We have suffered along with her, because all of us her sisters adore her and it pains us so much that she suffers this way. She is worthy of admiration for she is so abnegating and strong and thanks to this she puts up with her misfortune. I would have wanted to write to you before, but I could not, Dr., since with these anxieties that we have I do not have time for anything. Today she is eating better and they have given her three plasmas of 500 or ½ a liter and quantities of sucrose and with this her spirits are a little better. They give her lots of vitamins and thus she is surviving. She sends you loving greetings and regards and she says that you should read my letters as if they were from her, because she cannot write. Diego sends you greetings also, he has behaved very well this time and she is tranquil.
Frida says to send you many kisses much love and that you should not forget her.. . . All my sisters send our greetings and we remember you often, since Frida speaks of you all the time and for all of us you are her good friend.
On my part many regards for you dear Dr.
Matilde
During Frida’s year in the English Hospital, Rivera took a small room next to hers so that he could spend the night near his wife. During some periods he slept in the hospital every night except Tuesdays, which were reserved for his work at Anahuacalli, or so he said. Diego could be extraordinarily tender, rocking Frida to sleep in his arms as if she were a little girl, reading poetry by her bedside, or, once when she had a terrible headache, distracting her by dancing around her bed brandishing a tambourine and pretending to be a bear. Other times, he was less attentive. According to Dr. Velasco y Polo, part of the reason Frida was hospitalized was that it was convenient for Diego, who wanted his freedom. “And the highs and lows of Frida while she was in the hospital depended on how Diego behaved.” If he was attentive, she was happy and her pains vanished. If he stayed away, she cried and her pains increased. She knew that if she was ill enough, he would be by her side. As Velasco y Polo puts it: “She couldn’t offer her pain to the Virgin so she offered it to Diego. He was her god.”
Frida was no ordinary patient. The nurses adored her for her gaiety (and her generous tips); the doctors liked her because, says Velasco y Polo, “she never complained. She never said this is badly done. She stood it all a little bit a la Mexicana, suffering, but without protesting.” Frida clung to her sense of the ridiculous; she loved to play, and on days when her natural exuberance won out against pain, she created a stage from the semicircular metal contraption designed to keep her right leg raised, and produced puppet shows with her feet. When the bone bank sent a bone extracted from a cadaver in a jar labeled with the name of the donor, Francisco Villa, Frida felt as vital and as rebellious as the revolutionary bandit hero Pancho Villa. “With my new bone,” she cried, “I feel like shooting my way out of this hospital and starting my own revolution.” Because of a fungus infection contracted from one of the bone grafts, Frida’s back was injected each morning (she was the first person in Mexico to take the antibiotic Terramycin), and when her doctors removed the drain, she would exclaim over the beautiful shade of green. She also liked to let friends peek through a hole in her plaster cast at the raw, unhealing wound.
Frida’s room was almost as exceptional as its occupant. It was decorated with candy skulls, brightly painted candelabra from Matamoros shaped like the tree of life, white doves made of wax with paper wings that to Frida signified peace, and the Russian flag. On her bedside table were towering piles of books and neat little pots of paint and a jar of brushes. Sheets of paper were pinned to the wall, and she persuaded her visitors—among them Miguel Covarrubias, Lombardo Toledano, Eulalia Guzmán, and other well-known Communists—to sign their names there in support of the Stockholm Peace Congress. (In 1952, Diego made Frida, sitting in her wheelchair and holding out a copy of the Stockholm Peace Petition for her compatriots to sign, the heroine of his mural The Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace. The hero, larger and more lofty by far, was Stalin.)
Visitors also signed their names on Frida’s various plaster corsets, and decorated them with feathers, mirrors, decalcomanias, photographs, pebbles, and ink. When her doctors ordered her paints removed, Frida painted her current cast with lipstick and iodine. There is a photograph of Rivera watching as his bedridden wife carefully paints a hammer and sickle on a corset that covers her entire torso.
Something else Frida produced while confined to her hospital bed was a series of so-called emotional drawings. These were part of an experiment conducted by her friend Olga Campos, who was studying psychology at the university at the time, and who had plans to write a book on the relationship between human emotions and line, form, and color. The twelve pairs of drawings that resulted reveal Frida and Diego’s spontaneous pictorial responses to the idea of pain, love, joy, hate, laughter, jealousy, anger, fear, anguish, panic, worry, and peace. Composed of numerous lines, Frida’s drawings show her fascination with intricate webs and root-like forms. Diego’s, by contrast, capture his reactions to the different emotions in a few broad, swift strokes.
When she felt well enough, and the doctors permitted it, Frida painted, using a special easel that attached to her hospital bed so she could work while lying on her back. By early November, after six operations, she was able to paint approximately four or five hours a day. She worked on My Family, begun years before and never finished, in which she once again gathered her forebears around her, this time adding her sisters and her niece and nephew. It was as though painting genealogical ties consoled her for the fact that she was literally falling apart. The very act of painting had become a source of spiritual support. “When I leave the hospital two months from now,” she said, “there are three things I want to do: paint, paint, paint.”
Frida’s hospital room was always full of visitors. Dr. Velasco y Polo recalls her fear of solitude and boredom. What she liked was gaiety, spicy gossip, and dirty jokes. Volatile by habit, she would, says the doctor, “get very excited and say, ’Listen to that son of a bitch, please throw him out of here. Send him to the devil.’ When she saw me with a pretty girl, she’d cry, ’Lend her to me! I’ll smoke that one myself!’ She liked to talk about medicine, politics, her father, Diego, sex, free love, the evils of Catholicism.”
Part of Frida’s appeal was her ability to listen. Elena Vásquez Gómez, an intimate friend from Frida’s last years, says, “We healthy people who went to visit her came away comforted, morally fortified. We all needed her.”
Fanny Rabel’s memory is similar: “She did not concentrate on herself. One did not feel her miseries and conflicts when one was with her. She was full of interest in others and in the outside world. She would say, ’Tell me things. Tell me about your childhood.’ Frida said that she liked this better than the movies. She would become very moved, and sometimes she cried when people talked. She could listen for hours. Once when I went to the hospital, Frida was coming out of anesthesia. When she saw me and my son through the glass window, she said she wanted to see us. Another time she was talking about the other patients in the hospital. She was very worried, because they seemed to be really sick. It was as if she herself were on a vacation.”
Visits from children gave Frida a special delight. She had a little disciple, a nine-year-old Indian boy from Oaxaca named Vidal Nicolas, who came to see her often. He would stand by her bedside wearing his serape, and with his huge adoring eyes, watch her paint. “He has great talent,” she said, “and I am going to pay for all his education and send him to the San Carlos Academy.” Frida died before Vidal could prove his talent, but the incident illustrates her impulse to throw her energies into great plans. Most of the schemes, whether trips to Europe or the education of this child, remained enthusiasms, for by 1950 Frida was too sick to realize her hopes.
Another form of entertainment was movies. Rivera borrowed a projector and every week he rented different films. Frida especially loved Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, and the movies directed by El Indio Fernández. When she had seen the whole
series of their films, she watched them over again. Her sisters and friends would keep her company. Olga Campos recalls that “Cristina brought a big basket full of all kinds of foods, and a large group of us had lunch with Frida every day—enchiladas, moles. We’d see the latest movies. There was always a bottle of tequila. There was a party on in Frida’s room every day.”
That is how Frida described her year in the hospital too: “I never lost my spirit. I always spent my time painting because they kept me going with Demerol, and this animated me and it made me feel happy. I painted my plaster corsets and paintings, I joked around, I wrote, they brought me movies. I passed three years [again, Frida exaggerates] in the hospital as if it was a fiesta. I cannot complain.”
In spite of what seems like a hit-or-miss medical history, Frida had the best care available at the time. Dr. Wilson was a pioneer in orthopedic surgery and a well-known specialist in spinal fusion. Dr. Farill was one of the most prominent surgeons in Mexico, founder of a hospital for lame children where he charged no fee to those too poor to pay. He handled his patients with just the right mixture of authority and gentle sympathy. Always informal with her doctors, Frida called him "chulito" (cutie), and she followed his advice so faithfully that Rivera even took to asking the doctor to persuade Frida to do things that he himself could not convince her to do. Even when she was well enough to go home, she continued to see him almost daily. Perhaps she was especially attached to him because he was, like herself, lame (his leg and foot had been operated upon, and for years he walked with crutches and then with an orthopedic apparatus).
Frida gave Dr. Farill two paintings, a 1953 Still Life with a peace dove and a Mexican flag, inscribed "Viva la Vida and Dr. Farill and I painted this with love Frida Kahlo,” and in 1951 the extraordinary Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill (plate XXXIV), in which she shows herself painting him. Done while Frida was convalescing at home from the series of bone grafts on her spinal column that he had performed, it is a secular retablo, with Frida the saved victim of a narrowly escaped danger and Dr. Farill taking the place of the holy image. Its strange, suffused intensity convinces us that it was, like an ex-voto, vital to the artist’s well-being; it records a real-life event not as a plea for compassion but as a confirmation of faith.
In the painting, Frida is seated in her wheelchair, working on a portrait of Dr. Farill. Except for her jewels, she is dressed almost as soberly as a nun. She wears her favorite huipil from Yalalag—the one with the lavender silk tassel—and a full black skirt. She sits rigidly straight; her loose blouse conceals the bulky orthopedic corset. Bare surroundings underscore the great austerity and dignity of this woman. They delineate loneliness too, for though friends were attentive, Frida was, as an invalid, very much alone. Like the vast, open desert that is her backdrop in other paintings, the blank, confining walls of the room in this one reverberate with her solitude. A wide blue band along the lower part of the wall is almost the only bright color in the painting, but the muted tones are poignant, not dull. A person who has been close to death does not need magenta to feel alive; for that person, even beige, brown, black, and gray are vibrant.
Frida’s diary describes her frame of mind:
I have been sick a year. . . . Dr. Farill saved me. He gave me back the joy of life. I am still in a wheelchair and I do not know if soon I will be able to walk again. I have a plaster cast, which, in spite of being a frightful bore, helps my spine feel better. I do not have pains. Only a weariness . . . and as is natural, often desperation. A desperation that no words can describe. Nevertheless, I want to live. I already have begun to paint the little painting that I am going to give to doctor Farill’ and that I am doing with all my affection for him.
Frida has placed her extracted heart, laced with red and blue veins, on her heart-shaped palette; it is the very pigment with which she creates art. She offers the doctor her heart-palette both as a token of affection and as a testimony to her suffering. In her other hand she holds a bunch of paintbrushes with pointed tips. They drip red paint, immediately reminding the viewer of surgical instruments. Painting for Frida was, after all, a form of psychological surgery; she cut and probed into her very spirit. When her brush dipped into the palette of her heart, it came out red.
“I do not have pains,” she had written. “Only a weariness . . . and as is natural, often desperation. A desperation that no words can describe.” Home from the hospital, she continued to deteriorate, and although her doctors tried, nothing could be done to improve her health for long. Mostly she remained in her house, a prisoner of monotony and, despite her brave words, of pain. She could propel herself in her wheelchair, but when she tired of sitting, she could walk only short distances, and this with a cane or crutches, as well as the help of painkillers injected by her nurse—first an Indian woman, Señora Mayet, and then, in 1953, a Costa Rican named Judith Ferreto. To be sure, the general pall was illuminated by visitors and stints of work, but these distractions were all too brief and could not dispel for long the pervasive gray blur of invalidism.
Like the adolescent who, after the bus accident, wrote to her boyfriend that she was lonely and “bored with a b of burro” and that she wished la pelona would take her away, Frida was often lonely, oppressed by tedium, and suicidal. She was, of course, sustained by the mythic persona that she had built up over the years. But now her defiant alegría took on an edge of desperation; the flamboyant mask was becoming brittle and paper-thin.
Her day began with tea brought to her in bed by her nurse. After a light breakfast, she would paint, usually in bed, or if she was able, in the studio or outside in the sunshine of the patio. In the afternoons, she received visitors. María Félix and Dolores del Rio and her husband, the famous film actor and singer Jorge Negrete, came often, and artists and writers, and such political associates as Teresa Proenza (an intimate friend who served as secretary to Cárdenas) and Elena Vásquez Gómez (who was at that time working for the Ministry of Foreign Relations). Her sisters Matilde and Adriana visited her frequently; Cristina came every day, and her children once or twice a week. In the last year of her life, it was Cristina who looked after her day and night, spelling the nurse so that her sister would never be alone. When she came, Frida would greet her tenderly: "Chaparrita [chubby one], what are you up to?” And Cristina, just as tender, braided flowers into Frida’s hair and assured her that various household matters would be attended to properly.
When she was sufficiently strong, Frida entertained in the living room or the dining room. Otherwise, friends ate on a little table in her bedroom. Elena Martinez, Frida’s cook from 1951 to 1953, especially remembers the visits of María Félix. The film star loved Frida’s company because with her she could let down her hair; instead of playing prima donna, she could play court jester, dancing and singing for the invalid, making her laugh. “María Félix was very intimate, and she would lie on the bed next to Frida for a little while to rest.”
There were occasional outings, excursions to places near Mexico City. Sometimes Dr. Velasco y Polo would pick her up in his Lincoln Continental convertible, and Frida would revel in the sense of speed and openness the wind gave, and in being able to see all around. Sometimes they would get out of the car, walk only a few yards, sit down to rest. “Give me a double tequila,” she would say. Occasionally she was able to go with her nurse to spend a day or so in nearby towns such as Puebla or Cuernavaca, where, if she could walk without too much discomfort, they browsed among the stands in the plazas at which popular art objects were sold. Wherever she went, “in one moment you would see a multitude following her,” Judith Ferreto remembers. “Whenever we would go to the movies, there were shoeshine boys and boys selling newspapers . . . [and she would say] ’they always like to go to the movies. I know, because I was one of them, so please bring them with us, and buy some cigarettes for them.’ They were very young, but she knew that they all smoked. . . . You could see in the faces of the people how they liked her.”
Someti
mes when she was strong enough to go out at night, Diego would gather a group of friends—the photographer Bernice Kolko, Dolores del Rio, Maria Asúnsulo (a great beauty whose features are recorded in portraits by various Mexican painters), poets Carlos Pellicer and Salvador Novo—and take her to a restaurant. “We’d dance and sing and drink and eat and be gay,” Bernice Kolko recalls, “and we’d sit her down at the table and Diego used to dance with me or with someone else, and she used to be so happy. She always liked gaiety.”
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