you’ve got to do is stick your neck out a little and a regiment of evil dwarfs cuts off your head.
“Resentment and solitude,” said the woman with sweet eyes under the aggressive brows, sticking four roses into her hair instead of a crown and peering into the compartment’s mirror to see the sweetness of her flower hairdo against the sunset over the great river of the plains, the Father of Waters. It smelled of charcoal, mud, dung, fertile land.
“I’d go out with the Caps and do all kinds of crazy things, like robbing trolleys and getting the cops to chase us the way they do in Buster Keaton movies, which are my favorites. Who would have known that a trolley would get even with me for stealing its chicks-because the Caps only stole single trolley cars, left at night in the Indianilla depot. We never took anything from anyone, but we did win the freedom of running around half Mexico City at night, all at whim, Laurita, following our fantasy but always on the rails, you never leave the rails, that’s the secret, admit there are rails but use them to escape, to liberate yourself.”
The great river, wide as a sea, origin of all the waters in the land lost by the Indians, water you can bathe in, the substance that receives you with joy, refreshes you, arranges spaces exactly the way God dreamed them: water is the divine material that welcomes you, unlike hard matter, which rejects you, wounds you, penetrates you.
“It was in September 1925, seven years ago. I was taking the bus from my parents’ house in Coyoacan when a trolley smashed into us and broke my spine, my neck, my ribs, my pelvis, the entire order of my personal territory. My left shoulder was dislocated-how well my wide-sleeved blouses cover it up! Don’t you think? Well, one of my feet was ruined forever. A handrail pierced my back and came out my vagina. The impact was so terrible that all my clothes flew off me, can you imagine that? My clothes just evaporated, I was left there bleeding, naked and broken. And then, Laura, the most incredible thing happened. Gold rained down on me. My naked, broken, prostrate body was covered with golden dust.”
She lit an Alas cigarette and burst into a smoky guffaw.
“A worker on the bus was carrying some packages of gold dust. I was left broken but covered with gold dust, what do you think of that?”
Laura thought the trip to Detroit in the company of Frida and Diego so filled her existence that there was no room for anything else, not even for thinking about Xalapa, her mother, her sons, her aunts, her husband Juan Francisco, her lover Orlando, Carmen, her lover’s lover, her “friend” Elizabeth: all of them were being left far behind like the sad, poor border at Laredo and the desert and central plateau before it, where the whole story, Frida repeated, was a matter of “defending yourself from the bastards.”
Watching her sleep, Laura wondered if Frida defended herself alone or if she needed Diego’s company, Diego the imperturbable master of his own truth but also of his own lie. She tried to imagine what all the men in her life would think of a man like that, those men of order and morality like Grandfather Felipe and her father, Fernando, those who were ambitious but petty like her husband, Juan Francisco, those who became broken promises like her brother, Santiago, those whose promises were as yet unspoken like her sons Danton and the second Santiago, or the perpetual enigma who was Orlando and, to close and recommence the circle, the immoral man who was also her grandfather, a man capable of abandoning his illegitimate, mulatta daughter: what would have become of the tender, adorable Auntie Maria de la O if the firm will of Grandmother Cosima and the equally tenacious mercy of her father hadn’t saved her?
There was Rivera (seated by the dining-car window, telling fabulous lies about his physical origin-sometimes he was the son of a nun and a lovesick frog, sometimes the son of a captain in the conservative army and the insane Empress Carlota-evoking his legendary Paris life with Picasso, Modigliani, and the Russian Ilya Ehrenburg, who wrote a novel about Diego’s life in Paris,
What could a woman as fragile as Frida Kahlo hope to find in a man like that? What was his strength? Did Rivera give her the power her frailty needed, or was the important thing the sum of two strengths that would give her physical weakness its independent and painful place? And what about Diego: was he as strong as he physically appeared to be-huge and robust-or as weak as that same naked body-hairless, pink, puffy, with a tiny penis-which Laura saw one morning when she accidentally opened the compartment door? Might it not be that she, Frida the victim, gave strength to him, man of vigor and victories?
Frida was the first to take note of the changed quality of the light, before Diego did, but she mentioned it as if he had discovered it, knowing he’d be thankful for the lie at first and then make it an original truth, the property of Diego Rivera.
“Here in Gringoland there’s not enough light, not enough shadow. You really hit the nail on the head, sweetheart.” She shone, while he returned, trying to forget, well, for your sweetheart, your night mirror, there are only two kinds of light in the world, the afternoon light of Paris, where I became a painter, and that of the central plateau of Mexico, where I became a man. I don’t understand either the light of the gringo winter or the light of the Mexican tropics, which is why my eyes are green swords in your flesh that turn into waves of light in your hands, Frida.
Thus the two of them went from the station to the hotel ready to contrast things, to fight, and not to allow anything to pass unnoticed or slip by quietly. Detroit satisfied them on all counts, nourished them from the outset, gave them opportunities-to Rivera the chance to cause a scandal, to Frida the opportunity for fun. At the hotel they got in line to check in. An old couple in front of them was turned away by the receptionist with a cutting statement: “We’re very sorry, but we do not accept Jews here.” The disconcerted couple stepped aside, whispering to each other, unable to find anyone even to help them with their bags. Frida asked if she could fill in the registration cards and wrote on them in huge letters: MR. AND MRS. DIEGO RIVERA, then their address in Coyoacan, their Mexican nationality, and then, in even larger letters, her religion-JEWISH. The flustered receptionist stared at them, not knowing what to say. So Frida said it for him: “Is something troubling you, sir?”
“It’s that we didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?”
“Excuse me, madam, your religion…”
“More than a religion. A race.”
“It’s that…”
“You don’t allow Jews in your hotel?”
She turned on her heel without listening to the receptionist’s answer. Laura held back her laughter and listened to the comments of the white hotel guests, the women wearing big straw summer hats, the men wearing those strange gringo seersucker suits and Panama hats. Could they be gypsies? And what is that woman disguised as?
“Let’s go, Diego, Laura. We’re getting out of here.”
“Mrs. Rivera,” begged the trembling hotel manager, catapulted from his office smelling of erasers, his newspaper opened to the funny pages, “we’re sorry, we didn’t know, it doesn’t matter, you’re the guest of Mr. Ford, accept our apologies.”
“Go tell that old couple over there they can stay here even if they are Jews. That’s right, the ones going out the door. Step on it, you shit!” ordered Frida. Later, in the suite, she collapsed in laughter, playing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” on her ukulele. “They not only let us in but let in the old fogies and lowered the price for us!”
Diego didn’t waste a moment. The next day he was already in the museum, examining the spaces, preparing the fresco materials, giving instructions to his assistants, spreading out the drawings, and giving press
