone.” That explanation is, for me, the most ripe—picked with callus-free hands from the vine of Jack’s decades-old propaganda tree about working-class roots.

Human will is a particularly powerful magic. Alchemy happens when a person truly decides something; when a mind is changed. We’d shared exchanges like this hundreds of times before, my husband and I. Tiny acts of violence enacted with words. Exchanges that had cut and left me bleeding, with my best stuff—confidence, clarity—pooling down, away from me, onto the floor. But not that night. No. Because that day I had decided to reclaim my might; to cease to be shrunk. And in my decision, I’d grown a new version of myself. My new skin thick like coconut shells, impervious to his attempts to crack my joy. My triumph at my accomplishments, my exultation with my own art, euphoria at this new power I’d discovered in simply deciding to change my mind. All of it now in safekeeping, deep inside my new self.

Then, like finding a five-dollar bill in an old coat pocket, I remembered my thick, coconut-shell skin and that I had changed my mind.

That series: an exorcism; a terrible recollection of one of our foster homes. You can’t imagine the things that happen to children when adults see them as dispossessed.

Who the fuck said women’s art existed to do or say anything about male art practices? “Leslie, this might be controversial to say here,” Jack said with the air of a provocateur, and I could feel the room—the men, especially—lean in toward him, eager to lap up the crap he was about to serve. “Because I admire what you’ve done. But, should this gallery even exist?” There was an audible reaction, gasps and clucked tongues and sniggers. I, for my part, had a big smile on my face. Because I realized in that moment that this guy’s art form wasn’t sculpture, it was bullshit. How many times would I remember realizing that? How many times would I come to kick myself for forgetting

what I knew was that there was no Anita de Monte artwork without the life and mind and body and fucking pain of Anita de Monte!

The pictures coming off the wall had changed the energy. Catastrophe can be a course correction, you know? Everyone pitching in to help clean up the glass; tenderly picking the prints off the floor with the care that they so deserved. A warmth filled the space. Levity. People—critics, other artists, even some of the grumpy chauvinists who’d had me rattled earlier—came to express their shock, sorrow, regret that this had happened. That I would have to rehang all of the pictures. “Believe me,” I’d said with a quiet smile, “many more difficult things have happened to me.” And this was true.

I pretended I was nonplussed, but I’d never met anyone like him. He was like the pitaya fruits I’d eaten in Mexico: hard and prickly on his outside, but inside, soft enough to scoop up with a spoon. He was not attractive: his face ruddy from sun and wine. But his speech was elegant and precise. A spider of language. Crafting sticky webs with words. Wrapping you in his threads. He would say he was just a poet or, as he preferred to call himself, a sculptor of words. And I don’t know. It turned me on. True, he was old; too old, my sister would say. But I felt my bomba contract, sparked by the friction of his delicate language and his brutish self. His cold, brutal art. But also, it shrunk me a bit too, I must admit. How vast his existence had been and how narrow mine was by comparison.

What did I say?” her mother said, defensive now. “She can do whatever she wants. It’s her life to mess up.” “That’s why I didn’t tell you,” Raquel said, surprised at the bite in her own voice. “Everything becomes a premonition for disaster.