Frida

by Hayden Herrera

  Caring for you will never end. It can’t! I just as well get rid of my right arm my ear or my brain. You understand that don’t you. Frida you are a great person a great painter. I know you’ll live up to this. I also know I’ve hurt you. I will try to heal this hurt with a Friendship that I hope will be as important to you as yours to me is

  Your Nick

  On June 13 she replied with a farewell that has some of the poignancy of her first Self-Portrait, and none of the buoyancy of her other letters to Muray or of the saucy self-portraits from the previous year.

  Nick darling, I got my wonderful picture you send to me, I find it even more beautiful than in New York. Diego says that it is as marvelous as a Piero de la Francesca. To me [it] is more than that, it is a treasure, and besides, it will always remind me that morning we had breakfast together in the Barbizon Plaza Drug Store, and afterwards we went to your shop to take photos. This one was one of them. And now I have it near me. You will always be inside the magenta rebozo (on the left side). Thanks million times for sending it.

  When I received your letter, few days ago, I didn’t know what to do. I must tell you that I couldn’t help weeping. I felt that something was in my throat, just as if I had swallowed the whole world. I don’t know yet if I was sad, jealous or angry, but the sensation I felt was in first place of a great despair. I have read your letter many times, too many I think, and now I realize things that I couldn’t see at first. Now, I understand every thing perfectly clearly, and the only thing I want, is to tell you with my best words, that you deserve in life the best, the very best, because you are one of the few people in this lousy world who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts. I don’t know why I could feel hurt one minute because you are happy, it is so silly the way mexican wenches (like myself) see life sometimes! But you know that, and I am sure you will forgive me for behaving so stupidly. Nevertheless you have to understand that no matter what happens to us in life, you will always be, for myself, the same Nick I met one morning in New York in 18 E. 48th St. I told Diego that you were going to marry soon. He said that to Rose and Miguel [Covarrubias], the other day when they came to visit us, so I had to tell them that it was true. I am terribly sorry to have said it before asking you if it was O.K., but now it’s done, and I beg you to forgive my indiscretion.

  I want to ask from you a great favor, please, send by mail the little cushion, I don’t want anybody else to have it. I promise to make another one for you, but I want that one you have now on the couch downstairs, near the window. Another favor: Don’t let “her” touch the fire signals on the stairs (you know which ones). If you can, and it isn’t too much trouble, don’t go to Coney Island, specially to the Half Moon, with her. Take down the photo of myself which was on the fire place, and put it in Mam’s room in the shop, I am sure she still likes me as much as she did before. Besides it is not so nice for the other lady to see my portrait in your house. I wish I could tell you many things but I think it is no use to bother you. I hope you will understand without words all my wishes. . . .

  About my letters to you, if they are in the way, just give them to Mam and she will mail them back to me. I don’t want to be a trouble in your life in any case.

  Please forgive me for acting just like an old fashion sweet heart asking you to give me back my letters, it is ridiculous on my part, but I do it for you, not for me, because I imagine that you don’t have any interest in having those papers with you.

  While I was writing this letter Rose telephoned and told me that you got married already. I have nothing to say about what I felt. I hope you will be happy, very happy.

  If you find time once in a while, please write to me just a few words telling me how you are, will you do it? . . .

  Thanks for the magnificent photo, again and again. Thanks for your last letter, and for all the treasures you gave me.

  Love

  Frida

  Please forgive me for having phoned to you that evening. I won’t do it any more.

  Losing Nickolas Muray’s love and being replaced by another woman was heartbreaking for Frida, not only because her affair with him had been more than casual, but because, even as Muray wrote, “Of the three of us there was only two of you,” she and Diego were separating. By midsummer she had moved into her own blue house in Coyoacán, leaving Diego in San Angel. By September 19 they had begun divorce proceedings, and by mid-October they had petitioned for a divorce by mutual consent before the court of Coyoacán. Frida’s old friend Manuel González Ramírez served as her lawyer. By the end of the year, the divorce came through.

  Friends have several explanations for the separation and divorce, none of which is entirely convincing. Possibly Rivera learned of Frida’s affair with Nickolas Muray; certainly the real passion she felt for the dashing Hungarian would have made him even more jealous than usual. Some say that the source of the Riveras’ problem was sexual—Frida’s physical fragility or her lack of desire made her either unable or unwilling to satisfy Rivera’s sexual needs. Others say that Rivera was impotent. Frida once blamed Lupe Marín for breaking up her marriage. It is true that Rivera always retained an attraction to his ex-wife, and he was tied to her as the mother of his children. “When Frida was good for nothing anymore, he came singing at my windows,” Lupe said. His admiration for her beauty certainly shows in his 1938 Portrait of Lupe Marín, but Lupe also remembered that he painted the portrait at Frida’s urging, and that Frida was not at all jealous of Rivera’s attentions to his former wife. Another theory is that Rivera divorced Frida to protect her from reprisals as a result of his political activities. Jean van Heijenoort thinks he might have found out about Frida’s affair with Trotsky.

  When the divorce proceedings were initiated, there was a rumor that Rivera was planning to marry the pretty Hungarian painter Irene Bohus; but though she became one of his assistants after the decree was final, and though Frida was certainly jealous of her, eventually the two women became such close friends that her name is one of those that decorate the wall of Frida’s bedroom. Perhaps there was a triangle: a photograph (published in October 1939) shows Bohus and Diego in Rivera’s San Angel studio; both artists are painting the famous American movie star Paulette Goddard. Rivera is widely believed to have been romantically involved with Paulette Goddard, who had taken up residence at the luxurious San Angel Inn, just across the street from Rivera’s studio. The press made much of this affair, and so did Diego. But though Frida was displeased by Rivera’s infatuation, she and Paulette, too, became friends, and in 1941 Frida painted The Flower Basket, a charming still life tondo for her ex-rival.

  In October, the press reported that Frida and Diego said divorce was the only way to preserve their friendship. New York’s Herald Tribune noted that Frida and Diego had been parted for five months, and that Rivera had called the divorce just a matter of “legal convenience.” In Time magazine he elaborated: “There is no change in the magnificent relations between us. We are doing it in order to improve Frida’s legal position. . .purely a matter of legal convenience in the spirit of modern times.”

  Some newspapers said that “artistic differences"—of all things!—had led to the separation, that it would help Frida to “paint more freely.”

  At a party he gave to celebrate his divorce, Rivera proffered still another reason. Bertram Wolfe’s Diego Rivera: His Life and Times had just been published, and in it Wolfe had said: “This is the tenth year of their marriage, and Diego grows more and more dependent upon his wife’s judgment and comradeship. If he should lose her now, the solitude which besets him would be much heavier than it is.” At the party, Diego asked a friend to “tell Bert that I have divorced Frida to prove that my biographer was wrong.”

  The separation had been accomplished with “no trouble, no fuss,” Diego told a reporter at San Angel. “There are no sentimental, artistic, or economic questions involved. It is really in the nature of a precaution.” His esteem for Frida, he continued, was higher
than ever. “Nevertheless, I believe that with my decision I am helping Frida’s life to develop in the best possible way. She is young and beautiful. She has had much success in the most demanding art centers. She has every possibility that life can offer her, while I am already old and no longer have much to offer her. I count her among the five or six most prominent modernist painters.”

  When the same journalist interviewed Frida in Coyoacán, she had little to say. “We have been separated for five months. Our difficulties began after my return to Mexico from Paris and New York. We were not getting along well.” She added that she had no intention of marrying again, and cited “intimate reasons, personal causes, difficult to explain” as the motive for the divorce.

  Like the rift over Diego’s affair with Cristina in 1934 and 1935, the Riveras’ separation was unconventional. They saw each other often, and their lives remained intricately intertwined. Frida continued to look after Diego’s well-being, handling his correspondence and helping with his business transactions. When the American engineer Sigmund Firestone commissioned a pair of life-size self-portraits by Frida and Diego as a memento of their hospitality to him and his daughters, it was Frida who served as intermediary. On January 9, 1940, just after the divorce came through, Firestone wrote to Diego from the U.S.: “I trust that by this time you and Frida are busy painting yourselves for my benefit. Please make them both on the same size canvas as I intend to always keep them together in memory of our pleasant acquaintanceship. You remember my telling you of my talk with Frida, at the Reforma, and of having advised her that the total cost will be $500.00 to be divided between you two for the two paintings.” On February 15, Frida responded (in English) on Diego’s behalf, because, she wrote, “his English is lousy and he is ashamed to write.” She said that she had had “some troubles,” but that her portrait was finished and she would send it as soon as Diego finished his. Frida then described in the most understated way possible what her “troubles” were:

  Diego is happier now than when you saw him. He eats well and sleeps well and work with great energy. I see him very often but he doesn’t want to live in the same house with me anymore because he likes to be alone and he says I always want to have his papers and other things in order, and he likes them in disorder. Well anyway I take care of him the best I can from the distance, and I will love him all my life even if he wouldn’t want me to.

  Frida signed her letter, as she was wont to do, with magenta-pink lipstick kisses, and she enclosed (as also was her wont) bright pink feathers as a token of her affection.

  Diego and Frida continued to entertain and make public appearances together as well. Friends remembered the commotion the divorcees made arriving, always late, at Rivera’s box in the concert hall of the Palace of Fine Arts accompanied by his daughters, a current mistress, and either Cristina Kahlo or Lupe Marín. Parker Lesley recalls one such occasion: “No one paid any attention to the dance performance by Carmen Amaya. Everyone stared at Frida, who wore her Tehuana dress and all Diego’s gold jewelry, and clanked like a knight in armor. She had the Byzantine opulence of the Empress Theodora, a combination of barbarism and elegance. She had two gold incisors and when she was all gussied up she would take off the plain gold caps and put on gold caps with rose diamonds in front, so that her smile really sparkled.” Frida was pleased with the company of the art historian because Lesley not only was entranced with Frida’s person, he also admired her work. “For her, this was better than love,” he says. When the dancers broke for intermission, Frida took the attractive young American by the hand, giving it a squeeze, and led him to the bar. Crowds parted before them as if she were a queen.

  Frida was openly seductive. She “loved the minuet of flirtation” and danced it well. But even as she dallied with others, her real interest remained focused on Diego. Just as her Tehuana costume hid her physical ailments, her diamond-studded smile and her flamboyant flirtatiousness hid the pain of rejection. In public she was vibrant, devil-may-care; defiantly she embarked on love affairs, one in particular with a Spanish refugee, Ricardo Arias Viñas, whom she probably met during her work for the Spanish Republican cause. In private, she confided her anguish to a few close friends—and to her art.

  “Nick Darling,” she wrote to Nickolas Muray on October 13, “I couldn’t write to you before, since you left [Muray had been in Mexico in September], my situation with Diego was worse and worse, till came to an end. Two weeks ago we began the divorce. I have no words to tell you how much I been suffering and knowing how much I love Diego you must understand that this troubles will never end in my life, but after the last fight I had with him (by phone) because it is almost a month that I don’t see him, I understood that for him it is much better to leave me. . . . Now I feel so rotten and lonely that it seems to me that nobody in the world has suffer the way I do, but of course it will be different I hope in a few months.”

  All during the fall of 1939 and winter of 1940 Frida was depressed and ill. She had a fungus infection on the fingers of her right hand that sometimes prevented her from working, and worse still, terrible pains in her spine. Some of the doctors she consulted recommended an operation; others opposed it. Dr. Juan Farill told her she needed complete rest, and he ordered an apparatus with a twenty-kilogram weight to stretch her spine. A photograph taken by Nickolas Muray shows her trapped in this device; her expression, though forbearant, cries out with the agony of being unable to move. By the end of 1939, she was so desperate that she was drinking a full bottle of brandy each day.

  Although she was lonely, she avoided company, especially friends she had in common with Diego. In her October letter to Muray she said she had not seen the Covarrubiases or Juan O’Gorman, because “I don’t want to see anyone that is near Diego,” and to Wolfgang Paalen she wrote that she had refused to see him and Alice Rahon because her current situation was the hardest thing she had ever been through; given her state of mind, the best thing she could do for her friends, she said, was not to see them. In January, she wrote to Muray: “I don’t see anybody. I am almost all day in my house. Diego came the other day to try to convince me that nobody in the world is like me! Lots of crap kid. I can’t forgive him, and that is all—”

  Years later, in his autobiography, Rivera recollected his and Frida’s divorce with a Riveraesque mixture of self-deprecation and self-congratulation. At least in retrospect, he was aware of Frida’s suffering:

  I never was . . . a faithful husband, even with Frida. As with Angelina and Lupe, I indulged my caprices and had affairs. Now, moved by the extremity of Frida’s condition [he refers to her ill health], I began taking stock of myself as a marriage partner. I found very little which could be said in my favor. And yet I knew that I could not change.

  Once, on discovering that I was having an affair with her best friend [he refers to Cristina], Frida left me, only to return with somewhat diminished pride but undiminished love. I loved her too much to want to cause her suffering, and to spare her further torments, I decided to separate from her.

  In the beginning, I only hinted at the idea of a divorce, but when the hints brought no response, I made the suggestion openly. Frida, who had by now recovered her health, responded calmly that she would prefer to endure anything rather than lose me completely.

  The situation between us grew worse and worse. One evening, entirely on impulse, I telephoned her to plead for her consent to a divorce, and in my anxiety, fabricated a stupid and vulgar pretext. I dreaded a long, heart-wrenching discussion so much that I impulsively seized on the quickest way to my end.

  It worked. Frida declared that she too wanted an immediate divorce. My “victory” quickly changed to gall in my heart. We had been married for 13 [actually ten] years. We still loved each other. I simply wanted to be free to carry on with any woman who caught my fancy. Yet Frida did not object to my infidelity as such. What she could not understand was my choosing women who were either unworthy of me or inferior to her. She took it as a personal humiliation to be
abandoned for sluts. To let her draw any line, however, was this not to circumscribe my freedom? Or was I simply the depraved victim of my own appetites? And wasn’t it merely a consoling lie to think that a divorce would put an end to Frida’s suffering? Wouldn’t Frida suffer even more?

  During the two years we lived apart, Frida turned out some of her best work, sublimating her anguish in her painting.

  On the day the divorce papers came through, Frida had nearly finished what is probably her best-known painting, The Two Fridas (plate XIV). American art historian MacKinley Helm was there:

  I had tea with Frida Kahlo de Rivera . . . on the December day in 1939 when there was handed into the studio a set of papers announcing the final settlement of her divorce from Rivera. Frida was decidedly melancholy. It was not she who had ordained the dissolution of the marriage, she said; Rivera himself had insisted upon it. He had told her that separation would be better for them both, and had persuaded her to leave him. But he had by no means convinced her that she would be happy, or that her career would prosper, apart from him.

  She was working then on her first big picture, a huge canvas called Las Dos Fridas. . . . There are two full-length self-portraits in it. One of them is the Frida that Diego had loved . . . the second Frida, the woman whom Diego no longer loves. There the artery is ruptured. The Frida scorned tries to stay the flow of blood, momentarily, with a pair of surgeon’s forceps. When the divorce papers arrived, while we were looking at the picture, I half expected her to seize the dripping instrument and fling it across the room.

  “I began painting it three months ago and I finished it yesterday,” Frida said to reporters a few days later. “That’s all I can tell you.” The Two Fridas sit side by side on a bench, their hands joined in a stiff but poignant clasp. The Frida Diego no longer loves wears a white Victorian dress; the other wears a Tehuana skirt and blouse, and her face is perhaps just a shade darker than that of her more Spanish companion, suggesting (like the contemporaneous Two Nudes in a Forest) Frida’s dual heritage—part Mexican Indian and part European. Both Fridas have their hearts exposed—the same unashamedly literal device to show pain in love that Frida used in Memory. The unloved Frida’s lace bodice is torn to reveal her breast and her broken heart. The other Frida’s heart is whole.