IT WAS A BAD TIME TO BE A FOREIGNER. MEXICO WAS IN THE THROES OF revolution, and the masses were out to get Díaz and his band of alien cronies.
Porfirio Díaz was in power from 1877 until 1880 and then again from 1884 until the Revolution. At first, he hadn’t seemed so bad. He was gung-ho progress, and he pushed Mexico ahead faster than ever before. Industry prospered. The government extended the railroads, improved the harbors, constructed new public buildings. Telegraph lines sprang up everywhere. For the first time ever, you could go down to the telegraph office and send a message anywhere from Oaxaca to Chihuahua. And the national budget was balanced for the first time in decades. So what was there to complain about?
For a lot of people, the answer was simple: the foreigners. They were everywhere. They ran everything. Díaz had these fancy French ideas. He thought that society was like some giant animal, subject to the same scientific laws as any other living organism. He thought society was like, say, a baboon or a puma, and if it got sick and didn’t perform the way it was supposed to—I mean, if it didn’t shit regularly or learn to hunt by the time it was two—you could bring in a doctor who would get it going again. The doctor would train it so it would always do what it was supposed to, see? Or else he’d give it a shot, or zap it with electricity, and in no time it would be jumping through the right hoops in the right way. Díaz brought in these científicos, scientists, whose job it was to organize the country. Doctors for an ailing society, if you see what I mean. But Mexico didn’t have the cash to carry out their projects, so Díaz went courting the foreigners. Like Pearson and Son, for example. Pearson and Son was a British firm that designed a drainage canal system for the capital, which we needed. And the American, French, and British companies that laid thousands of miles of railroad track, mined silver and gold, and pumped tons of oil. Sure, all those things were good, but before we knew it, foreign firms were gobbling up our land, our mineral resources. You Americans were the worst of the bunch!
Well, I was just a baby when Díaz and the científicos were running the country, but all during the time I was growing up, during the Revolution and afterward, that’s all people talked about—how bad the foreigners had been, how we had to get rid of all that alien influence. And of course they were right, the foreigners squeezed all the juice out of Mexico and left it like a shriveled lemon. Still, there were people who said that the foreigners transformed Mexico, that they propelled us into the twentieth century. But really, the foreigners were bad. At least, the ones who cheated Mexico were bad, the ones who came and left, or else stayed at home and pumped money out of the country, the ones who sat on their fat Anglo-Saxon asses and deposited their profits into Swiss or English or American bank accounts, while our people sweated in the mines and fields to keep them afloat in whiskey and bourbon. Not foreigners like us. No, I don’t mean that. We weren’t foreigners. But Papá was born in Germany, as Mamá’s relatives never let him forget. They would sit in the patio and sip sangría and make fun of his accent. They’d toss out snide remarks about money-guzzling foreigners and watch his reaction out of the corner of their eyes. Then they’d give one another knowing looks when they thought they’d made a hit. Although who knows how much Papá took in. He’d usually respond with that sharp little lunatic laugh he had. Was he agreeing with them or mocking them? Or was he just not paying attention? Anyway, foreigners like Papá weren’t the problem. Foreigners like Papá came and stayed here, they worked and made a real contribution.
Why did Mami marry him? Did she ever love him? Maybe. He was a good catch. He was handsome. What they said about Mami—I’m really ashamed to tell you this—what they said about her was that she was getting old. She had been engaged to another man, also a German, and he had died, so she was kind of, how do you call it? She was kind of on the rebound. Papá was a young widower, and he had two little girls. Well, Mami’s time was running out. Girls got married in their teens back then, but Mami was already twenty-four—past her prime—and so, when she met Papá … What I mean is, they were two people who needed to get married, attractive people, but both with serious drawbacks. Her age, his kids. You know what? I don’t want to talk about this. I’ll tell you about it another time. No, you won’t have to wait long. I’ll tell you about it before you leave today. I was talking about Porfirio Díaz, so please don’t ask any more questions until I’m done.
The thing is, the Mexican masses were growing poorer and poorer, and everyone said it was the foreigners’ fault. Half of the rural population lived like slaves. They owed so much to the rich hacienda owners that they had to work for free to pay it back. And most people couldn’t tell the difference between a foreigner like Papá and the bloodsuckers who were gobbling up our resources and leaving our people to rot in the fields.
Díaz thought he was very sophisticated. He thought he was a French éclair, even though he was just a plain old Mexican tortilla—a mestizo from Oaxaca. The thing is, he had studied law. Me, I never studied anything, because Frida was the smart one, so she was the one they sent to school. I’ve learned things on my own, though. I’ve done my best to improve my vocabulary so that I don’t sound like a mule driver who grunts at asses all day. I always try to say things the best way I can. When I was young, I tried to learn a new word every day. Surprised, aren’t you? Well, I don’t blame you. After all, everyone says I’m the dumb one. Anyhow, Díaz made a splash fighting against the dictator Santa Anna and against Maximilian when the French were running Mexico. What they say about Díaz is that he had incredible energy, and yes, he was ambitious. The funny thing is, in spite of tangling with the French in the days of the emperor, he came to think of France as the cradle of culture. I mean, for him, the French were the last drop of pulque in the glass. Actually, I should say the last drop of champagne or cognac, or something more … elegant. Pulque is for common people, like me. Díaz worshiped Europeans. In fact, he wanted to be one of them so badly he ordered all kinds of fancy powders and pomades from Paris in order to lighten his skin, as if a slug could stop being a slug just by dragging itself through a puddle of white paint.
He thought of himself as so goddamn … how do you say it? … cosmo … cosmopolitan that he couldn’t be bothered messing with the rabble. Instead, he cozied up to the rich landowners and let them take over the communal properties that had belonged to the Indians. He also kissed the butts of the priests, which was a bad thing, because as you know—well, I suppose you know—there had been laws on the books limiting the power of the Church ever since Juárez threw out the French.
How can you say that? Of course we’re good Catholics! We’re not against the clergy. I mean, at least, I’m not. I believe in God and everything. Frida, on the other hand, she hated priests. Men who don’t fuck, that’s what she called them. Men who wear dresses, men who pull their clothes on over their heads, like women. It’s a good thing they weren’t allowed to wear their habits out in the street after the Revolution, because Frida would have sneaked around and pulled up their skirts. “Hey, padre, what’s that useless noodle you’ve got under there? Ever use it?” She loved to tease priests. As for him, even though he went back to the Church at the end, he never believed in anything except his own talent and his own importance. He didn’t need God, he thought, because he was God.
But getting back to Díaz, another bad thing he did was mess up public education. He didn’t think it was important. So the peasants and the workers grew more and more miserable, and resentment grew against him, his científicos, and his foreigners.
In 1910 Díaz had elections and lost to Madero, but not right away. Madero was the son of a rich-bitch landowner and the grandson of a politician, and he had studied abroad in California, I think, and in France, but he wasn’t a snob. He wanted change. He’d been reading the revolutionary newspapers and he was willing to get his hands dirty. My sister Adriana still remembers going to political rallies with my father. Papá had no use for politics, really, but he was a photographer and liked to take pictures of important events—protests, speeches, stuff like that. Madero drew huge crowds. It was like a circus, with vendors selling peanuts, cotton candy, political cartoons like the ones by Posada that show all the priests and rich people as skeletons—all dressed up, but with their skulls showing and their eye sockets empty. Well, Madero was getting so much attention that Díaz was growing nervous. So he did what he always did in tough situations, he threw his rival in jail. But Madero maneuvered his way out, and before you knew it, he was plotting a revolution.
He picked a day, and on that day, small revolts broke out all over Mexico—brushfires that were easily put out by Díaz’s forces. But in Chihuahua, Pancho Villa—an ex-bandit who got his start by murdering his sister’s lover—put Díaz on the run. After Madero was elected president of Mexico in 1911, Díaz kept on running, and in fact ran all the way to Paris, where—at last in the lap of civilization—he eventually died.
Honest presidents don’t last long in Mexico. The rebel leaders were used to making their own rules and they sure weren’t going to take orders from Madero. Also, he made a big mistake. He tried to get rid of Victoriano Huerta, that ambitious, ruthless son of a bitch who had been general under Díaz. Huerta returned the favor by entering into cahoots with Madero’s enemies and seizing Mexico City. Then he had Madero murdered.
Revolts erupted all over the place. Carranza pushed out Huerta and tried to make things better for the peasants, but real radicals like Zapata still weren’t happy. They wanted land reform right now, and they thought that Carranza was dragging his heels. Zapata hooked up with Villa, and before you knew it, Carranza was heading out of town. But then the tide turned, and what can I tell you? For us, Zapata was a hero. He was from Morelos, like Mamá’s family. Frida worshiped him like he was God, and him, he took his hat off when he said Zapata’s name, just as if he was talking about Our Lord Jesus Christ. He lowered his voice and got all emotional, all teary-eyed. One of his most famous paintings was of Zapata. You know the one. Zapata on a white horse. I grew up thinking Zapata was a saint, and he was, I guess. No, I mean he was for sure. It wasn’t his fault that his rowdy, ragtag soldiers behaved like animals. Zapata himself, he never raped anybody, he never stole from anybody.
There are stories about Zapata … Once, some of his soldiers snatched up a bunch of women. You know, those women who tagged along with the government troops. The soldiers took them prisoner so they could come back and enjoy them. Sort of like going to a party and stuffing some cakes into your bag so you can savor them later. And then afterward, who knows, maybe they were going to kill them. But then Zapata came along and discovered the women and asked them, “Why are you here in this encampment? Are you Zapatistas?” The women were terrified, because they weren’t Zapatistas at all, they were for the government—not that it would make much difference to a starved soldier; in fact, to most men one ass is as good as another, since when it comes to humping, they don’t care what political party you belong to. But these women, they were afraid to say that they weren’t Zapatistas, that they belonged to men who were fighting for the other side. “They’re just government whores,” one of his troopers said. “We’re saving them for later.” But Zapata set the women free. “Go back to your men,” he told them. “We have no business with you. You’re not the ones who are fighting against the forces of liberation.” Zapata’s men, they were just poor peasants, and they had been exploited for so long they felt they had the right to get whatever they could out of the war—a piece of land, a piece of bread, a piece of ass. It was because of them that Zapata was called Attila of the South. His men pillaged villages, burned shacks, stole livestock, raped women. Sometimes they murdered entire families. They left a trail of blood and spilled guts all over the countryside. But you have to realize that these people had been exploited since the time of the Spaniards. Frida always said you couldn’t blame them for what they did, because worse things had been done to them, and who knows if the government supporters just made up those stories, or at least exaggerated the facts. After a while, soldiers kill just for the joy of killing. For example, they’d round up all the pregnant women and hang them by their feet. They’d split open their bellies with their knives. Then they’d take the dead babies and feed them to the dogs. If they could find the husbands, they’d make them watch. People who saw it firsthand told me. Most of them can’t talk about it without gagging or dissolving into tears, even the men.
Carranza made his way back to the capital, and in 1917 became the first president to be elected under the new constitution. But then he was murdered too.
What the Revolution did was make us appreciate our Mexican heritage. With Díaz, we were all supposed to look to Europe for models. In the schools, they taught European history, European art, European philosophy. But it was all a bunch of bunk, because we’re not Europeans. The revolutionaries, they put an end to all that. They were full of nationalist fury. It started with “Death to Porfirio! Death to the científicos! Death to the foreigners!” Once Díaz and the científicos were out of the way, there were still the foreigners to deal with, because lots of them remained in Mexico to suck our blood. Carranza had balls. He told you Americans to stay out of Mexico’s affairs in no uncertain terms. There was one dispute after another with the U.S. government, and he even took sides with his own rivals, Huerta and Villa, against your military. In fact, in 1919—a date that’s sacred to every Mexican schoolchild—he almost provoked a war with Uncle Sam when he expropriated foreign-owned oil. You did have it coming. You thought we were your plaything. You thought you could do whatever you wanted with us and we’d be too dumb even to notice.
I remember when I was a kid, under the new revolutionary government, everything Mexican was good, everything foreign was out. Instead of European styles, women wore native costumes. Fancy ladies came over to play canasta with my mother dressed in veracruzana dresses. In painting, sculpture, architecture, music, dance, in every aspect of our culture, there was a new appreciation of our Mexican past. Of course, he was a big part of it. His murals, they celebrated our culture. He was a major force. Through his art, he was educating the masses to appreciate their birthright. He was a superstar, a hero of the Revolution. That’s the first thing I knew about him, that he was a national hero.
I’m getting off the subject. I always do that. I, uh … Anyhow, what the new government wanted was to revive the pre-Columbian styles. They paid painters—Orozco, Siqueiros, and of course, him, the great Diego Rivera—to cover the walls of public buildings with murals based on popular themes. We worshiped him because he was everything we wanted to be: a good Mexican, a good communist, and a servant of the people. Well, I wasn’t really a communist, but Frida was. The government wanted to get through to the masses that the new Mexico was for everybody. It pushed revolutionary, Mexican messages through records, films, art. Mariachi music became more popular than the Charleston. Children learned to dance the jarabe tapatío in school. ¡Viva México! ¡Viva lo mexicano! was the cry.
What do you mean what’s the point of all this? You mean, all this that I’m telling you? The point is, as I was saying, that it was a bad time to be a foreigner.
But when Papá moved to Mexico in 1891, it was a good time to be a foreigner. And that was fine for Papá, because he was foreign through and through. He looked foreign, he acted foreign, he talked foreign and he felt foreign. He was a slim, handsome, brown-haired man, with an enormous mustache that was pointed at the ends. The pictures in the family album show a sensitive mouth and intense eyes, which I remember as being hazel. Even then, he had that haunted look, like a clairvoyant or an oracle. His parents, Jakob Heinrich Kahlo and Henriette Kaufmann, were Hungarian Jews who had settled in Baden-Baden, where he was born. My grandfather was a jeweler and also sold photographic equipment.
Ever since Papá hurt his head, he had epileptic fits. He had to give up his studies, and he didn’t know what to do exactly. A little while later, his mother died and his father remarried a woman Papá always referred to as “the bitch hund.” “Oy,” he would say to Mamá whenever she got carried away. “Don’t carry on like dot. You remind me off ze bitch hund.” We always had dogs at home when I was growing up—tiny Mexican escuincles—but never females, because they reminded Papá of the bitch hund. All Papá wanted was to get away from her. That’s how he wound up in Mexico.
He was nearly penniless when he arrived. Fortunately for him, Mexico had a small but thriving German community, and he found work in a German-owned glassware store called Cristalería Loeb. Later he worked in La Perla, a jewelry store also owned by Germans, and it was there that he met my mother, Matilde Calderón. His first wife was a Mexican woman who died giving birth to Papá’s second daughter, my half sister Margarita. The night of her death, Papá turned to Mamá for comfort. She comforted him so well that, three months later, they were married.
Tongue-waggers said she was anxious to find a man and lucky to have caught one with so much potential. As I said before, she had been involved with another German who had—I don’t know why, but he had committed suicide. That left scars on her emotions as well as on her reputation. A girl with a history is hard to marry off in Mexico even now, and it was worse back then.
The pictures of Mamá in the family album show a stern-looking, dark-complected woman with large brown eyes and a protruding chin. She was the oldest of twelve children and very Catholic. My maternal grandmother was the daughter of a Spanish general and had been raised in a convent. She was rigid, fanatical, really. Papá was the German in the family, but Abuelita is the one who always reminded me of a Prussian army general. She was very superstitious. She thought that evil spirits lurked everywhere, so she wore crucifixes all over her body to ward them off.
Once, when I was pretty small, seven or eight, she gave me a pretty gold crucifix and told me never to take it off. It would keep away the spooks, she said. It would scare away the demons. Just like garlic, only stronger. Well, we all went to a fair one Thursday morning, and of course I had on my cross. There was a rickety Ferris wheel, and vendors selling balloons and cotton candy, also handmade shawls, mantillas, homespun cloth, fancy combs, lace, penny booklets—the kind that run stories in installments—prayers, pictures of the Virgin, pictures of naked women, tortillas, beans, enchiladas, every kind of cheese, pigs, cows, sheep, goats, dogs. You can’t imagine the activity and the noise. People everywhere, some buying, some selling, some riding the Ferris wheel, some just looking. I was so excited that I started to turn somersaults—after all, I was just a little girl—and the cross fell off my neck and onto the ground. I retrieved it right away, but even so, my grandmother started shaking me and slapping me until my lip bled, screaming who did I think I was that I dishonored Jesus Christ that way. Who could I be but the daughter of a Jew who had raised me to disrespect our Lord and Savior! She made me kiss the piece of metal with my bloody lip. Then she told me to kneel and say ten Hail Marys right then and there. My sister, she would have told Abuelita to shove her stupid cross—Jesus forgive me—right up her ass, but I just sat there. Abuelita stood over me, her hands on her hips, her feet planted in the ground like two oaks. “Do it!” she commanded. But I refused to move. Abuelita was standing over me, her braids tied up in knots like rodent ears, carrying on like a madwoman while people walked by and pointed their fingers at us.
“Pray!” she ordered once again.
But I just sat there on the grass, my legs straight out in front of me, refusing to get up on my knees.
“Pray!” she thundered. She pulled a lace hanky out of her bosom. She unknotted it and took out a silver rosary, then got down on her knees to pray herself. She was going to show me how it was done, you see. Everywhere, people were scurrying around, from the pig stall to the Ferris wheel, from the tortilla vendor to the merry-go-round. Balloons hovered above the balloon vendor like a flock of brilliantly hued birds. Abuelita was oblivious to it all. She just knelt there and said the rosary. After a while, I had to pee, but I was afraid to tell Abuelita, and I was just as afraid to get up and walk away. I began to feel like a wineskin ready to burst. I was really suffering.
“Abuelita …” I began.
She kept on praying.
“Abuelita …”
“Well?” she said finally.
I looked down at the ground. I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes, and I was terrified that liquid flowing out of one part would stimulate liquid to flow out another.
“Well?” she said again.
“Nothing,” I whispered.
She went back to her rosary. I spread my skirts around me as decorously as I could, then inched down my bloomers and let go. Whoosh! What a feeling! Not only was I relieving myself, I was defying Abuelita! I felt like a pony breaking loose from the stable or a prisoner making it over the wall. The pee was warm and smelled of ammonia, but it didn’t sting. It flowed smoothly, like tamarind water out of a jug. And all the time I was going, Abuelita was praying the rosary.
I said a silent prayer of thanks to the Virgin myself as I dragged my bottom along the grass, careful to keep my skirt dry. Abuelita was too engrossed in her rosary to notice. And all the time, happy fairgoers scuttled this way and that, to the prize heifers or to the shooting gallery, to the balloon man with his colorful flock or to the organ grinder with the dancing monkey.
Mamá learned piety from her mother, so you can imagine. Her father, Antonio Calderón, was a photographer, and from him she learned the attention to detail that made her absolutely obsessive about housework. Everything had to be perfect, every object had to be in place. Whenever she came back from shopping or canasta or church, she would check the pictures on the walls. “Rufina!” she would shriek at the parlor maid. “I told you not to dust the frames. Now they’re all crooked! Ay, how can I live in this house where everything is always such a mess!” Then she would run her finger over the walls, the ledges, the objects in the sitting room. “There’s dust here!” she would snap at Rufina. The maid would mumble Sí Señora, but you could tell she was thinking about something else, probably about her boyfriend down in Oaxaca.
Mamá was even more finicky about her appearance than her house. She loved clothes. To go to church, she wore an adorable black jersey suit with a quilted collar and bows at the throat and at the belt. It had piping down the front, and a skirt at midcalf—what they called the “deluxe poor” look. Displays of wealth were out of the question after the war, but you couldn’t expect Mami to dress like a peasant. No, veracruzana dresses weren’t for her, except for special occasions. And her accessories were always perfect. Black leather gloves, a thin-brimmed hat that cast a dramatic shadow over her eyes, and exquisite, thick-heeled pumps with a Mary Jane strap. Even when she wore traditional Indian garb to show her solidarity with the masses, she insisted on quality. Bound seams. Lined bodices. Perfectly embroidered roses along the hem and at the collar. And, of course, matching jewelry. Frida got her passion for clothes from Mami. Actually, Mami and Frida had more in common than either of them cared to admit.
My grandfather Antonio was a dark man with Indian features, a goatee, and a full mouth. He wore a downturned mustache, which made him look like those caricatures of Zapata that became popular after the leader died, after it was no longer fashionable to worship him, after so many people forgot what he had done for them. My abuelito Antonio never spoke much to us. He never spoke much to his own daughters, either, according to my mother. Mami always said he was as quiet as a shadow, as quiet as nightfall. But he managed to support his family. They had a little house, shabby but presentable. They were what they used to call “poor but decent”—decent meaning you could have them over for supper provided no one else was coming.
My mother never had much schooling, but she was a shrewd woman. I don’t think she knew a thing about the surrealists or Freud or the Russian Revolution or any of the other fancy nonsense that Frida and Diego were always jabbering about—they liked to make themselves feel superior—but she could count money like an adding machine. As I said, Mami liked to have everything in its place. That’s why she got rid of my half sisters, María Luisa and Margarita. It wasn’t just that they might be a bother or a constant reminder of the other woman. It was that they were in the wrong place. For years I hardly knew them. I thought of them as Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters. Me being Cinderella, of course. Ha! That’s a laugh! She was Cinderella. She’s the one who got to marry the prince. Anyhow, eventually, we all got to be friends, real sisters, but that was much later.
Mami’s next task was to make a Mexican out of Papi. He was so German. That’s what Mami always said, that he was as German as a Wiener schnitzel. After he took a new wife, Papá also took a new name, Guillermo. He couldn’t go around being Wilhelm, could he? According to Mami, he tried hard to be Mexican. But he was always an outsider. Every detail of his life reminded him that he was an immigrant. His heavy accent with its ugly, guttural German R irritated and embarrassed him, but he couldn’t get rid of it. Spicy Mexican food upset his stomach. But what exasperated him most was his own rigidity, which contrasted with the total disorder of Mexican life. And then there was the religious thing. Papá was no fanatic. In fact, he never practiced his own faith. But he just couldn’t warm up to Catholicism. To him, Mami’s infatuation with images of Christ on the cross was morbid. It was one thing to turn the other cheek or to transform water into wine, he said, but to expect people to kneel down and worship you while you dripped blood all over the place, that was too much. Papá hated Mami’s collection of crucifixes, and he didn’t understand why she had to stockpile images of the wounded Jesus—blood trickling from his forehead, blood gushing from his side, blood spurting from the holes in his hands. Blood! Blood! Blood! Blut! Blut! Blut! It made him nauseous, he said. He couldn’t look at those pictures before dinner. In time he became an atheist, and then Mami’s icons drove him crazier than ever.
His attitude toward work and time was German. He was obsessively punctual and meticulous. You could set your clock by watching him leave for work in the morning. He was not the kind of man to take siestas, or even to come home for lunch, as Mexican men always did back then, and usually still do.
As time went on, Papá became more and more withdrawn. Maybe he thought that he had made a mistake by coming to Mexico, by settling in this beautiful but chaotic and inefficient land. Maybe we were asking too much of him. Maybe the struggle to become one of us was just too great. At any rate, he spent more and more time alone in his room, reading, executing two-part inventions on the piano, listening to music or playing chess with his only friend—a thin old man that no one knew much about. His name was Neftalí and his hands shook when he picked up the chess pieces, but he was a shrewd strategist and had the gift of concentration, and he was a good match for Papá, who seemed to enjoy his company, even though the two of them hardly exchanged a word. I remember his coming over every so often. He had sallow skin and hardly any hair. His breath stank of—I don’t know what—tobacco and rotting fish, maybe. Old Don Neftalí, he and Papá could sit at the table for hours deciding on a play or waiting for the other one to move. And all that time, neither spoke. Don Neftalí respected Papá’s need for silence. I think that’s why Papá liked him.
With the exception of Frida, none of us seemed to matter much to my father. He wasn’t hostile, just aloof or indifferent. Frida used to say he was the archetypal brooding German romantic, teetering a hair’s breadth from insanity.
But even brooding romantics have to earn a living. It was Mami who urged Papá to take up photography, I imagine because it was her father’s profession. She always said that if it hadn’t been for her, Papá never would have made anything of himself. It was my grandfather Antonio Calderón who lent him his first camera. With it, Papá launched a career, taking pictures mostly of landscapes, ruins, buildings, interiors. Later, he sometimes took pictures of crowds and political events. Not for the papers, and not for the government, either. For himself, because he thought they were interesting, from an artistic point of view, I mean. He was very precise, very meticulous, and in photography, those qualities paid off. He composed his pictures with so much care, paying attention to perspective, angle, lighting. All the things that made Frida a great painter later on, those were things that had made Papá a great photographer. And since precision demanded the best equipment, he began to import fine German cameras and lenses. It’s not surprising that he attracted the attention of Díaz’s científicos, since those boys really appreciated European talent and technology.
The centennial of Mexico’s independence from Spain was coming up, and the científicos, who knew the government wasn’t popular and their own asses were on the line, thought that a big to-do for the occasion would bolster Díaz’s reputation and boost public morale. The secretary of the treasury decided to publish a series of deluxe art books celebrating Mexico’s heritage, and so he started looking around for someone to do photographs of native and colonial architecture. Papá was perfect for the job.
Papá was so proud of the pictures he took for those books! Mami kept framed copies of some of the best ones in the parlor. Popocatépetl at sunset, her irregular, volcanic head stretching up into the shadowy mists. The Cathedral of Puebla, its angular bell towers standing like two giants. Tasco’s sunny colonial streets. Stucco houses. Seductive balconies. Red tile roofs. Wrought-iron gates. The centennial celebration was one of the few things that he showed any enthusiasm for. He had had to travel all over Mexico. “I hot to vait two hours to take it, until the sunlight vas exactly perfect!” he would boast. Every photo had a story. I learned more about Mexican history and geography from those pictures than I did from textbooks. Papá devoted four years to that project, from 1904 to 1908. He used the best imported cameras and prepared nearly a thousand glass plates himself.
The government paid him well. No sooner did he receive his first commission than he had a new house built on the corner of Allende and Londres Streets, in a smart neighborhood of Coyoacán located conveniently near the main square and the market. That was our house, the house that Frida and I grew up in. Then, later, it was hers, hers and Diego’s. Now it’s a museum. The Frida Kahlo Museum. Nobody cares that I once lived there.
Like other traditional houses, ours had no corridors. Each room boasted a stylish French door that gave access to a large patio. With her impeccable taste, Mami furnished the living room with smart Parisian furniture, since that was the style among comfortable, upper-middle-class Mexicans, which is what we were. I’m talking about the time before we got poor. About the time before it became unfashionable to be a foreigner. About the time before Papá lost nearly everything.
Next to the parlor were a traditional dining room and a large kitchen. The master bedroom was located adjacent to the dining room, an arrangement that seems strange to me now that I look back, but then we all thought it was normal; we were used to it. Along the outside walls tall windows with gray shutters opened to the street. The house’s colors, a bright blue called azul añil with red trim, might have shocked the gentry in a somber northern city, but they weren’t unusual in Coyoacán. The town was full of brilliantly hued buildings—block after block of pink houses next to yellow houses next to lavender houses. It was like a kaleidoscope, a palette on which a painter had experimented with every imaginable combination. Maybe that’s where Frida got her dazzling sense of color. Me too: I’ve always loved luminous colors. It’s because I grew up surrounded by color—red like liquid sun, green like crushed emeralds, blue like a baby’s eyes. Sturdy cedars occupied the dirt-filled gaps in the cobblestone sidewalk. They shaded the houses and softened the appearance of the street.
Papá was not a political man. What he liked was to sit and think. He meditated on a lot of different subjects, but Díaz’s policies were not one of them. He was making a good living from the government, and he was satisfied. “Zo zis regime is corrupt, zo vat else is new? It’s corrupt, zo? At least it’s quiet,” he said. “Quiet is gut. The next one will be corrupt and noisy.”
But once the Revolution erupted, it was impossible not to take sides. You were either for the rebels or against them. Still, Papá couldn’t make up his mind. “Who needs this aggravation?” he said to Mami. “Vhy can’t zey leef vell enouf alone?”
When Díaz fell, fighting between Zapatistas and Carrancistas broke out in Coyoacán. Because abuelito Antonio was an Indian from Morelos, Zapata country, our family cast its lot with the Zapatistas. Mamá opened the house to Zapata’s men. She allowed them to climb through the windows on Allende Street into our living room. Inocencia and Concha and Rufina cut up old sheets for bandages, and Mamá washed the soldiers’ wounds with soap and iodine. Mamá wasn’t the nurturing type. I’m sure the smell of blood, sweat, and shit made her nauseous, but she considered it her patriotic duty to help the men who were fighting against that tyrant who had sold out to the French, to the British, to the Americans, and to every other foreign power that wanted to take a bite of our country.
There wasn’t much food to share except for tortillas. The markets were closed. It was dangerous to go out. Soldiers were battling in the plazas and alleys, and snipers hid behind every gate. I was very young. Sometimes I’m not sure how much I really remember of the Revolution. Is it possible I’ve heard so many stories that what I think I remember is really scenes that somebody described to me? Or scenes from books? Or films? They talked about the war all the time while I was growing up, all the way through my teenage years and beyond. Diego and Frida, they both had such stories to tell, although when the fighting broke out, Frida was just a child like me. But the way she talked, you’d think she had been out there on the front lines, a pistol in each hand. I’m not sure how many of the pictures in my head are memories and how many are inventions. Sometimes I’m just not sure of things. Not like Frida. Frida was always sure of everything.
There are certain images, though, that have stuck in my mind. Certain terrible memories that haunt me. Things that must be true, because I see them so vividly. I must have been very tiny when this happened: In front of our house—oh God, it was awful—a child ventured out onto the road. He was a little boy who lived a few houses down. Frida used to play soccer with him sometimes. He had straight black hair that fell into his enormous black eyes, and a sweet smile. Sometimes he would play naked in his patio—he couldn’t have been older than four or five—and Frida would squirt water at him to make his little prick stand up. Then, when it did, she would shriek with laughter. Well, this little boy—his name was José Luis—he wandered into the road, and … oh, God … I remember it as though it happened just seconds ago. A sniper blew his head off. I saw it. I saw it through the window. Oh, Jesus, that poor little boy … that poor little angel. His erect torso stood in the middle of the road for nearly a minute before it collapsed, still quivering, not five meters from our front door. Blood spewed from his arteries. It formed thick, sticky pools that were lapped up later by marauding dogs. The mother was hysterical. His pitiful, grief-stricken mother—Doña Ramona—such a gentle women … her only child. She couldn’t fetch him right away. The soldiers were shooting at anything that moved. Finally, she couldn’t bear it any longer. She crawled out over the cobblestones to collect first the pieces of the skull, then the trunk. Miraculously, they didn’t kill her. It might have been better if they had.
There was another incident. A donkey meandered out of its corral and caught a bullet in the eye. It lay braying and squealing in agony until a sniper shot it in the head, less to put it out of its misery than to shut it up. That was another scene I witnessed from my window, and somehow, even though it was just a donkey, the death of that animal affected me nearly as much as José Luis’s. Poor beast. He carried on, eeey-aw eeey-aw, it was enough to break your heart. He was just an innocent victim. Why did they have to kill him? I was just a baby, and I didn’t understand the politics of the Revolution. I just saw the blood mixing with dust and debris as it ran over the cobblestones and seeped into the cracks, seeped into the ground, where it would nourish the huge leafy cedar tree in front of our house.
I guess that’s what it was all about. Some people had to die in order to nourish the soul and spirit of Mexico. Some people had to die in order to ensure our future. But poor little José Luis and that poor, unsuspecting animal … Sometimes none of it makes sense.