THERE ARE A LOT OF BOGUS STORIES ABOUT FRIDA AND DIEGO. REPORTERS were always writing about them, and whatever they didn’t know, they just made up. They’d come down here to interview us. All of us. Me too. They were interested in everything about Frida—her old letters, her little dogs, her doll collection, her dirty hankies, even her sisters. And then Diego wrote this book a few years ago. Let’s see … it’s 1963 now and Diego died in 1957 … It must have come out in ’58. He describes how he met Frida, but just like everyone else, he leaves out one important detail, which is: I was there.
Only, I was invisible. This is what happened: At the time, Diego was painting the frescoes at the Ministry of Education. Wonderful frescoes, Frida said. Paintings that celebrated our Mexican heritage by depicting Indians working in the fields that had been returned to them by the Revolution, Indians holding meetings and deciding their own destinies, Indians in school, learning to improve themselves. Tra-la-la! Frida was always singing the communist tune in those days, always on the soapbox pushing the communist line. What were they learning, those Indians? Were they learning Spanish, the language of the conqueror? Were they learning the farming methods invented by Europeans? Now people are asking if all that “improvement” of the Indians was such a good idea, or if all we really did was wipe out their culture, but back then, no one asked. Especially Frida. She was too carried away with the Party slogans. She had just joined the Young Communist League. Well, where was I?
Frida had about three or four paintings she wanted to show Diego. They were heavy canvases, and her back was still giving her problems, so I offered to go with her and help carry them. No matter what they say, I always tried to help Frida.
We had a nice trip in the trolley. Frida was a little jittery, but she was chipper and talkative, and she kept telling jokes about Diego’s looks. But as we got closer to the Ministry of Education, she started to clam up. She was growing more and more tense, and then, all of a sudden, she said to me, “Listen, Cristi, I don’t think you should go the rest of the way with me. Why don’t you give me the paintings you’re holding, and I’ll go see Rivera alone.” I was stunned. After all, I had taken the morning off from work to accompany her, and now she was telling me to get lost. It seemed pretty rude to me.
“And what will I do while you talk to Diego Rivera?”
“You could just wander around.”
“I don’t want to just wander around,” I said.
We kept walking toward the Ministry of Education. When we were a few meters away from the entrance, she turned to me.
“Give me the canvases,” she commanded. “Then go into that little shop and buy yourself some pastries and something to drink, and I’ll meet you there as soon as I’m done talking to him.” She pointed toward the Pastelería Agua Mansa. “You like to eat,” she added. She was being sarcastic.
I handed over the paintings and she took off, walking as fast as she could, which wasn’t very fast, since her spine and leg were bothering her and the paintings were bulky. I let her get pretty far ahead of me, then followed her into the Ministry at a distance.
Why do you think she didn’t want me to go with her? Because I was the prettier one and she didn’t want Diego to see me? Because she didn’t want him to know that she was an invalid who needed help carrying her paintings? Or was it just nerves? Maybe she was afraid he would tell her to shove off and she didn’t want a witness, or maybe she thought he’d take her for a baby if she showed up with her sister. Anyhow, I crept along until I pretty much caught up with her. She was too wrapped up in her own thoughts to turn around, I guess. I was careful to be very, very quiet. I got pretty close, then ducked into a doorway.
Diego was on the scaffold. From where I stood, he looked like an enormous ass topped by a peanut-sized head. Frida walked right up to him. “Diego!” she called. “Please come down. I have to talk to you about something.”
An awful thought popped into my mind: I hope he drops a brush on her head and tells her to scram. I hope he spits at her! It was a horrible, mean-spirited thing to think, but I was miffed because Frida hadn’t let me go with her to meet Diego Rivera. I stood there fuming and waiting to see what would happen. What happened was nothing. Diego looked at her and smiled, but kept on working. Lots of young girls went to watch him paint. He was used to it, and he loved the attention, but he couldn’t stop every time a pretty face materialized in front of him. Good, I thought. He’s just going to ignore her.
But Frida never gave up.
“I have something to show you!” she called.
Diego kept on working, but he gave her a kind of once-over. You know what I mean. He looked her up and down. He always loved a fresh young girl, and even though Frida wasn’t, shall we say, conventionally pretty—I mean, she was lame and had a mustache—she had a kind of brazenness that made her attractive to a lot of men.
“Look,” she said. “I’m not flirting with you. I have something serious to talk to you about. I’ve brought some of my paintings and I would like your opinion of them.”
After a long pause she added, “I am Frida Kahlo. I met you a long time ago at the Prepa.”
Did he recognize her as the little girl who had faced down Lupe Marín in the amphitheater years before? Maybe. Lombardo Toledano was always complaining about her, so maybe the words Frida Kahlo stuck somewhere in his brain. Or he could have remembered her from Tina Modotti’s party. Anyhow, she pestered him a while and he finally climbed down, strangely nimble, a hippopotamus on a tightrope.
“I’m not here to play pranks,” she said. “I’m here to get your opinion on my paintings. I have to earn a living, and I want to know if you think I could become a professional painter. If I have no talent, I’d rather know it now so I can stop wasting my time and find something productive to do.”
Diego looked at her paintings, but actually, I think he was looking at her out of the corner of his eye. He had just separated from Lupe Marín. They had never had a civil wedding, and church weddings weren’t recognized in postrevolutionary Mexico, so they didn’t have to get a divorce. Diego had been in Russia to paint a fresco celebrating the Red Army, and by the time he got back to Mexico, Lupe had decided she was sick of his affairs. He had been carrying on with Tina before he left, and Lupe felt he was making her the laughingstock of Mexico City. The minute he walked in the door, she told him to go to hell, and that was the end of it. Lupe was a real tiger. Diego licked his wounds and hopped into bed with Ana, with María, with Neli, Marta, Rosalía, and so on and so forth. I found out about all this much later, when Lupe and I became friends.
One peek at Frida’s valiant boobs was probably enough to convince him that the conversation was worth having.
He looked—or maybe pretended to look—at Frida’s paintings a long time.
“I have many more,” she said. “If you want to come to my house on Sunday to see them, I live in Coyoacán, Avenida Londres, 126.”
“You have talent,” he said. “I especially like this self-portrait.” But I couldn’t tell whether he actually meant it or was just saying it to be polite, because after all, Frida was a young lady. Then he said something else, but since he was turned toward her and I was standing off to the side, I couldn’t quite hear. I supposed he said something like “I would love to see the rest of your paintings, little girl, but I’m busy on the weekends.” After all, he was a famous painter with hundreds of friends, and besides, he was an important member of the Communist Party and had meetings and important functions to go to.
Frida said thank you and good-bye and moved through the corridor toward where I was hiding. Diego offered to help carry her paintings, but she said no, she could manage. Of course, she didn’t want him to see her out. She didn’t want him to see her join up with me in the pastry shop on the other side of the street where I was supposed to be waiting for her.
I met Frida halfway up the corridor. “What are you doing here?” she snapped. “I thought I told you to buy yourself a cake and wait for me over there.” She nodded toward the shop.
“So? I didn’t do it. So what?”
“Here, take these paintings,” she ordered. She handed me the two heaviest ones.
“Well? What did he say?”
“You should know. You were spying on me.”
“I couldn’t hear very well,” I lied. Actually, I had heard everything but that one sentence.
“He said he adored my paintings, that my portrait is magnificent, that I was one of the most talented young artists around, and that he would be happy to visit me on Sunday to see the rest of my works.”
“Really?” Since she exaggerated on the first part, I assumed she lied about the second. I figured he had just made some polite excuse or some ambiguous remark to salvage her feelings. I mean, I certainly never thought the great artist Diego Rivera would agree to come all the way out to our house in Coyoacán just to see the paintings of a twenty-one-year-old girl.
No, Frida wasn’t eighteen at the time. She was twenty-one. Don’t forget, she had been out of commission for a year after her accident, so she just took another year off her age. So now she was making herself three years younger than she really was. If you read that she was eighteen, that’s because she always lied to reporters.
You can’t imagine my surprise when that Sunday, who should appear at our house but the great Diego Rivera! Frida was wearing overalls and climbing a tree, and I was sitting in the shade daydreaming, when this enormous beast comes clumping along, clump clump clump. He was wearing a clean shirt for once, and pants that weren’t all speckled with paint, a jacket, and his typical Stetson. He was smoking a cigar that made an awful stink, but Frida said she liked it.
“Is this where Señorita Kahlo lives?” he asked me.
“I am Señorita Kahlo,” I said, just to be ornery.
Frida threw a twig down from the tree, and it landed right by those big steamboats. I mean his feet, of course.
“I’m the Señorita Kahlo you’re looking for. That’s the other Señorita Kahlo. Come on,” she said, without introducing me. “Let’s go inside and I’ll show you my paintings.”
That day Diego didn’t stay too long. He looked at the paintings Frida had set aside for him to see, but I didn’t hear his comments because I didn’t accompany them to Frida’s room. She made it very clear that she wanted him all to herself and didn’t care to have me tagging along. I thought: Even if he doesn’t like them, he’ll tell Frida that he adores them because he’s a real lady-charmer. He’ll tell any girl that he loves her work in order to jump into the sack with her. Frida must have had the same thought, because after they came out of her room, I heard her tell him, “Please give me your honest opinion. Don’t try to flatter me, because I really can’t waste time on something that I’m no good at.”
Frida asked him to stay for supper. He declined but promised to return the following week.
Mami was not pleased at all. It was bad enough that Frida had become a communist and ran around with the likes of Tina Modotti, that crazy woman who thought she was a photographer, but now she had become friends with this fat old painter who boasted he was a national treasure. In Mami’s middle-class Catholic mind, Diego was nothing more than an oversize atheist.
True to his word, he came by the following Sunday afternoon, but this time Frida and I were both dressed for callers, I in a simple skirt and blouse and she in a tailored man’s suit that Alberto Lira had given her when he’d outgrown it. She wore a carnation in the lapel; the color of the flower was identical to that of her brilliant lipstick and the polish she wore on her Dracula-length fingernails. She had pinned a matching carnation in her hair, which was slicked back like an Argentine tango dancer’s, only it was too long to be a man’s. The trousers hid her misshapen leg, but strangely, as if to call attention to her handicap, she had put on a ridiculous little pair of satin slippers. You can’t imagine how feminine she looked, how feminine and how seductive. It was incredible how alluring she could be in a man’s suit. I was a little nervous—after all, Diego was already a legend and here he was, right in my own living room—but Frida was very poised, not in the least flustered.
His entrance was like an invasion. First, his Trojan-horse belly, then a warship-like foot, two shoulders like battered citadels, lips that reminded you of fresh carnage, flaccid jowl, chins, nostrils, a second warship-like foot, a baggy posterior (deserted bunkers? empty storerooms?)—an army of incongruous parts that seemed subject to some inner, cohering discipline in spite of their individual functions. I found him repugnant.
Mami invited him to sit down, and as he sank into the chair he swung his arm—a huge, unwieldy battering ram—and knocked over a silver tea service, one of the few remaining mementos of better times, which went crashing to the ground like ten thousand suits of armor clashing furiously. He spread his legs to accommodate his gargantuan paunch and smiled self-consciously as Inocencia picked up creamers and sugar crystals. How could this uncoordinated mass of parts be a great painter? I wondered. I felt as though our space had been violated. Yet Frida seemed hardly to notice.
I peered at him coyly. I crossed my legs and arranged my flowered skirt over my knees. Dainty Cristina. So graceful. She was laughing raucously. She was recalling some hilarious prank the Cachuchas had once played at school and describing the incident in meticulous detail. He turned toward her, his face as impassive as a rhinoceros’s. Then he smiled, parting his meaty, obscene lips. He smelled slightly of sweat and turpentine.
“Old Mr. Bayer, the English teacher,” she was saying, “he turned as red as a whore’s underpants when he opened his desk and found an exquisite porcelain pot full of dog shit!”
“Frida!” snapped Mami.
But Diego was enchanted. His smile widened, and the scales of armor dropped off his face slowly, as if they had trouble detaching themselves from his skin. He no longer reminded me of a rhinoceros. The flesh beneath the coat was as smooth and fragile as the skin of a delicate fruit. In fact, settled into the cushiony armchair, he now reminded me of a huge, overripe plum, ready to split and pour forth its sweet, sticky juice. Much later—decades later—I realized that those paintings Frida did of voluptuous, succulent, mangoes and watermelons, slit and spilling their juices to the viewer, were actually portraits of Diego.
“That’s disgusting, Frida,” I said self-righteously. Diego’s eyes were no longer on Frida. No. He was looking at me. I could feel his gaze on my ankles, on my knees, on my thighs, and I shifted nervously in my chair.
Then, all fleshy and oozy, he looked me right in the eye and grinned.
A shiver shot from my elbow to my ear, and suddenly I felt as though I were sitting there naked in full view of everyone—Diego, Frida, Mami, Papá, Inocencia, everyone. Instinctively, I lifted my hand to my chest, as if to protect myself, and once again, Diego’s lips parted into what seemed to me to be a lewd smile. I looked away. My eyelids were stinging.
Frida was jabbering about her communist youth group. Something about equality. Something about the new Mexico, where workers and peasants would rule. Something about no more foreign investment. Something about the end of Yankee imperialism. Diego had turned back to her and was eating it up. Don’t forget, he was a revolutionary hero, an instrument of the people. But, except when it came to painting, Diego had a short attention span, and after a while, I think, he forgot about the masses. Yes, he definitely forgot about the masses. Instead of contemplating the masses, he was examining me from head to toe. Me. Not Frida, but me. He wasn’t even discreet about it. Didn’t my parents notice? They were sitting only a few meters away. And what about Frida? Was she too absorbed in her story to realize? I don’t know. I’ve never understood how he got away with it, but I guess that for Diego, admiring a beautiful young girl was so natural, so normal, that he could ogle without attracting attention. Or maybe the others just didn’t want to see. Or maybe, maybe I just imagined the whole thing.
Well, that was the beginning. After that, Diego came to our house to visit every Sunday. It was a very bourgeois courtship for two rabid communists. He would bring a bouquet of flowers or a box of bonbons and would sit in the parlor and talk to Papá about the political situation. He and Frida would go for walks around the plaza, just like two old-fashioned sweethearts, except that he would be dressed in work clothes and she would be wearing jeans and a black shirt with a hammer and sickle pin. Politics was an obsession they shared. In one of the murals in the Ministry of Education, Diego showed Frida as a Communist Youth activist in a work shirt with a red star on the pocket, surrounded by bigwigs from the Party. Frida used to say that the attraction between them was electric. Once, according to her, they were walking along the street at dusk when all of the streetlamps went on. It must have been about five o’clock. The way she told it, Diego took her gently around the waist and kissed her on the lips, and the second their flesh touched, the lamps began to glow. Can that be true, or is it just another one of Frida’s inventions? According to Frida, there was so much voltage between them, they could have lit up the whole city. Anyhow, I’m sure they didn’t limit themselves to pristine kisses under streetlamps. I’m sure they slipped off to Diego’s apartment and fucked themselves crazy, or else carried on like savages at Tina’s orgies. But in Coyoacán they performed like middle-class angels with wings of gossamer, even though they looked more like an orangutan and a sparrow. There was no doubt that Diego was absolutely in love with my sister, although, to tell you the truth, whenever I was present, he couldn’t take his eyes off me.
Was I flattered? Of course I was. After all, we’re talking about the great Diego Rivera, painter-hero of the Mexican Revolution, and besides, there was something irresistible about Diego in spite of his bulk. Or maybe because of his bulk. He was so sensual. Fleshy and sensual. You wanted to touch him. You wanted to sink your teeth into those folds of flesh. Besides, he had such a reputation. No, I don’t mean as an artist … that is, I don’t mean just as an artist, I mean as a lover. He had been with so many women; at least, that’s what people said. A girl couldn’t help but be fascinated. A girl couldn’t help but wonder: What’s he giving to the others that I’ve never had? What does he do that other men don’t do? And then it was the way he looked at you, the way he talked to you. He made you feel that you mattered, that he really admired you, that you weren’t just some thing, some object with the necessary equipment to satisfy his needs. Once I got to know him, I never felt like just the other sister. I was me, Cristina, not as brilliant as Frida, maybe, but a young woman with ideas and opinions and feelings as well as a beautiful body. He would tell me about communism, about his days in Paris, about Picasso and Juan Gris and André Breton, the poet. He would talk about the Italian frescoes, about his trip to Russia, about how he tried to sign up to be a soldier in World War I. In other words, he treated me like a real person, and that’s why I fell in love … No! I don’t mean that. I didn’t fall in love with him, at least not then, while he was courting Frida, because I was in love with someone else. I was very much in love with my own fiancé. We were going to be married soon, very soon. In fact, we were married that year, 1928. So, although flirting with Diego—and I guess I did flirt—was a pleasant game, it was nothing more than that, because I would soon become Señora Cristina Kahlo de Pinedo.
In spite of all Papá’s complaining about being broke, we did have a wedding. Mami finally got herself into gear and started to behave like a proper Mexican mother of the bride, fussing over lace and sending pictures to the society pages. The ceremony turned out to be just what Mami wanted: a church affair with her darling youngest daughter wearing white. All our friends came, although the festivities weren’t too elaborate because of the money situation. Me and Mami and Inocencia spent days making burritos, enchiladas suizas, tamales, chiles rellenos, empanadas, mole, ceviche … There were vats of pulque and sangria. All kinds of pasteles. Dulce de coco. Arroz con leche. Frida helped too. She loved to cook. Maty and Adri also lent a hand. Even though we had to skimp and do without a lot of things, and do all the work ourselves, there was plenty of food. We had a civil ceremony as well, because Mexican law required it. Pinedo was very handsome and proper-looking at the mass, although a bit distant. Maybe he was intimidated by Frida and Diego and their artist friends. He thought they were degenerate and silly. Especially Diego. Here he was masquerading as a worker when he had ten times more money than any of us and lived in a big house with a studio and a car. “He’s a phony,” Pinedo said to me, and I guess that in a lot of ways he was right. We went to live in a little house on San Cristóbal Street, not too far from Mami and Papá, and before I knew it, I was pregnant. Isolda was born in 1929, the most precious, bright-eyed little bundle you could imagine. Well, I thought, at least I did something right. You see, I was the only one of my sisters who had produced a baby.
Mami was growing more and more apprehensive about Frida’s relationship with Diego. She didn’t care that he was a famous painter. The arts were not something that mattered to Mami. Diego was too fat and too communist and, above all, too old. He was already forty-one, twenty years older than Frida. Besides, he was a slob and a playboy.
Mami was so beside herself that she wrote to Alejandro and begged him to do something. But Alejandro was busy with his new girlfriend, and frankly, I think he was glad to be free of my sister. They had been like a balero; Frida was the cup and he was the ball. Every time he’d try to get away, she’d whine and snivel and snap him back and catch him. Now he had finally cut the string, and he wasn’t about to fall into that little cup again. Would Frida have gone back to him if he had begged? I don’t think so. She was too happy being the girlfriend of the magnificent Rivera. She went to parties with famous people who paid attention to her because she was with Diego. It made her feel important. She wasn’t about to give that up.
During all this time, Frida was painting like crazy. That’s something I have to hand to Diego. He never discouraged her. Some famous men keep their wives in cages, like decorative birds. They don’t want them to have interests of their own. But Diego appreciated Frida’s talent, and he pushed her to paint. He wasn’t exactly her teacher. I mean, he didn’t give her lessons. “I don’t want to overwhelm her,” he told my father. “I don’t want to impose my own style on her.” But he was very supportive of Frida, and she was grateful for it. She would watch him paint for hours, sitting beside him on the scaffold. That’s how she learned.
She did this one portrait of me where I look like I have a rod up my ass, all serious and stiff. A tree branch is leaning toward me as if it’s alive and wants to touch me, and another lonely tree cowers in the background. It’s a weird picture; the canvas seems to extend right into the frame, as though I’m oozing out of the painting and into the real world, which is exactly how I feel sometimes—like I’m trapped in some sort of cell that’s too small for me, and I kind of pour out in spite of everybody’s efforts to keep me contained.
Frida also painted a portrait of Adri about the same time. I don’t like it. It makes her look like a mean old schoolteacher. I said old. Old, like me. How old do you think I am? No, don’t look at the records, just guess. I’m fifty-five years old, and I feel as though I’m a hundred. Adri glares out of the painting as though she wants to nab you. She’s wearing an off-the-shoulder dress that emphasizes her enormous breasts, and she looks very imposing. The kind of person you don’t want to antagonize. It’s funny, because Adri wasn’t that way at all. Frida also did a lot of portraits of children—neighborhood kids, the sons and daughters of friends. Frida loved children. She was a good aunt to mine.
Well, Frida and Diego were becoming almost inseparable. Mami still didn’t like him, but she was beginning to see that he had more than enough money to take care of Frida, and besides, he was generous. Don’t forget that Papá was still trying to pay off Frida’s doctor bills, and we were worried about losing the house.
One day Papá said to Diego, “It looks to me like you’re interested in my daughter.”
Diego laughed that deep, throaty laugh of his. “What do you think?” he said. “That I have nothing better to do with my Sundays than to travel out to Coyoacán to see a girl I’m not interested in? Of course I’m interested in her. That’s why I’m here.”
“She’s not an easy child,” said Papi. “Cristi here is much easier.” I was visiting my parents with my baby Isolda, just as I did every Sunday.
Diego smiled at me. “Yes, I know. Frida is a real little demon, but I love her very much.”
“Well,” said Papá, “you’ve been warned.”
“Yes,” said Diego. “I’ve been warned.”
“And another thing,” added Papá. “Und anoder tink. She is expensive. Zer are doctors’ bills.” He explained about Frida’s illnesses, about her accident. He told Diego that Frida would probably need medical attention for the rest of her life.
“Come,” said Diego. “Let’s talk.”
The two men went into Papá’s study to hash things out, I guess. I wasn’t invited to go with them, and anyhow, I had to nurse Isolda. The next thing I heard, the wedding date had been set for August 21, 1929.
Frida had to outdo me in everything, didn’t she? I had made a nice marriage and I had produced a beautiful baby, but I wasn’t the one who was going to be the savior of the family. No, of course not. The savior of the family was Frida. Or rather, Diego. I thought I had done everything right, but I couldn’t pull them out of that morass of debt that Frida had gotten them into with her sicknesses and her accidents. No, I don’t mean that. It wasn’t Frida’s fault. But the truth was, her medical expenses were so enormous that they ate up every cent Papá made, and he wasn’t making much. We would have lost the house on Londres Street for sure if Diego hadn’t taken over the mortgage payments. And he not only paid for the house, he let Papi and Mami go on living there. Later, when my husband left me, I went back and lived there too. Isolda, little Antonio, and I. So we all owe Diego a lot. If it weren’t for Frida … If Frida hadn’t married him, I don’t know what would have happened.
It was a very lively wedding, I heard. Not the civil ceremony, of course. The party afterward. I didn’t go to either one, and neither did my mother or sisters. Mami didn’t like the kind of people Frida and Diego had invited or the fact that there was no priest, and she carried on so much about it that Maty, Adri, and I were afraid to cross her. She would have taken it as a slap across the face if we had abandoned her that day and run off to Frida’s bash. Don’t forget that Maty had only recently worked her way back into Mami’s good graces. Papá went, though.
Some wedding. They showed up at the courthouse and said their I do’s in front of a judge. Very revolutionary. Very in keeping with their communist, anticlerical principles. I’m sure it made them giddy with self-righteousness to dispense with the clergy. Poor Mami. She had cared for Frida so lovingly while she was ill, and now Frida was throwing tradition into the sewer and marrying without religion, knowing how much that would hurt her.
Frida didn’t even wear a wedding dress. No, a wedding dress would have been too bourgeois. Instead, she turned the ceremony into a political statement, a declaration of her solidarity with the people. She borrowed clothes from the maid. The maid! Skirts, a blouse, a rebozo—that is, a kind of shawl poorer women wear hear in Mexico. She could have at least put on a nice Tehuana dress, a new Tehuana dress. She could have gone to the market and bought one, but she wore Inocencia’s daughter’s old rags. I’m sure she thought it was a cute move, very radical. Or maybe she just wanted to humiliate Papá because he couldn’t give her the kind of wedding he had given me. Anyhow, she stuffed her shoe and wore heavy stockings so you couldn’t see she was lame—she was always good at camouflaging her defects—and, for added effect, smoked during the whole ceremony. In the picture that came out in the newspaper the next day, she had a cigarette dangling from her lips, just like a whore. Excuse me, but that’s what she looked like. Mami nearly fainted. Diego just wore a regular suit with no vest. “It was a joke,” Papá told me afterward. “Eet vas a choke! Such business, such business. How can such business be taken seriously!”
After Judge Mondragón said the magic words and Frida and Diego were husband and wife, they all took off for the house of Andrés Henestrosa, a writer who was a good friend of Diego and Frida’s. He had a nice voice, and he always sang at all the parties, especially after he got good and drunk. He was part of Tina Modotti’s crowd, so that should give you an idea. So they all left, except for Papá, who went home.
For months the stories circulated about the orgy at Henestrosa’s. This one got drunk and peed in a flowerpot. That one got drunk and threw up on the sofa. The other one got drunk and grabbed Lupe Marín between the legs, not that she minded. And then someone was smoking opium and someone was crazy on heroine. I didn’t go. I had a baby to take care of. Isolda had a bad cough and I didn’t want to leave her with the maid, and besides, I had the impression that Frida didn’t really want me there with her unruly crowd. In other words, I wasn’t invited. They were the elite, you see. The aristocracy of the art world—even though there wasn’t supposed to be any aristocracy in Mexico. Very distinctive people. Frida did tell me about it afterward, and I admit it, I asked a lot of questions. I was curious. I had never been to a party like that, and I wanted to know what it was like. The women wore bobbed hair, greased to keep it close to the head, and mannish blazers. The lesbian look was still in with Frida’s crowd, even though it was going out everywhere else. Tina Modotti wore a revealing red shift, her abundant hair caressing her body sensuously. She shouldn’t have been there, because Lupe was. Lupe hated Tina because Tina had posed for some of the nudes in Diego’s murals in the Chapingo Chapel, which had made Lupe wildly jealous. She blamed Tina for the breakup of her marriage, and when she saw her at Henestrosa’s, she went right up to her and slapped her. “Slut!” she screamed. “Why don’t you go back to California or Italy or wherever the hell you came from!” Tina had actually been born in Italy, but had lived with Weston in California before coming to Mexico with him. When she was done insulting Tina, Lupe grabbed Frida’s skirt and pulled it up. “Look at those legs,” she shrieked. “Wooden legs! Legs like toothpicks!” When I heard this story, I remembered how the girls at school teased Frida, how they chanted, “Peg-leg Frida! Peg-leg Frida!” and I felt sorry for my sister. “These are the legs that Diego now takes to bed with him instead of mine!” And then she pulled up her own dress to reveal her gorgeous gams. Lupe was still tied to Diego emotionally—they had two children together—and even though she said she didn’t love him anymore, she couldn’t stand it that he had found someone new.
Diego behaved very badly at that party. He got drunk on tequila and went around shooting things—plants, lamps, mirrors, vases, glasses. He left Henestrosa’s place full of bullet holes and didn’t even offer to pay for the damage. Hugo Leffert, a journalist from somewhere, I can’t remember where, tried to get the gun away from him, and Diego shot off his little finger! Frida usually thought Diego’s antics were cute, but things were getting out of hand. This was their wedding party, and he wasn’t paying any attention to her. Instead, he was firing his pistol and grabbing the women’s asses, walking into walls and breaking Henestrosa’s china.
“You’re behaving like a savage,” she told him.
Diego was indignant. Who was this twenty-one-year-old kid to tell him what to do?
“I’m your wife, that’s who,” she snapped.
Diego roared like a wounded lion. “Get away from me! Get out of here!”
“Fine!” said Frida. “I will!” And she burst into tears.
It was late at night, but she made her way all the way back to Avenida Londres and fell asleep in the same bed she had slept in since she was a little girl.
The next day, when I went to visit, I found her sobbing. “I’ll never go back to him!” she cried. “Never! I’ll live with you and help you take care of Isolda!”
But in a few days Diego came to get her, and they began their life together.