Frida Read online

  “Because you’re older,” snapped Miss Caballero. Frida considered this a moment, but didn’t grasp the logic.

  “What does being older have to do with it?” She thrust out her jaw.

  “Do it!” snapped Miss Caballero.

  Slowly, Frida took down her bloomers and handed them to me. “Stupid baby!” she hissed.

  “Never mind!” retorted Miss Caballero. She helped me with the underwear, then she went on, “You think you’re so grown up, little Frida. Remember that time in science class? The time I was explaining how the universe worked?”

  Frida looked at her shoes.

  Miss Caballero kept on talking. “We turned out the lights,” she said, “and I held a candle in one hand and an orange in the other and I showed you how the Earth revolves around the sun and how the moon revolves around the Earth. Remember?”

  “Yes,” said Frida. She knew what was coming. She pursed her lips and waited for the teacher to humiliate her.

  “What happened that day, Frida?”

  Frida didn’t answer.

  “You got very excited, didn’t you?”

  Frida shot her a spiteful look, but said nothing.

  “Come on, you remember, don’t you, Frida?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Frida knew she was licked. Her face was turning red, and her jaw was tightening.

  “And what did you do, Frida?”

  “I wet my pants.”

  “That’s right. You wet your pants.” Miss Caballero smiled, satisfied. She had won.

  But on the day of the science lesson, it hadn’t been such a clear victory.

  As soon as Estela had spied the little puddle under Frida’s chair, she began to chant: Frida wet her panties! Frida wet her panties! Soon the whole class was singing: Frida wet her panties!

  A decent teacher would have hustled Frida out of the room and cleaned her up quietly. Instead, Miss Caballero dragged her up to the front of the room and tried to pull up her dress. But Frida was too wriggly for her, too wriggly and too quick. Miss Caballero tried to hold her in place with the sash of her dress, but Frida squirmed away. As she did, she elbowed the basin that the teacher had set out to wash her. Wash her in front of the whole class! The basin crashed to the floor. It sounded like cars colliding. Frida darted for the door, knocking slates and picture books to the ground. The noise must have dizzied her, because she tottered and hit the edge of the shelf where they kept mixed tempera. A bottle of red fell and shattered, spraying bloodlike droplets everywhere. She could have sprinted to safety, but she stood there, mesmerized by the patterns the paint was forming on the floor. Her ruffled white socks were drenched, and her legs were spattered.

  Suddenly, she stooped and immersed her pudgy six-year-old hands in the paint.

  “Stop!” shrieked Miss Caballero, but Frida was already rubbing paint on her dress, her arms, her face. Even her eyelids were dripping with the thick, red, gooey liquid. She had … how do you say it? Meta—metamorphosed into a ghoul. In my five-year-old mind, blood was trickling from her lips, and an otherworldly gleam was radiating from her eyes. The hazy beams streaming through the window seemed to transform her into something enormous and sinister.

  “Come get cleaned up this instant!” commanded Miss Caballero. Frida snickered. She held up her hands and wiggled her fingers like the legs of a crab. It was grotesque. I was terrified, and I was so mad at Frida I wanted to pummel her.

  At last Miss Caballero gave up. Frida went home that day covered in red.

  Frida had humiliated Miss Caballero in front of the whole class, and so whenever she got the chance, the teacher started in about how my sister had once gotten so excited during a science class that she wet her pants. What Miss Caballero wanted was to cut Frida down, to make her feel like a fly on a piece of turd.

  Let’s see, where was I? I’m so old now I can’t keep my mind on anything. Ah, yes, I was telling you how Frida always protected me. Well, I had put on my sister’s clean underwear. Frida held out her hand to me, and I took it and nestled my head against her shoulder.

  The other children had lined up outside the classroom door and were waiting to come in. “Stay here,” said Miss Caballero. She straightened her skirt and walked to the door. At her signal, the girls began to file into the room and move toward their seats.

  “Come on, Cristi!” whispered Frida. “Let’s get out of here!”

  The building was a renovated Spanish-style house that had been transformed into a school. It was a two-story affair constructed in the form of a squared-off U with a patio in the center. On the ground floor, the sides of the U contained two classrooms, a storeroom, a small office, and a tiny chapel. Living quarters for the owner of the school and Miss Caballero were on the second floor. There were no hallways; all the first-floor rooms opened onto the courtyard and all of the second-floor rooms opened onto the balcony above the arcade. Each of the classrooms had two doors on the patio side. As Miss Caballero stood guiding the children through one door, Frida darted for the other, pulling me behind.

  I was terrified. “We can’t leave. Mami will kill us.”

  “Mami won’t know!”

  Miss Caballero noticed us and took off in pursuit, but before she could catch up, we had reached the unlocked gate and slipped out into the street.

  Frida and I knew every crook and cranny in Coyoacán. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, doctor, but it’s a picturesque colonial town about an hour to the south of Mexico City. Baroque churches, plazas, tianguis—that is, native markets. Hernán Cortés once lived there while he was fighting the Aztecs. Now it’s pretty built up. Tourists, of course. Tourists who come to see our house. Frida’s house, I mean. They come to see it because Frida lived there, not because I lived there. The town is still surrounded by open fields and ranches, but now it’s a suburb of Mexico City, that sprawling, ravenous monster. The capital is bustling and filthy and crazy, of course, just like any big city, but Coyoacán is still sort of old-fashioned. It has a kind of small-town warmth, a quaintness, a sense of history.

  Anyhow, we darted down a cobblestone path, then cut onto an unpaved road leading to the Viveros de Coyoacán, a large, tree-filled park with a narrow, sleepy river winding through it. Street vendors were selling brightly colored toys made of wood, gourds, or papier-mâché, and I asked Frida to buy me a balero, a cup-and-ball gizmo that we used to play with when we were kids.

  “That would be just dandy, wouldn’t it,” she snapped. “Mami would know the second we walked into the house with a balero that we’d been fooling around in the streets! Really, Cristi, you’re so dumb.” She always used to say that to me: “Really, Cristi, you’re so dumb.”

  Frida’s plan was a simple one. We would go to the park and play until it was time for Conchita, our nanny, to pick us up from school. Then we’d wait in the little stationery shop across from the school gate, far enough away to avoid Miss Caballero’s vulturine eyes but near enough to see Conchita coming up the street to get us. As soon as we saw the maid, we would run to meet her, then just go home with her as usual. Mami would never know the difference.

  I wasn’t too convinced, but I trudged along behind Frida, dragging my feet in the dust. We passed a pulquería, a bar where they served pulque, a fermented milkish drink made from agave juice. In those days, the walls were all brightly painted with figures from Mexican folklore—a bandit-hero assaulting an emaciated landowner, a brassy whore counting her money. I wanted to get away from the place, but Frida was enthralled by the colors and by the obscene songs the rowdy construction workers were singing inside.

  Frida took a coin out of her pinafore and bought me a quesadilla—a tortilla with cheese and chili sauce—from a street vendor. She didn’t know his name, but she considered him a friend because she had bought from him many times before.

  “Don’t get cheese on your pinafore, or Mami will know I bought you a quesadilla in the street,” she said sharply. “We’
re playing hookey,” she confided to the man. He smiled and held out another quesadilla for her.

  “I have only one centavo,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he answered. “This is my gift to you.”

  We ran to the park and played for what seemed like a half hour or so. The whole time Frida nagged me about not dirtying my dress, not muddying my shoes, not getting grass stains on my socks, so that Mami wouldn’t know where we’d been.

  Frida was watching the sun’s movement in the sky. When, according to her calculations, it was time to go, she led me back through the dusty streets to the school.

  One look at the stationery shop and I felt my blood turn to sawdust. The store was closed for lunch. Since businesses usually shut their doors at two o’clock and didn’t reopen until five or six, that meant school had been dismissed long ago, hours ago. I looked down the street. The florist was closed as well, and so were the bakery and the tortillería. No children were waiting by the school gate. The streets were empty.

  “Let’s go!” ordered Frida. “They’ll be looking for us.”

  “Now we’re really going to get it!” I cried. “And it’s all your fault.”

  Frida didn’t answer. She just grabbed my hand, and we bolted down the street toward home.

  CHAPTER 2

  Frida Dancing

  IT’S ALWAYS SEEMED TO ME THAT THE REASON FRIDA WAS SO DAMNED patriotic, so more-Mexican-than-thou, was because of those experiences we had in school. To Frida the Mexican sky was the purest, most exquisite in the universe—even though the air above Mexico City is usually the color of filthy socks or shit-tinged urine. But you couldn’t say that to her. No. Otherwise, she’d accuse you of having sold out to the Yankees. She’d accuse you of being a capitalist pawn or of sucking the cock of the European intellectual elite. She had a mouth as foul as a drunkard’s piss. But I don’t need to tell you that. You know that already. She’d mow you down just for saying that the sky gleamed less brightly in Mexico than in, say, California. She was like that, you see. Fanatical about everything. For Frida the Mexican sky was blazing liquid amber, a turquoise jewel, a mantle of crushed sapphires. Not just a mass of grimy air. Not just what it was. To Frida, nothing was ever what it really was. She lived in her own imaginary world. Of course, he found that charming, but to tell you the truth, she could overdo it. She could get on your nerves. But maybe it wasn’t her fault, because when you’re endlessly being teased, endlessly being called a Jew and a foreigner, it’s easy to turn into a zealot. On the other hand, she provoked people. Sometimes she was so blunt and confrontational that she brought out the worst in everyone around her.

  Or maybe not. After all, who am I to try to explain things? You figure out what was going on in her head, for God’s sake. You’re the doctor!

  All I’m saying is, well, I think you know what I’m talking about because you’re a foreigner yourself. You know what it’s like to feel like an outsider, although you can’t begin to compare what we went through with the situation that exists now. Anyway, you’re a respected person, a psychiatrist. We were just impressionable little girls, and for us, always being called aliens, Hebrews, immigrants—all that took its toll. On Frida, especially, because she was the aggressive one, the one who was always in the middle of the fray. That’s something else that he loved about her, her feistiness, although sometimes I think she played that role just to keep his attention. I mean, she was feisty all right, feisty by nature, but later on, that feistiness got to be part of her act. And he was an actor too. The revolutionary. Muralist for the masses. It was all part of his persona.

  For her, showing she was as Mexican as anybody and more Mexican than most became an obsession. You know, Frida was born in 1907, on July 6, to be exact, but she always said she was born in 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution started. She wanted to be a true daughter of the new Mexico, down to the date of her birth.

  Sometimes she would close her eyes and proclaim, all exalted, “I’m as Mexican as the eagle that spreads its wings of snow and ash and sails through the air, grazing the stratosphere with its powerful beak!”

  “And dropping shit all over my murals!” he would answer. And we’d laugh and laugh.

  Those long Indian dresses she wore, people said they were to hide her crippled leg or to disguise her limp, but that was only part of it. She wanted to make a point of her mexicanidad—her solidarity with the common people of Mexico—even though we had as much Indian blood flowing in our veins as the ocean has honey. No, that’s not really true. Mami’s father was an Indian from Morelos. The point is, Frida wanted to be identified with the revolutionary cause, especially since he was so important in the movement. And the other thing is, she liked to stand out in a crowd.

  What do you mean I’m digressing again?

  Ah, yes, I was telling you the other day about how Frida always protected me. Always. Even when we were little. I was telling you about the day we ran away from school.

  When we realized how late it was, we took off toward home, praying that Mami hadn’t heard what had happened and gone totally berserk. Unfortunately, Miss Caballero had sent an attendant home with the news that we had escaped. Attendant—that’s the name we used so we didn’t have to call them servants, so we could pretend we were democratic and respected everybody, so we could convince ourselves we didn’t consider them just Indians who jumped and hopped at our bidding. This “attendant’s” name was Arturo. Miss Caballero always said he had the face of a calf that just had its throat slit.

  On the road, Arturo ran into Conchita, who was on her way to pick us up.

  When Mami heard we had escaped from that hell they called a kindergarten, instead of thinking things through and just waiting for us to come back, she sent Manuel, the houseboy, all the way to Papá’s studio in Mexico City to give him the news.

  I can just imagine Manuel, so ancient and gnarled, bursting into Papá’s darkroom and announcing, “The children are missing!”

  I can imagine Papá, with that half-crazed look of his, staring at Manuel and trying to force the information into his brain. I can conjure up the scene as if I had been there. Papá is looking at Manuel with dazed eyes, trying to assimilate what he’s saying.

  “Señor! The little girls are missing! They left school, and no one knows where they are. Miss Caballero sent a messenger to the house. The señora is frantic!”

  Papá is mute.

  “Your daughters, Señor!”

  “My daughters?” Guillermo Kahlo begins to process the message. Diamonds of sweat form on his brow.

  You have to understand that in those times, a missing child could be a dead child. We grew up during the dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta, who came to power in 1913. Huerta’s men were known to snatch little ones off the playground in order to coerce or punish their families. Zapata sympathizers, like our parents, were ready targets. The Huertista big shots made a show of their respectability—after all, they had wrenched power from the rebels and returned order to society, hadn’t they?—but they had goons to do their dirty work, and these men knew no mercy. They would just as soon slice the throat of a cherubic three-year-old as that of a goat. Children were easy pawns in the power game.

  I’m sure that when Papá finally assimilated Manuel’s message, he dropped whatever pictures he was developing and ran out the door, probably leaving chemicals all over the counter and forgetting to put on his hat.

  What kind of a father was he? What does that have to do with the story? What I’m trying to explain to you is how good Frida was to me, so you’ll quit implying that I—that I did what I did because I resented her … or hated her. I know that’s what you’re getting at.

  What difference does it make about Papá?

  All right, I’ll tell you about Papá. Let me think a minute. He was a strange man. As a father, he was detached, forbidding even. But deep in his heart, he loved us, especially Frida. For him, Frida was everything, maybe because she was like him, brilliant, driven, crazy. F
or him, Frida was the last hard-boiled egg at the picnic, the last aspirin in the medicine cabinet, the last pitcher of punch in the icebox. Frida the imp. Frida the troublemaker. Frida was the one who went with him on his walks. They would examine flowers or collect stones together, organizing them by size and color. Sometimes I’d tag along too, but I always felt out of place, like a chicken in the wrong coop. Papá hoped that Frida would be a scientist someday, or maybe a doctor. He would sit her on his knee and stare into space looking unhinged and otherworldly, like a saint witnessing the Resurrection.

  As for me, he thought I’d become what I became: nothing.

  So, I’m sure the thought of Frida in danger zapped him like a bolt of lightning, leaving his poor brain completely scrambled.

  In the meantime, Frida and I were cautiously approaching the house, which looked, from a distance, like a gigantic cake smothered with blue icing. The beams and window frames were cinnamon sticks and chocolate candies. It was a sprawling house in the old Spanish colonial style with narrow shuttered windows that opened to the street. Inside, interconnecting rooms enclosed a large patio, where terra-cotta pots held geraniums and flowering cacti. A few years before Frida was born, Papá had the house built and painted it a deep royal. From as far back as I can remember, everyone called it the Casa Azul.

  My sister had put up a brave front on the way home, but I could see now that she was really frightened.

  “Maybe we could sneak in and go to our room,” she whispered to me, “and pretend we were there all the time.”

  “You think it would work?”

  “Maybe.” She tried to sound convincing, but we both knew that Mami had probably torn up the house looking for us. In my mind, I could see trinkets crashing against walls, while Mami cursed the Apostles, Miss Caballero, and especially the lunk of a husband that had given her such wayward children.

  “Let’s try to find Conchita first,” suggested Frida.

  We slipped around the side of the house and into the kitchen. Conchita wasn’t there, but Inocencia, the cook, was down on her knees praying to the Virgin of Guadalupe at the small altar by the pantry: “Poor children … villains … assassins … Virgen Madre … bring them home …”