In the lower part of the painting Frida has rendered “the masses” as pointillist multitudes of minute heads and hats constituting bread lines, crowds of demonstrators, soldiers on parade, and the audience at a baseball game. Over twenty fragments of photographs and other bits of cut-up paper have been chosen and glued on the canvas with great deliberation, in terms of composition as well as of meaning. Several have a pattern of swarming spots that look like microscopic life. Juxtaposed with the masses of hats, they suggest the idea of microcosm/macrocosm, the great continuum of life so dear to both Frida and Diego.
To top it all off, the Statue of Liberty raises high her torch, a satirical reminder of what the United States was meant to stand for in better days. The only thing that does not belong here is Frida’s dress, and it may be that the collaged steamship puffing painted smoke in the harbor was a stroke of wishful thinking. Frida would have liked to be on it.
Through the shortening days of autumn, Frida and Diego argued about whether to stay in New York or return to Mexico. On one occasion Lucienne Bloch and Stephen Dimitroff found them in such a heated argument that Rivera picked up one of his paintings—an oil depicting desert cacti that resembled grasping hands—and shouted: “I don’t want to go back to that!” Frida retorted: “I want to go back to that!” Diego grabbed a kitchen knife and, as his wife and friends looked on in horror, ripped his painting to shreds. When Lucienne tried to stop him, Frida held her back. “Don’t!” she cried. “He’ll kill you!” Stuffing the tattered bits of canvas into his pockets, Diego stalked out of the apartment, impervious to a bombardment of imprecations in Lucienne’s native French. “Frieda trembled all day,” Lucienne wrote in her diary. "[She] couldn’t get over the loss of the canvas. She said it was a gesture of hate towards Mexico. He feels he must go back there for Frieda’s sake, because she is sick of New York. . . . She has to accept the fact that she is to blame.”
Finally, early in December, the frescoes in the New Workers’ School were finished. On December 5 a farewell reception was given. On December 8, 9, and 10 there were public showings of the completed murals, with a lecture given by Rivera every evening at eight. But Rivera had not yet, as he had promised he would do, spent every penny of Rockefeller’s fee painting revolutionary frescoes in the United States. Not until he had completed two small panels in the Union Square headquarters of the New York Trotskyites was he broke and ready to leave.
On December 20, 1933, Frida and Diego boarded the Oriente, bound first for Havana and then for Veracruz. “We got together a group,” Louise Nevelson said, “put the money together, and bought tickets for them. Took them bodily onto the boat and saw that they left.”
* * *
* The Lovestonites were an anti-Stalinist Communist group headed by Rivera’s friend and biographer Bertram D. Wolfe.
Chapter 12
A Few Small Nips
WHEN THE RIVERAS returned to Mexico from the United States at the end of 1933, they moved into their new home on the corner of Palmas and Altavista in San Angel: two sleek international-modern cubic shapes “Mexicanized” by their colors (pink for Diego’s house; blue for Frida’s) and by the wall of organ cactus that surrounded them. Ella Wolfe says that Diego wanted two separate houses because “it seemed, from a bohemian point of view, the ’interesting’ or ’arresting’ thing to do.” A Mexican newspaper put it another way: "[Diego’s] architectural theories are based on the Mormon concept of life, that is to say, the objective and subjective interrelationships that exist between the casa grande and the casa chica!" (“Big house” in Mexico refers to a man’s home; “little house” is an apartment for a mistress.) And indeed, the new houses were separate but unequal. Rivera’s, of course, was bigger. It contained a large high-ceilinged studio, really a semipublic place where he entertained and sold paintings, and a spacious kitchen; most meals were eaten there. Frida’s blue house was more private and compact. It had three stories: a garage at ground level; a living room/dining room and small kitchen above it; and on the top floor, reached by a spiral staircase, a bedroom/studio with a huge picture window, plus a bath. Its flat roof was made into a terrace by the addition of a metal railing: from here the bridge led to Diego’s studio.
Home at last from Gringolandia, occupied with fixing up the two houses, the kind of task she loved, Frida should have been happy, but the evidence of her paintings in the next two years shows that she was not. In 1934 she produced no paintings at all. The following year she completed only two: the astoundingly gruesome A Few Small Nips (plate VIII) and a Self-Portrait (figure 37) in which her short, curly “poodle” haircut gives her a totally different look from the Frida with smoothly pulled back hair who appears in the small panel she painted shortly before leaving Detroit in 1933.
A Few Small Nips is based on a newspaper account of a drunken man who threw his girl friend on a cot and stabbed her twenty times; brought before the law, he innocently protested, “But I only gave her a few small nips!” In the painting, we are presented with the immediate aftermath of the murder: the killer, holding a bloodied dagger, looms over his dead victim, who lies sprawled on a bed, her naked flesh covered with bloody gashes. As in some depictions of the dead Christ descended from the Cross, one of the woman’s lifeless arms hangs downward, her wounded and bleeding palm open toward us. Streams of blood flow from the fingers and splash onto the acrid, greenish-yellow floor (yellow, Frida later said, stood for “insanity, sickness, fear"). As if the small sheet of tin cannot contain the horror, splotches of blood continue out onto the painting’s frame, becoming life-size red splashes. The impact on the viewer is immediate, almost physical. We feel that someone in our actual space—perhaps ourself—has committed this violence. The transition from fiction to reality is made by a trail of blood.
Hand in pocket, fedora set at a jaunty tilt, the murderer looks as brutal as the woman looks brutalized. Indeed, the painting presents stereotypes, the macho and the chingada, his victim. Chingada, literally the “screwed one,” is Mexico’s most familiar curse and a word used frequently by Frida. “The verb [chingar, to screw],” Octavio Paz said, “denotes violence, an emergence from oneself to penetrate another by force. . . . The verb is masculine, active, cruel: it stings, wounds, gashes, stains and it provokes a bitter, resentful satisfaction. The person who suffers this action is passive, inert and open, in contrast to the active, aggressive and closed person who inflicts it.” Frida told a friend that she painted the murderer as he appears here “because in Mexico killing is quite satisfactory and natural.” She added that she had needed to paint this scene because she felt a sympathy with the murdered woman, since she herself had come close to being “murdered by life.”
“Murdered by life”: within a few months of the Riveras’ return to Mexico, Frida felt that all her hopes for setting up a new and harmonious existence had been extinguished. Diego had embarked upon a love affair with her younger sister, Cristina. In her anguish, Frida cut off the long hair Diego loved and stopped wearing Tehuana costumes. And as if the immediate pain was too great to record, she painted A Few Small Nips, depicting not her own experience but her suffering projected onto another woman’s calamity.
No one knows when the affair began (probably in the summer of 1934), or how and when it ended, or indeed, if it stopped and began again. We do know that Rivera was not pleased to be back in Mexico, and like a sulky child, he blamed Frida for making him return. Though he had been invited to paint murals in the Mexico City Medical School and soon secured the commission to repaint his Rockefeller Center fresco on a large wall on the third floor of the Palace of Fine Arts, he felt angry and apathetic and he did not work. Poor health added to his misery. Despite all the puddings and pistachio ice cream he had consumed in Manhattan, his drastic diet in Detroit had left him shrunken and saggy, prey to glandular disorders, hypochondria, and extreme irritability. (Finally, in 1936, a doctor treating him for an infection of the tear duct of his right eye ordered him to be “reinflated.”) He was “weak, thin,
yellow, and morally exhausted,” Frida wrote to Ella Wolfe in July:
Because he doesn’t feel well he has not begun painting, this has made me sadder than ever, since if I don’t see him happy, I can never be tranquil, and his health worries me more than my own. I tell you that if it was not that I do not want to mortify him more, I would not be able to stand the very great pain I have from seeing him like this, but I know that if I say that it grieves me to see him like that, he worries more and it is worse. . . . he thinks that everything that is happening to him is my fault, because I made him come to Mexico . . . and that this is the cause of his being the way he is. I do everything possible to encourage him, and to arrange things in a way that is easier for him, but I have still not succeeded in anything, since you cannot imagine how changed he is compared to the way you saw him in New York, he does not want to do anything and he has absolutely no interest in painting here, I agree with him completely, because I know the reasons he has for being like this, with the people from around here who are the most mulish in the world, and the most uncomprehending without changing what needs to be changed in the world which is full of that type of bastards . . . he says that he no longer likes anything of what he has done, that his painting done in Mexico and part of that in the United States is horrible, and that he has wasted his life miserably that he no longer wants to do anything.
Frida’s own health was not much better than Diego’s. She was in the hospital at least three times in 1934: once to have her appendix removed, once for an abortion performed after three months of pregnancy, and a third time because the foot problems that had troubled her in New York grew worse. “My [right] foot continues to be bad,” she wrote to Dr. Eloesser, “but it can’t be helped and one day I am going to decide that they should cut it off so that it won’t annoy me so much anymore.” The foot was operated on for the first time; the healing process was very slow. To make matters worse, since Diego’s depression and inertia kept him from working, funds were low. With all these troubles, it was natural that Frida should have turned for solace to her sister Cristina, who had been deserted by her husband not long after the birth of her son, Antonio, in 1930, and was living with her children (and Guillermo Kahlo) in the blue house in Coyoacán.
In many ways the sisters complemented one another. Frida was the brilliant one who had made the brilliant marriage, a gifted artist with the celebrity that came with being Rivera’s wife; Cristina, on the other hand, was blessed with motherhood. She was lively, generous, and beguilingly feminine. In Rivera’s depiction of her in his 1929 Health Building mural (at Frida’s suggestion, Cristina had posed for one of the allegorical nudes), she is the essence of voluptuous sexuality, a plump Eve holding a flower (that looks like a vagina), while a seductive serpent whispers in her ear. ". . . She lives a little bit in the . . . ether,” Frida wrote of her some time later. “She still keeps on asking . . . who is Fuente Obejuna [a play by Spanish writer Lope Félix de Vega]? and if she goes to see a movie she always asks, well, but who is the informer? who is the assassin? who is the girl?, in sum, she does not understand either the beginning or the end, and in the middle of the movie she usually delivers herself to the arms of Morpheus.”
Surely it was not malice that made Cristina betray her sister, though perhaps a touch of rivalry did play a part. More likely she was overwhelmed. Rivera was the great maestro, and a genius who is a charmer is hard to resist. Probably he persuaded his sister-in-law that he desperately needed her. No doubt he thought he did, for after her abortion, Frida had been told by her doctors to refrain from sexual intercourse. Still, it was an unconscionable affair, embarked upon as casually as his earlier flings and perhaps with intentional cruelty. “If I loved a woman,” Rivera wrote in his autobiography, “the more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her. Frida was only the most obvious victim of this disgusting trait.”
“I have suffered so much in these months that it is going to be difficult for me to feel completely well soon,” Frida wrote to Dr. Eloesser on October 24, “but I have done everything I can to forget what [has] happened between Diego and me and to live again as before. I do not think that I will succeed completely since there are things that are stronger than one’s will, but I can no longer continue in the very great state of sadness that I was in, because I was heading with large strides toward a neurasthenia of that horrible type that makes women turn into idiots and antipáticas [nasty people] and I am even happy to see that I was able to control the state of semi-idiocy that I was in.”
And on November 13: “I believe that by working I will forget the sorrows and I will be able to be a little happier. . . . I hope my stupid neurasthenia will soon go away and my life will be more normal again—but you know it is rather difficult and I will need much willpower to manage even to be enthusiastic about painting or about doing anything. Today was Diego’s saint’s day and we were happy and it is to be hoped there will be many days of this kind in my life.”
On November 26 she wrote again, apologizing because she had not sent the doctor a drawing she had promised him:
I made various, they all turned out to be frightful and I decided to tear them up before sending you porquerías [junk]. Then I fell into bed with influenza and only got up two days ago and naturally the first thing I did was to start making the drawing, but I do not know what happens to me so that I can’t do it. It all comes out less than what I want, and I even began to shriek with rage but without managing to produce anything good. Thus I decided in the end to tell you this and to ask you to be good enough to forgive me such rudeness, do not think that I do it because of lack of desire to make the drawing, but rather because I am in such a state of sadness, boredom, etc. etc. that I can’t even do a drawing. The situation with Diego is worse each day. I know that much of the fault for what has happened has been mine because of not having understood what he wanted from the beginning and because of having opposed something that could no longer be helped. Now, after many months of real torment for me, I forgave my sister and I thought that with this things would change a little, but it was just the opposite. Perhaps for Diego the troublesome situation has improved, but for me it is terrible. It has left me in a state of such unhappiness and discouragement that I do not know what I am going to do. I know that Diego is for the moment more interested in her than in me, and I should understand that it is not his fault and that I am the one who should compromise if I want him to be happy. But it costs me so much to go through this that you can’t have any idea of what I suffer. It is so complicated that I don’t know how to explain it to you. I know that you will understand it anyway and you will help me not to let myself be carried away by idiotic prejudices, but nevertheless I wanted so much to be able to tell you all the details of what is happening to me in order to lighten my pain a little. . . .
I believe that soon this state of unspeakable troubles will pass and someday I will be able to be the same as I was before. . . .
Write me when you can. Your letters give me great pleasure. . . .
Now we can no longer do what we said we would do, destroy all of humanity and let only Diego, you, and me remain—since now Diego would no longer be happy.
While Frida tried desperately not to be “carried away by idiotic prejudices” and clung to the hope that her “unspeakable troubles” would pass, Diego was, she told Dr. Eloesser, “busy day and night.” Sometime in early November, he had begun his Modern Mexico mural on the left wall of the National Palace stairway (figure 35). Once more Cristina posed for him, this time accompanied by her two children and holding a political document instead of a flower. Nevertheless, she looks seductively round in face and body, and her golden eyes have that blank, orgasmic expression that Rivera reserved for women with whom he was sexually infatuated. Lovingly, he has made Cristina’s dainty feet in their high-heeled sandals a pivot for his whole composition. Frida, who sits behind Cristina holding a book with a political text for a boy to read, plays the role of eager young activist more convincingly than he
r sister; for one thing, she wears the right costume: denim skirt, blue work shirt, and cropped hair. She also wears a pendant bearing a red star emblazoned with a hammer and sickle.
It seems likely that Diego’s affair with Cristina lasted longer than is generally thought. A Few Small Nips is one indication that the affair continued into 1935. And early that year Frida abruptly moved out of her San Angel house and, taking her favorite spider monkey with her, went to live in a small modern apartment in the center of Mexico City at Avenida Insurgentes 432.
It was to be the first of many separations (Frida actually consulted a lawyer, her friend and fellow Cachucha Manuel González Ramírez, about a divorce), and it set a curious pattern. Even though they lived apart, Frida and Diego saw each other constantly. He kept some of his clothes in her apartment, and wanting to be fair to both sisters, he bought Frida a set of blue leatherette and chromium 1930s “moderne” furniture just like the red set he had already purchased in order to furnish a flat for Cristina on fashionable Florencia Street.
Perhaps Frida took the apartment as much to create a life of her own as to get away from Diego. After all, her friends the painter María Izquierdo (Rufino Tamayo’s mistress) and the photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo (Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s wife) had recently rented an apartment together and tried to make a living on their own; why couldn’t Frida do the same?
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