by Carole Maso
And you play one last time directly into their disdain. Narcissist, drama queen, dabbler, hysteric. Dying posthumously from their potshots: Rivera was a better artist than his wife, but it’s she who is now enshrined as a saint. Her self-portraits sell for the requisite millions, and Madonna, who collects them is planning a movie based on her life. This meeting between the Material Girl and the Mexican Communist might seem a bit surreal, but no more so than the current fashion for producing worshipful books on the artist. The tomes of the past few years include a cookbook of her “fiesta” recipes and a biography for teenage girls that presents the artist as the most exemplary female role model since Florence Nightingale.
Little girls playing at grownup things. Their disdain. In the diminished, in the belittled. An astonishingly vapid pornographic fantasy, from the Brown/Columbia professor whose previous labors in this vineyard (The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, 1994, etc.) have been praised by some as masterly … Although the poetic sequences contain striking passages and vivid images, they can’t convey a story in any recognizable sense, running the high risk of rapidly coming to seem pointless. Unfortunately, they form the whole of the book.
In the mean-spirited, in the demeaning
Floating: a pair of red legs severed from the body — and between them a pair of lips.
Hair on fire tiny shrunken Frida heads on fire. Tongues are lapping, laughing, lapsing last grotesque,
total eclipse on fire. A dancing pair of lips. Insisting insinuating separating now you see—
In one 1951 Still Life now lost the flagpole’s pointed tip emerges inside the halved fruit’s soft dark interior.
And I am still caught in it, in you again and writing the Frida etudes and singing little patriotic songs demented songs, let’s hear one, in the bleak hilarity of the end. Lips lowered. Magenta.
Wayward songs and love — through the condescension — making a muffled song up.
Parts of her
fall away
a hand
an eye
everything we’ll usually need a mouth a wing
hair on fire
look over there
It’s like floating
Your hands arranging …
The visible wing of the misshapen angel.
Pulque—a kind of ambrosia,
Sing me into the end she begs.
Black rose of blood flowering in the eye
Crow feathers glittering in the corners of the room.
Monkey fur.
Where does your life go?
You put it in a box. Marked 3 7 9. Fingering the necklace of
humming birds and thorns
dark corridor.
down the dark hall
to the crematorium.
I am the disintegration you scrawl you scratch paw — The noise of steel against skin—Are you leaving then?
No.
Another shot of Demerol
Votive: oblivion
So touch me with your disembodied hand. It will be like floating, it will be like living some.
How badly do you want it?
— other side.
carrying a wooden box.
Men in black ascend double staircases carrying the wooden box but you are out watching the solar eclipse.
You are out singing off-color songs in front of a falling curtain of velvet and pulque and blood. The furious theater of you. “Diego please make her stop. The operatic pitch of Kahlo’s sentiments left little room for the day-to-day particulars of experience. Her diary provides neither startling disclosures nor the sort of mundane, kitchen-sink detail that captivates by virtue of its ordinariness.… Kahlo’s diary allows for no such dreamy identification with its subject, whose life was less lived than staged.” Deborah Solomon “reviewing” your diary in the New York Times would like to insult you a little longer
But you are out painting solitude.
drawing a right foot.
drawing
hair on fire. Shaking your fetus in a bottle.
remembering …
Frida adored children. She believed they possessed purer creative powers than adults.
The tone of the box 10 our fathers—
the hum of the box.
— are ascending double staircases with roses and weeping.
10 our fathers
hope
But they are in another corner of the dark garden altogether
force — feeding each other flowers. What links them to each other is a tendril, a fragile line of paint, a word.
She smirks. Good-bye on fire
See how she—
Fetus V viva
Viva la vida she writes in red with only one week left to live. Amputated leg and life. The grave we dig all night.
Dress on fire halo tendril.
Toward the end of June when her health improves she will ask, What are you going to give me now as a prize since I’m getting better? I’d like a doll best
The strange dancing legs.
I would like a doll most.
She covers her wooden leg with boots made of red leather with Chinese gold emblazoned and bells embroidered. And she dances. But only once. Heartbroken. Love me. How badly tonight.
Life — begging for it by then, remembering she smiles — she’ll be begging for it by then. Not yet.
A perfect day: make love, take a bath, make love again.
And sucking drugs and roses. If you could feel what I feel. And she carves a door. The drone of the box and the cross and the word.
love, love.
In another garden altogether
force — feeding you the end
Knife through the succulent melon — knife through. All the weeping fruit. She whispers bites my ear but gently blurs, seduction, love, no blood, she whispers, biting—Shh — Shh — or they’ll hear—
Men ascend with dirges but.
With Glory Bes to the Father and to the Son but.
Ascend with testimonies, reviews, dirges, posthumous appraisals but you refuse. “While other artists of her generation (Rivera included) were trying to master the tilting planes of Cubism, Kahlo was painting herself flat on her back, having a miscarriage — and recycling her sorrows as spectacle.” With double recriminations, but you refuse. Carrying the wooden box.
Falling off that ludicrous pedestal. The plaster cracking. Your corset. Breaking into arms and legs. Dance away. Resilient one. Trying to keep up. A three-legged race.
Men ascend with passions, compliments flirtatious but—
You are driving in a Lincoln Continental convertible with Doctor Polo. Jangling. Charms. You ask for a double tequila.
Caught in the buzz and hum
the festival of the sun.
Beauty is convulsive or not at all.
I love you Frida next to the next to the painting sound, the scraping sound don’t go.
I love you next to the solitude.
Her increasingly dark and silent theater, her darkening verandah of invitations, talons, treacherous birds, monkey, songbook, her wrought-iron
Men ascend look:
A love-lorn woman with a cup of poison fallen dead at her blue door
Cupped, her hands reveal a little bird, a box, solace, a 3 7 9
Her very blue door, then door of earth, you wave the fetus cackle babble drugged: abyss oblivion sorrow
Papá!
You see birds, the planets you see a little deer and you see your father closing the aperture now.
hourglass
pyramid
a deer with 9 arrows — confined to an apparatus
In Aztec mythology and iconography the image of the deer stands for the right foot.
Crimson
Crimson
Crimson
Crimson like the blood
that runs
when they kill
a deer
The names in pink on her bedroom door:
Maria Felix
Elena Vdsquez Gdmez
>
Marcela Armida
Irene Bohus
Maria Félix you cry!
Viva la vida she scrawls on my breasts. And I am trying to extricate myself — in anticipation of the end.
Coward, she hisses.
Viva la vida.
Her ruined leg.
Oh Valentin, Valentina, she croons
I too know how to die. But if
they’re going to kill me
tomorrow, why don’t they
kill me now?
Hair on fire wayward halo angel garden fur and there yes good no yes oh paint no scrape it hurts like that right there — opening — to reveal 9 arrows — sorrow, nails and roses, upside down, now up, now down, hold there, oh look — oh love—Comb my hair Cristina
Arrange my hair with combs now
Color of poison
Everything upside down.
Me? Sun
and moon
feet
and
Frida
Heartbroken
She pictures the V
a little
free
Viva
Holding a melon on the eve of her death
Trying to let go of—
3 7 9
tenacity and wildness
of the day
of the night
A perfect day: make love, take a bath, make love again.
And we force feed her tubers and the end.
Men ascend with the pine box looking for your body but
She closes her eyes recalling her twin votives: vision, devotion
She would become happy in front of any beautiful thing.
She clutches a tequila and a sugar skull. Against the blue door she poses a moment longer. Then she walks one-footed down the hall, poor paw, poor paw
and she says live once more, and she says love
arranges the fruit: watermelon on the dark earth
once more
the ripe red
love, love
Viva la vida
And she picks up a brush.
Incessant dreaming: Chalice
To love you very much with an M
as in music or mundo.
All the things you held and hold …
and everything and everyone you loved
and all you wanted feared and—
your jokes:
Frida clung to her sense of the ridiculous; she loved to play, and on days when her natural exuberance won out against pain, she created a stage from the semi-circular metal contraption designed to keep her right leg raised, and produced puppet shows with her feet. When the bone bank sent a bone extracted from a cadaver in a jar labeled with the name of the donor, Francisco Villa, Frida felt as vital and as rebellious as her revolutionary bandit hero Pancho Villa. With my new bone, she cried, I feel like shooting my way out of this hospital and starting my own revolution.
your disdain your rage
absurdity of the maimed and desperately decorated
your handful of black charms suns moons and stars
your handful now of nights and days left
your Diego votives: venga
Without flinching you hold your pain that cup of mysterious universe
your viva la vida
your joie de vivre
And you make love freely to the world — burning
gracious, overflowing wayward halo cup on fire
And you play the jeux de la vérité in Paris, the game of truth and when you refuse to tell your age your punishment is to make love to the chair — which you do — beautifully.
laughing lovely chalice.
The project was conceived and executed in the spirit of fun. No one presumed that a great work of an would be produced. The style combined the broad, simplified realism of Rivera with the awkward primitivism of the pulquería mural tradition. The subjects — town and country scenes based on the bar’s name (The Little Rose) and the theme of pulque — were delegated according to each student’s predilection. Fanny Rabel recalls that her job was to paint a little girl. She also put roses in the pasture.
All you held, and gently:
Her students agree that Frida’s teaching was completely unprogrammatic. She did not impose her ideas on them; rather she let their talents develop according to their temperaments and taught them to be self-critical. Her remarks were penetrating, but never unkind.
balancing hope, exchanging fires
All you saw:
drawn to the vision, dreaming one:
a purple carnation
a red ribbon in her hair
her lips are crimson
eyebrows like swallows
monkey, skeleton, exposed heart, a blood-red ribbon
a paw
at the fetish altar
flower of life
shells symbols of birth, fecundity,
a scallop and a conch intertwined by the roots
from the magenta frame flowers, fruit, Frida, a red vein
She would become happy in front of any beautiful thing
Fanny Rabel: Frida’s great teaching was to see through artist’s eyes.… She did not influence us through her way of painting, but through her way of living, of looking at the world and at people and at art. She made us feel and understand a certain kind of beauty in Mexico that we would not have realized ourselves.… She did not impose anything. Frida would say, Paint what you see, what you want. We all painted differently. Followed our own routes. We did not paint like her. There was lots of chatting, jokes, conviviality. She was not giving us a lesson. Diego, on the other hand, could make a theory about anything in a minute. But she was instinctive, spontaneous. She would become happy in front of any beautiful thing.
Delirious chalice:
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.
Without flinching you hold and are held by pain:
Ella Paresce, an American pianist who visited Frida often, remembered how one cast almost killed her. Frida had allowed a friend who happened to be a doctor, but with little experience in applying casts, to put a plaster corset on her one afternoon while friends were over. Everyone watched and laughed along with Frida as he molded it to her body.
Then during the night, Ella explained, the corset began to harden, as it was supposed to do. I happened to be spending the night there in the next room, and about half past four or five in the morning, I heard a crying, nearly shrieks. I jumped out of bed and went in, and there was Frida saying she couldn’t breathe! She couldn’t breathe!
The corset had hardened, but it hardened so much that it pressed on her lungs. It made pleats all around her body. So I tried to get a doctor. Nobody would pay any attention at that hour in the morning, so finally I took a razor blade and knelt on the bed over Frida. I began slowly, slowly cutting that corset right over her breast. I made about a two-inch cut so that she could breathe, and then we waited until a doctor appeared, and he did the rest. Afterward we laughed to tears over this thing. Frida’s hospital room was always full of visitors. Dr. Velasco y Polo recalls her fear of solitude and boredom. What she liked was gaiety, spicy gossip, and dirty jokes. Volatile by habit, she would, says the doctor, get very excited and say, “Listen to that son of a bitch, please throw him out of here. Send him to the devil.” When she saw me with a pretty girl, she’d cry, “Lend her to me! I’ll smoke that one myself!” She liked to talk about medicine, politics, her father, Diego, sex, free love, the evils of Catholicism.
Trotsky, Noguchi, Muray, floating in the extraordinary cup of her. Her trinkets, treasures. Her assortment of lovers.
My adorable Nick—
I am sending you from here millions of kisses for your beautiful neck to make it feel better. All my tenderness and all my caresses to your body, from your head to your feet. Every inch of it I kiss
from the distance.
To love you very much with an M as in music or mundo or Mexico:
I remember that I was four years old when the “tragic ten days” took place. I witnessed with my own eyes Zapata’s peasants battle against the Carrancistas. My situation was very clear. My mother opened the windows on Allende Street. She gave access to the Zapatistas, seeing to it that the wounded and hungry jumped from the windows of my house into the “living room.” She cured them and gave them thick tortillas, the only food that could be obtained in Coyoacan in those days.
Your eyes — grave chalice — all you held and hold
Beautiful witness
Cherish.
And you hold good-bye and tenderly now:
Since you wrote to me, on that day so clear and so far away, I have wanted to explain to you, that I cannot escape the days, nor return in time to the other time. I have not forgotten you — the nights are long and difficult. The water. The boat and the pier and the departure, that was making you so small, to my eyes, imprisoned in that round window, that you looked at in order to keep you in my heart. All this is intact. Later came the days, new days of you. Today I would like my sun to touch you.
The huipil with reddish-purple ribbons is yours. Mine the old plazas of your Paris, above all the marvelous Place des Vosges, so forgotten and firm. The snails and the bride doll are yours too, that is to say you are you. Her dress is the same one that she did not want to take off on the day of the wedding with no one, when we found her almost asleep on the dirty floor of a street. My skirts with ruffles of lace, and the old blouse … make the absent portrait of only one person. But the color of your skin, of your eyes and your hair changes with the wind of Mexico. You also know that everything that my eyes see and everything that I touch with my own self, from all the distances, is Diego. The caress of cloth, the color of color, the wires, the nerves, the pencils, sheets of paper, dust, cells, war and the sun, all that lives in the minutes of the no-clocks and the no-calendars and the no-empty glances, is him — You felt it, for that reason you allowed the boat to carry me from Le Havre, where you never said good-bye to me.