Frida, page 37
Frida had completely disarmed the girl. You see, she had that talent. She was so funny and warm. She left people defenseless.
Fanny was still standing there, paralyzed.
“No? Well, then, who will teach me how to give classes?”
No one answered, but some of them started to twitter shyly.
“If that’s the case, I’ll guess I’ll just let you all do whatever you want. How would that be? Because I’m certainly not going to tell you what to do.” Once again, she burst out laughing. They stared at her in amazement. A boy in a ragged white shirt shifted his weight from one foot to the other. A boy with a poncho and a surprisingly healthy mustache for one so young pulled at his ear nervously. Then, one by one, they joined her in laughter.
She didn’t break her promise. She actually did let them do what ever they wanted. I mean, she didn’t teach them to draw, really. Instead, she taught them to open their eyes and see the world around them. She let them paint the stuff that was lying around their homes, jugs, flowers, brooms, scraps of cloth. She taught them to appreciate the beauty of their surroundings, the mexicanidad of their surroundings. She let them pick their own subjects and work at their own pace. She never said, “Draw it this way. Copy from the book. Use my work as a model.” She never said, “Trace this page.” She let them develop their own styles. “Draw what you see,” she told them. “Draw what you feel.” She just wanted them to create images taken from their own world.
“All I want is to be your friend,” she told them. “So let’s get to work, and you’ll teach me as much as I teach you. More, in fact, because I really know nothing about teaching at all.”
None of those kids had ever heard an adult talk like that before, and especially not an adult in authority. They ate it up. They adored her. The great Frida Kahlo was going to be their friend.
She did love them. She had a way of teaching them that was different from anyone else’s. They’d be painting in a classroom when all of a sudden she’d say, “Oh, this is too boring! Let’s go out in the street. That’s where the true beauty and color of Mexico can be found. Let’s go, kids! Take your sketch pads!” And they’d all troop out to the slums and look for hours at the wash hanging from a clothesline—colorful cotton skirts, rebozos, underwear, shirts—or a dog urinating by the side of a building, or a cactus in a pot.
Sometimes they’d go to a pulquería. They’d drink and watch other people drinking, and they’d listen to the guitar music and sing songs with the drunken ex-revolutionaries Frida called her comrades, even though she didn’t invite them to her fancy dinner parties with guests like Dolores del Río and President Cárdenas.
Sometimes she’d show up at the school with basketfuls of snacks—empanaditas, flautitas, plantain chips, coconut cookies.
These were poor kids. A basketful of snacks went a long way. A basketful of snacks meant something.
After a few months, Frida got tired of going to La Esmeralda. She and Diego were both living in the Casa Azul in Coyoacán, and it was a long ride into the city every day, exhausting and hard on her back.
“Fine,” said Diego. “Don’t go anymore.”
“And my muchachitos?”
“Have them come out here!”
Did she really love them, or was she addicted to their devotion? Guillermo Monroy called her a walking flower. He was a poor boy. His father was a carpenter. I think he was overwhelmed by Frida’s presence. By the fact that Frida Kahlo, the Frida Kahlo, was paying attention to him.
Ha, I thought. He should see his walking flower when she’s puking in the toilet. He should see his walking flower when she’s so sloshed she slumps into the arroz con pollo. But then I thought about it. “Why am I being such a bitch?” I said to myself. “Why am I being so unfair?” Because I knew, deep down inside, that even though Frida was a selfish woman, she gave these kids what she could.
“I can’t abandon them,” she told me. “They need me. They adore me.”
And it was true. They adored her. But did they need her? She needed them, but did they need her?
“You’re so beautiful, Frida. Pose for us!”
“Teach us a song from the Revolution, Frida!”
“Come with us to the Communist Youth Organization tonight, Frida!”
Fridita, Friducha, Fridísima all day long. They called themselves the Fridos.
At first about ten or twelve Fridos came out to the house every day. They set up their easels in the garden and painted all morning. She fed them. She supplied paints and canvases. While they created images of swelling hibiscuses, exploding watermelons, cavorting monkeys, and exuberant jugs, Frida painted more Fridas. She painted her emotions, her physical pain. Frida beset by demons, Frida with a skeleton plugged into her brain, Frida with Diego in the middle of her forehead like an all-seeing eye, Frida in desolation, Frida with roots growing out of her gut, Frida with a crumbling spine, Frida in tears, Frida pierced with nails, Frida disemboweled … Frida the goddess, Frida the Christ, Frida the lord of all things seen and unseen.
My God! My God! Fridos and Fridas everywhere. It was like a shrine to our most holy lady Santa Frida. They even wrote music for her. Really! Guillermo Monroy wrote a corrido with fifteen verses. “Doña Frida de Rivera / our revered teacher …” la la la, and so on and so forth. Don’t ask me to sing it! A shrine attended to by devoted priests and priestesses. And I was one of them, don’t you see? I was the mistress of the cult, I was the chief priestess, the pope, the goddamn pope of the religion of our most holy lady the divine Saint Frida Kahlo de Rivera, because I was the one who took care of her, who medicated her, who fed her and bathed her. I was the one who listened to her, who soothed her and put up with her shit, her temper tantrums, her drinking, her vomit all over the bathroom floor, her whining, her depressions. No priest of any religion ever devoted his life to his beloved god the way I devoted mine to Saint Frida.
Go away. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Please, doctor … please just go away.
Well, all right. I’ll finish the story, but then, for the love of Jesus, go away.
One by one, the students stopped coming. Coyoacán was too far away. Most of them weren’t willing to make the trek. Anyhow, Frida didn’t really critique their work. Oh, once in a while, but not very often. Sometimes she and Diego would go out into the garden and throw out a comment or two, like princes throwing scraps of meat at dogs, but it wasn’t enough for some of them. They wanted a real teacher, so they left. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it wasn’t that way at all. Maybe they stopped coming because they just couldn’t pay the bus fare or couldn’t spare the time or didn’t have the energy. I don’t know why they stopped coming, but they did. Only four remained—Arturo García Bustos, Guillermo Monroy, Arturo Estrada, and Fanny Rabinovich. In addition, there was another one who came once in a while. He was about fifteen. His name was Carlos Sánchez Ahumada. A scrumptious boy, a young Aztec warrior, with an aquiline nose and a high forehead. You could just see him in a loincloth and feathers, lifting his arm as if to hurl a lance, flexing his muscles. He had a beautiful body. He was a mason like his father, and he was used to lifting stones.
Frida took an interest in him right away.
She used to bring him into her bedroom. That’s where she had her easel set up.
“Carlos, come see the portrait I’m doing of Doña Rosita,” she said to him one morning. The others pretended not to notice. “I want your opinion of it. Honestly, darling, tell me what you think. I learn as much from my students as they learn from me!
No one said a word. The others all knew that Frida had unconventional tastes. That’s one of the things that made her so fascinating to them—her absolute disdain for traditional morality. The morality of their peasant mothers. Catholic morality. They took Frida’s unusual preferences as an expression of her commitment to communist ideals. To hell with the middle class and all that. Only these kids weren’t middle-class, they were poor, and the morality she was thumbing her nose at was the morality they had been raised with. Even so, they accepted her. They loved her. Santa Fridita.
Still, her interest in Carlos came as something of a surprise. Everybody had thought she had her eye on Fanny. And maybe she did. But one thing didn’t rule out the other.
“Carlitos, mi amor, come and see the portrait I’m doing.”
“Sí, Doña Frida.”
“How many times do I have to tell you, Carlitos! Don’t call me Doña Frida! I’m your friend, darling, not your maiden aunt.”
“Sí, Doña Frida.”
She put her arm around his waist and nestled against his shoulder. She giggled, and her laughter floated up to the treetops and mingled with the chirping of the birds.
She winked at Carlos and ran her tongue over her lips.
“Carlitos, mi amor!”
The boy looked down at his sandals. Frida took him by the hand and led him into her bedroom. I watched from the kitchen door.
He emerged an hour or so later, his hair a mess, his shirt open, and his white homespun trousers askew. The others kept on painting. Carlos, back at his easel, kept his eyes on his work.
Frida was leaning against the patio wall, a malicious smirk on her lips, her eyes dancing.
“He’s impossible,” she told me that night. We were sitting in the kitchen, shelling peas. “He thinks his mamacita is watching. Whatever he does, he thinks his mamacita can see him. Her and the Virgin of Guadalupe. You touch his crotch, and you have the feeling the whole assembly of saints is right there with you, Santo Tomás, San Ignacio, Santa Teresa, Santa Rosa. The whole gang, and the whole choir of angels. Everyone from Doña Hortigosa, the next-door neighbor, to the goddamn pope is scrutinizing your every move!” She burst into gales of laughter. “Shit, the rubbish they pump into these kids’ heads!”
I was annoyed. She had used the word scrutinize. I didn’t know what it meant.
She looked as me as though she expected me to express sympathy. I kept on shelling peas.
“But eventually, he came around.” She chuckled. Then she stuck her index finger in her mouth and sucked on it wickedly. “When they’re young, they’ll do whatever you want.”
I was overcome by a sudden fit of nausea. Carlitos wasn’t that much older than my own son, Toñito.
She must have seen the look of disgust on my face. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” I lied. “Nothing.”
“You’re happy for me, aren’t you, Cristi?” She sounded heartbreakingly sincere.
“Of course I am, Frida.”
“I love you so much, Cristi.”
I knew she meant it.
“I love you, too,” I whispered.
My heart was in shreds. I bit my lip and got up and left the room. Why couldn’t I just accept her the way she was? Why did her stunts drive me so crazy?
Not long after that, Carlos Sánchez Ahumada disappeared. He not only stopped coming to the Casa Azul, he abandoned La Esmeralda altogether. Why? I don’t know. No one looked for him. No one went to his house to inquire.
What? No! Of course not. I had nothing to do with it! I never said anything to anyone about it until now, and now it doesn’t matter anymore.
So many years have passed. Anyway, nobody ever mentioned him again, not ever. Carlos was a taboo subject, like babies. You just didn’t talk about certain things with Frida. It was as though they didn’t exist. They had been erased by virtue of her wanting to forget them.
I’m old. I’m older than old. I don’t want to remember anymore. All I want is for you to go away.
All right, I’ll go on, but only for a little while. You have to understand, I’m tired.
I know I’ve been selfish. All the times I judged Frida harshly. All the times I resented her success. I admit it. I was horrible, cruel. I hate myself for that, but sometimes I just couldn’t help it. Sometimes she was so annoying, so self-centered, I just wanted to kill her. No, I don’t mean that. But she was full of herself, like a clam that fills its shell so tightly there’s no room for anything else. For example, at the opening of La Rosita.
You don’t know La Rosita? It was a pulquería on the corner of Aguayo and Londres, right down the street from our house. A sorry little place, dirty floors, a few stools. Some of the Fridos had studied mural painting with Diego, and so Frida got permission for them to decorate the outside walls. It would be good practice for them, she said. It wasn’t such an original idea. What I mean is, pulquería walls were usually painted. Simple stuff, graffiti almost, drawings of things suggested by the name of the place. Pulquería El Cacto had a lot of cactuses painted on its walls, for example. Or sometimes the pictures were political—revolutionary heroes, that sort of thing—or had something to do with the history of the town. For example, in San Pablo Guelatao, in Oaxaca, all the pulquerías had pictures of the famous president Benito Juárez because he was born there. At one point the government decided that the pulquerías had to be cleaned up, and so the walls all had to be whitewashed. But Frida and Diego objected to that. The paintings were the people’s art, they said, beautiful, authentic, and unconstrained. Frida’s idea was to give her students practice painting murals by giving them a crack at the walls of La Rosita. Just an exercise, she said, but at the same time, these kids’ paintings were going to revive the kind of folk art that had produced the original pulquería murals.
So they all trooped down there. The Fridos and some of Diego’s students too, the Dieguitos. They painted for days. Fanny did a little girl and a lot of roses. The name of the pulquería, Rosita, could be a girl’s name, or it could mean “little rose.” Frida and Diego would visit every once in a while and offer their comments. Anyhow, by June it was done.
The year? I think it was 1943. I’m almost sure. It was the year the movie Distinto Amanecer came out. Well, when the pulquería was ready to show off its new murals, Frida had these broadsides printed up, very funny broadsides with pictures of roses and people drinking pulque, and the announcement of a spectacular lunch, a barbecue of meats sprinkled with the best pulque in Mexico. She made it sound like she was announcing the opening of a very important exhibition. She had these broad sides distributed everywhere, in the central market, in the plazas. She had them pasted to church walls, she sent them to the newspapers, she sent them to the most important and influential people in Mexico City.
As you can imagine, it was a circus, a parade of celebrities.
“¡Dios mío!” said Frida. “I never suspected it would be anything like this!”
But of course she did. I mean, she’s the one who made it happen. After all, when Frida and Diego Rivera gave a party, the reporters came running. And Frida made sure they had plenty of advance notice. She made it into an event.
Concha Michel, the famous folksinger, sang “Delgadina,” about a girl who refuses to become a big shot’s mistress, and Guillermo sang his damned corrido about his beloved art teacher. Salvador Novo, Frida’s old friend from Prepa days and now a famous poet, recited verses. Padre Esteban, the parish priest, kissed Frida’s cheek, and the mother of one of Frida’s students kissed her hand. All the reporters kissed her ass.
Everywhere the lively sounds of guitars, blithe adolescents, spirited children. A toothless old lady was dancing a jaranda with her grandson, moving her hips and throwing her head back in joy. Even the dogs seemed to bark in time to the music. One chased another into a group of dancers, and a crew of little boys howled with laughter. The girl students were dressed in Tehuana costumes with full, colorful skirts, lacy blouses, and roses and ribbons in their hair. Miniature Fridas. Next they’ll all be limping, I thought.
The air was redolent with barbecue, as well as poached guavas, quince paste and cheese, and sugar cookies. And the best pulque from Ixtapalapa. You could get drunk just on the fragrance. Frida the bountiful. People thought she had paid for the whole thing, even though Diego and several other generous fat cats had footed the bills. Everyone ate and laughed and rejoiced in the exquisite mexicanidad of the moment, and Frida was the queen of this fairy-tale kingdom, where for one afternoon everyone was in a good mood and everyone—from the governor to the carpenter’s son—had enough to eat.
Lola del Río, my old friend Lola, who had held my hand and stroked my hair in Xochimilco, stood up on a chair and congratulated Frida on her great contribution to Mexican culture. Then she jumped down and hugged Frida. Diego applauded. Frida beamed. The photographers went snap snap snap. The pictures would be in the morning’s paper. I smiled at Lola, and she looked right past me. “Lola,” I whispered, but it was like I wasn’t there.
They were all dancing. I was dancing too, but as though in a dream. Floating, bobbing up and down like a balloon on a string. I was there, yet I saw the scene from afar, in muted colors, soft reds and yellows and greens, grainy, like a poor-quality film. I felt as though I were on the outside, as though I were watching from some place in heaven, where I hovered like a quivering, feathered creature.
The only one who wasn’t dancing was Benjamin Péret, a French teacher at La Esmeralda. He was a slight man with dull hair, droopy eyelids, and a limp wrist. He had just arrived from Paris and made it clear that although he shared Mexicans’ revolutionary zeal, he had no intention of ever touching a real Mexican. He was a good communist, he loved humanity, but he washed his hands with disinfectant whenever he shook hands with a campesino.
Diego signaled him to move into the dance area. “Vamos, compañero. We’re going to do a zapateado.”
Péret looked horrified. “Mais non!” He twitched. He looked like a scrawny rooster who had just swallowed a foul-tasting worm. Or maybe a string he had taken for a worm.
“Mais non!” His head jerked around oddly. His eyes were enormous and round. “I do not know how to make those dances, Diego.”
Diego was drunk. “ Vamos, Benjamín,” he coaxed. He winked at him and beckoned as though the French teacher were a coy young girl.
