Frida

by Hayden Herrera

  She may have been tired and broken, but she was bidding goodbye to life in her own gallant style. In her diary Frida listed, as a kind of prose poem, some of the images—The Little Deer, Flower of Life—that hung on the walls of her exhibition. The last, separated deliberately from the others, is Tree of Hope.

  La Vida callada . . . The silent life . . .

  dadora de mundos. giver of worlds.

  Venados heridos Wounded deer

  Ropas de Tehuana Tehuana clothes

  Rayos, penas, Soles Lightning flashes, pains, Suns

  ritmos escondidos hidden rhythms

  “La niña Mariana" “The little girl Mariana"

  frutos ya muy vivos. Fruits that are very much alive.

  la muerte se aleja— death keeps its distance—

  lineas, formas. nidos. lines, forms. nests.

  las manos construyen hands build

  los ojos abiertos open eyes

  los Diegos sentidos the Diegos full of feeling

  lágrimas enteras whole tears

  todas son muy claras all are very clear

  Cósmicas verdades Cosmic truths

  que viven sin ruidos that live without sounds

  Arbol de la Esperanza Tree of Hope

  mantente firme. keep firm.

  Chapter 24

  Night Is Falling in My Life

  “I HAD GONE to leave a ring for her,” Adelina Zendejas remembers of the day in August 1953 when, after half a year of torturous uncertainty, Frida’s doctors decided they would have to amputate her right leg. “She had always told me that she would like to have a peacock ring. I asked her to draw it. ’Look,’ she told me, ’I have a few little stones here. Go out in the street and look for more.’ I gathered a pile of little stones and took them to her.

  “Dr. Farill arrived. He was in a great hurry and he said, ’Let’s see the leg,’ because by now the pain was unbearable. Diego was desperate, and the amount of drugs that she took was terrible.

  “For the first time in many years, I saw her leg. It was so crippled, shrunk, degenerated, that I cannot understand how she was able to put her foot into her boot. Two toes were missing. Farill was examining it, touching it, and he became pensive. Frida said to him, ’What, Doctor, are you going to cut off? Another toe? Cut these two at once.’ And he said to her, ’You know, Frida, I think that it is useless to just cut your toe, because of the gangrene. I think that the moment has come when it would be better to cut off your leg.’

  “If you could have heard the scream that Frida let out! She said, ’No!’ It came out of her guts. It was something pathetic. Her hair was loose, she was wearing a Tehuana costume, and she had bedclothes over her, but the foot stuck out from under the bedclothes. The leg was very thin, as if it were broken, as if it hung on her. And then she turned around and looked at me and said, ’What do you think? Tell me, Timida, what do you think?’

  “And I kept looking at Diego. He was holding on to the end of the bed. I said, ’Well, Frida, you always used to call yourself "Frida la coja, pata de palo" [Frida the gimp, with the peg leg]. So you will be lame. Now you are lame with much suffering. Your leg does not allow you to walk, and now there are very good artificial legs, and you are a person who knows how to overcome this kind of thing very well. Probably you will be able to walk and move more normally than with this leg that no longer is much use to you and that also gives you so many pains and makes you an invalid. And the sickness won’t spread. So you no longer have to be “Frida the gimp.” Think about it. Why don’t you let them operate on you?’

  “Frida looked at Diego. He was on the verge of tears. He didn’t want to look at me. Dr. Farill was looking at me as if to say, Thank you. Frida said, ’If you say so, I’ll do it.’ She turned, and said to Dr. Farill, ’Prepare me for the operation.’ When Diego took me home, he said to me, ’She is going to die; this is going to kill her.’

  “The day before the operation, I sent Frida a little clay deer, one of those that you plant with a chia seed. It had a little monkey on it. I sent a message that said, ’Here is your deer. I hope that you come out of the operation as gay as he is with his little monkey.’ And she answered me, ’Adelina you always give me courage. Tomorrow I will go under the knife. Now I will be Frida the gimp, peg leg, from the city of the Coyotes.’ ”

  Frida was putting on a brave face. “Do you know,” she said gaily to friends, “they are going to cut off my paw?” She hated to be given pitying looks. But the entries in her diary during the six months preceding the operation, when, Frida recalled, “they were saying over and over again that they were going to amputate my leg, and I wanted to die,” reveal both her anguish and the desperateness of her hope.

  In one horrific drawing she depicted herself as a one-legged doll, toppling off what can only be seen as an ironic pedestal for a figure so lacking in the classical ideals of balance, unity, and harmony—a classical column. The doll’s body is covered with splotches. A hand and a head are falling from it. Above this grim self-portrait are the even grimmer words “I am DISINTEGRATION.”

  But in July, a month before her amputation, while she was in Cuernavaca, where her nurse had taken her to see if the warmer climate could improve her health and spirits, Frida wrote:

  Points of Support

  On my whole body there is only one; and I want two. In order to have two they have to cut one. It is the one that I do not have that I have to have in order to be able to walk, the other will already be dead! For me, wings are more than enough. Let them cut it and off I’ll fly!!

  Two pages later, there is a drawing of a headless, winged nude with a dove perched where her head should be, and a cracked marble column in place of her spine. One leg is artificial, the other is her own. The legs are labeled “Support number 1” and “Support number 2.” Frida’s accompanying words are: “The dove made a mistake. He was mistaken . . . . instead of going north he went south. . . . He thought wheat was water. He made a mistake.” In another drawing of the nude and winged Frida, her body is covered with a thicket of dots and cross-hatching. “Are you going? No,” is written above the figure. Below is the reason: “BROKEN WINGS.” In a different mood, Frida drew her feet on a pedestal. The right foot is severed at the ankle. From the place where it has been cut, thorny brambles grow. The legs are tinted yellow, and the background is a wash of ink the color of blood. There is a caption: “Feet what do I want them for if I have wings to fly. 1953.”

  In perhaps the most heart-wrenching drawing in the diary, Frida weeps beneath a dark moon, her recumbent body dissolving into the earth, turning into a network of roots. Above her are the words “color of poison,” referring perhaps to gangrene. The sun is below the surface of the earth, and in the sky, next to a small disembodied foot, she has written: “everything backward sun and moon, feet and Frida.” Opposite, there is a drawing of a bare, storm-tossed tree; the wind whips off its leaves. It is lacerated, bent but not broken, and its roots dig deep into the earth.

  The theme of disintegration is reiterated in The Circle, a tiny, undated self-portrait. Done on a round piece of sheet metal, it shows Frida’s naked torso, cracked at the chest and decomposing into the surrounding nocturnal landscape. Her lower legs metamorphose into a fungus. Her head has vanished into moss-green and earth-brown patterns behind which smoke rises. A streak of red slashes across her chest and crimson flames shoot from the place where her right shoulder has disappeared. So unlike Roots’ sanguine vision of women’s participation in life cycles, The Circle, like the drawing in the diary, is a fearful image of physical and psychological dissolution. To her old friend Andrés Henestrosa Frida said that she had replaced her motto “Tree of Hope, keep firm” with another: "Esta anocheciendo en mi vida " (Night is falling in my life).

  When, in August, the doctors had finally made their decision and so had Frida, she wrote in her diary: “It is certain that they are going to amputate my right leg. I know few details, but the opinions are very serious. Dr. Luis Méndez and Dr. Juan Fari
ll. I am very worried, but at the same time, I feel that it will be a liberation. I hope I will be able, when I am walking, to give all the strength that I have left to Diego, Everything for Diego.”

  On the eve of the operation, her friend Antonio Rodríguez, the art historian who had written so many laudatory articles about her art and her heroism, was by her bedside with a few other friends. Seeing how they suffered, Frida tried to cheer them up with stories and jokes. Rodríguez says, “We were almost in tears seeing this marvelous, beautiful and optimistic woman, and knowing they were going to amputate her leg. She, of course, noticed that we were suffering, and she gave us courage, saying, ’But what’s the matter? Look at your faces, it’s as if there were a tragedy! What tragedy? They are going to cut off my pata. So what?’ ” Later she dressed in an elegant Tehuana dress as if it were for a party, and she delivered herself to the surgeon’s knife.

  But Judith Ferreto was there after all the guests had gone, and Frida abandoned her façade of alegría; she had kept Frida company during the two days in the hospital prior to the operation, and she was at Frida’s side when it was over. “The night before the operation when we were finally alone, Diego, Frida, and I, in her [hospital] room, the nurse came in to prepare her leg for surgery. It was just silent. . . . We didn’t say a single word. And all the days after the operation it was silent. Even if she was furious—and I was anxious to see her furious, protesting—nothing. Just silence. Just the very few words that were completely necessary. She was not even interested in Diego’s visits, and Diego was her life. The doctor came and he ordered me to force her to walk in the corridor, to go to Chapultepec Park with me, to paint, to paint, to paint. After the doctor left, she was completely upset. Then after a while, her psychiatric doctor came. He asked me what had happened. I said that she had been quiet, and that then the doctor came and ordered me to take her to the park to make her paint. The psychiatrist told me, ’Please, Judy. Don’t force her to do anything. She doesn’t want to live. We are forcing her to live.’ ”

  The removal of her leg was a terrible offense to Frida’s aesthetic sensibility: her sense of integrity and her self-esteem were linked with her vanity on the deepest level, and her vanity was shattered. She became so demoralized that she did not want to see people, even Diego. “Tell them I am sleeping,” she would say. When she did see Diego, she ignored his presence, acting indifferent and detached. She was silent, listless, interested in nothing. “Following the loss of her leg,” Rivera said in his autobiography, “Frida became deeply depressed. She no longer even wanted to hear me tell her of my love affairs, which she had enjoyed hearing about after our remarriage. She had lost her will to live.”

  When it came time to go home from the hospital, she at first refused to go. Ferreto recalled that “Diego had some person in his studio. Frida always respected his right to do whatever he wanted. She said, ’If I suffer because of that, it’s my fault,’ because he loved women and Frida just accepted it. But that person who was in his studio gave orders in Frida’s house. You had to be very careful about giving orders in her house or in something related to her house. That woman did not have tact, and she made Frida suffer. That was why Frida refused to go to her house.

  “One morning Frida had a crisis. The night before, Diego had been with her. It was during those bad days in the hospital. She had been very happy with Diego. But then the nurse on the floor came and said, ’Mr. Rivera, someone is waiting for you, because you have to go to the opening of an exhibition.’ It was the person who was in his studio. I saw that Frida was not happy, because of that interruption, but anyway, Diego left her.

  “The next morning I [got up and] went into the bathroom. She was sleeping. She had tried to kill herself that morning.”

  In a strange meditation on pain, loneliness, and suicide in her journal, Frida seems either to be welcoming the hand of death or expressing remorse over some recent suicide attempt. Death she calls an “enormous” and “very silent exit.”

  Quietly, the pain

  Noisily the suffering

  the accumulated poison—

  Love was leaving me

  Now my world was a strange one

  of criminal silences

  of alert alien eyes

  mistaking the evils.

  Obscurity in the day

  I did not live the nights

  You are killing yourself!!

  with the morbid knife

  of those who are watching over you

  was it my fault?

  I admit my great guilt

  as great as the pain

  It was an enormous exit that I went through, my love.

  a very silent exit

  That carried me to death

  I had been so forgotten

  that that was my best luck

  You are killing yourself!

  YOU ARE KILLING YOURSELF

  There are those who will no longer forget you

  I accepted its strong hand

  Here I am, so that they should live.

  Frida

  The poem’s refrain, “You are killing yourself!” could be Frida talking to herself, or it could be words she heard from Diego, who despaired at all the narcotics she took to ease her suffering. When Frida says, “Here I am,” at the end of the poem, she appears to be accepting either death’s or life’s hand.

  About two months after the “person” in Rivera’s studio moved out (she was Emma Hurtado, Rivera’s dealer since 1946, and the woman who would become his fourth wife, in 1955), Frida went home to Coyoacán. Rivera did what he could to comfort her. Judith Ferreto recalled that he was a “wonderful collaborator” with her. Although they knew he hated being interrupted in his work, when no one else could calm Frida or stay her tears, Ferreto or Frida herself would call him, and Diego would go home and sit by Frida’s side, entertaining her with stories of his adventures, reading poetry aloud, singing soft ballads, or simply holding her in his arms until medications made her sleep. As he told it in his autobiography:

  Often, during her convalescence, her nurse would phone to me that Frida was crying and saying she wanted to die. I would immediately stop painting and rush home to comfort her. When Frida was resting peacefully again, I would return to my painting and work overtime to make up for the lost hours. Some days I was so tired that I would fall asleep in my chair, high up on the scaffold.

  Eventually I set up a round-the-clock watch of nurses to tend to Frida’s needs. The expense of this, coupled with other medical costs, exceeded what I was earning painting murals, so I supplemented my income by doing watercolors, sometimes tossing off two big watercolors a day.

  Sometimes he did not rush back to his studio. Instead, he would sit in a kind of sleep watch until midnight, his great girth filling his chair and his face falling into folds of sadness and exhaustion, an old, wise, resigned, but not defeated bullfrog.

  At first, Frida refused to wear her artificial leg. It was distasteful and painful to her, and when she tried to learn to walk on it she fell. Dr. Velasco y Polo recalls: “She sent to have a special boot made, because she didn’t like the artificial leg. I told her, ’No one is going to notice it, because you always wear long skirts.’ She answered me in foul language: ’You son of a . . . , don’t meddle in what is not your business! You cut off my leg, but now I’m going to say what’s to be done!’ ”

  But after three months, she did learn to walk a short distance, and slowly her spirits rose, especially after she started painting again. To hide the leg, she had boots made of luxurious red leather with Chinese gold embroidered trim adorned with little bells. With these boots, Frida said, she would “dance her joy.” And she twirled in front of friends to show off her new freedom of movement. The writer Carleta Tibón recalls that “Frida was very proud of her little red boots. Once I took Emilio Pucci’s sister to see Frida, who was all dressed up as a Tehuana and probably drugged. Frida said, ’These marvelous legs! And how well they work for me!’ and she danced the jarabe
tapatío with her wooden leg.”

  One Sunday afternoon, Rosa Castro went to visit Frida, only to be presented with an odd spectacle. When she opened the door of the bedroom, there was Frida all dressed in white, except for her red boots; she was wearing white gloves with her many rings placed on top of her gloved fingers. Waving her hands in the air, she laughed, and said, “Don’t you love them? They are the first gloves I have ever worn in my life!” She offered friends another, more somber spectacle as well. Just as in 1951 she had delighted in showing visitors her unhealing surgical wounds through the hole in her plaster cast, she now asked them to look at the stump of her leg. Mariana Morillo Safa recalls that “Frida used to joke about the amputation, but with the blackest humor. One day when I went to the house, she gave me a photograph of herself and she dedicated it: ’Su majestad es coja’ [this translates literally: “Her majesty is lame,” but Frida was making a pun: escoja means “chooses"]. At that time she was having a fight with her old friend Dolores del Rio, and she joked, ’I will send her my leg on a silver tray as an act of vengeance.’ ”

  In medical terms, the amputation was a simple procedure—the leg was removed at the knee—but despite the red boots and the laughter, Frida did not recover, not completely. Her diary entry for February 11, 1954, says: “They amputated my leg six months ago, they have given me centuries of torture and at moments I almost lost my ’reason.’ I keep on wanting to kill myself. Diego is the one who holds me back because of my vanity in thinking that he would miss me. He has told me so and I believe him. But never in my life have I suffered more. I will wait a little while.” On the next page is a flash of the old alegría:

  I have achieved a lot.

  I will be able to walk

  I will be able to paint

  I love Diego more

  than I love myself.

  My will is great

  My will remains

  Thanks to the magnificent love of Diego, to the honorable and intelligent work of Dr. Farill. To the purpose, so honest and loving, of Dr. Ramón Parres [Frida’s psychiatrist] and to the darling persons of my whole life [Dr.] David Glusker and Dr. Eloesser.