Frida

by Hayden Herrera

  11) Tell him that as a sick person I am rather stoic, but that now it is a little hard for me because in this f . . . ing life, one suffers but one learns, and that in addition the pile of years has made me more pen. . . sadora [thoughtful, but she probably was going to say pendeja, which is a swear word meaning “stupid"].

  Here are other facts for you, not for el Doctorcito Wilsonito,

  1st, you are going to find me a bit changed.

  grey hairs bother me. So does skinniness.

  I am a little bit gloomy because of this trouble.

  2nd, married life goes very well. . . .

  Many kisses and thanks from your cuatacha

  Frida

  Say hello to all the friends

  On May 10 she cabled Ella to say that she would fly to New York on the twenty-first of that month to be operated on by Dr. Wilson. Since she refused to be anesthetized unless she could hold her sister’s hand, Cristina would accompany her.

  The operation was performed in June at the Hospital for Special Surgery. Four vertebrae were fused with a piece of bone extracted from her pelvis and with a metal rod fifteen centimeters long. Frida’s recovery was good. During her recuperation (over two months in the hospital) she was in high spirits. Ordered not to paint, at first she drew instead. But before long, she disobeyed doctors’ orders and produced, in the hospital, a painting (unidentified) which she later sent to the “Salon del Paisaje,” a landscape exhibition in Mexico City.

  Among the many friends who visited Frida in the hospital was Noguchi. It was to be the last time he saw her. “She was there with Cristina,” he remembers, “and we talked for a long while about things. She was older. She was so full of life, her spirit was so admirable.” Noguchi gave Frida a glass-covered box full of butterflies, which she hung over her hospital door and later placed on the underside of the canopy of one of her two four-poster beds.

  On June 30, she wrote to Alejandro Gómez Arias (her letter is full of invented words interspersed with numerous English words, which here are in italics):

  Alex darling,

  They do not allow one to write very much, but this is only to tell you that the big operation already took place. Three weeks ago they proceeded to the cutting and cutting of bones. And he is so marvelous this doctor, and my body is so full of vitality, that they already proceeded to have me stand on my "puper” feet for two little minutes, but I myself do not believe it. The first two weeks were full of great suffering and tears so that I do not wish my pains on anybody. They are very strident and evil, but now, this week, my yelling diminished and with the help of pills I have survived more or less well. I have two huge scars on my back in this form. [Here she drew her naked body with two long scars with the marks of surgical stitches. One scar runs from her waist straight down to below the coccyx, the other is on the right buttock.] From here [an arrow points to the scar on her buttock] they proceeded to the pulling out of a slice of the pelvis in order to graft it onto the column, that is where my scar ended up being less hair-raising and straighter. Five vertebrae were damaged and now they are going to be like a rifle [in popular usage, “in terrific shape"]. The bother is that the bone takes a long time to grow and to readjust itself and I still have to spend six weeks in bed before they release me and I will be able to flee from this terrifying city to my beloved Coyoacán. How are you please write to me and send me one book please don’t forget me. How is your mamacita? Alex, don’t abandon me alone in this evil hospital and write me. Cristi is very very bored and we are burning up with the heat. It is enormously hot and we no longer know what to do. What’s happening in Mexico. What’s happening with “la raza” there.

  Tell me things about everybody and above all about you.

  Your F.

  I send you lots of affection and many kisses. I received your letter which cheered me so much! Don’t forget me.

  By October, Frida was back in Coyoacán and full of plans. On the eleventh she wrote to her patron Eduardo Morillo Safa in Caracas:

  My dear Engineer,

  Today I received your letter, thank you for being just as kind to me as you always are, and for your congratulations for said prize [the prize she was awarded for Moses by the Ministry of Public Education]. (I still have not received it) . . . you know how they are, those retarded bastards! Along with your letter, that is to say, in the same moment, I received one from Dr. Wilson who was the one who operated on me. It made me feel like an automatic rifle! He says that I can now paint two hours a day. Before I received his orders I had already started to paint, and I can stand up to three hours dedicated to painting and painting. I have almost finished your first painting [Tree of Hope] which is of course nothing but the result of the damned operation! . . .

  Your letter enchanted me, but I continue to feel that you find yourself pretty much alone and unconnected, among those people who live in such an old fashioned and fu. . .ed-up world! Nevertheless it will help you to cast an ojo avisor [sharp eye] on South America in general and later you can write the pure, bald truth, striking a comparison with what Mexico has achieved in spite of its misfortunes. I am very interested in knowing something about the painters in Venezuela. Can you send me photos or magazines with reproductions? Are there Indian painters? Or only mestizo?

  Listen, young man, with all my love I will paint you a miniature of Doña Rosita [Morillo Safa’s mother, whose portrait Frida had painted in 1944]. I shall have photographs made of the paintings and from a photograph of the large portrait I can paint the little one, what do you think? I will also paint the altar with the virgin of sorrows, and the little pots with green wheat, barley, etc. since my mother arranged this kind of altar every year, and as soon as I finish this first painting which I told you is almost ready, I will begin yours, the idea of painting the bald one [death] with the woman with a shawl also seems wonderful to me, I will do what I can so that the above-mentioned paintings turn out somewhat piochas [terrific]. As you asked me to do, I will deliver them to your house, to your aunt Julia. Sending you a photo of each one as I finish them, the color you will have to imagine, my friend, because it is not difficult for you to guess since you already have so many Fridas. You know sometimes I tire of daubing, especially when I have shooting pains, and I continue more than three hours, but I hope that within a few months I will be less worn out. In this damned life one suffers a lot, brother, and although one learns, one resents it very much, in the long run, no matter how much I do to play the strong one, there are times when I would like to throw in the sponge. I’m not kidding! Listen, I don’t like to feel that you are sad, now you see that there are in this world people like me who are worse off than you, who keep on plugging, so that you should not undervalue yourself and as soon as you can, return to Mexicalpán of the Pulque and you already know that here life is hard, but tasty, and you deserve many good things because the real truth is that you are super terrific, compañero. You know that I say this from the heart, your soul mate.

  Now I really cannot tell you any gossip from these parts, because I spend my life cloistered in this stupid mansion of forgetfulness, dedicated supposedly to recuperating and to painting, in my leisure moments, I see no class or raza neither high nor proletariat, nor do I go to my “literary-musical” reunions. At most I listen to the odious radio, that is a punishment worse than being purged, I read the dailies, which are just as bad. I am reading a fat book by Tolstoy that is called War and Peace that I think is terrific. Novels of love and counter-love don’t give me any pleasure, and only from time to time do detective stories fall into my hands. Each day I like more the poems of Carlos Pellicer, and of one or another poet like Walt Whitman. Outside of that, I don’t get involved with literature. I want you to tell me what you like to read so that I can send it to you. Naturally you will have heard about the death of Doña Estercita Gómez, the mother of Marte [the engineer Marte R. Gómez]. I did not see him personally, but I sent him a letter with Diego. Diego tells me that it was very difficult for him and that he is
very sad. Write to him.

  Thank you sweety for the offer to send me things from there, whatever it is that you give me will be a remembrance that I will keep with deepest love. I received a letter from Marianita and it pleased me immensely, I will answer her, give Licha and all Chamacos my love.

  To you, as you already know, I send a kiss and the sincere affection of your cuate.

  Frida

  Thank you because you are going to send me dough and I’m rather needing it.

  Frida mentioned “shooting pains.” The truth was that the spinal fusion did not permanently alleviate her back problems. When she was released from the hospital and returned to Mexico, she was first bedridden and then enclosed in a steel corset for eight months. Dr. Wilson had ordered her to lead a quiet life with frequent rests, but Frida did not follow his orders, and her health deteriorated. The pain in her spine grew worse, she lost weight, developed anemia, and the fungus infection on her right hand recurred.

  Alejandro Gómez Arias believes that Dr. Wilson fused the wrong vertebrae. One of Frida’s doctors, Dr. Guillermo Velasco y Polo, an assistant to the surgeon Dr. Juan Farill, who performed other spinal fusions a few years later in Mexico, also holds this opinion. He says that the metal plate Dr. Wilson inserted “was not put in the right place, because it was just below the sick vertebrae. Perhaps it was for this reason that Frida then put herself in the hands of Dr. Farill. Here in the English Hospital, it was a question of removing the piece of metal that Dr. Wilson had inserted and trying to do a spinal fusion with a bone graft.” Cristina maintained that the operation performed in New York was so painful that Frida was given extremely large doses of morphine, and she began to hallucinate and to see animals in the hospital room. Afterward, she could not shake her drug addiction. It is true that Frida’s handwriting became larger and less controlled around this time, and her journal often sounds frenetic and euphoric.

  Hindsight, no doubt, made Frida’s spinal fusion look like a failure. But Frida herself said the surgeon was “marvelous” and that she felt terrific. It may be that she subverted her own recovery. Lupe Marín recalled that “Dr. Wilson’s operation left Frida perfectly well, they thought, but during a night of desperation—possibly Diego did not come home, or something—Frida attacked herself and opened all her wounds. So there was nothing to do with her, absolutely nothing.” A similar story has it that sometime after the spinal fusion, Frida threw herself on the ground in a rage, and the fusion came “unfused.” Unfortunately, the precise medical data are unavailable, but she is said as well to have had osteomyelitis, an inflammation of the bone marrow that causes progressive deterioration of the bones and that certainly the spinal fusion could not cure.

  Tree of Hope, 1946, which in her letter to Morillo Safa Frida called “nothing but the result of the damned operation,” shows a weeping Frida, clothed in a red Tehuana costume, sitting guard over a Frida who lies naked but partially covered with a sheet on a hospital trolley (plate XXX). The recumbent Frida appears to be still anesthetized after an operation that has left deep incisions on her back—the same scars she drew in her letter to Alejandro Gómez Arias, except that here they are open and bleeding. The seated Frida proudly holds an orthopedic corset painted—with an irony typical of Frida—bright pink with a crimson buckle: her trophy for her medical marathon. That she also wears another corset is evident from the two braces that support her chest. It is not, however, the back brace that really buttresses Frida; rather, a flag in her right hand does—a green flag emblazoned in red with words that Frida often repeated to friends: “Tree of Hope, keep firm.” It is the first line of a song from Veracruz she liked to sing. The song continues: “Don’t let your eyes cry when I say goodbye,” suggesting that the tree of hope is a metaphor for a person, and in the particular case of this painting, for the guardian Frida who weeps with compassion but sits firmly upright. The notion of making paintings based on songs came from Rivera’s frescoes on the third floor of the Ministry of Education, as well as from Posada’s ballad sheets. Frida, however, always used the songs only as a starting point for images of personal drama. “Tree of Hope, keep firm” was her rallying cry and motto.

  But Frida’s tree of hope grows from her pain: in the painting, the flag’s red tassels are analogous to the blood dripping from the patient’s wound, and the flagpole’s red pointed tip suggests the bloody sharp end of a surgical instrument. The two Fridas are bounded on one side by a precipice (where a clump of “hopeful” grass sprouts in the volcanic rock) and on the other by a rectangular grave or trench, which is a more ominous version of the dark ravines that streak across the barren land and that serve as a metaphor for Frida’s wounded flesh. But despite all the horror and danger, this painting is an act of faith, like a retablo. Here Frida’s faith is in herself, not in a holy image; the guardian Frida resplendent in her Tehuana dress is her own miracle worker.

  “The landscape is day and night,” Frida said of Tree of Hope in her letter to Morillo Safa. “And there is a skeleton (or death) that flees terrified in the face of my will to live. You can imagine it, more or less, since my description is clumsy. As you can see, I possess neither the language of Cervantes, nor the aptitude of a poetic or descriptive genius, but you are quick-witted enough to understand my language which is a little bit ’relaxed.’ ” In the painting as it now stands, although the will to live is perfectly evident, the fleeing skeleton has been painted out. Death is present only metaphorically, in the grave-like trench and in the dialectic of light and dark (sun and moon) that accompanies the living and the nearly dead Fridas. Oddly, the Frida that holds hope sits beneath the moon, while the daylight sun reveals the devastated surgical patient. One might speculate that this is because the sun, here a huge reddish orb, is nourished, according to Aztec belief, by human blood.

  Another 1946 painting that records the spinal fusion is The Little Deer, a self-portrait in which Frida presents herself with the body of a young stag (Granizo, her model, was male), her human head crowned with antlers (plate XXXI). Originally it was owned by Arcady Boytler, the man who recommended Dr. Wilson to Frida, and who, as Frida mentioned in her letter to Ella Wolfe, had spinal problems of his own. Like The Broken Column, The Little Deer uses simple metaphors to show that Frida is prey to suffering. Running through a glade, the deer is pierced by nine arrows that will slowly kill him; surely this must refer to Frida’s own journey through life, persecuted by the injuries that gradually destroyed her. The little deer’s arrow wounds bleed, but Frida’s face is calm.

  The painting points to psychological sufferings as well. Indeed, in her life as in her art, Frida’s physical and psychic suffering were interconnected. Starting with the divorce, and probably even before that, her illnesses coincided so often with periods of spiritual trauma that one can surmise she “used” them to hold onto or to win back Diego. Ella Wolfe says that The Little Deer relates to “the agony of living with Diego.” Another close friend says that the arrows signify Frida’s suffering due to male oppression, which would make them analogous to the knife wounds in A Few Small Nips.

  In The Little Deer Frida once again used flawed objects to refer to her injuries, both physical and psychological. Massive tree trunks of dry, cracked wood with broken branches signify decay and death, and the knots and gashes in the bark echo the wounds in the deer’s flank. Beneath its hooves is a slender, leafy green branch that has broken off a young tree, a symbol of the artist’s (and the deer’s) broken youth. The branch also points to Frida’s general sympathy for damaged things. Once when a gardener brought her an old chair, asking if he should throw it away, she requested him to give her the broken leg, and she carved her own lips on it to make a gift for a man she loved. The branch may also have another meaning: Antonio Rodríguez says that “in the pre-Hispanic world, in order to enter paradise, one put a dry branch [on the dead person’s grave], and resurrection was the resurrection of the dry branch into a green branch.”

  By painting herself as a deer, Frida expres
sed again her feeling of oneness with all living things. It is a feeling that has a source in Aztec culture. As Anita Brenner explained in Idols Behind Altars, there is a pervasive Indian attitude underlying much of Mexican culture which assumes that human beings “participate of the same stuff of being, with other lives not human.” For this reason, pre-Columbian artists produced abstract, composite creatures, half human and half animal, to symbolize the idea of continuance and rebirth. Pre-Columbian gods were not specific beings, but dynamic complexes with many changing forms and attributes. “Worship,” wrote Anita Brenner, “was a longing, not to acquire god’s character and mode of life (which was never defined), but rather an identification with some attribute or function of divinity. Thus an Aztec worshipper could pray, ’I am the flower, I am the feather, I am the drum and mirror of the gods. I am the song. I rain flowers, I rain songs.’ ” This, of course, sounds like Frida speaking of herself as a mountain or a tree or saying in her diary that human beings are part of a single current and that they direct themselves to themselves “through millions of stone beings, bird beings, star beings, microbe beings, fountain beings. . . .“To the Aztecs, certain animals had peculiar meanings. The parrot, for instance, because it could talk, was looked upon as a supernatural creature and symbolized as a man-headed bird. The Aztecs also believed that a newborn human has an animal counterpart; a person’s fate was tied to that of the animal that represented the calendrical sign of the day of his or her birth. Similarly, Frida perceived herself as a creature with metamorphic potential. Her head could be flowers, her arms could become wings, her body could transform itself into a deer. Certainly Surrealism had something to do with this, but the magical approach to life that is an ancient part of Mexican culture is its real source.

  The Little Deer comes out of Mexican folklore and poetry too. There is a popular song that begins:

  I am a poor little deer that lives in the mountains.