Among the last drawings in her diary are two nude self-portraits in which she stands with her false leg. One is dedicated with love to her “child Diego.” In the other, the leg is just a wooden pole, a pata de palo, and arrows that point to various places on her head and body suggest psychic and physical suffering.
Once Frida wrote in her diary that death was “nothing but a process in order to exist"; for her the process of dying—the slow decay caused by osteomyelitis and poor circulation—could not be stopped despite all the operations and other medical treatments she underwent. On April 27, 1954, her diary entry suggests that she has just recovered from a crisis, perhaps another suicide attempt, or simply a downturn in her health. She sounds as if she were in a drug-induced euphoria, but the urgency in her litany of thanks hints at an underlying despair, as if she knew her leave-taking from this world was imminent:
I came out healthy—I made the promise and I will keep it never to go backwards. Thanks to Diego, thanks to my Tere [Teresa Proenza], thanks to Cracielita and to the little girl, thanks to Judith, thanks to Isaua Mino, thanks to Lupita Zuñiga, thanks to Dr. Farill, to Dr. Polo, to Dr. Armando Navarro, to Dr. Vargas. thanks to me myself and to my enormous will to live among all the people who love me and for all those whom I love. Long live alegría, life, Diego, Tere, my Judith and all the nurses I have had in my life who have treated me so marvelously well. Thanks because I am a Communist and I have been all my life. Thanks to the Soviet people, to the Chinese, Czechoslovaks, and Polish people and to the people of Mexico, above all to the people of Coyoacán where my first cell was born, which was incubated in Oaxaca, in the womb of my mother, who had been born there, and married my father, Guillermo Kahlo—my mother Matilde Calderón, a brunette country girl from Oaxaca. Marvelous afternoon that we spent here at Coyoacán; the room of Frida, Diego, Tere and me. Señorita Capulina, Señor Xolotl, Señora Kosti. [The last three are names of Frida’s dogs.]
She clung to notions of hope and gratitude as if she might otherwise sink into bitterness and despair. Perhaps, too, she felt that gratitude and alegría were, like retablos or prayers, rites of devotion that held some magic power: they, too, could connect her with those people she needed and loved.
Because of her loss of control, both physical and mental, terrible things happened to Frida. One accident occurred when she was confined to her bed, and needed something that lay beyond her reach. Hating not to be able to do things for herself, and not wanting to ask for help, she got up. As she told it in her diary: “Yesterday May 7 . . . when I fell on the stone floor tiles a needle entered one of my buttocks. They took me immediately to the hospital in an ambulance. I was suffering enormous pains and screaming all the way from the house to the English Hospital—They took an X-ray—various. They found the needle and they are going to take it out one of these days with a magnet. Thanks to my Diego love of all my life. Thanks to the doctors.”
When she was neither drugged nor sleeping, she was often nervous to the point of hysteria. Her behavior was unpredictable. She became angry over little things, things that would not normally have bothered her. She flailed out at people, yelling abuse, even at Diego. Judith Ferreto remembers that “sometimes just a word, something like a thing done wrong, or something not clean, or even just an attitude, could make Frida explode because of her sensitivity. If they love you, they really love you, especially Frida. If she loved you, you could be sure that she loved you. She could never show a thing that she was not feeling, and she could not keep things inside, except for her pain, her suffering.”
There were times when Frida’s illness and wild behavior were more than Rivera could bear. Raquel Tibol tells of an occasion when Frida was extremely sick and lay upstairs in her bedroom, half unconscious from drugs. “Diego and I were downstairs in the living room. He had come home to eat, but he didn’t want to eat. He began to cry like a child, and he said, ’If I were brave, I would kill her. I cannot stand to see her suffer so.’ He cried like a child, cried and cried. It was a kind of pious love.”
His misery at seeing Frida miserable drove him away from her. Often he stayed away for days at a time, and Frida became lonely, angry, desperate. “But the moment Diego appeared,” Rosa Castro remembers, “she would change and say, ’My child, where have you been, my child?’ in the most soft and loving voice. Then Diego would go and kiss her. There was a dish of fruit near the bed, and she would say, ’My darling child, do you want a little piece of fruit?’ Diego would answer ’chi’ instead of ’si,’ as if he were a little boy.”
Once when Adelina Zendejas and Carlos Pellicer were having lunch in the patio of the Coyoacán house, Frida threw a bottle of water at Diego. He ducked, and it just missed his head. The noise of glass crashing on the stone floor shocked her out of her rage. She began to cry. “Why did I do it?” she asked. “Tell me, why did I do it? If I continue like this, I would prefer to die!” Driving Adelina home after lunch, Rivera said, ’I must have her put in a home. I must commit her. It is not possible to go on like this.” Like everyone except Cristina, Diego withdrew from Frida. Judith Ferreto tried to explain to her that Diego had to run away from her because he loved her so much that he could not bear to witness her suffering. Sometimes this explanation was consoling, but usually Frida was bitter:
Every night he stays up. He does not come home early, even one night. Where does he go? I no longer even ask him anything. He may go to the theater with his architect friends, to lectures. Every day [he appears] at eleven or twelve o’clock; one or four in the afternoon. From where? Who knows! The next morning he gets up, he comes to say hello to me: “How are you, linda [pretty one]?” “Fine, and you?” “Better.” “Are you coming home for lunch?” “I don’t know, I’ll send word.” He generally eats in the studio. His lunch is sent with Oswaldo. I eat alone. At night I don’t see him because he arrives so late. I take my pills, and I never see him, he is never with me, and he is a horror, and he doesn’t like me to smoke, he doesn’t like me to sleep, he makes such a scandal about everything that he wakes one up. He needs his liberty and he has it.
“Her relations with Diego in this final and tragic period were irregular,” writer Loló de la Torriente remembers. “Some easy, sweet, and affectionate, others of tempestuousness and fury. Patiently, the maestro humored her, supported her in those rages, indulged her, but he ended by calling the doctor, who calmed her with palliatives. She would go to sleep and then everything in that large house was like a tomb. . . . During this period Frida spoke little. She lay or sat near the large window in her bedroom and watched the pigeons and branches and a fountain moving in the garden.”
Frida’s feelings toward Diego changed from hour to hour, from minute to minute. “No one knows how much I love Diego,” she said. “But neither does anyone know how difficult it is to live with that señor. And he is so strange in his way of living that I have to guess whether he loves me; because I think that he does love me, even if it is ’in his way.’ I always say this sentence when our marriage is discussed: that we have joined ’hunger with the desire to eat.’ ” Presumably she meant that she was hungry and Diego greedy: hunger takes what it can get; greed takes what it wants, here and there, for its own pleasure.
Her emotional excesses had much to do with her increased dependence on drugs. She had permission to acquire them from a government office, but her need now went beyond what she could purchase in this manner, and often she turned to Diego; he always knew how to find them. She sometimes became wild, and made desperate phone calls to friends to borrow money. At one point, Rivera tried to stop her drug addiction by substituting alcohol. Frida consumed two liters of cognac a day—without giving up the drugs.
She took huge doses and mixed them in the most unorthodox ways. Several times when Raquel Tibol was helping Cristina care for Frida, she watched her put three or more doses of Demerol into a large syringe and add various small vials of other narcotics. Frida would ask Tibol to inject her, and since her back was a mass of scabs from oth
er injections as well as scars from operations, it was hard to find a place to insert the needle. Frida would cry, “Touch, touch, and where you find a soft place, inject!”
“Once I went to see her with Lupe Marín,” Jesús Ríos y Valles remembers. “She was completely lost. She asked me to get her an injection. I asked, ’Where am I going to get it?’ And I told her that Diego and her doctor had told me that she should not have any more injections. Frida was as if crazy. She said, ’Please! please!’ I said, ’Anyway, where will I get it?’ She said, ’Open that drawer.’ In the drawer, behind a group of Diego’s drawings, was a box with thousands of vials of Demerol.”
Frida had painted almost nothing for a year when in the spring of 1954 she forced herself once more out of bed and into the studio. There, tied to her wheelchair with a sash to support her back, she worked at her easel for as long as she could stand the pain, then kept on painting in bed.
Painting was now a devotional act. She made paintings that communicate her political faith and several “alive still lifes"; all have a visionary quality and a kind of exuberance that has much to do with the euphoric effect of Demerol. One 1954 Still Life is divided into four quarters (earth and sky, day and night) and the sun’s rays become a web of glowing red roots or veins that embrace both the fruits and the dove nesting in their midst. Where the roots end at the bottom of the painting, they spell the word “LUZ" (light) plus Frida’s name. Although this painting is rough in facture, harsh in color, and unsubtle in concept, there is something gallant about the passion and hope that Frida projects upon oranges and melons. It is clear that as she was painting the embrace of life by light, she knew that the final night was near.
To find the scenario for her expression of political faith, Frida once again turned to retablos. In Frida and Stalin, she sits in front of a huge portrait of Stalin that is propped on her easel; like the painting of her doctor in Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill, the image of Stalin functions as the holy intercessor in an ex-voto. Likewise, in Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick, Frida, the protagonist dressed in an orthopedic corset, is saved by the miracle-making saint, Karl Marx (figure 80). His white-bearded head floats in the sky; a hand projecting from it strangles an American eagle, a caricature of Uncle Sam. Projecting from Marx’s head on the other side, a white peace dove hovers protectively over Frida and over a globe that displays a huge red continent, no doubt Soviet Russia. The earth beneath her feet has been politicized too. Under the peace dove and Russia, rivers run blue. Beneath the night sky that surrounds the American eagle, rivers run red. Two enormous disembodied hands (one with the eye of wisdom in its palm) descend from the sky (from the vicinity of Marx) to support Frida. The Marxian hands and the red book, probably Marx’s Capital, that she holds allow her to cast aside her crutches. Frida told Judith Ferreto that in this painting, “For the first time, I am not crying anymore.”
Though flags may wave in these paintings, peace doves may fly, and Marxist heroes occupy the heavens, Frida’s last works remained personal and self-identifying; they could never serve as political propaganda. Instead, like prayers, they affirmed faith. She knew this when she complained to her nurse in bitter frustration over her inability to make paintings with social value: “I cannot, I cannot, I cannot!” She knew she could not, indeed, even as she told Antonio Rodríguez: “I want my work to be a contribution to the struggle for peace and liberty"; and “if I do not transmit more ideas in my painting, it is because I have nothing to say, and I don’t feel that I have the authority to give lessons; but it is never because I think that art should be something mute.” Frida’s paintings are hardly mute. They shriek their personal messages so passionately that there are no decibels left for propaganda.
Like Showcase in Detroit, the curious, ugly landscape called The Brick Kilns was inspired by something Frida happened to see on an outing. One spring day, Dr. Farill took her for a drive on the outskirts of the city. They passed a group of brick kilns, and something about the bleak, archaic beauty of these round ovens caught the attention of the crippled pair. Dr. Farill said he wanted to paint the kilns. Frida said she would do it. When her doctor suggested that she make a sketch on the spot, Frida replied that she did not need to, she would carry the sketch in her head. The Brick Kilns shows a group of kilns with a man in a sombrero sitting and stoking one of the ovens with a long stick. The style testifies to Frida’s loss of control. Brushwork is messy; impasto is gritty; color is murky. The general unpleasantness of the scene is underscored by wretched, leafless trees and ominous clouds of smoke that billow from the brick ovens. Since it was Frida’s expressed desire that she be cremated, the sight of the brick kilns on her outing with her surgeon probably turned her thoughts to her own end. Certainly the painting foreshadows death.
Raquel Tibol, who was with Frida at the time, recalls that when Frida finished it, she gave the work a solemn but reckless look and asked, “Haven’t you seen the other? It’s of my face inside a sunflower. It was a commission. I don’t like the idea; it seems to me that I am drowning inside the flower.” Tibol found the painting Frida mentioned, and brought it to her. It was, like The Brick Kilns, painted in a slapdash way with thick impasto. But unlike the other, it was full of movement, an expression of joy. Tibol remembers:
Irritated by the vital energy that radiated from an object that she had created, an energy that she, in her own movements, no longer possessed, she took a knife made in Michoacán which had a straight and cutting edge, and overcoming the lassitude produced by her nocturnal injections, with tears in her eyes, and a convulsive grin on her tremulous lips, she began to scratch the painting slowly, too slowly. The noise of steel against very dry oil paint grew like a lament in the morning of this space of Coyoacán where she had been born. . . . She scratched, annihilating, destroying herself; it was her sacrifice and her expiation.
She may have been repelled by the radiant energy of the self-portrait as a sunflower, but as the darkness of her own twilight thickened, she wanted to be nearer to light. In June, she asked that her fourposter bed be moved from her small corner bedroom out into the adjacent passageway which led to her studio. She wished, she said, to be able to see more greenery; the tiny passageway had glass-paned metal doors that opened onto a flight of steps leading down to the garden. From this vantage point, she could see the pigeons that lived in the ceramic pots that Rivera had embedded in the pitted stone walls of the new wing of the house. When the summer rains came, she spent many hours watching the flutter of light on leaves, the branches moving in the wind, and the rain pelting onto the roof and pouring from the gutters.
Mariana Morillo Safa remembers: “In her last days she was lying down, unable to move. She was all eyes. I could not stand to see her again. Her character was totally changed. She fought with everyone. Since I stayed only a short while, she was nice to me, but it was as though she was thinking of something else, and just trying to be nice. She couldn’t stand noise and didn’t want too many people near her. She did not want to see children. Just her arms and hands moved, and she threw things at people. ’Stop bothering me! Peace!’ she would cry as she beat people with her cane. She would yell, ’Bring me this! I’m talking to you!’ Her cane was beside her bed, and if you didn’t do things fast, she’d use it. She was very impatient because she couldn’t do things by herself. All she could do was comb her hair and put on lipstick. Earlier, she had not worn makeup except lipstick. At the end of her life, she used makeup, and she could not control her colors. It was grotesque. She was a horrible imitation of the old Frida Kahlo.”
Judith Ferreto: “During those days, she was going down rapidly. . . . I think that she foresaw that she was going down and down. . . . That morning she called me up. I always knew in her voice how she was; it’s very easy to note in the voice when a person is completely desperate, and she was completely desperate that day. And she said, ’Oh, please, Judy, come! Can you come here, Judy, to help me? I cannot do anything. I am completely upset. Please come a
nd help me.’
“I went and spent most of the day with her. She was painting in the studio . . . . she was always so beautiful, with very beautiful dresses. But that day was different. These pleats were separated from the dress in large part. Her hair was completely unarranged, her eyes out of their orbits. She was painting, and was all full of paint on her hands, knuckles, and everything. . . . I took her with all my love. I put her in bed and I said, ’Do you want me to fix you up?’ She said, ’Yes.’ I asked, ’Which dress do you want to wear?’ ’Please bring me the one you prepared before you left, because all those things were done with love, and there is no love around here now. And you know that love is the only reason for living. So bring the one that was made with love.’ I fixed her hair and everything, and she was resting . . . so sweet, so angry, so nasty.”
The visit ended with a fight and a reconciliation. Some visitors had stayed too long, and Judith, seeing how they exhausted Frida, had asked them to leave. Frida was furious. Judith, she felt, was ordering her around in her own home. But they made up, and Frida tried to press her former nurse into accepting the gift of a ring and a Tehuana dress, both of which Judith refused. As she explained it: “I was exasperated that day, because I was convinced, as a nurse, that it was impossible to help Frida Kahlo. I had seen her in many crises in her life. In most of them I helped her, but then Frida had both legs, and I knew that without the leg it was impossible to help her anymore.
“During those days, sometimes some children came to the house to visit her . . . even the child of her sister, whom she loved very much. And after they left her she would say, ’Oh, Judy, I don’t like children anymore. I don’t want them. I can’t tell them not to come, because it’s not good, but I would prefer not to see children anymore.’ After the amputation, she hated children.. . . The operation destroyed a personality. She loved life, she really loved life, but it was completely different after they amputated her leg.
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