The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Wake up, sweetie. This city’s like a small village. Everyone knows everything.”

  Frida fluffed up the pillows on her bed with its brightly painted posts and quickly said, as Laura helped her to pack, “Tomorrow we’re off to Gringoland. Diego’s going to paint a mural in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Commissioned by Henry Ford himself, imagine. You know where all this leads. The Communists around here are attacking him for taking capitalist money. The capitalists up there are attacking him for being a Communist. I just tell him that an artist is above all this stupid bullshit. The important thing is the work. That’s what remains, no one can erase that, and that’s what will speak to the people when all the politicians and critics are pushing up daisies.

  “Have you got any clothes of your own? I don’t want you to imitate me. You know I trick myself out as a piñata because of my own fantasies but also to cover up my sick leg and my hobble. She may limp, but she won’t need pimps-that’s my motto,” said Frida, running her hand over the dark down covering her upper lip.

  Laura came back with her valise. Would Frida like her in the Balenciaga and Schiaparelli dresses she’d bought with Elizabeth and thanks to Elizabeth’s generosity, or should she revert to a simpler style? A sudden intuition told her that what would matter to this woman, so carefully turned out and decorative, and exactly because of that, would be naturalness in other people. That was her way of making others accept the naturalness of the extraordinary in her, in Frida Kahlo.

  Frida kissed her hairless ixcuintle dogs goodbye, and they all took the train to Detroit.

  The long journey through Mexico’s northern deserts with their rows upon rows of magueys reminded Rivera of a verse by the young poet Salvador Novo: “The magueys do gymnastics in rows five hundred deep.” But Frida said that Novo was no good, watch out for him, he was a backbiter, a bad fag, not like the tender, gentle queers she knew who were members of her group.

  Rivera laughed. “If he’s bad, then the worse he is, the better.”

  “Watch out for him. He’s one of those Mexicans who’d sell their own mother just to bring off a cruel joke. You know what he said to me at the show of that Tizoc guy? ‘Bye-bye, Pavlova.’ So I answered, ‘Bye bye, Salivator.’ I thought he was going to explode.”

  “How vindictive you can be, Friducha. If you start speaking badly of Novo, you’re giving Novo permission to speak badly about us.”

  “Doesn’t he already? The kindest insult he uses on you is to call you a cuckold. And me he calls Free-ass Kulo.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Nothing but resentment, gossip, stories. Novo the writer stands. As does Rivera the painter. And so does life itself. The anecdotes evaporate.”

  “Fine. Diego, pass me the ukulele. Let’s sing the Mixteca song. It’s my favorite song for watching Mexico pass by.”

  How far I am from the land where I was born,

  Immense nostalgia invades my thoughts…

  They changed trains at the border and then again at St. Louis, Missouri. From there, they went straight to Detroit, Frida singing to her ukulele, telling dirty jokes, and then, at nightfall, while Rivera slept, staring at the passage of the infinite North American plains and talking about the pulsing of the locomotive, that steel heart which excited her with its rhythm, simultaneously spirited and destructive like that of all machines.

  “When I was a girl, I would dress up as a man and raise hell in philosophy class with my pals. We called ourselves the Caps. I fit right in, liberated from the conventions of my class, with a group of boys who loved Mexico City as much as I did, and we explored it all the time, the parks, neighborhoods, studying it as if it were a book, from cantina to cantina, from stall to stall, a small, pretty city all blue and pink, a city of sweet, disorganized parks, silent lovers, wide avenues and dark alleys that took you by surprise.”

  All her life, she told Laura as they let the plains of Kansas and the wideness of the Mississippi run by, she’d sought out the dark city, discovering its smells and tastes, seeking above all company, friendship, any way to tell solitude to go fuck itself, to be one of the boys, to keep an eye out for the bastards, Laura, because in Mexico, all you’ve got to do is stick your neck out a little and a regiment of evil dwarfs cuts off your head.

  “Resentment and solitude,” said the woman with sweet eyes under the aggressive brows, sticking four roses into her hair instead of a crown and peering into the compartment’s mirror to see the sweetness of her flower hairdo against the sunset over the great river of the plains, the Father of Waters. It smelled of charcoal, mud, dung, fertile land.

  “I’d go out with the Caps and do all kinds of crazy things, like robbing trolleys and getting the cops to chase us the way they do in Buster Keaton movies, which are my favorites. Who would have known that a trolley would get even with me for stealing its chicks-because the Caps only stole single trolley cars, left at night in the Indianilla depot. We never took anything from anyone, but we did win the freedom of running around half Mexico City at night, all at whim, Laurita, following our fantasy but always on the rails, you never leave the rails, that’s the secret, admit there are rails but use them to escape, to liberate yourself.”

  The great river, wide as a sea, origin of all the waters in the land lost by the Indians, water you can bathe in, the substance that receives you with joy, refreshes you, arranges spaces exactly the way God dreamed them: water is the divine material that welcomes you, unlike hard matter, which rejects you, wounds you, penetrates you.

  “It was in September 1925, seven years ago. I was taking the bus from my parents’ house in Coyoacán when a trolley smashed into us and broke my spine, my neck, my ribs, my pelvis, the entire order of my personal territory. My left shoulder was dislocated-how well my wide-sleeved blouses cover it up! Don’t you think? Well, one of my feet was ruined forever. A handrail pierced my back and came out my vagina. The impact was so terrible that all my clothes flew off me, can you imagine that? My clothes just evaporated, I was left there bleeding, naked and broken. And then, Laura, the most incredible thing happened. Gold rained down on me. My naked, broken, prostrate body was covered with golden dust.”

  She lit an Alas cigarette and burst into a smoky guffaw.

  “A worker on the bus was carrying some packages of gold dust. I was left broken but covered with gold dust, what do you think of that?”

  Laura thought the trip to Detroit in the company of Frida and Diego so filled her existence that there was no room for anything else, not even for thinking about Xalapa, her mother, her sons, her aunts, her husband Juan Francisco, her lover Orlando, Carmen, her lover’s lover, her “friend” Elizabeth: all of them were being left far behind like the sad, poor border at Laredo and the desert and central plateau before it, where the whole story, Frida repeated, was a matter of “defending yourself from the bastards.”

  Watching her sleep, Laura wondered if Frida defended herself alone or if she needed Diego’s company, Diego the imperturbable master of his own truth but also of his own lie. She tried to imagine what all the men in her life would think of a man like that, those men of order and morality like Grandfather Felipe and her father, Fernando, those who were ambitious but petty like her husband, Juan Francisco, those who became broken promises like her brother, Santiago, those whose promises were as yet unspoken like her sons Danton and the second Santiago, or the perpetual enigma who was Orlando and, to close and recommence the circle, the immoral man who was also her grandfather, a man capable of abandoning his illegitimate, mulatta daughter: what would have become of the tender, adorable Auntie María de la O if the firm will of Grandmother Cosima and the equally tenacious mercy of her father hadn’t saved her?

  There was Rivera (seated by the dining-car window, telling fabulous lies about his physical origin-sometimes he was the son of a nun and a lovesick frog, sometimes the son of a captain in the conservative army and the insane Empress Carlota-evoking his legendary Paris life with Picasso, Modigliani, and the Russian Ilya Ehrenburg, who wrote a
novel about Diego’s life in Paris, Adventures of the Mexican Julio Jurenito, detailing his Aztec culinary taste for human flesh, Tlaxcaltecan preferably-the traitors deserved to be fried in lard-lies, all the time, sketching on huge sheets of paper spread out on the dining-car table the gigantic, detailed plan of the Detroit mural, the hymn to modern industry). For Laura, the exciting novelty was that of a creative man who was both fantastic and disciplined, hardworking as a bricklayer, dreamy as a poet, funny as a circus clown, and (finally) cruel as an artist, who insisted on being the tyrannical owner of all his time, with no thought for the needs of others, their anguish, their calls for help… Diego Rivera painted, and while he painted, the door to the world and to his fellow man remained shut, so that inside the cage of art its forms, colors, memories, homages could live freely, so that no matter how social or political the art might become, it was above all part of the history of art, not of politics, and it either added reality to a tradition or took it away, a tradition and reality that most mortals judge to be autonomous and flowing. The artist knows better: his art does not reflect reality; it establishes it. And to accomplish that work, generosity, concern, contact with others do not matter at all if they interrupt or weaken the work. On the other hand, cheapness, disdain, the most flagrant egoism are virtues if, thanks to them, the artist does his work.

  What could a woman as fragile as Frida Kahlo hope to find in a man like that? What was his strength? Did Rivera give her the power her frailty needed, or was the important thing the sum of two strengths that would give her physical weakness its independent and painful place? And what about Diego: was he as strong as he physically appeared to be-huge and robust-or as weak as that same naked body-hairless, pink, puffy, with a tiny penis-which Laura saw one morning when she accidentally opened the compartment door? Might it not be that she, Frida the victim, gave strength to him, man of vigor and victories?

  Frida was the first to take note of the changed quality of the light, before Diego did, but she mentioned it as if he had discovered it, knowing he’d be thankful for the lie at first and then make it an original truth, the property of Diego Rivera.

  “Here in Gringoland there’s not enough light, not enough shadow. You really hit the nail on the head, sweetheart.” She shone, while he returned, trying to forget, well, for your sweetheart, your night mirror, there are only two kinds of light in the world, the afternoon light of Paris, where I became a painter, and that of the central plateau of Mexico, where I became a man. I don’t understand either the light of the gringo winter or the light of the Mexican tropics, which is why my eyes are green swords in your flesh that turn into waves of light in your hands, Frida.

  Thus the two of them went from the station to the hotel ready to contrast things, to fight, and not to allow anything to pass unnoticed or slip by quietly. Detroit satisfied them on all counts, nourished them from the outset, gave them opportunities-to Rivera the chance to cause a scandal, to Frida the opportunity for fun. At the hotel they got in line to check in. An old couple in front of them was turned away by the receptionist with a cutting statement: “We’re very sorry, but we do not accept Jews here.” The disconcerted couple stepped aside, whispering to each other, unable to find anyone even to help them with their bags. Frida asked if she could fill in the registration cards and wrote on them in huge letters: MR. AND MRS. DIEGO RIVERA, then their address in Coyoacán, their Mexican nationality, and then, in even larger letters, her religion-JEWISH. The flustered receptionist stared at them, not knowing what to say. So Frida said it for him: “Is something troubling you, sir?”

  “It’s that we didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “Excuse me, madam, your religion…”

  “More than a religion. A race.”

  “It’s that…”

  “You don’t allow Jews in your hotel?”

  She turned on her heel without listening to the receptionist’s answer. Laura held back her laughter and listened to the comments of the white hotel guests, the women wearing big straw summer hats, the men wearing those strange gringo seersucker suits and Panama hats. Could they be gypsies? And what is that woman disguised as?

  “Let’s go, Diego, Laura. We’re getting out of here.”

  “Mrs. Rivera,” begged the trembling hotel manager, catapulted from his office smelling of erasers, his newspaper opened to the funny pages, “we’re sorry, we didn’t know, it doesn’t matter, you’re the guest of Mr. Ford, accept our apologies.”

  “Go tell that old couple over there they can stay here even if they are Jews. That’s right, the ones going out the door. Step on it, you shit!” ordered Frida. Later, in the suite, she collapsed in laughter, playing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” on her ukulele. “They not only let us in but let in the old fogies and lowered the price for us!”

  Diego didn’t waste a moment. The next day he was already in the museum, examining the spaces, preparing the fresco materials, giving instructions to his assistants, spreading out the drawings, and giving press interviews.

  “I’m going to paint a new race for the age of steel.”

  “A people without memory is like a well-intentioned siren. It doesn’t know when because it doesn’t know how.”

  “I’m going to give an aura of humanity to a dehumanized industry.”

  “I’m going to teach the United States of Amnesia to remember.”

  “Christ chased the money changers out of the temple. I’m going to give the money changers the temple they need. Let’s see if they behave better.”

  “Mr. Rivera, you’re in the automobile capital of the world. Is it true you don’t know how to drive?”

  “It’s true, but it’s also true that I know how to break eggs. You should see how tasty my omelettes are. Puros huevos.”

  He never stopped talking, joking, ordering, painting as he talked, as if a world of forms and colors needed a defense and a distraction external to the hubbub, the movement, and the words to gestate slowly, behind his sleepy, bulging eyes. Nevertheless, when he came back to the hotel, he was exhausted.

  “I don’t understand these gringo faces. I scrutinize them. I want to like them. I swear I look at them sympathetically, begging them, Say something to me, please. It’s like seeing a tray of rolls in a bakery. They’re all alike. They have no color. I don’t know what to do. The machines are turning out great, but the men look awful. What am I going to do?”

  “How do our faces become what they are, how does a body model itself?” Frida repeated to Laura when Diego went off very early in order to avoid the increasing heat of the continental summer.

  “How far I am from the soil where…” Frida half sang. “Do you know why it’s so hot?”

  “Because we’re so far from the two oceans. Sea breezes just don’t get here. The only relief is the wind from the North Pole. Nice relief!”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “My father may have been a banker, but he read a lot. He subscribed to magazines. We’d go to the dock at Veracruz every month to pick up his European books and magazines.”

  “And do you also know why I feel so much heat, no matter what temperature the thermometer says it is?”

  “Because you’re going to have a baby.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  Because of the way she was walking, Laura said. But I’m lame. But now the soles of your feet touch the ground. Before, you walked on tiptoe, uncertain, as if you were about to fly away. Now it’s as if you were putting down roots with every step you take.

  Frida hugged her and thanked her for being with her. From the first moment, she’d liked Laura. Seeing her, dealing with her, she said, she’d understood that the young woman felt useless or had been made to feel useless.

  “I never saw a woman come through my door with a more desperate need to work. I think even you didn’t know it.”

  “No, I didn’t know it. I was just obsessed by a need to invent a world for myself, and I suppose that means inventin
g work for yourself.”

  “Or a child-that’s a creation, too.” Frida looked inquiringly at Laura.

  “I have two.”

  “Where are they?”

  Why did Laura D az have the feeling that her conversations with Frida Kahlo-so intimately feminine, with no tricks, no twists and turns, not a drop of malice-were, on the one hand, a recrimination that Frida directed at her irresponsible maternity, not because it wasn’t conventional but because it wasn’t enough of a revolt against the men- the husband, the lover-who had distanced the mother from her children? Frida told Laura, in total frankness, that she’d been unfaithful to Rivera because he was unfaithful to her first. Between them they had only one agreement: Diego slept with women and Frida did the same, because if she slept with men, Diego would be enraged, as he wouldn’t in their symmetrical, shared taste for the female sex. That wasn’t the problem, the invalid woman confessed one night to Laura. Sometimes, infidelity has nothing to do with sex. It’s a matter of intimacy with another person, and when the intimacy is secret, and secrets require lies to protect intimacy, the secret is sometimes called “sex.”

  “Whom you sleep with doesn’t matter, but whom you confide in does. And whom you lie to. It looks to me as though you don’t confide in anyone, Laura, and you lie to everyone.”

  “Do you desire me?”

  “I already told you I like you. But with the situation as it is, I need you as a companion and nurse most of all. If we complicate things sentimentally, it could turn out that I’ll find myself all alone, with no one to take me to the hospital when things start getting rough. Then I’ll be yelling for my granny! That’s on the one hand.”

  She laughed a lot, as usual, but Laura persisted. “And what was the other reason? You said, On the one hand, but what about the other hand?”

  “I won’t tell you. I might need you to give me tomorrow what I’m reproaching you for today. Let’s talk about practical things.”

  It was July. The baby was supposed to arrive in December. If Diego finished in October, they’d have time to return safely together so the baby would be born in Mexico. But if Diego were slow, how could I have my baby here, in the cold, without friends, with no one to help me but you? And if I go back to Mexico early, don’t I run the risk of losing the baby on the way, in all that confusion and jangle of trains, as my little doctors warned me?