Frida, page 13
“Look,” said Lupe, grabbing Frida by the arm, “I want you out of here.”
Diego turned to look at them, a grin on his lips. He loved it when women fought over him, and he found Lupe’s jealous fits amusing. Besides, he was enthralled by Frida’s tenaciousness.
“Leave her alone, Lupita,” he said gently. “She’s not bothering me.”
“Well,” snarled Lupe, “she’s bothering me!”
Lupe sat down and picked up her weaving. She unbraided three strands of yarn, then let her work fall to the floor. She got up and paced. She was fuming.
“Damn it, Diego,” she screamed. “I want her out of here! Get her out of here!”
Diego went on painting and Frida went on watching.
Lupe sat down, crossed her arms, and sulked. “Shit! I don’t know why I put up with you.”
“You love me!”
“Pig! Your ego is as swollen as your belly.”
“That’s why you love me!” Diego answered without pausing. His power of concentration, thought Frida, was extraordinary.
Finally, Frida got up. “Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate your letting me watch you.”
Then she turned to Lupe and smiled. “Bye!” she said.
Lupe became suddenly involved once again in her weaving. But Frida wasn’t going to let her get away with pretending to ignore her. She had stayed exactly as long as she wanted, and she was going to rub Lupe’s nose in it.
“Good-bye, Señorita Marín.” Frida held out her hand.
It was a standoff.
Lupe directed her gaze at the mural. “Look,” she called to Diego, “you messed up that section there, right by my foot, right where the male figure starts.”
Diego didn’t bother examining the spot, or answering Lupe for that matter.
Frida was still standing there with her hand extended.
Lupe finally looked up.
“Nice to meet you, Señorita Marín,” said Frida. Her hand and her eyes were steady.
“Bye,” said Lupe. And, in spite of herself, she smiled.
Frida heaved her book bag over her shoulder and walked out of the room. Her step was firm, her carriage dignified and graceful.
This story is a family legend. Frida told it to me that very night, when she got home from the Prepa. Not just once. Over and over again, because she comes out the winner. She plays David to Lupe’s Goliath. Years later, Lupe told it to me too. And so did Diego.
“You know,” Lupe told Diego when Frida had gone, “that child is really something! How many little girls would have the guts to invite themselves in here like that, and then to stand up to a woman like me? Not many!”
Diego just chuckled and went on working.
Lupe liked Frida. She liked her a lot in spite of everything. And that’s the strange thing about Diego’s women: they started out rivals, but they wound up friends. They loved and hated one another. Just like … just like Frida and me.
What can I tell you about Diego Rivera? It’s not easy to get to the truth about Diego, even for someone like me, who knew him so well. So many stories circulated about him. Scandal clung to him like a second skin. And to make matters worse, he was a terrible liar. It was something he had in common with Frida.
I’ve spent my life surrounded by famous people. So many famous people. Diego and Frida, of course, and so many others. Politicians, movie stars … Yes, I finally got to meet movie stars, lots of them. Artists and photographers. People like Trotsky, Vasconcelos, Cantinflas, Dolores del Río, Siqueiros, Edward Weston—the photographer who took so many magnificent pictures of Lupe. Lots and lots of famous people. I was the one who stood out by not standing out. But I was there at their parties and rallies and openings because I was Frida Kahlo’s sister.
So, you want to know about Diego. What I can tell you is that he was born on December 8, 1886. We always gave him a birthday party, and we celebrated his saint’s day as well because Diego loved parties. If you forgot one of his special days, he got out of control like a bee in the attic on a hot afternoon. Diego had had a twin brother, but he died as an infant. His father, also named Diego, was an enormous man, a schoolteacher, who according to the official story was the son of a Spaniard and of a Mexican woman of Portuguese-Jewish descent. His mother, María del Pilar Barrientos, was the daughter of a Spaniard and a mestizo woman, so I guess it was true that Diego was a lot of things—Spanish, Jewish, Portuguese, Indian—but not Chinese. Every time some reporter interviewed him, Diego invented a different story about his background. Sometimes he said he was part Dutch, or that his great-grandmother was Asian, or that his grandfather was African. He was like Frida. He would say anything to get attention.
According to him, he was a brilliant baby. According to his old aunt Vicenta, he talked in paragraphs from birth and drew elaborate pictures from the time he could hold a pencil. He drew everywhere, including in the family bible, an omen, perhaps, that someday he would become a come-cura, a priest-eater. I guess his father realized that surrender was the better part of valor, because he covered the walls of Diego’s room with blackboard and told him to hop to it. The budding Diego filled them with images of everything he saw in his town, Guanajuato, or in his imagination: trains, toy soldiers, flowers, birds, a dog peeing, a monster on roller skates, a pyramid, a snake with wings and feathers.
When aunt Vicenta took him to church and told him to pray to the Virgin, Diego pointed out that the statue was made of wood and had no ears. When aunt Vicenta complained to the boy’s father, the elder Diego started taking Dieguito with him to his meetings with the town Jacobins. I guess that’s how Diego became a radical.
He was five when his sister María was born. Of course, Diego was curious about where babies came from. Sex was always one of his main interests. He began to conduct experiments. The story that he stabbed a pregnant mouse is true. Diego got ahold of some anatomy books and added pictures of human bodies to his repertoire. He loved to draw crashes and train wrecks, with mangled corpses strewn over the ground. He also made cutouts of soldiers and staged massive military campaigns with lots of carnage.
Now the facts get blurry. Legend has it that, at nine, he had sex with an eighteen-year-old American schoolteacher, then took up with the wife of a railroad engineer. At nine years old! In spite of his grotesque looks, women found him irresistible. Even beautiful women. Just look at Frida. Just look at me.
Diego’s papá thought that with his son’s taste for sex and gore and his talent for strategy, he had the makings of a good general. He enrolled him in a military school, but Dieguito threw a temper tantrum and insisted on studying art instead. Before long, he had won a scholarship to the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts. But Diego always said he learned more from the engraver Posada than he ever did from his teachers. During those years, Posada was a hero. Even maids and peasants knew his stuff. He had a little shop right near the school where he hung his pictures. Every day, Diego used to press his fat little nose against the pane and watch him work. One day the engraver asked him in and they became friends. Diego always said that Posada was one of his most important influences because Posada created art for the people, and that’s what Diego wanted to do too.
In those days, before the Revolution, students were always protesting about one thing or another, and Diego always had to be in the middle of everything. Before long he got caught up in some riots and was expelled. It was a blessing in disguise.
He picked up his paints and his brushes and left the classrooms, the rules, and the theorists. For four years he roamed the Mexican countryside, painting whatever he saw, the spectacular and the mundane, which at times were one and the same. Indians with expressionless faces, purple volcanoes against topaz skies, serene landscapes. He also painted a portrait of his mother.
“Oh my God,” she cried when she saw it. “Who is that bulky, common-looking woman with the deformed body? Now I know you don’t love me!” That story became a family legend.
Most of Diego’s other paintings pleased not only Mrs. Rivera, but also the public. His reputation was growing. Still, how far could he go if he just kept on doing what he was doing? Europe was the heart—and the navel—of the universe. Everything was being churned up over there—politics, art, science, sex. Diego was having fun in Mexico, carousing in bars and brothels, but he knew he really wanted something else. The best teachers were abroad; Europe was like a distant, beckoning star. Papá Rivera couldn’t finance a trip, and Diego grew bored and sulky. He painted less and less. He was always a hypochondriac, and he became convinced he was going blind. Señor Rivera saw that he had to find a way to challenge his son. A talent, like a precious flower, withers without proper nourishment.
At the time, Diego Senior was an inspector in the National Department of Public Health. When yellow fever broke out in the southeast, he saw his chance. He left for Veracruz to do a report on the medical situation and took his son with him, but left the boy in Jalapa, the state capital, where he would be out of danger. The new surroundings worked like peyote. Colors became radiant; forms became distinct and arresting. Once again Diego could really see the world—hues, patterns, contrasts, shapes—and he filled his canvases, this time with semitropical vegetation and delicate colonial houses. Diego Senior was thrilled. His plan was working. Next, he arranged for the governor of the state, Teodoro Dehesa, to see his son’s work. As Diego Senior had hoped, the governor loved it and used his clout to get the boy a scholarship to study abroad. Diego’s dream had come true, and so had his father’s. Two for one, because they were the same dream.
Just before Diego left for Spain—it must have been around 1907—there was a big rally in the textile mills. The cavalry charged the workers, and soldiers fired at close range on men, women, and even children, leaving heaps of bodies on the blood-drenched earth. Diego saw it all, and it was something he would never forget. It helped make him a true revolutionary who used art to educate the people and tell their story. Much later, when he painted the murals at the National Palace, he incorporated that scene. It’s on the left wall. You’ve probably seen it. A row of peasants facing soldiers who are pointing guns right at them. It gives you goose bumps.
Diego left a country in chaos, but he was headed for greater chaos still. I don’t know too much about Spain, but I know from what Diego told me that she had lost her last colonies not long before in a war against the United States, and that set off a national disaster. Republicans wanted to get rid of the monarchy. Socialism and anarchism were winning converts left and right, and strikes were breaking out all over. The monarchists were shooting at people, the socialists passed out leaflets, the revolutionaries made bombs and burned down factories, and the republicans drew up one constitution after the other. It was as bad over there as back home.
Diego didn’t learn so much about art in Spain, but he did learn something about politics. He listened, he watched, and he got caught up in the revolutionary rhetoric. He spent hours in cafés talking. Diego was never much of a reader, but he began to skim anarchist pamphlets. He purchased a copy of Marx’s Das Capital and read a few pages.
The ideas people were throwing around weren’t new to him. He had already heard them during the student protests in Mexico City and in the mill workers’ strike. “But during those first few months in Madrid,” Diego once told me, “everything seemed finally to come together.”
His imagination was going wild! He took off for the north, making his way through Belgium, Holland, and England, drinking in the popular culture. He studied the great masters. I can’t remember their names right now … Breughel, Hogarth … I can’t remember. He met other painters, writers, activists. And he slept with lots of women. He wasn’t at all shy about talking about it. When Frida first met him, she didn’t mind hearing about his conquests. She was proud of his success as a lover. Later, though, his affairs devastated her. Especially …
I always knew that Diego belonged to other women. He was never mine alone, although sometimes he would tell me I was his favorite. I didn’t make demands on him, like Frida. I wasn’t temperamental. I was—how can I say it?—a refuge …
Wherever he went, Diego caused a commotion. People turned around to look at him. Frida used to call him a walking hyperbole. How do you like that, doctor? A walking hyperbole. Frida knew words like that. And that’s what he was, an exaggeration. Everything about him was excessive. His belly poured over his belt. His clothes were outlandish. He was extravagantly filthy because he never took a bath, never washed his things, never brushed his hair. In Brussels he took up with María Gutiérrez Blanchard, a painter who was part French and part Spanish. He would have been a strange enough character on his own, but when he walked down the boulevard with her—a dwarf-size hunchback—the eyes of passersby popped out of their heads.
He told a million stories about those days in Belgium. He was good at spinning yarns, and he never let the truth get in the way of a good story. According to him, a fire broke out one night in Brussels, so he grabbed an armful of paintings and ran out in the street, only to realize later that he had forgotten to put on his pants! Maybe it was true, who knows? Diego was very comfortable with his pants off. María introduced him to the Russian émigré painter Angelina Beloff, and Angelina soon replaced her friend as Diego’s bed partner. But neither affair prevented him from sleeping with whatever other women came along. Attractive ones, ugly ones, fat ones, thin ones—every woman from the hooker on the street to the flower vendor on the corner to the society matron in the salon. How do I know? He talked about it all the time.
Diego wound up where all aspiring artists had to wind up, in Paris. He shared an apartment with María and Angelina. That was a favorite arrangement of his—being shared by women. Since all three valued art over cleanliness, no one bothered scrubbing the floors or even washing the dishes. The stench got so bad that the neighbors called the police.
In those days, all the famous painters were in Paris—Cézanne, Rousseau, Picasso, Klee. Diego saw paintings that were totally different from anything he had seen before. “I was thrilled to the roots of my hair!” he told me. Or maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe he was talking to Frida and I was just there. He wandered around the city looking at galleries. He got so excited he developed a fever. At least, that’s what he said.
He started to paint. He made friends with Picasso, and his style began to develop and change. Before long, he had built quite a reputation in Paris, and people were talking about him here at home as well. When Díaz began to make plans for an art exhibition to celebrate his regime’s thirty-year anniversary, he invited Diego to take part in the festivities.
The day it opened, Madero launched his revolt. Zapata led the peasant uprising in the south, and Villa in the north. Diego forgot the exhibition. He was dazzled by what he was witnessing. All those discussions in European cafés, all those abstract ideas taking form right here at home. Words made action! Diego was completely taken by Zapata. Here was a real revolutionary hero, larger than life. The man on the white horse who would appear in so many of his paintings.
He was so excited, you might think he would have stayed until the end of the war. But he didn’t stay. He returned to Paris.
In Mexico, revolution was transforming the country, but in France, cubism was transforming art. Diego must have felt torn. Or maybe not. He was an artist, not a warrior. In fact, I would say that Diego had none of the qualities of a warrior. He wasn’t brave, and he wasn’t disciplined, except when it came to painting. He detested regimentation, and he was incapable of following orders. He loved the idea of revolution, but wars were something other people fought. When World War I broke out, he made a kind of halfhearted attempt to enlist in the French Army because that’s what all of his friends were doing, but he didn’t really want to go. Long marches in the mud weren’t his style. Fortunately for him, the recruitment officers felt that, with his huge bulk, he was too conspicuous a target and rejected him. No, Diego was no soldier. A soldier has to be willing to make sacrifices. Diego didn’t like to make sacrifices. What he liked was for other people to sacrifice themselves for him. He was egocentric and self-indulgent. I’m not criticizing, really. An artist has to be that way. Diego was too caught up in the spell of cubism to waste his time cleaning muskets. You know what cubism is, don’t you? Cubism is where you reduce things to their geometric forms—rectangles, circles. Listen, you can’t live a lifetime around people like Frida and Diego and not learn an awful lot, because they knew everything about art and they were always talking about it. I had to pick up something. I’m not as dumb as Frida used to say.
Diego painted a lot of cubist paintings, but after a while he got tired of the Paris avant-garde. As far as he was concerned, cubism had become just another school with theories and rules. He wanted to produce art that was more authentic, more his. Nostalgia for Mexico began to creep into his paintings. Zapata on a white horse! A lot of Diego’s friends had gone off to the war, and he felt left behind. The ones who stayed in Paris were mostly foreigners, and they were starving. With bombs exploding everywhere, no one was interested in buying art. So what was the point in being there?
“¡Bombas! ¡Bombas!” Diego would cry, flailing his froglike arms. “¡Bombas! Everywhere bombas! ¡Pum! ¡Gapum!” He was describing a tragedy, but Frida and I would burst out laughing.
His scholarship funds were used up. They were all in the same boat—Diego, Picasso, Juan Gris, Modigliani, Lipschitz. All poor, I mean. “When one of us sold a piece,” he told me, “we would all eat.” Only sometimes no one sold a piece for weeks, even months. According to him, once he went five days without eating. Can you believe that?
Diego had friends and he had women, but he was still a foreigner among foreigners, too involved in his own work to be really one of the crowd. He painted from dawn until dusk, driving himself until he was tipsy from exhaustion. His behavior became weird. He rambled on about being possessed by spirits. He became convinced that his liver and kidneys were diseased, and went on strange diets. One day he thought his eyeballs had become too big for their sockets. Another day, he thought his heartbeat was irregular, his bowel movements were too black, his skin was full of blotches. Sometimes he felt his immense body growing, growing, growing right out of his baggy clothes. He complained that the room was becoming tight and suffocating. He ran to the window to give himself space to expand because he felt his torso inflating like an immense blob and spreading all over Paris.
