Frida hardly needed to invent ploys to attract Trotsky. At twenty-nine, she was at that perfect moment when youthful prettiness merges with character to define a more compelling loveliness. What Trotsky saw when he met Frida was the woman she herself depicted in the March, 1937, self-portrait Fulang-Chang and I (plate XIII) and in Escuincle Dog with Me from the following year (figure 49; the painting is lost, but is documented in a photograph): a seductive young woman with a full face and sensuous lips. Her eyes are appraising, appealing, and wise, without the wariness that would fill them in later self-portraits. There is, however, a note of explosive but contained emotion, a mood of slightly perverse, even insolent, amusement in the way, for example, in Fulang-Chang and I, Frida’s features “match” those of her pet—Frida always maintained that her paintings were full of humor, for those with the wit to see. Surely, as in both Western and Mayan tradition, the monkey is a symbol of lust or promiscuity. And in Escuincle Dog with Me, as in Remembrance of an Open Wound, Frida’s pose, cigarette in hand, is deliberately provocative; there is something naked and yet absolutely self-contained in the unblinking, undeviating directness of her gaze; like the regard of certain animals and children, it makes the viewer feel naked too. From the evidence of these self-portraits it is perfectly clear that Frida is a woman who has loved and been loved by men.
Trotsky began writing letters and slipping them into books he had recommended to Frida. Then, often in the presence of Natalia and Rivera, he would hand Frida the book as she left the house. A few weeks after the end of the Dewey Commission sessions, the coy flirtation had become a full-fledged love affair. The couple met at Cristina’s house on Aguayo Street.
Fortunately, Rivera was unaware of the liaison, but by the end of June, Natalia was jealous and deeply depressed. She had been married to Trotsky for thirty-five of her fifty-five years, and they had left their imprint: her wonderfully warm, intelligent face was creased by deep lines. Pathetically, she wrote in a note to her husband: “I saw myself in a mirror at Rita’s, and found I look much older. Our inner state has an enormous importance in old age; it makes us look younger, it also makes us look older.” Trotsky’s entourage feared that if the affair was exposed, the scandal would discredit the Russian in the eyes of the world.
On July 7, Trotsky left the Coyoacán house and went to stay at a farm that was part of a large hacienda near San Miguel Regla, approximately eighty miles northeast of Mexico City. On July 11, Frida went with Lupe Marín’s brother, Federico, to the hacienda to visit him. When Natalia learned about the trip, she wrote her husband a letter in which her injured feelings cry out between the lines. It seems that she herself had hoped to go as well, but thanks to deliberately poor communications between herself and the Riveras, she had been left behind. A few days later she received Trotsky’s distinctly underplayed report on Frida’s visit. He told her that he had just come back from fishing when
all of a sudden visitors arrived. Frida in the company of Marín and the aforementioned Gómez [nephew of the hacienda’s owner]. Frida said you “could not” come. . . . The visitors (all three) had lunch with me, while drinking quite a bit and carrying on a lively conversation in Spanish (I took part whenever I could). After the meal Gómez took us all to see some old mines and the main farmhouse (state chambers, flower beds—a splendor!), on the way over we took a look at a basaltic canyon. . . . No conversations worthy of note took place, except what I was told about you. After a hastily drunk coffee, Frida and Marín left, to get back before dark (the road is bad). . . . Frida spoke “well” of you to me—she mentioned the concert, the movie; she was perhaps too “optimistic” in order to reassure me, nonetheless it seemed to me you are doing slightly better.
When Trotsky joined Natalia in Coyoacán for three days on July 15, he saw Frida and Diego as well, and immediately upon his return to the hacienda, he wrote to his wife:
Now, let me tell you about the visit. I was received by F. D. was in his studio, where a photographer was taking pictures of his paintings.
The first thing I did was to ask permission to call you on the telephone. Meanwhile, F. sent for D. No sooner had I sat down, the telephone rang; it was Marín’s wife, asking F. when she could find you at home (she wants to bring you flowers). . . . I was surprised how unpleasantly F. spoke with her. While we were waiting for D., F. told me that she was planning to go away. “Not to New York?” “No, I have no money for that; somewhere around Veracruz.”
D. arrived with a parrot on his head. We spoke standing up, because D. was anxious to leave. F. said something to D., who translated for me with a smile: “She says if it were not so late she would accompany you as far as Pachuca and come back by bus.” She had said nothing of the kind during the three minutes we were waiting for D. Why did she tell him that? He translated her words for me in a very friendly way. Excuse me for writing you all these details, but maybe they will interest you, at least a little.
Clearly Trotsky’s affair with Frida was over. The next day Trotsky wrote: “I remembered that yesterday I did not even thank F. for her intention to accompany me and generally I behaved in a thoughtless manner. Today I wrote her and D. a few affable words.” In this letter, and in others, he expressed the flood of love for Natalia that came over him after his break with Frida. “I love you so much, Nata, my only one, my eternal, my faithful, my love and my victim!”
Ella Wolfe believes that it was Frida, not Trotsky, who ended the affair, and that she probably did so during her visit to San Miguel Regla. From there, Trotsky wrote Frida a nine-page letter begging her not to break relations with him, and telling her how much she had meant to him during the weeks that they had been together. “It was a plea, the kind of plea that a young lover at the age of seventeen would make to somebody he loved, instead of a man in his sixties. He was truly infatuated with Frida, and she meant a great deal to him.” Frida sent the letter to Ella, because, she said, it was so beautiful. Nevertheless, she ordered her friend to tear it up after reading it, and Ella did as she was told. "Estoy muy cansada del viejo," Frida wrote. “I am very tired of the old man.”
Flattered to be loved by the great Russian, fascinated by his mind, and moved by his desire, Frida was delighted to have an affair with Trotsky; but she did not love him. In the end, both of them retreated from what could only have led to disaster. “It was impossible to go on without committing themselves completely or without an incident with Natalia, Diego, or the GPU,” says Jean van Heijenoort.
After Trotsky returned from the hacienda to Coyoacán on July 26, life in the blue house more or less returned to normal. But the delicate chemistry of relationships between the two couples had been subtly altered. Frida no longer flirted so flagrantly with Trotsky. There were no sous-entendus, no secret letters. The word “love” no longer was heard in their farewells. Trotsky and Frida became simply close friends. But lovers that become close friends always retain a little frisson of intimacy. In a film showing Trotsky, Natalia, Frida, Diego, Jean van Heijenoort, and others, taken in Coyoacán in 1938, Frida cuddles in Rivera’s lap in such a kittenish way that one suspects her of trying to excite her former lover’s jealousy. On her lips is the provocative half smile she wears in Remembrance of an Open Wound.
Months after their affair was over, on November 7, 1937, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution and also Trotsky’s birthday, Frida gave her ex-lover a present. The gift was one of her most charming self-portraits (plate XII). Curiously, she presents herself to the revolutionary leader in the form of a colonial-style bourgeois or an aristocratic woman rather than as a Tehuana or a political activist. She stands like a prima donna between two curtains with all the poise of a Creole maiden, holding in her primly clasped hands a bouquet of flowers and a sheet of paper inscribed with the words: “For Leon Trotsky with all love I dedicate this painting on the 7th of November, 1937. Frida Kahlo in San Angel, Mexico.”
She is dressed “fit to kill” in colonial jewelry and with a purple carnation and a red ribbon in her h
air. Her lips are crimson, her cheeks are pink, and her nails are painted red. She has chosen the colors of her clothing with consummate skill—a salmon-pink skirt, an ocher rebozo, and a wine-colored blouse, all beautifully set off by the painting’s olive-green background. The highly original mixture of colors suggests that Frida’s color sense, like her subject matter, comes straight out of her life—out of the colors she actually wore. Indeed, her aesthetic finesse in art was part of the same impulse that made her take great care with clothing, interior decoration—even the laying of her table. The pink and green velvet frame that she chose for this self-portrait, for example, compliments the painting in the same way that her yellow shawl is becoming to Frida. It underscores her idea that there is no great division between a charming or pretty object and a work of art.
In her first Self-Portrait, offered to her first love when he rejected her, a winsome and pure Frida entreats him to return; the seductive, worldly Frida of the Trotsky portrait, having rejected her lover, now teases him by giving herself back to him in the form of a portrait. “I have for long admired the self-portrait by Frida Kahlo de Rivera that hangs on a wall of Trotsky’s study,” wrote the French Surrealist poet and essayist André Breton the following year. “She has painted herself dressed in a robe of wings gilded with butterflies, and it is exactly in this guise that she draws aside the mental curtain. We are privileged to be present, as in the most glorious days of German romanticism, at the entry of a young woman endowed with all the gifts of seduction, one accustomed to the society of men of genius.” Thus Frida appears not only in the self-portrait dedicated to Trotsky but also in the more or less contemporaneous Fulang-Chang and I, Escuincle Dog with Me, and Remembrance of an Open Wound. Breton could have been describing these self-portraits when he wrote: “There is no art more exclusively feminine, in the sense that, in order to be as seductive as possible, it is only too willing to play alternately at being absolutely pure and absolutely pernicious. The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon about a bomb.”
Chapter 14
A Painter in Her Own Right
AFTER FRIDA’S AFFAIR with Trotsky ended, the Riveras’ life resumed the pattern, more or less settled and accepted, of shared activities and mutual autonomy. Both Frida and Diego worked and played hard. Their love affairs became more casual. Frida laughed at Diego’s escapades, and pursued her own in secret. She began as well to take her professional life more seriously, painting in a more disciplined way and greatly improving her technical skills; between 1937 and 1938, she produced more paintings than she had done in all her previous eight years of marriage. Perhaps recognizing these changes, she confided to Lucienne Bloch in a letter dated February 14, 1938, that Trotsky’s coming to Mexico was the best thing that ever happened in her life.
“Ella Darling,” she wrote to Ella Wolfe (in Spanish) in the spring,
I have wanted to write to you for centuries, but as always, I do not know what messes I get into so that I never answer letters nor do I behave myself like the proper people. . . . Well, niña, permit me to thank you for your letter and for your kindness in asking me about Diego’s shirts, I am sorry not to be able to give you the measurements that you asked me for, since no matter how much I search in their collars, I don’t find even a trace of what could be called a number indicating the thickness of the neck of Don Diego Rivera y Barrientos. Thus I think the best thing to do would be, in case this letter arrives on time, which I doubt very much, to tell Martin please to buy me six of the biggest shirts that exist in Nueva Yores, those shirts that are so large it seems incredible that they could be for a person, that is to say the biggest on the planet, commonly called earth. I think that you can buy them in stores for sailors, over there on one of New York’s shores, which one . . . I can’t remember, in order to describe it to you as I should. In sum, if you don’t find them, well . . . ni modo! [It doesn’t matter.] Anyway, I am grateful for your attention and he is too. [Martin Temple was a manufacturer and a leftist who, during the rise of Nazism, formed an organization in Mexico City, of which the Riveras were members, that collected funds to help people escape from Hitler’s Germany; Temple had a seven-year love affair with Frida’s half-sister Margarita, and when he did not marry her, she entered a nunnery.]
Listen, niña, a few days ago Diego received a note from Boit, he says to say thank you for him, and that he should please send the mosca [dough] from Covichi [sic; Covici, Friede, Inc., was the publisher of Wolfe and Rivera’s 1938 Portrait of Mexico] and the mosca from the man who bought the drawing or watercolor from him. Tell him that in fact he has lost various letters and the reason that Boit gives in his letter is precisely the correct one. So that it would be good if whatever has to do with the powerful and never very well pondered mosca should be sent in a special form in order to avoid that the rupas se la avancen. [In popular usage, rupas means “thieves” and se la avancen means “steal it.”] As you can see, my lexicon is becoming more florid every day, and you can understand the importance of such a cultural acquisition within my extensive and immense culture! Diego says to say hello to Boit, the same to Jay [the Wolfes’ son], Jim [Ella’s brother] and to all the cuatezones [great pals].
If you want to know something about my singular person, here goes: Since you left this beautiful country, I have had a sick hoof, that is to say, foot. With the last operation that they did (precisely a month ago), I am healing and they have hacked me up four times. As you will understand, I feel truly “poifect” and I feel like getting even with the doctors, and all their progenitors, beginning with our good parents, in general terms, Adam and Eve. But since that would not be enough to console me, nor to let me rest, having had my revenge on those bastards, I abstain from such punishments, and here I am, turned into a true “saint” with patience and everything that characterizes that special fauna. . . . What’s more, other more or less disagreeable things have happened to me which are the center of my misfortune, things which I will not tell you because they are of insignificant worth. The rest, daily life, etc., is exactly the same as you know it to be, with the exception of all the natural changes due to the lamentable state in which the world now finds itself, what philosophy, and what comprehension!
Besides illnesses, political messes, visits from gringa tourists, losses of letters, Riveraesque arguments, preoccupations of the sentimental sort, etc., my life is, like the poem of López Velarde, . . . the same as its daily mirror. [Frida is quoting a line from Velarde’s "La Suave Patria”: “Fiel a tu espejo diario . . .”] Diego too has been sick, but now he is almost well, he continues working as always, a lot and well, he is fatter, just as garrulous and greedy, he sleeps in the bathtub, he reads the newspapers in the WC and he amuses himself for hours playing with Don Fulang-Chang (the little monkey) for whom a consort was obtained, but unfortunately it turned out that the lady in question was a little hunchbacked, and she didn’t please the gentleman enough for the hoped-for marriage to be consummated, so that there still are no descendants. Diego still loses all the letters that reach his hands, he leaves his papers everywhere, . . . he gets very cross when one calls him for a meal, he pays compliments to all the pretty girls, and sometimes . . . he makes an ojo de hormiga [to make an “ant eye” is a popular expression for disappearing or hiding] with some city girls who arrive unexpectedly, on the pretext of “showing them” his frescoes, he takes them for a day or two . . . to see the different landscapes for a change, he no longer fights as he did before with the people who bother him when he is working, his fountain pens go dry, his clock stops and every fifteen days it has to be sent to be fixed, he keeps wearing those huge miner’s shoes (he has used the same ones for three years). He gets furious when he loses the keys of the car, and usually they appear in his own pocket, he does not take any exercise nor does he ever sunbathe, he writes articles for newspapers that generally cause a terrific uproar, he defends the IVth International with cloak and sword, and he is enchanted that Trotsky is here. Now I have more or less told you the principal detail
s.
. . . As you can observe, I have painted. Which is already something, since I have spent my life up until now loving Diego and being a good-for-nothing with respect to work, but now I continue loving Diego, and what’s more I have begun to paint monkeys seriously. Concerns of the sentimental and amorous order . . . there have been a few, but without going beyond mere flings. . . . Cristi was very sick, they operated on her gall bladder and she was in very critical condition, we thought she would die, fortunately she survived the operation very well, and now although she does not feel very well, she is much better. . . . The little ones are adorable, el Tonito (the philosopher) [Antonio Kahlo] is more intelligent each day and he builds many things with the “mechanism.” Isoldita is in third grade, she is very naughty and very cute. Adriana my sister and the little blond Veraza, her husband (they were the ones that went with us to Ixtapalapa) always remember you and Boit, and they send you greetings. . . .
Well pretty one, I hope that with this exceptional letter, you will at least love me a little bit again, and thus little by little until you love me as much as before . . . answer my love by writing me a powerful letter-missive that will fill with alegría this very sad heart that beats for you from here TIC-TAC!!! Literature is terrible for representing and giving the volume of interior noises, so it’s not my fault if instead of sounding like a heart, I sound like a broken clock, but . . . you know what I mean, my dear children! And let me tell you, it’s a pleasure. Lots of kisses for both of you, lots of hugs, all my heart, and if there’s a little left over divide it between Jay, Jim, Lucienne, Dimy [Stephen Dimitroff] and all my soul cuates. Give lots of love to your mother and father and to the little baby who loved me so much.
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