Frida

by Hayden Herrera

  Frida’s staff at Coyoacán adored her, for when she was well enough she worked in the kitchen alongside them, and she treated servants like family. The mozo Chucho, who had worked for her for almost twenty years, was almost in love with her. He liked to drink, and so did she, so they often enjoyed a copita together. “I love him for many things,” said Frida, “but first because he makes the most beautiful baskets that you will ever see.” Chucho bathed her when she was too weak to take care of herself. He would undress her very tenderly and carry her to the bathtub. When she was washed and dried, he would dress her and arrange her hair and carry her back to bed as if she were a baby.

  As Frida’s health declined, her attachments—to things, to politics, to painting, to friends, and to Diego—grew more and more intense. Abhorring solitude, as if having no one there or nothing to do would leave a void into which terror would flow, she clung to her connections with the world. “I very much love things, life, people,” she told a friend in 1953.

  A cabinet and a dressing table in her bedroom are crammed with her collection of little things—dolls, dollhouse furniture, toys, miniature glass animals, pre-Columbian idols, jewelry, all kinds of baskets and boxes. She loved to arrange and rearrange them, and she used to say, “I’m going to be a little old woman and go around my house fixing up my things.” She received gifts like a young child, impetuously ripping open the wrappings, exclaiming her pleasure in the contents. “Because she was immobile,” says Fanny Rabel, “the world came to her. The boxes full of toys were very clean and well arranged. She knew where everything was.”

  Just as compulsively as she solicited gifts, she gave things away. “If one refused to accept a present, she would get very angry, so you had to accept,” says Jesús Ríos y Valles. If receiving gifts was a way of bringing the world to her, giving was a way of extending herself out into it, and of confirming her relation to other people.

  Politics was another way, and during her last years Frida’s allegiance to the Communist party, to a system that claimed to explain the past and encompass the future of mankind, became devotion. Her diary reveals that her faith in the interconnectedness of all things grew more and more fervent as her body disintegrated and that this faith was now mediated by the Party: “The revolution is harmony of form and of color and everything exists and moves beneath only one law—life,” she wrote. And later, on November 4, 1952:

  Today as never before I am accompanied (25 years) I am now a Communist being. . . . I have read the history of my country and of almost all the nations. I know their class conflicts and economics. I understand clearly the materialistic dialectic of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse. I love them as the pillars of the new Communist world. . . . I am only one cell of the complex revolutionary mechanism of the people for peace and of the new Soviet—Chinese—Czechoslovakian—Polish people who are bound by blood to my own person and to the indigenous peoples of Mexico. Amongst these large multitudes of Asiatic people there will always be my own faces—Mexican faces—of dark skin and beautiful form, limitless elegance, also the blacks will be liberated, they are so beautiful and brave.

  On March 4, 1953: “I lost equilibrium with the loss (the passing) of STALIN—I always wanted to know him personally but now it doesn’t matter—Nothing stays everything is revolutionized.” Interspersed with such statements are chaotic drawings—Frida divided in two, half dark, half light, and much of her figure scratched out; a globe with a hammer and sickle; Frida holding a peace dove while long lance-like lines entrap her smudged head. Some are accompanied by exclamations: “Peace, revolution,” “Viva Stalin, Viva Diego,” or “Engels, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao.” (Photographic portraits of these five men still hang in a row at the foot of Frida’s bed.)

  Always in the past Frida’s politics had bound her more closely to Diego. But now that she was enfolded once more within the bosom of the Party and he was not, her position was more complicated. She turned on Trotsky like a cat with her claws out, accusing the dead leader of any number of sins, from cowardice to theft, and stated that only her sense of hospitality had prevented her from refusing to accede when Diego invited him to stay in her house. “One day,” she said in an interview published in Mexico’s leading newspaper, Excelsior,

  Diego said to me: “I am going to send for Trotsky,” and I said to him: “Look, Diego, you are going to make a tremendous political error.” He gave me his reasons and I accepted. My house had just been fixed up. El viejo Trotsky and la vieja Trotsky arrived with four gringos, they put adobe bricks in all the doors and windows [of my house]. He went out very little because he was a coward. He irritated me from the time that he arrived with his pretentiousness, his pedantry because he thought he was a big deal. . . .

  When I was in Paris, the crazy Trotsky once wrote to me, and he said to me, “Diego is a very undisciplined individual who does not like to work for peace, only for war. Be good enough to convince him to return to his party.” I told him: “I can’t influence Diego at all. Because Diego is separate from me, he does whatever he wants and so do I, what’s more, you robbed me, you broke my house and you stole from me fourteen beds, fourteen machine guns and fourteen of everything.” He only left me his pen, he even stole the lamp, he stole everything.

  And to a friend, journalist Rosa Castro, she declared:

  I was a member of the Party before I met Diego and I think I am a better Communist than he is or ever will be. They kicked Diego out of the party in 1929, at the time of our marriage, because he was in an opposition. I had only just begun to know about politics. I followed him personally. My political error. And not until ten years ago [actually five years] did they restore my carnet. Unfortunately I have not been an active member because of my illness; but I have not failed to pay a single fee, nor have I failed to inform myself of every detail of the revolution and of the counter-revolution in the entire world. I continue to be a Communist, absolutely, and now, anti-imperialist, because our line is that of peace.

  Painting, too, was a way of confirming her connection with the world, and she felt better and happier when she was painting. “Many things in this life now bore me,” she said, "[and] I am always afraid I will get tired of painting. But this is the truth: I am still passionate about it.” Confined to her house and often bedridden, she painted mostly still lifes—the fruits of her garden or the local market, which could be placed on a table by her bed. Because the fruits are painted larger in relationship to the background than they were in the still lifes from the 1930s and 1940s, one feels that she has literally drawn close to her subject, pressing her eyes and nose near the objects of her love and desire. In the close world of the bedridden, the truly real objects are those within arm’s reach. Significantly, though her fruits are ripe and tempting, they are also sometimes bruised. Even as she enjoyed their vitality and sensuous beauty and delighted in the oneness with nature that she felt in painting them, she recognized their transience.

  As always when painting objects other than herself, Frida made her fruits look like her. Her melons and pomegranates are cut open, revealing juicy, pulpy centers with seeds, making us remember her wounded self-portraits and her association of sex with pain. Sometimes she peels off just a little of a fruit’s skin. Or she jabs a tiny flagpole into the flesh, recalling the arrows, thorns, and nails that torture her own flesh in self-portraits. In one 1951 Still Life (now lost), the flagpole’s pointed tip emerges inside the halved fruit’s soft, dark interior; in another, the wound brings forth three drops of juice, like the three tears on Frida’s cheeks in several self-portraits. Near the melon in this painting, Frida has placed one of her pre-Columbian ceramic dogs from Colima, and though he is only made of clay, his wistful eyes glisten. In a number of late still lifes, coconuts have faces with round, simian eyes weeping tears; the artist’s identification with nature was so strong that the fruits she laid out to paint wept with her.

  As her devotion to communism intensified, the personal quality of her painting began to trouble he
r. “I am very worried about my painting,” she wrote in her diary in 1951. “Above all to transform it, so that it will be something useful, since until now I have not painted anything but the honest expression of my own self, but absolutely distant from what my painting could do to serve the Party. I should struggle with all my strength for the little that is positive that my health allows me to do in the direction of helping the Revolution. The only real reason to live.”

  Frida tried to politicize her still lifes by inserting flags, political inscriptions, and peace doves nesting among the fruits. (In these years Rivera, too, used the dove as a symbol; Stalin, for example, holds a peace dove in The Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace.) By the fall of 1952, she felt she had progressed along the road toward socialist art. “For the first time in my life my painting tries to help the line traced by the party. REVOLUTIONARY REALISM," she wrote in her diary. But the truth is, Frida’s still lifes are a hymn to nature and to life. She acknowledged their peculiar animation when she titled one of them (painted in 1952) Naturaleza Viva, meaning “alive nature,” as opposed to the usual Spanish term for still life, which is naturaleza muerta, or “dead nature.” Not only are the fruits and the way they are painted restless; even the title, written across the bottom of this painting, pulsates with life: the words are formed out of creeping tendrils.

  The still lifes Frida painted in 1951 and earlier are neat and precise in technique, full of refined detail and sly, suggestive wit. By 1952 her style had changed radically; the late still lifes are not just animate but agitated. They have a kind of wild intensity, as if Frida were flailing about in search of something solid, a raft in a heavy sea of impermanence. Brushwork becomes looser; she has lost the exquisite precision of the miniaturist. Her characteristic small, slow, affectionate strokes give way to messy, frenetic handling. Colors are no longer clear and vibrant, but strident and grating. Modeling and surface texture are so summary that oranges lose their firm, appealing roundness; watermelons no longer look succulent. In several earlier still lifes Frida’s pet parrots perched amid the fruits. Looking out at the spectator quizzically, they gave the paintings a special kind of charm. Now parrots are replaced by peace doves daubed in the roughest, most slapdash manner.

  The contents of the late still lifes seem as agitated as the style. Fruit is no longer neatly piled on a tabletop; instead it is most often spread on the earth or beneath an open sky. Several still lifes are divided into day and night, with the sun and the moon echoing the shape of the fruits. The choice of still life as a subject does not communicate a feeling of domestic plenty or well-being. Nor does Frida, like so many artists, paint fruit because it is one of the most abstract of subjects, its emotionally neutral shapes and colors lending themselves to formal manipulation more freely than, say, landscape or portrait subjects. On the contrary, Frida’s still lifes take on an apocalyptic note. Suns have faces, full moons have an embryonic rabbit-like creature drawn on their surfaces, a creature closely resembling a well-known carved stone representation of an Aztec pulque god, which Rivera inscribed in the moon in his Tlazolteotle, God of Creation mural at the Hospital de la Raza (1952–1954).

  Pulque, that ambrosia of delirium so loved by the suffering Mexican poor, had long been (with tequila and brandy) Frida’s anodyne. Now to kill pain she took larger and larger doses of drugs as well. The hasty brushwork and the deterioration of her artistic control were symptoms of this. “The style of her last paintings shows anxiety,” Dr. Velasco y Polo says, “with states of excitation of the type that come from drug addiction.” Always a fastidious painter, she now got her hands and clothes covered with pigment, and this, said Judith Ferreto, made her desperate.

  Her style also suffered because Frida was in a hurry. She was in a hurry because she needed to complete a commission in order to get money for drugs or to help Diego financially. (Once, when Diego was so broke that he was about to sell a present María Félix had given him, Frida, though she was extremely sick at the time, announced to her nurse: “I must paint tomorrow. I don’t know how I am going to do it. . . .I have to make money. Diego doesn’t have any dough.”) Or she was in a hurry because she could only paint for a short while before succumbing to pain or to the stupor that came from too many painkillers. Most of all, she was in a hurry because she knew her death was close.

  But even as her paintings became ever more clumsy and chaotic, Frida kept on straining for balance and order in her art. In her diary for 1953 there are two studies for still lifes in which she tried to achieve harmony by applying the golden section. Feeling control slip from her fingers, she was looking for a controlling absolute.

  Frida’s most intense friendships during this time were with women: María Félix, Teresa Proenza, Elena Vásquez Gómez, and the artist Machila Armida. These are the women whose names, together with the names of Diego and of Irene Bohus, are painted in pink on her bedroom wall. Her house, Frida said, was theirs. Though she still had devoted men friends—Carlos Pellicer, for example, came to see her often, and so did some of the Cachuchas—she was too much of an invalid to go out and seek men’s company.

  Several among her old friends were put off by the coterie of intimates that surrounded Frida like a queen’s guard. Yet there is something poignant and archetypal in this gathering of women around Frida’s bedside during her final years. Just as women are the bearers of life, they are also the traditional attendants to death.

  Diego now cajoled his women friends into becoming intimate with her, asking them to visit her, to pass the night with her. Sometimes she was quite aggressive about her lesbianism. One friend was so shocked when Frida kissed her goodbye on the lips that she pushed her away, and Frida fell backward onto the ground. Raquel Tibol recalls Frida’s fury when she rejected Frida’s advances; Raquel, who had been living with the Riveras at Coyoacán, had to go live in the San Angel studio, thus giving Frida another reason to be upset. Made jealous by the affair she suspected Diego was having with Tibol, she tried to hang herself from her bed’s canopy, and would have died had not her nurse found her and taken her down in time.

  Tibol also tells of the suicide of a brain-damaged girl (she had a trephination of the cranium) who was the sister of one of Frida’s patrons, and whose advances Frida spurned: “The girl had a strong fixation on Frida. Frida was repelled by her. When I returned to the San Angel studio, the girl took advantage of my absence, and like an animal, went into the house to see if she could have some physical contact with Frida. An obsessive lesbian, the girl said, ’If you don’t pay attention to me I’ll kill myself.’ She went down to the little dining room, took poison, went upstairs, and fell dead at the foot of Frida’s bed. Chucho was the one who called Diego, who laughed uncontrollably and then arranged for the body to be removed and for the story not to come out in the press. It never appeared in the newspaper that someone had killed herself in Frida’s room.”

  Other than Cristina, Judith Ferreto was probably the woman closest to Frida during these last years. Alejandro Gómez Arias remembers her as a tall, good-looking, dark-haired woman who underscored her masculinity by wearing high black boots. But she was tender. Like many private nurses, Judith came to feel a proprietary love for Frida. She was convinced that she knew what was best for her patient and that doctors, friends, Diego—even Frida herself—did not. Her devotion was sometimes tyrannical. Sometimes Frida rebelled. “You are like a fascist general imposing things on me,” she would protest. And from time to time, she became so thoroughly exasperated with her nurse that she would scream at her or kick her. Several times she threw Judith out of the house, only to call her back again, saying, “You are the only one that can help me.” Judith noticed that usually when Frida sent her away it was because her condition was growing rapidly worse.

  As with other people she loved, Frida was determined to bind her nurse to her, but when she had accomplished this, she felt suffocated and guilty. “I think I have cultivated your feelings for my own advantage, to use them in a good way for mysel
f,” she said to Judith. “I would like you to love me, to take care of me the way you do, but not to suffer so much. . . . Many of my good friends know I’ve been suffering all my life, but nobody shares the suffering, not even Diego. Diego knows how much I suffer, but to know is different from suffering with me.” Her nurse became almost a part of Frida, another way to extend herself out into the world and to pull the world into her being.

  “I started working with her during the night as well as during the day,” Judith remembered, “because she was very lonesome, constantly, but especially during the night, even when a lot of people were around. . . . In my hands she was like a child. Many times I felt that she was like my child, because she behaved that way. She liked to fall asleep the way babies do. As if she were a baby, you were supposed to sing a song or tell a tale, or to read something. Our beds were in the same room. You could not behave like a nurse with Frida; a nurse would not lie down with a patient or sit on a patient’s bed. But with Frida and Diego it was different. So I always lay down beside her as a support for her back and she called me her ’little prop.’ And sometimes I sang to her, and to Diego too. In that way, she would start falling asleep. She always slept with some medications that the doctor prescribed. Sometimes they would not take effect for two hours, depending on her condition, of course. All this time, before she fell asleep, I was beside her. She would ask me for another cigarette, and at the very last moment she would always have a cigarette in her hand. When I could see that her hand was no longer able to hold it and that its direction was not right for her mouth, I would ask her if she wanted me to take it away. She would say ’No’ with a movement because she couldn’t speak, though she could understand. She was still enjoying the cigarette. I would watch until the moment when I could take it away and she wouldn’t know it. That meant she was sleeping.

  “She always asked me, ’Please don’t leave me immediately when I fall asleep. I need you nearby, and I feel it even after I am asleep, so don’t go away immediately.’ I would remain beside her bed for an hour or more until I thought she wouldn’t know that I had left her. At that moment I would put her back in the right position on her side, and put special pillows behind her back to support her. I tried to make the pillow under her head neat and smooth, because everything was so painful in her body. I would always hear when her breathing changed, and when she woke up she would sometimes be furious and say, ’You don’t sleep just in order to listen to me!’ But I think this made her happy.”