Frida, page 17
Only the lens hadn’t shattered. Not really. It had only looked that way to Papá. When he finally got his bearings, he realized that it had only cracked, which somehow made it worse. If it had been demolished, he could have swept up the pieces and wept. But there was the lens, seemingly whole, seemingly good, yet utterly useless.
Papá picked it up as lovingly as if it was a dead baby. He wrapped it in a piece of flannel and put it back in its case. Frida and I had both witnessed the accident, but neither of us spoke. Mami was in another part of the house, or maybe she had gone to church, I can’t remember. Both of us knew that this had to be our secret, our secret with Papá. Both of us understood, even though Papá said nothing, that we must never breathe a word to anyone. Papá got his things together. Then he left for work as though nothing had happened.
He couldn’t tell Mami. How could he tell her that all of her sacrifices had produced only a fractured lens? Poor Papá. I think he felt as though the lens had cracked of its own free will—a kind of occult reprimand for going broke and ruining Frida’s chances of becoming a doctor. I think he felt as though everything—fate, his father, his own weak body, political events, even the objects in the house—were conspiring against him. I think he thought that, from the day he had fallen and cracked his head to the day he had dropped and cracked his lens, a steady succession of disasters had turned him into a failure.
And the morning wasn’t over. Once out on the cobblestone street, Papá began to feel lightheaded again. The air was dank. He must have been thinking about what he would do at his studio in Mexico City. There was no work. Maybe he would try to appear busy, polishing lenses and cleaning his equipment. Perhaps a customer would appear. He had a sign on his door that read GUILLERMO KAHLO, SPECIALIST IN LANDSCAPES, BUILDINGS, INTERIORS, FACTORIES, ETC. It was always possible that someone would want him to take a picture of … of what? A refinery? A plot of land? If asked, he would do a portrait, although he didn’t care to take pictures of people, except in crowds. With crowds, it wasn’t the individual that mattered but the complete scene. “Why should I take pictures of people and try to make them look attractive?” he used to say. “Why should I make beautiful what God has made ugly?”
Maybe Papá was mulling all this over as he walked down the street. Maybe that’s what made him dizzy—his exasperation, his feelings of inadequacy. At any rate, all of a sudden he reeled. In his mind’s eye, he must have seen the trees in front of the house growing larger, their branches stretching out toward him, toward his lens case. He must have seen the sidewalk growing longer; each cobblestone, a mountain; the yellow-edged curb, a precipice. If he slipped, he would fall for an eternity. At one point or other, he surely remembered that somewhere beyond was the street, but in his state of mind he must have seen it as a vast, open valley with no beginning and no end. Papá could usually feel his seizures coming on, so he would have known what was happening to him. He would have recognized the signs—rubbery legs, difficulty in breathing.
How long did he lie there on the ground? Perhaps a moment or two, perhaps longer. When he regained consciousness, he was crumpled on our doorway, a servant standing over him with his epilepsy medication and a glass of water. Mami was giving directions: “Don’t move him. Watch the equipment bag. Don’t let anyone touch it. Now, now … gently take him to the bedroom. Be careful now … be careful.” Frida and I watched from the window. We had seen seizures before, but we were scared anyway. When they got him into the house, I started to cry.
Papá rested. Was he aware of Mami flitting around the room? Did he know why he was still at home instead of on his way to the studio? Probably not right away. At first he was disoriented, but slowly, slowly, he got himself together. At some point, with a sick feeling, he must have remembered his lens, his cracked lens.
Mami was busy straightening his things. She was fussing with his lens case. “Leave that alone,” he barked at her. He looked as though he had been seized by a fit of nausea.
Mami lifted an eyebrow. “What?” she said.
“I’m leaving now,” said Papá.
“I don’t think so,” Mami said calmly.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m going.”
“Why don’t you rest a while?” she suggested.
“I don’t want to rest a while,” he said wearily. “I want to leave.”
Mami tried to get him to wait another few minutes, but Papá was anxious about the lens. He was afraid she would find it. He pulled himself into a sitting position, then breathed deeply. Mami was fidgeting with the clasp on the lens case, and Papá’s eyes were glued to her fingers.
“What’s in here that makes you so nervous?” Mami asked. “Pictures of your sweetheart?”
“I don’t have a sweetheart,” Papá said sourly.
“Gracias,” answered Mami.
He pulled himself out of bed and smoothed out his clothes.
Mami said good-bye without affection and promised to have Manuel take him his lunch when it was ready.
“I suppose you won’t want to come home,” she mumbled.
But Papá said, as he always said every time she suggested it, that it was too far to come home for lunch. Then he clutched his lens case and his equipment bag and opened the door.
“God is getting even with me for being an atheist and a bad father,” he whispered to me as he left. Little did he know. God was just getting warmed up.
CHAPTER 11
September 17, 1925
SEPTEMBER 17, 1925. WHEN I REMEMBER THAT DAY, I SEE A RIOT OF crows. I see shattered glass and rivers of blood, wolves devouring maggot-infested meat, swords piercing writhing bodies, battered roses, muddied corpses, dissected embryos, urine-splattered crucifixes, feces, vomit, tears, death. I see death. I can’t bear to think about it, and yet I think about it all the time. Even now. Even though it happened nearly forty years ago.
It was supposed to be a wonderful day.
I had stopped seeing Eusebio, not because I didn’t like him anymore, but because I had met Antonio Pinedo. I thought my parents would adore Pinedo, especially Mami. He had a job. He kept his nails perfectly trimmed and went to mass. I was young and still at an age where I thought you could make people love you by doing what they wanted. Pinedo was taken with me because I had a full, soft figure and demanded very little. I had set my mind to making him marry me, so I flirted relentlessly, and he fell into my trap like a grasshopper into a spiderweb. After that business about Frida and Leticia Santiago, our name had been pretty much dragged through the mud. Even the servants were embarrassed. I figured it was up to me to redeem the family honor and supposed that while I was at it, I could earn the everlasting gratitude of my parents. September 17 was the day I thought Pinedo was going to talk to Papá, but as it turned out, fate changed the reel. I wasn’t the star of the show that day. Frida was.
The afternoon was gray, and maybe that was a sign. But maybe not. Most September afternoons were gray, and anyhow, Frida didn’t care about the atmospheric pressure. She and Alejandro had reconciled, and she was positively giddy when she left for the city to be with him. Alejandro was attentive, more attentive than he had been in months. The two of them wandered hand in hand through the Zócalo district. Street stalls had been set up for the Mexican National Day celebrations, and vendors hawked their wares with the kind of jubilation reserved for holidays.
“¡Cómpreme este muñeco, señorita!” “Buy this doll from me, miss!”
“¡Cómpreme este títere, señor!” “Buy this puppet from me, sir!”
A brightly colored miniature parasol caught Frida’s eye, and Alex bought it for her.
“It’s for a doll,” he told her, “and since you’re a little doll, I’ll buy it for you!” Alex paid for the trinket and gave it to Frida, and she stood on her toes to kiss him on the lips. The vendor cheered them on. “¡Andale, hijo!”
“See?” said Frida. “These people are never embarrassed by love. Only stupid middle-class people like my mother make a big deal about things that are perfectly natural!”
Strangely, I have a clearer recollection of Frida’s afternoon than my own. I wasn’t there, but we had long hours to talk about it afterward. Long hours while Frida recovered. But it’s more than that. When something happened to Frida, I reinvented it, relived it my mind over and over again, until it was as though I had been there.
The two lovebirds made their way through the streets, stopping to buy a taco or a churro. A light rain forced them to take refuge under a nearby awning, but after a while they ventured out again. Afternoon showers are an almost daily phenomenon here, don’t forget. No one really pays attention to them. Frida and Alex started toward the plaza and ran into some school chums. They lingered to chat a while, then examined the wares in front of the cathedral, silvery and spectral in the rain.
“It’s getting late, mi amor,” said Frida with a sigh. “I have to get going.”
“Parting is such sweet sorrow!” declaimed Alex melodramatically.
Frida laughed. “Shut up, you lunkhead. Can’t you at least find a Mexican poet to quote?”
“Como hermana y hermano / vamos los dos cogidos de la mano …” (“Like sister and brother / we’ll go hand in hand …”)
“I don’t recognize it, but it sounds like shit!”
“It’s not shit! It’s Enrique González Martínez. You said to quote a Mexican poet.”
“Yeah, but I don’t like this brother and sister stuff. I’m not your sister, I’m your woman!”
Alex grabbed her around the waist and kissed her on the neck, and they took off in the direction of the trolley.
“God, you’re in a hurry to get rid of me,” complained Frida.
“Don’t call me God, just call me Alex!”
She poked him in the ribs and he tweaked her cheek.
They reached the trolley, and he helped her board. But all of a sudden, Frida wailed and jumped down.
“What’s the matter?”
“My parasol! The little parasol that you bought for me. I must have left it at one of the stands where we bought food or something. Come on, let’s go back and look for it.”
They retraced their steps, and when they didn’t find it, they returned to the vendor who had sold it to them.
“Come,” said Alex, “I’ll buy you another. I can’t let my little chamaca be unhappy, can I?”
But the parasols were all gone.
“I’m sorry, señor,” said the vendor. “Maybe the señorita would like something else. Here’s a nice balero.”
The man showed them a carved wooden cup with a wooden ball attached by a string. He swung the ball around a couple of times, then caught it in the cup to show how easy it was. Alex paid for it and they took off.
A gaily painted wooden bus stopped on the corner. Buses were a curiosity, a novelty in Mexico City. They hadn’t been running for very long, and they attracted crowds of people—something like a roller coaster at an amusement park. Sometimes Frida would take me to the city just to ride the bus.
“Come on,” said Frida. “Let’s take this. You can transfer to the trolley later on.”
Alex and Frida darted toward the door of the clunky vehicle.
The driver had decorated the dashboard with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and faded pinups with fixed plastic smiles. A rosary dangled from the rearview mirror.
A bench ran along either side of the bus, which was packed, although Alex and Frida finally found seats toward the back. Across from them a woman in a rebozo nursed an infant, and a worker in a large sombrero pulled out a cigarette and lit up, jovially offering smokes to his fellow passengers. Toward the front, a housepainter with splattered overalls closed his eyes and waited for the bus to move. Between his feet, he balanced a can of paint, and in his hand he held a packet of gold-colored powder.
The driver was a young, mustachioed mestizo with a kind of nervous aggressiveness. He pulled out cockily into the busy street. He seemed to think that since the bus was bigger than the automobiles and carts, the other drivers would just have to watch out for him. Like a hotheaded knight rushing into the fray, he pushed ahead without checking for danger. A car swerved to the left to get clear. The driver bore down on the horn.
They were nearing the San Juan Market, at the corner of Cuahutemotzín and Cinco de Mayo. A two-car trolley from Xochimilco was approaching. The bus driver was about to turn onto Calzada de Tlalpán, but the oncoming train was in his way. He slowed down for a second, then gauged his distance and decided he could make it. The train proceeded slowly but steadily, as if the trolley engineer was challenging the bus driver for the right-of-way. The bus driver forged ahead. And then it happened. The trolley bulldozed the bus, hitting it right in the middle and ramming it against a wall.
The bus didn’t break right away. Curiously supple, it yielded to the pressure, bending and contorting crazily before it snapped. Suddenly Alex found himself nose to nose with the worker with the cigarette, and Frida found herself in the lap of the nursing mother. It happened instantaneously, yet things seemed to be moving in slow motion. Objects floated lazily above them—a newspaper, a wedding band, a baby blanket, a pinup, a paintbrush, keys, cigarettes, a ball of yarn, gold-colored speckles. And then, with an excruciating crash, the vehicle shattered. People were hurled onto the tracks in a tempest of wood and metal. Meanwhile, the trolley moved forward slowly, deliberately, as if to claim victory over its adversary.
Alex was thrown under the train. He opened his eyes to find a metal chassis above his head and mangled bodies all around. Two or three people were dead. Others were nearly dead. Somewhere, a baby was crying.
In an instant he sized up the position of the rods. If the train moved forward another centimeter, it would slice him to pieces. Cautiously, Alex worked his way out from the pinched space. The front of his coat had disappeared, but he seemed to have no serious injuries. He looked around for Frida.
He found her in the street, bathed in blood, totally nude. Her clothes had been torn off by the force of the collision. The housepainter’s packet had burst and covered her with specks of gold, giving her an eerie, carnivalesque appearance.
“¡Miren a la pequeña bailarina!” shouted a man. “Look at the little dancer!” He must have thought she looked like a circus performer, all covered in red and gold. Or maybe she reminded him of a dancer because her body was so slight and delicate and graceful.
Shattered glass and rivers of blood. Exposed entrails. Crushed skulls. Twisted metal and twisted limbs. The stench of bile and terror. Screams. Sobs. Sirens.
Blood oozed from Frida’s body. An iron handrail had pierced her pelvis from one side to the other. But she didn’t know what had happened to her. Maybe she was hysterical, or delirious, or numb. “My balero!” she kept crying. “Where’s my balero? Don’t tell me I’ve lost that too!”
Alex watched in horror as Frida groped for her toy, oblivious to the rod that impaled her. He tried to calm her, to keep her from moving. He threw what was left of his coat over her and picked her up. Frida continued to twist and cry, “My balero!” The huge piece of iron moved with her body.
A familiar-looking man came running up to Alex.
“Is that Frida Kahlo? Oh my God! What’s that thing she’s got sticking into her? We have to get that out!” He grabbed the iron rod.
Alex was frantic. “Who are you?” he screamed.
“I work at the school. What difference does it make? Here! Put her down! Someone call an ambulance!”
The man pinned Frida’s body in place with his knee and yanked. Frida shrieked with pain. Blood gushed from her wound. Together the man and Alex carried her to a nearby billiard hall and laid her by the window. Alex stroked her hand, but Frida didn’t even know he was there. She was in too much agony.
They didn’t hear the Red Cross ambulance come because Frida’s wailing blocked out the siren. Alex helped the medics ease her onto a stretcher and transport her to the hospital on San Jerónimo Street. All the time he was praying, “Please don’t let her die, dear God. Please, please don’t let her die.” He was a revolutionary, of course, but at moments like those, you forget about politics and just pray. By the time they got to the hospital, he was exhausted and nearly hysterical.
A weary nurse with a large mole above her lip took his arm. The mole seemed to expand and contract as she spoke, and Alex had to focus on that mole in order to keep from collapsing at her feet. All the nurses wore ankle-length white tunics tied at the waist and a wimple with a red cross on it. In the rarefied air of the hospital, they seemed like specters that floated in and out of ill-defined spaces, nodules of light that appeared and disappeared, angels who guided dazed pilgrims to safety.
“Come,” she said. “You can’t stay here. They have to get the young lady ready for surgery.”
“Will she be all right?”
The mole remained motionless.
“Tell me, will she be all right?”
“It’s in God’s hands,” she murmured finally. “If he wishes to save her, he will work through us.”
“I wanted to squash that mole, and with it, that voice that seemed to come from an apparition,” Alex told me. He was screaming at the nurse in his mind: “Stop talking about Jesus and tell me if Frida’s going to be all right!” But he didn’t say it out loud. He was too upset, too consumed with fear. He just sat down and waited.
