Carole Maso - Beauty is Convulsive - The Passion of Frida Kahlo

Then during the night, Ella explained, the corset began to harden, as it was supposed to do. I happened to be spending the night there in the next room, and about half past four or five in the morning, I heard a crying, nearly shrieks. I jumped out of bed and went in, and there was Frida saying she couldn’t breathe! She couldn’t breathe!

The corset had hardened, but it hardened so much that it pressed on her lungs. It made pleats all around her body. So I tried to get a doctor. Nobody would pay any attention at that hour in the morning, so finally I took a razor blade and knelt on the bed over Frida. I began slowly, slowly cutting that corset right over her breast. I made about a two-inch cut so that she could breathe, and then we waited until a doctor appeared, and he did the rest. Afterward we laughed to tears over this thing. Frida’s hospital room was always full of visitors. Dr. Velasco y Polo recalls her fear of solitude and boredom. What she liked was gaiety, spicy gossip, and dirty jokes. Volatile by habit, she would, says the doctor, get very excited and say, “Listen to that son of a bitch, please throw him out of here. Send him to the devil.” When she saw me with a pretty girl, she’d cry, “Lend her to me! I’ll smoke that one myself!” She liked to talk about medicine, politics, her father, Diego, sex, free love, the evils of Catholicism.

Trotsky, Noguchi, Muray, floating in the extraordinary cup of her. Her trinkets, treasures. Her assortment of lovers.

My adorable Nick—

I am sending you from here millions of kisses for your beautiful neck to make it feel better. All my tenderness and all my caresses to your body, from your head to your feet. Every inch of it I kiss from the distance.

To love you very much with an M as in music or mundo or Mexico:

I remember that I was four years old 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 Coyoacan in those days.

Your eyes — grave chalice — all you held and hold

Beautiful witness

Cherish.

And you hold good-bye and tenderly now:

Since you wrote to me, on that day so clear and so far away, I have wanted to explain to you, that I cannot escape the days, nor return in time to the other time. I have not forgotten you — the nights are long and difficult. The water. The boat and the pier and the departure, that was making you so small, to my eyes, imprisoned in that round window, that you looked at in order to keep you in my heart. All this is intact. Later came the days, new days of you. Today I would like my sun to touch you.

The huipil with reddish-purple ribbons is yours. Mine the old plazas of your Paris, above all the marvelous Place des Vosges, so forgotten and firm. The snails and the bride doll are yours too, that is to say you are you. Her dress is the same one that she did not want to take off on the day of the wedding with no one, when we found her almost asleep on the dirty floor of a street. My skirts with ruffles of lace, and the old blouse … make the absent portrait of only one person. But the color of your skin, of your eyes and your hair changes with the wind of Mexico. You also know that everything that my eyes see and everything that I touch with my own self, from all the distances, is Diego. The caress of cloth, the color of color, the wires, the nerves, the pencils, sheets of paper, dust, cells, war and the sun, all that lives in the minutes of the no-clocks and the no-calendars and the no-empty glances, is him — You felt it, for that reason you allowed the boat to carry me from Le Havre, where you never said good-bye to me.

I will always continue writing to you with my eyes. Kiss the little girl.

I started painting twelve years ago while I was recovering from a bus accident that kept me in bed for nearly a year. In all these years, I’ve worked with the spontaneous impulse of my feeling. I’ve never followed any school or anybody’s influence; I have never expected anything from my work but the satisfaction I got from it by the very fact of painting and saying what I couldn’t say otherwise.

I have made portraits, figure compositions, also paintings in which the landscape and still lives are the most important. In painting I found a means to personal expression, without any prejudice forcing me to do it. For ten years my work consisted of eliminating everything that didn’t spring from the internal lyric motivations that impelled me to paint.

Since then my themes have always been my sensations, my states of mind, and the deep reactions that life has been causing inside me. I’ve frequently materialized all that into portraits of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do to express how I felt about myself and what was in front of me.

Once when a gardener brought her an old chair, asking if he should throw it away, she requested him to give her the broken leg, and she carved her own lips on it to make a gift for a man she loved.

She draws. She draws a door of breath. Breathes on the pane and dreams. She walks once more. Six years old. To the river of glass. Papá. Just a child. She smiles. All is.

All is …

Here is a kiss

Night is falling

Night is falling in my life

Sleep

Sleep

I’m falling asleep

Darling Papá

I send you all my affection and a thousand kisses. Your

daughter who

adores you

Frieducha here is a kiss

Write to me

everything you do

and everything that happens to you …

And she sings, Don’t let your eyes cry when I say good-bye. And she crows and cries good-bye.

Your dress may hang there, but you are already elsewhere.

without flinching

Your dress hangs there but you are

In June she asked that her four-poster bed be moved from the small corner of the bedroom out into the adjacent passageway which led to her studio. She wished she said to be able to see more greenery.…

She draws an O on the windowpane in breath.

The girls liked to loiter — in the court of miracles. She dreams

Here is a kiss.

Her wayward halo — all the mutilated beauty.

Toward the end of her life Frida described the series of orthopedic corsets she wore after 1944 and the treatments that went with them as “punishment.”

There were twenty-eight corsets in all — one made of steel, three of leather, and the rest of plaster. One in particular, she said, allowed her neither to sit nor to recline. It made her so angry that she took it off, and used a sash to tie her torso to the back of a chair in order to support her spine. There was a time when she spent three months in a nearly vertical position with sacks of sand attached to her feet to straighten out her spinal column. Another time Adelina Zendejas, visiting her in the hospital after an operation, found her hanging from steel rings with her feet just able to touch the ground. Her easel was in front of her. We were horrified, Zendejas recalls. She was painting and telling jokes and funny stories.

The vials of Demerol and other drugs all mixed up where tied to a wheelchair she worked for as long as she could and then continued in bed.

Mariana Morilla Safa remembers: In her last days she was lying down, unable to move. She was all eyes.