A Reissue of “Antonio Montoya,” Rick Collignon’s First Guadalupe Novel

By Jenny Shank, 8-24-09

The Journal of Antonio Montoya
By Rick Collignon
Unbridled Books, 214 pages, $15.95

This month Unbridled Books reprinted Rick Collignon’s The Journal of Antonio Montoya, first published in 1996. Antonio Montoya was the first of Collignon’s four novels set in the New Mexico town of Guadalupe, and it establishes this traditional, insular, and unchanging desert place through the story of Ramona Montoya, an artist who tried to leave it behind.  It’s a contemplative, gently humorous novel, and reading it is an experience that fills one pleasantly, like the nourishing food that Ramona’s resurrected grandmother cooks throughout the book.

As a young woman, Ramona moved away, but the people of Guadalupe seem to be like plants that can’t take root outside of their native ground, and she returned in mid-life after she inherited her grandparents’ old adobe, which she suspects is “turning back to dirt.” Oddly for Guadalupe, Ramona lives alone, passing the days painting pictures of the town, until her brother and sister-in-law are killed in a car collision with a cow, leaving their son José orphaned.  José is to live with his mother’s relatives, but then his mother, Loretta, sits up in her coffin at her funeral and asks Ramona to raise José.

More ghosts start to appear, crowding Ramona’s house and making her realize that with a family as tightly bound as the Montoyas, with such a lengthy history in Guadalupe, she can never truly be alone.  Ramona’s grandparents, Rosa and Epolito, turn up at their old house.  ("I thought you were dead,” José says. “I am a little bit dead,” Rosa replies.) Ramona sought fulfillment by pursuing art, rejecting the traditional route of marriage and children.  But although after years of practicing her art, she discovered her true subject matter—her hometown—there remains something stagnant about her life.  It will take the introduction of an unasked-for child and the stirring up of her ancestors’ ghosts to nudge Ramona onto the right path again, that of engagement with others.

Collignon’s style is unassuming, matching the dry landscape that he writes about, sparsely covered with sagebrush, piñon, and juniper.  Collignon underplays the dramatic portions of the story so that even the four resurrections it includes seem natural.  When The Journal of Antonio Montoya was first published, several critics described its style as magical realism and compared it García Márquez, but there is something less fanciful about Collignon’s world than those of most writers who typically fit into the “magical realism” camp.  If it’s magic, it’s of a very deadpan sort, with ghosts who irrigate fields and make enchiladas, going about the same work they spent their entire lives doing. 

The lack of fuss that the people of Guadalupe make over the reappearance of the departed makes sense, given that they are a practical lot.  Collignon writes that at the rainy funeral for José’s parents, “No one had thought to bring an umbrella.  In fact, no one in Guadalupe owned an umbrella.  When it rained, you stayed inside. No one was foolish enough to go outside and stand in it.”

In The Journal of Antonio Montoya, Collignon weaves in letters and journal entries (as he does in other Guadalupe novels), layering the present story with these fragments of the past.  Rosa gives Ramona the journal of the title:

“Ramona looked down at the book.  Again, she could smell the strong odor of mildew.  The thick cover was bloated and warped and chewed around the edges.  She could see the date, 1924, printed in ink and faded on the cover.  She wondered if it was possible to catch something mortal from the filth on the book.  Carefully, with her fingertips, she opened the cover to the first page.”

While Rosa and Epolito throw a party in Ramona’s house, inviting old friends, Ramona steals off to read the journal, which tells the story of Antonio Montoya, an artist living in Guadalupe and a loner like Ramona.  Instead of producing drawings and paintings, Antonio carved santos, wooden statues of saints, that seemed to have mysterious powers.

Although the way Ramona Montoya becomes a parent is unusual to say the least, the party thrown by ancestors in her house is reminiscent of the way it feels when a person becomes a parent in the regular way: like in accepting the responsibility of a child, you’ve joined the long line of people who came before you and are all present in this experience, and in joining them you realize how none of us can journey very far from our roots.