Slavenka Drakulic - Frida's Bed

If such days had ever existed, they were now lost in the thickening fog that was slowly settling around her like gelatin.

Frida grew up to be an energetic, vivacious girl who wore her hair cropped short and sported trousers. She read poetry, went out with her friends and was in love with Alex. She preferred men to women, her father to her mother, boys to girls. In secondary school there was only one other girl in her crowd of friends, the rest were all boys. A family photograph taken by her father shows her dressed like a man. Her sisters and mother are all wearing elegant dresses, while she is in a man’s suit, with vest and tie. Her hair slicked back, holding a cane in her right hand, she looks straight into the camera.

From her expression and demeanor in the photograph, it is difficult to be sure that this is a girl. While her mother and sisters are smiling coquettishly, she remains serious. She even comes across as a bit stiff, arrogant maybe, aware of how provocative her image is in this “official” family photograph. But she could indulge in such behavior because she was her father’s favorite. Of his six daughters, she alone received an education. Admittedly, his two daughters from his first marriage were hardly ever mentioned. Doña Matilda had refused to let the girls live with them and so they wound up in a convent. She was not much kinder to her own eldest daughter, who was named after her. When the girl ran away with a boy at the age of fifteen, her mother would not let her return home. The father seemed to have no say in the mother’s decisions. He was gentle, introverted, withdrawn. A photographer, after work he would retreat to his room and play the piano or read German philosophy. He never spoke about the life he had left behind or whether he missed Germany, his mother tongue, his studies. His wife Matilda, mother of Matilda, Adriana, Frida and Cristina — or Kity, as they called her — was a decisive woman, pragmatic, obstinate and most of the time ill-tempered. Perhaps it was from her mother that Frida had inherited her tenacity, a certain rigidity, even.

The mother did not think it necessary for Frida to get an education. As with her other three daughters, she taught her everything a woman needed to know in order to get married and have children of her own. She knew how to cook, clean, sew, embroider, knit, so why this unnecessary expense? But the father stood firm. He said Frida was the most like him and since he had not completed his own studies, he was determined that she would finish hers and become a doctor.

Don Guillermo never said he wanted a son, but Frida sensed it and the feeling was confirmed by his smile that day when he photographed the family with her standing in the middle, dressed like a man.

Doña Matilda was illiterate. That had not bothered Frida in the days when she was posing as a man for her father’s camera. By the time it did, her mother no longer saw any point in doing anything about it. Learning to read and write? What for? Life is complicated enough as it is, she told her daughter.

Mama was right, Frida mused that morning, how right she was.

Later, Frida often thought how strange it was that she had not had even the slightest premonition of the turn her life would take that day. It was September. She was strolling through the marketplace, holding hands with Alex and drinking in the scent of the first autumn rain. The yellow melons and sky-blue dress of a porcelain doll in the antiques shop window caught her eye. She vividly remembered the colors and the piece of orange that Alex had fed her. Its refreshing succulence had made her whole body tingle. The juice trickled down Alex’s fingers and she licked them one by one. She and Alex were standing in the street, Alex drowning in her eyes; a breeze caressed her back, she touched the skin under his shirt and a warmth spread through her womb. She knew that passersby were looking at them; a woman smiled.

This moment before the accident, when she was aware of her body from head to toe, was perhaps the last time in her life that she felt whole. Little did she know that only a few seconds later her entire world would be shattered and that nothing would ever be the same again.

Whenever she recalled that day, she would think how her fate had been sealed by the paper parasol Alex had bought her at the market. They were already at the bus stop when she remembered that she had forgotten her parasol somewhere. They ran back and bought another one. It had stopped drizzling just as they were boarding the streetcar. In those days streetcars were still a novelty in town and were made of wood. It was full and they barely managed to find seats together. She would know the faces of the passengers even today, the Indian woman with the turquoise shawl, the man in blue trousers soiled at the knees as if he had been kneeling or had maybe fallen, the woman with a basketful of red chile peppers. The smell of sweat, damp hair and the orange in Alex’s hand. She could feel the touch of his leg through her skirt.

The streetcar was about to turn a corner when there was a screech of the brakes. Then a crash and the sound of wood splintering and glass shattering. Frida felt neither the blow nor pain.

It is not true that you feel something when you are in an accident. There is no feeling, no thought. You do and you do not exist, like a particle of dust swirling in the air. You see the blue sky and you are a part of it, you are a part of the air, the water, the greenery in the park. You drift in a silence where you cannot even hear the beating of your own heart. Isn’t that the experience of nothingness?

And quiet, yes, she remembered the quiet. That was really her only memory of the accident. When she was a child she would fold a sheet of paper over several times and then with a pair of scissors cut out symmetrical shapes. Her paper sun had sun rays, but it lacked a center. Her memory of the accident was like that sun with a hole in the middle.

She did not know how long she was absent from her body. The next thing she remembered was the woman with the peppers running and holding her own guts in her hands. She heard someone calling for help and then someone else shouting, “Ballerina, ballerina.” How silly, she thought, what is he talking about? She lifted her arm and saw that it was covered in blood and dusted with gold. The scene was unreal, as if she had suddenly been transported to the theater. Or was already dead.

I remembered that red is both the color of life and the color of death. Later, whenever I tried to remember my crushed body, the blood and the gold dust, I would think how mine was a life of color and kitsch even then. Had I ever painted the accident itself I would have used those two colors. But that is the one picture I never painted, however much it underlaid all my work.

Because all I ever really painted was my accident, she thought as she gazed out the window that morning.

Later, she learned that the crash had left her lying naked in the street, her blood-streaked body dusted with gold powder which a house painter had probably been carrying. She remembered a man leaning over her, pressing his knee against her stomach and yanking out something lodged deep inside her. Suddenly blood gushed out and spilled down her thighs. She screamed and lost consciousness again.

She came to in the hospital. Alex, who had walked away from the accident miraculously unhurt, later told her that her right leg, the lame one, had been broken in eleven places and her right foot had been dislocated and crushed. Her lower spine was broken in three places, her collarbone was broken and so were two ribs. Her left shoulder was dislocated. The doctors would be able to patch everything back together again except for the spine and fractured pelvis, he said. Then he described what he had seen with his own eyes: a long metal rod — the handrail — had ripped into her stomach near her left hip and come out through her vagina.