Frida
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Rivera decided to tell his side of the story at a conference on progressive education at the Palace of Fine Arts that began on August 26,1935. His lecture, entitled “The Arts and Their Revolutionary Role in Culture,” was well received. The following afternoon, Siqueiros, passionately committed to Stalin’s version of communism, read a paper on the Mexican mural movement, including a scathing attack on Rivera’s role in it. Siqueiros’s vehemence demanded no less from Diego. He leaped to his feet and shouted his denial of all Siqueiros’s accusations. The congress’s chairman, also at that time head of the Department of Fine Arts, reprimanded Diego; this was a conference, he said, not a debate. But Rivera pulled his pistol from his hip pocket, waved it in the air, and demanded equal time. The chairman conceded; a duel of words between Rivera and Siqueiros was scheduled for the following afternoon.
The next day, theatrically late, Rivera pressed through the crowd that had come to hear the debate and joined Siqueiros on a balcony overlooking the stage. Surveying the audience battling for seats, he requested and was given a larger hall. Once again the crowds scrambled for seats. When the adversaries finally spoke, the event quickly became dull and bland; it terminated with a tedious discussion of what percentage of his work each artist sold to tourists. By this time, the audience was restless. People snickered, harumphed, and yawned. Frida, furious with anyone she thought behaved with disrespect toward Diego, kept whirling around in her seat and glaring at offenders.
After the last of the audience had straggled out, there was a final confrontation, which was recorded (slightly sanitized) for posterity in the Communist journal New Masses by the “victim,” Emanuel Eisenberg. According to Eisenberg, Frida stormed up to him and enigmatically shrieked: “See a crowd?” Eisenberg was bewildered, all the more so when she slapped him across the mouth. “He’s been laughing at me all evening!” she screamed. “Every time I turn my head! These bastard gringos come down from that country for nothing else than to make fun of us here!” Rivera, seizing the occasion for chivalry and revenge, tore up the stairs and swung twice at the writer’s jaw. Friends dragged him away and he left, shouting, “He’s a son-of-a-bitch Stalinist!” But at least this time he did not pull a gun.
Although Frida shared Diego’s enthusiasm for Trotsky, she never became a member of the Trotskyite party; in Mexico, it consisted of a few intellectuals and people involved in trade union life and was too small and too poor to be something one could join without working actively for it. But the Spanish Civil War, which broke out on July 18, 1936, mobilized her political conscience. In her view, the Spanish Republic’s struggle against Franco’s revolt signified “the liveliest and strongest hope to smash fascism in the world.” Together with other Loyalist sympathizers, she and Diego formed a committee to raise money for a group of Spanish militiamen who had come to Mexico seeking economic aid. She herself was part of the “Commission of the Exterior"; it was her job to contact people and organizations outside Mexico in order to raise funds. “What I would like to do,” she wrote to Dr. Eloesser on December 17, 1936,
would be to go to Spain, since I believe that it is now the center of all the most interesting things that are happening in the world. . . . The welcome that all the Mexican workers organizations gave this group of young militiamen has been the most enthusiastic thing. They have succeeded in getting many of them to vote to give one day’s salary to help the Spanish comrades, and you cannot imagine the emotion it causes to see the sincerity and enthusiasm with which the poorest organizations of campesinos and workers, making a true sacrifice (since you very well know the miserable conditions in which these people live in the little towns), have given nevertheless a whole day’s wages for those who are now fighting in Spain against the fascist bandits. . . . I have already written to New York, and to other places, and I think I will obtain help, which, even if it is small, will mean at least food or clothing for some children of workers who are fighting on the front at this moment. I would like to ask you to do whatever possible to make propaganda among friends in San Francisco.
Frida’s engagement in the political ferment both focused her energies and brought her closer to Diego. And he needed her help. In 1936 and 1937, eye and kidney problems kept him hospitalized for weeks at a time, while her health, except for her foot (she had another operation on it in 1936), was good. When she wrote to thank Dr. Eloesser for his support of her cause on January 5, 1937, she wrote from the sanatorium where she was staying to keep Diego company: “I try to help him as best I can but nevertheless, no matter how much good will I have about trying to partially alleviate his problems, my help is not enough. . . . I would like to write you a long letter with personal things about me and Diego, but you can’t imagine how much time I spend [she refers to her work for the Spanish militiamen], one could almost say that it’s a miracle if we succeed in sleeping four or five hours.” In her next letter to Eloesser (January 30, 1937), she said: “I have worked very hard and tried to help him [Diego] in every way I could while he is in bed, but as you know he is desperate when he doesn’t work and nothing makes him adjust to it.”
By December 19, 1936, when Leon and Natalia Trotsky boarded the oil tanker Ruth in Oslo, bound for Mexico, Trotsky had spent nine long years in exile. Expelled from Moscow by decision of the Fifteenth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, he had lived in Alma-Ata, a city in eastern Soviet Central Asia, until 1929, when he was deported from Russia. He had moved to the island of Prinkipo, off the coast of Turkey, then in 1933 to France and finally to Norway. During all those years, he had never lost faith in the idea that he was destined to change the world, and he had worked tirelessly toward that goal. But when Norway, too, under economic pressure from the Soviet Union (the Russians threatened to cancel their large imports of Norwegian herring), decided to send him on his way, and as country after country rejected his petition for asylum, he and Trotskyites everywhere came close to despair.
So it was that on November 21, Rivera, who had joined the Mexican section of the (Trotskyite) International Communist League in September, received an urgent cable from Anita Brenner in New York saying that it was a matter of life or death to know immediately whether the Mexican government would grant Trotsky asylum. The political bureau of the Mexican section of the league met at once. Rivera and Octavio Fernández, a leader of the Mexican Trotskyite group, were secretly dispatched to see President Cárdenas, who was at the moment in the north of Mexico overseeing his land distribution program at La Laguna. When they arrived at Torreón, Rivera presented the petition for Trotsky’s asylum in his own name, and Cárdenas granted it, provided that Trotsky would pledge not to interfere in the internal affairs of Mexico.
The Ruth arrived in the harbor of Tampico on the morning of January 9, 1937. Natalia Trotsky, made wary from months of being surrounded by guards and years of living with the constant threat of assassination by Stalin’s agents, was afraid to leave the boat. Trotsky told the police that he and his wife would not disembark unless they saw the faces of friends. Just as they were about to be forcibly deposited on shore, a government cutter approached carrying a welcoming party consisting of some familiar faces—Max Shachtman (a founder of the American Trotskyite movement) and George Novak (secretary of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky)—as well as local and federal authorities, Mexican and foreign journalists, and Frida Kahlo. Frida had come to represent her husband, who to his fury missed the Russian revolutionary’s arrival because he was still hospitalized. It would have been a moment of triumph for Rivera; as Trotsky was to acknowledge: “It was to him above all that we were indebted for our liberation from captivity in Norway.” Satisfied that they were in safe hands, Trotsky and Natalia walked down the wooden pier to freedom. He, wearing tweed knickerbockers and a cap, and carrying a briefcase and a cane, walked with his chin held high, his stride that of a proud soldier. She, a little dowdy in a suit and looking worn and worried, watched her feet so as not to trip on the rough planks of the narrow dock. Just behind them walk
ed Frida, lithe and exotic in her rebozo and long skirt. “After four months of imprisonment and isolation,” Trotsky wrote, “this meeting with friends was especially cordial.”
A special train called “El Hidalgo” (the nobleman) was sent by Cárdenas to carry the party to the capital. To protect Trotsky from GPU agents, it left Tampico in secrecy at ten at night, and on January 11 arrived at Lechería, a small station on the outskirts of Mexico City. In the predawn darkness, at a nearby restaurant, Rivera (temporarily released from the hospital for the occasion) and other members of the Mexican Trotskyite group joined forces with various government officials and police to form a welcoming party. Meanwhile at the Riveras’ San Angel home, a number of people gathered to give the impression that Trotsky was expected to arrive there, and at Mexico City’s main railroad station, fake welcomers milled about with ostentatious expectancy.
The retinue at Lechería station had a long wait before a column of smoke appeared in the distance, and the rumble of the oncoming train was heard. In spite of all the red herrings, reporters and photographers, including Agustín Victor Casasola (1874–1938), the great photojournalist of the Mexican Revolution (or one of his associates in the family-run business), were there to catch the moment when Trotsky, Natalia, and Frida descended from the train. Trotsky embraced Rivera, and together with Natalia was driven quickly by way of side streets to the blue house in Coyoacán, where he was to live rent-free for the next two years. (Cristina had recently moved a few blocks away to a house on Aguayo Street, probably purchased for her by Rivera. Guillermo Kahlo went to live with Adriana, keeping a room in the house he had built in which to store his photographic equipment.) The Trotsky party arrived at noon. Already the house was surrounded by a police guard.
One hour later Jean van Heijenoort found his way to Coyoacán. The tall, blond Frenchman, trained as a mathematician, had served as Trotsky’s secretary since 1932, and after learning that Mexico would grant his mentor asylum, had come to Mexico City by way of New York. Inside the blue house he found Frida and Diego busy installing their guests. Rivera, always thrilled by danger, whether real or imagined, was solicitous about the details of Trotsky’s safety. Since neither Trotsky nor Natalia spoke Spanish, Frida was to be their principal adviser and escort; Cristina would sometimes serve as chauffeur. Trustworthy servants were essential, and Frida had arranged for several of her own to serve her guests. As a security measure, the windows of the house that looked out on the street were filled in with adobe bricks, and Trotskyite party members were to do their bit by spelling the police guard and standing vigil at night. Later, when there was suspicion that the house might be attacked from the house next door, Diego did not hesitate or fuss about ways to strengthen the wall that divided his and his neighbor’s gardens. In a typically grand and generous gesture, he simply purchased the adjacent lot, evicted the neighbor, and hired workmen to connect the two properties—a move that made it possible, in the 1940s, to expand the garden of the Coyoacán house and to add a new wing with a studio for Frida.
The Trotskys were in high spirits, relieved to be out of immediate danger, pleased with the blue house, the patio filled with plants, the spacious, airy rooms decorated with popular and pre-Columbian art and numerous paintings. “We were on a new planet in Rivera’s house,” Natalia wrote.
The house must have seemed a “new planet” to Guillermo Kahlo too. “Who are these people?” he asked his daughter. “Who is Trotsky?” Frida told him that Trotsky was the creator of the Russian army, the man who had made the October Revolution, the companion of Lenin. “Ah,” said Kahlo. “How strange!” Later, he called Frida over and said, “You esteem this person, don’t you? I want to talk to him. I want to advise him not to get involved with politics. Politics are very bad.”
Bad or not, Trotsky did not let up the pace of his political activity. He went to work immediately, and on January 25, two weeks after his arrival, Time magazine could print: “At latest reports, Host Diego Rivera had had to return to a hospital with a kidney ailment; Mrs. Trotsky had gone to bed with what seemed to be a recurrence of her malaria; Guest Trotsky respectfully watched and waited on by dark-eyed young Hostess Rivera, had resumed dictation to his secretaries of his monumental Biography of Lenin begun nearly two years ago.” Trotsky also asked for the formation of an international commission to examine the evidence used against him at the Moscow trials, and worked furiously to prepare his deposition.
The commission consisted of six Americans, one Frenchman, two Germans, an Italian, and a Mexican. The American educator and philosopher John Dewey served as chairman. To make ready for the hearings, the Coyoacán house was transformed. A six-foot barricade of bricks and sandbags was built overnight to further protect the largest room in the house, where the sessions were to be held. Forty seats were arranged for journalists and invited guests. A long table was set up, behind which sat Trotsky, Natalia, Trotsky’s secretary, and members of the commission. Supplementary police watched for assassins and saboteurs.
The first of the Dewey Commission’s thirteen sessions took place on April 10, 1937, and the “trial” lasted a week. Diego Rivera attended wearing a wide-brimmed hat decked with a peacock feather. Frida, arrayed in Tarascan jewelry and Indian costumes, sat as close as possible to Trotsky, who answered his interrogators with his usual precision and with a sure command of the enormous amount of information that he had gathered to discredit his accusers. At the end, exhausted but exhilarated, he closed his defense with this flourish: “The experience of my life, in which there has been no lack either of success or of failures, has not only not destroyed my faith in the clear, bright future of mankind, but, on the contrary, has given it an indestructible temper. This faith in reason, in truth, in human solidarity, which at the age of eighteen I took with me into the workers’ quarters of the provincial Russian town of Nikolayev—this faith I have preserved fully and completely. It has become more mature, but not less ardent.” Dewey’s response was exactly right: “Anything I can say will be an anticlimax.” In September the commission handed down its verdict: Trotsky had demonstrated his innocence beyond the least suspicion of a doubt.
During the months following the “trial,” the Riveras and their guests saw much of each other. Although both Rivera and Trotsky were obsessive workers, with little time for social life, the two couples ate together often, and they went on picnics and excursions to places near Mexico City, Trotsky collecting different species of cactus that he found in the countryside and carrying enormous specimens, roots and all, home with him in Rivera’s car. He was given the use of a house in Taxco, an extravagantly picturesque silver mining town high in the mountains south of Cuernavaca, and every so often he and his entourage went there for a week or so. Exhilarated with the freedom, Trotsky would ride his horse furiously over the steep rocky terrain, worrying his companions, who could not keep up. When Frida and Diego visited him there, Diego spent his days painting tree trunks shaped like women, a rather forced attempt to inject surrealism into his vision of Mexico. Because of her "maldita pata" (damned paw), Frida spent her time chatting and drinking cognac while watching the hubbub of balloon and ice cream vendors, children and old women, in the central plaza.
No matter how long or well he knew a person, Trotsky always kept a certain guarded formality. Yet with the Riveras he was unusually friendly and relaxed. Diego was the one person who could visit Trotsky at any time without making an appointment, and he was one of the few people whom Trotsky received without having a third person present. A highly methodical man, Trotsky apportioned certain activities to certain hours during each day. Rivera was the opposite, and for a period of time, the Russian’s relationship with him broke the confines of his rigidity. For his part, Diego admired Trotsky’s courage and moral authority, and respected his discipline and commitment. In Trotsky’s presence, he tried to bridle his compulsion to fantasize, and made an effort to rein in his anarchical ways.
“If they were together,” Jean van Heijenoort recalls, �
��Diego might dominate the talk, and then Trotsky would take the floor. They would talk mostly about Mexican politicians, and Diego had a very penetrating mind for people, for what a person really was. That was a bit different from Trotsky, who always interpreted things in terms of tendencies, left-right, all that—abstract concepts. Trotsky enjoyed this side of Diego, and Diego’s insights were helpful to Trotsky.” In addition, Trotsky was pleased to have the world-famous muralist within the ranks of the Fourth International. In a Partisan Review article entitled “Arts and Politics” (published in August–September 1938), he extolled Rivera as the “greatest interpreter” of the October Revolution. A mural by Rivera was, Trotsky wrote, “not simply a ’painting,’ an object of passive aesthetic contemplation, but a living part of the class struggle.”
For all his years, the Russian’s physical presence was impressive. He carried himself like a hero. His gestures were dynamic, his stride military. Piercing blue eyes behind round tortoise-shell glasses and a firmly set jaw transmitted intellectual fervor and tenacity, and although he had humor, there was about him a certain commanding severity. He was a man used to getting his way.
He was also a man with a vigorous interest in sex. Around women, Trotsky became especially animated and witty, and though his opportunities were few, his success seems to have been considerable. His was not a romantic or sentimental approach; it was direct and sometimes even crude. He would fondle a woman’s knee under the table, or make an unabashedly forthright proposition. At one point, his lust for Cristina led him to plan a kind of fire drill, a practice escape over the garden wall at night plus a dash to Cristina’s house on Aguayo Street. Only the expressed misgivings of his entourage and possibly Cristina’s own fond but firm disinterest finally dissuaded him from this reckless adventure.
While his mane of white hair and his even whiter beard made her nickname him “Piochitas” (little goatee) and refer to him as "el viejo" (the old man), Trotsky’s reputation as a revolutionary hero, his intellectual brilliance and force of character, attracted Frida. No doubt Rivera’s obvious admiration for him fanned the flames: an affair with her husband’s friend and political idol would be the perfect retaliation for Rivera’s affair with her sister. In any case, Frida deployed all her considerable seductive powers to attract Trotsky, enhancing intimacy by speaking to him in English, which Natalia did not understand. “Frida did not hesitate to use the word ’love,’ ” Jean van Heijenoort recalls. ” ’All my love’ were the words she used when she said goodbye to Trotsky.”