Frida

by Hayden Herrera

  There were, according to Rivera, certain conditions on which Frida agreed to remarry him (perhaps Anita Brenner’s advice had had some effect after all):

  . . . she would provide for herself financially from the proceeds of her own work; that I would pay half of our household expenses—nothing more; and that we would have no sexual intercourse. In explaining this last stipulation, she said that, with the images of all my other women flashing through her mind, she couldn’t possibly make love with me, for a psychological barrier would spring up as soon as I made advances.

  I was so happy to have Frida back that I assented to everything.

  On December 8, 1940, Diego’s fifty-fourth birthday, Frida and he were married for the second time. The ceremony was brief. They had applied for a license on December 5. The county clerk brought the marriage papers to the courtroom, which was opened specially for the Sunday wedding. The marriage was performed by Municipal Judge George Schoenfeld, with only two friends, Rivera’s assistant Arthur Niendorff and his wife, Alice, present. Frida wore a Spanish costume with a long green-and-white skirt and a brown shawl. Her face looked beautiful but was ravaged by months of suffering. There was no reception. In fact, Rivera, always in love with painting, went off to work at Treasure Island on the very day of his wedding. There, before an audience of appreciative assistants and the public that came to watch the “Art in Action” section of the fair, he stripped off his shirt to show his undershirt, covered with the imprints of his wife’s magenta lipstick.

  After the wedding Frida and Diego were together for nearly two weeks in California before she returned to Mexico in time for Christmas with her family. "Emilucha linda," she wrote to Emmy Lou Packard (in Spanish) from Coyoacán:

  I received your two short letters, many thanks compañera. I’m anxious that you finish all the work so both of you will come to Mexicalpán de las Tunas. What I would give to be just around the corner so I could visit you today but it’s no use, I’ll have to put up with the wait, sister.

  I miss both of you very much. . . . Don’t forget me. I entrust the big-child [Diego] to you with all my heart, and you don’t know how thankful I am that you are concerned and taking care of him for me. Tell him not to have so many tantrums and to behave himself.

  Now I only count the hours and the days before I will have both of you here. . . . Be sure that Diego sees the oculist in Los Angeles. And that he doesn’t eat too many spaghettis so he won’t get too fat. . . .

  In February the Treasure Island mural and a few other painting commissions were finished. Trotsky’s assassin had been captured and had not accused Rivera of being an accomplice. Diego packed his things and went home to Frida in Mexico, where he moved into the blue house on Londres Street, keeping San Angel as his studio.

  Frida had prepared his bedroom in Coyoacán with loving care. It had a dark wooden bed wide enough to encompass his bulk and pillows gaily embroidered (perhaps by Frida) with flowers and “sweet nothings.” On the wall she placed an old-fashioned coatrack in the hope that he would hang his overalls, Stetson hat, and other garments on hooks instead of dropping them on the floor. And there were shelves for his pre-Columbian idols, a bureau to house his huge shirts, and a table where he could write. (Of course, he kept a bedroom in San Angel for himself as well: on those occasions when he escorted gringas to “see the sights” of Mexico and captured them with his glistening, hyperthyroid gaze and genial, Buddha-like smile, he needed a place to which to take them when they returned to the city.)

  The Riveras’ reconciliation soon settled into a comfortable, reasonably happy pattern, a pattern that was no longer determined mainly by Diego, but rather by mutual agreement or compromise; from now on, the terms on which Frida lived her life would be more or less her own. Having gained in confidence and independence through her exhibitions and through her insistence on financial and sexual autonomy, she became more maternal toward Diego, an attitude immediately evident in her letter to Dr. Eloesser dated March 15, 1941:

  Queridisimo [Dearest] Doctorcito:

  You are right to think that I am a mule because I didn’t even write to you when we arrived in Mexicalpán de las Tunas, but you must realize that it was not pure laziness on my part but rather that when I arrived I had a lot of things to arrange in Diego’s house, and you must have an idea of how he needs to be taken care of and how he absorbs time, since as always when he arrives in Mexico he is in a devilish bad humor until he acclimatizes himself once again to the rhythm of this country of craziness. This time the bad mood lasted more than two weeks, until they brought him some marvelous idols from Nayarit and seeing them he began to like Mexico again. Also, the other day, he ate a very delicious duck mole, and this also helped to give him back his pleasure in life. He stuffed himself with duck mole that I thought would give him indigestion, but as you know he has a resistance that can be put to any test. After those two events, the idols from Nayarit and the duck mole, he decided to go out to paint water colors in Xochimilco, and little by little he got himself into a better humor.

  Frida went on to tell the doctor about her life and her difficulties with her guest Jean Wight, who had accompanied her to Mexico. Jean Wight’s defects, as Frida saw them, were indiscretion, sloth, and Stalinism:

  It is not that I am boasting, but if she is sick, I am worse off than she, and nevertheless, dragging my foot as best I can, I do something, or I try to fulfill as best I can my obligation to take care of Diego, I try to paint my little monkeys or to have the house at least in order, knowing that this means to diminish many difficulties for Diego and to make his life less tiresome since he works like a burro in order to give one something to swallow. . . .

  I gave myself the intention that although I am lame, it is preferable not to pay much attention to sickness, because in any case one can kick the bucket simply by stumbling against a banana peel. Tell me what you are doing, try not to work so many hours, have more fun, since the way the world is going we are all on death’s door and it is not worth while to leave this world without having had a little fun in life. . . .

  According to Emmy Lou Packard, who came to Mexico with Rivera to continue working as his assistant, and who lived in the blue house in San Angel for almost a year, a typical day in the Rivera household began with a leisurely breakfast during which Frida or Emmy Lou would read the morning paper, full of news of the war, aloud to Diego, who was having trouble with his eyes and did not want to tax them. After breakfast, Rivera would turn his attention to his work. He and Emmy Lou went to his studio in San Angel around ten or eleven. At 1:30 or 2:00 P.M. they returned to the Coyoacán house for lunch, bringing, on days when Rivera had spent the morning drawing in the local marketplace, Indian foods such as huitlacoche (a fungus that forms on ears of corn) for the cook to prepare. Lunch was usually a simple meat or chicken dish; there was always guacamole to spoon onto tortillas, and Frida drank several copitas, which made her animated and gay. Because he was worried about his health at this time, Rivera abstained. (In addition to the trouble with his eyes, he had thyroid problems and bouts of hypochondria that convinced him he was dying.)

  If Frida had been painting in the morning, she would sometimes appear, not in her usual flowing skirts, but in work clothes—denim pants and a Western-style workman’s jacket—and would invite Diego and Emmy Lou into her studio before lunch to see what she had done. “He always seemed to be somewhat in awe of her work. He never said anything negative. He was constantly amazed at her imagination,” Emmy Lou recalls. “He’d say, ’She is a better painter than I am.’ ”

  If Frida had not been painting during the morning, she might well have gone to the market with a friend or with one of her sisters to buy flowers, household items, or any objects that struck her fancy. She knew the artisans and shopkeepers; one of her favorites was Carmen Caballero Sevilla, who sold extraordinary Judas figures, as well as other handicrafts, such as toys or piñatas, that she made. Diego also made purchases, but Señora Caballero remembers that “The niña Fr
idita was the one who spoiled me most; she paid a little more than the maestro did. She did not like to see me toothless. Once a man hit me and I lost my teeth, well, it was a time when I did some very pretty work for her, and she gave me as a present these gold teeth that I now wear. I am grateful to her. I gave her only the skeleton and she dressed it and even put a hat on it.” Señora Caballero was not the only person Frida assisted. Driving to and from the market, she would recognize the poor people who came to beg for a few centavos when her car stopped in traffic, and even if there were six or seven of them, she gave each one something. “She loved them and she spoke to them in a way that was a gift better than money,” says Jacqueline Breton, who visited Mexico a second time in the mid-forties.

  Frida also enjoyed domestic duties: making her house attractive for Diego was not a chore but a delight, and Rivera frequently took part in household decisions; when she remodeled the kitchen, covering the walls with blue, white, and yellow tiles as in a traditional provincial kitchen, she consulted with Diego first. Of course, he approved: the kitchen was emphatically Mexicanista, with its big clay pots set out on the tiled range, and the multitude of tiny earthenware mugs hooked on the wall in a pattern that spelled “Frida and Diego.”

  The dining room, too, was decorated in a way that showed the Riveras’ allegiance to Mexico’s campesino culture. Its walls were hung with naïve still lifes, masks, and other popular art objects, and its pine-wood floors were painted with polvo de congo, the yellow paint used in peasant homes, and covered with straw petates. As in the houses of the poor, the lights were bare electric bulbs dangling from their cords, and Frida usually placed a simple Mexican oilcloth printed with myriad small flowers on the unpainted rough wood of the table. Guests would sit there for hours, drinking out of red clay cups and eating off earthenware plates; that “bourgeois” invention the living room was seldom used.

  Emmy Lou Packard remembers that “every day Frida made the table into a still life for Diego,” arranging dishes and fruit and six or seven huge bouquets of flowers that she brought back from the morning’s shopping expedition and simply plunked into clay jars, often leaving their wrappings around them. Diego always sat at the end of the table to get the best view, with Frida and Emmy Lou on either side.

  Frida liked to enliven this tableau with animals—a chipmunk in a cage, or, on the loose, her little parrot, Bonito, who was then her favorite pet and used to nestle under the blankets when she rested in bed. During lunch, Bonito chattered, cocked his head, and gave people his quizzical round-eyed look before bestowing beaky kisses upon them. His favorite dish was butter; watching him make his pigeon-toed way around an obstacle course of clay pots and bowls set up by Frida and Diego, and then delve into his buttery reward, kept guests in fits of laughter. Meanwhile, outside in the patio, a large male parrot, which drank quantities of beer or tequila, cursed and squawked: "No me pasa la cruda!" (I can’t get over this hangover!) If his cage was open, he would put his head down and make a beeline for some unsuspecting guest’s appetizing ankle.

  After the comida, Frida would sometimes lie in the sun in the patio, spreading her Tehuana skirts over the warm clay tiles and listening to the birds. Or she might stroll around the garden paths with Emmy Lou, noticing with loving attention each little flower as it came into bloom, playing with her pack of bald Aztec dogs, holding out her hand as a perch for tame doves or for her pet eagle (an osprey), which she named “Gertrude Caca Blanca,” because the bird dropped white excrement all over the steps. Most entertaining of all were the two gray turkeys, which lived in the garden. “The male would do a macho dance in front of the female, who paid no attention,” Emmy Lou remembers. “When he’d start drumming his feet on the ground loudly, she would begin to pay attention. Finally, she would lower herself to the ground and spread her wings. He’d jump on her back and drum with his wings outspread. Then it was all over. It was these ordinary things of life—animals, children, flowers, the countryside—that most interested Frida. The animals were to her like children.” (On December 15, 1941, after Emmy Lou had returned to California, Frida wrote to her: “Imagine, the little parrot ’Bonito’ died. I made a little burial for him and everything, and I cried for him a lot since, you remember, that he was marvelous. Diego also felt very sad about it. The little monkey ’El Caimito’ got pneumonia and he too was about to drop dead, but ’sulphanilamide’ made him better. Your little parrot is very well—he is with me here.”)

  In the afternoon, after Emmy Lou and Diego returned to the San Angel studio, Frida sometimes rested. She might then visit a friend, take care of her own or Diego’s business, or paint. Some afternoons she went to the movies or, occasionally, to a boxing match. Diego liked the symphony, but Frida did not, so she would dress Emmy Lou in her clothes and send her in her stead. She preferred the concerts of mariachi bands that she heard in the Garibaldi Plaza, where she could feast on tacos and, for a few pesos, request her favorite songs to be sung by groups of itinerant musicians who competed to see who could sing more movingly and who could be more dashing in tight pants, bright scarves, and huge, ornate hats.

  In the evenings Diego came home for a late supper of hot chocolate and pan dulce—sweet rolls and pastries that were served on a large platter and were made in a multitude of different shapes, some of which referred humorously (and sometimes pornographically) to parts of the human body. Frida and Diego would amuse themselves by drawing cadavres exquis or singing corridos. Although Diego couldn’t carry a tune, he loved to sing, and he took pleasure in listening to Frida, for she sang with great spirit, and could handle the falsetto breaks in songs like “La Malagueña” beautifully. Diego also delighted in Frida’s ability to cut straight through pretension to truth and in the shuttlecocks of her repartee—so much so that he sometimes teased her in ways that hurt, just to get a response. He would, for example, taunt her about his affair with Cristina, saying to a guest, “Frida composed the Mexican song called ’El Petate’ because there’s a line in it that says, ’I don’t love you, I love your sister.’ ” Such jibes occasionally left Frida impassive, but more often she retaliated. One day at lunch she gave Diego a schoolmarm lecture about one of Rivera’s models, who Frida thought had huge, ugly breasts. “They’re not so big,” Diego countered. Frida came back with, “That’s because you always see them when she’s lying down!”

  The Riveras’ instinctive compatibility is evident in another of Emmy Lou’s stories: Once, when the three were to meet at a movie theater to attend a film about the German invasion of Russia, Diego and Emmy Lou could not find Frida in the crowds milling about outside. Diego whistled the first bar of the Internationale. From somewhere in the crowd came the second; it was unmistakably Frida. The whistling continued until the couple found each other and all three went in to take their seats.

  The calm, assured mood of Frida’s March 15 letter to Dr. Eloesser had changed by July 18, when she wrote to him again. In the interim, her father had died and her health had worsened. Nevertheless, she spoke of misfortune in a spirited, headlong tone: even with a friend as close as Dr. Eloesser, she tried to hide grief and pain behind a façade of alegría.

  Dearest doctorcito,

  What will you say of me—that I am more like saxophone music than like a jazz band. Not even thanks for your letters, nor for the baby boy [the fetus that Dr. Eloesser had sent her as a gift] that gave me such joy—not even one word in months and months. You are totally right if you send me to hell. But you know that if I don’t write you, it doesn’t mean I remember you any less. You know that I have the great defect of being lazy as only I can be lazy with regard to that thing of writing letters. But believe me I have thought a lot about you and always with the same affection. . . .

  My hoof, paw or foot is better. But my general state is rather fu . . . I think that this is because I don’t eat enough—I smoke a lot—and something strange! I drink no cockteltitos or cocktelazos anymore. I feel something in my tummy that hurts and I have a continuous desire to bur
p. (Pardon me—burpted!!) My digestion is that of the vil tiznada [the dastardly tippler]. My mood abominable. Every day I’m becoming more ill-tempered (in the Mexican sense of the word) non-valorous (Academic Spanish style of the language) that is to say very grouchy. If there is any remedy in medicine which improves the humor of people like me—proceed to advise me about it so that I can swallow it immediately, to see what effect it has. . . .

  The remarriage functions well. A small quantity of quarrels—better mutual understanding and on my part, fewer investigations of the tedious kind, with respect to the other women, who frequently occupy a preponderant place in his heart. Thus you can understand that at last—I have learned that life is this way and the rest is painted bread [just an illusion]. If I felt better healthwise one could say that I am happy—but this thing of feeling such a wreck from head to toe sometimes upsets my brain and makes me have bitter moments. Listen, aren’t you going to come to the International Medical Congress that will be held in this beautiful city—so called—of the Palaces? Take heart and grab a steel bird and [fly to] Zócalo Mexico. What will it be? Yes or Yes? Bring me lots of Lucky and Chesterfield cigarettes because here they are a luxury my friend. And I can’t afford daily dough for nothing but smoke.

  Tell me about your life. Something that proves to me that you still think that in this land of Indians and gringo tourists there exists for you a girl who is your real true friend.

  Ricardo [probably Ricardo Arias Viñas, Frida’s Spanish-refugee lover] became a little jealous of you because he says that I speak to you in the familiar tu but I explained to him everything that is explicable. I love him very much and I told him that you know this.