The Years with Laura Diaz

interviews.

“I’m going to paint a new race for the age of steel.”

“A people without memory is like a well-intentioned siren. It doesn’t know when because it doesn’t know how.”

“I’m going to give an aura of humanity to a dehumanized industry.”

“I’m going to teach the United States of Amnesia to remember.”

“Christ chased the money changers out of the temple. I’m going to give the money changers the temple they need. Let’s see if they behave better.”

“Mr. Rivera, you’re in the automobile capital of the world. Is it true you don’t know how to drive?”

“It’s true, but it’s also true that I know how to break eggs. You should see how tasty my omelettes are. Puros huevos.”

He never stopped talking, joking, ordering, painting as he talked, as if a world of forms and colors needed a defense and a distraction external to the hubbub, the movement, and the words to gestate slowly, behind his sleepy, bulging eyes. Nevertheless, when he came back to the hotel, he was exhausted.

“I don’t understand these gringo faces. I scrutinize them. I want to like them. I swear I look at them sympathetically, begging them, Say something to me, please. It’s like seeing a tray of rolls in a bakery. They’re all alike. They have no color. I don’t know what to do. The machines are turning out great, but the men look awful. What am I going to do?”

“How do our faces become what they are, how does a body model itself?” Frida repeated to Laura when Diego went off very early in order to avoid the increasing heat of the continental summer.

“How far I am from the soil where…” Frida half sang. “Do you know why it’s so hot?”

“Because we’re so far from the two oceans. Sea breezes just don’t get here. The only relief is the wind from the North Pole. Nice relief!”

“How do you know all that?”

“My father may have been a banker, but he read a lot. He subscribed to magazines. We’d go to the dock at Veracruz every month to pick up his European books and magazines.”

“And do you also know why I feel so much heat, no matter what temperature the thermometer says it is?”

“Because you’re going to have a baby.”

“And how do you know that?”

Because of the way she was walking, Laura said. But I’m lame. But now the soles of your feet touch the ground. Before, you walked on tiptoe, uncertain, as if you were about to fly away. Now it’s as if you were putting down roots with every step you take.

Frida hugged her and thanked her for being with her. From the first moment, she’d liked Laura. Seeing her, dealing with her, she said, she’d understood that the young woman felt useless or had been made to feel useless.

“I never saw a woman come through my door with a more desperate need to work. I think even you didn’t know it.”

“No, I didn’t know it. I was just obsessed by a need to invent a world for myself, and I suppose that means inventing work for yourself.”

“Or a child-that’s a creation, too.” Frida looked inquiringly at Laura.

“I have two.”

“Where are they?”

Why did Laura D az have the feeling that her conversations with Frida Kahlo-so intimately feminine, with no tricks, no twists and turns, not a drop of malice-were, on the one hand, a recrimination that Frida directed at her irresponsible maternity, not because it wasn’t conventional but because it wasn’t enough of a revolt against the men- the husband, the lover-who had distanced the mother from her children? Frida told Laura, in total frankness, that she’d been unfaithful to Rivera because he was unfaithful to her first. Between them they had only one agreement: Diego slept with women and Frida did the same, because if she slept with men, Diego would be enraged, as he wouldn’t in their symmetrical, shared taste for the female sex. That wasn’t the problem, the invalid woman confessed one night to Laura. Sometimes, infidelity has nothing to do with sex. It’s a matter of intimacy with another person, and when the intimacy is secret, and secrets require lies to protect intimacy, the secret is sometimes called “sex.”

“Whom you sleep with doesn’t matter, but whom you confide in does. And whom you lie to. It looks to me as though you don’t confide in anyone, Laura, and you lie to everyone.”

“Do you desire me?”

“I already told you I like you. But with the situation as it is, I need you as a companion and nurse most of all. If we complicate things sentimentally, it could turn out that I’ll find myself all alone, with no one to take me to the hospital when things start getting rough. Then I’ll be yelling for my granny! That’s on the one hand.”

She laughed a lot, as usual, but Laura persisted. “And what was the other reason? You said, On the one hand, but what about the other hand?”

“I won’t tell you. I might need you to give me tomorrow what I’m reproaching you for today. Let’s talk about practical things.”

It was July. The baby was supposed to arrive in December. If Diego finished in October, they’d have time to return safely together so the baby would be born in Mexico. But if Diego were slow, how could I have my baby here, in the cold, without friends, with no one to help me but you? And if I go back to Mexico early, don’t I run the risk of losing the baby on the way, in all that confusion and jangle of trains, as my little doctors warned me?

Laura found herself looking at a very vulnerable woman, almost hunched over, shrunken, swimming in the roomy peasant costumes that hid not only her physical diminution but also her fear, her imperceptible tremor, the second fear, a fear that came from within her, that not only extended or duplicated the physical fear of the shattered woman but replaced it with another, unexpressed and shared with the being gestating within her. There was a complicity between the mother and the child who was growing in her womb. No one could enter that secret circle.

Frida guffawed and asked Laura to help her braid her hair, arrange her skirts and blouse, drape her rebozo over her shoulders, and comb her mustache. Laura lent her a hand and both sallied forth into Gringoland, to the dinners and parties in honor of the “most famous painter in the world and Mrs. Rivera,” to dance with the millionaires of industry, challenging them to inquire into the invalid missteps Frida covered up by saying they were steps from Oaxaca folk dances, astonishing Indian dances, as astonishing as Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic face when Frida asked him during a dinner, Mr. Ford, is it true you’re Jewish? She scandalized Michigan high society with her feigned ignorance of how vulgar certain expressions were that she used in English, saying, with the most courteous smile, Shit on you! when she stood up after a banquet or, when she announced during a card game with society ladies, I enjoy fucking, don’t you? Accompanied by Laura in theaters blazing hot in a city where it was already 100 degrees Fahrenheit, she saw Chaplin in City Lights, Laurel and Hardy-the cream pies, the houses turned upside down, the police chase, a plate of spaghetti emptied down the bodice of a stately matron-all of that killed her with laughter, she would take Laura by the hand, weep with laughter, weep, laugh, weep, shout with laughter, shout…

The stretcher rolled along under the lights like eyes without eyelids, and the doctors asked Laura, How has she been feeling? She feels the heat a lot, her skin gets blotchy, her uterus hurts, a handrail pierced her vagina, she was hit by a trolley. What did she eat today? Two cups of custard, salad, she threw it all up, she’s the woman deflowered by a trolley. Did you know that? Her husband paints clean, shiny, steel machines, but she was raped by an old machine, rusty, indecent, toot toot and off we go, she shouted in the movie theater, she turned blue, began to bleed, they picked her up in a lake of blood, surrounded by clots of blood she’d lost from laughing, did you know? Laurel and Hardy.

She looked like a twelve-year-old girl resting in bed, her hair wet from weeping, shrunken, skinny, silent.

“I want to see my baby.”

“But, Frida, it’s only a fetus.”

“It doesn’t matter.”