Frida

by Hayden Herrera

  Certainly she put on a brave front, acting gay and delighting others with her sardonic humor, so that though a few close friends knew what she was going through, new acquaintances, such as Mary Schapiro, who met Frida while traveling in Mexico, did not suspect the extent of her unhappiness. But Alejandro Gómez Arias, who went to see her at the flat, remembers the time Frida flew into a rage upon spotting Cristina at a gasoline station across the street. “Look!“ she cried. “Come here! Why does she come and fill up her car in front of my house?” And A Few Small Nips remains as the proof of Frida’s hurt.

  Finally, in early July, Frida packed and flew to New York with Anita Brenner and Mary Schapiro. The trip was both a desperate fleeing and a madcap flight. On the spur of the moment, the women decided to travel not by train but in a private Stinson plane flown by a pilot they had happened to meet the night before at a lively dinner party given by Diego. The grueling six-day journey included many forced landings. To escape her terror, Frida slept in the back seat. Eventually the women abandoned the plane and traveled to Manhattan by train. There, Mary (recently separated from her husband) and Frida stayed together at the Holly Hotel near Washington Square, and after confiding her troubles to Lucienne Bloch and to Bertram and Ella Wolfe, Frida came to a resolution. “As the flames of resentment died down within her,” Bertram Wolfe wrote, “she knew it was Diego she loved and that he meant more to her than the things that seemed to stand between them.” Reconciling herself to a marriage of mutual “independence,” she wrote to her husband on July 23, 1935:

  [I know now that] all these letters, liaisons with petticoats, lady teachers of “English,” gypsy models, assistants with “good intentions,” “plenipotentiary emissaries from distant places,” only represent flirtations, and that at bottom you and I love each other dearly, and thus go through adventures without number, beatings on doors, imprecations, insults, international claims—yet we will always love each other. . . .

  All these things have been repeated throughout the seven years that we have lived together, and all the rages I have gone through have served only to make me understand in the end that I love you more than my own skin, and that, though you may not love me in the same way, still you love me somewhat. Isn’t that so? . . . I shall always hope that that continues, and with that I am content.

  As for Rivera, though he knew he would keep on deceiving her, he regretted wounding her. And one thing was certain: if he had had to choose between the two sisters, he would have chosen Frida. In his autobiography, he tells of an incident that took place sometime after Frida’s return from New York in 1935. Assassins hired by the German ambassador fired two shots into his studio (the reason, according to Rivera, was that as a Communist and outspoken antifascist, he was persona non grata with the Germans). The killers apparently aimed at a “typist” who was posing for him in the chair where Frida habitually sat and chatted with Diego while he worked. He identified the “typist” as Cristina Kahlo. “Afterward it occurred to me,” said Diego, “that the would-be assassins had thought that by killing Frida they could hurt me infinitely more than if they struck at me. In this respect, they were absolutely right.” Keeping Cristina as a “secretary” can have done nothing to heal Frida’s wound, but his words reveal the depth of Rivera’s love for his wife.

  If in A Few Small Nips Frida made it graphically clear that her wound had not closed, she also made it obvious that she was not going to allow herself to be maudlin about her woes. She had made up her mind not to be a wretched "antipática," but instead to be the wise, calm, amused, forgiving woman who appears in the Self-Portrait with curly hair. She would turn life’s “nips” into a joke. Thus the truly devastating violence of the subject matter in A Few Small Nips is mitigated not only by Frida’s primitivistic style but also by a strong note of caricature seen in sly, incongruous details—the delicate lace trim on the pillowcase, the festive pink-and-blue walls, the pink, beflowered garter and the rolled-down stocking on the dead woman’s leg that suggest she was a whore. Most incongruous of all is the pair of doves, one black, one white, that hold in their beaks a pale blue ribbon inscribed with the painting’s title. They belong in a valentine, not a massacre. Frida said they stood for good and evil.

  Frida’s black humor, a characteristically Mexican kind that relishes horror and laughs at death, is nowhere more vivid than in A Few Small Nips. The viewer’s response is twofold—and uncomfortable; it combines a kind of convulsed outrage and laughter. Examples of this brand of mordant wit abound in Mexico’s popular culture. One thinks, for instance, of the little clay hospital scenes sold for a few pennies in the markets of Guadalajara, showing doctors and nurses gleefully brandishing the severed head or leg, the extracted heart of the patient who lies on the operating table. On the toys’ bases appear captions such as "Por un Amor!" (For a Love), "Ultima Lucha!" (Last Battle), or "Ni Modo Cuate!" (Too Bad, Pal). Or one thinks of the sugar coffins with tiny skeletons that are made as edible treats for the Day of the Dead; jokes such as the one that goes: “He was lucky: of the three bullets that hit him, only one killed him,” or stories like the one that tells of a man who cured his friend of a hangover headache by emptying his pistol into his head.

  Retablos and anonymous paintings of the dead or flagellated Christ are also recalled in A Few Small Nips. So are genre scenes like the one that hangs in Frida’s dining room and that shows one man threatening another with a knife outside a pulquería. But the principal source for A Few Small Nips is certainly the satiric graphics of José Guadalupe Posada (1851–1913), whose chapbook and song illustrations, penny broadsides showing sensational horror scenes (plate IX), and calavera (skeleton) prints, in which skeletons act out the foibles of human life, Frida adored. Indeed, Frida’s tiny panel could be called a painted broadside.

  Even at their most violent, Posada’s prints contain an element of humor that undoubtedly appealed to Frida. Years later in her diary, she wrote: “Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.” By the end of 1935, she had forced herself to dismiss the Cristina-Diego affair. She shrugged her shoulders and steeled her psyche, and let out that deep, infectious laugh. A Few Small Nips was Frida’s carcajada, a burst of laughter so explosive that it could blow away pain. Humor, like hope, was a mainstay that helped her to survive her embattled life.

  But if Frida dismissed the affair, she did not forget, and two and three years later she gave testimony to its lingering impact in Memory, 1937, and in Remembrance of an Open Wound, 1938. Whereas in A Few Small Nips and in earlier works like the bloody Detroit paintings, Frida depicted the female body (usually her own) in actual physical pain or death, in Memory and Remembrance she has begun to use physical wounds as symbols for psychic injury. And she is no longer the passive female, recumbent and submitting to her fate; instead, she is an upright woman staring out at the viewer, conscious of, and insisting that the viewer be conscious of, her personal suffering.

  In Memory (figure 39), which also may refer to her transformation from child to woman after the accident, Frida appears with cropped hair, and she is wearing non-Mexican clothes—a skirt and a cowskin bolero that she actually owned, and that she wore when Lucienne Bloch photographed her during her trip to New York in 1935. She is flanked by her alternate identities—schoolgirl clothes and Tehuana costume, both linked to her by red ribbons (veins or bloodlines) and both hanging on red hangers that are suspended by ribbons from the sky. Each set of clothing has one stiff, paper-doll-like arm. The central Frida is armless (and thus helpless). One bandaged foot refers to the operation on her right foot in 1934, when Rivera fell in love with Cristina; the bandage is wrapped in such a way that the foot looks like a sailboat, and it stands in the ocean while the normal one stands on the shore. Perhaps the boat foot is a symbol of separation from Diego; the sea very likely is a symbol of suffering—an “ocean of tears,” like the pools of water Frida drew under weeping self-portraits in her letters
to Alejandro.

  Memory is an excruciatingly accurate rendering of pain in love, as simple and straightforward as a valentine heart shot through by an arrow. One is convinced that Frida knew all too well that the trite expression “broken heart” has a basis in a real, physical sensation—an ache or a sense of fracture in the chest—a feeling that a sword turns and twists in an ever-expanding wound. In Frida’s painting, her broken heart has been yanked out of her chest, leaving a gaping hole pierced by a shaft which recalls the handrail that impaled her body during her accident. On the ends of the metal rod sit two tiny cupids, blithely ignoring the agony that each up and down movement of their seesaw causes the human fulcrum. Frida’s huge heart lies at her feet, an imposing monument to the immensity of her pain. Her heart is a fountain; its severed valves pump rivers of blood into the bleak landscape. Blood flows up into the distant mountains and down toward the sea, where a red delta opens into blue water. The image has something of the brutality of an Aztec sacrifice in which the live victim’s beating heart was torn from him, and blood ran in rivulets down the stone temple steps to the ground, where his arms and legs were sold as meat. Indeed, the red river gushing from Frida’s extracted heart captures the poetry of blood that pervades so much of Latin American culture. One thinks not only of pre-Columbian and colonial art, but also of bullfights and of fighting cocks stabbing each other with their sharp spurs. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez wrote of a thread of blood that began in the murdered José Arcadio’s ear, traveled all through the town of Macondo, and returned to its source. Similarly, Frida combined concrete realism and fantasy when she took the insides of her body out, and presented them as symbols of feeling.

  Frida’s literal, ferocious use of the extracted heart as a symbol for pain in love in Memory and in other works is not so grotesque when understood in the context of Mexican culture. It is, for example, as naïvely straightforward as the manner in which pain is symbolized in such Mexican colonial paintings as the famous Polyptych of Death, in which an anonymous painter illustrated the verse “God will not despise a penitent and humble heart” by showing clerics grinding their own extracted hearts in a huge mortar, and pictured the command “crush your heart and bear upon it” with an angel squashing a human heart in a press. In modern Mexico, as in colonial times, the Sacred Heart, often girdled with a crown of thorns or otherwise wounded and bleeding, appears in myriad forms, from the silver hearts that are pinned on the velvet skirts of wooden Christs, to red silk cushions in the shape of hearts, to paintings in which the Sacred Heart is laced with veins, crowned with thorns, and sometimes either bursts with flames symbolizing religious fervor or sprouts foliage from the severed artery at the top. Frida herself had a pillowcase embroidered with cupids holding a sacred heart and the words “Wake Up Sleeping Heart,” and these are exactly the kinds of images she drew upon for Memory, where her heart is broken, her body is armless, and her psyche is divided into three people, none of whom is complete.

  When in the following year Frida painted the similarly bloody self-portrait called Remembrance of an Open Wound, her wounds were still not healed, but her attitude toward them had changed (figure 40; Remembrance was destroyed in a fire, but it is recorded in a black-and-white photograph). As in A Few Small Nips, sex and painful wounds are linked with humor—Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., who purchased the painting for his father, remembers that it had “lyrical bright Mexican colors: pink, red, orange, black; you somehow felt that pain and joy were indistinguishable.” As in Memory, physical wounds allude to psychological ones. But now Frida seems almost brazen and perverse in the way she sits with her legs apart and pulls up the white ruffle of her Tehuana skirt in order to display two wounds, one her bandaged foot propped on a stool, the other a long gash on her inner thigh. This “open” wound—an invented one—drips blood onto the white petticoat. Next to the gash lies a leafy plant, possibly a reference to the link Frida saw between her own blood and wounds and the idea of fertility, a connection first set forth in Frida and the Abortion. The thigh wound is intended as an allusion to her genitals conceived as a sexual wound or as the real wound in her vagina caused by the metal rod that pierced her pelvic region during the accident. She candidly told male friends that the way she placed her right hand beneath her skirt and near her sex in the painting was meant to show that she was masturbating. Even so, Frida looks straight out at the spectator, totally unabashed.

  The period when she painted Memory and Remembrance was a relatively happy one for Frida. But she had had to be the conquistador of happiness, slaying pain and trampling troubles that lay in her path. While Memory reveals how the hurt of Diego and Cristina’s affair led eventually to the emergence of a more independent, stronger woman—one who gained strength by stating her vulnerability—Remembrance shows that Frida transformed the “open wound” of jealousy and betrayal into a different kind of openness. She is the sexually free woman, a dauntless flirt, and for all her apparent intentness—her insistence on her suffering—she is a little insouciant. As she stares at us, nearly smiling, it is as if she were about to wink.

  Chapter 13

  Trotsky

  JUST AS THE ACCIDENT transformed Frida from a madcap girl into a young woman with a deep vein of melancholy as well as a ferocious will to combat sadness, Rivera’s affair with Cristina changed her from an adoring bride into a more complex woman, one who could no longer even pretend to be a pretty appendage to her more “important” spouse; she had to learn to be—or to pretend to be—her own source, autonomous. Of course, she kept on shining and reflecting in the dazzle and glow of Diego’s orbit, making her husband happy; but more and more, the light that attracted people to Frida was her own.

  The Riveras’ curious relationship of independence and interdependence was symbolized by the two houses in which they lived, and by the bridge that linked the dwellings to each other. Both houses belonged to Diego. But when Frida was angry at him, she could lock the door on her end of the bridge, forcing him to go downstairs, cross the yard, and knock on her front door. There, as often as not, he would be told by a servant that his wife refused to receive him. Huffing and puffing, Rivera would climb his stairs, cross the bridge again, and through Frida’s closed door, plead for forgiveness.

  Diego provided the money; Frida managed it. Rivera took no interest in finances, leaving large checks in payment to him in unopened letters for years. When reprimanded, he would counter, "Demasiado molestia" (Too much bother). He spent money when he felt like it, and though his and Frida’s life style was relatively modest, their expenses were enormous. A river of money flowed out in payment for the pre-Columbian idols Diego kept adding to his collection. “Frida used to scold me sometimes for not keeping enough money to buy such prosaic things as underwear,” Diego said, but, he added, collecting was “worth it.” Rivera also was generous in his support of leftist political organizations, and of his own and his wife’s families. Another great expense, of course, was Frida’s medical bills. “There were times,” Diego once complained, when her medical expenses “virtually bankrupted me.”

  Frida did her best to keep costs down, scrupulously recording expenditures in an account book, which is now displayed in the Frida Kahlo Museum. She was responsible for all the household expenses, including items like house paint, plaster, and servants’ wages. It was never easy. Cash came and went in mysterious ways, and she was often flat broke. From 1935 to 1946 she kept an account with Alberto Misrachi, a charming and literate man who owned one of the best bookshops in Mexico City and whom she painted in 1937. He and his wife, Anita, were good friends; he served as the Riveras’ dealer, their accountant, and their banker as well. A typical message from Frida reads: “Albertito, I am going to ask you the favor of advancing me next week’s money, because I have none left from this week.” Or:

  I am going to ask you the favor of advancing me next week’s money, since from this week not one penny remains, since I paid you the 50 that I owed you, 50 to Adriana, 25 that
I gave to Diego for Sunday’s outing and 50 to Cristi, and I ended up like the bear. [She refers to bears trained to dance with tambourines to earn a few coins for their masters.]

  I did not ask Diego for the check because it pained me to bother him since he is very irritated about money but since in any case you would have to give me the week’s money on Saturday, I preferred to ask you for it, and you will not give me money on Saturday but instead not until the following week. Do you agree? Of the $200.00 please take the 10 that I owe Anita and pay them to her for me, since she lent them to me on Friday at Santa Anita. (Don’t forget to give them to her, since she’ll say that I am very ratty if I don’t pay them back.)

  Thank you for the favor and lots of love.

  In other notes she said she needed money for a hospital bill, for rent, for Diego’s expenses, for masons, for house paint, for the moving of Diego’s idols, for the materials used in the construction of the little pyramid that served as a pedestal for pre-Columbian sculptures in the garden at Coyoacán. Another time she wanted to buy two parakeets, and once she had to pay for a Tehuana costume. “Albertito,” she wrote, “The carrier of this note is a lady who sold Diego a Tehuana dress for me. Diego was supposed to pay for it today, but since he went to Metepec with. . . some Gringachos [a slightly more pejorative version of “Gringos"], I forgot to ask him for the pennies early enough and he left me without a dime. In a word, it is a question of paying this lady $100.00 (one hundred pesos) and putting them on the account of Diego, keeping this letter as a receipt.” The arrangement with Misrachi may have been casual, but it worked.