Frida

by Hayden Herrera

  That is exactly what she does in The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me and Señor Xolotl, painted at about the same time as Diego and I. Here Frida is a kind of Mexican earth mother, and Diego is her baby. A bright red crevasse cracks open her neck and chest, and a magical fountain of milk sprays forth from where her breast and heart would be, food for the large, pale baby Diego lying in her lap. He holds a maguey plant painted in fiery orange, yellow, and gray—an emblem of his “fountain-flower,” which was Frida’s metaphor for his sex. Tears make Frida a weeping Madonna, a Madonna who has lost, or fears she will lose, her child.

  In “Portrait of Diego,” written during the year she painted The Love Embrace, Frida described the Diego she had painted with all the keen physicality of a doting mother:

  His form: with his Asiatic-type head upon which grows dark hair so thin and fine that it seems to float in the air, Diego is an immense baby with an amiable face and a slightly sad glance. . . . and very seldom does an ironic and tender smile, the flower of his image, disappear from his Buddhaish mouth with its fleshy lips.

  Seeing him nude, you immediately think of a boy frog standing on his hind legs. His skin is greenish white like that of an aquatic animal. Only his hands and face are darker, because the sun burned them. His infantile shoulders, narrow and round, flow without angles into feminine arms that end in marvelous hands, small and delicate in design, sensitive and subtle like antennae that communicate with the whole universe. It is amazing that these hands have served to paint so much and that they still work indefatigably.

  Fussing over Diego was Frida’s pleasure. She would laugh about having his enormous underclothes made in cheap cottons, preferably in bright Mexican pink. (He was too fat to fit into ready-made underwear.) Or she would grumble affectionately: “Oh, that boy, already he has spoiled his shirt.” When Rivera dropped his clothes on the floor, Frida would scold him gently. His response, even when she was really angry, was to hang his head in silence like a guilty child, relishing the attention.

  Rivera liked being babied. That there was much of the little boy in him, he himself showed in his Hotel del Prado mural (figure 74), where, in 1947–1948, he painted himself as a fat, devilish boy in knee pants (a frog in one pocket and a snake in the other), standing in front of Frida, depicted as a mature woman with one hand resting protectively on his shoulder. One of the happier moments in the day was his bath. As a schoolgirl, Frida had told her friend Adelina how much she liked Rivera, how much she would love to “bathe him and clean him!” Her wish was granted, for like his earlier wives, she discovered that he needed encouragement to take a bath. She bought various toys to float in the bathwater, and scrubbing her husband with sponges and brushes became a household ritual.

  Like any child, when Diego did not get what he wanted he made a fuss. Antonio Rodríguez remembers an occasion when he went to see Frida, accompanied by his youngest son, “whom she treated with great affection.” Diego was not there. Frida gave the child a toy, “one of those tanks that arrived in Mexico during the war, saying ’keep it hidden, because if Diego comes and sees you playing with it, he will get angry or take it away.’ My son did not pay attention to her, and he kept on playing with it. When Diego arrived, and saw my son with the toy, he made a face like a little boy almost crying, and said to Frida: ’Why do you give me things and later take them away?’ Frida said, ’I’ll give you another one. I’ll buy another.’ But Diego left the room murmuring, ’I don’t want anything anymore.’ He was almost in tears. It was as if he were really a child.”

  Frida wrote of Diego’s infantile egocentricity in “Portrait of Diego”:

  The images and ideas flow in his brain with a rhythm that is different from the common one, and because of this, his intensity of fixation and his desire to do always more are uncontainable. This mechanism makes him indecisive. His indecision is superficial, because finally he succeeds in doing whatever he wants with a sure and well-planned will. Nothing better illustrates this modality of his character than what his aunt Cesarita, his mother’s sister, once told me. She remembered that when Diego was a very small child he entered a store, one of those little variety shops full of magic and surprise that we all remember with affection, and standing in front of the counter, with a few centavos in his hand, he looked at and surveyed again and again the whole universe contained within the store, while he desperately and furiously screamed: “What do I want!” The store was called “The Future,” and this indecision of Diego’s has lasted his whole life. But although he seldom arrives at a decision to choose, he carries inside him a vector line that goes directly to the center of his will and his desire.

  To accommodate the “vector line” of Diego’s will and desire, Frida was at once protective and abnegating. “No one will ever know how I love Diego,” she wrote in her diary. “I don’t want anything to wound him, nothing should bother him or take away the energy that he needs to live—to live the way he wishes, to paint, see, love, eat, sleep, to feel himself alone, to feel himself accompanied—but I would like to give all to him. If I had health I would like to give it all to him. If I had youth he could take it all.”

  Frida would not thus sacrifice herself for a love that was merely romantic or maternal. She did so for Diego because even in his willful “childishness” she saw evidence of his superiority. To Frida, Diego was a man whose vision, impelled by the unerring vector of his desire, embraced the universe even as, in The Love Embrace, the universe embraces him. To show this in the painting, she placed a third eye in the middle of his forehead and she called this the eye of “supervisibility” or the ojo avisor (informing eye). And in “Portrait of Diego” she wrote: “His large, dark, and extremely intelligent bulging eyes—almost out of their orbits—are held in place with difficulty by eyelids that are swollen and protuberant, like those of a frog. They are very much more separate from each other than other eyes. They enable his vision to embrace a much wider visual field, as if they were constructed especially for a painter of spaces and multitudes. Between those eyes, so distant one from the other, one divines the invisible eye of Oriental wisdom.”

  Frida holds Diego, and she in turn is held by an earth goddess who represents Mexico and resembles a pre-Columbian idol. The idol is actually a cone-shaped mountain, a reference perhaps to mountain-pyramid symbolism in pre-Columbian religion, or to Frida’s characterization (in her diary) of herself and Diego as mountains. Its slopes are half green and half brown, perhaps to show that it comprises both the earth of Mexico and the plants that grow there, or perhaps to indicate the contrast of Mexico’s desert and jungle terrain or the alternation of the dry and rainy seasons. Like Frida, the idol-mountain has long loose hair, not black, but made of cactus. And the chest, like Frida’s, is cracked open in a barranca. Near this wound sprouts a patch of green grass—Frida’s way of saying that nature alternates between cycles of destruction and rebirth, life and death. The gash goes all the way to the earth goddess’s nipple, from which one drop of milk falls, like a tear.

  As always in Frida’s paintings, the concrete, specific connection of The Love Embrace with an actual event (the María Félix affair) is not the whole truth: although Frida is wounded and weeping, she is also caught up in a series of love embraces, set one inside the other, that not only expresses her belief in the interrelatedness of all things in the universe, but also forms the matrix that joins and sustains herself and her spouse. Plucked from the earth, the mountain floats in the sky so that the roots from the cacti growing up and down its slopes dangle in space. These roots, some red as if they were veins, are, like all the roots in Frida’s paintings, strangely alive. Frida once drew her notion of love as a tangle of red roots growing downward, and in The Love Embrace the dangling but live roots symbolize the hardiness of her and Diego’s love.

  In Frida’s extraordinary cosmology, the idolfmountain (earth, Mexico) is, in turn, embraced by a larger divinity, a pre-Columbian-looking goddess of the universe, divided into light a
nd dark and still only partly concretized out of the half-night, half-daytime sky. Frida and Diego are thus doubly encompassed by universal love and by their ancient progenitors, once on the earthbound and once on the celestial level. The Love Embrace can be seen as a fantastic Assumption of the Virgin in which Mother and Son are rejoined in a pre-Columbian heaven. But the image, with its familiar Mexican plants, its homely and humorous inclusion of Frida’s favorite escuincle dog, Xolotl (modeled on a pre-Columbian ceramic dog from Colima that Frida owned), curled up on the universe’s arm, is a concrete expression of a particular time when Frida’s sense of the fragility of her hold on Rivera as a husband made her all the more determined to hold on to him as a child.

  In the end Frida kept her husband. She was the woman Diego loved more than any other. “If I had died without knowing her,” Rivera once confided to Carmen Jaime, “I would have died without knowing what a real woman was!” On another occasion, Carmen Jaime heard Frida say to Diego: “What do I live for? For what purpose?” and he answered: “So that I live!” And to Frida, Diego was—everything. She wrote in her diary:

  Diego. beginning

  Diego. constructor

  Diego. my baby

  Diego. my boyfriend

  Diego. painter

  Diego. my lover

  Diego. "my husband"

  Diego. my friend

  Diego. my mother

  Diego. me

  Diego. universe

  Diversity in unity

  Why do I call him My Diego? He never was nor ever will be mine. He belongs to himself.

  Chapter 22

  Naturaleza Viva: Alive Still Life

  THE ARROWS that pierced the flanks of The Little Deer struck deep and did not fall out. For all the vitality that was left in the young deer’s body, he would not find his way out of the thick forest enclosure to the blue sea and sky beyond. The spinal fusion of 1946, wrote Cachucha Miguel N. Lira, began “the calvary that would lead to the end.” By early 1950, Frida was so sick that she had to go to a hospital in Mexico City. She was to remain there for a year.

  During a brief trip to Mexico, Dr. Eloesser saw her before she was hospitalized, and on January 26, 1950, he scribbled some notes about her condition. On the third of January, he wrote, Frida “awoke to find the four toes of her right foot black on the ends. The night before on retiring the toes were OK. Dr. came that day and sent her to the hospital. For the past year has been eating very little—lost. . . weight. In last 3 years has been taking much Seconal. No alcohol 3 years.” Dr. Eloesser mentions that Frida had been painting up to three months prior to his visit, that she had headaches, and that for a period of time she had had a continuous fever. Her leg, he said, was in constant pain. The rest is illegible except for the word “gangrene.”

  On January 12, in a letter to her dentist, Dr. Fastlich, about a broken dental bridge, Frida said: “Forgive the trouble that I’m giving you. I am still in the hospital since ’for a change’ they operated on my spine again and I can’t leave until tomorrow, Saturday, to go to my neighborhood Coyoacán. Still in a corset and rather screwed up! But I am not discouraged and I will try to start painting as soon as I can.” Besides these troubles, Frida was suffering from poor circulation in her right leg, which would explain the black toes and “gangrene.” On February 11, from Coyoacán, she wrote to Dr. Eloesser that she had seen five doctors, including Dr. Juan Farill. She trusted him, she said, for he seemed the most “serious"; he recommended that her foot be amputated, leaving only the heel.

  My dearest Doctorcito:

  I received your letter and the book, a thousand thanks for all your marvelous tenderness and your immense generosity with me.

  How are you? What are your plans? I am in the same state I was in when you left me the last night that I saw you.

  Dr. Glusker brought a Dr. Puig, a Catalan bone surgeon educated in the U.S. to see me. His opinion is like yours, to amputate the toes, but he thinks it would be better to amputate up to the metatarsus in order to obtain a less slow and less dangerous cicatrization.

  Until now the five opinions that I have had are the same—amputation. Only the place of the amputation varies. I do not know Dr. Puig well, and I do not know what to decide to do, since it is so important for me, this operation, that I am afraid of doing something stupid. I want to beg you to give me your sincere opinion of what I should do in this case. For the reasons that you know, it is impossible for me to go to the U.S. and also because it means a great quantity of money because I know that at this moment it represents a much larger effort for him [Diego] since the peso is worth shit. If the operation in itself is not something out of this world, do you think that these people could do it for me? Or should I wait until you can come, or should I get the dough and do it there with you? I am desperate since if it really has to be done, the best thing would be to confront the problem as soon as possible, don’t you think?

  Here in bed, I feel that I am vegetating like a cabbage and at the same time I think that the case must be studied in order to attain a positive result from the purely mechanical view. That is to say: to be able to walk, to be able to work. But they tell me that since the leg is in such bad shape, the cicatrization will be slow and I will spend a few months unable to walk.

  A young doctor, Dr. Julio Zimbrón, proposes to me a strange treatment that I want to ask you about, because I do not know up to what point it might be a good idea. He says that he guarantees that the gangrene will disappear. It is a question of some subcutaneous injection of light gases, helium-hydrogen and oxygen. . . . What is your immediate impression, do you think there is truth in all this? Couldn’t embolisms form? I am rather afraid of it. He says that he thinks that with his treatment I will not need the amputation. Do you think that is true?

  They are driving me crazy and making me desperate. What should I do? It is as if I am being turned into an idiot and I am very tired of this fucking foot and I would like to be painting and not worrying about so many problems. But, it can’t be helped, I have to be miserable until the situation is resolved. . . .

  Please, Lindisimo be good enough to advise me what you think I should do.

  The book by Stilwell seemed fantastic to me, I hope you will get me more on Tao, and the books of Agnes Smedley on China.

  When will I see you again? It does me such good to know that you really love me and that no matter where you go, you watch over me (from the sky). I feel that this time I only saw you a few hours. If I were healthy I would go with you to help you to make people turn into beings that are truly useful to others. But the way I am, I am useless even as a gutter cap.

  I adore you

  Frida

  Not long after writing to Dr. Eloesser, Frida went back to the English Hospital and put herself under the care of Dr. Juan Farill. She had already been operated on twice when, in mid-April, her sister Matilde wrote to Dr. Eloesser on her behalf:

  Today I answer your letter directed to Frida in the Hospital and in the name of Frida I thank you for all the affection and good wishes that your letters show towards Frida. She wants me to tell you everything that has to do with her operation and I do it with pleasure, in spite of the fact that the telling of it carries horrors suffered and that until today no progress has been seen.

  She has been through a real Calvary and I don’t know how this thing will go, since as I told you in my first letter they fused three vertebrae with a bone of I don’t know who and the first 11 days were something terrifying for her. Her intestines became paralyzed, she has had a temperature of 39 and 39½ [degrees centigrade] every day since the day after they operated on her, constant vomiting and constant pains in her spine and when the corset was put on her body and she lay on the place where the incision was, thus began this process and to calm her the doctors gave her a double injection of Demerol . . . and other things with the exception of morphine, because she cannot tolerate morphine. Her temperature continued and she began, this way, to suffer with pains in her sick leg and alt
hough they were of the opinion that it was phlebitis, they did not inject for phlebitis but from that moment on there was a Council of the Indies pricking her with injections and medicines. The fever did not stop and then I noticed that she was emitting a very bad odor from her back, I pointed it out to the Doctor and the next day they . . . opened up the corset and they found an abscess or tumor, all infected, in the wound and they had to operate on her once more. She suffered another time the paralysis of her intestines, horrible pains and instead of progress, other horrible problems. They put on another new plaster corset and this one took something like four or five days to dry and they left a duct to drain out all the secretion.

  They gave her Chloromycetin every four hours and her temperature began to drop a little but that’s the way it has been since the 4th of April when they operated for the second time and now the corset is dirty as a pigsty since she is secreting through her back, it smells like a dead dog and these “señores” say that the wound is not closing and the poor child is their victim. This time she will need another corset and another operation or treatment in order to get rid of all the illness. I do not know why, Dr. Eloesser, but I think, without Frida’s knowing it, that the infection is not superficial, but rather, I think, that the grafted bone has not stuck on the vertebrae and this has infected everything. Of course I do not say this to her, because the poor thing is in torment and she deserves compassion. I do not understand how she could have decided to have this stupid operation without being in good health, since they did a blood test when she had the fever and had already been operated on and she had only 3 thousand hemoglobin and this has been a real setback for her. Thus she doesn’t get well nourished, she is worn out and tired of staying in one position and she says all the time that she feels that she is lying on broken glass. The way I see her suffering, I would like to give her my life, but those “señores” say all the time that it is going well and it will come out well. But, I hesitate to say it to you Dr. Eloesser, but, without knowing anything about medicine, I know that Frida is not well. It is necessary to wait until they do the third operation or treatment and we will see once more how she will be. The stitches do not heal over and the wound does not look as though it is closing. She does not know this, since what she is suffering is already enough. It would have been preferable to stay the way she was, since the gangrene has gone down and the black ends have fallen off.