OUR SISTER MATY WAS WORSE THAN A CAT IN HEAT, AND THERE WAS nothing Mamá could do to keep her at home. Wilberto Luzárraga, the boy my parents had picked out for her, had excellent revolutionary credentials, but he wore Prince of Wales suits and tied his shoelaces in perfectly symmetrical bows, so of course he wouldn’t do. The guy who caught her eye was a tomcat named Paco who came from nowhere and who (Mami thought at the time) would never be able to pay the bills, but he had luscious brown eyes and a mustache like Zapata’s, even though he was just a kid, really. Maty was always threatening to run off with him, and Frida egged her on.
“I’ll die! I can’t live without Paco!”
“Then go to him! Go to him!” Frida urged.
“She’s sleeping with him,” she told me on the side.
“How do you know, Frida?”
“She told me.”
I must have looked as though I’d just seen Pancho Villa walk into church naked, because Frida snickered.
“You’re such a baby, Cristi. What do you think a girl with tits like Maty’s does with her boyfriend? You think they shell peas together or embroider pillowcases? Of course they’re fucking.” At the time, Frida was only about seven.
It’s true that Maty always had her eye on the boys. After the war, when it was safe to go out, Mami and my sisters and I would go to the tianguis—the Indian markets—on Friday mornings. People were thrilled to be able to leave their houses. They poured into the streets early Friday mornings to purchase grains and vegetables in the sprawling conglomeration of stalls. Vendors sold everything—brightly colored pottery, papier-mâché ornaments, baskets, embroidered blouses, serapes, woven blankets, corn starch for rashes, and charcoal for stomach aches. Mamá loved to go to the market. She would go instead of sending the maids, although she usually took Inocencia along to help carry the packages. She’d cinch her waist and strut into the tiangui—a coquette in spite of her devotion to the Holy Virgin Mother—and haggle till she got her price.
Maty could have been as sly as Mamá when it came to bargaining, if only she’d been able to keep her mind on what she was doing. But she’d lose interest. She’d start out dickering with the chicken man, for example. You call that scrawny bird a chicken? It looks like it died of consumption, poor thing! I can get one twice as fat for half the price at Don Tito’s! But then some handsome young dandy would catch her eye, some guy who had come to buy blankets, or maybe horse feed or saddles, and she’d forget all about the chickens she was supposed to be buying. Adriana, my second-oldest sister, was good only for helping Inocencia lug parcels, and of course, Frida and I, the two little ones, mostly scampered around getting into trouble.
The markets were hotbeds of Zapatista propaganda. On Fridays a centavo would get you a ballad sheet with revolutionary corridos—folk songs—edited by the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada. We’d look at the hoity-toity society matrons depicted as smiling skeletons wearing enormous flowered hats and burst out laughing. Later, back home, we’d hide in Mami’s armario and sing at the top of our lungs:
| Si Adelita se me fuera con otro | If Adelita ran off with another |
| La seguiría por tierra y por mar, | I’d follow her over land and over sea, |
| Si por mar en un buque de guerra | If by sea, in a warship |
| Si por tierra en un tren militar. | If by land, in a military train. |
Maty didn’t sing. She wasn’t interested in politics or corridos. She was interested in men. And ever since that rogue Paco had weaseled his way into her life, all she talked about was running away with him. “Quiero realizarme en el amor, ” she’d say. “I want to find fulfillment in love.” And she’d roll her eyes like Claudette Colbert.
Frida and Maty planned the escape. They didn’t include me in the project. I was just a kid, and a stick in the mud to boot. Maybe they were afraid I’d tell Papá, and I would have, too, because the idea of Maty running away and living with someone who wasn’t one of us, that scared me. It didn’t matter who the guy was. It didn’t matter that he was poor. That wasn’t the thing. I was too young to care about his background or his wallet. I was just frightened by the idea of Maty going away. I thought I’d never see her again, and I was almost right. I didn’t see her again for a long, long time, because after she took off with Paco, she was too embarrassed to show her face again in Coyoacán, and both of them went off and hid in Veracruz. It was years and years before they came back.
The night she left, Maty crawled into bed at the regular time, but she didn’t go to sleep. She and Frida had tied some clothes and money into a bundle and stashed it so well that not even Rufina found it—Rufina, who cleaned the floors of our rooms with toothbrushes in order to pick up any incriminating evidence we might have left lying around. She didn’t miss a thing, that Rufina. Dirty books. Torn-up love notes. Cigarette ashes. Her vulture’s eye saw it all, and then she’d run to Mami in order to tattle. But not even Rufina found Maty’s pack, and to this day I can’t imagine where they hid it. Maybe they buried it with Frida’s dirty laundry, or maybe they stuffed it into a pillowcase. Frida was a regular Houdini when it came to making things disappear.
Of course I’d seen Houdini. Not in person, but in the newsreels. You’re just like Frida. You think I don’t know what’s going on.
Anyhow, after everyone had gone to bed and the house was so quiet you could hear a moth fart, Maty came tiptoeing into our room. She threw off her nightgown and under it she had on a long, faded black skirt, a white shirt, and a shawl.
“Why is Maty dressed?” I whispered.
“Shut up, turtle brain,” snapped Frida. “We’re serving the cause of true love.” As I told you, Frida was only about seven at the time, and Maty was about fifteen. Helping Maty escape made Frida feel grown up, important. It was an incursion into the adult world of love affairs and high adventure. Something I wasn’t ready for yet, according to Frida, because I was just a baby. She was always calling me a baby, even though I was only eleven months younger than she was.
I rubbed my eyes and wondered if Frida was going to tell me that this had something to do with Princess Frida Zoraída. I had figured out a while before that she didn’t exist, but you never knew what kind of shit Frida was going to come out with. Frida was flushed with excitement. She kept jumping around as though she had sparklers under her feet. She hovered over Maty, whispering and twittering, her hand over her mouth to keep from making too much noise. Maty, on the other hand, was strangely reserved, and her upper lip quivered when Frida pulled about a dozen coins out of a wadded-up stocking and handed them to her. Frida took some things out from under the cushion of a chair: her prized embroidered handkerchief, a gold cross, a pocketknife, and her favorite colored stone, which she had picked up on a walk with Papá. She pressed them into Maty’s palm, then pranced over to the window and cranked it open very slowly, taking care to keep it from squeaking. Sometimes that window whined like a pig in labor, but who knows, maybe Frida oiled it. Before I knew it, Maty was hiking her leg up over the sill. In the flicker of the oil lamp, the skin above her boots looked like fine ivory, and I cringed to think of Paco’s rough, granitelike hand on her body. I looked away from her open thighs and wanted to cry. Or maybe not, maybe those ideas didn’t come to me until I got older and thought back. Anyhow, before I knew it, she was on the other side.
I felt despondent, as though someone had died. What do you mean you’re surprised?
It’s true that up until now, I haven’t talked much about Maty, have I, doctor? After all, the one you’re interested in is Frida. But when I was little, Maty and I were very close. Maty was my big sister, my friend, and my guide. She was the one I curled up with when I felt myself being washed down the drain in a whirlpool of piss. But I was very little when she left, and during most of the period I’ve been describing, she was gone. Frida, on the other hand, was always there, always at the center of things. During my whole life, Frida has been at the center of things.
To get back to the story, everything was beginning to fall apart. I began to think that if Maty could leave, so could Mamá or Adriana or Frida, and I’d be left alone. Frida was darting from one side of the room to the other, giggling and waving. To her, it was all just another prank.
Paco emerged from the shadows like a specter. He carried a lantern that gave off a dim, eerie light; it perverted his face, giving it a diabolical cast. Maty gave him her hand, and they both disappeared into the night.
The end. There’s no happily ever after, and Maty doesn’t turn up again for quite a while. Actually, maybe I should say “ To be continued,” because we didn’t lose her for good, thank God.
You mean you don’t see the point? The point is that Frida was always up to antics. Helping Maty run away had nothing to do with true love. There was no romantic motive, no violins in the moonlight. Frida just liked to push things to the limit. She liked to see how much she could get away with. She was like that from the time she was a very little girl, and it was the same, years later, at the Prepa.
I’m coming to that. Wait a minute. I can’t tell you everything all at once. Let’s see … school … Wait, let me catch my breath.
As I told you before, the Prepa was a very special place, and celebrities were there all the time. I mean, celebrities were nothing out of the ordinary at the Preparatoria. The faculty included some of the most famous men in Mexico, and big shots like José Vasconcelos showed up periodically. Even the president of the republic made an appearance once in a while. The kids were pretty blasé about visiting luminaries, but when Lombardo Toledano announced that the actor Camilo Ramón Echegaray was coming, the student body went wild. Echegaray wasn’t a movie actor. He was a theater actor and reputed to be the best on the Spanish stage.
You have to understand that at the time there were hardly any original Mexican plays. Most of the productions at the Palace of Fine Arts or even local playhouses were Spanish. The classics, mostly. Lope de Vega’s El Caballero de Olmedo, that sort of thing. Once in a while someone would put on a regional musical, but even when the plays were Mexican, the actors were nearly always from Spain. They pronounced their C’s and Z’s with a Castilian lisp and declaimed like orators, even when they played bumpkins or clowns.
Well, Papá took Frida to the theater to see Echegaray in action. I didn’t go. In fact, I wasn’t invited, but to tell you the truth, I didn’t care. I had been to the theater before, and I hated those old-fashioned Spanish plays. If it had been a musical with lots of corridos, I might have felt differently.
Frida thought that Echegaray was an ass, which was too bad because Papá had spent money on the tickets, and money was scarce. Poor Papá. Frida actually whistled and booed after the performance. She told me about it, proud as a duchess in an eight-horse carriage.
Carmen had seen the play, too, and she called Echegaray “a braying quadruped.” “Why doesn’t Lombardo Toledano invite a Mexican poet or a Mexican playwright instead of that colonialist?” she huffed.
The Cachuchas put their heads together and came up with an idea to show Lombardo Toledano what they thought of his guest. On the morning of Echegaray’s presentation, while the students were filing into the auditorium, Angel Moreno snuck three large pigs from his uncle’s farm into an empty classroom.
“They were beautiful!” Frida told me. While her friends looked on in amazement, she pulled an assortment of fabric remnants, baubles, ribbons, yarns, and paper flowers out of her satchel and began to weave intricate garlands to decorate the animals.
“Everyone said I had an eye for color,” she told me, very impressed with herself. “Only that stupid Lorenzo, you know what he said? He said I should become a dress designer!” Obviously, she thought dress designing was beneath her, although as an adult she actually wore a lot of her own creations. I can understand how someone might have thought that Frida would become a dress designer. She was so particular about her clothes—the jewelry, the colors, the ribbons in her hair. Everything had to match. Clever Frida. I have to admit it; she was good not only in math and science and philosophy, but she knew how to doll herself up in order camouflage her defects. I mean, Frida wasn’t really pretty—I told you that before—but she was very particular about her appearance. She took hours to get dressed and do her hair. It was important to her to divert people’s eyes from that ugly, deformed leg.
Frida created the most stylish pig fashions any of them had ever seen. One of the sows, unimpressed with her new look, began to chew on bits of crepe paper lying on the ground.
“Don’t let her eat!” screamed Alberto. “She’ll shit all over the auditorium floor!”
Frida laughed. “So much the better. One piece of shit deserves another!”
At the appointed time, the two Cachuchas who were standing guard by the classroom door signaled Frida and Alejandro to let out the pigs, which they herded down the corridor to the auditorium.
Echegaray was reciting great monologues from Spanish theater. He was just reaching the culminating point of Segismundo’s soliloquy at the end of the second act of La vida es sueño—¿Qué es las vida? Un frenesí—when Alejandro shoved the pigs, one after the other, into the assembly hall.
The animals, aggravated with their “outfits” and frightened by the unfamiliar surroundings, squealed and shot down the aisles like escapees from an insane asylum. Pandemonium broke out. Some students dove at the pigs. Some stood on their seats. Everyone was shrieking and laughing. The clamor was deafening. The renowned Spanish actor turned the color of eggplant and began to sputter. Lombardo Toledano tried to calm him down with a glass of water, which Echegaray shattered on the lectern. “He was in a hyperbolic rage!” is what Frida told me. That’s what she said: “A hyperbolic rage.”
Lombardo Toledano disliked all the Cachuchas, but he especially hated Frida. At least that’s what she said. Frida would rather be hated than not noticed, so maybe she exaggerated. But maybe not, because Lombardo registered a complaint with José Vasconcelos that very day. I can just imagine him wringing his hands and complaining to the minister of education: “I cannot run a school under these conditions. This girl has no respect for authority.”
But Frida, brazen as a whore on a summer night, went to see Vasconcelos herself.
“What do you expect?” she said. I just see her standing there, adorable Frida, in her little middy blouse and her pleated skirt, a bow in her hair, her eyes huge and disarming. “We’re supposed to be reclaiming Mexico for the Mexicans, and here Lombardo Toledano brings us this rotting carcass from Spain.”
Who knows what Vasconcelos said to Lombardo about the meeting, but the next thing we knew, the director of the National Preparatory School had asked for an appointment with Papá. “I promise dot from now on, she vill go to class und behafe herself,” Papá promised.
Mami was seething. “I told you that sending her to a boys’ school was a mistake,” she hissed. “She’s not learning anything. All she does is waste her time! She’ll turn out worse than her sister!”
It had happened a long time ago, but Maty’s escape was still a thorn in Papá’s heart. Mami brought it up because she knew it would galvanize him into taking action.
“Zis has got to schtop!” he yelled at Frida, and this time she didn’t make fun of his accent because she knew he was really, truly upset, and she didn’t want to provoke a seizure.
For a while, at least, her behavior did improve.
And then, in psychology class, she drew a caricature of the teacher as a sleeping elephant and passed it around the room. It broke up the class.
In French, she glued the pages of the teacher’s book together so that he couldn’t open it.
And one morning she and the other Cachuchas rode mules down the corridor.
One of the worst stunts was the one with the firecracker.
The philosophy teacher, Antonio Caso, was highly respected in intellectual circles, but the Cachuchas considered him a right-wing snob.
“He lectures about Plato! He lectures about Aristotle!” Frida griped. “But when is he going to talk about something relevant? He won’t touch Marx and Engels!”
“Who?”
“Marx and Engels, Cristi. You’re such a dunce.”
Well, of course. Silly Cristi. How was I supposed to know about Marx and Engels? I wasn’t studying at the Prepa. I found out about that stuff later because Frida was always talking about it. He taught me a lot, too, and I learned quite a bit from all the communists who hung around Frida after she was married, but at that time, I didn’t know.
Anyhow, Caso delivered his lectures in the Generalito, a large hall that had once been a chapel. What the Cachuchas wanted was to shake him up without really doing too much damage. One of them, I can’t remember who, suggested tying some firecrackers to a mule and letting it loose in the lecture hall, but somebody else reminded him they had already done that once with a dog.
“The idea of firecrackers is good, though,” said Carmen.
The plan was to get a firecracker, a little one, and place it outside, in the window above the lectern. They’d attach it to a long fuse, one that took twenty minutes or so to burn, and one person would light it. The rest of them would go to class, except for Alejandro, Miguel, and Manuel, who would leave the school grounds to avoid suspicion. Whoever ignited the fuse would have time to make his getaway, and they’d all have alibis.
They drew straws to see who would light the match, and the job fell to Pepe—José Gómez Robledo.
“Shit!” he moaned. “How come I always get stuck with the filthiest job?”
On the designated day, Alejandro, Miguel, and Manuel made sure that Lombardo Toledano saw them leave the Preparatoria before Caso’s lecture. As leader of the Cachuchas, Alejandro was always a suspect whenever there was a ruckus, so it was important for Lombardo to see him make an exit before it all started. Frida and Carmen and several of the boys went to the lecture and sat in the back, taking notes to beat the band. Gómez Robledo lit the fuse, then entered the hall and sat down next to Frida.
Everyone waited.
Frida glanced at her watch every half second.
Pepe bit his lip.
Carmen kept looking up at the window, then tugging on the collar of her baggy brown jacket.
And then, BOOM! The panes exploded, sending glass and gravel flying into the hall.
The audience went berserk. Students screamed and howled and wailed. Frida and Carmen tried to look astonished, then caught each other’s eye and burst out laughing. Pepe looked down and stared hard at his notes.
Everyone else turned toward Caso. What would he do? Would he throw his papers down and run out of the room? Would he erupt in anger? Would he point a finger at one of them?
There was a long silence. Students fidgeted and held their breath. Some looked around the room to see if any of their classmates had guilty expressions.
Caso just stood there, brushing himself off and gazing out at the sea of faces. He had several small cuts on his right cheek, but most of the glass had hit his clothing and the lectern. He waited for the commotion to die down.
Finally, it did. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “As I was saying, Aristotelian poetics have been greatly misunderstood by generations of modern playwrights. The essence of the three unities is not …”
Let me tell you something about Frida. I loved her very much. She was clever and funny, and she shared everything with me. We were best friends. It’s true I had a special place in my heart for Maty, but Maty left when I was just six, and she was a lot older than me. Frida was my age. We were only eleven months apart, so we were like twins. Why do you think I can tell you all these stories? Because Frida reported everything. It’s true that there were times when she was so busy with her friends that she neglected me, but other times, she’d make up for it. And then she’d tell me absolutely everything. In luxurious detail. Maybe with a little exaggeration, too, but what’s wrong with that? Frida really didn’t know she was exaggerating. She built up things in her mind. She had trouble separating fact from fiction, but then who doesn’t? Who really sees things the way they are? Only God. Every trick Frida played, she lived it twice, once when she did it, and then again when she described it to me. Or maybe more than twice, because some of these stories she told me over and over again. With each telling, the stunt became more outrageous, and she became more the star.
Nobody knew Frida better than I did. Not Maty, not Mami, not him!
Frida had a kind of … almost … a sickness. Or maybe obsession would be a better word. She always had to be at the center of everything. Everyone had to be looking at her. She wanted to be different, and she was different, but it was strange. On the one hand, we were all different, I mean all us girls, because we had Jewish blood, and to have even a drop of Jewish blood in Mexico sets you apart, even if you’re a practicing Catholic. And in addition, she was—she’d kill me if she heard me say this—she was, well, a cripple. But both those things that really set her apart, being Jewish and being lame, she tried to cover up. She tried to convince the world that she was more Mexican than the Virgin of Guadalupe and more physically fit than Alfredo Codona.
You don’t know about Alfredo Codona? The Mexican aerialist who was the first man to ever perfect a triple somersault. You never saw him on the newsreels? Ha! And you think I don’t know what goes on in the world!
I was saying about Frida, the things that really made her different, those were the things she tried to hide. Sometimes I think she really didn’t like herself very much, and so she pretended that she didn’t care if other people liked her either. But that don’t-give-a-damn attitude, it was just a mask.
I don’t know if that makes sense or not.
No, I’m not trying to do your job. I’m just trying to give you my impression of things. I thought that’s what you wanted. But if you don’t want to hear it, just go away. I’ve talked enough for today, anyway.