SHE WAS COMPLAINING TO HER NEW FRIEND LUCIENNE BLOCH, AN ARTIST who worked as Diego’s assistant and was the daughter of the Swiss composer Ernest Bloch. At first, Frida had detested her, even insulted her at a party, but then, when she realized Lucienne wasn’t out to dive into bed with her husband, the two of them became as close as the two halves of a peanut. Frida’s voice droned on.
“Diego doesn’t want kids, Lucienne, I have to face it, he doesn’t want kids and he’s not going to let me get pregnant again, he told me so, just like that, words that slash like an ax, and in my present state, I’m so exhausted, darling, you can’t imagine, painting all day every day, on my feet and still hemorrhaging. But I have to stay busy, Lucienne, I have to keep my mind off the baby, the loss of the baby, you’re kind to come with me all the way to Mexico, darling. It’s important to have friends who really love you, people you can talk to, who share your interests, that’s what I love about you, Lucienne. You think Mami will be fine, don’t you? Gallstones aren’t really dangerous, are they? They can be taken out, that’s what the doctor said, but Mami has so many of them, over a hundred of them, and she’s so weak from the cancer, you don’t think she’ll die, do you, Lucienne? God, I can’t bear it, first the baby and now this. Mami took such good care of me when I was sick. I’m still sick, my foot, Lucienne, the pain is intolerable, and my back, too, who will take care of me if she dies? When I imagine her lying inert, cold, under the earth, larvae boring into her skull, nesting in her nostrils, when I see her without any eyelids, her hair matted and dull like dry seaweed, her hair coming loose from her scalp, her scalp coming loose from her cranium, her breasts with no nipples, her desolate womb, her rotting sex, it’s horrible, Lucienne, it’s like someone’s rubbing ice on my spine. Diego’s losing weight, Lucienne. He’s on a diet, that’s why he’s so cross all the time. He hurls things at me, paintbrushes, cigarettes, ashtrays, loaded guns, but it’s not him, it’s the diet, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He loves me, and he’ll give me a baby because he knows I need one, I need a baby, Lucienne, you understand, don’t you? I’ll die if I never have a baby. Sometimes I don’t want to go on, but I love Diego and that’s what gives me strength, Lucienne. Nobody understands except you. What am I, Lucienne? A rusty pipe, worthless, ruined. A gutted house, empty …”
I tried not to listen.
“Oh darling, I don’t know why I cry all the time. It’s as though I can’t control myself, Lucienne, and the only thing that helps is work, but here I won’t be able to lift a brush with everything that’s happening, and Diego all alone up there in that heartless country, poor Diego, I suffer for him, my poor wittle fwoggie, you can’t know the agony, darling.”
Shut up! I thought it, but I didn’t say it. I was ready to wrap my fingers around her throat and squeeze. She had come back for the final farewell. We all knew this was the end. Cancer had been gnawing away at Mami’s insides for who knows how long, and now she was going to have a gallbladder operation which the doctor said she probably wouldn’t survive. She had no more flesh, no more stamina. I don’t know exactly what I felt at that moment. The drone of Frida’s voice. Her incessant whining. Maybe I just wanted the whole thing to be done. Maybe I hoped Mami would just get it over with and Frida would go back to Detroit. No, of course not, of course I didn’t want that. It’s just that I was so drained. Sleepless nights. Bedpans. Broths. Medicines. Soothing words. “Of course you’re not leaving us, Mami. You’re not going anywhere. Before you know it, you’ll be running after Rufina with a switch, just like you used to. You’ll dance at Isolda’s wedding, Mami.” Never being able to do anything right, that was the worst thing. Because Mami was never satisfied. If I put yellow sheets on her bed, she wanted blue ones. If I put daisies in the vase on her dresser, she wanted carnations. It was the illness. The illness ate away at her understanding and made her say hateful things. I know that, but still, it was exhausting.
We had just picked Frida up at the train station in Mexico City. Maty’s husband was driving I can’t remember whose car, it wasn’t theirs, Maty and Paco didn’t have a car. Frida and Lucienne Bloch were sitting in the backseat. Frida had brought her friend with her because she said, she was too weak to travel alone. She and Lucienne were inseparable. Sometimes I wondered if they were lovers. Poor me, Frida was whimpering. Poor me poor me poor me poor me. I was getting a headache.
The problem, she kept explaining to Lucienne, was that she was exhausted. She was exhausted. Do you have any idea what it’s like to take care of a cancer patient? Maty didn’t help. She was too busy dolling up her little apartment—sewing ruffles on curtains, embroidering sheets, that sort of thing. Mami had given her a lot of things from the house, and she had bought some fake antiques. Frida said that Maty had terrible taste, that she was too bourgeois, but what business was it of Frida’s? It was Maty’s house, after all. Adri didn’t help either, because she couldn’t stand to be around sickness. Whenever the cat threw up, Adriana ran the other way and left the mess for me. And when Mami shit in her bed, well, Adri just couldn’t deal with it. I was the one who lived with them, and so it was up to me to fuss over Mami, to make sure she took her pills, to sit by her and read, to tell her the plots of the newest films. Anna Christi with Garbo, for example. It had come out before in the States, but I had just seen it. I also had to wait on Papá, make sure he ate, because he’d go for days without food. And my two kids … So yes, I admit it, I was irritated, because the tired one wasn’t Frida. I was the tired one.
It happened on September 15, two days after the operation. I was with her. I was the only one. The priest had been there earlier and performed the last rites. I closed her eyes very gently. Then I put on a black dress, threw a black shawl around my shoulders, and went to tell Frida.
The minute she saw me, she knew Mami had died. “It’s happened, hasn’t it?” she said. Right away, Frida began to scream like a pig at slaughter. “Mami! My beloved mother! Take me with you, Mami! Oh God oh God oh God, how could you do this to me? How could you take away my sainted mother?” The doctor gave her a pill, and Lucienne and I put her to bed. Then we went to tell Maty, Adri, and Margarita and María Luisa, too, because even though Mami wasn’t their mother, they had long since forgiven her for sending them away to a convent. We didn’t tell Papá, though. Not yet. He was so fragile. We were afraid that the news would bring on a seizure so violent that it would kill him. It wasn’t until the next day that, very tenderly, with the help of the doctor and the priest, we told him his wife was gone.
“Go,” he said to the cleric. “Take care off sings. You know vhat to do.” That’s all he said, but he wandered around the house like a soul in purgatory for the remainder of his life.
Inocencia, Margarita—our half sister who eventually became a nun—and I washed and dressed the body. How tiny Mami looked, her withered corpse stretched out on the bed. Such an imposing woman in life, so delicate in death. Flaccid breasts, emaciated arms. Disease and age had ravaged her form, except for her thighs and sex, which seemed to belong to a much younger, much healthier woman. How could it be, I wondered, that her malady had left some parts almost intact? It was as though she were two women, one already putrefying, one still clamoring for her place at the table.
At the funeral, Frida went berserk. She played the scene from Farewell, My Poet, where Catalina Trueba, who’s about fifteen in the film, sees them burying her brother who was killed by some landowning bully. She wails and wails. Then everything gets blurry, and she falls into her brother’s grave. Frida didn’t jump into Mami’s tomb, but she was shrieking and carrying on like Mary Magdalene. Still, she couldn’t pull off a scene the way Catalina Trueba could.
“My God,” I said, “control yourself. We’re all in pain. People are looking at you!”
“You cold-hearted bitch,” she hissed. “You can’t know what I feel!” And then she went on screaming, “Mamiii! Mamiii! I love you! Take me with you!”
“Just go!” I said under my breath.
I know what you’re thinking. You think I was so angry that I—that I conjured up a plan to punish her, but that’s not what happened at all. I was irritated, I don’t deny it, but you have to realize that all this had been a tremendous strain. When your mother dies, it’s as though you’re suddenly an orphan. Even when you’re a grown-up woman, when your mother dies, especially when you’ve been living in the same house, it knocks you off balance. It leaves you wobbly, as though you’re just learning how to walk. All the things you said you’d do when she died … dance with an Indian, throw out the ugly purple bedspread, smash the French porcelain vase in the parlor—the one with the two cupids—take the fur-trimmed jacket in her closet for yourself, throw your sister into the mud … all those things, you can suddenly do them, and yet you don’t feel a sense of liberation, because even more than before, her eyes are on you, watching you, judging you. Even though she’s not there, she’s there. Even though her eyes are closed, they’re open. So all those unruly thoughts that you’ve kept imprisoned in a dark corner of your mind, you leave them there. Maybe you let them out to play once in a while, but you feel uncomfortable about it.
In the four or five weeks that followed, Frida played the part of the adoring daughter. She had missed the mess. She hadn’t had to deal with the havoc caused by Mami’s illness the way I had. She came in at the end of the story, but now she and Lucienne were Papá’s saviors, fixing him tea, taking him to the park, telling him stories about the wonderful parties they had been to in Detroit and New York. They were quite entertaining, really. Frida told about the time she kissed a taxi driver on the cheek for teaching her how to sing the first four lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which had just recently become the official hymn of the U.S. A song about a dog! “Oh say, can you see, by the dog’s ears …” Something like that. I didn’t understand it at all, and neither did she, but it was really funny when she sang it. “Well, why not have an anthem about a dog!” She laughed. “I find it very democratic! Hail to the dog’s ears!”
Beneath it all, Frida was agonizing. Her face had grown drawn and tight, as though she suffered from perpetual gas pains, and her eyes were wet and red. I could hear her crying when she was alone in her room. I didn’t doubt her sincerity. After all, it’s true that on top of Mami’s death, she had to deal with just having lost a baby. She was in distress, all right, but the point is, she wasn’t the only one.
“You know,” she said to me on the way to Mexico City, where she was to catch a train to the States, “it’s a good thing I brought Lucienne along, because you didn’t take very good care of me, Cristi.”
Every nerve in my body stood with musket poised, ready to attack.
“What do you mean, Frida? I had Inocencia prepare mole poblano especially for you.”
“I don’t need Inocencia to make me mole poblano. I make better mole than she does.”
“Look,” I said. “This has taken a lot out of me, Frida. I did my best.”
“I know, darling, I know. You’re exhausted, we all are. It doesn’t matter. With the children, you don’t really have time for me anymore.”
I let it go. I didn’t say a word. But then, she started up again.
“It’s just that—”
“It’s just that what?”
“Well, you know what I’ve been going through with Diego and my own health, Cristi. I have practically no energy at all. You could have at least—”
“You had energy enough to make a scene at the funeral,” I snapped.
“A scene, Cristi? A scene? I was expressing my profound grief.”
“We were all feeling profound grief, sister, but you were the only one to carry on like Catalina Trueba.”
“My God, you’re hurting me, Cristi.”
“You’re hurting her, Cristina,” piped in Lucienne, with her awful Swiss accent that always made her sound as though her throat was full of diseased phlegm.
Frida started to cry.
I felt terrible. Poor Frida. After all, she was sick. After all, she had just lost a baby. After all, she was tired from the trip. After all, Diego treated her like shit. I knew all that.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She reached over and held my hand. We were approaching the station.
The train for Texas pulled away slowly, a giant caterpillar of metal and glass. I waved good-bye, feeling horribly alone.