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 D az, 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 modeclass="underline" “Hey, I’d have put in the mustache.”