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.