When she took the return train to Mexico City, she knew that she’d lied, that she was going to seek a destiny for herself and her sons without Juan Francisco, that reconciliation with her husband would be the easy way out and the worst thing for the boys’ future.
She lowered the window on the Pullman car, and saw herself and Juan Francisco seated in the Isotta-Fraschini that Xavier Icaza had given them as a wedding present, useless but elegant, and that they had given, also uselessly, to the four Kelsen sisters, who no longer left their house; the car was now in the hands of Zampaya, who could show off from time to time driving it around or taking the boys on a little excursion. She saw the four Kelsen sisters sitting there: they’d made the supreme effort to see her off along with the two boys. Danton didn’t look at her, pretending instead to drive the car and making extravagant noises with his mouth and nose. She would never forget Santiago’s gaze. He was his own ghost.
The train pulled out, and Laura felt a sudden anguish. There weren’t only four women in the Xalapa house. Li Po! She’d forgotten Li Po! Where was the Chinese doll, why didn’t she look for it or think about it? She tried to shout, to ask, but the train pulled out while handkerchiefs were waved.
“Can you imagine a leader in the workers’ movement with a luxury car imported from Europe parked in his garage? Forget about it, Laura. Give it to your mama and your aunts.”
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 D az 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 D az, 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 D az 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.