“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.”