Frida Read online

  In 1894 he married a Mexican woman, who died four years later as she gave birth to their second daughter. He then fell in love with Matilde Calderón, a fellow employee at La Perla. As Frida told the story, “The night his wife died, my father called my grandmother Isabel, who came with my mother. My mother and my father had been working in the same store. He was very much in love with her and later they got married.”

  It is not hard to imagine why Guillermo Kahlo loved Matilde Calderón. Photographs of her at the time of her marriage show that she was a strikingly beautiful woman with enormous dark eyes, full lips, and a determined chin. She was “like a little bell from Oaxaca,” Frida said once. “When she went to market, she gracefully cinched her waist and carried her basket coquettishly.” Born in Oaxaca in 1876, Matilde Calderón y González was the oldest of the twelve children of convent-bred Isabel González y González, the daughter of a Spanish general, and Antonio Calderón, a photographer of Indian descent who came from Morelia. According to Frida, her mother was intelligent, though unlettered; what she lacked in education she made up for in piety.

  It is somewhat more difficult to imagine what attracted the devout Matilde Calderón to Guillermo Kahlo. The twenty-six-year-old immigrant was by birth Jewish, by persuasion an atheist, and he suffered from seizures. On the other hand, his light skin and his cultured European background must have had a certain appeal in those days, when anything European was considered superior to anything Mexican. Moreover, he was intelligent, hard-working, and rather handsome, in spite of his protruding ears. He had thick brown hair, a beautiful, sensitive mouth, a fine mustache with pointed ends that twisted upward in just the way they should, and a slender, agile body—he “was very interesting and he moved in an elegant way when he walked,” Frida said. If the look in his huge brown eyes was a little too intense—and it became more disturbingly agitated over the years—his gaze was also romantic.

  Matilde, at twenty-four several years beyond the usual marriage age, may have been particularly susceptible because of a previous affair that ended tragically. Frida recalled that when she was eleven years old, her mother showed her a book covered in Russian leather “where she kept the letters from her first boyfriend. On the last page it said that the writer of the letters, a young German, had committed suicide in her presence. This man continued to live in her memory.” It is natural that the young woman would have been attracted to another German, and if she did not love him—Frida said she did not—she at least thought she was making a good match.

  It was Matilde Calderón de Kahlo who persuaded her husband to take up photography, her own father’s profession. Frida said that her grandfather lent her father a camera, “and the first thing that they did was to go off on a trip around the Republic. They produced a collection of photographs of indigenous and Colonial architecture and they returned to install their first workshop on Avenida 16 de Septiembre.”

  The photographs were commissioned by José Ives Limantour, the secretary of the treasury under the dictator Porfirio Díaz, and they were to illustrate a series of large-format luxury publications for the 1910 celebration of the centennial of Mexican Independence. The job took four years to complete. From 1904 to 1908, using fine Germanmade cameras and more than nine hundred glass plates that he prepared himself, Guillermo Kahlo recorded the architectural heritage of Mexico, earning the accolade “first official photographer of Mexico’s cultural patrimony.”

  Indeed, Limantour had chosen well: Guillermo Kahlo was a fastidious technician with a stubbornly objective approach to what he saw; in his photographs, as in his daughter’s paintings, there are no tricky effects, no romantic obfuscation. He tried to give as much information about the architectural structure he recorded as he possibly could, carefully selecting his vantage point and using light and shade to delineate form. An advertisement for his work printed in English and Spanish said: “Guillermo Kahlo specialist in landscapes, buildings, interiors, factories, etc., and who takes photos on order, be it in the City, be it in any other point of the Republic.” Although on occasion he took fine portraits of members of the Díaz government and of his own family, he said that he did not want to photograph people because he did not wish to improve what God had made ugly.

  Whether Guillermo Kahlo knew the humor of such a statement is hard to say, but when Frida’s contemporaries speak of him they almost always also recall his utterances, and usually the quote is at once direct, sardonic, and in a wonderfully deadpan way, funny.

  This does not mean that Frida’s father was a lighthearted man. To the contrary, he was a man of few words, whose silences had a powerful resonance, and there was about him an aura of bitterness. He never really felt at ease in Mexico, and although he was anxious to be accepted as Mexican, he never lost his strong German accent. As time went on, he withdrew more and more. Frida recalled that “he had only two friends. One was an old largote [tall man] who always left his hat on top of the armoire. My father and the old man spent hours playing chess and drinking coffee.”

  In 1936 Frida portrayed her birthplace and her family tree in the delightfully whimsical painting My Grandparents, My Parents and I (figure 2). She presents herself as a small girl (she said she was about two) standing naked and self-possessed in the patio of her blue house; her child-size chair is at her feet, and she holds the crimson ribbon, her bloodline, that supports her family tree as easily as if it were the string of a prized balloon. The portraits of her parents are based on their wedding photograph, in which the couple floats like angels in the sky, framed by an aureole of clouds. This old-fashioned photographic convention must have amused Frida: in the painting she has placed the portraits of her grandparents in similar soft cumulous nests. Frida’s maternal grandparents, the Indian Antonio Calderón and the gachupina (of Spanish extraction) Isabel González y González, are situated above Frida’s mother. On her father’s side is a European couple, Jakob Heinrich Kahlo and Henriette Kaufmann Kahlo. About the origin of Frida Kahlo’s most striking physical characteristic there can be no doubt: she inherited her heavy, joined eyebrows from her father’s mother. Frida said she looked like both her parents: “I have my father’s eyes and my mother’s body.” In the painting Guillermo Kahlo has an uneasy, penetrating gaze, a look that, in its unsettling intensity, was to appear again in his daughter’s eyes.

  Frida has faithfully copied every ruffle, seam, and bow on her mother’s wedding dress from the original photograph, creating a humorous foil for the pink fetus, well along in development, that she has placed on the virginal white skirt. The fetus is Frida; that it may also refer to the possibility that her mother was pregnant when she got married is typical of Frida’s delight in multiple meanings. Below the fetus is a mock wedding portrait: a big sperm, trailed by a school of smaller competitors, penetrates an egg: Frida at the moment of conception. Close by is another scene of fecundation: a crimson, U-shaped cactus flower opening to receive pollen carried by wind.

  Frida has set her house not in the suburbs but in the cactus-dotted plain of Mexico’s high central tableland. In the distance are the ravine-gashed mountains that were often the landscape setting of her self-portraits; just below the images of her paternal grandparents is the ocean. Her Mexican grandparents were symbolized by the earth, Frida explained, and her German ones by the sea. A humble Mexican home adjoins the Kahlos’ house, and in a field beyond there is a still more primitive dwelling, an Indian’s adobe hut. In a childlike vision, the artist has subsumed the entire town of Coyoacán into her own home, which she has then placed apart from the rest of reality, in a wilderness. Frida stands in the middle of her house, in the middle of Mexico, in the middle—one feels—of the world.

  * * *

  * Designed to be exploded on Sábado de Gloria—the Saturday before Easter—such figures stand for more than the betrayal of Christ by Judas. They have also come to signify the betrayal of the people by powerful oppressors, and they take many forms: some represent policemen, soldiers, politicians, and landowners—�
�anyone who had earned the hatred of the people” (Bertram D. Wolfe and Diego Rivera, Portrait of Mexico, p. 51).

  Chapter 2

  Childhood in Coyoacán

  MAGDALENA CARMEN FRIDA KAHLO Y CALDERÓN, the third daughter of Guillermo and Matilde Kahlo, was born on July 6, 1907, at eight-thirty in the morning, in the midst of the summer rainy season, when the high plateau of Mexico City is cold and dank. The first two names were given to Frida so that she could be baptized with a Christian name. Her third name, the one her family used, means “peace” in German. (Although her birth certificate says “Frida,” Frida spelled her name the German way, with an e, until the late 1930s, when she dropped the e because of the rise of Nazism in Germany.)

  Shortly after Frida’s birth, her mother became ill, and the infant was suckled for a time by an Indian wet nurse. “I was nursed by a nana whose breasts they washed every time I was going to suckle,” she told a friend proudly. Years later, when the fact that she had been nourished by an indigenous woman’s milk became crucial to her, she painted the wet nurse as the mythic embodiment of her Mexican heritage and herself as an infant at hėr breast.

  Perhaps because of Matilde Kahlo’s health—as she neared middle age, she began to suffer from “seizures” or “attacks” resembling her husband’s—or perhaps because of her temperament, Frida and her younger sister, Cristina, were cared for largely by their older sisters, Matilde and Adriana, and, whenever they were at home, by their half-sisters, María Luisa and Margarita, who had been placed in a convent when their father remarried.

  Three years after Frida’s birth, the Mexican Revolution broke out. It began with uprisings in various parts of the country and with the gathering of guerrilla armies in Chihuahua (under Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa) and in Morelos (under Emiliano Zapata); they were to continue for ten years. In May 1911 came the fall and exile of the old dictator, Porfirio Díaz. The revolutionary leader Francisco Madero was elected president in October 1912, but in February 1913, after the “tragic ten days,” when opposing troops in the National Palace and the Ciudadela bombarded each other, causing much destruction and death, Madero was double-crossed by General Victoriano Huerta and murdered. In the north, Venustiano Carranza rose to avenge the death of Madero. He took the title of first chief of the Constitutionalist Army and, with a small body of troops at his disposal, set out to overthrow Huerta. The vicious jockeying for power and its inevitable bloodlettings did not finally cease until the inauguration of President Alvaro Obregón, one of Carranza’s generals, in November 1920.

  In her diary, written in the last decade of her life and now on display in her museum, Frida proudly—and, one suspects, with considerable poetic license—recalled being witness to the battles of the opposing revolutionary armies that bore down upon Mexico City.

  I remember that I was four years old [actually, she was five] when the “tragic ten days” took place. I witnessed with my own eyes Zapata’s peasants’ battle against the Carrancistas. My situation was very clear. My mother opened the windows on Allende Street. She gave access to the Zapatistas, seeing to it that the wounded and hungry jumped from the windows of my house into the “living room.” She cured them and gave them thick tortillas, the only food that could be obtained in Coyoacán in those days. . . . We were four sisters: Matita, Adri, me (Frida) and Cristi, the chubby one. . . .

  In 1914 bullets just hissed. I still hear their extraordinary sound. In the tianguis [market] of Coyoacán propaganda in favor of Zapata was made with corridos [revolutionary ballads] edited by [the printmaker José Guadalupe] Posada. On Friday these ballad sheets cost one centavo and, enclosed in a great wardrobe that smelled of walnut wood, Cristi and I sang them, while my mother and father watched out for us so that we could not fall into the hands of the guerrillas. I remember a wounded Carrancista running toward his stronghold [near] the river of Coyoacán. From the window I also spied [a] Zapatista with a bullet wound in his knee, squatting and putting on his sandals. [Here, Frida drew sketches of the Carrancista and the Zapatista.]

  To Frida’s parents, the revolution was not an escapade but a misfortune. Guillermo Kahlo’s commissions from the Díaz government had given him enough money to build a comfortable house on a plot of land in a fashionable section of Coyoacán; the fall of that government, followed by a decade of civil war, brought him penury. Photographic commissions of any kind were hard to come by; as Frida said, “it was with great difficulty that a livelihood was earned in my house.”

  Matilde Calderón had married a man with prospects; now she found herself having to scrimp and save. Her husband had no head for money and was often unable even to buy photographic supplies. They mortgaged the house, sold the French living room furniture, and at one point had to take in paying guests. As Guillermo Kahlo became increasingly taciturn and misanthropic, it was his matronly wife who kept the household on its feet, grumbling at servants, bargaining with shopkeepers, and complaining to the farmer who delivered the milk. “She did not know how to read or write,” Frida remembered. “She only knew how to count money.”

  Matilde Kahlo knew more than that. She taught her daughters the domestic skills and graces that go with a traditional Mexican upbringing, and she tried to pass along to them the religious faith that meant so much to her, shepherding them to church every day and to retreats at Eastertime. Frida did learn to sew, embroider, cook, and clean at an early age—and all through her life she took great pride in the beauty and order of her home—but both she and Cristina rebelled against the traditional piety of their mother, their older sisters (Margarita became a nun), and their aunts. “My mother was hysterical about religion,” Frida said. “We had to pray before meals. While the others concentrated on their inner selves, Cristi and I would look at each other, forcing ourselves not to laugh.” She and Cristina attended a catechism class in preparation for their First Communion, “but we escaped and went to eat haws, quinces, and capulines [cherry-like fruit of the capulin tree] in a nearby orchard.”

  When the time came to go to school, Frida and Cristina went together. “When I was three or four years of age they sent Cristi and me to a kindergarten,” Frida remembered. “The teacher was old-fashioned, with false hair and the strangest dresses. My first memory is of this teacher. She was standing in front of the dark classroom holding in one hand a candle and in the other an orange and explaining how the universe worked, the sun, the earth, and the moon. It made such an impression on me that I urinated. They took off my wet pants and put on the pants of a girl who lived across the street from my house. Because of this, I took such a dislike to the girl that one day I brought her near my house and I began to strangle her. Her tongue was already out of her mouth when a baker passed by and freed her from my hands.”

  No doubt, Frida exaggerates her devilishness, but she was definitely a prankster. Once her half-sister María Luisa was sitting on the chamber pot. “In play I pushed her and she fell backward with the pot and all.” This time, the victim retaliated. “Furious, she said to me, ’You are not the daughter of my mother or my father. They picked you up out of a trash can.’ This statement impressed me so much that I changed into a completely introverted creature. From then on I had adventures with an imaginary friend.”

  Such rebuffs did not deter Frida for long. She even dared to tease her father, poking fun at his punctilious German ways by calling him “Herr Kahlo.” And it was she who played a leading role in the episode that perhaps more than any other demonstrates the unhappiness in the Kahlo household during the years when the sisters were growing up. Frida told the story:

  When I was seven I helped my sister, Matilde, who was then fifteen years old, to escape with her boyfriend to Veracruz. I opened the balcony window and later closed it again so that it looked as if nothing had happened. Matita was my mother’s favorite, and her flight made my mother hysterical. . . . When Maty left, my father did not say a word. . . .

  For some years we did not see Matita. One day while we were on a streetcar, my father
said to me, “We’ll never find her!” I consoled him and in truth my hopes were sincere [for a friend had told me], “There is a married woman who looks very much like you living in the Doctores section of town. Her name is Matilde Kahlo.” In the back of a patio, in the fourth room off a long corridor, I found her. The room was full of light and birds. Matita was bathing herself with a hose. She lived there with Paco Hernández, whom she later married. They enjoyed a good economic situation and they did not have children. The first thing I did was to tell my father that I had found her. I visited her several times and I tried to convince my mother to see them, but she didn’t want to.

  It was a long time before Frida’s mother forgave her eldest daughter. Matilde used to come home bearing gifts of fruit and delicacies, but since her mother refused to let her in, she left her offerings at the door. Later, when Matilde was gone, Señora Kahlo would take the presents into the house. Not until 1927, twelve years after Matilde ran away, could Frida write to a friend that “Maty now comes to this mansion. Peace has been made.”

  Frida’s ambivalence toward her mother—her love as well as scorn—showed itself when, in an interview, she described her mother as both “cruel” (for drowning a litter of rats) and “very nice, active, intelligent.” And although the inevitable battles with the woman she called "mi Jefe" (my Chief) became more intense as both grew older, when her mother died Frida “could not stop crying.”

  As a small child, Frida was a chubby imp, with a dimple in her chin and a mischievous glint in her eye. A family photograph taken when she was about seven shows a marked change: She is thin and gangling; her face is somber, her expression withdrawn. She stands alone behind a bush as if she wished to hide.

  The reason for the change was illness: when Frida was six years old, she was stricken with polio. She was to spend nine months confined to her room. “It all began with a horrible pain in my right leg from the muscle downward,” she remembered. “They washed my little leg in a small tub with walnut water and small hot towels.”