In Rogelio Teixeira’s letters to his ex-wife, Sera, there are a few cryptic allusions to a woman named Anna. I am writing Teixeira’s biography. It’s not a real biography, it’s one of those short introductions to an artist’s work. I’m deeply interested in his allusions to Anna. There once was an Anna in my own life.
I want to write a proper biography but there isn’t enough of an audience, or so I’m told. The editor of this series of little books, her name is Laura, told me to write it in English, which isn’t to say the language, but clear and concise prose. An impossible request. Teixeira was not just a poet but a real polymath. In fact, he first came to my attention as a collagist. I was living in Pittsburgh at the time and saw his work in a museum, the name of which I can’t recall anymore. The collages were incredibly small, some as small as one or two inches across.
We’ve settled on the idea that there should be six chapters. One on his novella, The Flying Saucer, one on his theater trilogy (Three Plays about Animals), one each on his first three books of poetry (Pygmy Songs, Gypsy Songs, and The Lepers), and one on his visual art that was collected posthumously in a coffee table book called A Sun Dial on the Moon: Paintings and Collages. Teixeira killed himself while staying at the Ambassador hotel in 1987. He was in Los Angeles for his sister’s wedding. The hotel was pretty rundown by that time but he wanted to stay there because of its infamous history. He hung himself with a belt on the bathroom door. His wife, the second one, was in bed asleep. No one knows the context, the full mental state, that sort of thing. Everyone says he seemed happy or as happy as an artist such as Teixeira could be.
I worked with my Anna at a bookstore and she came between me and my first wife. I shouldn’t say it that way, she didn’t “come between” us. I was as guilty of that transgression as anybody. When I think about it now, I was more in love with Anna than I was with my first wife. That must be how memory works because I never would have said that in the moment or even a few years ago. I guess the way I’d put it now is that I miss Anna more than I miss my first wife, though I do feel bad about that fact.
I met my first wife, her name is Becca, when I worked at a movie theater in Berkeley. She was getting her degree in Spanish, not the language as much as the literature and history of the Spanish-speaking world. Once we got together, it didn’t feel intellectual enough to work at the movie theater so I got a job at the bookstore, the bookstore where I met Anna. That was a stupid decision. The movie theater was a rep house and I probably could have learned more there than in a thousand bookstores. The irony being that I was too ignorant to understand that at the time. Looking back, I have no idea why we got married so young. I think it was a case of playing with fate a little. A case of thinking let’s just see where this thing goes. Anna was fun. It wasn’t that Becca was unfun, but Anna was more like a character and Becca was more like a real person. Anna got me into bands like the New York Dolls and Suicide. She and her friends would get wasted and go to A’s games. That’s how we started our thing. After an A’s game. Anyway, they’re both gone now. Or out of my life at any rate. Anna could be dead. I wouldn’t put it past her. Becca is alive, though. She teaches at an all-girls prep school in Maryland. We don’t really speak, but it’s easy enough to find out where people wind up these days.
Teixeira’s first wife was the painter Serafina Reyes. They lived in Santa Fe until Teixeira met and fell in love with the documentary filmmaker Lucinda Hazan. That’s who was in bed when he hung himself. As far as I know there were no letters between Teixeira and Hazan. The reason there were so many between him and Serafina Reyes is because he spent the summer of 1979 at some kind of artists’ retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains and then later he was hospitalized or in some kind of rehab for a few months at a place called Canyon Ridge. One of his letters from there is scribbled on a piece of stationary that says across the top, Find Hope at Canyon Ridge.
After we went to see his collages in the Pittsburgh museum that I can’t remember the name of, Becca bought me the one piece of fiction he ever wrote, The Flying Saucer (mentioned above). It’s a novella written in the form of a long suicide note left by the fictional photojournalist, D.T. Zuma. In it, he compares the moral complications of that conflict to the Second World War and the Spanish Civil War which were, at least in his mind, more heroic. It’s probably his weakest piece of writing, but I’ve read it more than any of the others. Teixeira was himself a photojournalist in Vietnam during the war, and, as I said earlier, he also committed suicide. Another strange thing about that book is that he originally wrote it in English. But then, out of some kind of shame, rewrote it in Spanish and pretended that the English version, which came out two years later, was actually a translation, when, in fact, it was the inverse. Serafina Reyes tells this story in a short documentary about the Santa Fe poets on YouTube. I think it ran on public television in New Mexico. There’s something about that story that makes me like him almost as I would a father (which is to say love) and, by extension, that book.
Getting back to this mystery of Anna, there are five allusions to her in the letters between Teixeira and Serafina Reyes. The first one is in a letter dated June 17, 1979. Serafina mentions that, “Anna writes from Lucerne where she’s staying for the summer (right on the lake). She’s photographing naked sunbathers—all men.” And then in parentheses she wrote “(e c & b).” Teixeira replied that he had recently had a dream of Anna. In it she was parasailing. They were in Acapulco or someplace like that. Her memory, he wrote, “nagged at him.” In the very next letter Reyes replied that Anna had “endured” an accident while boating. The use of that word, endured, has a heaviness to it that I can’t quite explain. Teixeira does not mention Anna again until his stay at Canyon Ridge, which was in 1982. He writes, “I had a vision or dream of Anna (hard to tell the difference in this place). She wore a green hospital shirt with her name stitched into it with red thread. She stared at me for a long while without saying anything. I wanted to ask her something but I thought if I spoke she would run away as a deer would in the forest.” In the next letter Serafina doesn’t mention the dream or vision, but relays the news that Teixeira’s brother, Manuel, had died in a motorcycle accident in the Sandia Mountains. The last letter (as far as I can tell) that Reyes wrote to Teixeira was dated October 17, 1982, and it contains the final mention of Anna. She begins by writing, “your fig tree finally died.” And then at the end she says how she found some old letters. Mostly, she writes, “from Paul and Andrea, a few from Martín, and two from Anna (Montreal or Vermont, hard to tell). I reread the ones from Anna, very beautiful. You should take them with you.”
The funny thing about my Anna is that I didn’t even try to hide it, my love for her was so intense. I keep saying love now, but I’m not sure that’s the right word. She didn’t want anything to do with me long term though so that left me in kind of a bind. I don’t think we ever exchanged letters. That’s a lost art. I don’t envy those in the future who’ll have to trawl through our emails and texts. The archives will be poorer, that’s for sure. Speaking of which, I’ve done some very minimal research into the Anna mentioned in Teixeira’s letters with Serafina Reyes, but I haven’t turned anything up. I think though that some things are better left unresolved. Like it is with difficult music.
Bryan D. Price’s stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Santa Monica Review, Bridge Eight, Diagram, Boulevard, JMWW, Rhino Poetry, and elsewhere. His collection of elegies, A Plea for Secular Gods will be published by What Books Press in 2023.
Gina Lumsden Kropf is a photographer and mixed media artist currently residing in in New York, NY. Gina was born in Raleigh, NC, where she began her BFA in studio art with an emphasis in photography. She spent 2 years studying photography and painting at Las Positas College in Livermore, California, 2 years at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, studying photography and figure drawing, before returning to Meredith College to earn her BFA. She spent 15 years working in photography studios and running her own as the principle photographer, before settling in Manhattan to continue her studies in art. Using the skills and techniques she acquired in the photography field and the classic photo techniques she learned in college, Gina employs various photographic mediums such as digital photography & manipulation, analog /120mm film photography and acrylic paint. Her work explores aspects of individuality, non-conformity, and the human figure. She incorporates these ideas into her chaotic world , where she searches for understanding of human nature and her own understanding of her life and how it evolves and takes on new meaning with the passing of each decade.