The Years With Laura Diaz

10. Detroit: 1932

ORLANDO’S NOTE had been waiting for her at the desk of the Hotel Regis when she returned from Xalapa. She’d been expecting it.

Laura my love, I’m not what I say I am nor what I seem to be. And I’d rather keep my secret. You’re getting too close to the mystery of your

Orlando

And without mystery our love would be uninteresting. I’ll always love you …

The hotel manager had told her she needn’t check out immediately, because Mrs. Cortina had taken care of everything until the following week.

“That’s right, Doña Carmen Cortina. She pays for the room that you and your friend Mr. Ximénez occupy. Well, for the past three years, she’s been paying for Mr. Ximénez.”

Friend? Whose friend? she was stupidly going to ask. Friend in what sense? friend of Laura, friend of Carmen, lover of which, lover of both?

Now, in Detroit, she remembered that a terrible feeling of abandonment had overwhelmed her at that moment, that she’d felt an urgent need for someone who’d feel sorry for her, “my hunger for pity.” And her immediate reaction, just as sudden as the desolation, impelled her to visit Diego Rivera’s house in Coyoacán and say, Here I am, remember me? I need work, I need to put a roof over my head, please accept me, maestro.

“Of course, the kid wearing black.”

“Yes, that’s why I dressed in mourning again. Remember me?”

“Well, mourning clothes still horrify me. They make me feel jinxed. Ask Frida to lend you something more colorful and then we’ll talk. Anyway, you look very different and very pretty.”

“I think so too,” said a melodious voice behind her, and Frida Kahlo made her entrance with a clatter of necklaces, medallions, and rings, rings especially, one on every finger, sometimes two: Laura Daz remembered the incident involving her grandmother Cosima Kelsen and wondered, watching this strange-looking woman enter the studio — black eyebrows, or rather one continuous black eyebrow, braided black hair tied up with wool ribbons, and a wide peasant skirt — whether the Hunk of Papantla hadn’t robbed the rings from Grandmother Cosima just to give them to his lover Frida. The sight of Rivera’s wife had Laura convinced that this was the goddess of transformations she and Grandfather Felipe had discovered in the Veracruz forest, the figure made by the Zapotal people which he had tried to demythologize by turning it into a mere ceiba tree, so that she wouldn’t go on believing in fantasies, a marvelous feminine figure staring at eternity, crisscrossed with belts of seashells and serpents, her head adorned with a crown woven by the forest, ornamented with necklaces and rings and earrings on her arms, nose, ears. No matter what Grandfather had said, a ceiba was more dangerous than a woman. A ceiba was a tree bristling with spines. No one could touch it. No one could embrace it.

Was Frida Kahlo the temporary name of a native goddess who assumed mortal form from time to time, reappearing here and there to make love with guerrilleros, bandits, and artists?

“She can work with me,” said Frida imperiously as she descended the studio stairs, averting her gaze neither from Rivera’s bulging eyes nor from Laura’s shadowy and deep-set ones. In that instant, Lauras, looking at herself in Frida, looked at herself, looked at Laura Díaz looking at Laura Daz, saw herself transformed, with a new personality about to be born in those familiar features but also about to metamorphose and, perhaps, be forgotten by Laura Daz herself, with her sculpted, thin, powerful face, her high, strong, long nose, the bridge flanked by eyes that grew increasingly melancholy, the rings under her eyes like lakes of uncertainty restrained at the edge of her pale cheeks, happy to have found the crimson of her thin lips, now even more severe, as if Laura’s entire visage had become, simply in contrast to Frida’s, more gothic, more statuesque when face to face with the vegetative life of Diego Rivera’s partner, a plucked flower, drained but still blooming.

“She can work with me … I’m going to need help in Detroit while you work and I, well … you know …”

She stumbled and slipped. Laura ran to help her, took her by the arm, and unintentionally touched her thigh — You didn’t hurt yourself, did you? — and what she felt was a dry, fleshless leg, compensated for or was it confirmed — in an act of simultaneous challenge and vulnerability, a dreamy glance that the women strangely exchanged. Rivera laughed.

“Don’t worry. I had no intention of touching her, Friducha. She’s all yours. Just think, this kid is German like you. And one Valkyrie is enough for me, I swear.”

Frida immediately liked Laura. She invited her to her bedroom, and the first thing she did was take out a mirror with an indigo-blue enameled frame. “Have you looked at yourself, woman, do you know how good-looking you are? Well, take advantage of it, you know you’re strange-looking, we just don’t see many great beauties, a profile that looks as if it were slashed out with a machete, the prominent nose, the eyes sunken, deep, and shadowed. Does your Orlando think he can take the mourning out of your eyes? Forget about him. I like you.”

“How do you know about Orlando?”

“Wake up, sweetie. This city’s like a small village. Everyone knows everything.”

Frida fluffed up the pillows on her bed with its brightly painted posts and quickly said, as Laura helped her to pack, “Tomorrow we’re off to Gringoland. Diego’s going to paint a mural in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Commissioned by Henry Ford himself, imagine. You know where all this leads. The Communists around here are attacking him for taking capitalist money. The capitalists up there are attacking him for being a Communist. I just tell him that an artist is above all this stupid bullshit. The important thing is the work. That’s what remains, no one can erase that, and that’s what will speak to the people when all the politicians and critics are pushing up daisies.

“Have you got any clothes of your own? I don’t want you to imitate me. You know I trick myself out as a piñata because of my own fantasies but also to cover up my sick leg and my hobble. She may limp, but she won’t need pimps — that’s my motto,” said Frida, running her hand over the dark down covering her upper lip.

Laura came back with her valise. Would Frida like her in the Balenciaga and Schiaparelli dresses she’d bought with Elizabeth and thanks to Elizabeth’s generosity, or should she revert to a simpler style? A sudden intuition told her that what would matter to this woman, so carefully turned out and decorative, and exactly because of that, would be naturalness in other people. That was her way of making others accept the naturalness of the extraordinary in her, in Frida Kahlo.

Frida kissed her hairless ixcuintle dogs goodbye, and they all took the train to Detroit.

The long journey through Mexico’s northern deserts with their rows upon rows of magueys reminded Rivera of a verse by the young poet Salvador Novo: “The magueys do gymnastics in rows five hundred deep.” But Frida said that Novo was no good, watch out for him, he was a backbiter, a bad fag, not like the tender, gentle queers she knew who were members of her group.

Rivera laughed. “If he’s bad, then the worse he is, the better.”

“Watch out for him. He’s one of those Mexicans who’d sell their own mother just to bring off a cruel joke. You know what he said to me at the show of that Tizoc guy? ‘Bye-bye, Pavlova.’ So I answered, ‘Bye bye, Salivator.’ I thought he was going to explode.”

“How vindictive you can be, Friducha. If you start speaking badly of Novo, you’re giving Novo permission to speak badly about us.”

“Doesn’t he already? The kindest insult he uses on you is to call you a cuckold. And me he calls Free-ass Kulo.”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing but resentment, gossip, stories. Novo the writer stands. As does Rivera the painter. And so does life itself. The anecdotes evaporate.”

“Fine. Diego, pass me the ukulele. Let’s sing the Mixteca song. It’s my favorite song for watching Mexico pass by.”

How far I am from the land where I was born,

Immense nostalgia invades my thoughts …

They changed trains at the border and then again at St. Louis, Missouri. From there, they went straight to Detroit, Frida singing to her ukulele, telling dirty jokes, and then, at nightfall, while Rivera slept, staring at the passage of the infinite North American plains and talking about the pulsing of the locomotive, that steel heart which excited her with its rhythm, simultaneously spirited and destructive like that of all machines.

“When I was a girl, I would dress up as a man and raise hell in philosophy class with my pals. We called ourselves the Caps. I fit right in, liberated from the conventions of my class, with a group of boys who loved Mexico City as much as I did, and we explored it all the time, the parks, neighborhoods, studying it as if it were a book, from cantina to cantina, from stall to stall, a small, pretty city all blue and pink, a city of sweet, disorganized parks, silent lovers, wide avenues and dark alleys that took you by surprise.”

All her life, she told Laura as they let the plains of Kansas and the wideness of the Mississippi run by, she’d sought out the dark city, discovering its smells and tastes, seeking above all company, friendship, any way to tell solitude to go fuck itself, to be one of the boys, to keep an eye out for the bastards, Laura, because in Mexico, all 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 Coyoacán 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 María 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, Adventures of the Mexican Julio Jurenito, detailing his Aztec culinary taste for human flesh, Tlaxcaltecan preferably — the traitors deserved to be fried in lard — lies, all the time, sketching on huge sheets of paper spread out on the dining-car table the gigantic, detailed plan of the Detroit mural, the hymn to modern industry). For Laura, the exciting novelty was that of a creative man who was both fantastic and disciplined, hardworking as a bricklayer, dreamy as a poet, funny as a circus clown, and (finally) cruel as an artist, who insisted on being the tyrannical owner of all his time, with no thought for the needs of others, their anguish, their calls for help … Diego Rivera painted, and while he painted, the door to the world and to his fellow man remained shut, so that inside the cage of art its forms, colors, memories, homages could live freely, so that no matter how social or political the art might become, it was above all part of the history of art, not of politics, and it either added reality to a tradition or took it away, a tradition and reality that most mortals judge to be autonomous and flowing. The artist knows better: his art does not reflect reality; it establishes it. And to accomplish that work, generosity, concern, contact with others do not matter at all if they interrupt or weaken the work. On the other hand, cheapness, disdain, the most flagrant egoism are virtues if, thanks to them, the artist does his work.

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 Coyoacán, 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 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 Daz 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.”

“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 Díaz, 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 Daz, 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 María 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:

Filled with myself, besieged in my own skin

by an ungraspable god who suffocates me

And look ahead here:

Oh intelligence, solitude in flames,

that conceives all without creating it!

And then at the end:

with Him, with me, with the three of us …

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, This woman is an artist, didn’t these idiots understand that? He scolded them, but said it to her, with love and pride, This woman who is my wife puts all the truth, suffering, and cruelty of the world into the painting that pain has forced her to create: you, surrounded by the routine suffering of a hospital, have never seen so much agonizing poetry, and that’s why you don’t understand her.

“My little sweetheart,” Frida said to him. “Mi chiquito lindo.”

When she could be moved, they returned to the hotel and Laura sorted Frida’s paintings for her. One day, the two of them finally went to see Diego painting at the Institute. Great progress had been made on the mural, but Frida saw the problem and how he had resolved it. The shining, devouring machines were woven together like great serpents of steel and proclaimed their primacy over the world of the workers who maintained them. Frida looked in vain for the faces of the American workers and understood. Diego had painted all of them with their backs turned because he didn’t understand them, because they were faces of unbaked dough with no personality, flour faces. But he had introduced dark faces — blacks and Mexicans — who did, yes, face the viewers, the world.

Every day, the two women brought him a nice tasty lunch in a basket and silently sat down to watch him work while he poured out his river of words. Frida sipped teaspoonfuls of cajeta from Celaya, which she brought to enjoy so she could fill up on that confection of caramelized condensed milk, each day a bit more as she got her strength back. Laura was dressed very simply in a tailored suit, but Frida was decked out in green, purple, and yellow rebozos, braids of colored ribbons, and necklaces of jadeite.

Rivera had left three blank spaces in his mural of industry. He began looking more and more often at the female couple sitting at one side of the scaffolding watching him work — Frida sipping cajeta and clanking her necklaces, Laura carefully crossing her legs — under the scrutiny of his assistants. One day, the two came in and saw themselves transformed into men, two workers with short hair and long overalls, in work shirts and with gloved hands grasping steel tools, Frida and Laura dominating the light of the mural at the far end of the wall, Laura with her angular features accentuated, her hatchet profile, her shadowed eyes, her hair even shorter than the old hairdo she’d rejected when the woman from Veracruz decided on her bangs and pageboy, Frida too with short hair and sideburns, her eyebrows thick but her most masculine trait, the down on her upper lip, eliminated by the painter, to the stupefaction of the model: “Hey, I’d have put in the mustache.”

There was another unpainted area in the center of the wall and in the upper part of the fresco, and Frida would glance nervously at those absences until one afternoon when she took Laura by the hand and said, Let’s get out of here. They took a taxi back to the hotel, and Frida ripped off a sheet of paper, spread it out over the table, and began to draw again and again, insatiably, the sun and the moon, the moon and the sun, separated, together.

Laura looked out of the hotel room’s high window searching for the star and its satellite, elevated by Frida to equal rank as day and night stars, sun and moon born of Venus, the first star of the day and the last of night, moon and sun equal in rank but opposite in hours, seen by the eyes of the world, not by the eyes of the universe, Laura, what will Diego put in those blank spaces in his mural?

“It scares me. He’s never kept a secret like that from me.”

They found out only on the day of the inauguration. A holy family of workers presided over the work of the machines and the white men with their backs to the world, the dark men facing the world, and, at the far end of the fresco, the two women dressed as men staring at the men, and above the depiction of the work and the machines a virgin wearing a humble calico dress and white beads like any Detroit shop-girl, holding a naked child, also with a halo, and seeking in vain the support of the eyes of a carpenter who had turned his back on the mother and child. The carpenter was holding the tools of his trade, hammer and nails, in one hand and two planks arranged in a cross in the other. His halo was faded and contrasted with the brilliant scarlet of a sea of flags that separated the holy family from the machines and workers.

The murmuring grew when the curtains were pulled back.

A joke, a parody, a joke on the capitalists who’d hired him, a parody of the spirit of Detroit, sacrilege, Communism. Another wall, this one of voices, began to rise opposite Diego Rivera’s, the assistants began to divide up, the shouting grew louder, Edsel Ford, son of the magnate, called for calm, Rivera climbed up on a stepladder and proclaimed the birth of a new art for the society of the future and had to scramble down painted yellow and red because the pots of paint that agitators had prepared beforehand at the direction of Rivera himself were beginning to be thrown at him, while another brigade of workers, also organized by Diego, stood in front of the mural and proclaimed they would guard it forever.

The next day, Diego, Frida, and Laura took the train to New York to start work on the Rockefeller Center mural project. Rivera was euphoric, cleaning his face with kerosene, happy as a mischievous child planning his next practical joke and succeeding at them all: attacked by capitalists for being a Communist and by Communists for being a capitalist, Rivera felt he was a pure Mexican, a joking, devilish Mexican with more quills than a porcupine to defend himself from bastards on both sides of the Rio Grande, devoid of the rancor that defeated both Mexicans and Americans before the game started, and delighted to be the target in the Mexican national sport of attacking Diego Rivera, which now would be seen as a national tradition as opposed to the new gringo sport of attacking Diego Rivera. Diego the fat Puck, who instead of laughing at the world from a thicket on a midsummer night could laugh from the thicket of his fresco scaffolding one moment, then fall to the floor and discover he had an ass’s head but find an amorous lap where he could take refuge and be caressed by the queen of the night, who saw not an ugly donkey but an enchanted prince, the frog transformed into the prince sent by the moon to love and protect his Friducha, mi chiquita, my adored little girl, broken, suffering, everything is for you, you know that, don’t you? And when I say, Frida, “Let me help you, poor little thing,” what am I saying but help me, poor little me, help your Diego?

They asked Laura to go back to Mexico with the summer suitcases, the cardboard boxes full of papers, to put the Coyoacán house in order, to live there if she liked, they didn’t have to say anything else to her because Laura saw they needed each other more than ever after the miscarriage, that Frida wasn’t going to work for a while, and that in New York she wouldn’t need Laura, she wouldn’t be useful, because Frida had many friends there, loved going shopping with them and to the movies, there was going to be a festival of Tarzan films she didn’t want to miss, she adored movies with gorillas, she’d seen King Kong nine times, they restored her sense of humor, made her laugh her head off.

“You know it’s hard for Diego to fall asleep in winter. Now I have to spend all my nights with him so he’ll get some rest and have energy for the new mural. Laura, don’t forget to put a doll in my Coyoacán bed.”