Frida, page 12
Nobody knew Frida better than I did. Not Maty, not Mami, not him!
Frida had a kind of … almost … a sickness. Or maybe obsession would be a better word. She always had to be at the center of everything. Everyone had to be looking at her. She wanted to be different, and she was different, but it was strange. On the one hand, we were all different, I mean all us girls, because we had Jewish blood, and to have even a drop of Jewish blood in Mexico sets you apart, even if you’re a practicing Catholic. And in addition, she was—she’d kill me if she heard me say this—she was, well, a cripple. But both those things that really set her apart, being Jewish and being lame, she tried to cover up. She tried to convince the world that she was more Mexican than the Virgin of Guadalupe and more physically fit than Alfredo Codona.
You don’t know about Alfredo Codona? The Mexican aerialist who was the first man to ever perfect a triple somersault. You never saw him on the newsreels? Ha! And you think I don’t know what goes on in the world!
I was saying about Frida, the things that really made her different, those were the things she tried to hide. Sometimes I think she really didn’t like herself very much, and so she pretended that she didn’t care if other people liked her either. But that don’t-give-a-damn attitude, it was just a mask.
I don’t know if that makes sense or not.
No, I’m not trying to do your job. I’m just trying to give you my impression of things. I thought that’s what you wanted. But if you don’t want to hear it, just go away. I’ve talked enough for today, anyway.
CHAPTER 7
Amphibia
I’LL TELL YOU THIS ABOUT DIEGO: HE WAS THE UGLIEST MAN I’D EVER seen, ugly enough to win an ugly contest. A mountain of suet that had to be stuffed with a trowel into those filthy overalls he wore. Vasconcelos had hired a bunch of famous artists to paint murals at the Prepa, and Rivera had been commissioned to do one of them. As you can imagine, sitting on the scaffold with his fleshy buttocks hanging over the edge, the fat man was an ideal target for the Cachuchas.
Pepe Robledo suggested that they set fire to the wood shavings the artist left all over the floor where he built his platform, but Alejandro thought they might try the firecracker bit again. “The paint would splatter and leave mosquito bites all over his Allegory of Erotic Poetry,” he suggested. The Cachuchas had created such hell for some of the other painters that they came to work armed.
Getting at Rivera wasn’t so easy. The Bolívar Amphitheater was off limits to students while he was working, and the doors were kept locked. A full-scale invasion was impossible.
For Frida, the prohibition only made the challenge more tantalizing. Besides, she was curious about this mountainous, homely, frog-faced painter. He seemed to be an affable type, not at all a snob. He stopped to talk to admirers in the corridor or to wink at a pretty girl. If he wouldn’t let the students watch him paint, it was probably just because he was afraid they’d distract him, she thought, although the boys had other ideas.
Rivera was six feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds. In his shabby overalls and immense Stetson hat, he himself was a spectacle. His shoes were filthy and stained with paint and plaster. As if in order to prove his revolutionary zeal (or perhaps only to protect himself from the Cachuchas), he wore a cartridge belt and carried a large pistol. His hair was fine and always a mess. He had a large, round baby face, with fat cheeks and who knows how many chins. His eyes were positively amphibian—you know what I mean, like a frog’s. They bulged out of his head and seemed to move separately from his face. They were set far apart and could turn in all directions in order to take in a complete panorama. His mouth was enormous, and you half expected a long, thin tongue to shoot out and snare a fly. His skin had a greenish tinge, except for his chest and paunch, which were creamy, like the underside of a frog. His shirt was always open halfway to his belly, which looked like a vat turned on its side, and on his chest you could see filaments of the fuzz that covered his whole body. After a day’s work in the hot auditorium, sweat rolled down his cheeks and neck and dripped from his armpits, giving him the look of an aquatic creature just emerged from a pond. He had swollen white breasts like mounds of blubber, a thick neck, and no shoulders. Amphibian forelegs stuck out from his huge torso, and his hands were pudgy and surprisingly small, with five skinny fingers—not four, like a frog—sticking out in all directions. Frida always said that it was unbelievable that such ugly, odd hands could produce such magnificent paintings. In spite of his girth, I wouldn’t say that he was lumbering. No, not really. Papá, who was slim and well proportioned, was far more lumbering than Diego. No, Diego was pretty agile for his size. He was capable of remaining almost motionless for a very long time, and sometimes, when he was working on a detail in a painting, his body would appear inert for an eternity. Then, all of a sudden, he would reposition himself, taking a gigantic step to one side or another. It was as though he leaped two or three meters at a time, you know, like a bullfrog. As I said, Frida liked him from the start, even though she was duty-bound to the Cachuchas to play the most malicious tricks on him. No, I’ve got it all wrong. She played tricks on him because she liked him and she wanted him to notice her. He seemed so unassuming and friendly that she couldn’t help but be enthralled, and I was enthralled just listening to her.
Of course, it was an act. Diego Rivera wasn’t really unassuming at all. He was as full of himself as a Spanish sausage.
You have to understand that at that time, Diego was thirty-six and already quite a star. Not the star he became later. That came with the murals he did at the National Palace and the paintings that I posed for. I told you before, I was his favorite model. Not Frida, but me. He always said that I had a softer, more … I had a gentler, fuller look. Frida had a harder edge. I was, well, more feminine.
Countless rumors circulated about Diego. For example, Frida told me he was part Chinese. We were looking at a picture of him in La República. He didn’t look Chinese to me, but to Frida he looked like a potbellied Buddha. Carmen called him “he of the porcine physiognomy.” She was a real pain, that Carmen, trying to impress everybody with her fancy expressions.
At the Prepa some people said he was part Jewish, but Frida didn’t get involved in those discussions. It was still a sore subject. Other people also said he was part Portuguese, part Spanish, and part Indian. The truth is that nobody knew exactly what he was.
“I hear he’s Russian,” said Pepe. “Someone heard him speaking Russian with one of the teachers.”
“No, he’s not Russian,” Alejandro corrected him. “His girlfriend in Paris was Russian.”
“Two of his girlfriends!” observed Alberto.
“Two of his many girlfriends,” added Adelina Zandejas, “according to my uncle’s godfather’s cousin, who knows Lupe Marín, his mistress.”
“You mean the model?” asked Alberto. “The one who’s posing for him?”
“One of the ones who’s posing for him. There are a lot of them—Lupe, Nahui Olín, a bunch of them.”
“You think she’s posing nude?” That was Pepe. In spite of the fact that they all thought of themselves as sophisticated revolutionaries who pooh-poohed bourgeois attitudes, they’d walk from here to Oaxaca for a peep at a nice pair of bare thighs.
“Of course she’s posing nude! Didn’t you see the sketches?” That was Alejandro, who always knew what was going on. “That’s the real reason they won’t let us in there.”
I have to admit that Frida made it all sound intriguing. I wasn’t interested in going to the Prepa to study to be a doctor, but I would have given anything to meet some of the exciting people who passed through the school’s doors—people like the movie stars Mimí Derba and Joaquín Coss, you know, from El automóbil gris. Me, I never did anything exciting. I mean, the local boys all looked at me. I had my share of admirers, big strapping boys with mustaches and worn boots and machetes to kill snakes with. But I had never met an artist or a movie star.
“I would never pose nude for anybody,” I told Frida self-righteously.
“I would. God, Cristi, you’re such an escuincla! You’re the same person with your clothes on or off, you know.” I knew she was just trying to shock me, but I was annoyed anyway.
“You know,” she said, “I wouldn’t mind being Diego Rivera’s model.”
“I think you’re disgusting.”
“What’s the big deal? I’m going to be a doctor, and doctors look at people’s bodies all day, just like artists. A person can’t have all those bourgeois prejudices like you and Mami and be an artist or a doctor.”
“You’re Catholic, aren’t you?” Both Mami and Abuelita had worked hard to instill the ideals of modesty and purity in us. And a sense of decorum. “El decoro, hija,” Mami would harp whenever she caught me with my feet on the furniture or my finger in my nose. “¡El decoro!”
The mention of our beloved faith didn’t faze Frida. “Yeah,” she said, “but God makes pricks and tits, doesn’t he?”
“Besides,” I said, playing my last card. “I heard he was a communist!”
“So? I might become a communist!”
“I thought you said you were Catholic, Frida. Communists don’t believe in God.”
“So I’ll be a new kind of communist.”
From the very beginning, Diego was associated with two things in Frida’s mind. Not painting, no. Sex and communism—two forbidden topics in polite Mexican society in spite of the leftist rhetoric of the Revolution. We were Zapatistas during the war, okay. But not communists. Being a Zapatista was not the same as being a communist. Communism was some foreign ogre who hated Our Savior Jesus Christ, and no self-respecting Catholic could be a communist. You could think like a communist, you could talk like a communist, you could glorify the workers and the peasants and vilify the imperialist pigs, but you couldn’t actually be a communist. At least, that’s what I thought, because that’s what my grandmother had told me.
Like I said, all sorts of stories circulated about Diego: that when he was a little boy, his father caught him cutting open a live mouse to find out where baby mice came from; that he had humped a girl when he was nine; that he had had an affair with a mulatto woman (the wife of an engineer on the Mexican Central Railroad); that he wanted it all the time, just like a bull, and fucked every woman he could get his hands on—actresses, prostitutes, housewives, models, artists, secretaries, tourists, everybody—and that his dick was so big, he ruined the uterus of one of his lovers! And, of course, that he was a revolutionary hero, not because he had fought on the battlefield, but because he fought injustice with his brush. Liberty, equality, fraternity, truth, and tortillas in every belly. Rivera stood for all that, and was a card-carrying communist to prove it. That’s what they said. So, you see what I mean, Sex and communism. The two taboos. How could Frida resist a man like that? A man who represented everything that was banned from refined conversation. Naturally, she fell in love with him. But not right away. At first it was just fascination.
Was I fascinated too? It’s hard to say. I had never met Diego, never even seen him. I pretended not to be interested, but Frida was full of anecdotes. Every day she’d come home with a story. I guess, well, I guess she sort of planted a seed. She made him sound so exotic and at the same time so ridiculous and lovable, with his bulging eyes and drooping chins. I couldn’t help but become infatuated.
Frida was determined to meet Diego Rivera.
She planned it carefully. He was painting that fresco in the Bolívar Amphitheater. Frida waited until late, when the building was practically empty. Diego used to begin at four in the morning, with the first glimmer of dawn, and worked practically without stopping until dusk, squinting and straining in order to accomplish as much as possible before the plaster dried. He didn’t even go home for lunch. Lupe brought him his food in a large, colorful basket decorated with flowers and covered by a small cotton tablecloth embroidered with a folk motif. Frida watched her go in and out, sizing her up. Sometimes other women came too, bringing lunches or gifts. Since they were allowed into the Bolívar Amphitheater to see Diego Rivera, why wasn’t she? Frida wanted to know.
“You have to help me, mana!” she said to her friend Agustina Reyna, known as La Reyna—“The Queen.”
That afternoon, they waited. They waited until the students had gone home. Until the teachers had gone home. Until the director had left. Until the janitors were out of the way. And then, forming a battering ram with their shoulders, they pounded the auditorium door.
“¡Uno dos tres, PUM! ¡Uno dos tres, PUM!” Not a very subtle entrance.
The door began to tremble. They could hear Rivera grumbling. “What’s going on here?”
“¡Uno dos tres, PUM! ¡Uno dos tres, PUM!”
One final thrust and the door opened.
Imagine Diego, stupefied, looking down from his scaffold. What did he see? A small, delicate girl dressed in a calf-length blue skirt, a white blouse, and a patterned sweater, a girl with fine features and dark hair. To him she must have looked like a child, except that her body was well formed and her breasts large and firm.
“What did you say to him?” I asked her. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t fascinated. My very own sister, face to face with the great Diego Rivera! Did I really understand who he was? I’m not sure, to tell you the truth, but I knew he was very important.
“I asked if I could watch him work. That’s all. ‘May I watch you work?’ That’s all I said to him.” She repeated the sentence to me exactly as she had uttered it to him. Her tone was steady and self-assured. I imagine she made Diego grin.
“What did he say?”
“He said he’d be delighted.”
She sat down on a stool, her gaze riveted on the painter’s brush. There was no one on the scaffold with him that night, but Lupe Marín sat on a chair down below, weaving.
“I was breathless,” Frida told me. “His hand was so quick and sure.” Segments of the wall seemed to come alive as he applied the colors—red, green, purple, gold.
The theme of the mural was creation, with specific reference to the Mexican race. The work was filled with dramatic allegorical figures—Man, Woman, Knowledge, Erotic Poetry, Tradition, Tragedy, Music, Charity. Some of them were more than twelve feet tall, and they represented every Mexican type: whites, Indians, mestizos. The lines of the figures harmonized perfectly with the curve of the ceiling and even integrated the pipe organ, which was built into the wall. Frida was hypnotized.
Lupe Marín was eyeing her and scowling. She had posed for three of the allegories, Woman, Justice, and Song. The one that held Frida spellbound was Woman, a seated nude. She looked like a peasant or a worker, a woman who had had four or five children, maybe, because she had massive breasts and a round belly, a woman who knew how to survive, who didn’t put up with any nonsense, who found out what had to be done and did it. Her legs were slightly parted, her jaw heavy and her nose uneven. Her mouth was rather too toothy, and her strong arms and thighs looked like they were used to heavy labor. Frida found the figure both hideously ugly and vibrantly feminine. “It didn’t look like Lupe at all,” she told me. “Lupe is tall, gorgeous woman with olive skin and breathtaking green eyes. She has black hair that looks like it was combed by a windstorm and lips like a luscious plum, so ripe it’s ready to split and spill its juices.” Diego’s Woman was earthy, heavy. Frida found it incredible that Rivera would make her look so unattractive, or that she would agree to pose for a portrait that deformed her so. At the same time, Frida was captivated by the painter’s ability to transform object into idea. The painting didn’t look like Lupe because it wasn’t meant to; it was meant to be an incarnation of womanhood, to capture a kind of … let’s see, how did Frida put it? A kind of vital reproductive energy. Diego’s Woman was bulky and earthbound, because she was part of the life force of nature. I understand now because I posed for that kind of painting too.
“Ideas were crashing around in my head,” Frida told me. She forgot the time. She forgot where she was. She felt as though she really was watching a “creation.” Diego could have that kind of effect on you.
But Lupe was growing impatient. “Little girl,” she said after a while, “don’t you have to go home now? Aren’t your parents waiting for you? Won’t they be worried?”
And do you know what Frida did? She looked right into Lupe’s dramatic green eyes. As I said, Lupe Marín was a truly breathtaking creature, a proper lover for a great artist. But that was no reason for Frida to allow Lupe to intimidate her.
“No,” she said calmly. And she went back to watching.
Diego’s hand moved with the lightness of a butterfly wing, yet his lines were firm and incisive. Such a giant, froglike man, but with such a delicate touch. He was a master technician, and yet these were not the lifeless shapes of a mere draftsman, but the robust, vibrant forms of a passionate artist.
Lupe had a violent temper. I saw it in action many times. Later, I got to know her pretty well. I can imagine that Lupe was growing irritated. This child had been in there nearly two hours. Lupe waited about fifteen minutes more, then became insistent. To her way of thinking, the girl had abused her invitation.
“It’s time for you to go home!” she snapped in a tone that made it clear she expected Frida to leave immediately.
Frida pretended not to hear.
“I said,” repeated Lupe, “that it was time for you to leave. Now, go!” She stood up and threw her weaving on the chair.
Frida didn’t say a word. Lupe towered over her. She was an imposing figure. But Frida held her ground.
