I’LL TELL YOU THIS ABOUT DIEGO: HE WAS THE UGLIEST MAN I’D EVER seen, ugly enough to win an ugly contest. A mountain of suet that had to be stuffed with a trowel into those filthy overalls he wore. Vasconcelos had hired a bunch of famous artists to paint murals at the Prepa, and Rivera had been commissioned to do one of them. As you can imagine, sitting on the scaffold with his fleshy buttocks hanging over the edge, the fat man was an ideal target for the Cachuchas.
Pepe Robledo suggested that they set fire to the wood shavings the artist left all over the floor where he built his platform, but Alejandro thought they might try the firecracker bit again. “The paint would splatter and leave mosquito bites all over his Allegory of Erotic Poetry,” he suggested. The Cachuchas had created such hell for some of the other painters that they came to work armed.
Getting at Rivera wasn’t so easy. The Bolívar Amphitheater was off limits to students while he was working, and the doors were kept locked. A full-scale invasion was impossible.
For Frida, the prohibition only made the challenge more tantalizing. Besides, she was curious about this mountainous, homely, frog-faced painter. He seemed to be an affable type, not at all a snob. He stopped to talk to admirers in the corridor or to wink at a pretty girl. If he wouldn’t let the students watch him paint, it was probably just because he was afraid they’d distract him, she thought, although the boys had other ideas.
Rivera was six feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds. In his shabby overalls and immense Stetson hat, he himself was a spectacle. His shoes were filthy and stained with paint and plaster. As if in order to prove his revolutionary zeal (or perhaps only to protect himself from the Cachuchas), he wore a cartridge belt and carried a large pistol. His hair was fine and always a mess. He had a large, round baby face, with fat cheeks and who knows how many chins. His eyes were positively amphibian—you know what I mean, like a frog’s. They bulged out of his head and seemed to move separately from his face. They were set far apart and could turn in all directions in order to take in a complete panorama. His mouth was enormous, and you half expected a long, thin tongue to shoot out and snare a fly. His skin had a greenish tinge, except for his chest and paunch, which were creamy, like the underside of a frog. His shirt was always open halfway to his belly, which looked like a vat turned on its side, and on his chest you could see filaments of the fuzz that covered his whole body. After a day’s work in the hot auditorium, sweat rolled down his cheeks and neck and dripped from his armpits, giving him the look of an aquatic creature just emerged from a pond. He had swollen white breasts like mounds of blubber, a thick neck, and no shoulders. Amphibian forelegs stuck out from his huge torso, and his hands were pudgy and surprisingly small, with five skinny fingers—not four, like a frog—sticking out in all directions. Frida always said that it was unbelievable that such ugly, odd hands could produce such magnificent paintings. In spite of his girth, I wouldn’t say that he was lumbering. No, not really. Papá, who was slim and well proportioned, was far more lumbering than Diego. No, Diego was pretty agile for his size. He was capable of remaining almost motionless for a very long time, and sometimes, when he was working on a detail in a painting, his body would appear inert for an eternity. Then, all of a sudden, he would reposition himself, taking a gigantic step to one side or another. It was as though he leaped two or three meters at a time, you know, like a bullfrog. As I said, Frida liked him from the start, even though she was duty-bound to the Cachuchas to play the most malicious tricks on him. No, I’ve got it all wrong. She played tricks on him because she liked him and she wanted him to notice her. He seemed so unassuming and friendly that she couldn’t help but be enthralled, and I was enthralled just listening to her.
Of course, it was an act. Diego Rivera wasn’t really unassuming at all. He was as full of himself as a Spanish sausage.
You have to understand that at that time, Diego was thirty-six and already quite a star. Not the star he became later. That came with the murals he did at the National Palace and the paintings that I posed for. I told you before, I was his favorite model. Not Frida, but me. He always said that I had a softer, more … I had a gentler, fuller look. Frida had a harder edge. I was, well, more feminine.
Countless rumors circulated about Diego. For example, Frida told me he was part Chinese. We were looking at a picture of him in La República. He didn’t look Chinese to me, but to Frida he looked like a potbellied Buddha. Carmen called him “he of the porcine physiognomy.” She was a real pain, that Carmen, trying to impress everybody with her fancy expressions.
At the Prepa some people said he was part Jewish, but Frida didn’t get involved in those discussions. It was still a sore subject. Other people also said he was part Portuguese, part Spanish, and part Indian. The truth is that nobody knew exactly what he was.
“I hear he’s Russian,” said Pepe. “Someone heard him speaking Russian with one of the teachers.”
“No, he’s not Russian,” Alejandro corrected him. “His girlfriend in Paris was Russian.”
“Two of his girlfriends!” observed Alberto.
“Two of his many girlfriends,” added Adelina Zandejas, “according to my uncle’s godfather’s cousin, who knows Lupe Marín, his mistress.”
“You mean the model?” asked Alberto. “The one who’s posing for him?”
“One of the ones who’s posing for him. There are a lot of them—Lupe, Nahui Olín, a bunch of them.”
“You think she’s posing nude?” That was Pepe. In spite of the fact that they all thought of themselves as sophisticated revolutionaries who pooh-poohed bourgeois attitudes, they’d walk from here to Oaxaca for a peep at a nice pair of bare thighs.
“Of course she’s posing nude! Didn’t you see the sketches?” That was Alejandro, who always knew what was going on. “That’s the real reason they won’t let us in there.”
I have to admit that Frida made it all sound intriguing. I wasn’t interested in going to the Prepa to study to be a doctor, but I would have given anything to meet some of the exciting people who passed through the school’s doors—people like the movie stars Mimí Derba and Joaquín Coss, you know, from El automóbil gris. Me, I never did anything exciting. I mean, the local boys all looked at me. I had my share of admirers, big strapping boys with mustaches and worn boots and machetes to kill snakes with. But I had never met an artist or a movie star.
“I would never pose nude for anybody,” I told Frida self-righteously.
“I would. God, Cristi, you’re such an escuincla! You’re the same person with your clothes on or off, you know.” I knew she was just trying to shock me, but I was annoyed anyway.
“You know,” she said, “I wouldn’t mind being Diego Rivera’s model.”
“I think you’re disgusting.”
“What’s the big deal? I’m going to be a doctor, and doctors look at people’s bodies all day, just like artists. A person can’t have all those bourgeois prejudices like you and Mami and be an artist or a doctor.”
“You’re Catholic, aren’t you?” Both Mami and Abuelita had worked hard to instill the ideals of modesty and purity in us. And a sense of decorum. “El decoro, hija,” Mami would harp whenever she caught me with my feet on the furniture or my finger in my nose. “¡El decoro!”
The mention of our beloved faith didn’t faze Frida. “Yeah,” she said, “but God makes pricks and tits, doesn’t he?”
“Besides,” I said, playing my last card. “I heard he was a communist!”
“So? I might become a communist!”
“I thought you said you were Catholic, Frida. Communists don’t believe in God.”
“So I’ll be a new kind of communist.”
From the very beginning, Diego was associated with two things in Frida’s mind. Not painting, no. Sex and communism—two forbidden topics in polite Mexican society in spite of the leftist rhetoric of the Revolution. We were Zapatistas during the war, okay. But not communists. Being a Zapatista was not the same as being a communist. Communism was some foreign ogre who hated Our Savior Jesus Christ, and no self-respecting Catholic could be a communist. You could think like a communist, you could talk like a communist, you could glorify the workers and the peasants and vilify the imperialist pigs, but you couldn’t actually be a communist. At least, that’s what I thought, because that’s what my grandmother had told me.
Like I said, all sorts of stories circulated about Diego: that when he was a little boy, his father caught him cutting open a live mouse to find out where baby mice came from; that he had humped a girl when he was nine; that he had had an affair with a mulatto woman (the wife of an engineer on the Mexican Central Railroad); that he wanted it all the time, just like a bull, and fucked every woman he could get his hands on—actresses, prostitutes, housewives, models, artists, secretaries, tourists, everybody—and that his dick was so big, he ruined the uterus of one of his lovers! And, of course, that he was a revolutionary hero, not because he had fought on the battlefield, but because he fought injustice with his brush. Liberty, equality, fraternity, truth, and tortillas in every belly. Rivera stood for all that, and was a card-carrying communist to prove it. That’s what they said. So, you see what I mean, Sex and communism. The two taboos. How could Frida resist a man like that? A man who represented everything that was banned from refined conversation. Naturally, she fell in love with him. But not right away. At first it was just fascination.
Was I fascinated too? It’s hard to say. I had never met Diego, never even seen him. I pretended not to be interested, but Frida was full of anecdotes. Every day she’d come home with a story. I guess, well, I guess she sort of planted a seed. She made him sound so exotic and at the same time so ridiculous and lovable, with his bulging eyes and drooping chins. I couldn’t help but become infatuated.
Frida was determined to meet Diego Rivera.
She planned it carefully. He was painting that fresco in the Bolívar Amphitheater. Frida waited until late, when the building was practically empty. Diego used to begin at four in the morning, with the first glimmer of dawn, and worked practically without stopping until dusk, squinting and straining in order to accomplish as much as possible before the plaster dried. He didn’t even go home for lunch. Lupe brought him his food in a large, colorful basket decorated with flowers and covered by a small cotton tablecloth embroidered with a folk motif. Frida watched her go in and out, sizing her up. Sometimes other women came too, bringing lunches or gifts. Since they were allowed into the Bolívar Amphitheater to see Diego Rivera, why wasn’t she? Frida wanted to know.
“You have to help me, mana!” she said to her friend Agustina Reyna, known as La Reyna—“The Queen.”
That afternoon, they waited. They waited until the students had gone home. Until the teachers had gone home. Until the director had left. Until the janitors were out of the way. And then, forming a battering ram with their shoulders, they pounded the auditorium door.
“¡Uno dos tres, PUM! ¡Uno dos tres, PUM!” Not a very subtle entrance.
The door began to tremble. They could hear Rivera grumbling. “What’s going on here?”
“¡Uno dos tres, PUM! ¡Uno dos tres, PUM!”
One final thrust and the door opened.
Imagine Diego, stupefied, looking down from his scaffold. What did he see? A small, delicate girl dressed in a calf-length blue skirt, a white blouse, and a patterned sweater, a girl with fine features and dark hair. To him she must have looked like a child, except that her body was well formed and her breasts large and firm.
“What did you say to him?” I asked her. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t fascinated. My very own sister, face to face with the great Diego Rivera! Did I really understand who he was? I’m not sure, to tell you the truth, but I knew he was very important.
“I asked if I could watch him work. That’s all. ‘May I watch you work?’ That’s all I said to him.” She repeated the sentence to me exactly as she had uttered it to him. Her tone was steady and self-assured. I imagine she made Diego grin.
“What did he say?”
“He said he’d be delighted.”
She sat down on a stool, her gaze riveted on the painter’s brush. There was no one on the scaffold with him that night, but Lupe Marín sat on a chair down below, weaving.
“I was breathless,” Frida told me. “His hand was so quick and sure.” Segments of the wall seemed to come alive as he applied the colors—red, green, purple, gold.
The theme of the mural was creation, with specific reference to the Mexican race. The work was filled with dramatic allegorical figures—Man, Woman, Knowledge, Erotic Poetry, Tradition, Tragedy, Music, Charity. Some of them were more than twelve feet tall, and they represented every Mexican type: whites, Indians, mestizos. The lines of the figures harmonized perfectly with the curve of the ceiling and even integrated the pipe organ, which was built into the wall. Frida was hypnotized.
Lupe Marín was eyeing her and scowling. She had posed for three of the allegories, Woman, Justice, and Song. The one that held Frida spellbound was Woman, a seated nude. She looked like a peasant or a worker, a woman who had had four or five children, maybe, because she had massive breasts and a round belly, a woman who knew how to survive, who didn’t put up with any nonsense, who found out what had to be done and did it. Her legs were slightly parted, her jaw heavy and her nose uneven. Her mouth was rather too toothy, and her strong arms and thighs looked like they were used to heavy labor. Frida found the figure both hideously ugly and vibrantly feminine. “It didn’t look like Lupe at all,” she told me. “Lupe is tall, gorgeous woman with olive skin and breathtaking green eyes. She has black hair that looks like it was combed by a windstorm and lips like a luscious plum, so ripe it’s ready to split and spill its juices.” Diego’s Woman was earthy, heavy. Frida found it incredible that Rivera would make her look so unattractive, or that she would agree to pose for a portrait that deformed her so. At the same time, Frida was captivated by the painter’s ability to transform object into idea. The painting didn’t look like Lupe because it wasn’t meant to; it was meant to be an incarnation of womanhood, to capture a kind of … let’s see, how did Frida put it? A kind of vital reproductive energy. Diego’s Woman was bulky and earthbound, because she was part of the life force of nature. I understand now because I posed for that kind of painting too.
“Ideas were crashing around in my head,” Frida told me. She forgot the time. She forgot where she was. She felt as though she really was watching a “creation.” Diego could have that kind of effect on you.
But Lupe was growing impatient. “Little girl,” she said after a while, “don’t you have to go home now? Aren’t your parents waiting for you? Won’t they be worried?”
And do you know what Frida did? She looked right into Lupe’s dramatic green eyes. As I said, Lupe Marín was a truly breathtaking creature, a proper lover for a great artist. But that was no reason for Frida to allow Lupe to intimidate her.
“No,” she said calmly. And she went back to watching.
Diego’s hand moved with the lightness of a butterfly wing, yet his lines were firm and incisive. Such a giant, froglike man, but with such a delicate touch. He was a master technician, and yet these were not the lifeless shapes of a mere draftsman, but the robust, vibrant forms of a passionate artist.
Lupe had a violent temper. I saw it in action many times. Later, I got to know her pretty well. I can imagine that Lupe was growing irritated. This child had been in there nearly two hours. Lupe waited about fifteen minutes more, then became insistent. To her way of thinking, the girl had abused her invitation.
“It’s time for you to go home!” she snapped in a tone that made it clear she expected Frida to leave immediately.
Frida pretended not to hear.
“I said,” repeated Lupe, “that it was time for you to leave. Now, go!” She stood up and threw her weaving on the chair.
Frida didn’t say a word. Lupe towered over her. She was an imposing figure. But Frida held her ground.
“Look,” said Lupe, grabbing Frida by the arm, “I want you out of here.”
Diego turned to look at them, a grin on his lips. He loved it when women fought over him, and he found Lupe’s jealous fits amusing. Besides, he was enthralled by Frida’s tenaciousness.
“Leave her alone, Lupita,” he said gently. “She’s not bothering me.”
“Well,” snarled Lupe, “she’s bothering me!”
Lupe sat down and picked up her weaving. She unbraided three strands of yarn, then let her work fall to the floor. She got up and paced. She was fuming.
“Damn it, Diego,” she screamed. “I want her out of here! Get her out of here!”
Diego went on painting and Frida went on watching.
Lupe sat down, crossed her arms, and sulked. “Shit! I don’t know why I put up with you.”
“You love me!”
“Pig! Your ego is as swollen as your belly.”
“That’s why you love me!” Diego answered without pausing. His power of concentration, thought Frida, was extraordinary.
Finally, Frida got up. “Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate your letting me watch you.”
Then she turned to Lupe and smiled. “Bye!” she said.
Lupe became suddenly involved once again in her weaving. But Frida wasn’t going to let her get away with pretending to ignore her. She had stayed exactly as long as she wanted, and she was going to rub Lupe’s nose in it.
“Good-bye, Señorita Marín.” Frida held out her hand.
It was a standoff.
Lupe directed her gaze at the mural. “Look,” she called to Diego, “you messed up that section there, right by my foot, right where the male figure starts.”
Diego didn’t bother examining the spot, or answering Lupe for that matter.
Frida was still standing there with her hand extended.
Lupe finally looked up.
“Nice to meet you, Señorita Marín,” said Frida. Her hand and her eyes were steady.
“Bye,” said Lupe. And, in spite of herself, she smiled.
Frida heaved her book bag over her shoulder and walked out of the room. Her step was firm, her carriage dignified and graceful.
This story is a family legend. Frida told it to me that very night, when she got home from the Prepa. Not just once. Over and over again, because she comes out the winner. She plays David to Lupe’s Goliath. Years later, Lupe told it to me too. And so did Diego.
“You know,” Lupe told Diego when Frida had gone, “that child is really something! How many little girls would have the guts to invite themselves in here like that, and then to stand up to a woman like me? Not many!”
Diego just chuckled and went on working.
Lupe liked Frida. She liked her a lot in spite of everything. And that’s the strange thing about Diego’s women: they started out rivals, but they wound up friends. They loved and hated one another. Just like … just like Frida and me.
What can I tell you about Diego Rivera? It’s not easy to get to the truth about Diego, even for someone like me, who knew him so well. So many stories circulated about him. Scandal clung to him like a second skin. And to make matters worse, he was a terrible liar. It was something he had in common with Frida.
I’ve spent my life surrounded by famous people. So many famous people. Diego and Frida, of course, and so many others. Politicians, movie stars … Yes, I finally got to meet movie stars, lots of them. Artists and photographers. People like Trotsky, Vasconcelos, Cantinflas, Dolores del Río, Siqueiros, Edward Weston—the photographer who took so many magnificent pictures of Lupe. Lots and lots of famous people. I was the one who stood out by not standing out. But I was there at their parties and rallies and openings because I was Frida Kahlo’s sister.
So, you want to know about Diego. What I can tell you is that he was born on December 8, 1886. We always gave him a birthday party, and we celebrated his saint’s day as well because Diego loved parties. If you forgot one of his special days, he got out of control like a bee in the attic on a hot afternoon. Diego had had a twin brother, but he died as an infant. His father, also named Diego, was an enormous man, a schoolteacher, who according to the official story was the son of a Spaniard and of a Mexican woman of Portuguese-Jewish descent. His mother, María del Pilar Barrientos, was the daughter of a Spaniard and a mestizo woman, so I guess it was true that Diego was a lot of things—Spanish, Jewish, Portuguese, Indian—but not Chinese. Every time some reporter interviewed him, Diego invented a different story about his background. Sometimes he said he was part Dutch, or that his great-grandmother was Asian, or that his grandfather was African. He was like Frida. He would say anything to get attention.
According to him, he was a brilliant baby. According to his old aunt Vicenta, he talked in paragraphs from birth and drew elaborate pictures from the time he could hold a pencil. He drew everywhere, including in the family bible, an omen, perhaps, that someday he would become a come-cura, a priest-eater. I guess his father realized that surrender was the better part of valor, because he covered the walls of Diego’s room with blackboard and told him to hop to it. The budding Diego filled them with images of everything he saw in his town, Guanajuato, or in his imagination: trains, toy soldiers, flowers, birds, a dog peeing, a monster on roller skates, a pyramid, a snake with wings and feathers.
When aunt Vicenta took him to church and told him to pray to the Virgin, Diego pointed out that the statue was made of wood and had no ears. When aunt Vicenta complained to the boy’s father, the elder Diego started taking Dieguito with him to his meetings with the town Jacobins. I guess that’s how Diego became a radical.
He was five when his sister María was born. Of course, Diego was curious about where babies came from. Sex was always one of his main interests. He began to conduct experiments. The story that he stabbed a pregnant mouse is true. Diego got ahold of some anatomy books and added pictures of human bodies to his repertoire. He loved to draw crashes and train wrecks, with mangled corpses strewn over the ground. He also made cutouts of soldiers and staged massive military campaigns with lots of carnage.
Now the facts get blurry. Legend has it that, at nine, he had sex with an eighteen-year-old American schoolteacher, then took up with the wife of a railroad engineer. At nine years old! In spite of his grotesque looks, women found him irresistible. Even beautiful women. Just look at Frida. Just look at me.
Diego’s papá thought that with his son’s taste for sex and gore and his talent for strategy, he had the makings of a good general. He enrolled him in a military school, but Dieguito threw a temper tantrum and insisted on studying art instead. Before long, he had won a scholarship to the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts. But Diego always said he learned more from the engraver Posada than he ever did from his teachers. During those years, Posada was a hero. Even maids and peasants knew his stuff. He had a little shop right near the school where he hung his pictures. Every day, Diego used to press his fat little nose against the pane and watch him work. One day the engraver asked him in and they became friends. Diego always said that Posada was one of his most important influences because Posada created art for the people, and that’s what Diego wanted to do too.
In those days, before the Revolution, students were always protesting about one thing or another, and Diego always had to be in the middle of everything. Before long he got caught up in some riots and was expelled. It was a blessing in disguise.
He picked up his paints and his brushes and left the classrooms, the rules, and the theorists. For four years he roamed the Mexican countryside, painting whatever he saw, the spectacular and the mundane, which at times were one and the same. Indians with expressionless faces, purple volcanoes against topaz skies, serene landscapes. He also painted a portrait of his mother.
“Oh my God,” she cried when she saw it. “Who is that bulky, common-looking woman with the deformed body? Now I know you don’t love me!” That story became a family legend.
Most of Diego’s other paintings pleased not only Mrs. Rivera, but also the public. His reputation was growing. Still, how far could he go if he just kept on doing what he was doing? Europe was the heart—and the navel—of the universe. Everything was being churned up over there—politics, art, science, sex. Diego was having fun in Mexico, carousing in bars and brothels, but he knew he really wanted something else. The best teachers were abroad; Europe was like a distant, beckoning star. Papá Rivera couldn’t finance a trip, and Diego grew bored and sulky. He painted less and less. He was always a hypochondriac, and he became convinced he was going blind. Señor Rivera saw that he had to find a way to challenge his son. A talent, like a precious flower, withers without proper nourishment.
At the time, Diego Senior was an inspector in the National Department of Public Health. When yellow fever broke out in the southeast, he saw his chance. He left for Veracruz to do a report on the medical situation and took his son with him, but left the boy in Jalapa, the state capital, where he would be out of danger. The new surroundings worked like peyote. Colors became radiant; forms became distinct and arresting. Once again Diego could really see the world—hues, patterns, contrasts, shapes—and he filled his canvases, this time with semitropical vegetation and delicate colonial houses. Diego Senior was thrilled. His plan was working. Next, he arranged for the governor of the state, Teodoro Dehesa, to see his son’s work. As Diego Senior had hoped, the governor loved it and used his clout to get the boy a scholarship to study abroad. Diego’s dream had come true, and so had his father’s. Two for one, because they were the same dream.
Just before Diego left for Spain—it must have been around 1907—there was a big rally in the textile mills. The cavalry charged the workers, and soldiers fired at close range on men, women, and even children, leaving heaps of bodies on the blood-drenched earth. Diego saw it all, and it was something he would never forget. It helped make him a true revolutionary who used art to educate the people and tell their story. Much later, when he painted the murals at the National Palace, he incorporated that scene. It’s on the left wall. You’ve probably seen it. A row of peasants facing soldiers who are pointing guns right at them. It gives you goose bumps.
Diego left a country in chaos, but he was headed for greater chaos still. I don’t know too much about Spain, but I know from what Diego told me that she had lost her last colonies not long before in a war against the United States, and that set off a national disaster. Republicans wanted to get rid of the monarchy. Socialism and anarchism were winning converts left and right, and strikes were breaking out all over. The monarchists were shooting at people, the socialists passed out leaflets, the revolutionaries made bombs and burned down factories, and the republicans drew up one constitution after the other. It was as bad over there as back home.
Diego didn’t learn so much about art in Spain, but he did learn something about politics. He listened, he watched, and he got caught up in the revolutionary rhetoric. He spent hours in cafés talking. Diego was never much of a reader, but he began to skim anarchist pamphlets. He purchased a copy of Marx’s Das Capital and read a few pages.
The ideas people were throwing around weren’t new to him. He had already heard them during the student protests in Mexico City and in the mill workers’ strike. “But during those first few months in Madrid,” Diego once told me, “everything seemed finally to come together.”
His imagination was going wild! He took off for the north, making his way through Belgium, Holland, and England, drinking in the popular culture. He studied the great masters. I can’t remember their names right now … Breughel, Hogarth … I can’t remember. He met other painters, writers, activists. And he slept with lots of women. He wasn’t at all shy about talking about it. When Frida first met him, she didn’t mind hearing about his conquests. She was proud of his success as a lover. Later, though, his affairs devastated her. Especially …
I always knew that Diego belonged to other women. He was never mine alone, although sometimes he would tell me I was his favorite. I didn’t make demands on him, like Frida. I wasn’t temperamental. I was—how can I say it?—a refuge …
Wherever he went, Diego caused a commotion. People turned around to look at him. Frida used to call him a walking hyperbole. How do you like that, doctor? A walking hyperbole. Frida knew words like that. And that’s what he was, an exaggeration. Everything about him was excessive. His belly poured over his belt. His clothes were outlandish. He was extravagantly filthy because he never took a bath, never washed his things, never brushed his hair. In Brussels he took up with María Gutiérrez Blanchard, a painter who was part French and part Spanish. He would have been a strange enough character on his own, but when he walked down the boulevard with her—a dwarf-size hunchback—the eyes of passersby popped out of their heads.
He told a million stories about those days in Belgium. He was good at spinning yarns, and he never let the truth get in the way of a good story. According to him, a fire broke out one night in Brussels, so he grabbed an armful of paintings and ran out in the street, only to realize later that he had forgotten to put on his pants! Maybe it was true, who knows? Diego was very comfortable with his pants off. María introduced him to the Russian émigré painter Angelina Beloff, and Angelina soon replaced her friend as Diego’s bed partner. But neither affair prevented him from sleeping with whatever other women came along. Attractive ones, ugly ones, fat ones, thin ones—every woman from the hooker on the street to the flower vendor on the corner to the society matron in the salon. How do I know? He talked about it all the time.
Diego wound up where all aspiring artists had to wind up, in Paris. He shared an apartment with María and Angelina. That was a favorite arrangement of his—being shared by women. Since all three valued art over cleanliness, no one bothered scrubbing the floors or even washing the dishes. The stench got so bad that the neighbors called the police.
In those days, all the famous painters were in Paris—Cézanne, Rousseau, Picasso, Klee. Diego saw paintings that were totally different from anything he had seen before. “I was thrilled to the roots of my hair!” he told me. Or maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe he was talking to Frida and I was just there. He wandered around the city looking at galleries. He got so excited he developed a fever. At least, that’s what he said.
He started to paint. He made friends with Picasso, and his style began to develop and change. Before long, he had built quite a reputation in Paris, and people were talking about him here at home as well. When Díaz began to make plans for an art exhibition to celebrate his regime’s thirty-year anniversary, he invited Diego to take part in the festivities.
The day it opened, Madero launched his revolt. Zapata led the peasant uprising in the south, and Villa in the north. Diego forgot the exhibition. He was dazzled by what he was witnessing. All those discussions in European cafés, all those abstract ideas taking form right here at home. Words made action! Diego was completely taken by Zapata. Here was a real revolutionary hero, larger than life. The man on the white horse who would appear in so many of his paintings.
He was so excited, you might think he would have stayed until the end of the war. But he didn’t stay. He returned to Paris.
In Mexico, revolution was transforming the country, but in France, cubism was transforming art. Diego must have felt torn. Or maybe not. He was an artist, not a warrior. In fact, I would say that Diego had none of the qualities of a warrior. He wasn’t brave, and he wasn’t disciplined, except when it came to painting. He detested regimentation, and he was incapable of following orders. He loved the idea of revolution, but wars were something other people fought. When World War I broke out, he made a kind of halfhearted attempt to enlist in the French Army because that’s what all of his friends were doing, but he didn’t really want to go. Long marches in the mud weren’t his style. Fortunately for him, the recruitment officers felt that, with his huge bulk, he was too conspicuous a target and rejected him. No, Diego was no soldier. A soldier has to be willing to make sacrifices. Diego didn’t like to make sacrifices. What he liked was for other people to sacrifice themselves for him. He was egocentric and self-indulgent. I’m not criticizing, really. An artist has to be that way. Diego was too caught up in the spell of cubism to waste his time cleaning muskets. You know what cubism is, don’t you? Cubism is where you reduce things to their geometric forms—rectangles, circles. Listen, you can’t live a lifetime around people like Frida and Diego and not learn an awful lot, because they knew everything about art and they were always talking about it. I had to pick up something. I’m not as dumb as Frida used to say.
Diego painted a lot of cubist paintings, but after a while he got tired of the Paris avant-garde. As far as he was concerned, cubism had become just another school with theories and rules. He wanted to produce art that was more authentic, more his. Nostalgia for Mexico began to creep into his paintings. Zapata on a white horse! A lot of Diego’s friends had gone off to the war, and he felt left behind. The ones who stayed in Paris were mostly foreigners, and they were starving. With bombs exploding everywhere, no one was interested in buying art. So what was the point in being there?
“¡Bombas! ¡Bombas!” Diego would cry, flailing his froglike arms. “¡Bombas! Everywhere bombas! ¡Pum! ¡Gapum!” He was describing a tragedy, but Frida and I would burst out laughing.
His scholarship funds were used up. They were all in the same boat—Diego, Picasso, Juan Gris, Modigliani, Lipschitz. All poor, I mean. “When one of us sold a piece,” he told me, “we would all eat.” Only sometimes no one sold a piece for weeks, even months. According to him, once he went five days without eating. Can you believe that?
Diego had friends and he had women, but he was still a foreigner among foreigners, too involved in his own work to be really one of the crowd. He painted from dawn until dusk, driving himself until he was tipsy from exhaustion. His behavior became weird. He rambled on about being possessed by spirits. He became convinced that his liver and kidneys were diseased, and went on strange diets. One day he thought his eyeballs had become too big for their sockets. Another day, he thought his heartbeat was irregular, his bowel movements were too black, his skin was full of blotches. Sometimes he felt his immense body growing, growing, growing right out of his baggy clothes. He complained that the room was becoming tight and suffocating. He ran to the window to give himself space to expand because he felt his torso inflating like an immense blob and spreading all over Paris.
People know that Diego was a great painter. What they don’t know is that he was crazy. He was impossible to live with, yet women fought over him. María, Angelina, and later Marievna. Lupe and Frida.
I guess it’s that women are drawn to genius. Or maybe it’s that Diego was such a big baby that women couldn’t resist taking care of him. Or maybe he was just sexy in spite of his flaws, and when he was in a good mood, he made you feel really beautiful and important. He threw out María and shared his room only with Angelina, who became his common-law wife. But when Angelina got pregnant, he flew into a rage. He didn’t want ties and he didn’t want distractions.
“I’ll throw the kid out the window!” he screamed.
He found solace in the arms of another émigré, Marievna Vorobiev-Stebeleska, the daughter of a Jewish actress and a Pole who served as a Russian official. Marievna, who knew what had happened to Angelina, started their affair with two gifts: a pair of Siamese cats and a condom. Between his two Russian mistresses and their émigré friends, Diego learned to speak Russian pretty well, which is why some of the Cachuchas were convinced that he really was a Russian. It was a skill that served him to argue politics in Paris cafés and later to insult Soviet bigwigs who pretended to be connoisseurs of art.
Angelina had Diego’s baby. When their son, Dieguito, was born, Diego did learn to change diapers. But the winter was too cold and the living conditions too awful, and the child died when he was two. Diego cried. In spite of everything, he cried. Marievna wound up having a baby as well—a little girl she named Marika. Diego denied he was the girl’s father, but I’ve seen pictures, and she looks just like him. He must have thought so too, because for years he sent her money.
Things were rotten in Paris, and Diego was getting homesick. The cubists got on his nerves, and he fought with Picasso. The Russian Revolution was promising a new world order, and Diego began to think about his responsibility as a painter in Mexico, where the new revolutionary regime was in place. He left for home, promising both Angelina and Marievna that he would send for them. He never did.
Diego’s timing was perfect. He returned to Mexico in 1921, just when Vasconcelos was pushing the idea that art should be used to educate the masses. He was planning a giant construction program—schools, libraries—and he wanted the public buildings to be adorned with murals that would teach Mexicans their own history, their own values. Mexican people, the Mexican landscape, the rich folklore of Mexico, those were things that stimulated Diego’s creative juices. Vasconcelos invited him to participate in his mural program, and Diego, who had seen a lot of public art in Italy, could not think of a single thing he’d like to do more. That’s how he came to be painting his allegory in the Bolívar Amphitheater at the Prepa, where my sister barged in on him.
Is it hard for me to talk about Diego? What a strange question. No, not at all. I spent so many years by his side. Perhaps I knew him better than anybody, even better than Frida. Hard? Well, maybe a little. After all, when you love someone … Yes, I did love him. He was an outrageous man, but he was so—so vibrant, like a revved-up machine. He was ferocious about everything—food, love, music, politics, art. Especially art. He attacked his mural assignments with the savagery of a wildcat. Yes, he was careful, yes, he was meticulous. But I’m not talking about technique. I’m talking about passion. His passion made him so exciting to be around, and so demoralizing too, because that passion could crush you. It could run you over and flatten you like a tortilla. But what I loved the most about Diego was that he treated me … like a real person. He told me about his experiences in Paris, about his little son who died, about Picasso, about the Latin Quarter.
Diego talked about himself all the time. He was completely self-absorbed. That’s why I can tell you so much about him. All right, some of his stories weren’t true, a lot of them were exaggerations—excuse me, hyperboles—but he talked to me as if he enjoyed talking to me, as if I weren’t stupid. So you see, I can tell you what he said, even if I can’t guarantee that it’s true. Frida was self-absorbed too. That’s why they fought, why they got on each other’s nerves. They both had to be the center of attention all the time. If you want to know the truth, I think they both needed me, and I’ll tell you why. Because I didn’t make demands. I didn’t jabber all the time. I didn’t have to be the star. I learned early on, when I was just a little girl, that I would never be the star, and I was better off for it. I never tried to compete. So they both clung to me. I was an oasis.
The things Diego told me, they make for a good story. Look at how you’re listening to me, hanging on to my every word. Not just because it’s your job, but because you’re fascinated by the great Diego Rivera.
Frida was a lot like him. She was an incredible girl. No matter how much she irritated you, you couldn’t help loving her. I loved her more than any person on earth, except, of course, my own children. That’s why when people say now, after all these years, that … that I destroyed her, I can’t bear it. I just can’t. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I suddenly break down sometimes. It’s that it’s so unfair … I loved her so much … We were so close. Listen—listen to this. One day, when she was still at the Prepa—it wasn’t a school day—one day I walked into the bedroom and let out a yelp.
“Frida! Your hair! What did you do to it?”
Frida, dressed in a man’s suit complete with vest and tie, was admiring her new look in the mirror. Her nails were beautifully lacquered and her lips painted bright red. That was the style among the avant-garde set: men’s clothes, but lots of makeup. Frida was delighted with my shocked reaction. She also liked the fact that the trousers covered her thin leg.
“Answer me, Frida!” I yelled at her. “What did you do to your hair?”
“I had it bobbed, you twit! Everyone’s doing it. You should do it too!”
“Me? Never!”
“You’ll get it done,” she said smugly. “Everything I do, you do … eventually.” Neither of us knew at the time how prophetic those words would turn out to be. “Anyway,” she went on, “the Cachuchas love it. Especially Alex. He adores it. That’s what I appreciate about him, he’s not like those old-fashioned men who expect women to wear their hair in curls and faint at the sight of a dick!”
“Frida!” I must have looked horrified. Frida climbed on the bed and began to massage my back.
“Don’t be such a prude, Cristina. I hate middle-class prudery. Sometimes you sound just like Mami.” But her voice was gentle, not taunting.
“I don’t sound anything like Mami,” I said. “Anyway, Mami doesn’t care anything about me. She’s still crying over Maty.” Frida and Papá had found her living in the Doctores neighborhood with her boyfriend, and ever since, Mami had been impossible. She wanted to see her, but when Maty came to visit, she wouldn’t let her in the house. And when Maty stayed away and didn’t at least try to visit, Mami got furious.
“She thinks it’s my fault, doesn’t she?” said Frida. “She thinks I tore the family apart by helping Maty escape.”
I didn’t answer.
“I hate being at home. I’d rather be at school with the Cachuchas.”
“You and your Cachuchas are going to get yourself thrown out of the Preparatoria.”
“Don’t be stupid, Cristi. We’re careful and we work together. Besides, we’re a hell of a lot smarter than the teachers.”
Frida really believed that. She thought she and her friends were invulnerable because they were cleverer than anyone else.
“Papá is going to kill you when he finds out how many classes you’ve cut.” I was thinking of telling him about it myself. We had so many money problems, and here Frida was fooling around in school. I had to work. I worked for a printer, laying out the pages. Why shouldn’t Frida have to work too?
“Why go to classes taught by stupid, boring teachers?” she snapped.
“The teachers are stupid and boring? I thought this was supposed to be such a hotshot school! It sounds to me like Mami is right. All you do is waste your time there.”
I remember looking up at the ceiling and pouting. Frida got off the bed and walked across the room. She took something out of her knapsack with a grandiose gesture. I stared at her in disbelief. It was a cigarette! A cigarette already rolled and ready to light. When she was sure I was looking good and hard, she lit it, took a long drag, and blew the smoke out through her nose.
My eyes must have been as enormous as balloons. “You’re smoking!”
Frida smirked. “Of course I’m smoking,” she said. “We all smoke.”
“Mami will kill you!”
Frida struck a vamplike pose in front of the mirror and watched herself take another drag. She contracted her lips into a sensuous pucker and blew smoke rings at the glass.
“Who taught you to do that? Alex?”
“Maybe.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“Maybe.” She picked up a pillow and threw it at me. “I guess so.”
“What do you do together?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean!” I said.
“We don’t do anything together, you idiot! We go to the library together. We read books together. We talk about stuff. We play tricks on the teachers.”
“Do you kiss him?”
“Do you let him touch you?”
Frida looked at me as though I were some kind of prehistoric toad. “What’s wrong with that?” she said, shaking her head as if the question was too mindless to answer, but out of compassion for a lesser being she was going to answer it anyway. “I love it when he touches me.”
“Do you let him touch you, you know, down there?” I could hardly talk because I could hardly breathe. I wondered if Frida could tell.
She made a lewd movement with her tongue. “Wouldn’t you like to know, you little dimwit.” She blew a smoke ring toward me. “But to answer your question, yes, I do love him.”
And she did, too. Alex was the knight on horseback, the fierce revolutionary, the rebel. He was the idealist and the ideal. Zapata, Rudolph Valentino, and Don Quijote all rolled into one. Frida adored him with that girlish passion that lets you dream of utopias and enchanted isles and endless, misty moonlit nights.
That’s why what followed really shocked me.
Frida was sitting on the bed now, blowing willowy smoke rings toward the window.
“Tell me your secret dream,” she whispered. “Your most secret, secret dream. The one thing you want more than anything.” I thought she was teasing. I thought that whatever I said, she would make fun of me. Even so, I told the truth.
“I’d like to be a movie star, like Emma Padilla.” Emma Padilla was my idol.
Frida didn’t laugh. Instead, she asked: “Do you know what my ambition is?” She looked me straight in the eyes.
Then, without waiting for me to answer, she said: “My ambition is to have Diego Rivera’s baby!”
I was speechless. She was looking at me, waiting for me to react.
“Are you crazy?” I said finally. At the time, I couldn’t imagine my sister wanting to go to bed with that fat, greasy man. I had never seen him in person, but I had seen pictures.
“He’s old!” I cried. “He’s thirty-six! And he’s repulsive!” That was all I could think of to say. Thirty-six! Thirty-six seemed ancient to me. After a long pause, I added, “He’d squash you!”
I shook my head. “What about Alejandro?”
“I still love Alex.”
“Well, you can’t want both of them! You can’t love two different people.”
“Why not? Men do it!”
I just couldn’t believe that I was hearing what I was hearing.
“Does Diego Rivera even know you’re alive?” I asked her. “Have you talked to him, really talked to him face to face, since that day you barged into the amphitheater?”
The answer was no, but that didn’t concern Frida. I don’t really know what was going through her head. Did she have a crush on Diego? Did she just want to knock me off my feet with her gall? You tell me.
She took another drag on her cigarette.
“Frida, teach me to do that, will you?” I had to change the subject. Those disturbing things that Frida was saying were making me dizzy.
“I don’t know, escuincla, you’re kinda young.” But she rolled a fresh cigarette and handed it to me.
“What do I do?” I asked her.
“Put it in your mouth, stupid!” She showed me how to light it, and I inhaled deeply, the way Frida had. The cheap black tobacco produced an awful stink and the smoke stung going down my throat. I tried not to cough, but that only made it worse. I began to sputter. My chest hurt. My eyes burned. Tears ran down my cheeks. I could feel my face turning splotchy and my nose starting to run.
Frida was laughing hysterically. She sat down on the bed and threw her arms around me. “Poor baby,” she cooed between jags of laughter. “Poor baby.” She kissed me on the cheek.
Now I was laughing too.
“Stick with me, kid,” said Frida, patting me gently on the back. “I’ll teach you everything.”
“Yeah,” I said, putting out the cigarette and resting my head in Frida’s lap. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”