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

everything backward

sun and moon, feet and Frida

the amputated leg.

But after three months, she did learn to walk a short distance, and slowly her spirits rose, especially after she started to paint again. To hide the leg, she had boots made of luxurious red leather with Chinese gold-embroidered trim adorned with little bells. With these boots Frida said she would “dance her joy.” And she twirled in front of friends to show off her new freedom of movement. The writer Carlota Tibon recalls that Frida was very proud of her little red boots. Once I took Emilio Pucci’s sister to see Frida, who was all dressed up as a Tehuana and probably drugged. Frida said, these marvelous legs! And how well they work for me! and she danced th ejarabe tapatto with her wooden leg.

Please don’t leave me immediately when I fall asleep. I need you nearby, and I feel it even after I am asleep, so don’t go away immediately.

And from deepest sleep she begs still not the not the …

not the leg …

So I always lay down beside her and she called me her little prop. And sometimes I sang to her.… And she’d ask me for another cigarette. And when she was nearly asleep I’d ask if I should take it and she’d smile no, not yet.

I kiss you through the distance.

For Frida Kahlo in her convalescence—

Beauty is Convulsive

these tendrils of ink from me to you

I kiss you through the distance

This small court of miracles

A sea of votives floating on the river: courage

I am happy as long as I can paint. Not yet.

Is that you? Just a girl at the Preparatoria — and then—

She cries for the wet nurse

kiss the little girl

The brown bloom of her

suck and want

mouthing

love

holding

light

good — bye.

It is coming, my hand, my red

vision. larger, more his.

martyrdom of glass, the great

nonsense. Columns and valleys.

fingers of the wind, the bleeding

children, the mica micron.

I don’t know what my mocking

dream thinks. The ink, the stain,

the shape, the color. I’m a

bird. I’m everything, without any more

confusion. All the bells.

the rules, the lands, the

big grove, the greatest

tenderness, the immense tide.

garbage, water jar, cardboard

cards, dice digits duets

vain hope of con-

structing the cloths, the kings.

silly, my nails, the

thread and the hair …

What is it Diego?

It is just that we are not very sure that she is dead.

She is dead, Diego.

No but it horrifies me to think that she still has capillary action. The hairs on her skin still stand up.

I assure you she is dead.

Olga Campos was among the early mourners: It was terrible for me. Frida was still warm when I arrived at the house around ten or eleven in the morning. She got goose pimples when I kissed her, and I started screaming, She’s alive! She’s alive! But she was dead.

But it horrifies me we should bury her in that condition.

It’s very simple, Diego. Let the doctor open her veins. If the blood doesn’t flow she is dead.

Rosa Castro: When Frida died he looked like a soul cut in two.

At a quarter past one, Rivera and various family members lifted Frida out of the coffin and laid her on the automatic cart that would carry her along the iron trucks to the crematory oven.

accompanied by music:

I’m off now to the port where the golden ships lie

Everyone was hanging on to Frida’s hands when the cart began to pull her body toward the oven’s entrance. They threw themselves on top of her, and yanked her fingers in order to take off her rings, because they wanted something that belonged to her.

Stay

At the moment when Frida entered the furnace, the intense heat made her sit up, and her blazing hair stood out from her face in an aureole.

The fires in the old-fashioned crematorium took four hours to do their job.

Her ashes retained the shape of her skeleton for a few minutes before being dispersed by currents of air. When Rivera saw this, he slowly lowered his clenched fist and reached into the right-hand pocket of his jacket to take out a small sketchbook. With his face completely absorbed in what he was doing, he drew Frida’s silvery skeleton. Then he fondly gathered up her ashes in a red cloth, and put them in a cedar box.

In the incineration she sits upright

At the furnace door forced by heat.

Her hair on fire like a halo

Love, I am the disintegration

She smirks good-bye she laughs she waves on fire

Love, I am.

Thanks to the doctors

Farill — Glusker — Parres

and Doctor Enrique Palomera

Sánchez Palomera

Thanks to the nurses

to the stretcher-bearers to the

cleaning women and attendants at the

British Hospital—

Thanks to Doctor Vargas

to Navarro to Dr. Polo

and to my will-

power

I hope the

leaving is joyful — and I hope

never to return—

FRIDA

And she leaves the frame

You must have been an angel, he mutters from the height

Heat and light

And he takes out a crumpled piece of paper

and draws her skeleton of ash — before it crumbles

heart, heart

Not long after Frida died, Rivera’s granddaughter was baptized in the Coyoacán house. For the occasion, Diego dressed up a Judas figure, perhaps a skeleton, in Frida’s clothes, and a bag containing her ashes and her plaster corset was laid in a cradle.

Her ashes in a sack on top a plaster death mask and a rebozo wrapped, O Frida, Diego whispers, you are beautiful like that.

In the Frida Kahlo Museum beneath a protective glass ball is an assemblage of small objects — an equestrian cowboy on top of a skull, tin soldiers, dice, toy angels, all on pedestals.… A piece that was surely hers, a gift for Alejandro Gomez Arias, was a world globe that Frida covered with butterflies and flowers. In a later year when she was sick and unhappy, she asked for it back and covered the butterflies and flowers with red paint.…

no moon, sun, diamond, hands—

fingertip, dot, ray, gauze, sea.

pine green, pink glass, eye,

mine, eraser, mud, mother, I am coming.

= yellow love, fingers, useful

child, flower, wish, artifice, resin.

pasture, bismuth, saint, soup tureen.

segment, year, tin, another foal.

point, machine, stream, I am.

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

Look at her work … ascetic and tender, hard as steel and fire and delicate as a butterfly’s wing, adorable as a beautiful smile and profound and cruel as life’s bitterness.

Diego, Diego

We are held together by smoke now

I know the way.

You are walking down a dirt road alone — free for a moment from the sorrow and drama of your life, free of your body’s pain — free of — free.…

You are walking without physical pain for a moment though it informs each step. Drawn to the swirling. A little free, a little free of — dragging a right foot.

While you have not forgotten it, for a moment, sucking on a paintbrush and looking up into the fiesta of the sun you see yourself walk away — walk out — out of your leather corset, your steel corset, your plaster corset, your corset of thorns and tears. Your abyss of dark birds. Diego, Diego.