Frida

by Hayden Herrera

  Frieda

  Forgive me for writing to you on this cursi paper but Cristina traded it for my white paper and though later I regretted it there was nothing to be done. (It’s not so ugly, so ugly)

  January 12, 1924

  My Alex:. . . The thing of school registration is very green [bad] since a boy told me that it begins on the 15th of this month, and then there was a mess and my mother says that I am not going to register until things are well settled so that there is no hope of going to Mexico, and I have to accept staying in the town [Coyoacán]. What do you know about the revolt? Tell me something so that I am more or less informed about how things are going, since here, I am becoming more and more dumb. . . . I put it to you chiquito [little one] because it shames me. You will tell me to read the newspapers, but the trouble is that I am too lazy to read the newspapers and I start reading other things. I found very beautiful big books that have a lot of Oriental art and that is what your Friducha is reading now.

  Well mi lindo [my handsome one], since I have run out of paper on which to write you and I am going to bore you with so many foolishnesses I say goodbye and I send you 1000000000000 kisses (with your permission) which can’t be heard because otherwise the people of San Raphael [the district where Alejandro lived] would get agitated. Write me and tell me everything that happens to you.

  Your Frieda

  Give my love to la Reynilla [Agustina Reyna] if you see her. Forgive the indecent handwriting that I have made.

  The next time Frida and Alejandro were separated was in April, when Frida went on a retreat. Despite her doubts about confession, she clearly had not yet lost her faith. “The exercises of the retreat were beautiful because the priest that directed them was very intelligent and almost a saint,” she wrote on the 16th. “In the general communion they gave us the papal benediction and one gains many indulgences and you can ask for as many as you want, the one I prayed for most was Maty (Matilde) my sister and since the priest knows her he said he would pray a lot for her. I also prayed to God and to the Virgin that everything should go well for you and that you should love me always and I also prayed for your mother and your little sister. . . .”

  In the second half of 1924 the tone of Frida’s letters changed. The intensity of her love for Alejandro grows, and there is a hint of sadness and a certain insecurity in her need to be constantly reassured that he cares for her. Although she retains a girlish playfulness and candor, she also speaks of a plan to go with her boyfriend to the United States. (Once she mentions wanting to expand her world and change her life by traveling to San Francisco.) She was now Alejandro’s “little woman,” as well as his cuate. He recalls, “Frida was sexually precocious. To her, sex was a form of enjoying life, a kind of vital impulse.”

  Thursday, December 25, 1924

  My Alex: Since I saw you I have loved you. What do you say? (?) Because it will probably be a few days before we see each other, I am going to beg you not to forget your pretty little woman eh? . . . sometimes at night I am very afraid and I would like you to be with me so that I should be less frightened and so that you can tell me that you love me as much as before; as much as last December, even if I am an “easy thing” right Alex? You must keep on liking easy things. . . . I would like to be even easier, a little tiny thing that you could just carry in your pocket always always. . . . Alex, write to me soon and even if it’s not true, tell me that you love me very much and that you can’t live without me. . . .

  Your chamaca, escuincla or woman or whatever you want [Here Frida drew three little figures showing these three different types of females.]

  Frieda

  On Saturday I’ll bring you your sweater and your books and lots of violets because there are lots at my house. . . .

  January 1, 1925

  answer me answer me answer me answer me answer me answer me

  " " " " " "

  " " " " " "

  " " " " " "

  " " " " " "

  Do you know the news? [Here Frida drew a girl with corkscrew curls and a crown. Around her, like a veil, she wrote: “The pelonas are over with.” By pelonas, she means “bobbed-hair flappers.”]

  My Alex: Today at 11 I picked up your letter, but I did not answer you until now because as you will understand, one can’t write or do anything when one is surrounded by a crowd, but now that it’s 10 at night, I find myself alone and it’s the most propitious moment to tell you what I’m thinking. . . . Concerning what you tell me about Anita Reyna, naturally I would not get mad even as a joke, in the first place, because you are only telling the truth, which is that she is and always will be very pretty and very cute and in the second place, because I love all the people you love or have loved (?) for the very simple reason that you love them, nevertheless I did not much like the thing of the caresses because in spite of the fact that I understand that it is very true that she is chulisima [very cute], I feel something like well, how can I say it, like envy you know? but it is natural. The day you want to caress her even if it is a memory caress me and make believe that it is her eh? My Alex? . . . Listen little brother now in 1925 we are going to love each other a lot eh?* Forgive the repetition of the word “love.” 5 times in one go but I am very gushy. Don’t you think that we should keep on carefully planning the trip to the United States, I want you to tell me how you feel about going in December of this year, there is lots of time to arrange things do you agree? Tell me all the pros and cons and whether you really can go, because look Alex; it is good that we should do something in life don’t you think so, since we’ll be nothing but dopes if we spend our whole life in Mexico, because for me there is nothing more lovely than to travel, it is a real pain to think that I don’t have sufficient willpower to do what I am telling you about, you will say no, that one needs not just willpower but also money power (dough) but one can gather it by working for a year and the rest is easier right? But since the truth is that I don’t know much about these things, it’s good for you to tell me the advantages and disadvantages and if truly the gringos are very disagreeable. Because you must see that all that I have written you from the asterisk to this line of writing, is full of castles in the air and it is good for me to be disillusioned right away. . . .

  At 12 last night I thought of you my Alex and you? I think you thought of me, too because my left ear rang. Well since you already know that “New Year means new life” this year your little woman is not going to be a 7 kilo flapper kid but rather the sweetest and best thing that you have ever known so that you eat her up with nothing but kisses.

  Your chamaca adores you

  Friduchita

  (a very happy new year to your mother and sister)

  Frida said she could save money to go to the United States by working for a year; the truth was she had to earn money to contribute to the family income. Still, working during vacations and after school was less onerous than it might have been, because employment allowed her greater freedom. Many were the days when she dispatched a note to her mother saying that she would not be home until late, that she was going to help her father in the photography studio. Since the studio was in the middle of Mexico City, it was not too difficult sometimes to slip out for a rendezvous with Alejandro. “I do not know what to do to get some work,” she wrote during one vacation, “since that is the only way that I will be able to see you daily the way I did before at school.”

  Work, other than helping her father, was not easy to find. For a brief period, Frida served as a cashier in a pharmacy, but she was inept; at the end of the day there was either too much or too little money in the till, and she frequently found herself putting her own earnings into the cash register in order to balance the books. Another time she followed up a want ad and took a job keeping accounts at a lumberyard for sixty pesos a month. In 1925, while she job-hunted, Frida studied shorthand and typing at the Oliver Academy. Excited about the prospect of employment at the Ministry of Education library, Frida wrote, “They pay 4 or 4.50 and to me that do
esn’t seem bad at all, but the first thing I need is to know something about typing and charm. So just imagine how backward your pal is! . . .”

  According to Alejandro Gómez Arias, it was during this period, when she was looking for work, that a woman employee of the Ministry of Education’s library, whom Frida met while applying for the library job, seduced her. It is probably to this incident that Frida referred when, in 1938, she told a friend that her initiation into homosexual sex by one of her “schoolteachers” had been traumatic, especially so because her parents discovered the liaison and a scandal ensued. “I am full of the most terrible sadness,” she wrote Alejandro on August 1, “but you know that not everything is as one would want it to be and what’s the point of talking about it. . . .“At the end of the letter she drew a crying face.

  In the same letter she told Alejandro, “I have been working in the factory, the one I told you about, during the day because there is nothing else to do while I look for something better, imagine how I’ll be, but what do you want me to do, even though working there does not fascinate me in any way, there’s nothing to be done about it, I have to bear it whether I want to or not.” The factory job did not last long; her next one, a paid apprenticeship in engraving with a friend of her father’s, the successful commercial printer Fernando Fernández, interested her more. Fernández taught Frida to draw by having her copy prints by the Swedish Impressionist Anders Zorn, and he discovered that she had, as he put it, “enormous talent.” According to Alejandro Gómez Arias, Frida responded by having a brief affair with him.

  At eighteen, Frida was clearly no longer the niña de la Preparatoria. The young girl who three years before had entered the National Preparatory School wearing pigtails and a German high school uniform was now a modern young woman, touched by the headlong buoyancy of the twenties, defiant of conventional morality, and unfazed by the raised eyebrows of her more conservative school friends.

  The fierce originality of her new persona is visible in a series of photographs taken by Guillermo Kahlo on February 7, 1926. There is a formal portrait in which she carefully hides her thinner right leg behind her left one and wears a strange satin dress that has nothing to do with 1920s fashions. And there are several photographs taken the same day in which she stands out from her conventionally dressed family group by wearing a man’s three-piece suit, complete with handkerchief and tie. She assumes a mannish posture, with one hand in her pocket and the other sporting a cane. She may have donned a man’s clothes as a joke, but in any case, this young woman is no innocent child. In all the photographs, she looks straight out at us with a disconcertingly level glance, and in her gaze there is more than a hint of that mixture of sensuality and dark irony that will reappear in so many of her self-portraits.

  Chapter 4

  Accident and Aftermath

  IT WAS ONE of those accidents that make a person, even one separated by years from the actual fact, wince with horror. It involved a trolley car that plowed into a flimsy wooden bus, and it transformed Frida Kahlo’s life.

  Far from being a unique piece of bad luck, such accidents were common enough in those days in Mexico City to be depicted in numerous retablos.* Buses were relatively new to the city, and because of their novelty they were jammed with people while trolley cars went empty. Then, as now, they were driven with toreador bravado, as if the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe dangling near the front window made the driver invincible. The bus in which Frida was riding was new, and its fresh coat of paint made it look especially jaunty.

  The accident occurred late in the afternoon on September 17, 1925, the day after Mexico had celebrated the anniversary of its independence from Spain. A light rain had just stopped; the grand gray government buildings that border the Zócalo looked even grayer and more severe than usual. The bus to Coyoacán was nearly full, but Alejandro and Frida found seats together in the back. When they reached the corner of Cuahutemotzín and 5 de Mayo and were about to turn onto Calzada de Tlalpan, a trolley from Xochimilco approached. It was moving slowly but kept coming as if it had no brakes, as if it were purposely aiming at a crash. Frida remembered:

  A little while after we got on the bus the collision began. Before that we had taken another bus, but since I had lost a little parasol, we got off to look for it and that was how we happened to get on the bus that destroyed me. The accident took place on a corner in front of the San Juan market, exactly in front. The streetcar went slowly, but our bus driver was a very nervous young man. When the trolley car went around the corner the bus was pushed against the wall.

  I was an intelligent young girl, but impractical, in spite of all the freedom I had won. Perhaps for this reason, I did not assess the situation nor did I guess the kind of wounds I had. The first thing I thought of was a balero [Mexican toy] with pretty colors that I had bought that day and that I was carrying with me. I tried to look for it, thinking that what had happened would not have major consequences.

  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.

  When Alejandro Gómez Arias describes the accident, his voice constricts to an almost inaudible monotone, as if he could avoid reliving the memory by speaking of it quietly:

  “The electric train with two cars approached the bus slowly. It hit the bus in the middle. Slowly the train pushed the bus. The bus had a strange elasticity. It bent more and more, but for a time it did not break. It was a bus with long benches on either side. I remember that at one moment my knees touched the knees of the person sitting opposite me, I was sitting next to Frida. When the bus reached its maximal flexibility it burst into a thousand pieces, and the train kept moving. It ran over many people.

  “I remained under the train. Not Frida. But among the iron rods of the train, the handrail broke and went through Frida from one side to the other at the level of the pelvis. When I was able to stand up I got out from under the train. I had no lesions, only contusions. Naturally the first thing that I did was to look for Frida.

  “Something strange had happened. Frida was totally nude. The collision had unfastened her clothes. Someone in the bus, probably a house painter, had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This package broke, and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida. When people saw her they cried, ’La bailarina, la bailarina!’ With the gold on her red, bloody body, they thought she was a dancer.

  “I picked her up—in those days I was a strong boy—and then I noticed with horror that Frida had a piece of iron in her body. A man said, ’We have to take it out!’ He put his knee on Frida’s body, and said, ’Let’s take it out.’ When he pulled it out, Frida screamed so loud that when the ambulance from the Red Cross arrived, her screaming was louder than the siren. Before the ambulance came, I picked up Frida and put her in the display window of a billiard room. I took off my coat and put it over her. I thought she was going to die. Two or three people did die at the scene of the accident, others died later.

  “The ambulance came and took her to the Red Cross Hospital, which in those days was on San Jeronimo Street, a few blocks from where the accident took place. Frida’s condition was so grave that the doctors did not think they could save her. They thought she would die on the operating table.

  “Frida was operated on for the first time. During the first month it was not certain that she would live.”

  The girl whose wild dash through school corridors resembled a bird’s flight, who jumped on and off streetcars and buses, preferably when they were moving, was now immobilized and enclosed in a series of plaster casts and other contraptions. “It was a strange collision,” Frida said. “It was not violent but rather silent, slow, and it harmed everybody. And me most of all.”

  Her spinal column was broken in three places in the lumbar region. Her collarbone was broken,
and her third and fourth ribs. Her right leg had eleven fractures and her right foot was dislocated and crushed. Her left shoulder was out of joint, her pelvis broken in three places. The steel handrail had literally skewered her body at the level of the abdomen; entering on the left side, it had come out through the vagina. “I lost my virginity,” she said.

  In the hospital, an old convent with dark, bare, high-ceilinged rooms, the doctors operated and shook their heads and deliberated: Would she live? Would she walk again? “They had to put her back together in sections as if they were making a photomontage,” says one old friend. When she regained consciousness, Frida asked that her family be called. Neither of her parents was able to come. “My mother was speechless for a month because of the impression it made on her,” Frida remembered. “It made my father so sad that he became ill, and I could not see him for over twenty days. There had never been deaths in my home.” Adriana, who now lived with her husband Alberto Veraza near the blue house in Coyoacán, was so upset when she heard the news that she fainted; of Frida’s family, only Matilde came at once. Still cut off from the others because her mother had not yet forgiven her elopement, she was glad to have the chance to help her younger sister. As soon as she read about the accident in a newspaper, she was by Frida’s side, and since she lived closer to the hospital than her family, she was able to come every day. “They kept us in a kind of horrifying ward.... Only one nurse cared for twenty-five patients. It was Matilde who lifted my spirits; she told me jokes. She was fat and ugly, but she had a great sense of humor. She made everyone in the room howl with laughter. She knitted and she helped the nurse care for the patients.” For a month Frida lay flat on her back, encased in a plaster cast and enclosed in a box-like structure that looked like a sarcophagus.

  Besides Matilde, there were visits from the Cachuchas and other friends; but at night, when Matilde and her friends had gone home, Frida was haunted by the thought that she might have died, might die. Death was a memory of gold-speckled redness on naked flesh, of exclamations—"La bailarina!"—piercing the general wailing, of seeing, with that awesome and disengaged clarity that sometimes comes with shock, other victims crawling out from under the train and one woman running from the wreck holding her intestines in her hands. “In this hospital,” Frida told Alejandro, “death dances around my bed at night.”