THE IMAGE IN THE MIRROR WAS DECEIVING. IT SHOWED A SLENDER BUT shapely young girl with thick, black, curly hair, evenly cut bangs, and heavy eyebrows so elongated toward the bridge of her nose that they almost touched, giving her a somber, severe look. Frida frowned, forcing her brows into one straight line above her dark eyes. She looked like the kind of girl who would study hard, satisfy her teachers, make her parents proud—the kind of girl whose exemplary conduct prompted comments like “Oh, Señora Kahlo, you must be so pleased.” Frida knew how to give that impression. She knew how to make adults say, “What a perfect little lady. If only her younger sister were more, well, more like her!”
She didn’t wear a uniform—none was required at her new school—but her plain white blouse, tailored sweater, and dark blue pleated skirt reminded you of the outfits girls wear to public school nowadays. You know, those silly navy jumpers and cardigans. On her legs she wore thick black stockings. Her shoes were those sensible boots that keep your feet dry and are easy to walk in and don’t give you blisters. The right one was stuffed with socks and rags that kept it from wobbling. On her head she wore a black straw hat with a wide brim and white ribbons that circled the crown and dangled behind. “The perfect little lady!”
Frida studied her reflection in the mirror. She pursed her lips to give herself a decisive look. She crossed her arms. She pulled herself up to her full height—a little over five feet two—and glowered at the other Frida, the one in the mirror. She took off her hat then put it on again, arranging the ribbons so that they fell exactly down the middle of her back. She took a hand mirror and checked the rear view. She wet her bangs with saliva and ran her index finger across her forehead to make sure they were perfectly even. Then she opened her underwear drawer. From among the bloomers she pulled out a tube of lipstick she kept hidden and applied a bit of color to her lips. Next, with her finger, she touched the stick lightly and daubed her cheeks. Just a smidgen. Not so Mami would notice. Just a dab. Again she studied her reflection, turning one way and then the other to see herself from different angles. No. The effect was all wrong. She wiped off the color, pulled out a new tube, and tried again with another shade. She struck a majestic pose—chin high, shoulders back, feet in fourth position—like a Degas ballerina. Frida loved to pose. She was always looking in the mirror and posing. That’s why, when she became a painter, she did so many self-portraits. She adored looking at herself in the mirror. She was fascinated with herself.
I don’t mean it as a criticism. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not reproaching Frida. I’m just saying that …
I don’t think she saw me. I think she forgot that I was there.
I snickered. “You look like an ape-woman!”
She wheeled around as though I had shot a rubber band at her. Ping!
I brought my hands up under my armpits and scratched my sides. “Ape-woman!” I grunted. “Ape-woman! Ape-woman!”
Frida stuck out her tongue, then burst into laughter.
“What’s the matter, Frida? Don’t you think you look like an ape-woman? Well, you do.”
A comb flew out of her hand, but I ducked. She made a face, stretching her lips into a grotesque apelike smile with her fingers. “Ugh! Ugh! Waaaa!” she growled at the mirror. “Me, ape! Me, ape!”
I was sitting on the bed, my feet pulled up under me, watching my sister get ready for her first day at the Preparatoria.
“I look like a real bore!”
“No, you don’t, Frida,” I said. “You look cute.”
“Cute! I don’t want to look cute. Puppies look cute. I’d rather be an ape-woman!” Frida stuck out her bust and began to strut. “Carmen Frida Kahlo, sexpot extraordinaire of the National Preparatory School!”
I laughed. I didn’t want to put her in a bad mood on the first day of school. Then, if things didn’t go right, she’d say I jinxed her. But I didn’t think it was such a good idea for Frida to play the siren at the Prepa. I was fourteen already, and I knew that kind of stuff could be dangerous.
“You’d better watch it, Frida! They’re all boys there. If you swing your butt around too much, you’ll get yourself into trouble. And you’d better watch that mouth of yours.”
Frida struck another pose in front of the mirror. She ran her tongue over those full, sensuous lips of hers and puckered. Then she opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue like she was French-kissing an invisible lover.
“Darling,” she panted. “Darling!” She opened her mouth again and began to move her lips as though in ecstasy. “Oh!” she moaned. “Oh, darling, don’t stop!” She squinted at herself in the mirror and ran her hands over her body. “Ah! Ahhh ahhhh ohhhh ahhh!” Then she got up close to the glass and pretended to lick.
I was laughing so hard I had to cross my legs to keep from peeing. “What are you doing, Frida?”
“I’m watching my mouth, you ninny! Didn’t you just say, ‘You’d better watch that mouth of yours’? Well, I’m just following directions, like a, you know, like a well-bred thirteen-year-old.” She struck a dignified pose. “As behooves a well-bred thirteen-year-old,” she corrected herself. “I’m just showing how obedient I am.”
Frida bowed her head, pretending to be submissive. She was good at pretending to be a sweet, docile little thing. That’s how she got her own way. Or else she’d play the feisty rebel. Whatever worked with the person in question. Depending.
She took a running leap and landed cross-legged on the bed. She began to bounce in a sitting position. “Frida is a good girl!” she chanted in a kindergarten singsong. “Frida is a good girl!”
“You’re not thirteen, you liar. You’re fifteen.”
“I’m thirteen! You want to make an old lady out of me, you little bitch!”
“Come on, Frida! I know how old you are. I’m your sister, for God’s sake! I’m fourteen, and you’re eleven months older than I am.”
“Not for God’s sake, for Papá’s sake. He’s the one who gave Mami a good screw, and then you popped out. Or did you think you were a child of the Immaculate Conception, like the Baby Jesus? Anyway, what difference does it make if I take off two years? I lost two years of school when I was sick with polio.”
“You only lost one year!”
“Well, who cares? I’ll still be one of the youngest at the Preparatoria. Or, if not one of the youngest, one of the only girls.”
“That’s right, Frida. You’ll be very special.” That’s what she wanted to hear, that she’d be exceptional, extraordinary. The last enchilada in the pot. The last drop of water in the desert. She was a phenomenon of sorts, but she had to keep hearing it.
“Damn right, I’ll be very special. They’d better watch their staid old asses!”
Actually, I knew Frida was nervous. I was nervous, too, even though I wasn’t the one who was going. I could feel little bees buzzing around in my stomach. Not wide-winged butterflies, just frenzied little bees. The National Preparatory was a huge school, and she would be one of only a handful of girls. Not only that, she’d have to take the streetcar into the city every day by herself. She was used to trekking around Coyoacán with me or Conchita or Papá, but this was different. Now she would be in unknown territory and on her own. Just thinking about it made me jittery.
The National Preparatory School—the Preparatoria—was not only the best secondary school in Mexico, but a symbol of a sort of—how can I put it?—a sort of sock-it-to-’em spirit that everybody had after the Revolution. You have to understand how important the Prepa was, what it represented, in order to see what it meant that Frida, our own Frida, my sister Frida, had been accepted as a student.
The Prepa had been a Jesuit colegio, a kind of prep school for rich boys who studied Latin, French, theology, that stuff. When Juárez became president, he took a machete to the European tradition, and the Prepa became a high-powered secondary school with courses like a university’s. The idea was to prepare the best kids, la crema de la crema as they say, to run the country. Only things got messed up when Díaz came into power, because the científicos took over and made the Prepa into a European-style lyceum. After the Revolution, José Vasconcelos, the minister of education, turned the Prepa into the finest high school in the country. It became a magnet, attracting the best teachers and the most promising young people in Mexico. The students were all glassy-eyed with their own importance. It was up to them to create a brand-new nation! And Frida was going to become part of that select group. Tra-la! The next Isabel la Católica! The next Marie Curie! We all knew that Frida was headed for greatness. Nobody doubted it. Especially not Frida.
Papá had the Prepa in mind for Frida from the beginning. She was smart, smart enough to be a doctor. She was always picking up rocks and leaves and things. Not me. Rocks are dirty. I’d rather gather flowers. Anyhow, Papá was a kind of amateur artist. Sometimes, during our walks, he’d sketch or paint in watercolor, and Frida would poke around the riverbank. She’d snatch up plants or animals to bring home to dissect. Papá had bought her a microscope, and she was always looking at little pieces of fly wing or dandelion fuzz. Did she really find that stuff so fascinating, I wonder, or did she just like the way Papá fawned over her when she brought him the little slides she had prepared? “A mind such as Frida’s,” he would say, “ought not to be wasted.” Only he said “vasted.”
Mami wasn’t convinced. She thought that ever since Frida got polio, Papá was raising her like a boy. And now he wanted to send her to a boys’ school to study a man’s profession. The Prepa had just opened its doors to girls, but hardly any attended. Decent girls from nice families didn’t need the kind of education the Preparatoria offered, as far as Mami was concerned. I guess she thought that Frida was already a handful—high-strung, overactive, and big-mouthed—and in the company of a bunch of boys (even if they were from the best families), she would only become more of a roughneck than ever.
Papá rarely put his foot down, but this time he did. His own university career had been cut short, and he had no son to fulfill his thwarted ambitions. His economic situation was worse than ever and money was unbelievably tight, but sending Frida to work was out of the question. She would go to the Preparatoria and then to the university, and she would become a doctor.
Mami never expected her to pass the entrance exams, but she did, and Papá felt vindicated. He rocked back on his heels and started to crow. “I told you so! Frida is as schmart as any boy!”
“RRRRight, Herr Kahlo,” Frida teased. “I ahm schmart, und I vill show tsem all!”
The Preparatoria was a grand-looking structure located near the Zócalo—the main square—called the Plaza de la Constitución. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? The cathedral, National Palace, and government buildings are all nearby. The Cathedral of the Virgin was the grand old lady of the neighborhood. She sat solidly on one side of the Zócalo like a fat, elderly matron, tattered but gaudy, waiting for countless grandchildren to pay their respects. The avenues fan out from the Zócalo to the far sections of the city, and smaller streets crisscross to form a kind of crude gridiron. Then, like now, little stores were tucked into every available space—food stores, dress shops, restaurants, bookstores, furniture stores, cleaners, tortillerías, pharmacies, sweet-smelling perfumerías, and mechanics’ workshops stinking of grease.
Frida loved the freedom going to the Prepa allowed her. In those days a young girl almost never went out unaccompanied, but Frida wandered around like a boy. She made the trip alone on buses and streetcars, sitting next to peasants in serapes and matrons going shopping. The streetcar was a fairly democratic mode of transportation. Sometimes I would go downtown with her, but I didn’t care for the commotion. Throngs of people filled the plaza and streets at almost all hours. Men wearing suits and carrying briefcases brushed past rustics in baggy white pants and ponchos. Organ grinders cranked out tunes. Street vendors sold toys, decorative papier-mâché parrots, chewing gum, postcards, ices, succulent chunks of spicy meat called carnitas, and statues of the Virgin. Sometimes a peasant riding a horse darted in front of an automobile. My stomach stampeded every time we had to cross the street. But Frida was fascinated by the bustle of the city. She loved to hang around the newsboys who roamed the plaza. She picked up their jargon and even mimicked their swagger. From them she learned a bunch of colorful swear words, like her mouth wasn’t dirty enough already.
Frida was one of only thirty-five girls in a school of about two thousand students. On the first day of classes, she wrote her name on the roster in the perfect penmanship she had learned in elementary school from Miss Caballero: Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón. In those days she still spelled her name the German way.
“I was doing my best to make a good impression,” she told me. “But the minute I met the girls’ prefect, I knew I was going to wind up pissing on her petunias. An old biddy with a rod up her ass. Her name is Dolores Angeles Castillo. She took us up to the top-floor arcade overlooking the largest patio and started giving us orders, probably so we’d get the idea from the start that she was the chief mobster, kind of the madrina of the pack. I mean, she looked like she’d have you mowed down if you didn’t jump when she opened her mouth. She wouldn’t do it herself. She’d just nod her head at one of her goons, and he’d pull out his weapons and bam bam bam! You’re dead!”
“This is where you are supposed to be when you are not in class,” Miss Castillo told the girls. “During recess and during your free periods.”
“I hated her!” Frida said. “I looked around for someone with a conspirator’s face, someone who might be willing to help me take her on.”
But her classmates must have been too intimidated to make eye contact. One was a bossy-looking girl with a long, ratlike nose, who reminded Frida of Estela. She was tall, sinewy, and dark, and she stood up straight, clutching her book bag in front of her, obviously impressed by her own height. Another, a prissy little thing with a flouncy blouse and a full skirt, reminded Frida of Inés. She was fair-skinned, with jet-black hair tied back in a knot and a cool, condescending look.
It must have been like tumbling into a ravine, scraping against juts of memory that cut. It had been a long time since her schoolmates had teased her about her withered leg and about not being “really Mexican,” but now the chants were grating in her head—¡Frida, Frida! ¡Frida, Frida!
“I shot that ratlike girl a look that said Don’t mess with me!” Frida said. “But she was too busy licking ass to notice.”
“You are to be up here at all times, except when you are in your classrooms,” concluded Miss Castillo. “Is that understood?” It was not a question.
“Yes, ma’am,” said the rodent-girl and the one who was dressed for First Communion.
“Suck-up,” Frida whispered under her breath. Ha! That’s my Frida! Putting her best foot forward.
“Excuse me, Señorita Kahlo,” said Miss Castillo. “Did you say something, my dear?”
“No, nothing,” she mumbled dutifully.
“But I had already decided not to hang around with those mealy-brained, brown-nosed nitwits,” she told me. They were too cursi—showy, affected, snobby, and vulgar. She would find her own friends, perhaps among the boys. Or she would go it alone.
The Preparatoria was a beehive. On one bench, boys reviewed French verbs—je parle, tu parles—on another, boys struggled with the intricacies of the Quiché language. In an arcaded patio, twenty or thirty students reached to the sky, then touched their toes as a drill master yelled Arriba … dos … tres … cuatro! Abajo … dos … tres … cuatro! Everywhere, impassioned student orators trumpeted causes, accosting passersby like vendors hawking their wares. Buy my brand of political reform! Abandon Western civilization and embrace your own heritage! No! Embrace Western civilization but tell the gringos to stay the hell out of Mexico! No! Try a little revolutionary reform! No! The Revolution was a flop! The Revolution was a triumph! The Revolution never happened! Free love for sale! No! Let’s get back to Catholic morality! ¡Viva la Raza Cósmica! The Raza Cósmica was the brainchild of Vasconcelos, who was pushing the idea that in Latin America all the races of the world would mingle to form the “fifth” or “cosmic” race, which would bring peace and prosperity. The progressives were convinced that Vasconcelos was a genius. The conservatives were convinced he was full of shit.
The Preparatoria was full of the sons of illustrious men, adolescents who knew that someday they, too, would be famous. Every day Frida came home with some fabulous story about people you read about in the newspapers. She knew Salvador Azuela, whose father had written the most important novel of the Mexican Revolution. She hung around with Salvador Novo and Carlos Pellicer, who would become celebrated poets, and with Xavier Villaurrutia, who would revolutionize Mexican theater. Even then, they were dizzy with their own importance.
“Carlitos wrote this silva just for me!” Frida told me. “Tomorrow we’re going to do a reading of Sal’s new one-act!” On and on. She never asked me how I had spent my day. She was so smug, so self-absorbed. They all were. They were always in a kind of … a kind of … orgasmic delirium. It was as if every time they had a new idea, a firecracker was supposed to burst in the sky, ignited by the heat of their brilliance. They were always arguing with one another, trying to show the others up. They faced off with their teachers too. They were busy, so busy, reinventing the country. They experimented with new literary forms and new political ideas. They called protests. They set off bombs. They defaced walls. They played pranks. You have to realize that Mexico was in the throes of rebirth, and the students were caught up in their own roles in the transformation. They were drunk with pride.
It wasn’t long before Frida had found her niche. At first she would come home and tell me everything that had gone on that day. But then she started staying late for meetings or going to cafés with her friends. She didn’t have time for me anymore. She didn’t have time for any of us.
But what really changed everything was Alejandro.
According to Frida, the first time she saw Alejandro Gómez Arias, he was talking to another girl—a beautiful, light-haired with a soft, voluptuous body and full, seductive lips. Frida had seen her that first day, when Miss Castillo told the señoritas to keep away from the boys at recess, and had decided that she was utterly cursi. “She’s an escuincla!” she told me. “She’s an escuincla from top to bottom! She probably pads her brassiere.”
Escuincle is the name of a hairless Mexican dog, but it was also slang for kid. Frida called the girls she considered stuck-up or stupid escuinclas. In fact, she called me an escuincla all the time.
Getting back to Alejandro and his friend, at that moment, she loathed them both. He—she didn’t know his name yet—he seemed enthralled with this dumb little girl. He kept leaning forward as if her spit were honey. “He looked like he wanted to lap it right out of her mouth,” according to Frida. “I couldn’t stand the sickening way she was oozing all over him.”
She didn’t feel like standing around and watching them, but for some reason, she found herself dawdling in the corridor, pretending to wait for someone, checking her watch, glancing up and down the hall—and, occasionally, at the boy and his adoring little escuincla pup.
He was handsome—dark-complected, with soft, gentle eyes and a ready smile. His nose was wide but not heavy; his lips were ample, his chin firm. He wore his black hair combed back off his broad forehead. You could tell he had breeding just by his clothes—his immaculate, perfectly pressed dress shirt, his fashionable, striped tie and double-breasted suit. Besides, he had the well-mannered poise of a young man of good family. He must have been about eighteen then.
Snob! That’s what Frida thought when she first saw him.
He was so absorbed in his conversation that he didn’t notice Frida standing there. It must have driven her mad. Frida was used to attracting attention. She was the youngest, the smartest. Everybody knew who she was. But this boy seemed oblivious to her presence. He took a notebook out of a bag and jotted down something the girl was saying. She squeezed his hand, then ran off down the hall. She turned back and waved, and he returned the gesture.
Then, unexpectedly, he pivoted and looked straight at Frida. “I felt my feet tingle” was how she described it. “I felt as though my arches were swarming with ladybugs. I tapped my shoe. I had to get them off! But then I felt them scurry up my foot to my ankle, then to my knees, then up the back of my thighs and right into my cunt!” I’m sorry, but that’s the way she talked. She wriggled and looked away. The ladybugs seemed to be crawling up her spine. She glanced at her watch. She tapped her foot again, this time to convey that she was growing impatient with the person she was pretending to wait for. She looked down the corridor and sighed, then looked at her watch again.
“I know that the hall must have been buzzing with students at that hour,” she said to me, “but somehow it seemed empty and still. I was sure I wasn’t fooling him a bit with that waiting-for-a-friend routine, but I didn’t know what to do. I was trapped! He must have seen me watching him out of the corner of my eye.” She giggled and paused for effect. Frida liked to draw out her stories. She liked to make them very dramatic in order to suck people in and hold their attention. “I’m not going to look up,” she told herself, but then she did look up, and there he was, his eyes twinkling teasingly, his smile radiant.
I like to imagine it. Even now, after all these years, I like to close my eyes and imagine it. Alejandro … his incredible cheekbones, his muscular arms flexing under his jacket, his broad chest, his exquisite tie, and his special fragrance—a touch of almonds, cinnamon, musk … And Frida, all starched and buttoned, but with those flirty hips, that extraordinary way of moving, that goading smile. It’s like a scene from a movie.
“¿Qué hubo?” he said. “What’s up?” He spoke as though he’d known her forever. Frida couldn’t take her eyes off his lips.
“I’m waiting for my friend, Adelina Zendejas,” she lied. “But I guess she’s not coming.”
“Listen,” he said, “I want to ask you a question. What do you think about the jellyfish?”
“What?”
“You know, the jellyfish!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about jellyfish.”
“What about jellyfish?”
“Well, do they have immortal souls or what? What I mean is, is salvation a possibility for jellyfish?”
Frida looked at him like he was mad. Then she bit her lip to keep from laughing, or maybe crying. Was he making fun of her? Did he think she was a baby? Or stupid, just because she was a girl? He hadn’t treated the escuincla that way. He had clung to the escuincla’s every word and even taken notes! Frida didn’t like to be teased.
“Get lost!” she snapped.
She moved away quickly, losing herself in a crowd of students. It wasn’t until she was sure she was out of his sight that she allowed herself to react. By the time she got to class, she was giggling convulsively. The ladybugs were still scurrying all over her body.
Later on in the day, she saw him again, this time in the middle of a group of boys. She recognized some of them—Miguel Lira, Alfonso Villa, Jesús Ríos y Valles. They were caught up in an animated conversation. Jesús, with conspiratorial gestures, confided something in the others, and they howled raucously.
Frida was walking with her friend Carmen Jaime, one of the few Prepa girls she considered worth knowing. Carmen was a quick-witted rebel who dressed in sloppy men’s clothes and a black cape. She spoke in a kind of code that forced the listener to reinvent her thought process. Instead of birds, Carmen said plumed flowers. Instead of fish, she said scaled vessels. Instead of it’s windy, she said the gods are sneezing. Flowers were petaled butterflies, animals were quadrupeds in multicolored coats, to sleep was to meet Morpheus, and to die was to swim the Lethe. She was a nonstop reader, and she knew Spanish literature backward and forward from El Cid to Unamuno. She also knew about philosophy—everything from ancient Greek to modern German to Oriental. Sometimes she would come over to the house and Frida would shoo me out of the room. “You’re too dumb to understand this stuff,” she’d tell me. “Go play with your dolls.” At that moment Carmen was initiating Frida into her private language.
“Who’s that?” whispered Frida, nodding at the group of boys.
“That? You mean the divine spirit Miguel Lira, he whose voice is a lyre, for which reason he is known as El Lira—not La Lira, of course, even though lyre is a feminine noun, because that would mean he was either a neck breather or a pillow biter, if you know what I mean—but El Lira. You mean him?” Carmen’s tone was always matter-of-fact, not exalted. She said things like that as though she were giving the maid the grocery list.
“No, the kid next to him.”
“Alejandro? You don’t know Alejandro?”
“Who is he?”
“The sparkplug!”
“What?”
“The energy source! The sun! The blessed Apollo in his golden chariot! The leader of the pack.”
“What pack? Our pack—the Cachuchas! Come, my juvenescent sprig! I’ll introduce you.”
Frida liked the way the boys greeted Carmen. No flirting. No piropos—those flowery compliments that compare women with angels, dewdrops, roses. Instead, they treated her with a kind of rough camaraderie that made it clear they wouldn’t watch their language just because she was around.
“Frida,” said Miguel. “Frida Calo. I’ve already met her. ¿Qué hubo, Frida?”
“Calo, Caló. Are you teaching her your caló, Carmen?” asked Alberto. “If you are, and she gets to be good at it, we’ll call her La Caló!” Caló means slang, but Frida didn’t find Miguel’s jokes very funny. We were both sensitive about our name. All those nasty remarks we had to put up with when we were little girls.
“It’s Kahlo,” interrupted Frida. “With a K and an H. K-A-H-L-O.” There was an uncomfortable pause while she waited for someone to remark that her name was foreign.
Alfonso was the one. “What kind of a name is that?” he asked. “It’s not Mexican.”
“A German name, Señor Aldea,” said Frida mockingly. Get it? I don’t know how good your Spanish is, doctor. I mean, we’ve been speaking Spanish all the time, but I don’t know if you’re getting the subtleties. Anyhow, Alfonso’s surname, Villa, means “town” or “country house,” and aldea also means “town.”
“And just because my name’s German doesn’t mean anything,” Frida went on. “My father’s German, but I’m Mexican.” She waited for someone to make an issue out of it, but no one did.
She wondered who would be the one to bring up her leg. Whoever it was, she had already decided to tell him to go to hell and mind his own goddamn business. “So I’ve got a short leg,” she was going to say. “I’ve heard you’ve got a short prick! Want to compare?” Or else “Would you like a kick right where it hurts so that you can see there’s nothing wrong with this limb?” She laughed under her breath.
“What happened to your leg?” asked Alejandro.
Damn! she thought. Why did he have to be the one? Frida considered not answering. She chewed her smart-assed comeback for a while and swallowed it. She wasn’t laughing anymore. It didn’t seem so funny anymore.
“I had polio when I was six,” she said finally.
“I’m sorry,” said Alejandro.
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” she said angrily.
“I meant I’m sorry you had polio, not I’m sorry for you.”
I imagine Frida looked away at that moment. I imagine she felt like crying, but she tightened her jaw to keep her lips from trembling.
“Listen,” he said. In my mind, I can hear his voice, deep and serious. I can see his face, solemn, earnest, reflective.
“Yes?” said Frida.
“Have you thought about what I asked you before?”
“What?”
“Have you thought about the jellyfish?”
Frida let out a yelp. “You dope!” Both of them burst into laughter. Frida took off after Alejandro, chasing him around the patio and threatening to wallop him with a book.
Listen, there’s something you have to understand. In spite of our … differences, Frida told me everything. At least at first. Sometimes even later. And then, after she got married and started having problems with Diego, it was like we were kids again. We’d talk for hours. Actually, she talked. She was the one with things to tell. I was Frida’s confidante. I was her best friend. Not just then. All during our lives. Whenever she had a problem, it was me she’d turn to. I was Frida’s best friend. Then and always.
What do you mean, what was I doing all this time? You asked me to talk about Frida, not about me. Frida’s the interesting one. No, doctor, it’s not what you’re thinking. I’m not resentful. Not at all. It’s just that I was always the one who had to take care of whatever had to be taken care of, because Frida was always too busy with her exciting life. When Mami got sick, I was the one … Never mind.
Ah, you’re right, I did do a few interesting things. She’s not the only Kahlo who slept with the great Diego Rivera.
Well, to answer your question, I was still in school in Coyoacán. There was no talk of sending me to the Prepa. That would have been out of the question. There wasn’t money to send both of us, even if I could have passed the entrance exams, which I couldn’t have.
Frida hooked up with the Cachuchas. That was the name they gave themselves. They were a loosely knit band of troublemakers that included the cleverest students at the school. Alejandro Gómez Arias was their leader. Cachucha is a kind of cap. They took their name from the little red caps they wore to school.
Back then, you would never have thought that some of these kids would grow up to be big-shot intellectuals, but Alejandro became a famous lawyer and journalist; José Gómez Robledo became one of Mexico’s first professors of psychiatry; Manuel González Ramírez became a lawyer and a writer; and Lira, well, you already know, he became a poet; Carmen Jaime, the only girl in the group until Frida joined, wound up a scholar in the field of seventeenth-century Spanish literature. And, of course, Frida Kahlo. Everybody knows what she became.
The Cachuchas were a nightmare for Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the head of the Preparatoria. Poor Don Vicente. Frida used to do imitations of him in front of one of those little mirrors that made you look like Pinocchio. She would croak like a bullfrog: “Those damn brats! Those goddamn brats! I’d like to throw the lot of them out!” It was true, you know. He wanted to get rid of them. Not only were they disrespectful and cocky, but they sowed chaos. Once they rode a donkey through the corridors of the school, and once they set off a round of firecrackers in the main patio. I remember when they dropped a bottle from a third-floor window right in front of Elías Galdós, the Latin teacher. It hit the ground like a bomb, exploding about three feet in front of him. Sparkling slivers of glass shot geyserlike into the air and onto the pavement. I wasn’t there, of course. I’m just repeating what Frida told me. Sparkling slivers of glass. Geyserlike. See? I’m not so stupid. I still remember. It was only by the grace of God that Galdós didn’t get his head knocked off. He could have been blinded. Frida used to tell me these stories at night, sitting on the bed and laughing so hysterically that she’d have to dash for the chamber pot. That is, when she still had time to talk to me. Before she got so busy with her friends she almost forgot all about her sister.
It was as though these stunts proved her group’s superiority over the riffraff—the rest of the student body. I pretended to think they were hilarious, but the truth is, it was sort of disgusting, their attitude. As though it didn’t matter that an old guy could have died of a heart attack. Just as long as they got their laughs, see? Just as long as they started an uproar and got everybody looking at them.
One night I said to her, “You know, you think you’re the last piece of toilet paper in the outhouse, but you could have killed that old guy. Then how would you feel? If you had to go to his funeral and watch while they lowered his casket into the ground? If you had to think about the worms crawling into his mouth and chewing up his tongue and his brains and his guts?” When she was young, Frida was terrified of death, but at the same time, she was fascinated by it. The whole idea of the corruption of the flesh enthralled her. Corruption of the flesh. A hot topic with the priests. Frida loved it. I mean, when she was still a Catholic. When she still went to church, she loved to hear them talk about corruption of the flesh. I thought I’d bring it up, just to make her squirm.
After a while Frida began to feel bad about teasing poor old Galdós, and in an act of contrition, she went to the cathedral and lit a candle to the Virgin. I went with her. She started out by explaining to Our Lady how sorry she was, how she felt like of turd in the gutter, and then, somehow, she got off track and started talking about how Galdós had it coming because he was such a damn snob, one of those highbrows who think their shit doesn’t stink because they always cross their T’s and dot their I’s and can spell words like Oberammergau and Massachusetts, but when they go to mass they sit in the back row and jerk off, and then she started to laugh hysterically. She was laughing so hard that people turned around and glared at her. So we got up and left. And that was the end of her penance.
Whenever there was a speaker at a student assembly that they thought was boring, the Cachuchas would gang up and shoot spitballs at him. Conservative professors who lectured on what these kids considered outmoded topics were prime targets. But how did they get to be the authorities on what was interesting for the rest of the students and what wasn’t? That’s what I want to know. What I mean is, how did they get to be the arbitrators—the arbiters—of good speeches?
Of course they were all leftists. We all were, even me. Even though, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know much about it. I just sort of repeated what Frida said. The thing is, we were all carried away by the revolutionary rhetoric of the new government, and well … no. It’s not true that I didn’t understand it. The Revolution taught us to be proud of who we were, proud of our heritage, proud—well, I said all that before, didn’t I? But it wasn’t really ideology that united the Cachuchas. It was more the members’ passion for mischief.
Frida loved being a Cachucha comrade. She loved being one of the boys. And she loved Alejandro. Or maybe not. Was it really love?
After a while, Frida never came home after classes. On cool autumn afternoons, she and her friends would walk to the Ibero American Library, a few blocks from the school. The library was a favorite hangout of the Cachuchas. They all loved to read, and the shelves were full of books in Spanish, English, French, German. The library lured them like a lodestone away from those predictable lectures, those repetitive experiments. Pretty soon, they were spending more time at the library than at the Prepa. I never went. Why would I go? I practically never went to the city in those days. I just stayed at home and helped Mami hem dresses or polish silver. Money was so tight that we had to let some of the servants go, so there was more work for me. Frida didn’t have to worry herself about those things.
At the library they would read and draw, argue and gossip. “We debated Hegel today,” Frida would tell me, as if I knew who the hell Hegel was. Sometimes they’d be inspired by the works of those European writers—Hugo, Wells, Dos … Dostoyevsky, or the one who wrote about the submarine before it was even invented—Verne—and they would describe fantastic imaginary voyages to far-off places. They would scale the Great Wall of China or travel down the Volga or visit the crypts of Notre Dame.
Frida was always reading. She had been reading Papá’s books for years, and she knew a lot about German philosophy. Me, I never read that stuff. Not that anyone ever suggested I give it a try. Not that anyone ever suggested I might be bright enough to understand Hegel. But her friends, they read everything. She got to know Russian writers, Pushkin and Tolstoy, she was always talking about them. She read them in translation, of course. She was brilliant, but not brilliant enough to learn Russian. He knew Russian. They use a different alphabet, you know. The Russians, I mean. Each student had a special corner. The librarians were all chochos, so thrilled to see young people devouring literature. Naturally, they gave them more or less free rein.
The building was nice. Frida showed it to me once or twice. It had been a church, and it had an elegant, high nave, which was sort of humanized by a maze of bookshelves. The walls were decorated with murals by Roberto Monte Negro y Nero, who founded the Museum of Popular Art. Colorful flags of all the Latin American nations brightened the main room. It was nice.
I remember one scene Frida described to me. The Cachuchas had gathered in a corner and were sprawled out on chairs and tables and the floor. Carmen, seated on her black cape, was reciting a poem by the Spanish Golden Age poet, Góngora. It was one of those poems we all had to memorize in school.
Mientras por competir con tu cabello, oro bruñido al sol relumbra en vano; mientras con menosprecio en medio el llano mira tu blanca frente el lilio bello; | While, to compete with your hair, gold burnished in the sun gleams in vain; while your white brow looks with scorn upon the lovely lily in the field; |
mientras a cada labio, por cogello, más ojos que al clavel temprano; y mientras triunfa con desdén laesione del luciente cristal tu gentil cuello: | while each of your lips is observed by more eyes than follow the early carnation and while, with hearty disdain, your graceful neck triumphs over glimmering crystal: |
goza cuello, cabello, labio y frente, antes que lo que fue en tu edad dorada oro, lilio, clavel, cristal luciente, | enjoy throat, hair, lips and brow before not only what was in your golden youth gold, lily, carnation and glimmering crystal |
no sólo en plata o vïola troncada se vuelva, mas tú y ello juntamente en tierra, en humo, en polvo, en sombra, en nada. | turns to silver and pressed violet but you too shall turn, along with them, into earth, smoke, dust, shadow, nothingness. |
They started arguing about it. Miguel kept saying that the poet wasn’t really saying anything new. Miguel always said things like that. Then he said something like “He’s playing with images.” “But,” Jesús answered, “I wouldn’t say that he represents no philosophical position.” And Miguel interrupted: “Góngora is not interested in taking a philosophical stance. What he wants to do is renovate Spanish poetry by invigorating conventional love rhetoric.” Or maybe it wasn’t Miguel. I’m really just making this up, the way I imagine it was. You like the way I’m imitating their voices? I heard these arguments so many times. I heard them in person when Frida’s friends came over, which wasn’t often, because we lived so far away. And I heard Frida recreate them. She was better at it than I am. She’d do the dialogue, with everybody’s gestures. One was pompous, one was earnest, one was vehement.
According to her version of this story, she was seated on the floor, engrossed in the discussion. Alejandro was leaning against a bookcase about a foot behind her. And then, without warning, he leaned forward and, with his fingertips, touched her arm lightly.
When she told me this story, I was sitting in the patio in the dark. I felt a shiver go up my arm, and suddenly, my bloomers felt full of ants. I squirmed. I wanted to rub myself to make them go away. I’m sure I turned red. I was afraid to look at Frida because I thought she might realize what was going on, even though she couldn’t see my face in the blackness.
Then he touched her hair. Frida jerked away, startled. Alejandro moved closer and pinched her gently. This time she turned. He winked at her and smiled, then signaled her to follow him.
He left first. She waited about ten minutes, then pulled herself up nonchalantly and walked out, leaving her books on the table.
Frida loved to tell me about her, uh, experiences. I’m only eleven months younger than she, but at that age, eleven months is a long time. Eleven months makes a big difference. I had never done anything with a boy, and when she’d tell me how Alejandro looked at her, how he touched her, I lapped it up. I’d get excited, just as though it were happening to me. And afterward, afterward I’d go into a corner of the patio, a corner hidden by shrubs, and… I’m sure Frida knew how those stories affected me, and she liked to embellish them, stuff them with details, just to make me fidget.
He was waiting for her in the hall.
“Come here,” he said. He led her into a small room used for storage. “Look,” he whispered. “I bought you this on the street.”
He stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a colorful papier-mâché trinket—a little painted toucan attached to a chain.
“I thought you’d like it.” He leaned over and fastened it around her neck. “I bought it from Lucho, the old vendor who stands in front of the cathedral. It was the prettiest one.”
“I could feel his breath on my cheek,” she told me. “It was like caramel.”
The ladybugs—the same ones she had felt that first day she saw him in the corridor of the Prepa—were beginning to crawl again, only this time they were creeping from her elbows to her armpits, and then … I could feel them too.
She stood up on the tips of her toes and put her arms around his neck.
“Fridita, my little Prepa girl …”
“I’m not such a little girl, Alex.”
“How can I describe his voice?” she said to me. “Warm and bright, like sunbeams. Sweet and delicious, like candy.” I closed my eyes. I could hear Alejandro’s voice. I felt as though I was going to swoon. “I was warm and yet I was quivering,” she whispered. “My lips were very, very close to his.”
“Go ahead!” she begged him.
His kiss was gentle, chivalrous even.
“No,” she breathed, “kiss me like this!”
She pulled herself up farther, pressing her torso against his, thrusting her tongue into his mouth. He drew her to him and gave her a long, deep kiss. But Frida wanted more.
Frida was like that. She always wanted more.
“Tell me what he did next!” I pleaded.
“What will you give me if I do?”
“My—my clown puppet, the one with the papier-mâché face!”
“I don’t want your stupid puppet.” She laughed. “Puppets are for babies. I’m not interested in your clown.”
She was tormenting me.
“I don’t know, then. What do you want?” Papá had bought me the puppet in the street. It had a beautiful red lace collar and a brightly painted face. It was a treasure, but I was willing to part with it in exchange for the rest of Frida’s story, even though Papá would have been heartbroken to know I had given it away. Papá was … how can I say it? … sensitive. And, even though I wasn’t his favorite, he did buy me that gift, a gift he really couldn’t afford.
“Your gold locket!”
“Oh no, Frida! Not the locket!”
“Yes, the locket! I’m going to put a piece of Alejandro’s hair in it.”
“But Frida,” I whimpered. “I can’t give it away. It was a First Communion gift. I’ve had it for years. Mami would kill me.”
But Frida knew how to get what she wanted.
I think Alejandro must have been taken aback. He was a prankster, but he was from a good family. He was the kind of boy who would make a ruckus in school, but knew better than to go too far with a girl. He chuckled. “Hold on, little Frida. Take it easy. Don’t rush.”
But Frida was in a hurry. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s rush! Let’s rush!”
He kissed her again. She closed her eyes and saw spiderwebs of brightly colored light against a phosphorescent blackness, sparkling gossamer threads of blue and turquoise and red and rose. Every centimeter of her body seemed to tingle.
That’s how she described it to me. “Spiderwebs of brightly colored light. Sparkling gossamer threads.” Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe I made it up later.
She grabbed his hair and held it tight in her fist.
“Kiss me,” she implored. “Really kiss me this time!” She nibbled at his lips. Then she opened her mouth. She bit and sucked as though she wanted to devour him, as though she wanted to cram all of him into her, as though she wanted to swallow him whole, to keep him inside her forever. She hung on his neck, forcing him to hold the embrace while she writhed against him.
Oh, God, even after all these years, I can feel their passion.
“My, but you’re a voracious little thing!” Alejandro must have felt as though he were in a tight space with a live bomb.
“I’m a hungry tiger!” growled Frida. “I’m going to eat you all up!”
“Frida, please …” His voice was glutinous; at least that was the way she described it. It excited her to think that she had made him speak in that choked, throaty way.
“Alex, darling,” she murmured. “This is so wonderful!”
She brought her hands up under his jacket and caressed his back. The cloth was moist and smelled faintly of lemon and shellfish. She buried her head in his neck in order to breathe in his aroma, then pulled at the knot of his tie and began to unbutton his collar. She licked his chest. His skin tasted sweet and salty on her tongue.
His breathing was heavy, tight. “I felt as though I was hallucinating,” she told me. Ideas were weaving in and out of her glistening spiderweb. Ideas that were visible, almost tangible. Ideas that seemed to pulsate with Alex’s strained inhaling. Ideas that had color and form and movement. One strange, beautiful, frightening idea worked its way through the core of the web: I did this to him. I made him lose his breath. I can make him lose his restraint, his willpower, even his common sense. He loves me. He loves me.
That’s what she was thinking. I know it.
“I can feel how you want me!” she whispered in his ear.
She moved her hand downward, past his waist to his lower buttocks. She felt the curve of his cheeks, the crack between them, the firm, tense muscles of his upper thigh. She massaged gently with her fingers until he was almost in tears. He must have been rigid. She must have felt him pressing against her through his trousers.
“Touch me!” She began to pull her blouse out from her skirt.
“Frida, no! I can’t! You’re just a baby!”
“I’m not such a baby, Alex. I’m not thirteen, the way I told you. I’m really fifteen.”
“No, you’re not! You’re just a baby!”
“I lied that time!” She had told everyone she was younger than she really was, and now it had caught up with her.
“You’re lying now!”
“No, I’m not. I’m telling the truth!”
“How do I know that?”
“Because you’re you, and I would never lie to you, Alex. When I said I was thirteen, the whole crowd was there. It was different!”
She took his hand and placed it under her shirt. “Feel me!” she begged. “Feel me, Alex. I want you to touch my tits! Put your finger in my brassiere! See? It’s loose! You can stick your fingers right in there!”
But Alex’s hands were down around Frida’s waist.
“Why would you lie about your age?” he asked her.
“Because when I had polio, I lost two years of life. So I just don’t count those two years.”
Ha, Frida! You ruined your own party! She must have been chafing. Here she wanted her boyfriend to feel her up, and he wanted to do some kind of investigation!
“But that doesn’t make sense!” he insisted.
“What difference does it make?” She tried to place his hand on her chest, but the spell had been broken.
He pushed her away gently. “I can’t do it here,” he whispered.
“Yes, you can!” She propelled herself forward, butting his chest gently like a baby goat. Lifting aside his shirt, she passed her lips over his nipple, then took it in her teeth and squeezed deliciously.
“Oh, Alex,” she moaned, “let me suck you, mi amor! Let me! Let me!”
“I was shivering from the roots of my hair to the soles of my feet,” she told me. But she wasn’t. She was lying. The spell was broken and it was all over. Well, maybe for her … but for him, it was all over.
“No, Frida, no!” he kept saying. “Not here! We can’t do this here!”
Frida pulled back. She had to. He wasn’t going to go any further, and that was that. “I had to hold on to a storage cabinet for balance,” she told me that night in the darkness of the patio. Her voice was low, as if she were confiding a delicious secret instead of admitting defeat. “I was dizzy, and my body felt heavy and liquid. I had the impression that it would melt into a puddle and seep through the floor. Oh, Cristi,” she moaned. “Even though it didn’t happen, it was wonderful. Because it was a start! I knew that Alex and I were a couple!” What she thought was that all the girls would die of envy.
She held out her hand to Alex, and he took it and kissed her fingers, one by one. Then he kissed her palms and her wrists.
“I love you, Alex,” she said.
He smiled. It was the same dazzling smile that had disarmed her that first day.
This should be the end of the story. At this point, balloons of many colors should waft gently upward into the sky and violins should play a—I don’t know, a waltz! But Frida never knew when to stop.
“Alex,” she said softly.
“Hmmm?”
“Remember that girl you were talking to the day we met?”
“What girl?”
“You know! That light-haired girl.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yes, you do! I think her name is Raquel.”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. There are only thirty-five girls in the whole school. You must know who I mean.”
“I’m not sure, Fridita. What about her?”
“What were you talking to her about?”
“I swear, I don’t remember. I have no recollection of her at all. But—”
“But what?”
“But I do remember something about … a philosophical, no … a theological problem … a question of grave importance.”
“Oh? What question of grave importance?”
“Something about, let’s see—what was it now? Something about jellyfish.”
Frida threw her arms around him. “You’re such a damn tease!” She poked his stomach with her finger.
So you see, at least this story has a happy ending.
“Come on,” he said, nudging her toward the door. “We have to go back.”
“Okay.”
“You go first. I’ll wait ten minutes, then I’ll follow.”
“No, let’s go together.”
“But then everybody will know.”
“So?”
“But you don’t want the others to think …”
That’s exactly what she wanted. Nothing pleased her more than to shock. She loved to see people’s eyes open wide and stare at her in disbelief. It made her feel superior.
“I couldn’t believe he was still hanging on to those bourgeois ideas,” she told me. “The common people, the Indians, they don’t feel shame about these things. Love, sex, having babies, for them it’s just natural. So why shouldn’t it be the same for us? What do you think the Revolution was all about? Shaking off this veneer of European gentility!”
“Please,” I told her, “don’t turn this into a political sermon.”
She was annoyed and she … got … up got up and … went into the house. The … the next day … when … when she came home from school … she was wearing it … the locket … my gold locket … the one I got … for my First … my First Communion … with a few strands of Alex’s hair inside. I’m sorry … I don’t know … I don’t know why … why I’m sniveling like this … why … suddenly I feel so … so … I almost … never cry … Anyway … here it is … the locket … see? I’m wearing it now. I took it back after she died. I always wear it. I first got it so many years ago … when I was just a little girl. I always wear it. It re … reminds me of … Frida.