FRIDA

“Love the earth and sun and the animals…
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”
–Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass

 

The address the woman at the market gave her

led to a stone house with a wooden door

on a rubbish-strewn street in Mexico City.

 

At the end of a long, dim hallway,

Frida came to a sunlit patio

alive with plants and birds

where she found her sister Maty

washing herself with a hose.

 

She’d not seen Maty since the day

she’d eloped at the age of fifteen.

Frida was seven when she helped her sister

escape through a balcony window

and fifteen when she found her again.

Their parents wouldn’t forgive Maty

for fleeing their unhappiness.

 

Their father proposed to their mother

the night his first wife died in childbirth.

Three months later, when they married,

Matilde sent his infant daughter and her older sister

to be raised in a convent.

 

Guillermo wanted sons, but their only son died.

He had four more daughters with Matilde.

After each birth, Matilde escaped into illness.

The two older daughters raised their younger sisters.

Next-to-youngest Frida was her father’s favorite,

dressed as a boy in family portraits

next to her more conventional sisters.

 

Frida was the only one

educated at the Preparatoria

among the elite like a favored son,

She commuted from Coyoacán

into the heart of Mexico City,

one of 35 girls among 2,000 boys.

 

After the Mexican Revolution,

the family began its slide into poverty

when Guillermo lost his commission

documenting his adopted country’s

architectural heritage. His beloved

Blue House had to be mortgaged.

Misanthropic, epileptic,

he retreated into failure,

while his shrewd, illiterate wife

managed the finances.

 

Frida was saucy, impertinent, lively,

despite her withered leg and limp

from polio. She was eighteen years old

and in love with an older student, Alejandro,

when one September afternoon, after school,

the rickety, wooden bus they were riding

was rammed by a street trolley.

 

They had been on another bus

when she missed her pink parasol,

and they got off to look for it.

After a while they gave up

and caught the next bus.

It was a long bus with benches

on either side. Struck in the middle,

the bus bent until it burst into pieces,

while the train kept moving.

 

It is a lie that one is aware of the crash,

a lie that one cries. In me there were no tears.

The crash bounced us forward, and a handrail

pierced me the way a sword pierces a bull.

A man saw me having a tremendous hemorrhage.

He carried me and put me on a billiard table

until the Red Cross came for me.

 

The train’s steel handrail broke off,

entering Frida’s abdomen

and exiting her vagina.

Her pelvis and spinal column

were broken in three places,

and her collarbone was fractured.

Her third and fourth ribs were broken.

Her right leg had eleven fractures.

Her right foot was dislocated and crushed.

 

The impact of the crash stripped

the clothes from her body.

A packet of gold leaf

carried by a painter spilled open,

sprinkling her naked, bleeding body

with flecks of gold. Seeing her,

people cried, La bailarina!

Alejandro covered her with his coat.

Few thought she would survive.

 

When they heard the news,

her parents fell ill. Her mother

didn’t speak for a month. Her father

took to his bed for twenty days.

Sister Adriana fainted.

Only Maty came to see her

and returned every day.

 

The hospital was once a convent,

dark and bare. In a gloomy ward,

Frida lay flat on her back in a plaster cast,

in a box like a coffin. During the day,

Maty nursed her and made her laugh,

but at night death danced around her bed.

 

Guillermo and Matilde

were consumed with Frida’s medical costs.

Had she been a rich man’s daughter,

the doctors would have been more careful.

After what was deemed a miraculous recovery,

she was sent home without exam or Xray.

A year later it was discovered

three vertebrae were misaligned.

 

In the Kahlo family,

Guillermo and Matilde claimed all

the psychic space for suffering.

Discharged from the hospital

after a month, Frida felt trapped at home

with her unhappy parents, far away

from her friends, confined to bed,

lonely, isolated, and in pain.

 

A little while ago, I was a child

who went about in a world of colors.

Everything was mysterious

and something was hidden,

guessing what it was

was a game for me.

How terrible it is to know suddenly

as if a bolt of lightning

elucidated the earth.

Everything is bland and lucid.

My friends grew up slowly,

but I became old in an instant.

I live on a painful planet,

translucent as ice.

 

For the rest of her life, Frida suffered

from pain and fatigue.

She wore plaster casts, heavy braces,

and corsets of leather and metal

to support her spine.

The sole of her right shoe

had to be built up an inch higher

than the left so she could walk.

She cut holes in the shoe

to ease the sores on her foot.

 

Despite 22 surgeries

to repair damage from the accident

and the doctors’ incompetence,

her health deteriorated,

until her death 29 years later.

 

Of the betrayals after the accident,

the worst was Alejandro.

To him as to no one else,

she poured out her heart.

But he was unequal to her need.

He fled to study in Europe

without telling her goodbye.

 

In the corner of his studio,

Guillermo kept a box of oil paints,

a palette, and some brushes in a vase.

Ever since she was a child,

Frida had cast her eye on his art supplies.

She persuaded him to let her use them.

Her mother hired a carpenter to make

an easel that attached to her bed

so she could paint lying down.

 

Frida was gifted with talents and aptitudes.

The accident ended her possibilities.

Painting became her child of necessity

She painted small because small

was what she could manage.

She preferred to work in private.

With painting she could tell her truth

without having to speak.

 

Once, when she was a child

confined to her room with polio,

Frida breathed on the window glass

and in the vapor, she drew a door.

In her mind she went through the door

and across the street. She stood in front

of the dairy with the sign, “Pinzon”

and entered the letter “O.”

Suddenly she found herself

in the interior of the earth.

 

A little girl was waiting for her.

Smiling, the girl listened as Frida

confided her secret problems.

The girl danced without music,

and Frida followed her.

When it was time to leave,

Frida returned the way she had come.

Back in her room, she blurred the glass

with her hand, and the door disappeared.

The illusion was gone, but the feeling

of friendship persisted.

 

Convalescent after the accident,

Frida remembered the dear companion

who accompanied her to the depths,

in whom she could confide

without being abandoned.

 

All aspects of her life

Frida transformed into art.

In her proliferating images,

the designs of her house and garden,

her clothes and her hair, her adornments

and her animal companions,

she created visions of enchantment.

 

After Alejandro left her,

she fell in love with an artist

so big she could hide behind him,

old enough to be her father,

and prosperous enough to support her

and help her family.

Of unquestioned stature himself,

Diego Rivera saw greatness in Frida:

The monumental is expressed

in the smallest dimensions.

 

In the first days of their love,

the electricity of their kisses

turned on and off the streetlamps

during their evening strolls

through Coyoacán’s avenues.

 

When Diego asked for permission

to marry Frida, her father replied,

“My daughter is sick, and all her life

she will be sick. She is intelligent,

but not pretty. Think it over,

and if you wish to marry her,

I give you my permission.”

Alone of her family,

Guillermo attended the wedding.

Frida wore a skirt and blouse

and rebozo borrowed from a maid,

draped to conceal her apparatus.

 

Her braided hair and floral headpieces,

dangling earrings and heavy necklaces,

square-cut blouses with ribbons

and ornaments, and long skirts

were how Tehuana women dressed.

It was Frida’s family’s custom to wear

these clothes on special occasions.

Frida’s costume became her emblem,

an expression of family ties

and national loyalty. In the gray streets

of New York and Paris, Detroit

and San Francisco, she attracted attention

like a tropical bird out of its element.

Sometimes she sewed bells to her petticoats

that made a tinkling music as she walked.

 

Frida liked to spend hours getting ready

to go out. Pleasure was in the preparation,

as essential as the performance.

Her attire gave her the appearance of gaiety.

Children followed her through city streets,

expecting to be led to a circus.

 

But appearances can be deceiving.

Her clothing concealed the broken parts

of her body and the braces and corset

she wore for support. The more

she was suffering or worse she was feeling,

the more adornment she would wear.

At the end of her life,

when she could no longer leave her bed,

she still dressed like a doll for visitors.

 

Frida met Diego when she was a student

and he got his first big commission,

a mural for her school’s auditorium.

Defying Lupe, his watchful wife,

she sneaked in to watch him at work.

When they met again eight years later,

he remembered the bold schoolgirl.

Then she had been mischievous,

but now she was serious. Showing him

three portraits, she demanded his criticism:

I’m neither an art lover nor an amateur,

but a girl who must work for her living.

 

I had to restrain myself from praising

her as much as I wanted.

It was obvious she was an authentic artist.

A week later, I went to see her.

Her room, her paintings, her presence

filled me with wonderful joy,

I did not know it then,

but Frida had already become

the most important person in my life,

 

Diego put art at the service of politics.

In monumental murals he celebrated

workers and peasants, his native Mexico.

Yet he preferred to live in New York.

Although he was a Communist,

his most important patrons

were American capitalists.

His productivity was astonishing,

his appetites legendary.

Women were attracted to him

in spite of his ugliness.

He was unfaithful

and Frida was jealous,

though she made friends

of most of her rivals.

 

Diego’s commissions brought them

to San Francisco, New York, and Detroit.

In every city, they were feted

by wealthy supporters of art and culture.

In 1932, the Museum of Modern Art

gave Diego a blockbuster retrospective.

Diego was in his element, but Frida was not.

The darkness of American cities

depressed her. Walking was difficult,

and she couldn’t bear the heat and cold.

She longed for children, but her body

was too damaged to bear a child.

Her pregnancies ended in miscarriage

or therapeutic abortions.

 

In the excruciating heat of a New York

summer, she sat in the bathtub

soaking her feet, in agonizing pain,

while Diego kept trysts with Louise Nevelson.

The public flocked to watch Diego at work

on a mural commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller

to celebrate “Men at the Crossroads

looking with Hope and High Vision

to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.”

Diego portrayed that future as a Marxist utopia

and the US as evil and corrupt.

 

When Diego’s design was publicized,

the sturdy scaffolding in the RCA building

was replaced by a flimsier structure.

Diego shielded his mural from the public,

transforming his sketch of a labor leader

into a portrait of Lenin. When Nelson objected,

Diego refused to remove the likeness.

Nelson paid the artist’s fee and fired him,

and the mural was destroyed.

Diego was astounded. He never dreamed

Nelson would call his bluff. He vowed

to use his fee to paint another mural

and threw himself into activism,

while the Communists attacked him

for accepting commissions from millionaires.

 

At Frida’s insistence, they returned to Mexico

over Diego’s objections. He punished

Frida by seducing her younger sister.

Cristina’s husband had left her,

and she was living with her children

and widowed father in the Blue House

in Coyoacán Diego had bought for them.

 

The more I loved a woman,

the more I wanted to hurt her.

Frida was the most obvious victim

of this disgusting trait.

 

In time Frida forgave her sister

because she needed her.

Eventually she divorced Diego,

and a year later remarried him.

Drama and farce defined their marriage.

On their honeymoon, painting a mural

in Cuernavaca, Diego seduced his assistant,

but when Frida slept with Noguchi,

Diego brandished a pistol,

threatening to shoot the sculptor.

 

Even more than passion or love,

art bound Frida and Diego together.

It was a hard time to be a woman

in the art world. Diego guided Frida

and steadied her. He believed

in her greatness more than in his own.

For the catalog of her first exhibition,

he wrote:  I recommend her to you,

not as a husband, but as an enthusiastic

admirer of her work, acid and tender,

hard as steel and delicate and fine

as a butterfly’s wing, and profound

and cruel as the bitterness of life.

 

After her unresolved injuries

and ongoing surgeries,

sex required imagination,

and men weren’t always willing

to put her pleasure first.

The only man who came close

to supplanting Diego in Frida’s heart

was Nikolas Muray. An immigrant

photographer like her father

and Olympic fencing champion,

Nick was on his third divorce

when they met in Mexico and fell in love.

Nick excelled at portraits, and he made

magnificent photographs of her

in Mexico and later in New York.

 

Like a peacock spreading its train,

Frida radiated an outward joy

that concealed an inward sadness,

even indifference. But with Nick,

Frida allowed herself to be fully seen.

She could confide her deepest secrets—

her misery and anguish with Diego,

her ceaseless pain and endless fears.

She trusted Nick, but he let her down

like the others. Diego was his excuse:

Of the three of us, there was only two of you.

Your tears told me that when you heard his voice.

The one of me is eternally grateful for the Happiness

that half of you so generously gave.

 

Some guests repaid the Riveras’ hospitality

with bad behavior. Leon Trotsky

was a dirty old man with wandering hands.

Frida looked on him as a father figure,

but he abused her and shamed his wife.

André Breton, the dean of surrealism,

was a freeloader and a thief, who stole

art off the walls of Mexican churches

and smuggled Aztec artifacts to Paris

which he sold at a profit. Frida

referred to him as a “cockroach,”

but she loved his beautiful wife

Jacqueline, who had to divorce André

to realize herself as an artist.

 

Encouraged by Diego, Frida traveled

to Paris on her own for the show

André had promised her, only to find

he’d made no plans and hadn’t paid the fee

to get her paintings out of customs.

In Mexico City, the Bretons were allowed

a whole wing of the Rivera’s house.

Frida expected a similar reception.

At first she thought the Bretons’ apartment

was André’s studio. There was no place to live,

to place Jacqueline to work. Forced

to share their daughter’s tiny bedroom,

Frida fled to a hotel, but the bathroom

was down the hall, and she came down

with a kidney infection. She was rescued

by Marcel Duchamp and Mary Reynolds

and welcomed into Mary’s beautiful home

near the catacombs, with a private garden

and wood-burning fireplace that reminded

her of her Blue House in Mexico.

 

Although Frida never painted

the public scene of her crucifixion,

it is the ghostly negative behind

the portraits of her wounded body,

bleeding, suffering, and exposed.

Even when her face is streaked by tears,

her gaze remains inward and unknowable,

while her body is screaming.

 

For the rest of her life,

she preserved the dead fetuses

of her aborted children in jars

of formalin in her wardrobe.

My painting carries the message of pain.

I will sell everything for nothing.

Nothing has a name.

I lost three children.

Paintings substituted for all this.

Children are the days

and here is where I end.

 

From you to my hands

I go over all your body,

and my blood is the miracle

that travels in the veins of the air

from my heart to yours.

 

Photo by Camila Cordeiro on Unsplash