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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Three-year-olds on the world stage

Three-year-olds on the world stage

By Nathan Stone

When I was very small, I lived six blocks from the Santa Fe Opera.  Our home was in the Tesuque Village, which is really just a country road that runs alongside the Tesuque Creek just north of Santa Fe, with twenty tiny cul-de-sacs stretching up into the alluvial crannies of the southern Rockies. There were fruit stands and general stores. The Indians from the Tesuque Reservation would come to trade hides for cigarettes. This was before there were casinos. I remember the taste of the fresh local pears. There will be some in heaven, I assume. Once, I got lost. I was three. An Indian from the reservation took me to every house in the village and asked me, “Is that your house, little boy?”

On the horizon to the east, we had the Sangre de Cristos. They were huge, daunting, legendary and high. Mountain snow accumulated there in the winter to keep the semi-arid New Mexico wasteland inexplicably green all summer. Deep in the heart of the wilderness, at Horsethief Meadow, the early Comanche hid away in the lush green grass of summer with the wild and not-so-wild herds of mustangs that made them the wealthiest traders at the Taos market in the nineteenth century. Savages? Trade in your textbook. They knew more about selective breeding than Her Majesty’s Master of Horses.

e Sangre de Cristos
The Sangre de Cristo Mountains (via Wikipedia)

To the west, there was the Opera. You might ask why Tesuque had an Opera. All I can say is that it just needed one. It simply couldn’t do without one. It was brand new, when I was three. It went up in 1957. I wasn’t sure where I lived, but I knew it was in the shadow of the Opera, a battleship on our western horizon. Man-made grandeur. And woman-made, of course. A work of art. An open-air theatre, like the Athenians had, long, long ago. A democratic, public forum.

I never went.  I was three years old. My brother, one year my senior, and my sister, one year my junior, never went, either. But Momma and Daddy went. (Assuming I got the right house, and they were my real momma and daddy.) Newlyweds, twenty-five years old with three little kids, and walking distance from the Santa Fe Opera. They had season tickets. They were there when an aging Igor Stravinsky conducted his masterpiece, the Rite of Spring. With the New Mexican sunset descending behind the main stage. They were there, in the third row, behind Georgia O’Keeffe, our friend from the Piggly Wiggly in Santa Fe.

We got the LP’s. We just called them records. We played our records one after the other on the old Magnavox Hi-Fi, set into a handcrafted hardwood cabinet, as if that precise technology, the culmination of 1961 electronic genius, was expected to last, unaltered, for two hundred years.

I had to push a stool up to the speaker, so I could reach over to find the switch at the lower right-hand corner of the record changer. Click to the right and click back. Stacked high with Igor’s Rite of Spring, I piled on Sherry Lewis and Lamb Chop, Toscanini’s Beethoven, Belafonte’s Calypso, Walt Disney’s Bambi and the legendary Kingston Trio. I sang with the Kingston Trio one night at a night club in Reynosa. By then, I was four. Walked right across the darkened dance floor all by myself and sat on one of the amplifiers. I knew all the words, and I sang with them, just as I always did. Every day, at home. Of course, they knew who I was. We had sung those songs together hundreds of times. But that is a tale for another day.

Rite of Spring, well, we called it the jungle record, and we hid behind the couch during the rowdy parts. That same year, we got our first Peter, Paul and Mary. The LP. Help me find the way, to the promised land. But, the opera was out of reach. Daddy bought the LP’s for La Traviata, La Bohème, and Madame Butterfly, but he kept them up high and we were down low. It was so we wouldn’t scratch them. And, it was because they were in Italian. And, because they were sad. Too sad for three-year-olds.

Original 1904 poster for Madame Butterfly by Adolfo Hohenstein
Original 1904 poster by Adolfo Hohenstein (via Wikipedia)

I am sixty now. I have been away for a long time. I decided it was time to go back. To go inside the Santa Fe Opera. I bought my ticket online. It was expensive. And I drove two days to get there. I guess, on horseback, it would have been two weeks. Three, by stage coach. Not one to complain.

I wanted Doctor Atomic. It was a contemporary opera sardonically set right there in the New Mexico piñon rattlesnake drylands. The role of Oppenheimer was to be sung by a thermonuclear power tenor. And a healing ceremonial dance by the Navajo and Pueblo nations, on stage, to ward off the bad karma. But it was sold out. Of course, it was. So, I bought Madame Butterfly.

Before you continue, comrade, you should really punch up the famous aria on Spotify or wherever it is you satisfy your musical impulses these days. I don’t know if the María Callas version is on there. She was the diva. It was that good, that night. Sung by Ana María Martínez. Brought the house down. It has been more than a month, and I still cry when I think of it.

Maria Callas
Maria Callas (via Wikipedia)

It had just rained. A grand New Mexico cloudburst, typical of mid-August. They call it their monsoon. The rain stopped before the curtain opened. Except there is no curtain. Athens, remember? It was cool and damp, though. A Santa Fe night, clouds lifting and the proverbial western sunset, iconic and scented of damp sagebrush, just behind the stage.

You know the melody of the aria.  Even if you have never been to the opera. Now, imagine it, there. Cio-Cio San, a.k.a., Madame Butterfly, gazes across the harbor at Nagasaki in 1904. Waiting for her lawfully wedded American imperial husband, Lieutenant Pinkerton, who never took her seriously, to return. Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you got on? Could it be a faded rose from days gone by? Yeah, like that, but, Puccini, comrade. Way cooler. And sadder. The big sad. Still has me choked up.

One day, three years after his departure, a ship does sail into Nagasaki with an American flag on it. Pinkerton has not come to assume his commitment to the delicate Butterfly. He has learned, through the diplomatic gossip network, that he has a Japanese child with blue eyes, that his flesh and blood is descending into poverty and dishonor. Beside the woman he fancied and then, abandoned. Pinkerton has come to take the child away from his mother.

He can’t face her, of course. Too ashamed. Of how he let her down. Of how unremittingly faithful she was, in the face of his own callous indifference.

View of the stage at the Sante Fe Opera House
View of the stage at the Sante Fe Opera House (via Wikipedia)

At the curtain calls, without a curtain, the crowd booed the tenor. Joshua Guerrero. But he was a good sport.  He understood. He had portrayed the playboy badass so well that the massive woke Santa Fe audience wouldn’t let him leave the role, not even for the curtain call. Pinkerton had been a world class prick, so his interpreter wasn’t getting a free pass. The listeners’ friendly jeers counted as a standing ovation, for the performer. There was something very wild west, about that. That was rodeo etiquette, comrade, not the Met.

The clincher, that night, was played by a three-year-old. I know this wasn’t in Puccini’s original score. These works are not dead artifacts. They are still alive. After Butterfly commits hara-kiri, Pinkerton arrives to take the boy away to America. The boy, without singing a note (he was really just three years old) wraps himself in the American flag that his mother had used as a curtain in her Japanese-American home in Nagasaki. He picks up the bloodied dagger with which his beautiful mother has just killed herself and, with it, faces down Pinkerton. He is having none of it.

No baby jails. No icy separation from families at borders. No teaching them foreigners a moralistic lesson with heartless biblical puritan cruelty. Cio-Cio San’s boy was only three, but ready to take on the egotistical American imperial madness. If only that gesture could come off the Santa Fe stage, into the real world. Maybe it already has.

Because I am now sixty, and not twenty and not three, I felt that perhaps the central character in the opera was, actually, Suzuki, Butterfly’s servant and companion, the only one who knows her commitment and her suffering, the only one who understands that there cannot possibly be a happy end to this tale. The long night, as Butterfly waits for Pinkerton to arrive, and Suzuki knows that he will most certainly not, was moving. One would hope that she took the boy with her. Somewhere, far away, where his life will be more than the currency of cruel old men and their hateful games.


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Miss O’Keeffe

Miss O'Keeffe by Nathan Stone

by Nathan Stone

I remember Georgia O’Keeffe.  I couldn’t have been but three, first time I met her.  She was already an older woman by then, or late middle age, at least.  She was tall and perfectly centered, with a slender frame and grey hair pulled back in a tight bun.  She wore long sleeves and dark jeans.  She smoked only the best Cuban cigars.  Women weren’t supposed to smoke cigars at all.  But she got away with it.  She and Frida Kahlo.

Miss O’Keeffe got her smokes from La Habana.  They were already hard to get in ’61. The trade embargo was not yet in place, but things were already getting sticky with Fidel.  The State Department didn’t like the combat fatigues, and the mob wanted their casinos back. I think they drove Fidel into Soviet arms.  After that, Ché Guevara went to Angola, with a habanero in his teeth, just like Miss O’Keeffe.  Cuban cigars became contraband.  Reserved for drug traffickers and CIA agents.  I suspect Miss O’Keeffe had some stashed away for a rainy day.  But in the summertime, it rained every afternoon on the high plains of New Mexico.  You learned to bide your time.  You knew that’s just the way it was going to be.

Georgia O'Keeffe looks directly at the camera, resting her head on her hands.
Georgia O’Keeffe, 1932, Gelatin silver print (via the Met)

Back then, people might have said that Georgia O’Keeffe dressed like a man, if she weren’t so strikingly feminine.  Sometimes, she switched the jeans for a long dark skirt, the sort Jean Harlow might have worn in a Western.  Her perfume was something classic from the 1920s, sprayed on with granny’s atomizer, a little pungent, perhaps, but a good combination with the juniper and piñon all around us.  We would meet her often at the Piggly Wiggly in Santa Fe.

She drove her pickup truck down from Ghost Ranch to Santa Fe about once a week for provisions.  Ghost Ranch was her home in Abiquiu, north of Española.  We rode in with Mom from Tesuque.  In a 1960 turquoise Volkswagen.  It wasn’t that we would just see her and comment that there goes a famous person.  She would always speak, and she remembered our names, and we would remember her.  I even remember a plane ride to Midland, sitting in the same row with Miss O’Keeffe.  To go to Houston, back then, you flew from Santa Fe to Midland and there, you took the train.  I don’t know where Miss O’Keeffe was going.  Probably, New York.  She had to check in with the art world once in a while.

Georgia O'Keeffe's home and studio
Georgia O’Keeffe’s home and studio, 1996 (via National Park Service)

One day, Daddy had to drive out to Abiquiu to fix Miss O’Keeffe’s hi-fi.  Stereo was still a dream of the future.  Daddy was good at fixing hi-fi systems.  And the old hi-fis were very good machines, but they needed attention.   You had to change the needle often, and when a vacuum tube burned out, you had to identify which one it was, buy the right replacement, and change it without electrocuting yourself.

Daddy was down on the floor, on his back, underneath Miss O’Keeffe’s hi-fi, and her German Shepherd walked into the room, growling, hackles raised.  Miss O’Keeffe was right behind him. Don’t move, she said, softly.  Instructions for the man on the floor, not for the dog.

She managed to call off her dog.  Daddy got it.  We had German Shepherds, too.  Far better than locks on the door for looking after yourself, or your wife and kids.  In what was left of the wild, wild west.  Aware of prowlers and mountain lions.

I suspect Sanders and Associates had sold Miss O’Keeffe her hi-fi, and that was why Daddy would drive out there to fix it.  He worked for them.  It was about an hour away.  Maybe it was just because he was a nice guy.  She didn’t let many people into her sanctuary.  Her dog knew that.

Georgia O'Keeffe side profile. She sits in front of firewood and looks to her right.
Georgia O’Keeffe, photographed by by Carl van Vechten (via Pixabay)

We often wondered, years later, what her music was.  Big bands or Aaron Copeland; maybe Stravinsky.  But Daddy’s gone now, and we never got around to asking him.

Igor Stravinsky came to Tesuque in ’61.  He was an elderly man, by then.  He came to direct his masterpiece at the Santa Fe Opera House.  It was three blocks from where we lived, so Mom and Daddy went.  They were young marrieds with three babies, no money and season tickets to the opera.  Where will you ever see that again?  Miss O’Keeffe was there, of course.

After that, Daddy bought a recording of the Rite of Spring to play for us at home on our hi-fi.  We just called it, the jungle record.  We played it over and over.  We hid behind the couch for the loud and rowdy parts.  Alongside that, the record changer dropped Toscanini’s Beethoven, Harry Belafonte’s Calypso and the complete The Kingston Trio.  It was all music to us.

Daddy worked for Sanders and Associates, a King Ranch subsidiary, which meant Alfred King was trying his hand at import-export in Santa Fe.  It folded because Mr. Sanders was cooking the books.  Daddy turned him in to Mr. King, and then we moved to Dallas. We watched Kennedy get shot while we were there.  Dealey Plaza was just a few blocks away.  Shit goes down that way in Texas.  JFK didn’t have a German Shepherd.  He sure needed one.

Cerro Pedernal, viewed from Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, New Mexico
Cerro Pedernal, viewed from Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, New Mexico (via Wikimedia Commons)

But this was supposed to be about Miss O’Keeffe.  She was lovely.  She had climbed the steep rock wall alone to get to the place where she was.  Her masculine dress, her artistic style, and her cigars were a testament to her eternal readiness for the ongoing struggle.  She possessed the peace that had cost her everything she had.  She had walked through the fire.

Miss O’Keeffe gave up painting as a young woman, after attending the Chicago Art Institute’s school for starving artists.  Said the smell of turpentine made her puke.  For a while, she drew for an advertising firm in Chicago, then she taught public school in Amarillo.  While she was in Amarillo, she started walking in the Palo Duro Canyon.  It seduced her heart back to beauty.

She contracted the Spanish Flu in 1918, along with 200 million others worldwide, but she survived.  She married Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer from New York, and he made many portraits of her.  But she couldn’t bear his snobby family, or his philandering, so she escaped to New Mexico every summer.  Hiking up high.  It was there that she started painting again.

When Stieglitz died in 1946, she settled permanently at Ghost Ranch.  She drove an old Model A until the wheels fell off.  Then she got a Ford pickup, the one I remember from the supermarket in Santa Fe.

Ghost Ranch was out near Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was in the process of becoming a world-changing reality.  Los Alamos is the strangest city on the planet.  Complex, yet simple.  If you drive into town to buy supplies, someone follows you.  That is why Miss O’Keeffe preferred the supermarket in Santa Fe.  She was recognized in Los Alamos and not welcome, there.  She was recognized in Santa Fe and loved.

Georgia O'Keeffe—Hands and Horse Skull by Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia O’Keeffe—Hands and Horse Skull by Alfred Stieglitz, 1931 (via Met Museum)

Her life was an ongoing thermonuclear moment.  Once, the soil rebelled and burned her workshop to the ground.  Unable to finish a commissioned piece in New York, she had a nervous breakdown and spent two years in a psychiatric hospital.  Behind bars with all the other artistic souls.  Big Nurse, medication and electro-shock.  She emerged, changed, but unscathed.  She strode out of there with frightful courage, strong legs and unyielding decision.

That was 1932.  The year that changed everything for her.  From then on, she was determined, committed and, yes, maybe even, happy. More and more, she spent her time in the land that gave her life.  She was more alone, but not lonely.  She went back to New York to bury Stieglitz in 1946. After that, her only love was the the New Mexico desert. She painted it, smoked Cuban cigars, and watched the sun set, over and over again.

She died in 1984. She was 98 years old.  She was not painting anymore.  She would sit and watch the red desert cliffs on the high plane as the sun rose and set each day.  Taking care of the beauty around her, just watching, perennially caught up in its angel fire.


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The Tiger
The Battle of Chile
Rodolfo Valentín González Pérez: An Unusual Disappearance

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