“Love the earth and sun and the animals…
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”
–Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass
The address the woman at the market gave her
led to a stone house with a wooden door
on a rubbish-strewn street in Mexico City.
At the end of a long, dim hallway,
Frida came to a sunlit patio
alive with plants and birds
where she found her sister Maty
washing herself with a hose.
She’d not seen Maty since the day
she’d eloped at the age of fifteen.
Frida was seven when she helped her sister
escape through a balcony window
and fifteen when she found her again.
Their parents wouldn’t forgive Maty
for fleeing their unhappiness.
Their father proposed to their mother
the night his first wife died in childbirth.
Three months later, when they married,
Matilde sent his infant daughter and her older sister
to be raised in a convent.
Guillermo wanted sons, but their only son died.
He had four more daughters with Matilde.
After each birth, Matilde escaped into illness.
The two older daughters raised their younger sisters.
Next-to-youngest Frida was her father’s favorite,
dressed as a boy in family portraits
next to her more conventional sisters.
Frida was the only one
educated at the Preparatoria
among the elite like a favored son,
She commuted from Coyoacán
into the heart of Mexico City,
one of 35 girls among 2,000 boys.
After the Mexican Revolution,
the family began its slide into poverty
when Guillermo lost his commission
documenting his adopted country’s
architectural heritage. His beloved
Blue House had to be mortgaged.
Misanthropic, epileptic,
he retreated into failure,
while his shrewd, illiterate wife
managed the finances.
Frida was saucy, impertinent, lively,
despite her withered leg and limp
from polio. She was eighteen years old
and in love with an older student, Alejandro,
when one September afternoon, after school,
the rickety, wooden bus they were riding
was rammed by a street trolley.
They had been on another bus
when she missed her pink parasol,
and they got off to look for it.
After a while they gave up
and caught the next bus.
It was a long bus with benches
on either side. Struck in the middle,
the bus bent until it burst into pieces,
while the train kept moving.
It is a lie that one is aware of the crash,
a lie that one cries. In me there were no tears.
The crash bounced us forward, and a handrail
pierced me the way a sword pierces a bull.
A man saw me having a tremendous hemorrhage.
He carried me and put me on a billiard table
until the Red Cross came for me.
The train’s steel handrail broke off,
entering Frida’s abdomen
and exiting her vagina.
Her pelvis and spinal column
were broken in three places,
and her collarbone was fractured.
Her third and fourth ribs were broken.
Her right leg had eleven fractures.
Her right foot was dislocated and crushed.
The impact of the crash stripped
the clothes from her body.
A packet of gold leaf
carried by a painter spilled open,
sprinkling her naked, bleeding body
with flecks of gold. Seeing her,
people cried, La bailarina!
Alejandro covered her with his coat.
Few thought she would survive.
When they heard the news,
her parents fell ill. Her mother
didn’t speak for a month. Her father
took to his bed for twenty days.
Sister Adriana fainted.
Only Maty came to see her
and returned every day.
The hospital was once a convent,
dark and bare. In a gloomy ward,
Frida lay flat on her back in a plaster cast,
in a box like a coffin. During the day,
Maty nursed her and made her laugh,
but at night death danced around her bed.
Guillermo and Matilde
were consumed with Frida’s medical costs.
Had she been a rich man’s daughter,
the doctors would have been more careful.
After what was deemed a miraculous recovery,
she was sent home without exam or Xray.
A year later it was discovered
three vertebrae were misaligned.
In the Kahlo family,
Guillermo and Matilde claimed all
the psychic space for suffering.
Discharged from the hospital
after a month, Frida felt trapped at home
with her unhappy parents, far away
from her friends, confined to bed,
lonely, isolated, and in pain.
A little while ago, I was a child
who went about in a world of colors.
Everything was mysterious
and something was hidden,
guessing what it was
was a game for me.
How terrible it is to know suddenly
as if a bolt of lightning
elucidated the earth.
Everything is bland and lucid.
My friends grew up slowly,
but I became old in an instant.
I live on a painful planet,
translucent as ice.
For the rest of her life, Frida suffered
from pain and fatigue.
She wore plaster casts, heavy braces,
and corsets of leather and metal
to support her spine.
The sole of her right shoe
had to be built up an inch higher
than the left so she could walk.
She cut holes in the shoe
to ease the sores on her foot.
Despite 22 surgeries
to repair damage from the accident
and the doctors’ incompetence,
her health deteriorated,
until her death 29 years later.
Of the betrayals after the accident,
the worst was Alejandro.
To him as to no one else,
she poured out her heart.
But he was unequal to her need.
He fled to study in Europe
without telling her goodbye.
In the corner of his studio,
Guillermo kept a box of oil paints,
a palette, and some brushes in a vase.
Ever since she was a child,
Frida had cast her eye on his art supplies.
She persuaded him to let her use them.
Her mother hired a carpenter to make
an easel that attached to her bed
so she could paint lying down.
Frida was gifted with talents and aptitudes.
The accident ended her possibilities.
Painting became her child of necessity
She painted small because small
was what she could manage.
She preferred to work in private.
With painting she could tell her truth
without having to speak.
Once, when she was a child
confined to her room with polio,
Frida breathed on the window glass
and in the vapor, she drew a door.
In her mind she went through the door
and across the street. She stood in front
of the dairy with the sign, “Pinzon”
and entered the letter “O.”
Suddenly she found herself
in the interior of the earth.
A little girl was waiting for her.
Smiling, the girl listened as Frida
confided her secret problems.
The girl danced without music,
and Frida followed her.
When it was time to leave,
Frida returned the way she had come.
Back in her room, she blurred the glass
with her hand, and the door disappeared.
The illusion was gone, but the feeling
of friendship persisted.
Convalescent after the accident,
Frida remembered the dear companion
who accompanied her to the depths,
in whom she could confide
without being abandoned.
All aspects of her life
Frida transformed into art.
In her proliferating images,
the designs of her house and garden,
her clothes and her hair, her adornments
and her animal companions,
she created visions of enchantment.
After Alejandro left her,
she fell in love with an artist
so big she could hide behind him,
old enough to be her father,
and prosperous enough to support her
and help her family.
Of unquestioned stature himself,
Diego Rivera saw greatness in Frida:
The monumental is expressed
in the smallest dimensions.
In the first days of their love,
the electricity of their kisses
turned on and off the streetlamps
during their evening strolls
through Coyoacán’s avenues.
When Diego asked for permission
to marry Frida, her father replied,
“My daughter is sick, and all her life
she will be sick. She is intelligent,
but not pretty. Think it over,
and if you wish to marry her,
I give you my permission.”
Alone of her family,
Guillermo attended the wedding.
Frida wore a skirt and blouse
and rebozo borrowed from a maid,
draped to conceal her apparatus.
Her braided hair and floral headpieces,
dangling earrings and heavy necklaces,
square-cut blouses with ribbons
and ornaments, and long skirts
were how Tehuana women dressed.
It was Frida’s family’s custom to wear
these clothes on special occasions.
Frida’s costume became her emblem,
an expression of family ties
and national loyalty. In the gray streets
of New York and Paris, Detroit
and San Francisco, she attracted attention
like a tropical bird out of its element.
Sometimes she sewed bells to her petticoats
that made a tinkling music as she walked.
Frida liked to spend hours getting ready
to go out. Pleasure was in the preparation,
as essential as the performance.
Her attire gave her the appearance of gaiety.
Children followed her through city streets,
expecting to be led to a circus.
But appearances can be deceiving.
Her clothing concealed the broken parts
of her body and the braces and corset
she wore for support. The more
she was suffering or worse she was feeling,
the more adornment she would wear.
At the end of her life,
when she could no longer leave her bed,
she still dressed like a doll for visitors.
Frida met Diego when she was a student
and he got his first big commission,
a mural for her school’s auditorium.
Defying Lupe, his watchful wife,
she sneaked in to watch him at work.
When they met again eight years later,
he remembered the bold schoolgirl.
Then she had been mischievous,
but now she was serious. Showing him
three portraits, she demanded his criticism:
I’m neither an art lover nor an amateur,
but a girl who must work for her living.
I had to restrain myself from praising
her as much as I wanted.
It was obvious she was an authentic artist.
A week later, I went to see her.
Her room, her paintings, her presence
filled me with wonderful joy,
I did not know it then,
but Frida had already become
the most important person in my life,
Diego put art at the service of politics.
In monumental murals he celebrated
workers and peasants, his native Mexico.
Yet he preferred to live in New York.
Although he was a Communist,
his most important patrons
were American capitalists.
His productivity was astonishing,
his appetites legendary.
Women were attracted to him
in spite of his ugliness.
He was unfaithful
and Frida was jealous,
though she made friends
of most of her rivals.
Diego’s commissions brought them
to San Francisco, New York, and Detroit.
In every city, they were feted
by wealthy supporters of art and culture.
In 1932, the Museum of Modern Art
gave Diego a blockbuster retrospective.
Diego was in his element, but Frida was not.
The darkness of American cities
depressed her. Walking was difficult,
and she couldn’t bear the heat and cold.
She longed for children, but her body
was too damaged to bear a child.
Her pregnancies ended in miscarriage
or therapeutic abortions.
In the excruciating heat of a New York
summer, she sat in the bathtub
soaking her feet, in agonizing pain,
while Diego kept trysts with Louise Nevelson.
The public flocked to watch Diego at work
on a mural commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller
to celebrate “Men at the Crossroads
looking with Hope and High Vision
to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.”
Diego portrayed that future as a Marxist utopia
and the US as evil and corrupt.
When Diego’s design was publicized,
the sturdy scaffolding in the RCA building
was replaced by a flimsier structure.
Diego shielded his mural from the public,
transforming his sketch of a labor leader
into a portrait of Lenin. When Nelson objected,
Diego refused to remove the likeness.
Nelson paid the artist’s fee and fired him,
and the mural was destroyed.
Diego was astounded. He never dreamed
Nelson would call his bluff. He vowed
to use his fee to paint another mural
and threw himself into activism,
while the Communists attacked him
for accepting commissions from millionaires.
At Frida’s insistence, they returned to Mexico
over Diego’s objections. He punished
Frida by seducing her younger sister.
Cristina’s husband had left her,
and she was living with her children
and widowed father in the Blue House
in Coyoacán Diego had bought for them.
The more I loved a woman,
the more I wanted to hurt her.
Frida was the most obvious victim
of this disgusting trait.
In time Frida forgave her sister
because she needed her.
Eventually she divorced Diego,
and a year later remarried him.
Drama and farce defined their marriage.
On their honeymoon, painting a mural
in Cuernavaca, Diego seduced his assistant,
but when Frida slept with Noguchi,
Diego brandished a pistol,
threatening to shoot the sculptor.
Even more than passion or love,
art bound Frida and Diego together.
It was a hard time to be a woman
in the art world. Diego guided Frida
and steadied her. He believed
in her greatness more than in his own.
For the catalog of her first exhibition,
he wrote: I recommend her to you,
not as a husband, but as an enthusiastic
admirer of her work, acid and tender,
hard as steel and delicate and fine
as a butterfly’s wing, and profound
and cruel as the bitterness of life.
After her unresolved injuries
and ongoing surgeries,
sex required imagination,
and men weren’t always willing
to put her pleasure first.
The only man who came close
to supplanting Diego in Frida’s heart
was Nikolas Muray. An immigrant
photographer like her father
and Olympic fencing champion,
Nick was on his third divorce
when they met in Mexico and fell in love.
Nick excelled at portraits, and he made
magnificent photographs of her
in Mexico and later in New York.
Like a peacock spreading its train,
Frida radiated an outward joy
that concealed an inward sadness,
even indifference. But with Nick,
Frida allowed herself to be fully seen.
She could confide her deepest secrets—
her misery and anguish with Diego,
her ceaseless pain and endless fears.
She trusted Nick, but he let her down
like the others. Diego was his excuse:
Of the three of us, there was only two of you.
Your tears told me that when you heard his voice.
The one of me is eternally grateful for the Happiness
that half of you so generously gave.
Some guests repaid the Riveras’ hospitality
with bad behavior. Leon Trotsky
was a dirty old man with wandering hands.
Frida looked on him as a father figure,
but he abused her and shamed his wife.
André Breton, the dean of surrealism,
was a freeloader and a thief, who stole
art off the walls of Mexican churches
and smuggled Aztec artifacts to Paris
which he sold at a profit. Frida
referred to him as a “cockroach,”
but she loved his beautiful wife
Jacqueline, who had to divorce André
to realize herself as an artist.
Encouraged by Diego, Frida traveled
to Paris on her own for the show
André had promised her, only to find
he’d made no plans and hadn’t paid the fee
to get her paintings out of customs.
In Mexico City, the Bretons were allowed
a whole wing of the Rivera’s house.
Frida expected a similar reception.
At first she thought the Bretons’ apartment
was André’s studio. There was no place to live,
to place Jacqueline to work. Forced
to share their daughter’s tiny bedroom,
Frida fled to a hotel, but the bathroom
was down the hall, and she came down
with a kidney infection. She was rescued
by Marcel Duchamp and Mary Reynolds
and welcomed into Mary’s beautiful home
near the catacombs, with a private garden
and wood-burning fireplace that reminded
her of her Blue House in Mexico.
Although Frida never painted
the public scene of her crucifixion,
it is the ghostly negative behind
the portraits of her wounded body,
bleeding, suffering, and exposed.
Even when her face is streaked by tears,
her gaze remains inward and unknowable,
while her body is screaming.
For the rest of her life,
she preserved the dead fetuses
of her aborted children in jars
of formalin in her wardrobe.
My painting carries the message of pain.
I will sell everything for nothing.
Nothing has a name.
I lost three children.
Paintings substituted for all this.
Children are the days
and here is where I end.
From you to my hands
I go over all your body,
and my blood is the miracle
that travels in the veins of the air
from my heart to yours.
Photo by Camila Cordeiro on Unsplash
