Features

There are two. The blue house in Coyoacán is Frida’s; the hacienda in Xochimilco—the one I think magnificent and the critics outrageous—that one is mine. On paper, of course, I own them both. Diego asked me to manage the museums there years ago. But in their essence, the way they rest within their spaces, it is clear one belongs to her and the other to me. A great deal of care was necessary to produce the elegance of my house, you know: the layers chiseled from stone, the surround of lush green tended by vigilant gardeners. And yet it’s hers I find myself wandering through again and again, blown through those passageways, drifting blind down that axis…

I have to stop. Already I feel my accuracy slipping. It would be nice if one could move oneself through rooms like that, fastening each door shut tightly behind. The truth is that my memory remains caught in places inhabited before, so that even now, for instance, I see various crews carrying out my instructions. A man with a face covered in sweat tugs at my sleeve: “Doña Lola, Doña Lola, this way, yes?” The statue’s feet are sticking up in the air; its head is buried in dirt. I’m not surprised at these people’s incompetence; for most of the population, getting things wrong is the natural condition. It is very difficult to make oneself understood by others. To most people I am simply Diego’s curator, and Frida is the woman who shaped his life; she and I hardly exchanged two words. But Diego and I had a friendship existing beyond the surfaces of our lives, one inevitably reduced by any attempt at description. The only thing a person can trust is her own mind, though even that gets turned wrong side up much of the time. Well, then: It may be true that in the end my own attempt will be no good either, this effort to explain how things are. Or—precision—how they were.

We first met at the Ministry of Education when I was sixteen, my hair done up in bright new ribbons. My mother, a schoolteacher, had come to process papers; leaning against the second level balcony, I waited, looking down at the courtyard hemmed in by walls. Blank then, those walls, though later covered by the famous murals. In the center below was the wide basin of a fountain, and I was trying to understand the water, how it tumbled over itself. I didn’t see him watching me, though I suppose he had been for some time. But my mother sensed it, hurrying back round the corner, opening her mouth to say something in protective alarm.

“Señora,” he said, by way of apology. “I would like to ask just one question.” Since he was Señor Rivera, of course, there was just one answer. Anyway, over the next few weeks, I came to his room as he asked, where with a vast sense of seriousness and cool ceremony, I posed. Head bent over the paper, looking up every so often, he worked away at his sketches. Thirty drawings were the result, of which he sent two lithographs to my house: one of himself and one of me, keeping the rest as models for his work. After dinner that night, as I rubbed soap against my hands in the sink, my husband—from England, already I was married then—came in and said he wanted to talk. Say what you want to say, I said. He gestured with his hands at some invisible rectangle. I publish an art magazine, he said, I’m familiar with the nude as form, but this gaze is not the gaze of the artist, there is more in it. What are you accusing me of, I asked, drying my hands on the cloth and looping it back on its hook. All I’m saying is that I’ve returned the drawings, he said coolly, and then all my rage was useless because that was in fact what he’d done, along with a note in bad Spanish explaining he was “not convinced they were offered in good faith.”

You must understand I loved my husband then very much. At the best moments we even felt like copies of one other: anyway, the mental terrain was largely the same. But Diego was a different matter. I called him “Maestro,” the only one I ever would call that; there was never another to whom I gave that respect. The truth is that it would not be wrong to say I felt a secret contempt for most people, that I was more confident and intelligent than they ever could be. With him, though, I was still always nervous, acting young and saying the simplest things. In my mind, God knew, there were edifices, whole architectures of thought, I simply could not express; sometimes the thoughts were formed completely but didn’t come out as I meant, other times they weren’t really verbal, were more like the curve of fruit or timbre of music than something I could write down. I thought then how inane the transcript would seem if someone did write down all the words we exchanged, overlooking how every word was linked with every other. The best thing most of the time was just to be quiet. We had other means: he could at least control color and texture, and I was coming to know the business venture, its strange energy and animal-like possibility.