“Here,” Harry said, handing her a Leica. “I used it to take stills in Hollywood. Don’t come back without bringing me Frida Kahlo dead.”
She had restrained the rage Harry sometimes aroused in her. Frida was dying, amputated and ill, but even on her deathbed she’d gone on painting-right to the last moment. Harry was dying in a tropical valley, but he was too cowardly to pick up pen and paper. The main reason why Laura took the photo of Frida’s body was to show it to Harry and tell him, “She never stopped creating, not even on the day she died.”
But now Harry, too, was dead. So was Carmen Cortina, and the rage Laura felt toward Harry, like the sense of absurdity she felt seeing Carmen Cortina’s embalmed body, was turning, as she stared at the photo of Frida dead, into something more than love or admiration.
In her coffin, Frida Kahlo showed off her black hair braided with colored ribbons. Her ring-covered fingers and her arms laden with bracelets rested on a bosom decked out for the final journey in sumptuous necklaces of thin gold and silver from Morelia. Her pendant earrings of green turquoise no longer hung from her earlobes but lay at rest like her, mysteriously retaining the dead woman’s final warmth.
Frida Kahlo’s face did not change in death. Her eyes were closed but seemed alert, thanks to the inquisitive vivacity of her thick unbroken eyebrows, her trademark, that dangerous and fascinating whip. The thickness of her brows did not succeed in masking Frida’s mustache, the notorious and notable down on her upper lip that made you think that a penis, the twin of Diego’s, might be trying to spring up between her legs to confirm the probability, not just the illusion, that she was a hermaphrodite, and parthenogenic to boot, able to fertilize herself and generate with her own semen the new being that her feminine half would bear thanks to the vigor of her masculine half.
That’s how Laura Díaz photographed her, for Laura thought she was taking the picture of an inert body, not realizing that Frida Kahlo had already set out on the journey to Mictlan, the Mexican Indian underworld you can reach only if you are guided by three hundred ixcuintles, those hairless dogs Frida collected which now, motherless, were howling disconsolately on the patios and in the kitchens and on the roof terraces of the funeral home.
Frida Kahlo’s recumbent position was a deception. She was heading for Mictlan, an inferno that resembled a painting by Frida Kahlo but without the blood, the spines, and the martyrdom, without the operating rooms, the scalpels, the steel corsets, the amputations, without the fetuses-a hell only of flowers, of warm rains and hairless dogs, a hell piled high with pineapples, strawberries, oranges, mangos, guanábanas, mameys, lemons, papayas, zapotes, where she would arrive on foot, humble and haughty at the same time, with a sound body, cured, prior to hospitals, virgin of all accidents, greeting Señor Xolotl, ambassador of the Universal Republic of Mictlan, Chancellor and Plenipotentiary Minister of Death, that is, of THIS PLACE. How do you do, Señor Xolotclass="underline" that’s what Frida would be saying as she entered hell.
She entered hell. From her house in Coyoacán they took her, dead, to the National Palace of Fine Arts. There she was draped with the Communist flag, an act that led to the dismissal of the Institute director. Then she was brought to the crematorium: she was put into the oven-all decked out, dressed, bejeweled, with beribboned hair, the better to burn. And when the flames sprang up, Frida Kahlo’s body sat up, sat up as if she were going to chat with her oldest friends, the Caps group whose practical jokes had scandalized the National Preparatory School in the 1920s; as if she were getting ready to talk once again with Diego; that’s how Frida’s body sat up, animated by the crematorium flames. Her hair flamed like a halo. She smiled one last time at her friends, and dissolved.
All that remained to Laura Díaz was the photo she had taken of Frida Kahlo’s cadaver. It showed that death for Kahlo was a way to distance herself from everything ugly in this world, not to avoid it but to see it better; to discover the affinity of Frida, woman and artist, not with beauty but with truth.
She was dead, but through her closed eyes passed all the pain of her paintings, the horror more than the pain, according to some observers. No, in Laura Díaz’s photo, Frida Kahlo was the conduit of the pain and ugliness of hospitals, miscarriages, gangrene, amputations, drugs, immobile nightmares, the company of the devil, the wounded passage to a truth that becomes beautiful because it identifies our being with our essence, not with our appearance.
Frida gives form to the body: Laura photographed it.
Frida gathers together what is scattered: Laura photographed that integration.
Frida, like an all too infrequent phoenix, rises when touched by fire.
She was reborn to go off with the hairless dogs to the other neighborhood, to the land of Madam Baldy, La Pelona, Miss Toothy, La Dientona, Lady Toasty, La Tostada, Mistress Fancy, La Catrina, Charley’s Aunt.
She went dressed up for a party in Paradise.
2.
With the photo of dead Frida in one hand and the camera Harry had given her in the other, Laura looked at herself in the mirror of her new apartment on Plaza Rio de Janeiro, where she moved after the earthquake had made the old house on Avenida Sonora uninhabitable. Danton, who owned it, decided to demolish it and build in its place a twelve-story condominium.
“I thought your father and I were the owners of our home,” said Laura in surprise but under no illusions, the day Danton visited her to explain the new order of things.
“The property’s been mine for a long time,” answered Laura’s younger son.
The mother’s shock was an act; the real surprise was the physical change that had taken place in the thirty-five-year-old man she hadn’t seen since Juan Francisco’s funeral, when Laura’s in-laws ostracized her.
It wasn’t the few gray hairs at his temples or his slightly larger potbelly that had changed Danton but his insolent mien, a display of power he couldn’t hide, not even in the presence of his mother, although, perhaps-precisely-he exaggerated it because she was there. Everything, from his hair, which he wore in the same cut Marlon Brando had in Julius Caesar, to the charcoal-gray suit, the narrow English regimental tie, right down to his black Gucci loafers, affirmed power, self-confidence, the habit of being obeyed.
With nervous self-assurance, Danton stretched out his arms to show his ruby-colored cuff links.
“I’ve got my eye on a sweet apartment for you in Polanco, Mother.”
No, she insisted, I want to stay in Colonia Roma.
“It’s getting polluted very fast. The traffic congestion will be terrible. Besides, it’s out of fashion. And it’s where the earthquakes hit hardest.”
And for all those reasons I want to live here.
“Do you know what a condominium is? The one I’m building is the first in Mexico. It’s going to be the fashion. Vertical property is the future of this city, guaranteed. You should get in on it before it’s too late. Besides, those apartments you like in the Plaza aren’t for sale. They’re rentals.”
Precisely. She wanted to pay her own rent from now on, without his help.
“What are you going to live on?”
“How old do you think I am?”
“Don’t be so stubborn, Mother.”
“I thought my house belonged to me. Do you have to buy everything to be happy? Let me be happy in my own way.”