Frida, page 16
What do you mean I’m making this part up? The part about the moth, you mean? Well, so what? That’s the way I see the scene. I’m doing the best I can. I wasn’t there, you know. I have to tell you the story the way Frida told it to me. What if I am embellishing? I’m just trying to—Do you want to hear this part or not? Okay, then, please don’t interrupt. I get confused. I forget where I was.
Frida read over the list of irrelevant questions, then answered them one by one. And then … then … See what happens when you interrupt me? You make me lose my train of thought. Well, finally she finished, and she shoved the forms in the clerk’s face. The man was annoyed at having been disturbed, but he took a set of official-looking seals out of his desk and stamped the papers one by one.
“We’ll call you,” he told her, motioning to the door.
But Frida, she wasn’t one to be put off. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I need a job now, not next year. When will you call me?”
“Listen, señorita,” said the clerk, “the decision depends on the chief librarian, and he’s not here.”
Frida was vexed. “Where is he?” she snapped.
“He hasn’t come in yet.”
“When will he come in?”
“How would I know? He doesn’t give me his schedule. I’m just a clerk.” A typical Mexican funcionario. One tiny spoke in a huge bureaucratic wheel. His only job was to hand out applications and collect them, see? Nothing else. But Frida expected him to offer her a job on the spot. Brilliant Frida. She could tell you all about Freud and Marx and Darwin, but she couldn’t figure out that a simple clerk could only do a simple clerk’s job, namely, hand out applications.
“Well, I’m not going to wait for you to get in touch with me,” she said. “I’ll come back later.”
“Suit yourself, but I doubt it’ll do any good. Come around one, if you want.” Frida didn’t mention it, but he probably went back to sleep.
At one o’clock, she was standing in front of the clerk. “He was slumped over his desk like a dead man,” she told me.
“Where’s the director? Has he seen my application?” she wanted to know. The clerk raised his head and forced open his eyes.
A young girl—perhaps a student or an office worker—came in and crossed the room without saying a word. She picked up a stack of papers and walked toward the door.
“The sunrise pales in comparison with your smile,” called the clerk languidly.
The girl laughed. “Go back to sleep, Grandpa.”
“Ay, the angels in heaven are in mourning because the prettiest angel has come down to earth to visit the library!” he said.
The girl giggled tolerantly and shook her head, then disappeared out the door.
“Imagine!” Frida said to me. “Here I am waiting for a response in a practically life-or-death situation. After all, we’re in danger of losing our house! And this jackass just ignores me while he flirts with this little pigeon-head.”
She cleared her throat to remind the clerk that she was still there.
“What? Oh, the director. Well, he came in,” said the man, “but he hasn’t had time to look at the applications.”
“Let me talk to him,” insisted Frida.
“You can’t talk to him, señorita. He’s the chief librarian!”
“I was forming a spitball of obscenities in my mouth,” Frida told me, “but for once I thought twice about launching it. I knew that if I alienated this moron, I’d never get the job. So I asked politely if I could at least see the director. No, I couldn’t, he said. Why not? I wanted to know. ‘He left for lunch,’ the clerk told me. I was ready to grab the guy by the balls and squeeze! ‘For lunch!’ I said. ‘It’s only one o’clock! The library doesn’t close for lunch until two o’clock!’ ‘Look,’ said the clerk, ‘come back this afternoon. I’ll give him your application myself.’”
It sounds to me like the guy was trying to be civil, even though Frida was being a pain in the butt.
When Frida arrived at four, the chief librarian was not back from lunch yet, and when she came at seven, he had already left for the day.
“Tomorrow for sure,” said the clerk.
“Damn!” screamed Frida. “I know what’ll happen when I come back tomorrow. The son of a bitch won’t be here yet. And then when I come back later, he’ll have left for lunch. And it’ll go on and on for weeks!” Astute Frida. Taking it out on the clerk.
Now the story gets hazy. The reason is that she didn’t tell me this part right after it happened, like she did the first part. This part I heard later, from her, but also from Alex Gómez Arias, then afterward, from Diego, from Tina Modotti—a girl who became Frida’s friend later—and from lots of other people, none of whom was there, obviously. I guess they had heard different versions from Frida and from one another, then dressed up the tale according to their own particular inclinations. I also heard it from Frida, but not right away. Not the day it happened. By the time she told me, she had probably reworked it hundreds of times in her mind. Who knows the truth about anything, anyway?
I guess the next thing that happened is that an attractive woman came out of one of the smaller offices and said, “Can I help you?”
Frida described her in detail, although, as I said, not right away. She was stylishly assembled and perfectly manicured, and apparently she had heard the whole encounter and sized up the situation. Her dark blue midcalf dress fell straight from the shoulder, obliterating any suggestion of bust or hips. It had a boat neck, the plainness of which was offset by a long necklace that nearly reached her waist. Her hair was ear-length and permanent-waved. Her stockings were a new shade of tan rather than the conventional black. She looked like anything but the typical library worker.
“I’m the assistant acquisitions librarian,” she said. “I heard you. I thought there might be a problem.”
“Damn right there’s a problem!” growled Frida. But then she lowered her voice. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve been trying to file a job application all day, and—”
“Come with me,” said the woman.
Her name was Leticia Santiago, she said. She had been working at the library for five years and she knew how frustrating the bureaucracy could be, but she also knew how to cut through the red tape. She led Frida to a small office toward the rear of the building. On the wall there were photographs of several paintings—two Gauguin Tahitian nudes, a Picasso acrobat, and Diego Rivera’s Woman. Frida was delighted.
“Oh!” she said. “Do you like Rivera?”
“Yes,” said Leticia. “I do. Do you?” She smiled at Frida and touched her curls. The bob had grown out long before, and Frida now wore her tresses tied back in a ribbon or hanging loose in ringlets on her shoulders.
“Yes.”
“I thought that there was something strange about the way Leticia was looking at me,” Frida told me when she finally shared this story. “Her words were friendly, but her eyes were as black as ink and weirdly forbidding. I began to fidget.”
“Look,” said Leticia, “I’ll take charge of your application myself. You have nothing to worry about. By ten tomorrow I’ll have it all straightened out.”
It sounded perfect. Why question a stroke of good luck? Still, Frida hesitated.
“Is something wrong?”
Frida didn’t want to anger this woman. She thought quickly. “Uh, forgive me for asking, but the pay?”
“You will be satisfied with your salary, I assure you,” said Leticia.
Frida forced her doubts out of her mind and allowed herself to be ecstatic. A job! This was the first good thing that had happened in weeks.
“At last,” she told Papá. “I’ll be able to make a real contribution. And the work is interesting. I’ll be helping in the Acquisitions Department.” But she didn’t say anything about Leticia either to him or to me.
Papá felt awful. He hated that Frida had to work. He didn’t want her to give up her studies the way he had done. He kissed her on the cheek.
The next morning, she got to the library early, but Leticia was already there. According to Frida’s detailed account, the librarian wore a knee-length yellow dress with a dropped waist and a white scarflike tie around the neck, complemented by both a choker and a long string of pearls. On her head she wore a white turban. How could Frida remember all those particulars? I guess because clothes were as important to her as they were to Leticia. Or maybe because Leticia herself was so fascinating.
Frida found Leticia’s attire both attractive and fiercely intimidating. In comparison with Mami’s conservatively fashionable friends or the schoolgirls from the Prepa, who were still wearing their skirts three inches above the ankle, this woman was a real radical. Frida was obsessively meticulous about her appearance, but now she felt suddenly dumpy. Her skirt was dragging, her stockings were too dark, and her sweater was too plain. But, she thought, with her undersize right leg, she could never get away with wearing such short skirts and light-colored hose.
Leticia led her to her office and explained her job. Frida watched the woman’s dark red lips move as she spoke. Her lipstick was perfect.
“Have you understood everything, dear?”
“Yes, I think so.” Leticia was a large woman, and as she bent forward to pick up the fiches on the desk behind Frida, her breast brushed lightly against my sister’s shoulder.
“Now, on this one, what you need to do is look for the subclassification.” She touched Frida’s hand as she pointed to the appropriate place on the card.
“Didn’t you squirm?” I asked Frida. But for her, there was no moral dimension to sex. Whatever was interesting, whatever felt good, was okay. She had already thrown out her bourgeois biases, even before she joined the Young Communist League.
“Do I make you nervous?” whispered Leticia.
“No, not at all,” said Frida. “But I think I can do it by myself now.”
“We can all do it by ourselves,” murmured Leticia, “but it’s so much nicer when you do it with someone else.”
Here the story gets even more muddled. According to Alex, the librarian took Frida by the waist and pulled her close, and Frida was too stunned to resist. According to Diego, Frida was drawn to Leticia’s sweet, flowered scent and actually made the first move herself. In Frida’s version, Leticia suddenly traced a line over her mouth with a forefinger and said, “You have a little mustache. It’s adorable.” Then Leticia ran her finger over Frida’s brow. “And I like the way your eyebrows come together. They look like the wings of a bird.” The fuzz on her lip and her heavy eyebrows had once made Frida self-conscious, but she learned to love them, even to highlight them in her paintings. The people she cared about thought they were attractive; although, to tell you the truth, I never did.
Leticia took Frida’s face in her hands and kissed her lightly on the lips.
“Darling, have you ever made love to a woman?” she whispered. “It’s so much nicer than doing it with a man. A woman understands what a woman likes.” She began to stroke Frida’s body softly, applying pressure in the most sensitive places.
Is this story making you uncomfortable? Would you like me to stop? You said you wanted to know everything, and I’m doing my best to accommodate. Are you sure you want me to go on? Well, just tell me if you want me to change the subject. With Frida, there’s so much to talk about. If you don’t want to hear about this, I can tell you about something else.
“See?” said Leticia. “Not like a man! A man grabs you, but a woman is gentle. Come, darling, let me. Isn’t it lovely? Now, you do the same to me!” With one sweep of the arm she pulled off her loose-fitting dress. She stood directly in front of Frida in her underwear and stockings and high-heeled shoes, her dangling necklace pointing provocatively toward the V between her legs. Her breasts were large and round, but her brassiere was designed to minimize. Her crepe de chine undergarments were gorgeously embroidered.
How did I feel about it? I don’t know. I didn’t like it. I didn’t go to any fancy schools where I learned stylish, revolutionary ideas. I wasn’t part of the dissident movement that rejected convention. I was, well, shocked. Yes, why not say it? I was shocked when I found out about Frida’s—you know—unorthodox activities. I was a good Catholic girl, and all I wanted was to get married and have about six kids, although it didn’t work out that way … but that’s what I was hoping for. Later, I became more accepting, tolerant, let’s say. I mean, Frida was right. Why shouldn’t you do what makes you happy? Why not take love where you find it, no matter who offers it? What does morality have to do with any of it? You should be able to have a relationship with anyone you want, as long as you aren’t hurting anyone. The problem with the relationship I had was that I hurt someone.
“Come now, precious,” Leticia kept telling Frida in her low, throaty voice. “Modern girls don’t need men. They can take care of their own needs.”
“Her breasts were like two fleshy melons that she was offering,” Frida told me.
What did I do? I started to cry.
“Leticia’s hands were as soft as silken gloves, but her knuckles were hard and delicious,” Frida went on. She was torturing me. My sister was torturing me. “It was wonderful!” she murmured over and over again. She wanted to make me squirm. She found it funny that I thought what she was doing was disgusting.
Carrying on an affair with Leticia Santiago was easy. Leticia had her own office, and besides, she knew every secret nook in the library. To simplify matters further, she had an apartment on Aguascalientes Street, right above a mechanic’s shop, where she lived with her very accommodating sister and a maid who shared her inclinations.
Still, there wasn’t a clerk or a secretary at the library who didn’t know that Leticia Santiago was a lesbian; she was subject to continual vigilance and gossip. And soon her name was linked with Frida’s. It wasn’t long before Mamá got wind of the scandal.
The volcano erupted one evening when Frida came home from work, less than a month after she had met Leticia Santiago. The instant Frida walked through the door, Mami grabbed her by the hair and nearly shook her senseless. My God, it was awful. I hid behind Inocencia in the kitchen. Mami slapped her across the face, she pummeled her, she kicked her, she yanked her ear, she bit her hand, all the while screaming, screaming, screaming, Slut! Disgrace!, screaming, screaming, Tramp! Oh Holy Virgin! Oh Mother of God!, screaming, screaming, Bitch! screaming, screaming, Pervert!, Worse than Maty! Worse than Maty!, screaming, screaming until her lungs were ravaged and she was overcome with a fit of coughing.
It never occurred to Frida to lift her hand in self-defense.
Finally, Mami swooned and fell into a chair. Rufina and Manuel came with smelling salts. I fanned her and patted her cheeks. It was around this time that Mami started having seizures similar to Papá’s.
I had no idea what was going on. Frida hadn’t confided in me about Leticia yet. I couldn’t imagine what she could have done to provoke such hysteria. Papá just watched with sad, sunken eyes. For days he said nothing to any of us.
Finally, he knocked on our bedroom door. “Come, Fridita,” he said. “I have another job for you. This one will be better.”
Fernando Fernández was a commercial printer who had known Papá for years, and out of friendship, he offered Frida a paid apprenticeship. His studio was full of prints, but the ones Frida liked the best were by the Swedish impressionist Anders Zorn. His exuberant, vivacious bathing peasant girls were so innocent and free of guilt that they seemed to mock the staid, middle-class mores that Frida now loathed more than ever. “I am like those girls,” she said. “I don’t care what others think. I could splash in the nude at Xochimilco, and I wouldn’t care who saw my naked body.”
But it wasn’t entirely true. The episode with Leticia had left deep scars. Others now saw Frida in a different light, and I don’t think she was entirely comfortable with her new image.
Fernández wanted her to learn to sketch, and he set her to copying Zorn. She produced draft after draft. “He says I have enormous talent,” she told me. She worked long hours to master the technique. “He says I could be a professional artist.”
But Frida didn’t want to be a professional artist. She still wanted to be a doctor, even though she knew she would probably never get to the university. “Actually, I’d probably be a terrible doctor,” she conceded, “because the idea of sticking my finger up people’s asses all day for a living nauseates me.”
Fernández kept encouraging her. “He says I’m a remarkable girl,” she said. I knew where it was headed. He was flattering her, leading her on, and Frida was ripe for an affair, because after the mess with Leticia, she had to prove to herself that she was still attracted to men. Fernández was middle-aged and a friend of Papá’s, but according to Frida, he had a beautiful, sensitive mouth that quivered ever so slightly under his mustache.
The romance with Fernández didn’t last long, but Frida learned how to draw.
Did Papá ever find out? He never said anything, but shortly after Frida left the printer, he grew more taciturn than ever, and then something happened. Did he think he was being punished, or was he punishing himself for allowing Frida to go to work and get involved with Leticia and then with Fernández?
In spite of all our money problems, Papá had managed to buy a brand-new Zeiss lens, thanks to Mamá’s scrimping. He ordered it directly from the Zeiss-Abbe workshop in Germany and gave instructions that the manufacturer should hold it until a German visiting Mexico could deliver it to him personally. It would have been crazy to send it by mail because the Mexican postal system was as unpredictable as a pregnant pony. Months passed before the right courier came along, but finally, a German reporter doing a story on Obregón delivered the treasure.
Papá was thrilled. He checked his lens for imperfections. He turned it around in his hands, over and over. He held it up to the light and cleaned it carefully with a soft cloth, then put it in its box and carried it into his study.
The next morning he removed it from its case one more time to admire it, just as he was getting ready to leave for work. And then something hideous occurred. Papá’s vision went blurry, and his hands began to tremble. The lens slid from his fingers, went rolling over the worktable, and crashed onto the floor. Papá just stood there, staring at the cracked glass, the perfectly ground crystal that he had waited almost a year to hold, to caress. It seemed to me that his eyes, weepy but for once focused, wanted to leap out of his head and grab the glittering splinters. Weeks, months, even years later, Papá was still trying to figure out the reason for the grotesque accident. Had he been startled? Had he bumped into the table? He didn’t remember. Had he had a mild epileptic seizure? All he recalled was a sudden, inexplicable weakness of the wrist, the eerie feel of the glass sliding out of his hand, and the terrible sight of the lens moving across the table, then falling, falling, falling through the air. In his mind’s eye, he saw it shatter, a million fragments flying upward in slow motion.
