I KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR, DOCTOR, BUT I’M SORRY, YOU’RE NOT going to pry some sordid confession out of me. You psychiatrists are all alike. You want to make me say that I despised her, that I resented her always being the center of attention, but you’re wrong. In fact, I hated it when people looked at me, which they did often because, to tell you the truth, I was the prettier of the two. He told me that.
But this isn’t fair. Believe me, in spite of everything, I loved her.
Look, from as far back as I can remember, she was kind to me. She protected me. I always looked up to her; she was the smarter one, the more talented one. I was quiet. She was dynamic. I was prettier. Maybe she didn’t think so, but … well, I mean, she had to realize that everyone admired my looks, even if she pretended not to. After all, she wasn’t stupid. He always said that I was gorgeous. Of course, he was a liar, a sweet-talker. But even so, I was the one he liked to paint. I was his favorite model. She didn’t like it when I posed for him, but I did it anyway. All the time. In the nude.
The point is, it’s not as though I wanted to get even with her. That’s not why I did it. She had her strong points and I had mine. She was clever. I was beautiful. She wasn’t beautiful. How could she be? A lame girl with a mustache and one leg shorter than the other? Sometimes she teased me, but that was to be expected. I mean, since she was the bright one and I was so dim-witted. Anyhow, she teased everybody. I wasn’t special in that sense. Let’s say I wasn’t the exception. I was never the exception.
It’s not as though I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew, but I thought she wouldn’t care. She was so wild and eccentric. Rules never mattered to her. Other people’s feelings never mattered to her. So I thought, well, okay, since she doesn’t give a damn about anybody, since she thinks it’s fine to go ahead and do whatever you want and to hell with what people think, I’ll just follow her advice.
You see, she was the leader. I was the follower. I was always the follower.
Let me give you an example. You were asking about our childhood, so let me tell you.
This happened a long, long time ago, when we were little. Such a long time ago, and still I picture it so vividly, as though it’s etched in my brain. You see, I’m an artist too. No, I don’t mean I’m an artist the way she was. I can’t paint pictures on canvas, but I engrave images on my mind. Well, I guess that’s not worth much, is it?
This is what I see: Frida, crouching behind a pillar, surveying her enemies. Estela, the commander, whispering to María del Carmen, the chief strategist. Estela gives the signal, and battle lines form. There are maybe forty girls in the courtyard. About fifteen of them group into attack teams. The others continue jumping rope or playing hopscotch, engrossed in their games. Now Frida is peering out from behind the post, taking stock of the hostile forces and biting her lip.
She was an adorable child. Not like me. I was tubby and kind of dull. I guess I have to admit it. In those days, she was the pretty one, although not for long. She was a delectable little girl, with a tea-and-cream complexion, full, rosy cheeks and pudgy arms. She was about six then, and she had chin-length, fluffy, dark brown curls that framed her face, which was still soft and babyish. Mami always sent her to school with a white bow in her hair, and in her gingham pinafore, she looked like an angel.
The school building was a Spanish colonial-style structure, with an interior patio surrounded by a colonnaded arcade. It had just rained—one of those quick, sudden downpours that fall in April on the Central Plateau—but now the sun was shining, and the pools that had formed on the patio tiles were glistening in the brightness. In the center of the yard, schoolgirls were giggling and jumping into puddles, each one vying to make a bigger splash than the others.
Frida wasn’t paying attention. Her eyes were glued on Estela and María del Carmen, who had hooked elbows and taken their positions at the head of their troops. They were going to try to goad her into coming into the open. But Frida didn’t wait for the taunts to begin. She thrust out her jaw defiantly, like this, then stepped away from the column.
“Frida!” I whispered. “Frida, don’t go!” I was shrinking in the shadows.
“Shut up!” she scolded. “Don’t be a sissy!” She was always calling me a sissy.
I cowered behind the column, waiting for her to move forward, into the line of attack. Suddenly I felt wetness, and the skin between my legs smarted. I shifted position, and the urine trickled down my legs onto my new white socks with the lace trim. I knew Mami would be furious.
Frida stood facing Estela. She was squinting, probably from the sunlight. Her lips were trembling, but her feet were firm, and she stared right into the eyes of her adversary.
Estela grinned, and as if on command, the girls in the hostile brigade began to chant:
| ¡Frida, Frida | Frida, Frida |
| Fue servida | Was served up |
| Al Diablo | To the devil |
| Por comida! | For dinner! |
¡Frida, Frida | But even he didn’t want her, |
| Escupida | Frida, Frida, |
| De su boca | So he spat her back up, |
| Por judía! | Because she was Jewish! |
It was horrible! Horrible! We were Catholic! We had made our First Communion, every one of us, but in that horrid school, the girls were always calling us Jewish because of Papá.
I wanted Frida to turn around and walk away, but instead, she tightened her jaw to keep it from trembling. The children who had been playing started to gather around her. Soon they had formed a large, jagged semicircle. Frida lifted her head and folded her arms. The knot in my stomach was growing tighter. I started to sob.
For an instant Frida’s chin quivered, but she blinked hard and managed to hold back the tears. Some of the children were snickering and pointing. A kind of phosphorescence was enveloping the yard. Frida swallowed hard, then took a deep breath.
“Shut up!” She hurled the words at Estela as though they were a spitball.
The children began to sing even louder.
“Shut up!” shouted Frida again, but this time her cry was inaudible above the chant.
“¡Frida, Frida!”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
The singing began to die down.
“What a stupid song!” she screamed. “An idiot must have made it up!”
Some of the girls started to giggle. A few took up the chant once again, only this time more softly.
I could hardly see what was going on. I peered out from behind the column and stood on my toes, but I was smaller than the girls who had formed a barricade around Frida, and I couldn’t see over their heads. I felt like pushing through the line in order to get a better view, but I knew that the others would make fun of my wet drawers and socks, and besides, they might turn on me just for being her sister. So I stayed hidden.
Estela and Frida stood staring at each other, not more than a foot apart. No one moved. The tension had been mounting for a long time—weeks or even months. And now, finally, the standoff. And now, finally, the showdown. The other children stood watching, waiting. They were frightened yet excited, hoping that maybe something terrible would happen.
“You don’t belong here, you’re not one of us,” hissed Estela. “You’re foreign!”
The children recoiled as though a bogeyman had dropped from the roof into the middle of the courtyard. Every eye was on Frida. I wanted to kill Estela, but what could I do? I stayed behind the pillar.
“I am not!” Frida countered.
“Yes, you are, FREY-DA!” Estela pronounced the name with a guttural German R. “You have a foreign name!”
Frida hesitated a moment. It was true she spelled her name the German way: F-R-I-E-D-A. And it was true our father was a German Jew of Hungarian origin.
She looked straight at Estela. “My name is Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón. That’s the name I was baptized with in church!”
“You’re foreigners! Your father speaks Spanish with an accent. When he says república or revolución, he sounds like a pig grunting.”
“I’m not a foreigner. I’m a Mexican!”
“Mexicans are Catholic!”
“I’m as Catholic and Mexican as you are! I go to church every Sunday! I go to the Church of San Juan, just like you, so you should know!”
Not that there’s anything wrong with being Jewish, doctor. Years later, Frida would brag about being Jewish. But at the time, in post-revolutionary Mexico, anything foreign was considered bad. Are you Jewish, doctor?
“Your father’s name is Wilhelm!”
“My father’s name is Guillermo!”
“Not his real name, FREY-DA. His real name is Wilhelm!”
“Wilhelm, Wilhelm,” the children chanted, “her father’s name is Wilhelm!”
The light caught Frida’s hair, causing the top of her head to shimmer like a halo. In the brightness she looked like a seraph, all gossamer and sparkle. She brought her delicate baby fingers to her lips and stood staring at Estela.
“My mother says your father is one of those foreigners brought in by Porfirio Díaz,” said Estela. “She says foreigners ruined the country, but now, with the Revolution, you’re all going to be hanged!”
“Your mother is a stupid fucking whore!”
Frida had caught Estela off guard. The girl’s parents were sympathizers of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and his agrarian reform, but they were decent people, not riffraff. In those polished bourgeois surroundings, you didn’t hear that kind of language. Certainly not from a young lady. Certainly not from a six-year-old. Estela caught her breath. I have to laugh! The expression on her face when Frida said those words.
A ripple of disbelief washed through the yard. The girls giggled. “Did you hear what Frida said?” they whispered. “She said f——! She said whore!” Even the peasants didn’t use those expressions. The peasants were reserved, dignified. Only lowlifes spoke like that. Frida was breaking all the rules, and that took daring! I was proud of her.
The children looked from Frida to Estela. Their faces were anxious, expectant. Some of them were nodding and smiling at Frida. They seemed to be on the verge of going over to her side. Estela had to regain the upper hand, which clearly she had lost to this dirtymouthed little brat.
“Your father worked for the Díaz government. My mother says—”
“Your mother’s full of shit! Your mother’s so mean she’s got spiders coming out of her cunt!”
“FRIDA KAHLO!”
The teacher’s bellow cut the air like a thunderclap. The children scattered as if repelled by some powerful magnetic force. In an instant, Miss Caballero swooped down on that precious, foul-tongued little girl, my sister, grabbed her by the ear and pulled her out of the patio.
“What kind of language is that? Who ever heard of a decent little girl using such language? It’s disgusting!”
Frida wriggled loose, but the teacher grabbed her by the ruffle of her pinafore and yanked her back.
“You!” She said it with revulsion. “You, who look like God’s little angel! You have the mouth of a street cleaner! You talk as though you were being raised in the gutter instead of in a decent home by a respectable, devout Christian mother. You should be ashamed of yourself!”
She was pulling Frida along the arcade toward the door that led to her classroom. I was scampering along behind.
Suddenly, Miss Caballero turned.
“And you!” she said, pointing a sausagelike finger at me. “You’re here too! Naturally. Wherever Frida goes, you go. You stick to her like a shadow. But you’d better be careful, Cristinita. She’s a troublemaker, and she’ll get you into trouble too.” I stood there, looking up at the teacher. My legs were sticky, and my wet pants made my skin itch. I started to squirm. Miss Caballero took me by the hand, then sniffed. The urine was beginning to smell.
“Oh no, not again,” she moaned. “Have you wet your pants again, Cristina? Both of you are repulsive little wretches!”
That’s what she called us: repulsive little wretches.
She grabbed Frida by the ear and me by the arm and yanked us both into the classroom. “Here,” she said to me, “take off those wet pants and give them to me. I’ll wrap them up in paper so your mother’s laundress can wash them. Now, come here and let me rinse you off.”
Instead of taking off my underwear, I shrank back and squatted under a table. She lunged for me, trying to pull up my skirt.
“I can do it myself,” I whimpered. I didn’t want her to touch me. I especially didn’t want her to rinse me off and touch me … down there.
“Don’t be silly,” she snapped.
She clutched my arm and tried to drag me out, but I bit her thumb as hard as I could, then wriggled into a corner. She let out a sharp little yelp that communicated more surprise than pain.
I tried to twist out of my panties without lifting my skirt, so that Miss Caballero wouldn’t see my bottom. I had heard people make remarks about Miss Caballero, but I was too small to understand the innuendo. Even so, I knew from how they lowered their voices when they talked about her that she must be strange. Some of the comments had to do with her name—Caballero, “man” or “gentleman.” I thought maybe it was because her hands were so big. They looked like a man’s.
I don’t know exactly what Frida thought of her. I think she found her both repugnant and fascinating. She liked to play tricks on her, to put her to the test the way children do with a person in authority, but she also liked to hang around her, to watch her. She adored it when Miss Caballero paid attention to her, but then Frida always liked to be the center of everything.
The teacher was a fair-skinned mestizo with heavy features and a firm mouth that conveyed both resoluteness and frustration. Rumor had it that she wore a wig, although since none of us had ever seen her without the thick black braids that encircled her head, we couldn’t be sure. She always dressed in black, in outfits that looked as though they were reconstructed ball gowns left over from some bygone era. In spite of her rough demeanor, her body was round, soft, sensual. Her hands reminded me of bunches of ripe bananas, the plump red kind. I had the impression that Miss Caballero could be nice if she wanted to; she just didn’t want to. Even as a small child, I sensed that something was holding her back, preventing her from showing the affection she kept locked inside.
Miss Caballero finally pinned me between the table and the wall. She grabbed me and held me fast with one hand. With the other, she poured water into a basin. Then, with a wet cloth, she wiped my legs and buttocks.
“Here, hike up your skirt,” she ordered. I was afraid to disobey. I gathered up my pinafore and held it at the waist. I wanted to die.
Frida should have helped me. I mean, she could have screamed or thrown something at Miss Caballero. But maybe she didn’t because I hadn’t helped her out when Estela and the others were taunting her. Maybe her silence was some kind of revenge. Anyhow, she just stood there watching as the rag went up and down my thighs and in between my legs, up and down and in between, over and over again.
“Come on,” snapped Miss Caballero, “open your legs so I can get you clean.” I widened my stance and bent my knees. Miss Caballero continued her wiping. Frida just stared. That was one time when she should have opened her mouth, but she just stared.
When she was done, Miss Caballero rinsed the rag, then wrung it out.
“Now,” she said to Frida, “you take off your panties and give them to Cristi.”
Frida shot me a look of contempt. “Why should I?” she said.
“Because I’m telling you to.”
“So? Why should I be the one to go home without underwear? She’s the one who wet her pants!”
“Because you’re older,” snapped Miss Caballero. Frida considered this a moment, but didn’t grasp the logic.
“What does being older have to do with it?” She thrust out her jaw.
“Do it!” snapped Miss Caballero.
Slowly, Frida took down her bloomers and handed them to me. “Stupid baby!” she hissed.
“Never mind!” retorted Miss Caballero. She helped me with the underwear, then she went on, “You think you’re so grown up, little Frida. Remember that time in science class? The time I was explaining how the universe worked?”
Frida looked at her shoes.
Miss Caballero kept on talking. “We turned out the lights,” she said, “and I held a candle in one hand and an orange in the other and I showed you how the Earth revolves around the sun and how the moon revolves around the Earth. Remember?”
“Yes,” said Frida. She knew what was coming. She pursed her lips and waited for the teacher to humiliate her.
“What happened that day, Frida?”
Frida didn’t answer.
“You got very excited, didn’t you?”
Frida shot her a spiteful look, but said nothing.
“Come on, you remember, don’t you, Frida?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Frida knew she was licked. Her face was turning red, and her jaw was tightening.
“And what did you do, Frida?”
“I wet my pants.”
“That’s right. You wet your pants.” Miss Caballero smiled, satisfied. She had won.
But on the day of the science lesson, it hadn’t been such a clear victory.
As soon as Estela had spied the little puddle under Frida’s chair, she began to chant: Frida wet her panties! Frida wet her panties! Soon the whole class was singing: Frida wet her panties!
A decent teacher would have hustled Frida out of the room and cleaned her up quietly. Instead, Miss Caballero dragged her up to the front of the room and tried to pull up her dress. But Frida was too wriggly for her, too wriggly and too quick. Miss Caballero tried to hold her in place with the sash of her dress, but Frida squirmed away. As she did, she elbowed the basin that the teacher had set out to wash her. Wash her in front of the whole class! The basin crashed to the floor. It sounded like cars colliding. Frida darted for the door, knocking slates and picture books to the ground. The noise must have dizzied her, because she tottered and hit the edge of the shelf where they kept mixed tempera. A bottle of red fell and shattered, spraying bloodlike droplets everywhere. She could have sprinted to safety, but she stood there, mesmerized by the patterns the paint was forming on the floor. Her ruffled white socks were drenched, and her legs were spattered.
Suddenly, she stooped and immersed her pudgy six-year-old hands in the paint.
“Stop!” shrieked Miss Caballero, but Frida was already rubbing paint on her dress, her arms, her face. Even her eyelids were dripping with the thick, red, gooey liquid. She had … how do you say it? Meta—metamorphosed into a ghoul. In my five-year-old mind, blood was trickling from her lips, and an otherworldly gleam was radiating from her eyes. The hazy beams streaming through the window seemed to transform her into something enormous and sinister.
“Come get cleaned up this instant!” commanded Miss Caballero. Frida snickered. She held up her hands and wiggled her fingers like the legs of a crab. It was grotesque. I was terrified, and I was so mad at Frida I wanted to pummel her.
At last Miss Caballero gave up. Frida went home that day covered in red.
Frida had humiliated Miss Caballero in front of the whole class, and so whenever she got the chance, the teacher started in about how my sister had once gotten so excited during a science class that she wet her pants. What Miss Caballero wanted was to cut Frida down, to make her feel like a fly on a piece of turd.
Let’s see, where was I? I’m so old now I can’t keep my mind on anything. Ah, yes, I was telling you how Frida always protected me. Well, I had put on my sister’s clean underwear. Frida held out her hand to me, and I took it and nestled my head against her shoulder.
The other children had lined up outside the classroom door and were waiting to come in. “Stay here,” said Miss Caballero. She straightened her skirt and walked to the door. At her signal, the girls began to file into the room and move toward their seats.
“Come on, Cristi!” whispered Frida. “Let’s get out of here!”
The building was a renovated Spanish-style house that had been transformed into a school. It was a two-story affair constructed in the form of a squared-off U with a patio in the center. On the ground floor, the sides of the U contained two classrooms, a storeroom, a small office, and a tiny chapel. Living quarters for the owner of the school and Miss Caballero were on the second floor. There were no hallways; all the first-floor rooms opened onto the courtyard and all of the second-floor rooms opened onto the balcony above the arcade. Each of the classrooms had two doors on the patio side. As Miss Caballero stood guiding the children through one door, Frida darted for the other, pulling me behind.
I was terrified. “We can’t leave. Mami will kill us.”
“Mami won’t know!”
Miss Caballero noticed us and took off in pursuit, but before she could catch up, we had reached the unlocked gate and slipped out into the street.
Frida and I knew every crook and cranny in Coyoacán. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, doctor, but it’s a picturesque colonial town about an hour to the south of Mexico City. Baroque churches, plazas, tianguis—that is, native markets. Hernán Cortés once lived there while he was fighting the Aztecs. Now it’s pretty built up. Tourists, of course. Tourists who come to see our house. Frida’s house, I mean. They come to see it because Frida lived there, not because I lived there. The town is still surrounded by open fields and ranches, but now it’s a suburb of Mexico City, that sprawling, ravenous monster. The capital is bustling and filthy and crazy, of course, just like any big city, but Coyoacán is still sort of old-fashioned. It has a kind of small-town warmth, a quaintness, a sense of history.
Anyhow, we darted down a cobblestone path, then cut onto an unpaved road leading to the Viveros de Coyoacán, a large, tree-filled park with a narrow, sleepy river winding through it. Street vendors were selling brightly colored toys made of wood, gourds, or papier-mâché, and I asked Frida to buy me a balero, a cup-and-ball gizmo that we used to play with when we were kids.
“That would be just dandy, wouldn’t it,” she snapped. “Mami would know the second we walked into the house with a balero that we’d been fooling around in the streets! Really, Cristi, you’re so dumb.” She always used to say that to me: “Really, Cristi, you’re so dumb.”
Frida’s plan was a simple one. We would go to the park and play until it was time for Conchita, our nanny, to pick us up from school. Then we’d wait in the little stationery shop across from the school gate, far enough away to avoid Miss Caballero’s vulturine eyes but near enough to see Conchita coming up the street to get us. As soon as we saw the maid, we would run to meet her, then just go home with her as usual. Mami would never know the difference.
I wasn’t too convinced, but I trudged along behind Frida, dragging my feet in the dust. We passed a pulquería, a bar where they served pulque, a fermented milkish drink made from agave juice. In those days, the walls were all brightly painted with figures from Mexican folklore—a bandit-hero assaulting an emaciated landowner, a brassy whore counting her money. I wanted to get away from the place, but Frida was enthralled by the colors and by the obscene songs the rowdy construction workers were singing inside.
Frida took a coin out of her pinafore and bought me a quesadilla—a tortilla with cheese and chili sauce—from a street vendor. She didn’t know his name, but she considered him a friend because she had bought from him many times before.
“Don’t get cheese on your pinafore, or Mami will know I bought you a quesadilla in the street,” she said sharply. “We’re playing hookey,” she confided to the man. He smiled and held out another quesadilla for her.
“I have only one centavo,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he answered. “This is my gift to you.”
We ran to the park and played for what seemed like a half hour or so. The whole time Frida nagged me about not dirtying my dress, not muddying my shoes, not getting grass stains on my socks, so that Mami wouldn’t know where we’d been.
Frida was watching the sun’s movement in the sky. When, according to her calculations, it was time to go, she led me back through the dusty streets to the school.
One look at the stationery shop and I felt my blood turn to sawdust. The store was closed for lunch. Since businesses usually shut their doors at two o’clock and didn’t reopen until five or six, that meant school had been dismissed long ago, hours ago. I looked down the street. The florist was closed as well, and so were the bakery and the tortillería. No children were waiting by the school gate. The streets were empty.
“Let’s go!” ordered Frida. “They’ll be looking for us.”
“Now we’re really going to get it!” I cried. “And it’s all your fault.”
Frida didn’t answer. She just grabbed my hand, and we bolted down the street toward home.