WHEN YOU’VE LIVED THROUGH A WAR, YOU NEVER FORGET. MEMORIES haunt you. A child lying in the street with his head blown off, a mule with its guts flowing into the dirt, its eyes eerily open, blood gushing, rushing. Children screaming, shrieking, squealing like pigs being slaughtered. Blurred images. Solitary fingers, a footless leg, a disjointed arm, crushed skulls … I was overcome with nausea.
“Frida! What did you do? Frida!”
A torn torso, a ripped, sexless crotch, a smashed shoulder.
“Frida! Why did you do this? What’s the meaning of this?”
Bits of hair, scraps of lace, a tiny parasol, a ruffle.
I could hear her in the bedroom, sobbing. I picked up a tiny hand and buried it in my fist.
“Poor baby,” I whispered. “Poor baby.” Who did it belong to, this delicate little hand? The blond baby with the sad blue eyes? The brunette baby with the crinoline dress?
“Frida!”
The entire collection, smashed or torn to smithereens. The Mexican revolutionary rag doll with her strap of cartridges, the French adolescent with her pretty bonnet, the Indian with her braids and her baby on her back, the painted porcelain babies with their perfect smiles and unmoving eyes, all of them in pieces. And those terrible scenes of real babies shot to pieces rushed into my head. The Revolution, and now, the war in Europe. It was happening again, only somewhere else. Sweet young girls in organdy dresses hanging like tatters on barbed wire fences. Girls that seconds before had had moist cheeks and quivering mouths. Dolls. Real live dolls. And here, now, plaster dolls with lacquered lips, brutally dismembered. How could my sister be capable of such violence? What monsters could have driven her to destroy her brood of beloved dolls? I felt like I was losing my mind. I was weary.
“Frida!”
She’d been unpredictable ever since Papá had died. One minute she would be all joy and laughter. “Hey, cuate, come here and give me a hug! How ’bout a tequila and a game of cards?” “Hey, manita, let’s go shopping. Let’s buy rings for every finger or a pretty, painted piece of junk!” But then she’d start to drink, and no one could stop her. If you tried, she’d get mean. “You bitch! You don’t want me to have any fun!” She’d throw things, smash things. You just couldn’t control her. The booze combined with the painkillers, that’s what made her crazy.
And after Papá died, things went from bad to worse. I was the one who cared for him, who measured out his medicine and forced it through his parched lips. I was the one who read him letters from old friends to keep him distracted. Some distraction! Jews were decaying in the camps. The Mexican papers didn’t say much about it, but the letters told it all. Jews were streaming out of Germany and into Spain, where Franco was giving them safe conduct through the country. Why? Diego said Franco was a monster, an ally of Hitler and Mussolini. But Franco was saving Jewish lives. Why did he do it? Papá didn’t know, but he blessed him for it. Not that Papá was Jewish, I mean really Jewish. He no longer considered himself Jewish, but still. Most of the refugees went to the U.S. Those who couldn’t get in went to Argentina or else came to Mexico. Papá agonized about relatives, people he hadn’t seen in decades, and about people he had never seen at all, and he wondered when the U.S. would get involved in the war. Papá died in 1941, and during those last years, Frida was off in New York screwing Nikolas Muray or in Paris cozying up to the surrealists or in San Francisco being the new Señora de Rivera. I was nursing our father. She was busy with her own life, yet when Papá was dying, it was Frida he asked for, and after it was all over, it was Frida who went berserk.
I’m not being sarcastic. She was the favorite, and his death affected her horribly. And don’t forget, we had just gone through the ordeal of Leon’s murder. One thing right after the other. It was too much. And her own health was going downhill. Everything was wrong—her spine, her foot. After she got back to Mexico from the States, she moved back to Diego’s house, but she spent most of her time with me. She wrote to Dr. Eloesser constantly. “My shank is better, but my stomach is in shambles. My neck is better, but my plumbing doesn’t work at all. My head is better, but my spine is like one of those gadgets invented by the Spanish Inquisition.” Sometimes she called him long-distance on the phone.
“What a jerk I am! I forgot to tell you something very important in my last letter! My digestion is as clogged up as the Mexican sewer system. I constantly need to burpted.”
“Burped!” Diego corrected her. We were sitting in the living room holding hands, Diego and I. It was the first time in ages that he had shown me any physical affection, but I suppose he thought it was okay because Frida was right there, not three meters away. I mean, how could there be anything naughty about it? We were both listening to Frida’s side of the conversation, although I didn’t understand most of it. I asked Diego to translate the good parts, but he said there weren’t any good parts, they were just talking about burping.
“Burping?” I asked.
Diego just laughed. “I’m an artist, not a translator,” he pretended to growl. In the end, he did translate a few sentences although his English was still pretty bad.
“I feel pain in my belly all the time,” Frida was saying, “and if I don’t burpted, I feel like a firecracker ready to explode.”
“Burped, not burpted!” snickered Diego. “I already told you!”
“And whose English is better, yours or mine?” she snapped. She scowled. She thought her English was perfect.
“Burp!” shouted Dr. Eloesser over the phone, so loud that even I could hear it. He was laughing hysterically. “You’re both wrong! It’s not burpted or burped. It’s burp! If Frida doesn’t burp, she feels awful!”
As I said, I don’t know much English, but after their conversation, well, I knew that word. Burp burp burp! How could Dr. Eloesser bear it? I mean, hearing her carry on about burping. How can doctors stand to hear about people’s gas and vomit and shit all day? It sounds like the worst job imaginable.
But you’re not that kind of doctor. You don’t have to deal with bodily functions.
Anyhow, the day she smashed her dolls, she was in such a black mood. It was as though God had turned his back on her and walked away. And just watching her, I felt as though I were lost in an underground tunnel with no entrance and no exit.
“Frida,” I whispered, caressing her hair. “Friducha, your beautiful babies.”
“No more babies!” she sobbed. “No more babies. I’ll never have a baby.”
We both knew it was true that Frida would never have a baby. She had come to terms with it a long time ago. Now she didn’t even pretend to want a child. She had no time for motherhood. She was too busy and too famous. Trotsky’s assassination and her divorce and remarriage to Diego had made her a superstar. She was interviewed by all the newspapers. The commissions were pouring in.
“You should get divorced and remarried more often,” I told her. “It’s good for business.”
She didn’t think that was funny, but she certainly smiled for the camera every time a reporter showed up at the door. She was in demand, and I wasn’t complaining. Frida’s good fortune was my good fortune. She was generous. She gave me money. She bought me clothes. She bought toys for Isolda and Antonio. She was thrilled to be the successful, noble, charitable sister.
That’s why the doll episode took me by surprise. I thought things were going better, that she was pulling herself together. She had just been asked to paint a series of portraits of the five Mexican women who were the most significant in the history of our people. “Cockroaches,” Frida called them. She was sure, she said, that ordinary Mexican women were more interesting and had “bigger teeth,” that is, were tougher. But she was going to accept the assignment anyway, because no matter how many commissions she was getting, we always needed more cash. The women she had to paint were Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, who, as every schoolchild knows, was a heroine of Mexican independence, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the famous nun-poet who did scientific research, women like that. The portraits were going to be for the Dining Hall of the National Palace. Frida wrote to Dr. Eloesser, asking him to get her some information about the “cockroaches.” The thing is, Frida was the provider. You see, we were a family, Frida, me, and the children. I was the mother and Frida was the father. Diego was a randy uncle who showed up on the doorstep once in a while.
I’m just an uneducated woman, and a stupid one at that, but I don’t think this business with the dolls had anything to do with babies. Maybe it was the pressure of having to do those portraits combined with everything else. Or maybe it was that Diego was still screwing every skirt he could get his hands on.
“I know I have to accept the presence of other ladies in his life,” she told someone, I can’t remember who. But it was probably someone important, because she said “other ladies” and not “other women.”
But then, later, when we were alone, she exploded. “His goddamn serial fucking is killing me, Cristi! It’s killing me! I can’t stand it anymore!”
“Serial fucking,” she said. Those were her exact words. Because, you see, that’s what he was, a goddamn serial fucker. A goddamn serial fucker! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be crude.
I don’t know if you can understand. When a man hurts a woman like that—when he says he loves her, then humiliates her—because it wasn’t so long after they remarried that Diego started fooling around with María Félix. He painted her, he showed up at openings with her. Their picture was in all the magazines, and before we knew it, Diego was talking about getting another divorce.
“Of course I love María,” he told an interviewer. “Everybody loves María.” And it was true. Ever since María starred in Fernando de Fuentes’s Doña Bárbara, people saw her as a savage, sexy Jezebel. All Mexico was in love with María. María the temptress. María the man-eater. It wasn’t until later, when she played a courageous schoolteacher who stands up to the town bully, that María Félix became a national heroine. You know, a great patriot, a champion of the Revolution. All that.
And what about Frida? the reporters asked. “I have to leave her,” Diego said simply. “I’m bad for her health.”
He was making himself out to be a hero. A man willing to make sacrifices. Yes, he was going to leave Frida, but it was for her own good. He added stress to her life, he explained, and her doctors insisted she avoid stress.
The truth is, he was bored with her. Her drinking was getting worse, and she wasn’t much fun to have around. After all, a woman who smells of vomit and death can’t be much of a vamp. Puke is no great come-on. But Diego was right about one thing. He was bad for her health.
She had promised me she’d stop drinking, and she even wrote to Dr. Eloesser that she had stopped. But I found empty glasses and bottles everywhere. She drank to deaden the pain in her body. She drank to deaden the pain in her soul. Diego’s behavior was killing her, and she was killing herself, destroying herself. The dolls were a kind of extension of her. They were little Fridas. She was killing the babies that represented a dream for the future. I think, at this point, Frida began to see that for her, there wasn’t much future.
For a while, I thought La Esmeralda would make a difference. You’ve heard of La Esmeralda, haven’t you? It was an art school started by the Ministry of Education sometime in the forties, 1942, I think. My God, over twenty years ago. They made Frida one of the teachers. Diego taught composition there—a lot of famous artists taught there—and he thought it would do Frida good to be around young people. Because she always loved kids.
She did love children. She painted them all the time. Well, maybe not all the time, because mostly she just painted herself, but, yes, she liked kids. Yes, absolutely.
I went with her sometimes, just to help out. I was there on the first day of class, tagging along, lugging canvases. It reminded me of that day so many years before when I had hauled Frida’s paintings from Coyoacán to the city so she could show them to Diego. The school was on Esmeralda Street. Frida had prepared nothing, brought no books or reproductions to show the kids. I didn’t have much education, so I’m no expert, but I would think that a teacher would have to do something to get ready for her class. At least figure out what to do on the first day. But Frida didn’t seem to attach much importance to the whole business.
The place was so new that it was dizzying. The vapors from freshly opened containers of rosin and turpentine and tempera made you light-headed, giddy. They created a terrible but wonderful perfume. Acrid and intoxicating. I felt slightly nauseated, and yet so excited. The place was exhilarating! Every space held a secret: the room where they made mosaics, tiny tiles of brash colors spilled from a sack like an Aztec chieftain’s cache of jewels. Trompe l’oeil cupboards of wooden inlay, so cleverly worked that the doors appeared open even though they were shut. A beautiful altarpiece with shellacked papier-mâché figures in bright pinks, yellows, turquoises, and lavenders, very Mexican, very lively.
The kids were huddled in clusters, buzzing like a motor in low gear. They were mostly from working-class families, the sons of street vendors and maids. Tuition and supplies were free. Some of the kids were peasants. They were young, mostly about sixteen or seventeen, but one or two looked about fourteen. There were a few girls, but not many.
Frida caught them off guard. She sashayed in wearing a white ruffled Tehuana outfit with pink and red ribbons. Her hair was done up with red, yellow, and pink roses, and she wore a ring on every finger. She looked like anything but a woman whose job it was to teach youngsters about the messy business of painting.
One of the girls approached Frida and looked her up and down. She must have been about sixteen, but she had the air of a petulant four-year-old showing off a new pair of shoes.
“I’ve only had men teachers, never a woman,” she announced. She spat out her words as though they were wads of tobacco.
Frida threw her head back and laughed.
“You’re no teacher!” hissed the girl. “Even my landscape instructor, Feliciano Peña, says that you’re no teacher!”
Frida looked at the girl with affectionate eyes. “You’re right!” she said gaily. “What’s this business about teaching, anyway?” Frida’s laughter fell at the girl’s feet like a shower of diamonds. “I swear, I have no idea what it means to give classes! Will you teach me?”
The child stood there, dumbfounded.
“Fanny.”
“Fanny what?”
“Fanny Rabinovich.”
Later, when she became famous for her portraits of children, she would be known as Fanny Rabel.
“Ah, well, Fannycita, you will be one of my muchachitas. You will be my student and you will teach me how to give classes, because really, darling, I have no idea. Will you do that for me, my precious Fanny? Will you teach me how to give classes?”
Frida had completely disarmed the girl. You see, she had that talent. She was so funny and warm. She left people defenseless.
Fanny was still standing there, paralyzed.
“No? Well, then, who will teach me how to give classes?”
No one answered, but some of them started to twitter shyly.
“If that’s the case, I’ll guess I’ll just let you all do whatever you want. How would that be? Because I’m certainly not going to tell you what to do.” Once again, she burst out laughing. They stared at her in amazement. A boy in a ragged white shirt shifted his weight from one foot to the other. A boy with a poncho and a surprisingly healthy mustache for one so young pulled at his ear nervously. Then, one by one, they joined her in laughter.
She didn’t break her promise. She actually did let them do what ever they wanted. I mean, she didn’t teach them to draw, really. Instead, she taught them to open their eyes and see the world around them. She let them paint the stuff that was lying around their homes, jugs, flowers, brooms, scraps of cloth. She taught them to appreciate the beauty of their surroundings, the mexicanidad of their surroundings. She let them pick their own subjects and work at their own pace. She never said, “Draw it this way. Copy from the book. Use my work as a model.” She never said, “Trace this page.” She let them develop their own styles. “Draw what you see,” she told them. “Draw what you feel.” She just wanted them to create images taken from their own world.
“All I want is to be your friend,” she told them. “So let’s get to work, and you’ll teach me as much as I teach you. More, in fact, because I really know nothing about teaching at all.”
None of those kids had ever heard an adult talk like that before, and especially not an adult in authority. They ate it up. They adored her. The great Frida Kahlo was going to be their friend.
She did love them. She had a way of teaching them that was different from anyone else’s. They’d be painting in a classroom when all of a sudden she’d say, “Oh, this is too boring! Let’s go out in the street. That’s where the true beauty and color of Mexico can be found. Let’s go, kids! Take your sketch pads!” And they’d all troop out to the slums and look for hours at the wash hanging from a clothesline—colorful cotton skirts, rebozos, underwear, shirts—or a dog urinating by the side of a building, or a cactus in a pot.
Sometimes they’d go to a pulquería. They’d drink and watch other people drinking, and they’d listen to the guitar music and sing songs with the drunken ex-revolutionaries Frida called her comrades, even though she didn’t invite them to her fancy dinner parties with guests like Dolores del Río and President Cárdenas.
Sometimes she’d show up at the school with basketfuls of snacks—empanaditas, flautitas, plantain chips, coconut cookies.
These were poor kids. A basketful of snacks went a long way. A basketful of snacks meant something.
After a few months, Frida got tired of going to La Esmeralda. She and Diego were both living in the Casa Azul in Coyoacán, and it was a long ride into the city every day, exhausting and hard on her back.
“Fine,” said Diego. “Don’t go anymore.”
“And my muchachitos?”
“Have them come out here!”
Did she really love them, or was she addicted to their devotion? Guillermo Monroy called her a walking flower. He was a poor boy. His father was a carpenter. I think he was overwhelmed by Frida’s presence. By the fact that Frida Kahlo, the Frida Kahlo, was paying attention to him.
Ha, I thought. He should see his walking flower when she’s puking in the toilet. He should see his walking flower when she’s so sloshed she slumps into the arroz con pollo. But then I thought about it. “Why am I being such a bitch?” I said to myself. “Why am I being so unfair?” Because I knew, deep down inside, that even though Frida was a selfish woman, she gave these kids what she could.
“I can’t abandon them,” she told me. “They need me. They adore me.”
And it was true. They adored her. But did they need her? She needed them, but did they need her?
“You’re so beautiful, Frida. Pose for us!”
“Teach us a song from the Revolution, Frida!”
“Come with us to the Communist Youth Organization tonight, Frida!”
Fridita, Friducha, Fridísima all day long. They called themselves the Fridos.
At first about ten or twelve Fridos came out to the house every day. They set up their easels in the garden and painted all morning. She fed them. She supplied paints and canvases. While they created images of swelling hibiscuses, exploding watermelons, cavorting monkeys, and exuberant jugs, Frida painted more Fridas. She painted her emotions, her physical pain. Frida beset by demons, Frida with a skeleton plugged into her brain, Frida with Diego in the middle of her forehead like an all-seeing eye, Frida in desolation, Frida with roots growing out of her gut, Frida with a crumbling spine, Frida in tears, Frida pierced with nails, Frida disemboweled … Frida the goddess, Frida the Christ, Frida the lord of all things seen and unseen.
My God! My God! Fridos and Fridas everywhere. It was like a shrine to our most holy lady Santa Frida. They even wrote music for her. Really! Guillermo Monroy wrote a corrido with fifteen verses. “Doña Frida de Rivera / our revered teacher …” la la la, and so on and so forth. Don’t ask me to sing it! A shrine attended to by devoted priests and priestesses. And I was one of them, don’t you see? I was the mistress of the cult, I was the chief priestess, the pope, the goddamn pope of the religion of our most holy lady the divine Saint Frida Kahlo de Rivera, because I was the one who took care of her, who medicated her, who fed her and bathed her. I was the one who listened to her, who soothed her and put up with her shit, her temper tantrums, her drinking, her vomit all over the bathroom floor, her whining, her depressions. No priest of any religion ever devoted his life to his beloved god the way I devoted mine to Saint Frida.
Go away. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Please, doctor … please just go away.
Well, all right. I’ll finish the story, but then, for the love of Jesus, go away.
One by one, the students stopped coming. Coyoacán was too far away. Most of them weren’t willing to make the trek. Anyhow, Frida didn’t really critique their work. Oh, once in a while, but not very often. Sometimes she and Diego would go out into the garden and throw out a comment or two, like princes throwing scraps of meat at dogs, but it wasn’t enough for some of them. They wanted a real teacher, so they left. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it wasn’t that way at all. Maybe they stopped coming because they just couldn’t pay the bus fare or couldn’t spare the time or didn’t have the energy. I don’t know why they stopped coming, but they did. Only four remained—Arturo García Bustos, Guillermo Monroy, Arturo Estrada, and Fanny Rabinovich. In addition, there was another one who came once in a while. He was about fifteen. His name was Carlos Sánchez Ahumada. A scrumptious boy, a young Aztec warrior, with an aquiline nose and a high forehead. You could just see him in a loincloth and feathers, lifting his arm as if to hurl a lance, flexing his muscles. He had a beautiful body. He was a mason like his father, and he was used to lifting stones.
Frida took an interest in him right away.
She used to bring him into her bedroom. That’s where she had her easel set up.
“Carlos, come see the portrait I’m doing of Doña Rosita,” she said to him one morning. The others pretended not to notice. “I want your opinion of it. Honestly, darling, tell me what you think. I learn as much from my students as they learn from me!
No one said a word. The others all knew that Frida had unconventional tastes. That’s one of the things that made her so fascinating to them—her absolute disdain for traditional morality. The morality of their peasant mothers. Catholic morality. They took Frida’s unusual preferences as an expression of her commitment to communist ideals. To hell with the middle class and all that. Only these kids weren’t middle-class, they were poor, and the morality she was thumbing her nose at was the morality they had been raised with. Even so, they accepted her. They loved her. Santa Fridita.
Still, her interest in Carlos came as something of a surprise. Everybody had thought she had her eye on Fanny. And maybe she did. But one thing didn’t rule out the other.
“Carlitos, mi amor, come and see the portrait I’m doing.”
“Sí, Doña Frida.”
“How many times do I have to tell you, Carlitos! Don’t call me Doña Frida! I’m your friend, darling, not your maiden aunt.”
“Sí, Doña Frida.”
She put her arm around his waist and nestled against his shoulder. She giggled, and her laughter floated up to the treetops and mingled with the chirping of the birds.
She winked at Carlos and ran her tongue over her lips.
“Carlitos, mi amor!”
The boy looked down at his sandals. Frida took him by the hand and led him into her bedroom. I watched from the kitchen door.
He emerged an hour or so later, his hair a mess, his shirt open, and his white homespun trousers askew. The others kept on painting. Carlos, back at his easel, kept his eyes on his work.
Frida was leaning against the patio wall, a malicious smirk on her lips, her eyes dancing.
“He’s impossible,” she told me that night. We were sitting in the kitchen, shelling peas. “He thinks his mamacita is watching. Whatever he does, he thinks his mamacita can see him. Her and the Virgin of Guadalupe. You touch his crotch, and you have the feeling the whole assembly of saints is right there with you, Santo Tomás, San Ignacio, Santa Teresa, Santa Rosa. The whole gang, and the whole choir of angels. Everyone from Doña Hortigosa, the next-door neighbor, to the goddamn pope is scrutinizing your every move!” She burst into gales of laughter. “Shit, the rubbish they pump into these kids’ heads!”
I was annoyed. She had used the word scrutinize. I didn’t know what it meant.
She looked as me as though she expected me to express sympathy. I kept on shelling peas.
“But eventually, he came around.” She chuckled. Then she stuck her index finger in her mouth and sucked on it wickedly. “When they’re young, they’ll do whatever you want.”
I was overcome by a sudden fit of nausea. Carlitos wasn’t that much older than my own son, Toñito.
She must have seen the look of disgust on my face. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” I lied. “Nothing.”
“You’re happy for me, aren’t you, Cristi?” She sounded heartbreakingly sincere.
“Of course I am, Frida.”
“I love you so much, Cristi.”
I knew she meant it.
“I love you, too,” I whispered.
My heart was in shreds. I bit my lip and got up and left the room. Why couldn’t I just accept her the way she was? Why did her stunts drive me so crazy?
Not long after that, Carlos Sánchez Ahumada disappeared. He not only stopped coming to the Casa Azul, he abandoned La Esmeralda altogether. Why? I don’t know. No one looked for him. No one went to his house to inquire.
What? No! Of course not. I had nothing to do with it! I never said anything to anyone about it until now, and now it doesn’t matter anymore.
So many years have passed. Anyway, nobody ever mentioned him again, not ever. Carlos was a taboo subject, like babies. You just didn’t talk about certain things with Frida. It was as though they didn’t exist. They had been erased by virtue of her wanting to forget them.
I’m old. I’m older than old. I don’t want to remember anymore. All I want is for you to go away.
All right, I’ll go on, but only for a little while. You have to understand, I’m tired.
I know I’ve been selfish. All the times I judged Frida harshly. All the times I resented her success. I admit it. I was horrible, cruel. I hate myself for that, but sometimes I just couldn’t help it. Sometimes she was so annoying, so self-centered, I just wanted to kill her. No, I don’t mean that. But she was full of herself, like a clam that fills its shell so tightly there’s no room for anything else. For example, at the opening of La Rosita.
You don’t know La Rosita? It was a pulquería on the corner of Aguayo and Londres, right down the street from our house. A sorry little place, dirty floors, a few stools. Some of the Fridos had studied mural painting with Diego, and so Frida got permission for them to decorate the outside walls. It would be good practice for them, she said. It wasn’t such an original idea. What I mean is, pulquería walls were usually painted. Simple stuff, graffiti almost, drawings of things suggested by the name of the place. Pulquería El Cacto had a lot of cactuses painted on its walls, for example. Or sometimes the pictures were political—revolutionary heroes, that sort of thing—or had something to do with the history of the town. For example, in San Pablo Guelatao, in Oaxaca, all the pulquerías had pictures of the famous president Benito Juárez because he was born there. At one point the government decided that the pulquerías had to be cleaned up, and so the walls all had to be whitewashed. But Frida and Diego objected to that. The paintings were the people’s art, they said, beautiful, authentic, and unconstrained. Frida’s idea was to give her students practice painting murals by giving them a crack at the walls of La Rosita. Just an exercise, she said, but at the same time, these kids’ paintings were going to revive the kind of folk art that had produced the original pulquería murals.
So they all trooped down there. The Fridos and some of Diego’s students too, the Dieguitos. They painted for days. Fanny did a little girl and a lot of roses. The name of the pulquería, Rosita, could be a girl’s name, or it could mean “little rose.” Frida and Diego would visit every once in a while and offer their comments. Anyhow, by June it was done.
The year? I think it was 1943. I’m almost sure. It was the year the movie Distinto Amanecer came out. Well, when the pulquería was ready to show off its new murals, Frida had these broadsides printed up, very funny broadsides with pictures of roses and people drinking pulque, and the announcement of a spectacular lunch, a barbecue of meats sprinkled with the best pulque in Mexico. She made it sound like she was announcing the opening of a very important exhibition. She had these broad sides distributed everywhere, in the central market, in the plazas. She had them pasted to church walls, she sent them to the newspapers, she sent them to the most important and influential people in Mexico City.
As you can imagine, it was a circus, a parade of celebrities.
“¡Dios mío!” said Frida. “I never suspected it would be anything like this!”
But of course she did. I mean, she’s the one who made it happen. After all, when Frida and Diego Rivera gave a party, the reporters came running. And Frida made sure they had plenty of advance notice. She made it into an event.
Concha Michel, the famous folksinger, sang “Delgadina,” about a girl who refuses to become a big shot’s mistress, and Guillermo sang his damned corrido about his beloved art teacher. Salvador Novo, Frida’s old friend from Prepa days and now a famous poet, recited verses. Padre Esteban, the parish priest, kissed Frida’s cheek, and the mother of one of Frida’s students kissed her hand. All the reporters kissed her ass.
Everywhere the lively sounds of guitars, blithe adolescents, spirited children. A toothless old lady was dancing a jaranda with her grandson, moving her hips and throwing her head back in joy. Even the dogs seemed to bark in time to the music. One chased another into a group of dancers, and a crew of little boys howled with laughter. The girl students were dressed in Tehuana costumes with full, colorful skirts, lacy blouses, and roses and ribbons in their hair. Miniature Fridas. Next they’ll all be limping, I thought.
The air was redolent with barbecue, as well as poached guavas, quince paste and cheese, and sugar cookies. And the best pulque from Ixtapalapa. You could get drunk just on the fragrance. Frida the bountiful. People thought she had paid for the whole thing, even though Diego and several other generous fat cats had footed the bills. Everyone ate and laughed and rejoiced in the exquisite mexicanidad of the moment, and Frida was the queen of this fairy-tale kingdom, where for one afternoon everyone was in a good mood and everyone—from the governor to the carpenter’s son—had enough to eat.
Lola del Río, my old friend Lola, who had held my hand and stroked my hair in Xochimilco, stood up on a chair and congratulated Frida on her great contribution to Mexican culture. Then she jumped down and hugged Frida. Diego applauded. Frida beamed. The photographers went snap snap snap. The pictures would be in the morning’s paper. I smiled at Lola, and she looked right past me. “Lola,” I whispered, but it was like I wasn’t there.
They were all dancing. I was dancing too, but as though in a dream. Floating, bobbing up and down like a balloon on a string. I was there, yet I saw the scene from afar, in muted colors, soft reds and yellows and greens, grainy, like a poor-quality film. I felt as though I were on the outside, as though I were watching from some place in heaven, where I hovered like a quivering, feathered creature.
The only one who wasn’t dancing was Benjamin Péret, a French teacher at La Esmeralda. He was a slight man with dull hair, droopy eyelids, and a limp wrist. He had just arrived from Paris and made it clear that although he shared Mexicans’ revolutionary zeal, he had no intention of ever touching a real Mexican. He was a good communist, he loved humanity, but he washed his hands with disinfectant whenever he shook hands with a campesino.
Diego signaled him to move into the dance area. “Vamos, compañero. We’re going to do a zapateado.”
Péret looked horrified. “Mais non!” He twitched. He looked like a scrawny rooster who had just swallowed a foul-tasting worm. Or maybe a string he had taken for a worm.
“Mais non!” His head jerked around oddly. His eyes were enormous and round. “I do not know how to make those dances, Diego.”
Diego was drunk. “ Vamos, Benjamín,” he coaxed. He winked at him and beckoned as though the French teacher were a coy young girl.
“No, Diego. I do not know how. I do not!”
Suddenly, Diego’s face turned mean. “Then I’ll teach you!” he snarled.
He yanked out the gun he always carried at his hip. Bystanders moved to the side. Mothers grabbed their children by the hand and snatched them away. Diego aimed at Péret’s feet.
“Non!” whimpered the Frenchman. “Non, Diego!” He was almost in tears.
Diego fired, and Péret hopped onto one foot. Diego fired again, and Péret shifted his weight again. Diego fired over and over, and Péret sprang from one foot to the other, suddenly agile.
“Now you’ve got it!” Diego roared. He kept on firing, and the dancer kept on zapateando. The patio of the pulquería exploded with laughter, but poor Benjamin was sniffing back snot.
Frida came up behind Diego and slipped her hand gently around his waist. “Come on, darling,” she coaxed. “That’s enough.”
Diego let himself be wooed.
Frida took the gun out of his hand and snuggled against him. Then he took it from her and slipped it back into the holster, and the two of them started to dance.
They both made me sick. How many times can you sit through the same film? It was time to change reels. It was time to change roles.
Frida danced for hours that night. How did she do it? I knew she was upset over Diego’s behavior and that her back and leg were killing her, but somehow she managed. Was it the liters of pulque she poured down her throat or simply the excitement? Or was she too aware of other peoples’ eyes on her not to put up a good show? Or had she taken an extra dose of painkillers before the spectacle began?
She was dying. Her body was decaying, wasting away before my eyes. And yet there she was, dancing.
“Pour me another drink!” she’d call out every once in a while, and someone would come running with another glass of pulque. All she had to do was ask. All she had to do was open her mouth, and someone would do her bidding. The whole world groveled at her feet. Frida the empress. She played her part like Bette Davis.
I was angry, I admit it. Her self-centeredness, her brave-little-invalid act. All of it disgusted me, but at the same time, I felt guilty because so much of Frida’s pain stemmed from what I had done to her. I just couldn’t put it out of my mind. I had betrayed my own sister. I loved her more than anyone in the world, yet I had betrayed her. Of all the horrible things that had happened to Frida, my treachery was the one that hurt her the most. It’s because I was family. That’s how it is with us Mexicans. One thing you learn from the time you’re born is that you can’t trust anybody except the members of your own family. So, you see, I had betrayed a sacred bond. Maybe things would have been different. Maybe she would never have gotten a divorce. I felt I had to do something to relieve her suffering, even if it meant being her slave for the rest of my life.
I watched Frida twirl around faster and faster, her face flushed, her chest heaving. She was laughing gaily. She was spinning from one partner to the other, stamping, clapping, swinging her hips. And yet, she was dying of a crushed back, a rotting leg, a broken heart.
And then I saw her gradually transform. Unexpectedly, without warning, Frida was no longer Frida. She was her skeleton. Instead of her face, her body, her feet, I saw her fleshless carcass, still in her Tehuana costume, whirling, laughing, its bony frame moving to the rhythm of the music, tapping, swaying, a skull sticking up above a ruffled blouse which hung limply over a mass of bones.
I looked from one to the other: Diego, Lola, Guillermo, Fanny, Salvador Novo, Concha Michel, all of them skeletons. Diego, who moments before had been stomping and pirouetting, graceful in spite of his tremendous girth, a supple giant. Now, a skull grinning ghoulishly atop a clanking, fleshless cadaver. Lola in her chic purple dress and sandals, Lupe Marín in her off-the shoulder white cotton blouse, the campesinos in their homespun shirts and trousers and huaraches. All skeletons. Even delicate Fanny, with her fine European cheekbones. Even Benjamin, jerking roosterlike along the edge of the dance area. All skinless skulls and torsos.
I wanted to scream, but why bother? Who would hear me? I was invisible.
Well, the La Rosita project was so successful that Frida got a lot of new projects for her Friditos. They did a mural in a public laundry with portraits of all the laundresses—a huge success. They did an exhibit at the Palace of Fine Arts in maybe 1945 or ’46 that made a lot of people mad because of its leftist themes. I can’t remember all the projects, but she helped those kids out a lot, getting them jobs, arranging shows. They came to think of her as a kind of second mother, and that was a big mistake. That was the beginning of the end.
As you know, I guess you know, in Mexico we celebrate Mother’s Day on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. One year Frida’s students decided to give Frida a Mother’s Day gift. They put together a collection of their paintings. Fanny did a maternity scene, a mother and child, but not the Mother and Child. One of them did a family of the Revolution—father, mother, son, and daughter—all poor in peasant clothes and huaraches, all with cartridge belts slung across their chests. Another did a birth scene inspired by Frida’s My Birth, painted more than a decade earlier. They were all small paintings, almost miniatures. The idea was that Frida would hang them together in her studio, on one wall, a tribute to her from her spiritual children. They came over early in the morning with their gifts and a huge bouquet of flowers—roses, orchids, daisies, carnations, hibiscuses—a huge bouquet, all done up in colored ribbons.
They had made a little card to go with the flowers. On it they had written: To our second mother. They had all signed it.
Obviously, they thought it would please Frida. They knew how much she had wanted to have children, how much she said she had wanted to have children.
Fanny presented the bouquet, a wide grin on her lips.
“Maestra …” she said breathlessly.
“Our adorada maestra,” Guillermo Monroy echoed her.
Frida stood staring at the youngsters, paralyzed. Only her lips moved, but no sound came out of her mouth.
Monroy seemed not to notice. He sat down and began to strum his guitar. He had written Frida another corrido. He started to croon. Segunda madre, “second mother,” are the only words I remember. They were part of the chorus, which he kept singing over and over. “You’re a second mother / to the kids who love you.” Something like that.
Frida’s lips were trembling. I expected her to make a biting remark, to light a cigarette and stare into space, as though she couldn’t possibly be bothered with their stupid little gifts. I expected her to adopt a bored look and a cynical tone. Instead, she thanked them graciously and told them that she was feeling ill, they would have to come back another time.
“But maestra,” they said. “We took the bus all the way from the city.”
“I’m sorry, darlings,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”
“Those idiots!” she howled the instant they had left. “Those stupid little morons! What do they think they’re doing calling me their mother? I’m not their mother! I’m nobody’s mother. I don’t want their presents! I don’t want their sympathy! I don’t want to be anyone’s second mother. Get this fucking shit out of here! Get it out of here right now.”
She took a knife and stabbed Fanny’s beautiful mother and child. She shredded each and every painting, then she attacked the flowers. She attacked them as though they were people, children. She ripped off their delicate heads, she yanked off their little leaves, she tore up their fragile stems. Crazed, she snatched pieces between her teeth, chewed them to shreds, then spat them out. Her eyes were white, out of orbit. She was screaming and sobbing. “Morons! Asses! Idiots! Imbeciles! I’m not your goddamn mother! I’m not your fucking mother, you fucking little dimwits. Take back your fucking posies. Get your shitty paintings out of here! I’m not your mother, do you hear me! I am not your mother! I have no children, and you are not my children!” She was shrieking, carrying on like a madwoman. I imagined she had ranted and raved the same way the day she smashed her dolls. She was hoarse from hollering. Finally, she collapsed onto her bed and sobbed.
So you see, I couldn’t abandon her. Sometimes I said to myself, “I just can’t stand this anymore. I’ve got to get out of this house.” But Frida needed me. I had to be her slave until the end.