I REMEMBER THIS FROM SCHOOL: “A GOOD TREE CANNOT BRING FORTH evil fruit.” It’s from the Book of Matthew. I’ve thought about that idea a lot over the years, because I brought forth evil fruit. At least, that’s what you think. You and everybody else. But … No, you’re right. I brought forth evil fruit. Yes, of course I did, but how? That’s what I want to know. I was an innocent kid. I didn’t know what was going on. I wasn’t an evil tree. At least, I don’t think so. All right, I wasn’t a baby. I was twenty-six or twenty-seven. But the thing is, I didn’t have evil intentions. I didn’t even know what I was doing. Or maybe I did. Of course I did, but I didn’t have an inkling where it would lead. No idea. I had no idea that our lives would never be the same afterward, that it would ruin everything, that it would destroy Frida. Maybe that in itself is evil. I mean, the fact that I didn’t even consider there would be a price to pay. Because everything we do has consequences. Maybe I should have realized. Or maybe I’m lying.
Frida returned to the States. Everything was going wrong. The frescoes in Detroit caused a lot of fuss because they were communist. They were a celebration of the worker. A lot of Americans thought they were a kind of attack on the American way of doing things, on capitalism. Also, there were nudes, and Americans are prudes who think that bodies are disgusting. That’s what Frida told me. She said that Americans don’t even like to touch their own bodies. That’s why, when they bathe, they use washcloths. The priests and the Protestant ministers all attacked the work. They’re the worst prudes of all, and besides, Diego always represents the clergy as greedy pigs. People were threatening to destroy the murals, but a bunch of workers got together to protect them. That made Diego feel great. Again, he was the hero of the people. His name was in all the papers. He wasn’t just supporting a cause, he was the cause.
No, Frida didn’t write to me. She was mad at me. But when they got back, they talked about it all the time. He was the hero, the knight in armor, the crusader, the leading man, and she, Frida, was the leading lady. It’s not hard for me to imagine what went on, how they ate up all the attention.
They were done in Detroit, and they left for New York, where Diego was to paint murals at the RCA Building. He was such a celebrity that they sold tickets to watch him work. Can you believe it? Every day crowds gathered under his fat but thinning ass, thinning because he was on a diet, and gawked at him painting images of greedy businessmen exploiting downtrodden laborers, peasants, workers, teachers, mothers … all those people united in a Marxist paradise. This is all a little blurry because, as I just said, Frida wasn’t writing to me.
The deal is this: Diego was having the same problems in New York as in Detroit. A lot of people were indignant because he was taking the Rockefellers’ money to paint pictures showing that American capitalists were crooks and pigs. I mean, let’s face it, the Rockefellers were the princes of capitalism. And here Diego was, showing that the princes of capitalism were living off of everybody else’s sweat. People said Diego’s work was immoral and profane, not only because of the nudes but because communists don’t believe in God. That’s why Mami never liked Diego. Frida brought back newspaper articles saying that the murals were nothing more than communist propaganda—full of red flags and red shirts and red bandannas. I couldn’t read them, but she translated them into Spanish for me. Frida was very clever at languages, you know. Such a brilliant girl. So talented. “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” Mami used to say. And when she didn’t say it, she thought it. She’d forget that Frida was a lesbian and a tramp. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that if you hire a communist artist, you’re going to get a communist painting. Nelson Rockefeller might be a financial wizard, but he sounds like a bonehead to me. He’s the one who decided to use his family’s oil fortune—made, according to Diego, by abusing generations of poor slobs, hardworking bastards—in order to commission murals celebrating a New and Better Future. So, you tell me, if you hire a communist artist to depict a New and Better Future, what do you think he’s going to paint? Society ladies dressed up like the Chrysler Building with diamond-studded cigarette holders, or a workers’ heaven?
Diego just kept on painting, and Frida, well, I’m not sure what she did. She didn’t paint. Frida only painted when she had nothing else to do, but in New York, there was plenty to keep her busy. It was a big city. There were stores. She went shopping with Lucienne. There were theaters. She went to the movies with Lucienne. Diego didn’t go. Diego did nothing but work work work. Frida loved dime stores. She found all kinds of treasures in dime stores: dangling earrings with glass birds, a plastic comb painted with different-colored flowers, an ashtray with a mermaid seated on the edge, a hideous scarf—so hideous it was almost pretty—with brown and yellow stripes, a gadget to peel oranges without breaking the skin, a picture of Betty Boop, panties with the days of the week printed on them in English. She brought all that stuff back with her. She stole some of it, not because she didn’t have money, but because she thought it was fun to snitch things from dime stores. What difference did it make?, she said. After all, the owners were rich. She gave some of that junk to me. And she went to parties. She had all kinds of high-society friends—in spite of the fact she was a champion of the worker and said she hated high society. She loved being surrounded by smart, powerful people who groveled to her because she was the wife of the great Diego Rivera. She made fun of them, but she loved being with them. She loved how important they made her feel. She bought fancy materials to make stunning dresses to go to their parties. (She had given up Tehuana costumes for the moment.) And she met other artists—painters, sculptors, photographers. What did they do when they got together? What did they talk about? I don’t know. I guess they played at being superior to everybody else. And they played cadavre exquis. Do you know that game? Frida taught me. You fold a paper in sections, like this, and the first person draws the top of a body in the first section, then folds it back so the next person can’t see it. Then the next person draws the trunk of the body in the middle section, and the next person draws the bottom of the figure. At the end they unfold the paper to see what they have. Lucienne saved some of those pictures. They’re a riot, because Frida always drew something obscene—a head that looked like a giant penis with balls for jowls, breasts dripping with milk, a woman’s open legs with a man’s fingers in between. A riot. When she got back to Mexico, she and Diego and I would play.
Frida couldn’t play all the time, because things were going badly with the mural. The crowds were getting hostile, and Rockefeller put guards all over the place. Of course, Diego had to go and make things worse. He was so used to everyone fawning all over him that he probably thought he could get away with anything. Rockefeller kissed his ass even when priests and politicians said that Diego was making a mockery of his generosity. Diego probably said to himself, “Hell, I’ve got the support of the masses, I’ve got the support of the bigwigs. I can do whatever I damn please.” Anyhow, he painted a portrait of Lenin right in the middle of the mural.
That was too much, even for Don Nelson. He told Diego to change it, but Diego wouldn’t. So what do you think Rockefeller did? He fired him! Just like that! He paid him what he owed him and kicked him out. Then he had the frescoes destroyed. I’m not the brainy one, but it seems pretty clear to me that in a capitalist country, the man with the money calls the shots. The guy who hires you can also fire you. I mean, Rockefeller was something of a dimwit—it took him a long time to catch on—but when he finally did, boom! The ax fell! Diego thought he was above all that because he was the great Diego Rivera, Jesus Christ on roller skates, but you can push a person too far, and he pushed Rockefeller too far.
Maybe it wasn’t all that terrible, because it certainly got Diego in the news. There was a huge public outcry, and all the big shots in the art world came running to help poor, abused Rivera. Here he was, defending the rights of the workers to take over the world, and those miserly savages from Standard Oil were going to try to put him in his place. But he wasn’t going to take it. No. He was going to fight back. Not for himself, but for his beloved masses. He was the hero again. He was on his white horse again. He was the Cid, with his devoted Ximena by his side.
Maybe I’m not being fair. After all, imagine what it must be like to work day and night on something, and then some moron who doesn’t really understand it comes along and throws it out. Diego really believed in what he was doing, and to be treated like that by some witless American … Frida knocked herself out defending Diego. She went back to wearing Tehuana dresses and stood on corners handing out leaflets. She went to meetings. She granted interviews. She insulted Rockefeller in public, although, as soon as the fracas was over, she turned around and kissed his ass all over again. She wasn’t stupid, you know. She knew which side her bread was buttered on. The truth is, if you ask me, not that anybody ever did at the time, the truth is that Frida loved it. “The Americans are so stupid,” she told me once. “It is so easy to win them over. You just play the poor little Mexican, all delicate and vulnerable, so hurt because everyone has turned against your husband, and they eat it up. The next day an article comes out in the paper saying, ‘The lovely Mrs. Rivera, so young and fresh, so beholden to Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller for their kindness in the past, is at a loss to explain the sudden change of heart of the great philanthropist, in whom she trusted.’ And tra-la! Everyone feels sorry for you and joins your cause.” That’s how she talked about the Americans. “They’re very moral, you know. Very decent. They always want to do the right thing, and they’re ridden with guilt about everything—their success, their wealth, their treatment of Mexico. Find the right string and it’s really easy to jerk them around.”
But after a while, she got tired of it all. Her right foot was getting worse. Sometimes she couldn’t even move it. Everybody was busy defending Diego, and she had to sit at home with her foot up, or else she’d soak in the bathtub, because the humidity was so bad she couldn’t bear it. She wanted to come home, but Diego was busy on some other project. I can’t remember which. And when he wasn’t painting, he was screwing some model, or student, or hanger-on. So he was busy and she was lonely. I think it was around then that she painted a picture called My Dress Hangs There. It shows New York, the rich part and the poor part, and right in the middle of all the skyscrapers hangs one of Frida’s Tehuana dresses. It means, she explained to me, that even though her dress was hanging in that big American city, she wasn’t there, not really. She wrote letters to her friend Isabel Campos, asking for news and making fun of the American women who tried to imitate her by wearing Tehuana outfits but looked absolutely ridiculous in them with their blond curls and big, gawky frames. Isabel showed me the letters. Not then, though. Years later. But Frida didn’t write to me. For months I had no news.
And then they were back. Diego finished whatever he was working on, and they took a boat to Havana, then to Mexico.
Yes, I was glad to see her. I missed my sister. I missed her terribly. We were like the petals on a flower. Pull one off and the flower is ruined. But … How can I explain it? Things were strained. We made up, of course. I was sorry about what I had said at Mami’s funeral and I told her so. She kissed me and said she understood that I was upset, so upset that I said things that I didn’t mean. “You just don’t understand how words can hurt, Cristi. You’re like a little girl. You say things without thinking, without considering the consequences.” And then she smiled at me as though I were a naughty baby who hadn’t understood a word she’d said.
They were both unbearable. Both she and Diego. She was pregnant again and he wasn’t one bit happy about it. He was already in a bad mood because of the awful experience he had had in the States and because he hadn’t wanted to come back to Mexico. In spite of everything, he was a star up there, and being a star in a rich country is not the same as being a star in a poor one. The Depression dragged on, but the elite partied more than ever; at least, that’s what it sounded like to me. In Mexico the government had commissioned some murals, but still, he was depressed. Besides, the diet he had been on in Detroit left him drained, listless, and bad-tempered. He was sick all the time. He had lost weight too fast, which affected his this, this that, his everything. His stomach hurt. His intestines were screwed up. His glands were a mess. Or maybe none of it was true and he just wanted to bellyache. The fact is that he complained all the time.
And then Frida made it worse by going and getting pregnant again. It was bad enough that she had made him come back to Mexico, he said, and that she did nothing but carry on about her foot, but now, on top of everything else, she had gone and gotten herself knocked up. Why did she do that when she knew he didn’t want a baby? And when she knew she couldn’t carry it to term? She just wanted attention, he said. She had already tried and failed twice before, and still, she insisted on putting herself and everyone else through the agony of another miscarriage. “It’s not fair,” he kept moaning. “What that woman is doing to me is just not fair.”
I felt sorry for him. He was such an infant, he couldn’t take care of himself. And now, Frida was all wrapped up in her womb once again. She had no time or energy left for her husband.
For weeks Diego wouldn’t work. He just couldn’t bring himself to pick up a brush. He sat around sulking, or else he flew into a rage for no reason at all. He’d throw things—paints, dishes, boots, Antonio’s wooden toys. Once he threw a birdcage against the wall with the parakeet still in it. It wasn’t his fault, though. He was miserable, and Frida irritated him with her constant groaning about her foot and her morning sickness.
Diego had a couple of big government projects he couldn’t get started on.
“Come on,” I said to him. “At least do something. Try a small painting or two just to get back into the swing of it. Even if you’re not ready to tackle the Medical School mural, at least get out your easel.” He didn’t answer. “I’ll pose for you!” I whispered, trying to sound enticing.
“I don’t know how to paint anymore,” he said. “I’ve never known how to paint. Everything I’ve ever done has been garbage.”
I just laughed.
“I’m glad they tore up the RCA frescoes. They were shit. And the Detroit stuff. Shit. All shit.”
“Look,” I said, “stop it. You’re acting like a two-year-old.”
He just sulked. “Why do women always tell men they’re acting like children?” he said finally. “You don’t take me seriously. I’m telling you that I’m a fraud, Cristina. I’m not a great artist, I’m a fraud, and I’ll never paint again because I refuse to go on living a lie. I can’t stand it. I’m going to kill myself.”
“Look,” I said, “just a little something to get going again. Some thing easy. Not the history of the planet, just a mango or a watermelon or whatever. Or me in my birthday suit.”
But he wasn’t paying attention. He had turned his back to me and sat facing the wall.
“Come on,” I said gently. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Come on, give it a try.”
He was crying. Tears dribbled down his cheeks in slow-moving little streams. He wasn’t pretending. He wasn’t putting on a show. He was really miserable. Poor Diego. I patted his jowl dry with the corner of my shawl.
“You’ll feel better if you start to work again,” I whispered. “You’re not happy unless you’re busy.”
“Maybe you’re right.” He placed his head on my hip, burying his face in my skirt, and I caressed his hair lightly.
“Poor Diego. Poor, poor Diego. ¡Pobrecito!”
“Under one condition,” he said without moving. His voice was muffled. I could hardly hear him.
“What?”
“You pose for me.”
“Of course! I said I would, didn’t I?”
I didn’t think anything of it. I had posed for him so many times before. I had been his favorite model, and I was looking forward to being his favorite model again. I loved posing for Diego. It made me feel special, womanly. Anyhow, I had nothing else of importance to do. Nothing was going on in my life. Antonio was about four. He didn’t need me there every minute of the day, and besides, Polinesta, his nanny, and the other maids took good care of him. I liked to have fun, go to parties, visit friends, just like Frida, but between the problems with Pinedo and Mami’s illness, I never got to do any of those things. Posing for Diego would be fun. It would make me feel like a person again, I thought, a person with a life and somewhere to go once in a while. I would be like old times.
“I’d love to pose for you, Diego. Just tell me when and where.”
“Tomorrow,” he said, “at my house.” His tone was matter-of-fact.
Diego and Frida had a kind of strange living arrangement. On the corner of Palmas and Altavista in San Angel, Diego had built two boxy houses connected by a bridge. He lived in the larger one, painted pink, and Frida lived in the smaller one, painted blue. His had a huge studio. Hers had a studio in the bedroom, which was bathed in light thanks to a perfectly positioned picture window. Frida loved that room. She had a bed with posts and a wooden canopy that she hung crepe paper ornaments from. The flowered bedspread, she had embroidered herself. She had her quarters decorated a lo mexicano, with gilded mirrors, native ceramics, papier-mâché parrots, flower wreaths, and colorful tiles. She also had a few skeletons hanging here and there, the kind they sell in the streets for the Day of the Dead. The room was just like Frida—bright, gaudy, and beautiful, but also a bit morbid. Anyhow, the arrangement allowed them each their own working and living space. In other words, it prevented them from killing each other. Often they ate together. Sometimes they slept together, but not often, because the doctor had told Frida not to have sex so she wouldn’t lose the baby. That bothered Diego, but not too much, because girls still lined up to sleep with him.
I showed up at Diego’s about noon. He had been up for hours. When he was working on a mural, he would start at the crack of dawn, so he was used to rising early. He had his easel all set up and his paints spread out in front of him on the old kitchen plate he used for a palette.
He hardly greeted me. He seemed anxious to get started, so I put down my things and asked for instructions.
“I’m doing some studies for the Medical School murals,” he said. “We’ll start with the allegory of health. You’re the perfect model for it, Cristina. You know, fitness, vigor, well-being. Take off your clothes and stand here.”
I did as he asked.
He explained the pose to me. Raised arm, firm step. As he demonstrated, his knuckle brushed against my breast. I tensed slightly, but he turned away as if he hadn’t noticed. After about a half hour I began to get tired. I hadn’t posed in a long time. I was out of practice, and besides, it was a difficult position to hold. I asked for a break.
“All right,” he said, “but you can’t be taking a break every ten minutes. I have a lot to do this afternoon.”
I threw on the light robe I always wore when I posed and went into the kitchen to make us some coffee.
“Wait,” he said suddenly. “Don’t do that.” He was standing in the doorway, looking at me. There was something different about his gaze. His eyes radiated an immense tenderness. I had never seen him look at anyone that way, except for Frida.
“Don’t you want coffee?”
“Take that thing off,” he whispered, nodding at the wrap. “I want to look at you. I want to watch you move.” His voice was thick. I knew what was on his mind. It was obvious. I turned and faced him. Looking him right in the eye, I threw off the robe and let it drop to the ground. He smiled and stared, examining my body as though he had never seen it before. Centimeter by centimeter. I didn’t care. I wasn’t embarrassed. It had been a long time since anyone had looked at me that way. I was savoring the moment.
He moved toward me. I watched him come without recoiling. I was excited. Every nerve in my body stood at attention. He placed his fingers gently on my breast and circled the tip with his thumb. Then he drew me toward him. I felt a shiver from my arches to the peak of my crown, and I closed my eyes and let him put his hands where he wanted. His touch was delicious, and his body was sensitive and responsive. He slipped off his clothes. No, that’s not right. That’s what you might say if you were describing an art movie, but that’s not what happened. Diego couldn’t slip out of anything. He was too bulky. He could hardly see over his paunch to the bottom of his shirt to undo it. He had been gaining weight, since his doctor had told him that if he didn’t inflate again, he would die of bad temper. He kept fumbling with the buttons until finally I pulled his hands away and put them on my hips, then ran my fingers down his chest and undid the last button on his shirt. We both burst out laughing.
“I’m a pig!” he chortled.
“Yes, you are!” I teased.
The skin underneath his clothes was soft and white like a baby’s, with a few scattered graying hairs on his oversize bosom.
“So do you, Cristi.”
He kissed me on the forehead. “A young, sensuous, beautiful girl.” He had become clinging, breathy. “I need you so much,” he kept whispering. “I need you so much.”
“You can’t have me until you take off your pants!” I whispered back, poking him in the stomach.
“Ah, that’s going to be a problem, unless you help me with this belt buckle!”
I struggled with the buckle, but it was buried under rolls of stomach fat, making it difficult to release. I kept pushing at his spongy middle. “Pull in! Hold it in! Otherwise, I can’t get the metal tongue out of the hole.”
“Ha! I know all about tongues in holes!”
“You are a pig!” I kissed his bloated belly. “How do you get undressed when I’m not there to help you?”
“Frida does it.”
Frida. The mention of her name. A kind of dull thud in the—where? In the brain? The gut? The conscience? Frida, my sister. I was about to make love with her husband. Ah yes, Frida. A dim image of Frida floated somewhere in the atmosphere … laughing … crying. Then it disappeared. But her voice, I could still hear her voice, distant, faint, disembodied. “Cristi! My own darling little sister!” An accusatory hiss. Diego heard none of it.
Frida! So what. Frida! She was there, I was here. She was here sometimes, but so what. Diego didn’t seem to have a problem with it, and I was having too much fun to stop.
He led me to the couch at the far end of the studio. Making love with Diego was like drinking honey. Satisfying, satiating. A sweet taste lingered afterward. I don’t know what I thought about. I can’t remember. I didn’t think of anything.
That’s how it began. Innocently. Diego had had so many affairs. What difference did one more make? Frida knew about Lupe, she knew about Tina. She knew about the Wills woman and the students. She said she didn’t believe in those stupid bourgeois ideas about marriage. “You don’t die when you get married,” she once told me. “You keep living, breathing, wanting.” Even though she ranted and raved for a while when Diego slept with somebody new, she always came around. I mean, she always wound up accepting it, conceding that Diego needed variety and that his affairs meant nothing at all as long as he loved her best. She complained, yes. But she didn’t leave him, did she? “Diego is a man who craves,” she explained to me when she was in one of her tolerant moods. “He can never get enough of anything. Diego is a man who rejoices in the world and its pleasures, who thirsts after every kind of gratification. You take that away from him, and what do you have? One more fat, boring, ascetic draftsman. You take that away from him and you kill the exuberance! You kill the artist! Do you know what ascetic means, darling?” Anyway, most of the time she made friends and allies of her rivals, and it was she, not Diego, who had the last laugh. So, to tell you the truth, I didn’t worry too much about what Frida would think.
I can tell you this: Diego was a wonderful lover. He not only fucked like a prince, he talked to me. And he listened to me. He described his student days in Spain. He said he hated the Spaniards because they had no imagination. The few good ones like Picasso and Gris went to France. Besides, the Spaniards decimated our native people. He told me things like that when we were lovers. He took me seriously, you see. He told me about his trips to Italy, about the Ravenna mosaics. “I traveled with just a knapsack,” he told me. “All I carried with me was my brushes and paints, a few pairs of socks, and a change of underwear. I stank like hell after a week!” That’s what he said to me, and I believe it, because Diego wasn’t so fond of bathing. He trudged on. He made sketches in Milan, Verona, Venice, who knows where else? So many years have passed since I lay in his arms and listened to those stories. I do remember something he told me about Picasso, though. Diego knew that Picasso was a genius, but he didn’t really like him. “I learned a lot from the son of a bitch,” he would say, but Picasso got on his nerves. He was too imposing, too much the master who expected younger artists to kowtow to him. “The fag never let you forget that he was the leader and you were the follower,” Diego told me. But Diego wasn’t a follower, and that’s the real reason he detested Picasso, if you ask me. They were too much alike, two strong men, two bulls in a perpetual pissing contest. Maybe he was just a little bit jealous. After all, Picasso was already a star, and Diego was just, well, he wasn’t a star yet. When he left Europe for Mexico to paint murals for Vasconcelos, he told Picasso, “Cubism is dead, viejo. Your warped demoiselles say nothing to the people. You call yourself a communist, but you don’t speak the language of the masses.” “You’ve always been a cabrón and a liar,” said Picasso without looking up from his work. That’s how they parted company. Diego told me all those things. It was an education for me. Cubism, Lombardi painting, Franz Hals. I learned about those things from Diego, from listening to him. I’m, well, exaggerating. We didn’t lie in bed talking about Picasso and cubism. Of course not! Diego was so hefty. It took tremendous energy for him to make love. Afterward, he’d just collapse, sort of like a rubber blimp that you punch a hole in, and it deflates … whoosh! That’s how Diego was: inhale, come, snore! Inhale, come, snore! One two three, one two three, inhale come snore! But he never treated me as though I was stupid. He talked to me, although not while we were lying in bed. At other times.
And he listened. I told him everything—about how they teased us on account of Papá’s being Jewish and a foreigner, about how Frida always managed to get her own way. I told him about Pinedo, and how miserable I felt when he left me. Even though Pinedo was a slimy, whoring slug and Frida said I was better off without him, being left like that by someone you once loved and who you thought loved you, it’s like losing an organ. And I talked about my children, about how sometimes I thought that Isolda loved Frida more than she loved me because, after all, Aunt Frida was so glamorous, with her flowing Tehuana costumes and her hair done up in braids. I didn’t talk about the kids too much, though, because Diego wasn’t interested in children, and besides, Frida’s pregnancy was a sore point.
Diego was generous, you know. He gave me things. At first, small things, things Frida wouldn’t notice. A gold pin representing the god Chac Mool. A book of French impressionist paintings with soft colors and little girls dancing ballet. A typewriter. Why did I need a typewriter? At the time I didn’t know that Diego was thinking of making me his secretary. That’s right. I became his official secretary. That way we could go everywhere together. After all, an important man like Diego couldn’t be without a full-time, rain-or-shine secretary, could he? Even in public. Even right in front of her, I was always with him. Cristi, write down Mr. Pérez’s phone number, please. Cristi, check my appointment schedule for tomorrow, please. He needed his Cristi, see? But when he gave me that typewriter, I thought it was just something Diego found beautiful, with its big black frame and shiny keys with white letters stamped on them. A modern-day sculpture is what he called it. A poem to technology. Diego loved machines, all kinds of machines. Afterward, he gave much larger presents, but for the moment, just little things. Things I could hide in my room in the house in Coyoacán, where I was still living with Papá.
Frida visited that house all the time. She went to visit Papá and to play with Toñito and Isolda. She would dress Isolda up in beautiful Tehuana costumes with ruffled headdresses, and they would put on the phonograph and dance in the patio. But she rarely went to my room. She never saw the typewriter.
How did she find out? I’m not exactly sure. Maybe Petronila, Diego’s maid, told her. Petronila came and went freely during the painting sessions. Or maybe Diego told her. After all, he wasn’t ashamed of it, at least, not at first. For him, it wasn’t a moral issue. For him, the man has one part, the woman has another part his fits into, and when they both feel like it, he sticks his into hers, and what’s the big deal? So maybe he just said something like “You know, Frida, yesterday while I was screwing Cristi, I happened to think of a good theme for the left panel of the Medical School mural.” Or maybe she just realized it. She had an eye like an eagle’s, that Frida, and besides, she had a kind of sixth sense.
What happened is that one day she just popped in on one of the sessions. Just popped in unannounced. It was her house too. Why shouldn’t she just pop in? After all, she and Diego usually had their dinner together around two or three in the afternoon in his enormous kitchen, and, of course, she had access to all the rooms. But lately, she hadn’t even been coming over for the main meal. She had had her appendix out a couple of months earlier, and the incision was still bothering her. Besides, the pregnancy wasn’t going well. She was tired all the time, and her foot hurt her, her back hurt her, everything hurt her. Sometimes it was hard for her to get around. Sometimes she couldn’t even get out of bed, she’d spend the day under the covers feeling sorry for herself. And she was nauseous a lot of the time because of the baby. She spent most of her time in her own quarters, in the blue box on the other side of the bridge.
She had a strange look on her face. Nothing was going on between Diego and me at the moment. I was just posing and he was just painting. It wasn’t as though she had caught us “in the act,” as they say, but her eyeballs were spurting fire and her tongue flicked like a snake’s.
She didn’t utter a word. She was wearing gray trousers and a lavender shirt. She looked stunning. She stood right in front of me, very close, so close I thought she’d singe my cheeks. She didn’t need to say anything. I knew that she knew, and I knew that she cared. What do you want me to say? I had hurt her. That was obvious. Her look was like bolts of lightning. I felt myself reduced to a pile of filthy ashes.
“Frida …” I murmured.
She turned away from me. Diego just kept on painting as if he didn’t know what was going on, as if Frida were a fly or a gnat—annoying but unimportant.
She stood there staring at him.
“It’s too early to eat,” he said finally. “I’m not ready yet.”
She didn’t answer. She turned and faced me again. Then she took a step backward and looked me up and down, looked at my body as though it were a pile of dung. She walked around me, still staring. I felt like a slave on the block, a naked Indian slave. I felt like a whore on display. That’s how she made me feel. My sister. Then she turned and left.
I waited for Diego to make a soothing remark. “It doesn’t matter, Cristi.” Or even “We’ve wounded her, Cristi. We’ve got to put an end to this affair.” But he didn’t. He just went on painting as if nothing had happened.
After that day, I didn’t want to have sex with him anymore. I didn’t even want to pose anymore. I made up excuses not to show up at the studio. “I have to take Toñito to the doctor, Diego.” “I have to help my friend Ana María Quintano prepare two hundred burritos for her daughter’s First Communion.”
He begged. He had to get done with the preliminary studies in order to get going on the Medical School mural, he said, and he couldn’t switch models in the middle of an assignment. Please, Cristi, just a few more days. Please, Cristi, just till I get myself together. Please, Cristi, otherwise I won’t be able to paint at all. Please, Cristi, you were the one who said I had to start painting again, and now you’re throwing me off the boat in the middle of the ocean. Never a word about Frida, though. Never a word about what we had done to her. Well, he wore me down. I wanted to stay away, but he wouldn’t let me.
“All right,” I said finally. “I’ll pose, but I won’t make love with you ever again, Diego. I can’t bear what’s it’s doing to Frida.”
“Ah, yes, Frida,” I expected him to say. “We have to talk about Frida.”
But instead, he said: “Just pose. That’s all I ask.”
Frida was playing the martyr. She was good at that, you know. Saint Justina, clutching the cross while the flames scorched her toes. But instead of carrying on like a madwoman, which was what I was prepared for, she looked out at the world through the eyes of a flogged puppy. Her foot was worse than ever. She was going to need an operation, and now the doctor said that she couldn’t go through with the pregnancy because her health was too fragile. She was going to have to get an abortion. She didn’t say it was all my fault, but the way she looked at me, I felt that it was. To make matters worse, Diego hadn’t started the Medical School mural yet, and they had no money.
“Shit, you bitch!” I said to myself. “Call me slut! Call me traitor! Just spare me that mournful mask.”
I couldn’t bear it. The flogged puppy. The sacrificial lamb. I wanted to die. I couldn’t stand the way I was feeling. But it wasn’t her fault. It was Diego’s. Why had I let myself get trapped in his web? An unwitting fly, that’s what I was. An unwitting fly that suddenly got sucked into a sticky, silken maze and wrapped up in fatal threads. I could feel myself being squeezed to death, squeezed and smothered. I vowed never to let him touch me again.
But who could resist the great Diego Rivera? At first he behaved. He painted. He didn’t talk. He was cordial but professional. He built up my trust, and I let down my defenses.
One night, as we were finishing up, he took my hand and led me into the kitchen. I was dressed already.
“Just stay and have a bite with me,” he pleaded. “Petronila prepared some empanadas.”
“Diego …”
He looked like a rejected schoolboy. I didn’t have the heart to go.
We ate in silence. He seemed not to be able to find words. I took his hand in mine.
“Poor Diego,” I murmured.
“I’m so lonely, Cristi.”
“Forlorn little froggie,” I said, trying to sound sarcastic.
“I need you so much, Cristinita.”
I didn’t want to get caught again. “I can’t betray Frida,” I said firmly. I think I said it firmly. “We’ve hurt her once. Please, let’s not do it again.”
I was still holding his hand, but then he shifted positions slightly, so that he was holding mine. I felt him subtly tighten his grip.
“She’s had an abortion,” he said.
“I know. Poor Frida. She suffers terribly.”
“Yes.” He paused. “But why does she keep on getting pregnant? She knows she can’t carry a baby to term. It seems stupid to me. Stupid and selfish.”
“Why selfish? She wants to give life to a baby.”
“She’ll never give life to a baby, and now she can’t give life to me, either. The doctor says no sex. Not for a long time. She has to recover, and then she has to have an operation on her foot. Whenever I go to her, it’s the same. She can’t have me. She won’t have me. She’s too wrapped up in her own pain. She loves to suffer, Cristi. That’s the real reason she keeps on getting pregnant. So she can be miserable and make everybody else miserable with her. It’s her greatest pleasure. But you know what, Cristi? It really doesn’t matter, because you’re the one I want. I need you, Cristi I need you. I’ve always loved you, from the very beginning, from the first time I saw you, when I went to visit Frida at your parents’ house.”
He was kissing me gently. He was unbuttoning my blouse, pulling it off my shoulders, massaging my buttocks, leading me to the bedroom.
How long did it go on? Maybe a year. Maybe longer. What I can tell you is this: I never felt more like a woman than when Diego and I were lovers. He was completely devoted to me. He talked to me. He painted me. He took me places with him. He wasn’t ashamed of me. Whenever he had money, he bought me things. He set me up in a beautiful apartment on Florencia Street, in the best part of Mexico City. He even bought me a car. In those days, there weren’t that many Mexican women who knew how to drive. I was special. When I went out in my two-tone Packard, I turned heads. I would let my hair down so it flew in the breeze. I was a sight to see. That’s what everyone said. I would go to see Papá in Coyoacán every weekend, and I would take him for rides in the country. He loved it. I was a good daughter. I was even a successful daughter, because I was the favorite model of the great Diego Rivera! When Diego painted his Modern Mexico mural in the National Palace, he put me in the center of it. There I am, looking round and sensuous, leaning slightly forward to show the curve of my hip, my two children by my side. There I am, holding a communist something or other, a document, a declaration of the rights of the worker or something. I’m in front. Frida is there too, but she’s in back of me, looking like a Girl Scout, no, excuse me, a Young Communist.
Frida was enraged that Diego and I were back together. Once in a while she spewed venom: “You’ve hurt me, Cristina! How could you do this to me! You little snake!” But most of the time it was just the cold shoulder. The I-don’t-even-know-you’re-here treatment. She’d walk into a room and kiss Diego, kiss Papá, kiss Toñito and Isoldita, even kiss Petronila and pretend I was invisible. At a party, if someone asked about me, she’d shrug as though she didn’t know who they were talking about. Even if I was standing right there. Well, what did I care? I had Diego. She had a broken back, a sore foot, and an empty uterus.
She moved out of her house next to Diego’s and into an apartment on Avenida Insurgentes, in Mexico City. “I’ll help you pack,” I told her. Instead of answering, she sniffed and turned her back. I was sick of her moods, sick of her hysterics, sick of her operations, her pain, her whining, her pregnancies and her abortions. I was the successful one, that’s what I want you to understand. I was Diego Rivera’s woman. I was the favorite, the pretty one, the one who had borne children. She couldn’t even conceive a baby and carry it to term.
Diego still loved Frida. I knew that. I knew he went to see her almost every day. I knew because he told me.
“She’s feeling better,” he’d say. “We made love today. We made love savagely. She was magnificent!”
He said those things to upset me. They weren’t true. They couldn’t have been true, because Frida was sick. But he loved to get me riled. He loved to play one against the other. He was in heaven when women fought over him. He did everything he could to fan the fires. He bought me some beautiful red leatherette furniture for my apartment, then turned around and bought Frida the same set in blue. He knew we’d find out and would be at each other’s throats.
“I’m just trying to be fair!” he said with that goddamn innocent grin of his. Fan the flames, fan the flames, keep the sisters clawing at each other! Was he taking bets on which one would destroy the other? Well, I didn’t care. I was enjoying myself.
And what do you think? Do you think I was selfish? Do you think I was cruel?
I guess I was. Of course I was. Poor Frida. She was going through hell, and she needed me. But I was too busy zipping around in my new car, showing off, flirting with every pair of pants that came into my field of vision. I was enjoying my status as Diego Rivera’s current favorite. Was that so wrong? All I wanted was a little happiness, a little fun. After all, hadn’t she been running around to parties for years, hobnobbing with big shots and eating caviar? Well, now I was doing it! I was meeting movie stars, people like Dolores del Río! I was meeting famous politicians! Even Lázaro Cárdenas. And so many others! I would stand real close to them at parties and say outrageous things, fluttering my eyelashes at them right in front of their wives, just like Frida did. Just like I imagined she did. All I wanted to do initially was show Frida that I was somebody, that a man could really love me. Yes, I was hurting her, but so what? Let her take a little of what she’s been dishing out. That’s what I thought.
But then I began to think about it more. It began to sink in. I had betrayed my own sister. I had driven an awl into her gut. Who knew if I would ever be able to put back together what I had ripped apart. I began to think that things would never again be the same between us. I couldn’t bear it. I began to stay home from the parties. I began to sit in front of the window, drinking and sobbing. Sometimes I’d hide in the bathtub. I’d sit and soak for hours. I’d lose track of the time. All I have to do is slide down under the water and breathe in deeply, I’d think. Then it would all be over. I wouldn’t be an obstacle to Frida’s happiness anymore. I would imagine myself slitting my wrists and watching the blood trickle out of my veins and into the soapy water. I’d imagine myself walking into the sea, Isolda’s little fingers in my right hand and Toño’s in my left. I’d just walk and walk, the gentle waves shrouding first the baby’s tiny form, then Soldita’s, then lapping around my neck, my ears, my eyes until at last they covered me entirely. I could hear Frida calling from the shore, “Cristi, please! Don’t go! Don’t leave me all alone! At least don’t take the children! They’re all I have!” Bitch! They’re all I have? Even in my dreams she thinks only of herself!
I had finally realized what a mess I’d made of things. How did I realize? First there was the apartment. Frida’s apartment, I mean. To move out of Diego’s house and into her own place was a pretty radical step. She was trying to break away from him, that was clear. I’m not a psychiatrist, a professional like you, but I could see she was struggling to break bonds. She was going to try to support herself with her painting, she said. She didn’t need him anymore. She was lying, of course. Lying to herself and to all of us. Because she saw him all the time. Every day! She didn’t cut the cord at all. But she didn’t want to depend on him financially, and to prove it, she set up a studio in her apartment and got busy working. She even went to see a lawyer, Manuel González Ramírez, one of the Cachuchas from her days at the Prepa, about getting a divorce. I never dreamed she would go so far. I was scared.
Frida was changing. What happened between us made her change. It made her more independent. It was as though Frida wasn’t just divorcing Diego, she was divorcing me. I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d lie awake, staring into the blackness, thinking about how I had ruined everything. I was miserable.
But there was something else that happened that made me realize what a shit I had been, how horribly I had hurt her. It was a painting she did around that time called A Few Small Nips. It was inspired by a newspaper story about a man who viciously murdered his girlfriend. He stabbed her all over her body, then left her in a pool of blood. When the police arrested him, he said something like “What’s the big deal? I just gave her a few small nips!” Frida’s picture shows the assassin holding a bloody knife over a woman lying on a cot, her body covered with gashes. It’s brutal, incredibly brutal. But, this is awful, I’m embarrassed to tell you this. The first time I saw it, I burst out laughing! I mean, it was so gruesome, it reminded me of a Mexican melodrama. You know, those movies where the wronged husband shoots his wife, her lover, her mother, her father, her sister, the kids, the family dog, and all their cattle to boot! I couldn’t stop laughing. Tears gushed out of my eyes. I tried to stop, but what could I do? “It’s all right, Cristi,” Frida said softly. She had that hurt little smile on her lips. “It is funny, in a way.” She was in such pain. And the murderer in the painting was me. I knew that. Diego and me.
I loved her. So did Diego. We both loved her. We loved her more than we loved each other. Diego made her suffer, but afterward he was miserable, really, sincerely. We hated hurting her. Hated it. And yet we kept on doing it.
Diego and I didn’t separate. I had learned how to type, not very well, but I kept on working as Diego’s secretary, and I kept on posing for him. Frida knew we were still lovers. What was it about Frida that made you hurt her even though you didn’t want to? Why did I treat her so cruelly? It was as though I were trapped … trapped in some kind of zombielike state where I couldn’t control my own actions.
Did Frida ever forgive me? She said she did. Eventually, after it was over, she told me that she had put it all behind her. Her love for me and Diego was greater than anything, she said. But I knew that things would never be the same between us.
Frida didn’t go through with the divorce, but she took a lover of her own—a famous Japanese sculptor—and then another and another. Some were men, some were women. An art student. One of Diego’s assistants. A waiter at Sanborn’s. A young political activist. A dancer from a visiting zarzuela company. A nurse she had met at the hospital. She was drowning her sorrow in sex, and she was getting even. Diego didn’t care about the women. He thought lesbian affairs were interesting. All the women in their crowd were having them. But the men, that he couldn’t take. He couldn’t bear the thought of Frida in another man’s bed. That’s why, every time she did it, she made sure he knew. Once she convinced her sculptor-lover Isamu Noguchi to take an apartment with her. They ordered some furniture for it, but Frida had it sent to Diego’s instead. “Oh!” she told him. “The delivery man must have made a mistake and delivered it to the wrong address!” She did things like that to hurt him, you see.
Why do people who love each other torture each other so? You figure it out. That’s your job. The only thing I know is this: I never stopped loving Frida. No matter what terrible things I did, I loved her. Write it down: Cristina Kahlo loved her sister Frida.