Frida, page 27
“I’m glad they tore up the RCA frescoes. They were shit. And the Detroit stuff. Shit. All shit.”
“Look,” I said, “stop it. You’re acting like a two-year-old.”
He just sulked. “Why do women always tell men they’re acting like children?” he said finally. “You don’t take me seriously. I’m telling you that I’m a fraud, Cristina. I’m not a great artist, I’m a fraud, and I’ll never paint again because I refuse to go on living a lie. I can’t stand it. I’m going to kill myself.”
“Look,” I said, “just a little something to get going again. Some thing easy. Not the history of the planet, just a mango or a watermelon or whatever. Or me in my birthday suit.”
But he wasn’t paying attention. He had turned his back to me and sat facing the wall.
“Come on,” I said gently. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Come on, give it a try.”
He was crying. Tears dribbled down his cheeks in slow-moving little streams. He wasn’t pretending. He wasn’t putting on a show. He was really miserable. Poor Diego. I patted his jowl dry with the corner of my shawl.
“You’ll feel better if you start to work again,” I whispered. “You’re not happy unless you’re busy.”
“Maybe you’re right.” He placed his head on my hip, burying his face in my skirt, and I caressed his hair lightly.
“Poor Diego. Poor, poor Diego. ¡Pobrecito!”
“Under one condition,” he said without moving. His voice was muffled. I could hardly hear him.
“What?”
“You pose for me.”
“Of course! I said I would, didn’t I?”
I didn’t think anything of it. I had posed for him so many times before. I had been his favorite model, and I was looking forward to being his favorite model again. I loved posing for Diego. It made me feel special, womanly. Anyhow, I had nothing else of importance to do. Nothing was going on in my life. Antonio was about four. He didn’t need me there every minute of the day, and besides, Polinesta, his nanny, and the other maids took good care of him. I liked to have fun, go to parties, visit friends, just like Frida, but between the problems with Pinedo and Mami’s illness, I never got to do any of those things. Posing for Diego would be fun. It would make me feel like a person again, I thought, a person with a life and somewhere to go once in a while. I would be like old times.
“I’d love to pose for you, Diego. Just tell me when and where.”
“Tomorrow,” he said, “at my house.” His tone was matter-of-fact.
Diego and Frida had a kind of strange living arrangement. On the corner of Palmas and Altavista in San Angel, Diego had built two boxy houses connected by a bridge. He lived in the larger one, painted pink, and Frida lived in the smaller one, painted blue. His had a huge studio. Hers had a studio in the bedroom, which was bathed in light thanks to a perfectly positioned picture window. Frida loved that room. She had a bed with posts and a wooden canopy that she hung crepe paper ornaments from. The flowered bedspread, she had embroidered herself. She had her quarters decorated a lo mexicano, with gilded mirrors, native ceramics, papier-mâché parrots, flower wreaths, and colorful tiles. She also had a few skeletons hanging here and there, the kind they sell in the streets for the Day of the Dead. The room was just like Frida—bright, gaudy, and beautiful, but also a bit morbid. Anyhow, the arrangement allowed them each their own working and living space. In other words, it prevented them from killing each other. Often they ate together. Sometimes they slept together, but not often, because the doctor had told Frida not to have sex so she wouldn’t lose the baby. That bothered Diego, but not too much, because girls still lined up to sleep with him.
I showed up at Diego’s about noon. He had been up for hours. When he was working on a mural, he would start at the crack of dawn, so he was used to rising early. He had his easel all set up and his paints spread out in front of him on the old kitchen plate he used for a palette.
He hardly greeted me. He seemed anxious to get started, so I put down my things and asked for instructions.
“I’m doing some studies for the Medical School murals,” he said. “We’ll start with the allegory of health. You’re the perfect model for it, Cristina. You know, fitness, vigor, well-being. Take off your clothes and stand here.”
I did as he asked.
He explained the pose to me. Raised arm, firm step. As he demonstrated, his knuckle brushed against my breast. I tensed slightly, but he turned away as if he hadn’t noticed. After about a half hour I began to get tired. I hadn’t posed in a long time. I was out of practice, and besides, it was a difficult position to hold. I asked for a break.
“All right,” he said, “but you can’t be taking a break every ten minutes. I have a lot to do this afternoon.”
I threw on the light robe I always wore when I posed and went into the kitchen to make us some coffee.
“Wait,” he said suddenly. “Don’t do that.” He was standing in the doorway, looking at me. There was something different about his gaze. His eyes radiated an immense tenderness. I had never seen him look at anyone that way, except for Frida.
“Don’t you want coffee?”
“Take that thing off,” he whispered, nodding at the wrap. “I want to look at you. I want to watch you move.” His voice was thick. I knew what was on his mind. It was obvious. I turned and faced him. Looking him right in the eye, I threw off the robe and let it drop to the ground. He smiled and stared, examining my body as though he had never seen it before. Centimeter by centimeter. I didn’t care. I wasn’t embarrassed. It had been a long time since anyone had looked at me that way. I was savoring the moment.
He moved toward me. I watched him come without recoiling. I was excited. Every nerve in my body stood at attention. He placed his fingers gently on my breast and circled the tip with his thumb. Then he drew me toward him. I felt a shiver from my arches to the peak of my crown, and I closed my eyes and let him put his hands where he wanted. His touch was delicious, and his body was sensitive and responsive. He slipped off his clothes. No, that’s not right. That’s what you might say if you were describing an art movie, but that’s not what happened. Diego couldn’t slip out of anything. He was too bulky. He could hardly see over his paunch to the bottom of his shirt to undo it. He had been gaining weight, since his doctor had told him that if he didn’t inflate again, he would die of bad temper. He kept fumbling with the buttons until finally I pulled his hands away and put them on my hips, then ran my fingers down his chest and undid the last button on his shirt. We both burst out laughing.
“I’m a pig!” he chortled.
“Yes, you are!” I teased.
The skin underneath his clothes was soft and white like a baby’s, with a few scattered graying hairs on his oversize bosom.
“You look like a girl!”
“So do you, Cristi.”
He kissed me on the forehead. “A young, sensuous, beautiful girl.” He had become clinging, breathy. “I need you so much,” he kept whispering. “I need you so much.”
“You can’t have me until you take off your pants!” I whispered back, poking him in the stomach.
“Ah, that’s going to be a problem, unless you help me with this belt buckle!”
I struggled with the buckle, but it was buried under rolls of stomach fat, making it difficult to release. I kept pushing at his spongy middle. “Pull in! Hold it in! Otherwise, I can’t get the metal tongue out of the hole.”
“Ha! I know all about tongues in holes!”
“You are a pig!” I kissed his bloated belly. “How do you get undressed when I’m not there to help you?”
“Frida does it.”
Frida. The mention of her name. A kind of dull thud in the—where? In the brain? The gut? The conscience? Frida, my sister. I was about to make love with her husband. Ah yes, Frida. A dim image of Frida floated somewhere in the atmosphere … laughing … crying. Then it disappeared. But her voice, I could still hear her voice, distant, faint, disembodied. “Cristi! My own darling little sister!” An accusatory hiss. Diego heard none of it.
Frida! So what. Frida! She was there, I was here. She was here sometimes, but so what. Diego didn’t seem to have a problem with it, and I was having too much fun to stop.
He led me to the couch at the far end of the studio. Making love with Diego was like drinking honey. Satisfying, satiating. A sweet taste lingered afterward. I don’t know what I thought about. I can’t remember. I didn’t think of anything.
That’s how it began. Innocently. Diego had had so many affairs. What difference did one more make? Frida knew about Lupe, she knew about Tina. She knew about the Wills woman and the students. She said she didn’t believe in those stupid bourgeois ideas about marriage. “You don’t die when you get married,” she once told me. “You keep living, breathing, wanting.” Even though she ranted and raved for a while when Diego slept with somebody new, she always came around. I mean, she always wound up accepting it, conceding that Diego needed variety and that his affairs meant nothing at all as long as he loved her best. She complained, yes. But she didn’t leave him, did she? “Diego is a man who craves,” she explained to me when she was in one of her tolerant moods. “He can never get enough of anything. Diego is a man who rejoices in the world and its pleasures, who thirsts after every kind of gratification. You take that away from him, and what do you have? One more fat, boring, ascetic draftsman. You take that away from him and you kill the exuberance! You kill the artist! Do you know what ascetic means, darling?” Anyway, most of the time she made friends and allies of her rivals, and it was she, not Diego, who had the last laugh. So, to tell you the truth, I didn’t worry too much about what Frida would think.
I can tell you this: Diego was a wonderful lover. He not only fucked like a prince, he talked to me. And he listened to me. He described his student days in Spain. He said he hated the Spaniards because they had no imagination. The few good ones like Picasso and Gris went to France. Besides, the Spaniards decimated our native people. He told me things like that when we were lovers. He took me seriously, you see. He told me about his trips to Italy, about the Ravenna mosaics. “I traveled with just a knapsack,” he told me. “All I carried with me was my brushes and paints, a few pairs of socks, and a change of underwear. I stank like hell after a week!” That’s what he said to me, and I believe it, because Diego wasn’t so fond of bathing. He trudged on. He made sketches in Milan, Verona, Venice, who knows where else? So many years have passed since I lay in his arms and listened to those stories. I do remember something he told me about Picasso, though. Diego knew that Picasso was a genius, but he didn’t really like him. “I learned a lot from the son of a bitch,” he would say, but Picasso got on his nerves. He was too imposing, too much the master who expected younger artists to kowtow to him. “The fag never let you forget that he was the leader and you were the follower,” Diego told me. But Diego wasn’t a follower, and that’s the real reason he detested Picasso, if you ask me. They were too much alike, two strong men, two bulls in a perpetual pissing contest. Maybe he was just a little bit jealous. After all, Picasso was already a star, and Diego was just, well, he wasn’t a star yet. When he left Europe for Mexico to paint murals for Vasconcelos, he told Picasso, “Cubism is dead, viejo. Your warped demoiselles say nothing to the people. You call yourself a communist, but you don’t speak the language of the masses.” “You’ve always been a cabrón and a liar,” said Picasso without looking up from his work. That’s how they parted company. Diego told me all those things. It was an education for me. Cubism, Lombardi painting, Franz Hals. I learned about those things from Diego, from listening to him. I’m, well, exaggerating. We didn’t lie in bed talking about Picasso and cubism. Of course not! Diego was so hefty. It took tremendous energy for him to make love. Afterward, he’d just collapse, sort of like a rubber blimp that you punch a hole in, and it deflates … whoosh! That’s how Diego was: inhale, come, snore! Inhale, come, snore! One two three, one two three, inhale come snore! But he never treated me as though I was stupid. He talked to me, although not while we were lying in bed. At other times.
And he listened. I told him everything—about how they teased us on account of Papá’s being Jewish and a foreigner, about how Frida always managed to get her own way. I told him about Pinedo, and how miserable I felt when he left me. Even though Pinedo was a slimy, whoring slug and Frida said I was better off without him, being left like that by someone you once loved and who you thought loved you, it’s like losing an organ. And I talked about my children, about how sometimes I thought that Isolda loved Frida more than she loved me because, after all, Aunt Frida was so glamorous, with her flowing Tehuana costumes and her hair done up in braids. I didn’t talk about the kids too much, though, because Diego wasn’t interested in children, and besides, Frida’s pregnancy was a sore point.
Diego was generous, you know. He gave me things. At first, small things, things Frida wouldn’t notice. A gold pin representing the god Chac Mool. A book of French impressionist paintings with soft colors and little girls dancing ballet. A typewriter. Why did I need a typewriter? At the time I didn’t know that Diego was thinking of making me his secretary. That’s right. I became his official secretary. That way we could go everywhere together. After all, an important man like Diego couldn’t be without a full-time, rain-or-shine secretary, could he? Even in public. Even right in front of her, I was always with him. Cristi, write down Mr. Pérez’s phone number, please. Cristi, check my appointment schedule for tomorrow, please. He needed his Cristi, see? But when he gave me that typewriter, I thought it was just something Diego found beautiful, with its big black frame and shiny keys with white letters stamped on them. A modern-day sculpture is what he called it. A poem to technology. Diego loved machines, all kinds of machines. Afterward, he gave much larger presents, but for the moment, just little things. Things I could hide in my room in the house in Coyoacán, where I was still living with Papá.
Frida visited that house all the time. She went to visit Papá and to play with Toñito and Isolda. She would dress Isolda up in beautiful Tehuana costumes with ruffled headdresses, and they would put on the phonograph and dance in the patio. But she rarely went to my room. She never saw the typewriter.
How did she find out? I’m not exactly sure. Maybe Petronila, Diego’s maid, told her. Petronila came and went freely during the painting sessions. Or maybe Diego told her. After all, he wasn’t ashamed of it, at least, not at first. For him, it wasn’t a moral issue. For him, the man has one part, the woman has another part his fits into, and when they both feel like it, he sticks his into hers, and what’s the big deal? So maybe he just said something like “You know, Frida, yesterday while I was screwing Cristi, I happened to think of a good theme for the left panel of the Medical School mural.” Or maybe she just realized it. She had an eye like an eagle’s, that Frida, and besides, she had a kind of sixth sense.
What happened is that one day she just popped in on one of the sessions. Just popped in unannounced. It was her house too. Why shouldn’t she just pop in? After all, she and Diego usually had their dinner together around two or three in the afternoon in his enormous kitchen, and, of course, she had access to all the rooms. But lately, she hadn’t even been coming over for the main meal. She had had her appendix out a couple of months earlier, and the incision was still bothering her. Besides, the pregnancy wasn’t going well. She was tired all the time, and her foot hurt her, her back hurt her, everything hurt her. Sometimes it was hard for her to get around. Sometimes she couldn’t even get out of bed, she’d spend the day under the covers feeling sorry for herself. And she was nauseous a lot of the time because of the baby. She spent most of her time in her own quarters, in the blue box on the other side of the bridge.
She had a strange look on her face. Nothing was going on between Diego and me at the moment. I was just posing and he was just painting. It wasn’t as though she had caught us “in the act,” as they say, but her eyeballs were spurting fire and her tongue flicked like a snake’s.
She didn’t utter a word. She was wearing gray trousers and a lavender shirt. She looked stunning. She stood right in front of me, very close, so close I thought she’d singe my cheeks. She didn’t need to say anything. I knew that she knew, and I knew that she cared. What do you want me to say? I had hurt her. That was obvious. Her look was like bolts of lightning. I felt myself reduced to a pile of filthy ashes.
“Frida …” I murmured.
She turned away from me. Diego just kept on painting as if he didn’t know what was going on, as if Frida were a fly or a gnat—annoying but unimportant.
She stood there staring at him.
“It’s too early to eat,” he said finally. “I’m not ready yet.”
She didn’t answer. She turned and faced me again. Then she took a step backward and looked me up and down, looked at my body as though it were a pile of dung. She walked around me, still staring. I felt like a slave on the block, a naked Indian slave. I felt like a whore on display. That’s how she made me feel. My sister. Then she turned and left.
I waited for Diego to make a soothing remark. “It doesn’t matter, Cristi.” Or even “We’ve wounded her, Cristi. We’ve got to put an end to this affair.” But he didn’t. He just went on painting as if nothing had happened.
After that day, I didn’t want to have sex with him anymore. I didn’t even want to pose anymore. I made up excuses not to show up at the studio. “I have to take Toñito to the doctor, Diego.” “I have to help my friend Ana María Quintano prepare two hundred burritos for her daughter’s First Communion.”
He begged. He had to get done with the preliminary studies in order to get going on the Medical School mural, he said, and he couldn’t switch models in the middle of an assignment. Please, Cristi, just a few more days. Please, Cristi, just till I get myself together. Please, Cristi, otherwise I won’t be able to paint at all. Please, Cristi, you were the one who said I had to start painting again, and now you’re throwing me off the boat in the middle of the ocean. Never a word about Frida, though. Never a word about what we had done to her. Well, he wore me down. I wanted to stay away, but he wouldn’t let me.
