“At the end of the day, Carlos Pellicer appeared. And I was so happy, because it was almost the time when I was supposed to leave her, and the day had been awful. I was so happy, because I knew how much they loved each other. At the last moment, Frida took a doll without a leg, and she said, ’That is me without my leg.’ That was her last present, and also a little bunch of very beautiful flowers in a small glass. She said, ’Take it with you.’ And I took a taxi, and on the way I dropped the flowers on the street. I was furious with life, and it was the last day that I saw her.”
Toward the end of June, her health seemed to be improving. “What are you going to give me as a prize since I’m getting better?” she teased. Not waiting for the answer, she said, “I’d like a doll best.” She was demanding with her friends, insisting, for example, when they talked to her on the telephone, that they promise to visit. “Soon” was not good enough; they had to assure her that they would come that very afternoon. She begged people to spend the night with her. She even invited Lupe Marín, with whom she had a weeping reconciliation. Lupe declined the invitation.
She was full of hopes and plans for the future. She said she wanted to adopt a child. She spoke of her longing to travel. An invitation to Russia tantalized her, but she said that she did not want to go without Rivera, who had not been readmitted to the Communist party in spite of his several applications. She was excited about the prospect of traveling to Poland, where she planned to follow a medical treatment recommended to her by Dr. Farill. Diego, she said, thought it was a good idea; he had offered to accompany her. What Frida looked forward to most of all was her and Diego’s silver wedding anniversary. On August 21 they would have been married twenty-five years. She told a friend, "Traigan mucha raza [Bring lots of people], because there will be a great Mexican fiesta!” Already she had acquired her anniversary present for Diego. It was a beautiful antique gold ring. She wanted the anniversary celebration to be a popular event, like a posada. All the people of Coyoacán would come.
It was one of those cold, dank rainy-season days when, on July 2, 1954, Frida disobeyed doctor’s orders and left her bed in order to participate in a Communist demonstration. Although she was convalescing from bronchopneumonia, she wanted to express her feeling of solidarity with the crowd of more than ten thousand Mexicans who took to the streets, walking from Santo Domingo Plaza to the Zócalo to protest the ouster of Guatemala’s left-leaning President Jacobo Arbenz and the CIA’s imposition on that country of a reactionary regime headed by General Castillo Armas. This was her last public appearance, and Frida made herself into a heroic spectacle. As Diego pushed her wheelchair slowly through the bumpy streets, prominent figures in the world of Mexican culture followed in her wake.
As in so many of Rivera’s murals, Frida was a living exemplar of moral fortitude, a rallying point for revolutionary zeal. Photographs taken during the demonstration show her holding a banner emblazoned with the peace dove in her left hand, her right hand clenched in a fighting fist. Her gaunt, weary face looks older than her years, a battlefield of suffering. Too sick to bother with coquetry, she had not arranged her hair in its usual crown of braids. Instead, she simply covered it with an old wrinkled kerchief. The only signs of her habitual flamboyance were the many rings that made her fist of protest sparkle like a scepter. Frida withstood the discomfort of sitting in her wheelchair for four hours, joining in the cry of the multitude: "Gringos, asesinos, fuera!" (Yankee assassins, get out!) When she finally went home, she had the satisfaction of knowing that her presence had meant much to her fellow demonstrators. She confided to a friend, “I only want three things in life: to live with Diego, to continue painting, and to belong to the Communist party.”
She would not have any of these things for long. As a result of her participation in the protest her pneumonia hung on, and to make matters worse, a few days later she got out of bed at night and, again disobeying her doctor’s orders, took a bath, thus making herself violently ill.
Frida knew she was dying. In one of the last pages of her diary, she drew skeletons in costumes like Posada’s Calaveras. In bold letters, she wrote: “MUERTES EN RELAJO" (the dead having a fling). For her, death was a fact of life, part of an eternal cycle, something to be faced head on. “We look for calm or ’peace,’ ” she wrote in her diary, “because we anticipate death, since we die every moment.” When Cachucha Manuel González Ramírez went to see her shortly before she died, she discussed the details of her demise openly. “It was not awkward to speak of her [death],” González Ramírez recalled, “because Frida was not afraid of it.” What did worry her, though, was the thought of being lowered into the ground in a recumbent position. She had suffered so often, in so many hospitals, in this posture, Frida explained, that she did not want to go to her grave lying down. For this reason, she had asked to be cremated.
The night before Frida’s birthday, she said to Teresa Proenza, “Let’s start celebrating my birthday. I want, as a present, for you to stay here to accompany me so that you wake up here tomorrow.” Teresa agreed, and early the next morning put on a record of “Las Mañanitas,” Mexico’s birthday song, so that Frida would awake to music. Frida spent the morning in bed, sleeping off the narcotics she had taken. When she awoke again, she received a few visitors. Later, dressed in her heavy white cotton Yalalag huipil with the lavender tassel, her face made up, she was carried downstairs to the dining room. There, surrounded by all her birthday flowers, she entertained her friends. People came and went. One hundred guests ate a luncheon of Mexican dishes—turkey mole, chilis, and tamales with atole. Frida was full of her old vivacity. At eight o’clock in the evening, she went upstairs and continued to hold court in her bedroom. A letter from the women of the Communist party gave her great pleasure. A sonnet sent by Carlos Pellicer delighted her too.
In the last pages of Frida’s journal are strange winged female figures that are much more chaotically drawn than the winged self-portraits of a few months before. The final entry is a drawing of a black angel risen into the sky—surely the angel of death. Such figures point to a desire for transcendence that is a counterpart of the desire for earthy rootedness expressed in Frida’s other drawings: even her idea of death was split between the Catholic and pagan traditions. The last words in her diary reveal most poignantly her will to look at the bleakest realities with alegría. “I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to come back—Frida.”
These words and her last drawing suggest that Frida committed suicide, yet the cause of her death, on Tuesday, July 13, 1954, was reported as a “pulmonary embolism.” Certainly Rivera’s account of his wife’s death does not preclude the possibility of suicide. But at the same time he maintains the image of Frida as indomitable in her battle for life. He said that the night before she died, Frida was critically ill with pneumonia.
I sat beside her bed until 2:30 in the morning. At four o’clock she complained of severe discomfort. When a doctor arrived at daybreak, he found that she had died a short time before of an embolism of the lungs.
When I went into her room to look at her, her face was tranquil and seemed more beautiful than ever. The night before she had given me a ring she had bought me as a gift for our twenty-fifth anniversary, still seventeen days away. I asked her why she was presenting it so early and she replied, “Because I feel I am going to leave you very soon.”
But though she knew she would die, she must have put up a struggle for life. Otherwise why should death have been obliged to surprise her by stealing away her breath while she was asleep?
Many of Frida’s friends do not believe that she would have taken her own life. To the very end, they say, she retained her hope and gallant will. Others suspect that she died from an overdose of drugs that may—or may not—have been accidental. It is true that her circulation was bad and that her recent bout with bronchopneumonia had left her frail.
After Frida died, her friend Bambi published a long report on her last hours in the Excelsior. It said that Frida h
ad received no visitors the day before her death because she was in great pain. For a little while in the afternoon, Diego had been with her. They chatted and laughed together, and she told him that she had slept most of the morning, because Dr. Velasco y Polo had told her she should. She joked about a special feeding cup for invalids that her nurse, Señora Mayet (who was working for her again), had brought in order to feed her liquid foods. This, said Frida, was the “year of broth.” It seemed to her that she had consumed nothing but soup.
That evening she gave Diego the ring which was to be his anniversary present, and told him that she wanted to say goodbye to him and to a few of her closest friends. At ten o’clock that night, Rivera called Dr. Velasco y Polo. “Frida is very sick, I would like you to come and see her.” The doctor came and found Frida in critical condition from bronchopneumonia. When he left her bedside and went downstairs, Rivera was sitting and talking with a friend. The doctor said, “Diego, Frida is very sick.” Diego replied, “Yes, I know.” “But she is really sick, she has a high fever,” the doctor insisted. “Yes,” said Diego.
At 11:00 P.M., after being given fruit juice, Frida went to sleep, with Diego sitting by her side. Certain that she was fast asleep, he left to spend the rest of the night at his San Angel studio. At four o’clock, Frida awoke and complained that she was in pain. Her nurse calmed her and straightened her sheets. She stayed near Frida until she slept again. It was still dark at six in the morning when Señora Mayet heard someone knocking and, on her way to open the door, paused by Frida’s bed to tuck in her covers. Frida’s eyes were open and staring. She touched Frida’s hands. They were cold. Señora Mayet called Rivera’s chauffeur, Manuel, and told him what had happened. The old chauffeur who had worked for Guillermo Kahlo and had known Frida from birth, took the news to Diego. “Señor,” he said, "murió la niña Frida" (Miss Frida has died).
Chapter 25
Viva la Vida
WHEN FRIDA DIED, Diego’s usually ebullient, rotund face became haggard and gray. “He became an old man in a few hours, pale and ugly,” one friend recalls. A reporter from Excelsior came to photograph him and to extract quotes, but Rivera refused to be interviewed. “I beg of you don’t ask me anything,” he said. He turned his face to the wall and remained silent.
The news of Frida’s death traveled fast. Diego called Lupe Marín early in the morning, and she and Emma Hurtado, Rivera’s soon-to-be fourth wife, drove together to his third wife’s home. “Diego was completely alone,” Lupe recalled. “I stayed near him, and took his hand. By 8:30 A.M. Frida’s friends began to arrive, and I said goodbye and left.”
Frida lay on her four-poster bed dressed in a black Tehuana skirt and in the white huipil from Yalalag. Her friends braided her hair with ribbons and flowers. They adorned her with earrings, necklaces of silver, coral, and jade, and placed her hands across her body; every finger wore a ring. A white pillow with starched bands of Mexican lace framed her face. Beside her head was a vase of roses. A single foot with bright red toenails protruded below the hem of her long skirt. Next to it were branches of red flowers. From the shelf by the bed, Chinese dolls and pre-Columbian idols stared over the scene.
Large numbers of people, many of them unable to restrain their tears, filed past Frida’s bed that day. Olga Campos was among the early mourners: “It was terrible for me. Frida was still warm when I arrived at the house around ten or eleven in the morning. She got goose pimples when I kissed her, and I started screaming, ’She’s alive! She’s alive!’ But she was dead.”
Bernice Kolko arrived in the middle of the day: “Naturally, when I came there to that house, I was hysterical. I met her sister Cristina and she took me around and said, ’We lost our Frida.’ And I went to her bed, and saw her there, and then we waited for some time. We couldn’t see Diego, because Diego had locked himself in his room.”
At 6:30 P.M., all her jewelry except for her rings, a Tehuantepec chain, and some cheap shiny beads was taken off Frida’s body, and she was placed in a gray coffin and driven to the Palace of Fine Arts. “Diego went with his chauffeur all alone in his car,” Bernice Kolko said. “He didn’t want anybody to go with him.”
There, in the spacious lobby of the grand neoclassical structure, Mexico’s greatest cultural center, Frida Kahlo lay in state, Rivera in agitation at her side. He had asked Dr. Velasco y Polo for a death certificate, so that he could have Frida’s body cremated, but the doctor had refused, for what seem to have been legalistic reasons. So Rivera obtained the certificate from his friend and ex-brother-in-law, Dr. Marín. But even with the certificate, he was still not convinced that his wife was dead.
Rosa Castro tells this story: “When she was lying in state in Bellas Artes, Diego was standing with Dr. Federico Marín, Lupe’s brother. I went over and said, ’What’s the matter, Diego?’ He said, ’It’s that we are not very sure that Frida is dead.’ Dr. Marín said, ’Diego, I assure you that she is dead.’ Diego said, ’No, but it horrifies me to think that she still has capillary action. The hairs on her skin still stand up. It horrifies me that we should bury her in this condition.’ I said, ’But it’s very simple. Let the doctor open her veins. If the blood doesn’t flow, it’s because she’s dead.’ So they cut Frida’s skin, and there was no blood. They cut her jugular, and one or two drops came out. She was dead. Diego didn’t want to believe that she was dead, because of his terrible desire not to separate himself from her. He loved her very much. When Frida died, he looked like a soul cut in two.”
All that night and the following morning, Frida lay in the huge, high-ceilinged hall. Her coffin was set upon a black cloth spread on the floor, and surrounded by masses of red flowers.
Permission to honor Frida in this way had been given by Andrés Iduarte, her old schoolmate at the Preparatoria, who was then director of the National Institute of Fine Arts, on condition that Rivera promise to keep politics out of the ceremony. “No political banners, no slogans, no speeches, no politics,” he had warned. Diego had nodded: “Yes, Andrés.” But when the first honor guard, consisting of Iduarte and several other Department of Fine Arts officials, entered the vestibule where Frida’s coffin was, Frida’s disciple Arturo García Bustos emerged from a group clustered around Rivera and moved quickly toward the coffin. Suddenly the casket was covered with a shiny red flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle set in the middle of a white star.
Iduarte and his aides retreated in consternation. From his office upstairs, he sent Rivera a message reminding him of his promise. A note brought word that Rivera was so stricken by grief that he could not be disturbed. Unfortunately for Iduarte, President Ruiz Cortínez was away from the capital at that time, so the director turned to the presidential secretary for advice. He must persuade Rivera to remove the Communist flag, he was told, but he must also avoid a scandal. Rivera, surrounded by his leftist friends, would have none of it. He threatened to take Frida’s body out into the street and stand guard there if the flag was removed.
Iduarte was greatly relieved when former president Lázaro Cárdenas arrived to take his place in Frida’s honor guard; if a man of such high rank was willing to tolerate the red flag, it might not be so improper after all. A telephone call to the presidential secretary confirmed his feelings. “If General Cárdenas is standing guard,” he was told, “you should stand guard too.”
Thus was a national idol transformed, at least temporarily, into a Communist heroine. One result of this “Russophile farce,” as the press called it, was that Iduarte lost his directorship (he returned to his chair as professor of Latin American literature at Columbia University). For his part, Rivera was delighted to be readmitted to the Communist party two and a half months after Frida’s funeral.
All through the night and the following morning, the honor guards stood at the four corners of Frida’s coffin. They included Communist notables as well as intimate friends and family. Lola Alvarez Bravo was there, and Juan O’Gorman, Aurora Reyes, María Asúnsulo, and the muralist José Chávez Morad
o. Three of Frida’s sisters stood watch too, and so did Rivera’s daughters, Lupe and Ruth. Two representatives from the Russian embassy came for a few minutes. Diego, formally dressed in a dark suit, his face drawn with exhaustion and grief, stayed near Frida’s coffin all evening and took part in several of the watches. He had pulled himself together sufficiently to shake hands with consolers and to cooperate with the press. He told one newspaper reporter that Frida had died of a lung embolism in the presence of an osteologist between three and four in the morning. He proudly said that his wife had painted about two hundred paintings in her lifetime, that Frida was the only Hispano-American painter to have conquered the Louvre, and that her last painting, done a month before, was a still life of watermelons, full of color and alegría.
The last honor guard consisted of Rivera, Iduarte, Siqueiros, Covarrubias, Henestrosa, and the prominent agronomist and leftist politician César Martino, plus the former president, Cárdenas, and his son Cuauhtémoc. By noon on July 14, more than six hundred people had honored Frida’s coffin. At 12:10 P.M., Cristina Kahlo asked the assembled crowd to sing the national anthem and then the “Corrido de Cananea,” a ballad that interweaves indignation at the injustices suffered by the Mexican people with an unhappy love story. With great solemnity, Cárdenas moved his arms to keep the beat. Rivera, Siqueiros, Iduarte, and others hoisted Frida’s coffin onto their shoulders and carried it down the broad marble steps of the Palace of Fine Arts and out into the rain. A funeral procession of some five hundred mourners followed on foot as the hearse carrying Frida’s coffin moved slowly down Avenida Juárez.
The crematorium at the Panteón Civil de Dolores (the civil cemetery) was small and extremely primitive. Crowded into the tiny hot room were friends and family, cultural representatives of various socialist countries, the secretaries of the Mexican Communist party and the Communist Youth Organization, as well as luminaries from the worlds of art and literature. Outside, hundreds of guests stood among the tombstones beneath the ceaseless rain. Frida’s coffin was brought into the anteroom and opened. She lay with a diadem of red carnations around her head and a rebozo covering her shoulders. Someone placed an enormous bouquet of flowers at the head of the coffin. Then, standing next to Frida, and with Rivera by his side, Andrés Iduarte gave a grandiloquent funeral oration:
Frida Page 52
