Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“Read this poem to Frida.” Rivera handed a slim volume to Laura. “This is the best Mexican poem since Sor Juana. Read what it says on this page:

Filled with myself, besieged in my own skin

by an ungraspable god who suffocates me

And look ahead here:

Oh intelligence, solitude in flames,

that conceives all without creating it!

And then at the end:

with Him, with me, with the three of us …

See how Gorostiza understands everything? We are only three, always three. Father, mother, and child. Woman, man, and lover. Change it around any way you like, at the end you’ll always be left with three, because four is immoral, five is unmanageable, two is insufferable, and one is the threshold between solitude and death.”

“And why does four have to be immoral?” Frida asked in surprise. “Laura got married and had two sons.”

“My husband walked out.” Laura smiled timidly. “Actually, I left him.”

“And there’s always one child you favor, even if you have a dozen,” added Frida.

“Three, always three,” muttered Rivera as he walked out.

“That bastard’s got something up his sleeve.” Frida furrowed her bushy brows. “Hand those tin sheets to me, will you, Laura?”

When the hospital complained about the growing disorder in the room, the shreds of paper everywhere and the smell of the paints, Diego appeared like a god in a classical tragedy, Jupiter the Thunderer, and said in English, This woman is an artist, didn’t these idiots understand that? He scolded them, but said it to her, with love and pride, This woman who is my wife puts all the truth, suffering, and cruelty of the world into the painting that pain has forced her to create: you, surrounded by the routine suffering of a hospital, have never seen so much agonizing poetry, and that’s why you don’t understand her.

“My little sweetheart,” Frida said to him. “Mi chiquito lindo.”

When she could be moved, they returned to the hotel and Laura sorted Frida’s paintings for her. One day, the two of them finally went to see Diego painting at the Institute. Great progress had been made on the mural, but Frida saw the problem and how he had resolved it. The shining, devouring machines were woven together like great serpents of steel and proclaimed their primacy over the world of the workers who maintained them. Frida looked in vain for the faces of the American workers and understood. Diego had painted all of them with their backs turned because he didn’t understand them, because they were faces of unbaked dough with no personality, flour faces. But he had introduced dark faces — blacks and Mexicans — who did, yes, face the viewers, the world.

Every day, the two women brought him a nice tasty lunch in a basket and silently sat down to watch him work while he poured out his river of words. Frida sipped teaspoonfuls of cajeta from Celaya, which she brought to enjoy so she could fill up on that confection of caramelized condensed milk, each day a bit more as she got her strength back. Laura was dressed very simply in a tailored suit, but Frida was decked out in green, purple, and yellow rebozos, braids of colored ribbons, and necklaces of jadeite.

Rivera had left three blank spaces in his mural of industry. He began looking more and more often at the female couple sitting at one side of the scaffolding watching him work — Frida sipping cajeta and clanking her necklaces, Laura carefully crossing her legs — under the scrutiny of his assistants. One day, the two came in and saw themselves transformed into men, two workers with short hair and long overalls, in work shirts and with gloved hands grasping steel tools, Frida and Laura dominating the light of the mural at the far end of the wall, Laura with her angular features accentuated, her hatchet profile, her shadowed eyes, her hair even shorter than the old hairdo she’d rejected when the woman from Veracruz decided on her bangs and pageboy, Frida too with short hair and sideburns, her eyebrows thick but her most masculine trait, the down on her upper lip, eliminated by the painter, to the stupefaction of the model: “Hey, I’d have put in the mustache.”

There was another unpainted area in the center of the wall and in the upper part of the fresco, and Frida would glance nervously at those absences until one afternoon when she took Laura by the hand and said, Let’s get out of here. They took a taxi back to the hotel, and Frida ripped off a sheet of paper, spread it out over the table, and began to draw again and again, insatiably, the sun and the moon, the moon and the sun, separated, together.

Laura looked out of the hotel room’s high window searching for the star and its satellite, elevated by Frida to equal rank as day and night stars, sun and moon born of Venus, the first star of the day and the last of night, moon and sun equal in rank but opposite in hours, seen by the eyes of the world, not by the eyes of the universe, Laura, what will Diego put in those blank spaces in his mural?

“It scares me. He’s never kept a secret like that from me.”

They found out only on the day of the inauguration. A holy family of workers presided over the work of the machines and the white men with their backs to the world, the dark men facing the world, and, at the far end of the fresco, the two women dressed as men staring at the men, and above the depiction of the work and the machines a virgin wearing a humble calico dress and white beads like any Detroit shop-girl, holding a naked child, also with a halo, and seeking in vain the support of the eyes of a carpenter who had turned his back on the mother and child. The carpenter was holding the tools of his trade, hammer and nails, in one hand and two planks arranged in a cross in the other. His halo was faded and contrasted with the brilliant scarlet of a sea of flags that separated the holy family from the machines and workers.

The murmuring grew when the curtains were pulled back.

A joke, a parody, a joke on the capitalists who’d hired him, a parody of the spirit of Detroit, sacrilege, Communism. Another wall, this one of voices, began to rise opposite Diego Rivera’s, the assistants began to divide up, the shouting grew louder, Edsel Ford, son of the magnate, called for calm, Rivera climbed up on a stepladder and proclaimed the birth of a new art for the society of the future and had to scramble down painted yellow and red because the pots of paint that agitators had prepared beforehand at the direction of Rivera himself were beginning to be thrown at him, while another brigade of workers, also organized by Diego, stood in front of the mural and proclaimed they would guard it forever.

The next day, Diego, Frida, and Laura took the train to New York to start work on the Rockefeller Center mural project. Rivera was euphoric, cleaning his face with kerosene, happy as a mischievous child planning his next practical joke and succeeding at them all: attacked by capitalists for being a Communist and by Communists for being a capitalist, Rivera felt he was a pure Mexican, a joking, devilish Mexican with more quills than a porcupine to defend himself from bastards on both sides of the Rio Grande, devoid of the rancor that defeated both Mexicans and Americans before the game started, and delighted to be the target in the Mexican national sport of attacking Diego Rivera, which now would be seen as a national tradition as opposed to the new gringo sport of attacking Diego Rivera. Diego the fat Puck, who instead of laughing at the world from a thicket on a midsummer night could laugh from the thicket of his fresco scaffolding one moment, then fall to the floor and discover he had an ass’s head but find an amorous lap where he could take refuge and be caressed by the queen of the night, who saw not an ugly donkey but an enchanted prince, the frog transformed into the prince sent by the moon to love and protect his Friducha, mi chiquita, my adored little girl, broken, suffering, everything is for you, you know that, don’t you? And when I say, Frida, “Let me help you, poor little thing,” what am I saying but help me, poor little me, help your Diego?