IT DIDN’T TAKE FRIDA LONG TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SNEAK INTO THE amphitheater without banging down the door, and the shenanigans that followed made for fables and legends. What I want to know is this: Why did they tell this story over and over? Why did these three people—Lupe, Diego, and my sister—people who had done fascinating things during their lives, find such pleasure in sitting around and telling stories about when one of them was a schoolgirl? Especially when that girl stole the other woman’s lover! Does this make sense to you? Frida would tell the story, then Diego would elaborate, then Lupe, then Frida again. Why?
One day Diego’s lunch was missing. He was furious. Lupe insisted that she had left it right by the scaffold, but it wasn’t there, and Diego carried on as though he was facing a calamity of tragic proportions. That’s the way he was. He transformed any minor inconvenience into a catastrophe. Inconvenience to himself, that is. If he inconvenienced you by sitting on your sofa and crushing it, or forgot to show up at the dinner party you had spent three weeks planning, that was just an excusable oversight, an insignificant slip-up.
“Here’s another lunch,” Lupe said. “One of your admirers must have left it.” She pointed to a small, plain basket sitting in a corner.
“No one has been here yet today,” complained Diego. “Not Teresa, not Leonarda, not Flavia.” Diego had a whole harem that came to watch him work, and what would you bring a fat man you were crazy to impress? Food, of course. They always brought food. “Those women love me!” he sniveled. “Not like you! You say you care, but you’re trying to starve me.”
Lupe shrugged. Diego was a man of appetites. When he was hungry, he wanted to eat. When he was tired, he wanted to sleep. When he was horny, he wasn’t interested in talking about it, in pondering whether it was appropriate or not, or even whether it was possible or not. No. If he wanted to do something, then he expected to be able to do it.
Lupe handed him the basket. “Here,” she said. “One of those bitches you go to when you’re not with me must have left it.”
He stuck his hand in and pulled out a luscious-looking slice of watermelon, but his sensitive artist’s fingers knew immediately that the texture and weight were all wrong. “What’s this?”
“It looks like a slice of watermelon,” said Lupe.
“It has nothing at all to do with a slice of watermelon,” snorted Diego.
Of course. A piece of papier-mâché feels nothing like a slice of watermelon.
“You’re right,” Lupe said, taking back the reins. “It doesn’t look like fruit at all.”
They investigated the wicker and found a covered platter with enchiladas made of real tortillas filled with pebbles and rags and floating in a muddy sauce, a thermos of something slimy, papier-mâché sweets, a rotten banana.
Frida, watching from her hiding place in the balcony of the amphitheater, burst into hysterics. Diego, ravished and humiliated, grabbed the basket and hurled it in the direction of the laughter with such force that it splintered against a wall. Pebbles and mud flew about wildly. Then he sat down on the floor with his face in his hands and started to sob like an orphaned child. Lupe shrugged again and walked away in disgust.
Diego got up and faced the balcony. “Who’s there?” he shouted.
Frida didn’t say a word.
“Who’s there?” he shouted again. And then, inexplicably, he threw back his head and roared with glee. He hooted and snorted until he shook. Lupe laughed too, and Frida, with feigned meekness, stood up and let herself be discovered.
“You!” said Diego. “You again!
I don’t know exactly what happened then, but I suppose Frida gave back the lunch Lupe had packed and they all sat down and ate together.
You know, this is terrible to say, well, maybe not terrible, but sort of pretentious—sometimes I think that Frida was the dumb one. Not dumb in book learning, but Frida was so childish, the way she’d get all giddy when she told about her days at the Prepa, even after she was a grown woman. It was as if she was holding on to her girlhood, living in the past. Maybe to escape all the pain. I hate to think of Frida in pain. Especially since I was sometimes the cause.
For a little while after that, the tricks continued. Once Frida spent hours on all fours rubbing the steps of the amphitheater with a bar of soap. The idea was that Diego would skid and go kerplop like the guys who slipped on banana peels in music-hall skits. Did she want him to break his neck? Is that what you do to a man whose baby you want to have? Actually, Diego didn’t fall. Like a frog that moves and waits, moves and waits, he made his way step by step. But the next day elegant old Antonio Caso came ambling down the stairs, and pum! Landed hard on his ass!
It continued for months. One day she filled Diego’s hat with mud. Another day she tried to mix up his paints and left a dead iguana in his pocket. Kid stuff. Stupid stuff. And then, something happened.
On November 23, 1923, a rebellion against President Obregón brought the government to a halt. It was a messy time. Obregón was trying to carry forward the agrarian reform the revolutionaries wanted, but the landowners were battling him tooth and nail. You Americans made it hard for him too, because you were afraid you were going to lose your oil holdings. By Christmas, the fighting had spread all over the city. Obregón sent in the troops, seven thousand people died. Vasconcelos resigned, although later he agreed to go back to his old post. Students all over Mexico protested in support of the minister of education, and the Cachuchas were in the middle of everything, screaming, throwing bottles, marching, scribbling graffiti. Except for Frida. Frida stayed at home.
“It’s chaos out there,” said Mami. “You’re not going.”
Frida protested that her friends were risking their lives, but Mami wouldn’t budge.
Frida sulked, but for once she obeyed. She yearned to join her schoolmates. She felt lonely and useless and even guilty because we were nice and comfortable here in Coyoacán while her friends were getting their heads bloodied in the streets. Besides, Frida loved to be in the middle of the fray. She wandered from room to room, looking for something to do. Sometimes she read books. Books on oriental art, on impressionism, on Indian totems. For someone who thought of herself as a revolutionary, she didn’t keep up much with events. She never looked at the newspapers. Sometimes she helped Mami with the chores. We had only a few servants left, and there were always errands to run, clothes to mend, meals to prepare, plants to care for. Mami was such a perfect homemaker, and she taught all of us girls to be good homemakers too. Even wild, rebellious Frida. With her eye for detail and her artist’s touch, she loved to fill space with objects, colors, forms. She could turn a room into a masterpiece with a few flowers, an exquisitely placed doily, a piece of pottery or a papier-mâché ornament. She adored Mexican handicrafts and knew how to combine a traditional French love seat with a gaudily painted wooden chair so that they looked as though they were made to go together. She rearranged our bedroom, carefully choosing the right position for each painting, vase, and knickknack, and she hissed at me when I moved anything. But redecorating didn’t fill her life, nor did the endless social obligations of a middle-class Mexican family—visits to the neighbors, outings and receptions, parties, First Communions, weddings, and baptisms. Frida went, but she was bored. Her mind was elsewhere.
She wasn’t thinking about Diego Rivera. No. She was thinking about Alex. She had forgotten all about wanting to have Diego’s baby.
She wrote to Alex nearly every day. She spent hours and hours penning poems, decorating pages with sketches. She never showed the letters to me. Sometimes she hardly even spoke to me, except to complain that I was a stupid escuincla who didn’t even know the difference between, who knows, Marx and Santa Claus. It was as though she blamed me for all the awful things that were happening. She would snap at me to leave her alone, accusing me of trying to read her letters, steal her cigarettes, ruin her clothes. And then, on rare occasions, she would cling to me, call me her muñequita preciosa, her precious little doll. She would tell me stories about the Cachuchas, about the tricks they had played. She would say that she loved me, that she would always take care of me no matter what.
We would go to church together and take communion. “I’m praying for Alex and all the Cachuchas,” she told me. She would go to confession, then come home crying because she had forgotten to mention some important sin and taken communion anyway. Other days, she would say that she was beginning not to believe in confession. “Why should I tell my secrets to some guy in skirts?” she would say. “Why should I tell him about Alex and me, when he’s never even been with a woman and doesn’t have the teeniest idea what it’s all about?”
It got to be January, and Frida still hadn’t registered for the next semester. There wasn’t much time left, but Mami said she couldn’t sign up for classes until things calmed down in the city. Hardly any of the Cachuchas came to visit, but rumors reached Frida that Alex had started seeing Agustina Reyna. “La Reyna, how could she!” Frida sobbed into my lap.
January came and went, and the crisis continued. Frida didn’t return to the Prepa that semester, and in the days that followed, she seemed to grow more and more forlorn. What could I do? I tried to comfort her, but to tell you the truth, she wasn’t very nice to be around. Besides, I was busy with my own friends.
At last, Frida made a decision.
“I don’t care what Mami says,” she told me. “I’m going to the city. I have to see Alex.”