10
VIVA LA VIDA
In almost every piece of work I’ve read reflecting on the life of Frida Kahlo, one word appears again and again to describe what the artist embodied: alegría. The literal translation from Spanish means joy or happiness, but it’s also used to describe a state of being—a lust for life. And that is something Frida Kahlo never lacked, despite a rough start to her life, a rocky marriage, and years of illnesses. In pop culture today, she’s often portrayed as a dark, serious artist and revolutionary, but by all accounts, the real-life Frida was hilarious—silly and even childlike, full of pranks, jokes, and laughter. And even when life threw the worst kinds of challenges her way, Frida Kahlo found the humor and beauty in those dim moments.
While writing this book, I’ve learned a lot about what it means to live life to the fullest. Whenever I feel tired after a long day of work, or complain about this friend or that family member, I imagine Frida appearing to interject her opinions. By now, I feel that she and I are well acquainted, and I’ve gotten to know her proclivity for over-the-top stories flourished with dramatics, almost always ending with a dose of black humor.
When I type late into the night, her presence is often by my side as I write about her years spent imprisoned within corsets and other contraptions, about the heartbreak of her infertility, and about the loneliness of it all. With each word, my own grievances feel small, like insignificant minutiae. This fictional Frida doesn’t hesitate to hop in and out of my life to put things into perspective—to show me that with a little alegría, truly nothing in this life can be that terrible.
No story better illustrates the real Frida’s lust for life than the entrance she made to her final art exhibition. In April 1953, Mexican photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo sensed that the end was near for her friend Frida who, after undergoing a bone transplant, was deteriorating fast. Lola organized an exhibition at the Galeria Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City, which would be the first-ever solo show of Frida’s work in her home country. At the time, the artist was confined to bed, barely able to stand on her own for more than ten minutes. Still, the idea of displaying her work for her friends and the people of Mexico apparently gave her a boost of energy. From bed, she put all her efforts toward helping to plan the event, even handcrafting invitations tied together with ribbons and featuring a poem written in her own hand. Here’s the verse in English (though it’s worth noting that in Spanish, it delightfully rhymes):
I AM BROKEN.
BUT I AM HAPPY
TO BE ALIVE AS LONG
AS I CAN PAINT.
With friendship and affection born from the heart, I have the pleasure of inviting you to my humble exhibition.
At 8 in the evening—you have a watch, after all—I’ll wait for you in the gallery of that Lola Alvarez Bravo.
It’s located at Amberes 12 and with doors open onto the street, so don’t get lost because that’s all I’m going to say.
All I want is for you to tell me your good and sincere opinion: you are well-read and well-written, your knowledge is first-class.
These paintings I painted with my own hands and they wait on the walls to please my brothers and sisters.
Well, my dear cuate [friend], with true friendship I thank you with all my heart.
—Frida Kahlo de Rivera
Unfortunately, even with all the excitement, Frida’s health worsened to the point that her doctors forbade her from leaving bed, much less attending an exhibition, even her own. So Frida thought of a clever way to make sure she could be there for her debut while following the doctor’s orders: she had her bed delivered to the exhibition so she could attend from bed.
Minutes after the doors opened to a packed crowd (newspapers and onlookers would later report that the line to enter had wrapped around the street corner), Frida arrived via ambulance on a hospital stretcher, dolled up in her standard Mexican-style dress and costume jewelry. She was deposited onto her bed, where she lay for the remainder of the show. The crowd queued up, eager to catch glimpses of or greet Frida, who was tired yet jovial; attendees remembered her holding court like a queen, drinking and singing Mexican corridos with her guests. She was as much a work of art as the paintings that surrounded her.
It was an entrance that has gone down in the history books, the moment that officially launched Frida’s star… just a little over a year before her death. Her work from the exhibition garnered interest from patrons around the world, located as far away as Paris and New York. For Frida, the celebration was bittersweet. In his 1960 autobiography, Diego would recall of his wife’s big night, “I thought afterwards that she must have realized she was bidding goodbye to life.”
Frida would hold on to that life for fifteen more months. The following August, after years of surgeries, the removal of multiple toes, and, finally, a lingering bout of gangrene, Frida’s doctors decided to amputate her leg. During this period, Frida’s alegría began to fade, if only temporarily. As an invalid, she dealt with physical pain while also mourning the loss of her leg. She sketched haunting drawings in her diary of herself as a one-legged doll, or showing her face crying beneath the moon as her body disintegrated into the ground. On one page, she sketched her feet standing on a pedestal, detached from her body, with the caption “Pies para que los quiero si tengo alas pa volar?” (“What do I need feet for if I have wings to fly?”)
Even after having her leg removed and spending every day trapped in bed with nothing but her journal-writing and her painting, Frida placed one passion above all else: Diego, el niño de sus ojos, the child of her eyes. A diary entry shows where her worries truly lay: “It is certain that they are going to amputate my right leg. I know few details, but the opinions are very serious.… I am very worried, but at the same time, I feel that it will be a liberation. I hope I will be able, when I am walking, to give all the strength that I have left to Diego. Everything for Diego.”
One woman can only be so strong, and after her surgery Frida became weaker and weaker, on both the outside and the inside. Frida’s nurse, Judith Ferreto, believes that Frida tried to take her own life, a suggestion that is affirmed by Frida’s diary entries from this dark time, including a poem she wrote with the lines: “YOU ARE KILLING YOURSELF / There are those who will no longer forget you / I accepted its strong hand / Here I am, so that they should live.”
As the artist hung on, her husband was often at her side. At first, as he wrote in his autobiography, it was a struggle: “Following the loss of her leg… Frida became deeply depressed. She no longer even wanted to hear me tell her of my love affairs, which she had enjoyed hearing about after our remarriage. She had lost her will to live.”
Diego was dedicated to keeping his wife’s spirits up, spending time by her bedside telling stories and singing her favorite songs. Three months after her amputation, Frida learned to walk using a prosthetic leg, and her reclaimed independence seemed to bring back some of that alegría. The 2019 traveling exhibition Appearances Can Be Deceiving featured many pieces from Frida’s wardrobe. One standout was a pair of Chinese-style red leather boots she had specially made after her amputation, which have small dangling bells and gold trim. It was in those shoes that Frida began not just to walk but to dance again.
EVERYTHING CHANGES,
EVERYTHING MOVES,
EVERYTHING REVOLVES,
EVERYTHING FLIES
AND GOES AWAY.
At this point, Frida was often in a drug-induced state, and the pain, her frustrations, and the medications apparently left her in a foul, angry mood. She was prone to tantrums triggered by her lack of control over her body and the increasing distance from her “child” Diego. Her diary reflects her state of mind, with pages upon pages of bleak, often incoherent ramblings paired with drawings depicting her physical struggles. Here and there, however, you detect glimpses of the old, joyful Frida. In an entry from February 1954, she wrote, “I have achieved a lot. I will be able to walk, I will be able to paint, I love Diego more than I love myself. My will is great. My will remains.”
Yet Frida and Diego’s marriage was still stormy. Diego seemed to be caught in a push-pull between wanting to be there for his wife and being unable to bear witness to her suffering. According to writer Raquel Tibol, Diego said at the time, “If I were brave, I would kill her. I cannot stand to see her suffer.” The discomfort of seeing his beloved in pain led Diego to spend more and more time away from Frida’s side, which only worsened her suffering. “No one knows how much I love Diego. But neither does anyone know how difficult it is to live with that señor,” she wrote. “And he is so strange in his way of living that I have to guess whether he loves me; because I think that he does love me, even if it is ‘in his way.’ I always say this sentence when our marriage is discussed: that we have joined ‘hunger with the desire to eat.’”
With a little help from the drugs (and the cognac she consumed to relieve her pain), Frida did some painting in the final months of her life; many of her last works were still lifes that managed to be simple while also infused with splashes of euphoria. But she was also present enough to make several paintings that contained political statements. Self-Portrait with Stalin features the artist seated in front of a painting of the communist revolutionary. The more intricate Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick portrays an angelic Frida in a corset as giant hands from a saint-like Karl Marx reach down as though to “save” her; her crutches are tossed to the side, and a peaceful dove hovers behind her.
According to Hayden Herrera’s 1983 biography of Frida, in June 1954, a month before her death, Frida’s condition began to improve slightly, and as her mood became more jovial, she also grew more hopeful, making plans to travel, adopt a child, and celebrate her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with Diego (clearly ignoring that short divorce), which would happen in August. In advance of their milestone, Frida had purchased an antique gold ring as a gift for her husband and began telling friends they should prepare for a grand “Mexican fiesta.”
All her plans were thwarted when, in typical Frida fashion, she ignored her doctor’s orders to stay in bed as she recovered from pneumonia. Instead, she headed out in a wheelchair pushed by Diego to a communist demonstration protesting the United States’ move to oust Guatemala’s liberalist president Jacobo Árbenz. A photo from the event is often shared on the internet to show Frida the revolutionary—but because the image is usually presented out of context, it’s shocking to realize that the determined woman holding a poster reading “Por La Paz” was less than two weeks away from her death. Perhaps the only sign in the photo of Frida’s fading joie de vivre is her face, which, upon closer inspection, appears exhausted and aged beyond her years.
The outing caused Frida’s pneumonia to worsen, and she knew it. The final pages of the diary she kept for the last decade of her life feature dancing skeletons dressed up in costumes and scribbled musings like “We look for calm or ‘peace’ because we anticipate death, since we die every moment.” On July 6, she celebrated her 47th and final birthday and was carried down to the kitchen of La Casa Azul to be surrounded by friends, mole, tamales, and tequila.
The final entry in Frida Kahlo’s diary features a green-winged angel with blackened legs flying upward into a colorful sky. Her last written words became some of her most iconic, the words of a woman who was both morbid and reflective yet full of—there’s that word again—alegría. “Espero alegre la salida y espero no volver jamás,” she wrote. “I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to return.”
Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954. The official cause was a pulmonary embolism. There has been much speculation that, having reached the end of her ability to bear unthinkable pain, Frida might have taken her own life with a drug overdose; according to her nurses and doctors, it wouldn’t have been the first time she’d tried. Still, both the medical reports and Diego’s account specify that an embolism was the true cause.
“I sat beside her bed until 2:30 in the morning,” Diego wrote in his autobiography. “At four o’clock she complained of severe discomfort. When a doctor arrived at daybreak, he found that she had died a short time before of an embolism of the lungs. When I went into her room to look at her, her face was tranquil and seemed more beautiful than ever.” She had seemed to know how near the end was. He wrote, “The night before she had given me a ring she had bought me as a gift for our twenty-fifth anniversary, still seventeen days away. I asked her why she was presenting it so early and she replied, ‘Because I feel I am going to leave you very soon.’”
Even so, Diego believed she had fight left in her: “But though she knew she would die, she must have put up a struggle for life. Otherwise why should death have obliged to surprise her by stealing away her breath while she was asleep?”
After her death, the Riveras’ friends ensured that she was celebrated with the same zest she embodied while alive. They dressed her in a black Tehuana dress with her signature costume jewelry and braided her hair with ribbons and flowers just as she had worn it while she was alive. Her bed was surrounded by her favorite dolls and pre-Columbian idols. Dozens of visitors came to visit Frida for one last time before she was cremated, per her wishes.
As for Diego? Onlookers say the death of his wife instantly aged him, and that he looked as though his soul were “cut in two.” A day after her death, he asked a doctor to cut Frida’s skin open to make sure she didn’t bleed—that she was truly dead, because he simply could not believe it.
Frida was transported to her memorial service in a coffin from the National Institute of Fine Arts, with honor guards that included former president Lázaro Cárdenas. As loved ones carried her, a student threw a bright red flag emblazoned with the communist symbol of a hammer and sickle onto her casket. Though some in Frida’s circle wondered if they should remove it, at Diego’s request the flag remained, a final nod to Frida’s status as a revolutionary.
Photographs show hundreds of mourners following Frida’s casket as it was carried to the crematorium; inside, she lay with her head surrounded by red carnations, her shoulders covered in her favorite rebozo. During the procession, friends and luminaries including writer Andres Iduarte and poet Carlos Pellicer read eulogies and sonnets. At Diego’s request, as Frida’s body entered the crematorium, her loved ones sang her favorite songs, including the mariachi classic “La Llorona” and ballads like “Adios, Mariquita Linda.”
A tale has been passed down from onlookers at Frida’s cremation who reported a strange occurrence—perhaps one last Frida-style joke from the afterlife. After her corpse entered the burning oven, the intense heat from the blaze caused her lifeless body to sit up straight. As Frida’s hair caught fire, it created a halo around her face, and she appeared to be wearing a smile.
I had always assumed that Frida’s final resting place was somewhere near her parents’ or ancestors’ burial sites. So I was surprised when I visited Museo Frida Kahlo—formerly La Casa Azul—to notice a small, toad-shaped clay urn in her bedroom. There was no sign, no “Here Lies Frida Kahlo.” In fact, I might have missed the urn entirely if not for the audio guide I’d purchased at the front desk that pointed it out. Frida’s ashes are displayed simply, without fuss, in the room where she spent many hours writhing in pain, singing with friends, and painting the portraits that built her legacy. There Frida Kahlo rests, overlooking her beloved garden.
Just like that, the life of an artist, lover, wife, friend, and revolutionary came to an end in the middle of the night—but her legacy had only just begun. Even the Frida who gritted her teeth through the pain to make her way to her first Mexican solo exhibition on an ambulance stretcher, greeting hundreds of fans, couldn’t have envisioned that someday, more than sixty years in the future, she would be a household name around the globe. I can’t imagine that she ever had an inkling that she would become an icon who would appear in hundreds of exhibits, movies, plays, and books—like this one. And she also probably had no clue that the life she lived so courageously would inspire countless people to emulate even a small bit of her fearlessness.
EXIT IS JOYFUL—
AND I HOPE
NEVER TO RETURN.
What would Frida do if she needed a reminder to live life to the fullest? She would be grateful for every moment of every day—down to the tiniest detail, whether it was carefully planning her outfit or taking extra care as she set the table for a meal. She would love without hesitation or abandon, pour her passion into her work, her politics, her friends, and her significant other—even when the world told her not to. And she would tell her story in her own way, viewing her tales through her own brilliant lens, writing them down, painting them.
I think Frida left her simplest but most important piece of advice for us in one of her final works. Days before she died, Frida got out of bed to walk over to a still life of sliced watermelons she had painted the previous year. It was an ode to the fruit often presented to the dead as part of Mexico’s Día de los Muertos holiday. It would be the last work that she signed her name to—and on the flesh of the melon, she wrote, “Viva la Vida!”
As I write these words, my imagined Frida smiles at me, satisfied that I’ve finally gotten it. “It’s really not that complicated after all,” she tells me. “Just live your damn life, cuate—every second of it.”