Living in close quarters with Natalia produced its own particular brand of tension, but Frankel and Van felt a strong sense of loyalty to “la chère,” as they referred to her in private. This formed no small part of their concern about the behavior of her husband. Van says he decided to say nothing, but that “Jan Frankel, as I remember, ventured to speak to Trotsky about the dangers inherent in the situation.” Over the years this cautious recollection somehow mutated into a dead certainty that Frankel broke with the Old Man over the Frida affair. The real story is less dramatic. Having spoken his mind to Trotsky and withdrawn from the Blue House, Frankel was in a better position to confront him about the Frida matter. Perhaps he also had a clearer sense of the looming catastrophe.
The dangers extended well beyond the health of Trotsky’s marriage. Every nightmare scenario revolved around Diego, who as yet had no notion of what was going on. “Since he was morbidly jealous,” Van testifies, “the least suspicion would have caused an explosion.” A scandal would compromise Trotsky’s reputation while feeding the fury of the Mexican Communists and thereby jeopardizing his security. Diego might feel honor-bound to evict Trotsky from the Blue House; perhaps he would throw his support behind the Communists in their unending pressure campaign against the government to terminate Trotsky’s asylum in Mexico.
Or Diego might simply decide to terminate Trotsky. Frida had warned previous lovers that her husband’s jealousy could conceivably incite him to murder. One of those lovers was Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, with whom Frida had an extended liaison in 1935. He later recounted that when a sock of his turned up at Frida’s house, “Diego came by with a gun. He always carried a gun. The second time he displayed his gun to me was in the hospital. Frida was ill for some reason, and I went there, and he showed me his gun and said: ‘Next time I see you, I’m going to shoot you!’”
Diego had a habit of threatening people, and he wielded his pistol like an exclamation point, so perhaps there was no reason to fear that he would actually use it as a deadly weapon. But there was no telling what acts of revenge he might be driven to if he were humiliated by the public airing of his wife’s affair with the great Trotsky—the man he had helped gain refuge in Mexico.
By the beginning of July, the atmosphere at the Blue House was becoming unbearable, because the discord between Trotsky and Natalia had turned venomous. The only possible remedy was a temporary separation. On July 7, Trotsky left Coyoacán and moved to a hacienda owned by a friend of Diego’s near San Miguel Regla, some eighty miles northeast of Mexico City. Here Trotsky would be able to enjoy the outdoors, to fish and ride horseback. Accompanying him were police sergeant Jesús Casas, who commanded the police garrison guarding the Blue House, and Sixto, one of Rivera’s chauffeurs.
Four days after Trotsky’s arrival at the hacienda, on July 11, Frida paid him a visit. Natalia had wanted to come along on this trip, but Frida had maneuvered to leave her behind. Their meeting was neither secret, nor very private. Frida traveled in the company of Frederico Marin, a brother of Diego’s first wife and a medical doctor, whose presence probably provided Frida with the pretext for her visit, just as Trotsky’s failing health served as the cover story for his retreat to the hacienda.
Whatever calculations lay behind their rendezvous on that rain-soaked July day, their affair was quickly coming to an end. Van believes that during Frida’s visit, the two made a joint decision to call a halt. “Now, in view of the circumstances, it was impossible for them to go further without committing themselves completely. The stakes were too high. The two partners drew back.” Frida’s alleged remark that she had become “very tired of the old man” might indicate that she alone drew back. Yet she was sufficiently inspired to undertake an arduous nine-hour round-trip by automobile in order to spend a few hours in Trotsky’s company.
After Frida and her traveling companions departed, Trotsky wrote to Natalia of his unexpected visitors and about the enjoyable—though not too enjoyable—time they passed together, expressing his regret that she had not felt well enough to undertake the journey. Trotsky tries so hard to make the visit seem uneventful that he ends up sounding like a man with something to hide. “This letter is purely descriptive,” he concludes awkwardly, “but it exhausts everything that would interest you.”
Hurt and angered at having been left out, and apparently fearing that her husband was part of the conspiracy, Natalia wrote to him demanding an explanation. In his overwrought reply, Trotsky tried to reassure her that her exclusion had been Frida’s doing. “Come!” he exclaims, declaring his innocence. His letter sheds light on the nature of the stormy conversations leading up to their separation, which featured a predictable psychological maneuver on his part. Thrown on the defensive about his relationship with Frida, he went on the attack, accusing Natalia of having had an affair of her own almost twenty years earlier, when they occupied an apartment in the Kremlin.
The alleged infidelity was supposed to have occurred in 1918, after Natalia had been appointed director of the museums department of the People’s Commissariat of Education. A young comrade on her staff had become infatuated with her, and she had deflected his attentions. So said Natalia. Trotsky could not be certain. It is unclear whether his suspicion took hold back in the Kremlin days or more recently, as he surveyed the marital landscape with a conscience troubled by his own transgressions and derelictions. Whatever the case, he kept turning the matter over in his mind and confronting Natalia, who called his behavior “recidivism.”
The sudden reappearance of the minor functionary from long ago was unquestionably convenient for Trotsky, enabling him to turn the tables on his wife. Yet his display of masochistic jealousy was no mere pose. “I have been reliving our yesterdays, that is, our pangs of memories, pangs of my torment,” he said, referring to his suspicions about her extramarital affair. This “insignificant question stands before me with such force, as though our entire life hangs on the answer to it…And I run to get a piece of paper and write down the question. Natalochka, I’m writing to you about this with self-hatred.”
In this and subsequent letters, Trotsky’s emotions bounce back and forth between euphoria and agony, repentance and revenge. “Your letter brought me happiness, tenderness (how I love you, Nata, my only one, my eternal one, my faithful one, my love and my victim!)—but also tears, tears of pity, of repentance and…torment. Natalochka, I will burn my stupid, pitiful, self-serving ‘questions.’ Come!”
In his hour of torment, Trotsky cannot keep still. “After every two or three lines I stand up, walk about the room and weep tears of self-reproach and of gratitude to you, and above all tears for the old age that has taken us by surprise.”
They had met in Paris in the autumn of 1902. Trotsky, who turned twenty-three that November, had recently escaped from eastern Siberia; he had spent three years in czarist prisons and exile there, following his arrest for distributing radical texts to the dockworkers of the Ukrainian city of Nikolaev, near the Black Sea. From Siberia Trotsky headed straight to London for his historic first meeting with Lenin, and from there he made his way to the Continent to lecture on Marxist theory to the radical Russian émigré colonies. This brought him to Paris, where he met Natalia Sedova, a smart and attractive young woman who was a member of the radical group associated with the Russian newspaper Iskra (The Spark), of which Lenin was a leading figure. The daughter of wealthy parents of noble birth, Natalia had been expelled from an exclusive boarding school in Kharkov, in the Ukraine, for reading radical literature and was now a student of art history at the Sorbonne. Like everyone else in the audience that autumn day in Paris, she was impressed by Trotsky’s oratory, which “exceeded all expectations.” Dialectical materialism had never sounded more appealing, and the two young radicals began seeing each other.
In Natalia, a slight, oval-faced woman with irrepressible wavy brown hair and full lips, Trotsky had a charming and knowledgeable guide to the sights of Paris, especially its art, and the two spent ho
urs touring the Louvre. Trotsky, the Ukrainian farm boy, proved to be a reluctant tourist, however, and generally behaved like a boor, dismissing Paris with the comment: “Resembles Odessa, but Odessa is better.” Natalia later recalled that her companion “was utterly absorbed in political life, and could see something else only when it forced itself upon him. He reacted to it as if it were a bother, something avoidable. I did not agree with him in his estimate of Paris, and twitted him a little for this.” Trotsky later attested that in Paris “I came face to face with real art” for the first time and that he learned to appreciate it only “with great difficulty” and only thanks to Natalia’s persuasive presence. “I had my own world of revolution, and this was very exacting and brooked no rival interests.”
The comrades became lovers, which presented Natalia with a dilemma, because she already had a lover. Trotsky was married, but his wife, Alexandra, and their two small children had been left behind in distant Siberia. Natalia felt torn, and she hesitated before committing herself to Trotsky. “He never forgave me,” she confided to a friend after Trotsky’s death. “It always kept coming up.”
Trotsky interrupted the separation with a visit to Coyoacán for three days, July 15 to 18, but his time together with Natalia did nothing to put him at ease. Upon his return to the hacienda, he writes to her that he has decided to confine all his disturbing thoughts and feelings to a personal diary, which they can read together when he rejoins her; this way his letters will not upset her. A moment later, however, he is unable to restrain himself: “I just wanted to say—and it’s not a criticism—that my ‘recidivism’ (as you write) was inspired to a certain extent by your recidivism. You continue (it’s hard even to write about it!) to compete, to rival…With whom? She is nobody to me. You are everything to me. No need, Nata, no need, no need, I beg of you.”
He reassures Natalia that in the diary he has moved on from the question of what actually transpired back in 1918, yet on the following day, July 20, he telephones her from the nearby town of Pachuca and unburdens himself. The scene is utterly preposterous: the hero of Red October shouting at his wife through an uncooperative Mexican telephone about an imagined infidelity of two decades earlier. Natalia protested that it was all in the past, and Trotsky shot back: “The past is the present.”
The conversation left Natalia feeling drained and depressed. The next day, she recorded her state of mind in a missive that is part letter, part diary. “Lvionochek doesn’t trust me; has lost faith in me,” she writes. She was fond of addressing her husband privately as “Lvionochek,” a diminutive of Lev that translates as “My Little Lion.” “Again he is racked by suspicion, jealousy and speaks about it on the telephone. He tells me to be calm, but how can I be calm when he, Lvionochek, raves, seethes; how can I be calm?…It’s your pride. I’m stopping to cry.”
Once again, Natalia lays out the case for her innocence in 1918, but then subtly, perhaps consciously, shifts the focus to what may have been the real source of her husband’s self-torment. She describes their marriage in terms that sound like a rationale for the infidelity she never committed. Her background in art history had helped her land an important position in the upper reaches of the Soviet establishment, but she had none of her husband’s experience and confidence, and she looked to him for support. “I remember whenever I wanted to tell you something about my work, something related to personal relations, about some success or failure, looking for your sympathy, or approval, or advice—you avoided me, turned me away, sometimes softly, more often brusquely.” Natalia had initially written “sometimes brusquely,” but must have decided that under the circumstances honesty ought to trump delicacy.
She won a small victory, she recalls, when her husband agreed to read a report she had written for the Central Committee and then pronounced it “very well written.” “This was a moment of great happiness for me. I had wanted to ask you to read it before I sent it, but I couldn’t find the right moment, you were always busy.” In those days they saw each other fleetingly, usually at lunch and dinner. Risking the disapproval of her colleagues, she would sometimes skip evening meetings in the hope of spending time with her husband. “But usually you arrived home after I had already gone to bed.”
Then, without a pause, her tone brightens. “I remember your morning moods. How cheerfully you rose from bed, how quickly you dressed, called the car and with a passing gesture or word encouraged me and…Seryozha, who was gloomily getting dressed. How vividly I remember you as such, dear, good, I want to hug you strongly. I would hurry to catch you and together with you drive to work.”
Now husband and wife spent almost every day in each other’s company and retired together almost every night. Yet, in this moment of despair, Natalia remarks: “Everyone is, in essence, terribly alone.” Trotsky underlined these words in red crayon. “This sentence stabbed me in the heart,” he told her, repeating the line, as though in disbelief that it came from his wife. Her words seem to have aggravated his growing sense of vulnerability in the face of advancing age, a thread that runs through their correspondence. Lately he has been repeatedly surprised at how old age has crept up on him. A solitary entry in the diary he kept in France in April 1935 reads: “Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a person.” On this the partners were in harmony and offered each other support and encouragement.
Natalia sounds more philosophical about it: “I saw myself in the mirror at Rita’s,” she tells her husband, “and found I look much older. Our inner state has an enormous importance in old age; it makes us look younger; it makes us look older.” Trotsky’s response to this observation returned him to their courtship in Paris in 1902: “This was the case with you also when you were young. On the day after our first night together you were very sad and looked ten years older. In happy times you looked like a fawn. You’ve retained this ability to change all your life.”
Confronted with the inevitable, Trotsky strikes defiant poses, twice punctuating one of his missives with the affirmation, “We will live on, Natasha!” In a letter dated July 19, defiance veers toward bravado: “Since I arrived here, not once has my poor cock stood up straight. It’s as though it doesn’t exist. It is also resting from the stresses of these days. But in spite of it, I myself am thinking tenderly of your old, dear cunt. I want to suck on it, shove my tongue all the way inside it. Natalochka, my dear, I will ever more strongly fuck you with my tongue and with my cock. Forgive me, Natalochka, these lines, it seems it’s the first time in my life that I write to you like this.”
For Natalia, of course, there was nothing to forgive in this unexpected outburst from “my intimate, old lover.” In fact this was just what she needed to hear.
On the following day, Trotsky sets off on a strenuous horseback ride with Casas and Sixto, both veteran cavalrymen. He returns invigorated and writes Natalia an erotic little dissertation on the benefits of a good hard ride. “The shaking is excellent for the organism,” he explains. This reminds him of something Leo Tolstoy’s wife once wrote in her diary, recounting how her husband, at age seventy, returned from riding full of lust and passion. Trotsky reasons that if Tolstoy at seventy was able to ride and to make love, then the riding itself would have been enough to arouse his passion: “aside from the general shaking, there’s the specific friction…. A woman who rides a horse like a man, should, in my opinion, experience complete satisfaction.”
One week later, Trotsky returned, by automobile, to Natalia in Coyoacán. She did not record whether he behaved like Tolstoy, but it was now clear to Van and the rest of the household that she no longer had to worry about her competitor. “A distance had been established between Trotsky and Frida; the word ‘love’ was heard no more.” Later Frida told Van that Trotsky had asked her to return the letters he had written her during their affair, warning, “They could fall into the hands of the G.P.U.” She complied and Trotsky no doubt destroyed this evidence.
The numerous post-affair photographs taken of Trotsky in the
company of Frida invite speculation as to what each was thinking as they took part, en famille, in picnics, sightseeing, and other excursions. In these images, Natalia is frequently positioned alongside Frida, and each woman seems uncomfortable in the other’s presence. Natalia tended to blow hot and cold in her dealings with members of the household, and her behavior toward Frida was no different. On some occasions when Diego and Frida visited the Blue House, Natalia would greet Frida with flowers and warm affection, while at other times she would not come out of her room. Like most everyone else, Frida found Natalia’s bursts of affection to be as oppressive as her cold shoulder.
Natalia did emerge from her room on November 7, 1937, her husband’s fifty-eighth birthday and the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution, when Frida presented Trotsky with a self-portrait dedicated to him. The Frida in this painting looks more like a conventional Southern belle, not the folkloric Tehuana Frida one expects. She is tastefully dressed and all done up, with red cheeks, lips, and fingernails, and with a purple carnation and a red ribbon in her hair. She stands between two curtains holding a small bouquet of flowers and a sheet of paper inscribed with the words, “For Leon Trotsky with all love I dedicate this painting on the 7th of November, 1937. Frida Kahlo in San Angel, Mexico.” Trotsky hung the painting on a wall in his study in the Blue House.
This proved to be a breakthrough period in Frida’s career as an artist. She became more prolific than she had been since her marriage to Diego eight years earlier. She had her first solo gallery exhibition in New York, and soon afterward her paintings were featured in a Paris exhibition devoted to Mexican art and culture. She was emerging from the shadow of her husband. Perhaps this is what she had in mind when she wrote to a friend that Trotsky’s coming to Mexico was the best thing that had ever happened in her life.
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