Frida handles thwarted love differently in the 1948 Self-Portrait. Except for a hint of tension around the mouth and a glistening sadness in her eyes, Frida’s face is, as always, determinedly composed. Yet furious emotions thrash beneath her skin. At the top of the painting, on a leaf, she signed her name and the year in the same color as the leaf’s veins—blood red. Three bright teardrops on her dark skin suggest her fascination with her own appearance in grief, the narcissism of sorrow. One feels that in a moment of despair, with hot, wet tears running down her cheeks, she has turned to the mirror for solace and communion, to find another person, the strong, alternative Frida, and to paint her. Such self-consciousness deadened feeling, while doubling it. By painting both the griever and the observer, Frida became the voyeur of her own emotions.
The peculiarly charged, disjunctive relationship between Frida and her Tehuana costume in this painting, the way her face seems quite separate from the lace that frames it, underscores the psychological duality of the weeping Frida, the sense of simultaneously feeling and perceiving oneself to feel. The split seems particularly painful because one can easily imagine why she decked herself out in the bride-like frills and veil—these self-portraits are a plea for Diego’s love. But pretty plumage was a mask as well as a magnet; it told of beauty and love while it hid uglier feelings—rejection, jealousy, rage, fear of abandonment. Thus it was that the greater the menace of loss, the more elaborate and desperately festive Frida’s self-decoration.
If arraying herself in ruffles and lace was a device to win Diego back, another was to make him realize that her sufferings might prove fatal. In Thinking About Death, painted the same year as Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, an opening in Frida’s forehead shows a skull and crossbones in a landscape (plate XXII). The same type of large leaves that ran with the sap of Frida’s life in Roots are gathered here into a thick, succulent wall behind her head. In front of and intertwined with these leaves are brown branches with cruel red thorns. Frida looks out at us with a sage and sober gaze that is almost Egyptian in its imperturbability; indeed, her dress and features in this self-portrait recall the famous bust of the unflappable Nefertiti, whom Frida admired. She once spoke of “the marvelous Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten, I imagine that besides having been extraordinarily beautiful, she must have been ’a wild one’ and a most intelligent collaborator with her husband.”
No doubt The Mask, 1945, in which Frida holds a purple mask with orange hair and dopey, doll-like features over her face, was painted during another period in which she was being betrayed by Diego. Her tears fall onto the mask, and her own black eyes peer through two holes torn in the mask’s eyes, which are painted to look like actual holes in the canvas. The displacement of the tears from the weeper to the weeper’s mask could hardly be more disturbing. Frida is clearly commenting on the inability of a mask to hide emotions when the wearer is under severe stress. The feeling of hysteria that this painting communicates is augmented by the heavy, grayish-green wall of ugly leaves and prickly cacti that press in on Frida from behind.
Two drawings from the 1940s reveal Frida’s continuing anguish. She weeps in the 1946 Self-Portrait (figure 63), and in Ruin, a gift for Diego in 1947, she spells out her misery with the words “Avenida Engaño” (Deceit Avenue). A cracked head, labeled “RUIN" and depicting what may be an amalgam of Frida and Diego, interlocks with an architectural structure, part of which is a tree with its branches chopped off. Twenty projections from this structure are numbered; they are said to refer to Rivera’s extramarital affairs. On the right, what looks like a commemorative monument is inscribed with the words: “Ruin/House for birds/Nest for love/All for nothing.”
As we have seen, Frida was by no means the passive victim of Diego’s ambient lusts, and she countered his infidelity with numerous casual, and some not so casual, extramarital affairs. Though her fragility, her illnesses, her numerous operations, meant that there were many periods in which she could not lead an active sex life, she had none of the passivity associated (at least in literature) with the stereotypical “long-suffering” Mexican woman. One of her lovers recalls that her physical ailments were no hindrance at all: “I’ve never seen anyone sturdier in the expression of affection than Frida!” Nor did she have compunctions about pursuing any man she wanted. She believed that what she called la raza—a people unspoiled by the hypocritical demands of civilization—was less inhibited about sexuality, and since she wanted to be primitivistic in her behavior, she made a point of being outspoken about matters of sex (although she did not talk about the details of her own sex life). She had sex on her mind often, a fact that is evident in her paintings and drawings, as well as in her diary.
Frida’s longest and deepest affair was with a Spanish-refugee painter who wishes to remain anonymous, and who lived in Mexico. He says that he actually lived in the Coyoacán house and that Rivera accepted this arrangement with equanimity, but Frida’s letters reveal that she tried to conceal the liaison from Diego. In October 1946, for example, after she had been with her lover in New York earlier that year, she wrote to Ella Wolfe to ask her to serve as mail drop while he was in the U.S.:
Ella darling of my heart,
It will surprise you that this lazy and shameless girl writes to you, but you know that one way or the other, with or without letters, I love you very very much. Over here there is no important news, I am better, I am already painting (an idiotic painting) but something is something, better than nothing. . . .
I want to ask you a huge favor as big as the pyramid of Teotihuacán. Will you do it for me? I am going to write to B at your house so that you will forward the letters to where he is, or perhaps you will keep them to deliver them to him in your own hand when he passes through New York. For the love of God, don’t let them out of your hands unless it is directly into his. You know what I mean kid! I would not even want Boit to know anything if you can avoid it, since it is better that only you keep my secret, do you understand? Here no one knows anything, only Cristi, Enrique—you and me and the boy in question know what it’s about. If you want to ask me anything about him in your letters, ask me with the name of SONJA. Understood? I beg you to tell me how he is, what he’s doing, if he is happy, if he takes care of himself etc. Not even Sylvia [probably Sylvia Ageloff] knows a single detail, so don’t chatter with anyone about this subject please. To you I can say that I truly love him and that he makes me feel the desire to live again. Speak well of me to him, so that he should be happy, and so that he knows that I am a person who is, if not very good, at least Regularcita [OK].
I send you thousands of kisses and all my love.
Frida
Don’t forget to tear up this letter in case of future misunderstandings—Promise?
To this day Frida’s lover continues to be passionately devoted to her, treasuring the tiny oval Self-Portrait—a miniature about two inches high—that she made for him around 1946. He keeps it in a box together with other relics—a pink hair ribbon, an earring, a few drawings, and the Tlatilco head mounted on a silver backing to form a brooch. The liaison lasted until 1952, but increasingly as the years went on and her physical frailties made relations with the opposite sex more difficult, Frida turned to women, often to women with whom Diego was having an affair. As Raquel Tibol put it, “she consoled herself by cultivating the friendship of women with whom Diego had amorous relations.”
That Frida’s masculine side became more pronounced in the late forties is apparent in her self-portraits: she gave her features an ever more masculine cast, making her mustache even darker than it actually was. But there was always a definite androgynous aspect to both Frida and Diego; both were attracted to what they saw of their own gender in their mate. Rivera loved Frida’s boyishness as he loved her “Zapata“ mustache—he was furious once when she shaved it off. She loved his soft, vulnerable quality as she loved his fat man’s breasts; it was the part of Diego that she knew ensured his need for her. She wrote: “Of his chest it must be said that if he
had disembarked on the island governed by Sappho, he would not have been executed by the female warriors. The sensitivity of his marvelous breasts would have made him admissible. Even so, his virility, specific and strange, makes him desirable also in the dominions of empresses avid for masculine love.”
One of the “empresses” was film star María Félix, whose liaison with Diego became a public scandal. The trouble began when Diego was preparing for his huge retrospective at the Palace of Fine Arts. He planned to make the portrait of María Félix on which he was working the exhibition’s centerpiece; naturally, it caused a stir even before it was finished. The press posed the question: During the forty modeling sessions to which no witnesses were admitted, was María posing naked for Rivera? Her diaphanous dress, they noted, hardly concealed the contours of her body. Photographs were published showing Rivera gazing amorously into his model’s eyes. (In the end, María Félix refused to lend her portrait to the show, and Rivera replaced it with an equally provocative one, a life-size nude of another beauty, the poet Pita Amor.)
Disregarding Rivera’s disclaimers, the press also reported that the muy distinguido pintor planned to marry the actress just as soon as he could get a divorce. Three leading papers published the “news” that María Félix had accepted Diego’s proposal on condition that she could bring her twenty-two-year-old girl friend, a beautiful Spanish refugee who had served Frida as nurse and companion, into the marriage as part of a sort of ménage à trois. Rivera claimed that his romance with María Félix had nothing to do with his intention, which he did not deny, to divorce Frida. “I adore Frida,” he said smoothly, “but I think my presence is very bad for her health.” He admitted his infatuation with María Félix: “like hundreds of thousands of Mexicans,” he was in love with her.
Memories of the affair are almost as numerous as rememberers. Most people say that Rivera was infatuated but not deeply in love with María Félix, and that she never really wanted to marry him, but liked the attention she got from the scandal. Some say that in order to be independent from Diego at this time, Frida took an apartment for a few months in the center of Mexico City near the Revolution Monument. Perhaps it was her near-death there in a fire—a candle she left burning on a table set her skirt ablaze and she was saved by a building employee who heard her screams—that convinced Diego to return to her. Others say that Frida was amused by the affair, that Rivera kept her informed about the progress of his courtship by telling her every detail and every problem and by sending her drawings and notes saying things like: “This is from your enamored Frog-toad,” or captioning a drawing of himself as a weeping toad, “This is how your Toad-frog is crying.” Frida pretended she did not mind. She even wrote María Félix a note offering to give her Diego as a present (María turned down the offer).
It is typical of Frida that her own relationship with María Félix continued during this period and after. Indeed, Frida, María, and Pita Amor—with whom, it is said, Rivera also had an affair—were all intimate friends. (Pita Amor’s photograph was one of those Frida lovingly affixed to her bed’s headboard, and María Félix is the first name on the list that adorns Frida’s bedroom in Coyoacán.)
Adelina Zendejas tells of the time when, as a reporter for the magazine Tiempo, she was sent to interview Diego about his affair with María She asked him, “Are you going to get a divorce?” and he said, “From whom?” Zendejas said, “From Frida, because you are going to marry your goddess María Félix.” Diego said, “If you want, you can telephone right now and you will see that María and Frida are chatting together.” Adelina countered that she had heard that Diego had already petitioned for a divorce. Diego said, “Look, that must be a FUF.” Adelina was perplexed. FUF, Diego explained, was the Frente Unido de las Feas (United Front of Ugly Women), because, said Diego, “they are jealous of the beauty of both Frida and María.” Adelina, whose informant about the divorce had been the beautiful Lupe Marín, said, “It was not only the ugly women who told me.” “Then,” said Diego, “it’s the FUA.” Again Adelina was perplexed. FUA was the Frente Unido de las Abandonadas (United Front of Abandoned Women), Rivera explained. “That’s who must have said it.” Diego was referring to Lupe Marín, but when Adelina went back to her original source, Lupe said, “Frida is an imbecile who is letting María get into her house and steal Diego from her. Diego is infamous, but the idiot is Frida.”
Yet perhaps Frida was not such an “idiot” after all, for she lost neither the friendship of María Félix nor her husband. Rivera, in his autobiography, recounted the dénouement with uncharacteristic succinctness. When María Félix refused to marry him, he said, he returned to Frida, who was “miserable and hurt. Within a short space of time, however, everything was well again. I got over my rejection by María. Frida was happy to have me back, and I was grateful to be married to her still.”
None of the stories of Diego’s affair with María Félix and Frida’s reaction to it (whether true or not) can negate the anger and sorrow that are manifest in the weeping self-portraits of 1948 and 1949. Diego and I was just a sketch, showing Frida with flowers adorning her braided hairdo, when the photographer and writer Florence Arquin and her husband, Samuel A. Williams, purchased it in Mexico; the portrait that arrived in the United States showed her crying (in this painting even her features seem to weep), with a mass of loose hair swirling around her neck as if it were going to choke her. As in Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, a small portrait of Diego rests on her eyebrows—Diego was the constant intruder in her thoughts. No matter what she said, no matter how she shrugged her shoulders and laughed in public, Diego and I remains a painted record of Frida’s lonely passion for her husband, and of her despair at the possibility of losing him.
That record appears in her journal as well. Many of its pages form what might best be described as a prose poem addressed to Diego. His name is everywhere. “I love Diego—no one else,” she wrote. In a moment of loneliness she exclaimed: “Diego, I am alone.” Then, a few pages later: “DIEGO,” and finally, days, months, or possibly years later (Frida did not usually date diary entries, and she sometimes added a page written in an earlier period): “My Diego. I am no longer alone. You accompany me. You put me to sleep and you revive me.” Elsewhere, following a page full of nonsense words and phrases spun out in stream-of-consciousness fashion, there is a notation that seems to refer to Frida’s loneliness at Rivera’s absence. “I am going with myself,” she wrote. “An absent moment. You have been stolen from me and I am weeping as I go. He is a vacilón [joker or philanderer].”
Many people say that the Riveras never had a sexual bond, that they were mainly companions. And to be sure, camaraderie was a strong part of Frida’s attitude toward her husband. But she did also retain an unmistakable, strong erotic love for him, even when his physical desire for her subsided after the first few years of marriage, and even though she stipulated that her bond with him be celibate after their remarriage. Her carnal love for Diego gives much of her journal the quality of an erotic love letter: “Diego: Nothing is comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the gold-green of your eyes. My body fills itself with you for days and days. You are the mirror of the night. The violent light of lightning. The dampness of the earth. Your armpit is my refuge. My fingertips touch your blood. All my joy is to feel your life shoot forth from your fountain-flower which mine keeps in order to fill all the paths of my nerves which belong to you.” Or, a few pages later:
My Diego:
Mirror of the night.
Your green sword eyes inside my flesh. Waves between our hands. All you in the space full of sounds—in shade and in light. You will be called AUXOCROMO— the one that attracts color. I CROMOFORO—the one that gives color. You are all the combinations of number. life. My desire is to understand line form movement. You fill and I receive. Your word crosses all the space and reaches my cells that are my stars of many years retained in our body. Enchained words that we could not say except in the lips of sleep. Everything was surr
ounded by the vegetal miracle of the landscape of your body. Upon your form, at my touch the cilia of flowers, the sounds of rivers respond. All the fruits were in the juice of your lips, the blood of the pomegranate . . . of the mammee and pure pineapple. I pressed you against my breast and the prodigy of your form penetrated through all my blood through the tips of my fingers. Odor of essence of oak, of the memory of walnut, of the green breath of ash. Horizons and landscapes—that I crossed with a kiss. A forgetfulness of words will form the exact idiom to understand the glances of our closed eyes.
You are present, intangible and you are all the universe that I form in the space of my room. Your absence shoots forth trembling in the sound of the clock, in the pulse of light; your breath through the mirror. From you to my hands I go over all your body, and I am with you a minute and I am with you a moment, and my blood is the miracle that travels in the veins of the air from my heart to yours.
THE WOMAN
THE MAN
The vegetal miracle of my body’s landscape is in you the whole of nature. I traverse it in a flight that with my fingers caresses the round hills, the . . . valleys, longing for possession and the embrace of the soft green fresh branches covers me. I penetrate the sex of the whole earth, its heat embraces me and in my body everything feels like the freshness of tender leaves. Its dew is the sweat of an always new lover. It is not love, nor tenderness, nor affection, it is the whole of life, mine that I found when I saw it in your hands, in your mouth and in your breasts. In my mouth I have the almond taste of your lips. Our words have never gone outside. Only a mountain knows the insides of another mountain. At times your presence floats continuously as if wrapping all my being in an anxious wait for morning. And I notice that I am with you. In this moment still full of sensations, my hands are plunged in oranges, and my body feels surrounded by you.
Given the intensity of Frida’s carnal love for Diego, it is not surprising that his sexual infidelities hurt. To protect herself, she took the stance of the indulgent mother—a relationship which was just as sensual as that of being his mate, but in a different way. Instead of feeling Diego’s “green sword eyes inside [her] flesh,” instead of her body feeling “surrounded” and “penetrated” by the “prodigy” of Diego’s form, she was the one who held him in her lap, bathed him, cared for him like a mother. Indeed, this mother-son bond was so physical that Frida announced in her diary her desire to “give birth” to Diego: “I am the embryo, the germ, the first cell that—in potency—engendered him—I am him from the most primitive and the most ancient cells, which with ’time’ became him,” she wrote in 1947. Another time, she confided: “At every moment he is my child, my child born every moment, diary, from myself.” And in “Portrait of Diego” she said: “Women . . . amongst them I—always would want to hold him in their arms like a newborn baby.”
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