“The doctors won’t allow it.”
“Tell them it’s for artistic reasons.”
“Frida, it was born in shreds. It broke apart in your womb. It has no form.”
“Then I’ll give it a form.”
She slept. She awakened. She couldn’t bear the heat. She got out of bed. She tried to escape. She was put back to bed. She asked to see the child. Diego came to visit, tender, understanding, distant, pressed to return to work, his gaze fixed on the absent wall, not on the woman before him.
Then, one night, Laura heard a forgotten noise that reminded her of the days of her childhood in the Catemaco forest. She was sleeping on a cot in Frida’s hospital room, and the noise awakened her. She saw Frida in her bed, completely naked with her body broken, one leg thinner than the other, her vagina eternally bleeding a flood of carnations, her back screwed in place like a sealed window, and her hair growing, visibly growing second by second, longer and longer, hair sprouting like Medusa’s from her cranium, trailing like spiders over her pillow, slinking like snakes along the mattress, putting down roots around the bedposts, while Frida stretched out her hands and showed her the wounded vagina, asked her to touch it, not to be afraid, we women are pink inside, take the colors out of my sex, smear them on your fingers, bring me brushes and a drawing book, Laura, don’t look at me that way, how does one naked woman see another naked woman? because you’re naked too, Laura, even if you don’t know it, I do, I see you with your head covered with ribbons and a hundred umbilical cords tangled between your thighs: I dream your dreams, Laura Diaz, I see that you’re dreaming of snails, the slowest snails that travel through your years with a fragile, slimy slowness not knowing they’re in a garden that is also a cemetery and the plants in that garden weep and shriek and ask for milk, ask for the breast, the little girl plants are hungry, the little boy snails are deaf and pay no attention to their mothers, only I see them, I hear them and I understand them, only I see the real colors of the world, of the snail boys, the plant girls, the mother forest, they are blue, green, yellow, sulphur, amaranth… the earth is a garden, a tomb, and what you see is the truth, the hospital room is the only prodigal forest in this cement wasteland called Detroit, the hospital room fills up with yellow parrots and gray cats and white eagles and black monkeys, everyone brings me presents but you, Laura, what are you going to give me?
Diego saw her and asked Laura to bring her drawing books, pencils, and watercolors. All he needed was a look and an exchange of very few words.
“Sweetheart, you’re not ugly no matter what they say, actually…”
“Friducha, I love you more and more.”
“Who told you that you’re ugly, my love?”
“Look, a newspaper clipping from Mexico. They call me the obese Huitzilopochtli.”
“And what do they call me?”
“An Aztec goddess in decline.”
She laughed, held Laura’s hand, they all laughed a lot, and Laura?
“I baptize you Obsidian Butterfly,” said Diego. “I have spoken.”
With Laura at her side handing her pencils, brushes, colors, paper, Frida began to paint while talking, just like her husband, as if neither of them could create without the protective shadow of language, simultaneously alien to artists and their indispensable shadow. Frida spoke to Laura, but she was really speaking to herself speaking to Laura, she asked her to let herself be seen seeing herself in a mirror and Laura, watching the reduced woman, curled up in the bed with her hair greasy and her eyebrows in open revolt and her mustache unclipped, could do nothing, and Frida told her to consider it carefully, it was one thing to be a body and another to be beautiful, for her, knowing she was a body was enough for now, knowing she’d survived, beauty would come later, the first thing was to give form to the body that every so often and more and more threatened to disintegrate like that fetus she could only expel in a roar of laughter: she drew more and more rapidly and feverishly, like her words which Laura would never forget, ugliness is the body without shape, help me gather together everything that was scattered, Laura, give it its own shape, catch the cloud on the wing, the sun, the chalk silhouette of my dress, the red ribbon that links me to my fetus, the bloody bedsheet that is my toga, the coagulated crystal of the tears running down my cheeks, all together, please, help me gather together everything that was scattered and give it its own shape, won’t you?, the theme doesn’t matter, pain, love, death, birth, revolution, power, pride, vanity, dream, memory, will, it doesn’t matter what animates the body so long as it gives it form and then it isn’t ugly anymore, beauty only belongs to the person who understands it, not to the person who possesses it, beauty is nothing more than the truth that belongs to each one of us, that of Diego when he paints, mine I’m inventing right in this hospital bed, yours you still have to find, Laura, you understand from everything I’ve said to you that I’m not going to reveal it to you, it’s up to you to understand it and find it, your truth, you can look at me without modesty, Laura D az, say that I look horrible, you wouldn’t dare show me the mirror, in your eyes today I am not beautiful, on this day and in this place I am not pretty, and I won’t answer you with words, I’m asking you instead for some colors and a sheet of paper and I turn the horror of my wounded body and my spilled blood into my truth and into my beauty, because you know, my true friend, my true buddy all the way, you know?, knowing ourselves makes us beautiful because it identifies our desires; when a woman desires, she’s always beautiful…
The hospital room was filling up, first with drawing books, separate sheets of paper later, then sheets of tin when Diego brought some church retables from Guanajuato and reminded Frida how people painted in villages and out in the country, on sheets of tin and abandoned wooden planks that became, when touched by rustic hands, ex votos giving thanks to the Holy Child of Atocha, the Virgin of Remedies, the Lord of Chalma, for the miracle that had been granted, the daily miracle that saved the child from sickness, the father from the mine collapse, the mother from drowning in the river where she bathed, Frida from dying pierced by a handrail, Grandmother Cosima from being chopped to pieces on the road to Perote, Auntie Maria de la O from being abandoned in a bordello for blacks, Grandfather Felipe from dying in a trench on the Marne, brother Santiago from being shot at dawn in Veracruz, Frida again from bleeding to death in giving birth, and Laura-from what? for being saved from what should she give thanks for her salvation?
“Read this poem to Frida.” Rivera handed a slim volume to Laura. “This is the best Mexican poem since Sor Juana. Read what it says on this page:
And look ahead here:
And then at the end:
See how Gorostiza understands everything? We are only three, always three. Father, mother, and child. Woman, man, and lover. Change it around any way you like, at the end you’ll always be left with three, because four is immoral, five is unmanageable, two is insufferable, and one is the threshold between solitude and death.”
“And why does four have to be immoral?” Frida asked in surprise. “Laura got married and had two sons.”
“My husband walked out.” Laura smiled timidly. “Actually, I left him.”
“And there’s always one child you favor, even if you have a dozen,” added Frida.
“Three, always three,” muttered Rivera as he walked out.
“That bastard’s got something up his sleeve.” Frida furrowed her bushy brows. “Hand those tin sheets to me, will you, Laura?”
When the hospital complained about the growing disorder in the room, the shreds of paper everywhere and the smell of the paints, Diego appeared like a god in a classical tragedy, Jupiter the Thunderer, and said in English,
