Frida, page 28
“All right,” I said finally. “I’ll pose, but I won’t make love with you ever again, Diego. I can’t bear what’s it’s doing to Frida.”
“Ah, yes, Frida,” I expected him to say. “We have to talk about Frida.”
But instead, he said: “Just pose. That’s all I ask.”
Frida was playing the martyr. She was good at that, you know. Saint Justina, clutching the cross while the flames scorched her toes. But instead of carrying on like a madwoman, which was what I was prepared for, she looked out at the world through the eyes of a flogged puppy. Her foot was worse than ever. She was going to need an operation, and now the doctor said that she couldn’t go through with the pregnancy because her health was too fragile. She was going to have to get an abortion. She didn’t say it was all my fault, but the way she looked at me, I felt that it was. To make matters worse, Diego hadn’t started the Medical School mural yet, and they had no money.
“Shit, you bitch!” I said to myself. “Call me slut! Call me traitor! Just spare me that mournful mask.”
I couldn’t bear it. The flogged puppy. The sacrificial lamb. I wanted to die. I couldn’t stand the way I was feeling. But it wasn’t her fault. It was Diego’s. Why had I let myself get trapped in his web? An unwitting fly, that’s what I was. An unwitting fly that suddenly got sucked into a sticky, silken maze and wrapped up in fatal threads. I could feel myself being squeezed to death, squeezed and smothered. I vowed never to let him touch me again.
But who could resist the great Diego Rivera? At first he behaved. He painted. He didn’t talk. He was cordial but professional. He built up my trust, and I let down my defenses.
One night, as we were finishing up, he took my hand and led me into the kitchen. I was dressed already.
“Just stay and have a bite with me,” he pleaded. “Petronila prepared some empanadas.”
“Diego …”
He looked like a rejected schoolboy. I didn’t have the heart to go.
We ate in silence. He seemed not to be able to find words. I took his hand in mine.
“Poor Diego,” I murmured.
“I’m so lonely, Cristi.”
“Forlorn little froggie,” I said, trying to sound sarcastic.
“I need you so much, Cristinita.”
I didn’t want to get caught again. “I can’t betray Frida,” I said firmly. I think I said it firmly. “We’ve hurt her once. Please, let’s not do it again.”
I was still holding his hand, but then he shifted positions slightly, so that he was holding mine. I felt him subtly tighten his grip.
“She’s had an abortion,” he said.
“I know. Poor Frida. She suffers terribly.”
“Yes.” He paused. “But why does she keep on getting pregnant? She knows she can’t carry a baby to term. It seems stupid to me. Stupid and selfish.”
“Why selfish? She wants to give life to a baby.”
“She’ll never give life to a baby, and now she can’t give life to me, either. The doctor says no sex. Not for a long time. She has to recover, and then she has to have an operation on her foot. Whenever I go to her, it’s the same. She can’t have me. She won’t have me. She’s too wrapped up in her own pain. She loves to suffer, Cristi. That’s the real reason she keeps on getting pregnant. So she can be miserable and make everybody else miserable with her. It’s her greatest pleasure. But you know what, Cristi? It really doesn’t matter, because you’re the one I want. I need you, Cristi I need you. I’ve always loved you, from the very beginning, from the first time I saw you, when I went to visit Frida at your parents’ house.”
He was kissing me gently. He was unbuttoning my blouse, pulling it off my shoulders, massaging my buttocks, leading me to the bedroom.
How long did it go on? Maybe a year. Maybe longer. What I can tell you is this: I never felt more like a woman than when Diego and I were lovers. He was completely devoted to me. He talked to me. He painted me. He took me places with him. He wasn’t ashamed of me. Whenever he had money, he bought me things. He set me up in a beautiful apartment on Florencia Street, in the best part of Mexico City. He even bought me a car. In those days, there weren’t that many Mexican women who knew how to drive. I was special. When I went out in my two-tone Packard, I turned heads. I would let my hair down so it flew in the breeze. I was a sight to see. That’s what everyone said. I would go to see Papá in Coyoacán every weekend, and I would take him for rides in the country. He loved it. I was a good daughter. I was even a successful daughter, because I was the favorite model of the great Diego Rivera! When Diego painted his Modern Mexico mural in the National Palace, he put me in the center of it. There I am, looking round and sensuous, leaning slightly forward to show the curve of my hip, my two children by my side. There I am, holding a communist something or other, a document, a declaration of the rights of the worker or something. I’m in front. Frida is there too, but she’s in back of me, looking like a Girl Scout, no, excuse me, a Young Communist.
Frida was enraged that Diego and I were back together. Once in a while she spewed venom: “You’ve hurt me, Cristina! How could you do this to me! You little snake!” But most of the time it was just the cold shoulder. The I-don’t-even-know-you’re-here treatment. She’d walk into a room and kiss Diego, kiss Papá, kiss Toñito and Isoldita, even kiss Petronila and pretend I was invisible. At a party, if someone asked about me, she’d shrug as though she didn’t know who they were talking about. Even if I was standing right there. Well, what did I care? I had Diego. She had a broken back, a sore foot, and an empty uterus.
She moved out of her house next to Diego’s and into an apartment on Avenida Insurgentes, in Mexico City. “I’ll help you pack,” I told her. Instead of answering, she sniffed and turned her back. I was sick of her moods, sick of her hysterics, sick of her operations, her pain, her whining, her pregnancies and her abortions. I was the successful one, that’s what I want you to understand. I was Diego Rivera’s woman. I was the favorite, the pretty one, the one who had borne children. She couldn’t even conceive a baby and carry it to term.
Diego still loved Frida. I knew that. I knew he went to see her almost every day. I knew because he told me.
“She’s feeling better,” he’d say. “We made love today. We made love savagely. She was magnificent!”
He said those things to upset me. They weren’t true. They couldn’t have been true, because Frida was sick. But he loved to get me riled. He loved to play one against the other. He was in heaven when women fought over him. He did everything he could to fan the fires. He bought me some beautiful red leatherette furniture for my apartment, then turned around and bought Frida the same set in blue. He knew we’d find out and would be at each other’s throats.
“I’m just trying to be fair!” he said with that goddamn innocent grin of his. Fan the flames, fan the flames, keep the sisters clawing at each other! Was he taking bets on which one would destroy the other? Well, I didn’t care. I was enjoying myself.
And what do you think? Do you think I was selfish? Do you think I was cruel?
I guess I was. Of course I was. Poor Frida. She was going through hell, and she needed me. But I was too busy zipping around in my new car, showing off, flirting with every pair of pants that came into my field of vision. I was enjoying my status as Diego Rivera’s current favorite. Was that so wrong? All I wanted was a little happiness, a little fun. After all, hadn’t she been running around to parties for years, hobnobbing with big shots and eating caviar? Well, now I was doing it! I was meeting movie stars, people like Dolores del Río! I was meeting famous politicians! Even Lázaro Cárdenas. And so many others! I would stand real close to them at parties and say outrageous things, fluttering my eyelashes at them right in front of their wives, just like Frida did. Just like I imagined she did. All I wanted to do initially was show Frida that I was somebody, that a man could really love me. Yes, I was hurting her, but so what? Let her take a little of what she’s been dishing out. That’s what I thought.
But then I began to think about it more. It began to sink in. I had betrayed my own sister. I had driven an awl into her gut. Who knew if I would ever be able to put back together what I had ripped apart. I began to think that things would never again be the same between us. I couldn’t bear it. I began to stay home from the parties. I began to sit in front of the window, drinking and sobbing. Sometimes I’d hide in the bathtub. I’d sit and soak for hours. I’d lose track of the time. All I have to do is slide down under the water and breathe in deeply, I’d think. Then it would all be over. I wouldn’t be an obstacle to Frida’s happiness anymore. I would imagine myself slitting my wrists and watching the blood trickle out of my veins and into the soapy water. I’d imagine myself walking into the sea, Isolda’s little fingers in my right hand and Toño’s in my left. I’d just walk and walk, the gentle waves shrouding first the baby’s tiny form, then Soldita’s, then lapping around my neck, my ears, my eyes until at last they covered me entirely. I could hear Frida calling from the shore, “Cristi, please! Don’t go! Don’t leave me all alone! At least don’t take the children! They’re all I have!” Bitch! They’re all I have? Even in my dreams she thinks only of herself!
I had finally realized what a mess I’d made of things. How did I realize? First there was the apartment. Frida’s apartment, I mean. To move out of Diego’s house and into her own place was a pretty radical step. She was trying to break away from him, that was clear. I’m not a psychiatrist, a professional like you, but I could see she was struggling to break bonds. She was going to try to support herself with her painting, she said. She didn’t need him anymore. She was lying, of course. Lying to herself and to all of us. Because she saw him all the time. Every day! She didn’t cut the cord at all. But she didn’t want to depend on him financially, and to prove it, she set up a studio in her apartment and got busy working. She even went to see a lawyer, Manuel González Ramírez, one of the Cachuchas from her days at the Prepa, about getting a divorce. I never dreamed she would go so far. I was scared.
Frida was changing. What happened between us made her change. It made her more independent. It was as though Frida wasn’t just divorcing Diego, she was divorcing me. I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d lie awake, staring into the blackness, thinking about how I had ruined everything. I was miserable.
But there was something else that happened that made me realize what a shit I had been, how horribly I had hurt her. It was a painting she did around that time called A Few Small Nips. It was inspired by a newspaper story about a man who viciously murdered his girlfriend. He stabbed her all over her body, then left her in a pool of blood. When the police arrested him, he said something like “What’s the big deal? I just gave her a few small nips!” Frida’s picture shows the assassin holding a bloody knife over a woman lying on a cot, her body covered with gashes. It’s brutal, incredibly brutal. But, this is awful, I’m embarrassed to tell you this. The first time I saw it, I burst out laughing! I mean, it was so gruesome, it reminded me of a Mexican melodrama. You know, those movies where the wronged husband shoots his wife, her lover, her mother, her father, her sister, the kids, the family dog, and all their cattle to boot! I couldn’t stop laughing. Tears gushed out of my eyes. I tried to stop, but what could I do? “It’s all right, Cristi,” Frida said softly. She had that hurt little smile on her lips. “It is funny, in a way.” She was in such pain. And the murderer in the painting was me. I knew that. Diego and me.
I loved her. So did Diego. We both loved her. We loved her more than we loved each other. Diego made her suffer, but afterward he was miserable, really, sincerely. We hated hurting her. Hated it. And yet we kept on doing it.
Diego and I didn’t separate. I had learned how to type, not very well, but I kept on working as Diego’s secretary, and I kept on posing for him. Frida knew we were still lovers. What was it about Frida that made you hurt her even though you didn’t want to? Why did I treat her so cruelly? It was as though I were trapped … trapped in some kind of zombielike state where I couldn’t control my own actions.
Did Frida ever forgive me? She said she did. Eventually, after it was over, she told me that she had put it all behind her. Her love for me and Diego was greater than anything, she said. But I knew that things would never be the same between us.
Frida didn’t go through with the divorce, but she took a lover of her own—a famous Japanese sculptor—and then another and another. Some were men, some were women. An art student. One of Diego’s assistants. A waiter at Sanborn’s. A young political activist. A dancer from a visiting zarzuela company. A nurse she had met at the hospital. She was drowning her sorrow in sex, and she was getting even. Diego didn’t care about the women. He thought lesbian affairs were interesting. All the women in their crowd were having them. But the men, that he couldn’t take. He couldn’t bear the thought of Frida in another man’s bed. That’s why, every time she did it, she made sure he knew. Once she convinced her sculptor-lover Isamu Noguchi to take an apartment with her. They ordered some furniture for it, but Frida had it sent to Diego’s instead. “Oh!” she told him. “The delivery man must have made a mistake and delivered it to the wrong address!” She did things like that to hurt him, you see.
Why do people who love each other torture each other so? You figure it out. That’s your job. The only thing I know is this: I never stopped loving Frida. No matter what terrible things I did, I loved her. Write it down: Cristina Kahlo loved her sister Frida.
CHAPTER 18
Turning Point
DOLORES DEL RÍO WAS THE MOST GLAMOROUS WOMAN I EVER MET. I’D seen all her movies, including her first, Joanne. She just had a bit part in that one. But even in that tiny role, you could see she was so mysterious, so graceful. You just knew she was bound for stardom. She was just our age, maybe a year or two older. But I looked up to her as though she was a more mature, experienced woman. There was something fine about her, something left over from her education in a fancy French private school. You could tell she was raised in a house where they ate roast beef on porcelain and had pictures of great-grandmothers in ruffled collars in the vestibule.
Her father was a banker, she herself told me. He was the director of the Bank of Durango. During the Revolution, he hightailed it out of Mexico and settled in the States. Of course, we had been Zapatistas, but by the time I met Lola—that’s what we called her—none of that mattered. We could laugh about it. We could be friends, and we were friends. I adored her. Her real name was Dolores Asúnsolo y López Negrete. Del Río was her husband’s name. She had married very young, at fifteen. Her husband was Jaime del Río, her first husband, I mean. These aren’t things I read in some movie magazine. These are things she told me herself.
Imagine this scene: We’re in a trajinera in Xochimilco. Diego and Frida and a bunch of friends had decided to have a picnic in the floating gardens. I think Lola Alvarez Bravo was with us—the famous photographer who took so many beautiful pictures of Frida—her husband, Manuel, and Lucienne. Let’s see, who else? Jean van Heijenoort, the French mathematician who became Trotsky’s secretary. All kinds of famous people. Nicolasa Larrubia de la Barca, the dancer. And there I was, right in the middle of everything.
We were in one of those big canoes they have at Xochimilco, you know, the trajineras. An adorable young oarsman with brown skin and luscious green eyes like mint candies, probably the descendant of some horny conquistador and an Indian princess, this boy … this young man was punting smoothly, so smoothly over the poplar-lined canal. The arches of the boat were decorated with every kind of flower—orchids, chrysanthemums, hibiscuses, carnations. The perfume made you heady, mixed with the tangy aromas of chile and moist earth. I was giddy from happiness, drunk with the moment, the fragrance, the luxurious vegetation, the delicious, lukewarm breeze, and Lola. She was intoxicating. Her smile made you feel inebriated. A couple of guitarists dressed like charros—Mexican cowboys—sat in the back and played “La Paloma,” “La Ciudad de Jauja,” “Cielito Lindo,” things like that. It had rained earlier in the day, and drops of water still shimmered on petals and leaves. Along the canal, the vegetation was so dense you could hardly see beyond the álamos, but you knew the forest was alive. You could feel it … you could hear the concert of invisible birds, crickets, frogs.
We had packed a spectacular lunch in huge metal containers, chile, mole poblano, enchiladas rojas, enchiladas verdes, tamales, refried beans, and rice with saffron. There were stacks of tortillas, tomatoes, tart black olives, guacamole, and bottles of wine, tequila, rum, whiskey. I had made sangría: sweet, potent sangría full of fruit that retained the alcohol. The alcohol concentrates in the fruit. You can get drunk just by eating the fruit. I was sitting next to Lola—Dolores del Río—right next to her, my head resting on her shoulder while she talked about Hollywood. It was so strange to hear her speak. Practically all the pictures I had seen her in were silent, All the Town Is Talking, with Edward Everett Horton, Upstream, with Walter Pidgeon, and What Price Glory?, in which she played a French peasant girl named Charmaine. There were so many.
“In Hollywood they don’t think I look Mexican, they just think I look foreign,” she said. That’s exactly what she said. Well, something like that. She wore deep purple lipstick, and her lips seemed to be kissing the air as she spoke. They were so sensuous you almost wanted to reach out and touch the corner of her mouth. “So, up to now, I’ve been getting away with playing little French girls. But now, with the talkies, who knows what will happen?”
Who knows what will happen? We all knew what would happen. It was already happening. She would make the transition beautifully. They would bill her as Spanish, which was more glamorous than Mexican, and put her in films where her accent wouldn’t be a problem. She had just made Flying Down to Río, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Who knows what will happen? No, I’m lying. I didn’t know what would happen, but I should have. I should have seen it coming.
