SEPTEMBER 17, 1925. WHEN I REMEMBER THAT DAY, I SEE A RIOT OF crows. I see shattered glass and rivers of blood, wolves devouring maggot-infested meat, swords piercing writhing bodies, battered roses, muddied corpses, dissected embryos, urine-splattered crucifixes, feces, vomit, tears, death. I see death. I can’t bear to think about it, and yet I think about it all the time. Even now. Even though it happened nearly forty years ago.
It was supposed to be a wonderful day.
I had stopped seeing Eusebio, not because I didn’t like him anymore, but because I had met Antonio Pinedo. I thought my parents would adore Pinedo, especially Mami. He had a job. He kept his nails perfectly trimmed and went to mass. I was young and still at an age where I thought you could make people love you by doing what they wanted. Pinedo was taken with me because I had a full, soft figure and demanded very little. I had set my mind to making him marry me, so I flirted relentlessly, and he fell into my trap like a grasshopper into a spiderweb. After that business about Frida and Leticia Santiago, our name had been pretty much dragged through the mud. Even the servants were embarrassed. I figured it was up to me to redeem the family honor and supposed that while I was at it, I could earn the everlasting gratitude of my parents. September 17 was the day I thought Pinedo was going to talk to Papá, but as it turned out, fate changed the reel. I wasn’t the star of the show that day. Frida was.
The afternoon was gray, and maybe that was a sign. But maybe not. Most September afternoons were gray, and anyhow, Frida didn’t care about the atmospheric pressure. She and Alejandro had reconciled, and she was positively giddy when she left for the city to be with him. Alejandro was attentive, more attentive than he had been in months. The two of them wandered hand in hand through the Zócalo district. Street stalls had been set up for the Mexican National Day celebrations, and vendors hawked their wares with the kind of jubilation reserved for holidays.
“¡Cómpreme este muñeco, señorita!” “Buy this doll from me, miss!”
“¡Cómpreme este títere, señor!” “Buy this puppet from me, sir!”
A brightly colored miniature parasol caught Frida’s eye, and Alex bought it for her.
“It’s for a doll,” he told her, “and since you’re a little doll, I’ll buy it for you!” Alex paid for the trinket and gave it to Frida, and she stood on her toes to kiss him on the lips. The vendor cheered them on. “¡Andale, hijo!”
“See?” said Frida. “These people are never embarrassed by love. Only stupid middle-class people like my mother make a big deal about things that are perfectly natural!”
Strangely, I have a clearer recollection of Frida’s afternoon than my own. I wasn’t there, but we had long hours to talk about it afterward. Long hours while Frida recovered. But it’s more than that. When something happened to Frida, I reinvented it, relived it my mind over and over again, until it was as though I had been there.
The two lovebirds made their way through the streets, stopping to buy a taco or a churro. A light rain forced them to take refuge under a nearby awning, but after a while they ventured out again. Afternoon showers are an almost daily phenomenon here, don’t forget. No one really pays attention to them. Frida and Alex started toward the plaza and ran into some school chums. They lingered to chat a while, then examined the wares in front of the cathedral, silvery and spectral in the rain.
“It’s getting late, mi amor,” said Frida with a sigh. “I have to get going.”
“Parting is such sweet sorrow!” declaimed Alex melodramatically.
Frida laughed. “Shut up, you lunkhead. Can’t you at least find a Mexican poet to quote?”
“Como hermana y hermano / vamos los dos cogidos de la mano …” (“Like sister and brother / we’ll go hand in hand …”)
“I don’t recognize it, but it sounds like shit!”
“It’s not shit! It’s Enrique González Martínez. You said to quote a Mexican poet.”
“Yeah, but I don’t like this brother and sister stuff. I’m not your sister, I’m your woman!”
Alex grabbed her around the waist and kissed her on the neck, and they took off in the direction of the trolley.
“God, you’re in a hurry to get rid of me,” complained Frida.
“Don’t call me God, just call me Alex!”
She poked him in the ribs and he tweaked her cheek.
They reached the trolley, and he helped her board. But all of a sudden, Frida wailed and jumped down.
“What’s the matter?”
“My parasol! The little parasol that you bought for me. I must have left it at one of the stands where we bought food or something. Come on, let’s go back and look for it.”
They retraced their steps, and when they didn’t find it, they returned to the vendor who had sold it to them.
“Come,” said Alex, “I’ll buy you another. I can’t let my little chamaca be unhappy, can I?”
But the parasols were all gone.
“I’m sorry, señor,” said the vendor. “Maybe the señorita would like something else. Here’s a nice balero.”
The man showed them a carved wooden cup with a wooden ball attached by a string. He swung the ball around a couple of times, then caught it in the cup to show how easy it was. Alex paid for it and they took off.
A gaily painted wooden bus stopped on the corner. Buses were a curiosity, a novelty in Mexico City. They hadn’t been running for very long, and they attracted crowds of people—something like a roller coaster at an amusement park. Sometimes Frida would take me to the city just to ride the bus.
“Come on,” said Frida. “Let’s take this. You can transfer to the trolley later on.”
Alex and Frida darted toward the door of the clunky vehicle.
The driver had decorated the dashboard with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and faded pinups with fixed plastic smiles. A rosary dangled from the rearview mirror.
A bench ran along either side of the bus, which was packed, although Alex and Frida finally found seats toward the back. Across from them a woman in a rebozo nursed an infant, and a worker in a large sombrero pulled out a cigarette and lit up, jovially offering smokes to his fellow passengers. Toward the front, a housepainter with splattered overalls closed his eyes and waited for the bus to move. Between his feet, he balanced a can of paint, and in his hand he held a packet of gold-colored powder.
The driver was a young, mustachioed mestizo with a kind of nervous aggressiveness. He pulled out cockily into the busy street. He seemed to think that since the bus was bigger than the automobiles and carts, the other drivers would just have to watch out for him. Like a hotheaded knight rushing into the fray, he pushed ahead without checking for danger. A car swerved to the left to get clear. The driver bore down on the horn.
They were nearing the San Juan Market, at the corner of Cuahutemotzín and Cinco de Mayo. A two-car trolley from Xochimilco was approaching. The bus driver was about to turn onto Calzada de Tlalpán, but the oncoming train was in his way. He slowed down for a second, then gauged his distance and decided he could make it. The train proceeded slowly but steadily, as if the trolley engineer was challenging the bus driver for the right-of-way. The bus driver forged ahead. And then it happened. The trolley bulldozed the bus, hitting it right in the middle and ramming it against a wall.
The bus didn’t break right away. Curiously supple, it yielded to the pressure, bending and contorting crazily before it snapped. Suddenly Alex found himself nose to nose with the worker with the cigarette, and Frida found herself in the lap of the nursing mother. It happened instantaneously, yet things seemed to be moving in slow motion. Objects floated lazily above them—a newspaper, a wedding band, a baby blanket, a pinup, a paintbrush, keys, cigarettes, a ball of yarn, gold-colored speckles. And then, with an excruciating crash, the vehicle shattered. People were hurled onto the tracks in a tempest of wood and metal. Meanwhile, the trolley moved forward slowly, deliberately, as if to claim victory over its adversary.
Alex was thrown under the train. He opened his eyes to find a metal chassis above his head and mangled bodies all around. Two or three people were dead. Others were nearly dead. Somewhere, a baby was crying.
In an instant he sized up the position of the rods. If the train moved forward another centimeter, it would slice him to pieces. Cautiously, Alex worked his way out from the pinched space. The front of his coat had disappeared, but he seemed to have no serious injuries. He looked around for Frida.
He found her in the street, bathed in blood, totally nude. Her clothes had been torn off by the force of the collision. The housepainter’s packet had burst and covered her with specks of gold, giving her an eerie, carnivalesque appearance.
“¡Miren a la pequeña bailarina!” shouted a man. “Look at the little dancer!” He must have thought she looked like a circus performer, all covered in red and gold. Or maybe she reminded him of a dancer because her body was so slight and delicate and graceful.
Shattered glass and rivers of blood. Exposed entrails. Crushed skulls. Twisted metal and twisted limbs. The stench of bile and terror. Screams. Sobs. Sirens.
Blood oozed from Frida’s body. An iron handrail had pierced her pelvis from one side to the other. But she didn’t know what had happened to her. Maybe she was hysterical, or delirious, or numb. “My balero!” she kept crying. “Where’s my balero? Don’t tell me I’ve lost that too!”
Alex watched in horror as Frida groped for her toy, oblivious to the rod that impaled her. He tried to calm her, to keep her from moving. He threw what was left of his coat over her and picked her up. Frida continued to twist and cry, “My balero!” The huge piece of iron moved with her body.
A familiar-looking man came running up to Alex.
“Is that Frida Kahlo? Oh my God! What’s that thing she’s got sticking into her? We have to get that out!” He grabbed the iron rod.
Alex was frantic. “Who are you?” he screamed.
“I work at the school. What difference does it make? Here! Put her down! Someone call an ambulance!”
The man pinned Frida’s body in place with his knee and yanked. Frida shrieked with pain. Blood gushed from her wound. Together the man and Alex carried her to a nearby billiard hall and laid her by the window. Alex stroked her hand, but Frida didn’t even know he was there. She was in too much agony.
They didn’t hear the Red Cross ambulance come because Frida’s wailing blocked out the siren. Alex helped the medics ease her onto a stretcher and transport her to the hospital on San Jerónimo Street. All the time he was praying, “Please don’t let her die, dear God. Please, please don’t let her die.” He was a revolutionary, of course, but at moments like those, you forget about politics and just pray. By the time they got to the hospital, he was exhausted and nearly hysterical.
A weary nurse with a large mole above her lip took his arm. The mole seemed to expand and contract as she spoke, and Alex had to focus on that mole in order to keep from collapsing at her feet. All the nurses wore ankle-length white tunics tied at the waist and a wimple with a red cross on it. In the rarefied air of the hospital, they seemed like specters that floated in and out of ill-defined spaces, nodules of light that appeared and disappeared, angels who guided dazed pilgrims to safety.
“Come,” she said. “You can’t stay here. They have to get the young lady ready for surgery.”
“Will she be all right?”
The mole remained motionless.
“Tell me, will she be all right?”
“It’s in God’s hands,” she murmured finally. “If he wishes to save her, he will work through us.”
“I wanted to squash that mole, and with it, that voice that seemed to come from an apparition,” Alex told me. He was screaming at the nurse in his mind: “Stop talking about Jesus and tell me if Frida’s going to be all right!” But he didn’t say it out loud. He was too upset, too consumed with fear. He just sat down and waited.
The doctor’s prognosis wasn’t encouraging: multiple fractures, deep wounds.
“Have her parents been notified?” Alex asked when he got his wits about him.
“Not yet. There hasn’t been time.” The doctor sighed. “We’ll do everything possible, of course, but it’ll be a miracle if she survives.”
Frida’s pelvis had three separate cracks in it, and her spinal column was broken in several places. Her collarbone and two of her ribs were smashed. Her right leg was shattered, her right foot dislocated, and her left shoulder thrown out of joint.
A nurse appeared to tell the doctor that Frida was in the operating room. Alex turned toward the wall and did something that he seldom allowed himself to do. He cried.
The hours are endless when you’re waiting to see whether or not someone will die. The air teems with demons. The angels wrestle with them as best they can, but sometimes they lose. Often they lose. The hospital had once been a convent, and its rooms were dark and cold and full of supernatural murmurs. All around, people were scurrying, whispering, giving orders, but Alex felt enveloped in an immense silence. He closed his eyes. Images of Frida, the sunny adolescent, the tease, the seductress, erupted into a clutter of mangled bones.
A nurse touched his arm.
“Will she be all right?” he asked wearily.
“For the moment, I’m concerned about you.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Alex looked up at the nurse. The insignia on her collar identified her as a nun. In postrevolutionary Mexico, nuns were forbidden to wear their habits, although some of them did. Except for the insignia, the garb of a nursing sister was no different from that of her lay colleagues.
Alex had been so anxious about Frida that he had forgotten his own condition; now he became aware of a dull pain working its way from the top of his head to the base of his skull. But he had no idea of the seriousness of his injuries, or that he himself would be confined to bed for months.
When Frida awakened, Death was sitting by her bed. That’s what she told Maty. “It’s not just that I can feel it,” she said. “I can see it. Death dances all over the room. Sometimes it rides a bicycle around my bed. Sometimes it takes a guitar and plays a cheerful tune. An enticing tune, one that makes me want to go to Death and embrace it.” All during her life, Frida found death attractive, alluring. Even when we were very young, when she still found it frightening, even then, death fascinated her.
“I begged her not to talk like that,” Maty told me, “but she said that Death wasn’t scary the way it had been when she was six or seven, that it looked like a skeleton, her skeleton, and that it wore her clothes—her blue skirt, her white blouse, her sweater. She said the skull had a little red rose painted on it. Very pretty. Very lively. According to her, Death has a sunny disposition, and Death is a girl, so we should say ‘she,’ not ‘it,’ when we talk about … it … her.” Maty was very upset by that conversation, as you can imagine, but I could see what Frida was trying to do. The doctors said she might die, so she was trying to look death in the face, to come to grips with it.
One good thing about the accident is that it brought the family back together. Mami still hadn’t forgiven Maty, but we all were rallying about Frida, and we had to pull together. Maty, Adriana, and I went to the hospital nearly every day, and Mami and Papá went when they could, although not right away. Mami was so upset when she heard what happened to Frida that she went to pieces, and Papá was having so many problems with his health that it was hard for him to get out.
The first time I saw Frida after the accident, I nearly fainted. She was encased in a coffinlike structure, her torso caged in a stiff plaster cast and her legs pinned into a kind of swing. Maty was afraid to touch her, and I was scared even to get close. She looked like a mummy. I was afraid that she was already dead.
“You’ll be getting out of here soon,” Maty kept saying.
“But who knows where I’ll be going! Maybe back to Coyoacán, maybe under the ground. At least I won’t die a virgin. The rod that went into my belly took care of that!”
“Ah?” said Maty. “I heard another version of how you lost your virginity.” She forced herself to laugh, and then they were both quiet.
“Mami and Papá send their love,” I said to break the silence. “Papá’s been having seizures again. He’ll come as soon as he can.”
“I want to see Papá.”
“I know. Don’t worry, he’ll come. You know that Adri passed out when she heard what happened to you?”
“It’s true,” said Adriana. “Alberto said that I was in no condition to make the trip to the city, but I came anyway. I wanted to see you.” Alberto was Adriana’s husband.
“You’re in no condition!” snapped Frida, suddenly hostile. “That’s pretty funny. I’m the one who almost died! I’m the one who had a rod stuck in her gut.”
“I’m sorry,” whispered Adriana, blinking back tears.
Frida was instantly repentant. She grew pensive, then weepy. “You’re the only ones who really love me,” she sobbed. “You, my sisters.” And then she said something that made me really angry! “Especially you, Maty. You’re the only one who bothers with me. You and my Cachucha friends. They’ve all been here. But it’s funny … When you ran away with Paco Hernández, Mami said you were the black sheep, that you were a good-for-nothing, but you’re the only one who hasn’t abandoned me. You’re an angel, Maty.”
Where does Maty come to be the angel? I was thinking. I’m the one who’s been putting up with Frida’s nonsense for the last seventeen years. Her arrogance, her airs. I’m the one who shared her room, although I moved into the other bedroom after Adriana got married. I’m the one she always confided in. I’m the one who helped her through all those terrible times with Alex. She always told me that I was her best friend, her cuate. And now Maty is the one who loves her the most?
“How could I abandon you?” Maty was cooing. “You were the one who helped me run away! You were the one who closed the window so that nobody missed us for hours! You were only seven years old, remember? Anyway, one black sheep deserves another, and, according to what Papá tells me, Mami says you’re the blackest sheep of all. Even blacker than me!” They both laughed in sisterly collusion. I felt like vomiting. Suddenly, I was happy that Mami still wasn’t talking to Maty, even though she and Paco had gotten married, and she was now a respectable señora.
Frida ambled on about Death, la pelona, “old baldy,” we call it—or her—in Mexico. And then she started to whine about Alex. He hadn’t come to see her, although she had written to him. He hadn’t even answered her letters.
“So that’s it,” I said to myself. “That’s why she’s being nasty to me.” I was the one who knew about her ups and downs with Alex, you see, and I guess she was sort of embarrassed. After all, she had chewed my ear off about their “reconciliation.”
“Alex was hurt pretty bad in the accident too,” I reminded her.
“Not as bad as me, though,” she retorted. “I was hurt the worst. And now nobody bothers to come to see me except for you all and the Cachuchas and la pelona.”
“The doctor says that the longer you keep la pelona at bay, the better your chances of sending her packing,” said Maty soothingly.
“You know, Maty,” said Frida, “sometimes I think she’ll be with me always.”
Look, doctor, I understand that she had just been through a trauma. Yes, goddamn it, of course I know what a trauma is! You’re just like Frida. You think I’m stupid. Look, all I’m saying is that she had a real bent for the melodramatic, and she was playing her role to the hilt.
Of course I felt sorry for her. What do you think I am? A demon? She was my sister, and she was suffering. I’m just saying, even then, in that awful state, she knew how to manipulate.
Anyhow, from the hospital Frida wrote long, detailed letters to Alex. She described her pains, the doctor’s diagnosis, the treatments. She complained about the nurses. She said she understood that with twenty-five patients per nurse, it was impossible for them to do better, but still, she thought they should pay more attention to her. I saw some of the letters. She spoke of the visits of her schoolmates or of friends from the Communist Youth Organization. She complained of her boredom and her terrible luck. She told him how she cried when they told her how much pain he was in. I don’t know if that’s true. I never saw her cry over anyone else’s pain.
Poor Frida. You have to admit, she was a remarkable girl. She went through so much, and yet she kept going, kept struggling. I suffered to see her suffering. She was so frail, but she had a will of iron and a spirit like a geyser. I loved her so much. In spite of the fact that she made me so angry and hurt me so deeply, I loved her more than anyone. Really.