Frida Read online

  Her irreverence toward professors sometimes went as far as petitioning the director to remove them. “He is not a teacher,” she would say. "[He] doesn’t know what he’s talking about since the text contradicts what he says, and when we ask him questions he is not capable of answering them. Let’s eliminate him and renew the professorship.”

  The Cachuchas had no more respect for painters than they had for professors. When Vasconcelos, in 1921–1922, commissioned a number of artists to paint murals in the Preparatoria, the painters, perched on their scaffolds, became perfect targets. After a scaffold was built, for example, there would be wood shavings and scraps all over the floor. “We would set them on fire,” said José Gómez Robleda, “and there the poor painter would be, amidst flames, and his paintings all ruined. The painters took to wearing huge pistols.”

  Of all the artists, Diego Rivera, commissioned to paint a mural in the Bolivar Amphitheater, the Preparatoria’s auditorium, was the most colorful personality. He was thirty-six years old in 1922, world-famous, and fantastically fat. He loved to talk while he painted, and his charisma together with his frog-like appearance guaranteed him an audience. Another attraction—in those days when teachers and public servants wore black suits, stiff collars, and homburgs—was his characteristic dress: a Stetson hat, big black miner’s shoes, and a wide leather belt (sometimes a cartridge belt), which could barely contain the baggy clothes that looked as if he had slept in them for a week.

  Frida in particular was moved to mischief by Rivera. Although the amphitheater was off bounds to students while the artist was at work, she managed to slip in without being caught. She stole food out of his lunch basket. Once she soaped the stairway that descended from the amphitheater stage where he was painting, and then hid behind a pillar to watch. But Rivera’s way of walking was slow and measured; placing one foot carefully before the other, he moved as if suspended in a liquid medium and never fell. The next day, however, Professor Antonio Caso tumbled down the same stairs.

  A succession of beautiful models accompanied Rivera on the scaffold. One was his mistress, Lupe Marín (he married her in 1922). Another model was the well-known beauty Nahui Olín, who posed for the figure representing erotic poetry in the Preparatoria mural and was a painter herself. Frida liked to hide in the dark doorway, and if Lupe was on the scaffold, she would call out: “Hey, Diego, here comes Nahui!” Or when no one was with him and she saw Lupe arriving, she would whisper loudly, as if Diego were about to be caught in some compromising situation, “Watch out, Diego, Lupe’s coming!”

  It is part of Frida Kahlo’s myth that she became infatuated with Diego Rivera during her Preparatoria years. Once when a group of girl students were discussing their life ambitions in an ice cream store, Frida reportedly came out with the astonishing statement: “My ambition is to have a child by Diego Rivera. And I’m going to tell him so someday.” When Adelina Zendejas protested that Diego was a “potbellied, filthy, terrible-looking” old man, Frida retorted, “Diego is so gentle, so tender, so wise, so sweet. I’d bathe him and clean him.” She would have his baby, she said, “just as soon as I convince him to cooperate.” Frida herself recalled that while she taunted Diego with names like “Old Fatso,” in her head she was always saying, “You’ll see, panzón [fat-belly]; now you don’t pay any attention to me, but one day I’ll have a child by you.”

  In his autobiography, My Art, My Life, Rivera tells another story:

  One night, as I was painting high on the scaffold and Lupe was sitting and weaving down below, there was a loud shouting and pushing against the auditorium door. All of a sudden the door flew open, and a girl who seemed to be no more than ten or twelve was propelled inside.

  She was dressed like any other high school student but her manner immediately set her apart. She had unusual dignity and self-assurance, and there was a strange fire in her eyes. Her beauty was that of a child, yet her breasts were well developed.

  She looked straight up at me. “Would it cause you any annoyance if I watched you at work?” she asked.

  “No, young lady, I’d be charmed,” I said.

  She sat down and watched me silently, her eyes riveted on every move of my paint brush. After a few hours, Lupe’s jealousy was aroused, and she began to insult the girl. But the girl paid no attention to her. This, of course, enraged Lupe the more. Hands on hips, Lupe walked toward the girl and confronted her belligerently. The girl merely stiffened and returned Lupe’s stare without a word.

  Visibly amazed, Lupe glared at her a long time, then smiled, and in a tone of grudging admiration, said to me, “Look at that girl! Small as she is, she does not fear a tall, strong woman like me. I really like her.”

  The girl stayed about three hours. When she left, she said only, “Good night.” A year later I learned that she was the hidden owner of the voice that had come from behind the pillar and that her name was Frida Kahlo. But I had no idea that she would one day be my wife.

  For all Frida’s fascination with Rivera, she was, during her school years, the girl friend of the undisputed leader of the Cachuchas, Alejandro Gómez Arias. Known as a brilliant and charismatic orator, an amusing storyteller, an erudite scholar, and a good athlete, Alejandro was also handsome, with a high forehead, gentle dark eyes, an aristocratic nose, and delicately formed lips. His manner was sophisticated, a little dégagé. As he spoke of politics or Proust, painting or school gossip, his ideas flowed with all the ease of water; but to him, conversation was an art, and he orchestrated his silences with care, always keeping his audience’s rapt attention.

  His refined sensibility, his severe notion of self-discipline, and his critical acumen sometimes made him hard on his friends. He could play with words like a juggler, but the swift trident of his satire was devastating. He despised vulgarity, stupidity, venality, the misuse of power. He loved knowledge, moral probity, justice, and irony. The young orator’s mellifluous voice, his graceful arms drawing arcs in space or briefly crossed upon his chest, his eyes full of passion, looking upward as if for inspiration, were captivating. “Optimism, sacrifice, purity, love, alegría are the orator’s social mission,” he would cry as he exhorted his fellows to dedicate themselves to their nation’s “great destiny,” to what he called “my Mexico.”

  Frida, who grew up to love great men, began by attaching herself to Alejandro. Having entered the Preparatoria in 1919, he was several classes ahead of her, and he became for a time her mentor, her cuate, and ultimately her boyfriend. Frida called him her novio, a term that in those days implied a romantic attachment that often ended in marriage (a novio is a fiancé, according to dictionary usage). But Gómez Arias feels that the terms novio and novia give an overly bourgeois notion of their relationship: he prefers to be called her “intimate friend” or her “young lover.” The adolescent Frida, he says, “had a fresh, perhaps ingenuous and childlike manner, but at the same time she was quick and dramatic in her urge to discover life.” Gentle and chivalrous, Alejandro wooed his “niña of the preparatoria,” as she called herself, with flowers and witticisms. After school they used to be seen walking and talking without cease. They exchanged photographs and, whenever they were separated from each other, letters.

  Frida’s letters to Alejandro are still in his possession; they offer a picture of her life, and they vividly reveal her development from a child into an adolescent and finally into a woman. They also show her compulsion to tell about her life and her feelings, a need that would eventually impel her to paint mostly self-portraits. She wrote with an emotional candor that is surprising in an adolescent girl, and her characteristic impulsiveness is sustained in the momentum of her language: the flow of words is rarely measured by commas, periods, or paragraphs. It is, however, often enlivened with cartoon-like drawings. Frida illustrated things that happened to her—a fight, a kiss, herself sick in bed. She drew numerous smiling or crying faces and faces that did both at once (Alejandro sometimes called her lagrimilla, “crybaby"). She sketched modish beauties with
long necks, bobbed hair, pencil-thin eyebrows, and pursed lips. Next to one of these she wrote in a mixture of Spanish and English, “One tipo ideal” (one ideal type) and the warning: “Don’t tear her out because she is very pretty. . . . From the little doll above, you can see what progress I am making in drawing, isn’t that so? Now you know that I am a prodigy in matters of art! So be very careful if the dogs should come near this admirable psychological and artistic study of one ’pay Checka’ (one tipo ideal).”

  Cachucha Manuel González Ramírez remembers that Frida developed a personal emblem that she used as a signature: an isosceles triangle with the point down that she sometimes transformed into a portrait by the addition of her features, the lower angle becoming a beard. Many of her letters to Alejandro are signed with a point-upward isosceles triangle, with no face.

  In Frida’s first letter to Alejandro, dated December 15, 1922, she sounds like a well-brought-up Catholic child; she has not yet found her own witty and intimate voice. The letter consoles Alejandro for some misfortune:

  Alejandro: I was very sorry about what happened to you and really the biggest condolence came out of my heart.

  The only thing that as a friend I advise you is to have enough strength of will to support such pains as God Our Father sends us as a test given the fact that we came into the world to suffer.

  I have felt in my soul this pain and what I ask God is that he gives you the grace and sufficient strength to accept it.

  Frieda

  During the summer of 1923, Frida and Alejandro fell in love, and the letters become more personal, revealing her cajoling flirtatiousness and the intensely possessive nature of her attachment.

  Coyoacán, August 10, 1923

  Alex: I received your note yesterday at seven in the evening when I least expected that someone would remember me, and least of all Dr. Alejandro, but luckily, I was mistaken. . . . You don’t know how delighted I was that you had confidence in me as if I were a true friend and you spoke to me as you had never spoken to me before, since you tell me with a little irony that I am so superior and I am so far beyond you, I will see the basis of those lines and not see what others would see in them. . . . . . and you ask my advice, something that I would give with all my heart, if the little experience of my 15 [sixteen] years is worth something, but if good intentions are enough for you not only is my humble advice yours but all of me is yours. . . .

  Well Alex, write to me often and long, the longer the better, and meanwhile receive all the love of

  Frieda

  P.S.: Say hello to Chong Lee and to your little sister.

  Since their relationship was not sanctioned by Frida’s parents, the couple met clandestinely. Frida invented excuses for leaving the house, for returning late from school; because her mother was apt to ask to whom her daughter was writing, she often wrote in bed at night. Or she would dash off notes while standing in the post office. When she was sick she had to rely on Cristina, not always a cooperative accomplice, to mail her letters to Alejandro. So that she could receive his, she asked him to sign them Agustina Reyna. She promised to write to him every day as proof that she had not forgotten him. “Tell me if you don’t love me anymore Alex, I love you even if you do not love me as much as a flea.” To prove it, she filled her letters with kisses and expressions of affection. Sometimes she drew a circle near her signature, explaining, “Here is a kiss from your Friducha,” or “My lips were here a long time.” When she grew up and wore lipstick, she no longer needed the captions, but she kept circling the imprint of her lips on letters all her life.

  During December 1923 and January 1924, Frida and Alejandro were separated not only by the inter-term vacation at the Preparatoria (which lasted from the end of final exams in mid-December to the beginning of the school year in mid-February) but also by the fact that on November 30, 1923, a rebellion against President Obregón broke out. By Christmas there was fighting in Mexico City. Vasconcelos resigned as minister of education in January to protest the ruthless suppression of the rebels, but he was persuaded to resume his post. The revolt lasted until March 1924, when it was finally put down, at a cost of seven thousand dead. But politics remained volatile, and in June, Vasconcelos resigned again (for the last time) in protest against the election (with the support of President Obregón and United States interests) of Plutarco Elías Calles as president of Mexico. When he was gone, conservative students in the Preparatoria turned their ire upon the walls the muralists had painted, scratching curses into the plaster and spitting on the motifs that offended them most.

  Though the Cachuchas disdained politics and politicians, they must have participated in demonstrations in support of Vasconcelos. It is said that on Christmas Eve, 1923, some of them rode the trolley to the Desierto de los Leones (between Mexico City and Coyoacán) with the intention of entering the fray. (Either the flash of gunpowder in the distance or the sudden appearance of a full moon changed their minds; they boarded the next homeward-bound streetcar.) Much to her regret, Frida did not participate in these adventures, for her mother kept her at home whenever there was political agitation or the rumor of violence. Frida loathed being confined: “I am sad and bored in this town,” she wrote in one note to Alejandro; “though very picturesque, [it] lacks a no se quien [I don’t know who] who goes every day to the Ibero American.” And on another occasion: “Tell me what’s new in Mexico [City], about your life and about everything that you want to tell me since you know that here there is nothing but pasture and pasture, Indians and Indians, and huts and huts so that one can’t get away and so that even if you don’t believe it I am very bored with b of burro. . . . when you come for the love of God bring me something to read because each day I am becoming more ignorant. (Forgive me for being such a bum)”

  December 16, 1923

  Alex: I am very sorry that yesterday at four I didn’t go to the University but my mother would not let me go to Mexico because they told her there was a bola [uprising]. What’s more I did not register [for the next term] and now I don’t know what to do. I beg you to forgive me since you will say I am very rude but it was not my fault, no matter what I did my mother took it into her head that she was not going to let me go out and there was nothing to be done, just put up with it.

  Tomorrow, Monday, I am going to tell her that I have an exam in modeling [sculpture in clay] and I will spend the whole day in Mexico, it’s not very certain since first I have to see what humor my mamacita is in and after that decide to tell this lie, if I go I’ll see you at 11:30 at Leyes [the law school, a frequent rendezvous for Frida and Alejandro] so that you won’t have to go to the University, please wait for me on the corner with the ice cream store. There is still going to be the posada [Christmas party] at Rouaix’s house [the Rouaixes were family friends who lived in Coyoacán], the first that is to say now I am planning not to go but who knows when the hour arrives. . . .

  But even if we are going to see each other I don’t want you not to write me, because if you don’t I am not going to write to you either, and if you have nothing to tell me send me 2 blank papers or tell me the same thing 50 times for that will show me that at least you remember me. . . .

  Well receive many kisses and all my love.

  Your

  Frieda

  Forgive the change of ink.

  December 19, 1923

  . . . I am upset because they punished me because of that idiot escuincla Cristina because I gave her a blow (because she took some of my things)—and she began to shriek for about half an hour and later they gave me a good thrashing, and they didn’t let me go to yesterday’s posada and they hardly let me go out in the street so that I can’t write you a very long letter but I write you like this so that you will see that I always remember you even if I am sadder than anything since you can imagine, without seeing you, punished and the whole day without doing anything because I have a terrible temper. This afternoon I asked my mother if I could go to the plaza to buy some lace and I came to the post office s
o that I could write. . . .

  Receive many kisses from your chamaca who misses you a lot. Say hello to Carmen James and Chong Lee (please)

  Frieda.

  December 22, 1923

  Alex: Yesterday I did not write to you because it was very late at night when we returned home from the Navarros, but now I have lots of time to dedicate to you, the dance that night was OK; rather it was ugly but we still had a little fun. Tonight there is going to be a posada in Mrs. Roca’s house and Cristina and I are going to eat there, I think it’s going to be very pretty because lots of girls and boys are going and Mrs. Roca is very nice, tomorrow I’ll tell you what it was like.

  At the Navarros’ dance I did not dance much because I was not very happy. I danced mostly with Rouaix, the rest of them were repulsive.

  There is a posada now at the Rocha house but who knows if we are going. . . .

  Write me don’t be mean

  Many kisses

  Your Frieda

  They lent me The Picture of Dorian Gray. Please send me Guevara’s address so I can send him his Bible.

  January 1, 1924

  My Alex:

  . . . Where did you spend New Year’s Eve? I went to the Campos’ house and it was as usual since we spent the whole time praying and afterward because I was so sleepy I went to sleep and did not dance at all. This morning I took communion and prayed to God for all of you. . . .

  Imagine, yesterday I went to confession in the afternoon, and I forgot three sins and I took communion that way and the sins were big, now let’s see, what shall I do, but the thing is that I have begun not to believe in confession and although I might want to, I cannot confess my sins well. I am very stupid, right?

  Well mi vida, take note that I have written to you. I think that that must be because she doesn’t love you at all your