by Carole Maso
I will always continue writing to you with my eyes. Kiss the little girl.
~ ~ ~
I started painting twelve years ago while I was recovering from a bus accident that kept me in bed for nearly a year. In all these years, I’ve worked with the spontaneous impulse of my feeling. I’ve never followed any school or anybody’s influence; I have never expected anything from my work but the satisfaction I got from it by the very fact of painting and saying what I couldn’t say otherwise.
I have made portraits, figure compositions, also paintings in which the landscape and still lives are the most important. In painting I found a means to personal expression, without any prejudice forcing me to do it. For ten years my work consisted of eliminating everything that didn’t spring from the internal lyric motivations that impelled me to paint.
Since then my themes have always been my sensations, my states of mind, and the deep reactions that life has been causing inside me. I’ve frequently materialized all that into portraits of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do to express how I felt about myself and what was in front of me.
~ ~ ~
Once when a gardener brought her an old chair, asking if he should throw it away, she requested him to give her the broken leg, and she carved her own lips on it to make a gift for a man she loved.
Kiss the Little Girl
She draws. She draws a door of breath. Breathes on the pane and dreams. She walks once more. Six years old. To the river of glass. Papá. Just a child. She smiles. All is.
All is …
Here is a kiss
Night is falling
Night is falling in my life
Sleep
Sleep
I’m falling asleep
Darling Papá
I send you all my affection and a thousand kisses. Your
daughter who
adores you
Frieducha here is a kiss
Write to me
everything you do
and everything that happens to you …
And she sings, Don’t let your eyes cry when I say good-bye. And she crows and cries good-bye.
Your dress may hang there, but you are already elsewhere.
without flinching
Your dress hangs there but you are
In June she asked that her four-poster bed be moved from the small corner of the bedroom out into the adjacent passageway which led to her studio. She wished she said to be able to see more greenery.…
She draws an O on the windowpane in breath.
The girls liked to loiter — in the court of miracles. She dreams
Here is a kiss.
Her wayward halo — all the mutilated beauty.
Toward the end of her life Frida described the series of orthopedic corsets she wore after 1944 and the treatments that went with them as “punishment.”
There were twenty-eight corsets in all — one made of steel, three of leather, and the rest of plaster. One in particular, she said, allowed her neither to sit nor to recline. It made her so angry that she took it off, and used a sash to tie her torso to the back of a chair in order to support her spine. There was a time when she spent three months in a nearly vertical position with sacks of sand attached to her feet to straighten out her spinal column. Another time Adelina Zendejas, visiting her in the hospital after an operation, found her hanging from steel rings with her feet just able to touch the ground. Her easel was in front of her. We were horrified, Zendejas recalls. She was painting and telling jokes and funny stories.
The vials of Demerol and other drugs all mixed up where tied to a wheelchair she worked for as long as she could and then continued in bed.
Mariana Morilla Safa remembers: In her last days she was lying down, unable to move. She was all eyes.
everything backward
sun and moon, feet and Frida
the amputated leg.
But after three months, she did learn to walk a short distance, and slowly her spirits rose, especially after she started to paint again. To hide the leg, she had boots made of luxurious red leather with Chinese gold-embroidered trim adorned with little bells. With these boots Frida said she would “dance her joy.” And she twirled in front of friends to show off her new freedom of movement. The writer Carlota Tibon recalls that Frida was very proud of her little red boots. Once I took Emilio Pucci’s sister to see Frida, who was all dressed up as a Tehuana and probably drugged. Frida said, these marvelous legs! And how well they work for me! and she danced th ejarabe tapatto with her wooden leg.
Please don’t leave me immediately when I fall asleep. I need you nearby, and I feel it even after I am asleep, so don’t go away immediately.
And from deepest sleep she begs still not the not the …
not the leg …
So I always lay down beside her and she called me her little prop. And sometimes I sang to her.… And she’d ask me for another cigarette. And when she was nearly asleep I’d ask if I should take it and she’d smile no, not yet.
I kiss you through the distance.
For Frida Kahlo in her convalescence—
Beauty is Convulsive
these tendrils of ink from me to you
I kiss you through the distance
This small court of miracles
A sea of votives floating on the river: courage
I am happy as long as I can paint. Not yet.
Is that you? Just a girl at the Preparatoria — and then—
She cries for the wet nurse
kiss the little girl
The brown bloom of her
suck and want
mouthing
love
holding
light
good — bye.
It is coming, my hand, my red
vision. larger, more his.
martyrdom of glass, the great
nonsense. Columns and valleys.
fingers of the wind, the bleeding
children, the mica micron.
I don’t know what my mocking
dream thinks. The ink, the stain,
the shape, the color. I’m a
bird. I’m everything, without any more
confusion. All the bells.
the rules, the lands, the
big grove, the greatest
tenderness, the immense tide.
garbage, water jar, cardboard
cards, dice digits duets
vain hope of con-
structing the cloths, the kings.
silly, my nails, the
thread and the hair …
Adios
What is it Diego?
It is just that we are not very sure that she is dead.
She is dead, Diego.
No but it horrifies me to think that she still has capillary action. The hairs on her skin still stand up.
I assure you she is dead.
Olga Campos was among the early mourners: It was terrible for me. Frida was still warm when I arrived at the house around ten or eleven in the morning. She got goose pimples when I kissed her, and I started screaming, She’s alive! She’s alive! But she was dead.
But it horrifies me we should bury her in that condition.
It’s very simple, Diego. Let the doctor open her veins. If the blood doesn’t flow she is dead.
Rosa Castro: When Frida died he looked like a soul cut in two.
At a quarter past one, Rivera and various family members lifted Frida out of the coffin and laid her on the automatic cart that would carry her along the iron trucks to the crematory oven.
accompanied by music:
I’m off now to the port where the golden ships lie
Everyone was hanging on to Frida’s hands when the cart began to pull her body toward the oven’s entrance. They threw themselves on top of her, and yanked her fingers in order to take off her rings, because they wanted something that belonged to her.
Stay
At the moment when Frid
a entered the furnace, the intense heat made her sit up, and her blazing hair stood out from her face in an aureole.
The fires in the old-fashioned crematorium took four hours to do their job.
Her ashes retained the shape of her skeleton for a few minutes before being dispersed by currents of air. When Rivera saw this, he slowly lowered his clenched fist and reached into the right-hand pocket of his jacket to take out a small sketchbook. With his face completely absorbed in what he was doing, he drew Frida’s silvery skeleton. Then he fondly gathered up her ashes in a red cloth, and put them in a cedar box.
In the incineration she sits upright
At the furnace door forced by heat.
Her hair on fire like a halo
Love, I am the disintegration
She smirks good-bye she laughs she waves on fire
Love, I am.
Thanks to the doctors
Farill — Glusker — Parres
and Doctor Enrique Palomera
Sánchez Palomera
Thanks to the nurses
to the stretcher-bearers to the
cleaning women and attendants at the
British Hospital—
Thanks to Doctor Vargas
to Navarro to Dr. Polo
and to my will-
power
I hope the
leaving is joyful — and I hope
never to return—
FRIDA
And she leaves the frame
You must have been an angel, he mutters from the height
Heat and light
And he takes out a crumpled piece of paper
and draws her skeleton of ash — before it crumbles
heart, heart
Not long after Frida died, Rivera’s granddaughter was baptized in the Coyoacán house. For the occasion, Diego dressed up a Judas figure, perhaps a skeleton, in Frida’s clothes, and a bag containing her ashes and her plaster corset was laid in a cradle.
Her ashes in a sack on top a plaster death mask and a rebozo wrapped, O Frida, Diego whispers, you are beautiful like that.
In the Frida Kahlo Museum beneath a protective glass ball is an assemblage of small objects — an equestrian cowboy on top of a skull, tin soldiers, dice, toy angels, all on pedestals.… A piece that was surely hers, a gift for Alejandro Gomez Arias, was a world globe that Frida covered with butterflies and flowers. In a later year when she was sick and unhappy, she asked for it back and covered the butterflies and flowers with red paint.…
no moon, sun, diamond, hands—
fingertip, dot, ray, gauze, sea.
pine green, pink glass, eye,
mine, eraser, mud, mother, I am coming.
= yellow love, fingers, useful
child, flower, wish, artifice, resin.
pasture, bismuth, saint, soup tureen.
segment, year, tin, another foal.
point, machine, stream, I am.
To love you very much with an M as in mundo or music.
Look at her work … ascetic and tender, hard as steel and fire and delicate as a butterfly’s wing, adorable as a beautiful smile and profound and cruel as life’s bitterness.
Diego, Diego
We are held together by smoke now
I know the way.
World Tonight
You are walking down a dirt road alone — free for a moment from the sorrow and drama of your life, free of your body’s pain — free of — free.…
You are walking without physical pain for a moment though it informs each step. Drawn to the swirling. A little free, a little free of — dragging a right foot.
While you have not forgotten it, for a moment, sucking on a paintbrush and looking up into the fiesta of the sun you see yourself walk away — walk out — out of your leather corset, your steel corset, your plaster corset, your corset of thorns and tears. Your abyss of dark birds. Diego, Diego.
I am sweeping the earth. I am soaking the earth with my tears. Dragging a right foot. Sorrow.
Brushing up, rubbing up slightly against her—I am sweeping the earth with my hair, with my grief.
All is failed — but the light is not failed. Walking away from your marriage which seems to be failing for a second time. One good leg.
You take her hand. She pulls on your necklace of swallows and thorns. You take her to the ditch at the end of the dirt road. You chew the earth at her door, screaming for her to come with you — down the dirt road — home. You take her hand and pull her with you, free. A little free. Free of—
You have come to the place of utter sorrow and coast as the end approaches. Smoke rising from the river.
As the end nears. You cradle a sugar skull.
And the small boats put up their white sails and your workers of the world unite once more.… See how the shoreline recedes and the boats and the dirt road you loved and walked no. And the roses. You are dragging her here to this — and your country soaked in blood and broken. Yes, you whirl in your communista, raising a fist and cigarette and swagger. Mouthing Trotsky, all your thorns and roses. Your country,
body gone to blood and broken. And you charm her with your fetish and image and promises and she watches as you suck on the edge of your corset. You swear into her ear as you lower her. You bisect in every possible way her body, in the ditch, laughing maniacally, left for dead, on the dirt road
home—
Without pain.
In pain in dread — you are devouring time and the earth and the woman — you are devouring women — in your bravado—
And the woman mud smeared all over her breathless points and gasps at the little deer pierced by arrows.
Laugh and cuss scrawl on her body with earth and blood you whisper: I hope the exit is joyful. And I hope never to come back.
hourglass
Because I am running out of legs, life.
Free. Free of.
She offers her palette like a heart. Paints fertile earth: green vines and leaves spring from her womb, her heart, while blood drips into veins that take root in the soil in front of her.
She nourishes the earth with her body, the woman with her body. She feeds the earth
fecund one. darling earthling.
soil, love.
She holds herself above her — lowers herself feeding folds and folds of fertile, gorgeous earth.
She smiles. You are sweet. And Diego too would like you. And she drags her down — rooted to the soil
stone spine
vagina fused to the throbbing earth
sunken
fucked.
The feminine earth. Lit by roses. Body of a woman, fire, future in your darkening theater. Proscenium of night. And you smile, mutter, not in any known language I am eating the earth. I need the earth in my mouth now. A rose opening. Chueca. Perfect one, unbroken.
Put it into my mouth now.
A tree grows inside you. I have seen it. Leaves sprout from your veins. Your blood nourishes the earth.
You drag your sexual entrails to this sacred place — drawn to the swirling — this final place of fury, desire — your tears are nails and paint — abyss of birds — ruined spine, leg.
No
No
Blood shall be shed.
One good leg
Kiss me. Again.
And she is furious, a fury flailing, screaming. Tortured — then replenished.
Hung upside down, naked, tied in an attempt to strengthen her spine.
And you are left in the end with all that pain cannot take from you.
Many nights she hung upside down from the bed’s canopy. The blood rushing to her head. While the women sat and whispered, prayed.
Pray:
Come to me now, down the dirt road, my little one — you remind me of a little girl I once knew at the Prepa (smooth and perfect) — before the accident.
And you sit laughing with all that pain cannot take.
And who could refuse you? Your dark dares
your outrageous,
your flagrant
your stare
If I could carve with thorns Diego into you allegiance. Fidelity. Carve wild fidelity — my blood sport, my art — paint pulsing, paint flowing — beauty — beating like an injured thing. If I could carve my pain. Draw blood.
Look you say pointing to the little deer pierced by arrows. Its head of a saint. Its head of a cursing martyr. Its leather corset. A grief-induced hallucination. A sex-induced or pain-in- duced—Look there: the open fruit. The lacerated melons, pomegranates revealing their juices, juicy — just a little skin pulled back on that one. Pulpy, hurt and splayed.
She is arranging and rearranging her long black hair and earth. The trinkets in her hair. The arrangement on the dressing table. She looks at the woman in the mirror. Slowly applies paint. Radiant, radiate. Free. She stares and offers her the heart-shaped palette:
World tonight.
Men ascend double staircases looking for you.
But you are not there.
You are out painting. You are watching the eclipse. You are balancing fire. Arranging and rearranging. Outlining the shape of a woman and gently filling her in.
You are nailed by roses now and gently fastened by the girl to this extraordinary world.
You are in the midnight garden spooning earth,
devouring gorgeousness.
because I miss you with all my heart and my blood, Diego.
heart and blood solemn
feed me slowly tonight
filling my mouth
All the distance, earth diminishes between us
A door.
And she falls into dream. And in the dream she is free from her pain a little, though it is never far off — and she is walking down a dirt road.
And she is sucking the blood from her brushes, free. And she is looking in the mirror and she is painting the earth and she is sucking on the earth. And she stops to bring Diego his lunch and the white woman with the pen says, and the gringa yells Frida leave that fat man for awhile! And the gringa is sucking on a pen and writing this: You are walking — a dirt road — free of pain.
Easy for you to say, chueca. Easy for you … With your pale pornography of hope, your “dirt road alone,”your pretty ink-stained hands, your little poems in prose, your mouth, your thigh. A rage of perfect white.