Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo by Carole Maso

Author:Carole Maso
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Hol Art Books
Published: 2011-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

O Mexico

And she closes her eyes onto a bed of nails, and she dies back a little and she watches an armada 11 ships 500 men 32 crossbows, and she watches from the distance the little conquistador Hemán Cortés grow slowly monstrous in her sight. The new Spain.

A comet with three heads hangs over the land.

A temple burns to the ground—

The Heart of the One World breaking open

magenta kisses

The new Spain they say.

The new Spain they say O Mexico!

La Uorona weeping for her dead children

La Malinche, La Chingada, the violated one—

She weeps.

All the violated ones.

See the tubes of fire, magical six-legged beasts O see

A world of betrayal, blood and ruin

As confirmed by the Aztec prophecy

And in her black pupil she holds her ancient world:

Aztec, Toltec, Mayan, Olmec — at her fetish altar

And she goes further — to the Chichimeca, dog people originated from the Place of Cranes — at her fetish altar — and then further — and she bites down

Fifty thousand years before. Until the end of the fourth ice age the indigenous people came across the Bering Strait. Venga, she smiles and waves.

Through the Demerol now she greets Tezcatlipoca, have a drink, the god of evil, embodiment of darkness, the smoking mirror. And Quetzalcoatl, his benevolent reflection, spirit bird, redeemer, winged eternity of wind, precious twin. Do you have a light? She holds the double burning bird in her mirrored eye. Dark and light. 2 Fridas, one who is whole and one who is broken. Not the leg.

She watches Quetzalcoatl on his doomed path now. Drinking deeply from the cup, who has tasted such sweetness? until he loses all memory, then self, then—

and when his lovely sister enters

and when his lovely sister enters the bedchamber

he succumbs and succumbs and succumbs again.

Ashamed he knows he cannot stay and builds a raft of snakes. Goodbye. She hears him say in the Year of One Reed I shall return one day.

Each year the solar calendar leaves five empty days. Days of waiting. Days in vain. The Toltecs wait. The Aztecs wait. Thousands of years are passing without a sign of him. Frida laughs. Look, now, on the horizon, is it you, can it really be you returned? It’s you she cackles drugged and babbling. In a year of One Reed: 1519.

Lord Quetzalcoatl, Moctezuma bows to him. Beloved one. How long we’ve waited. But it is the one deranged by gold-lust who takes his hand.

Carrying tubes of fire, the six-legged beast comes, carrying smallpox, sorrow.

Cortés.

And where there were once villages of mud and clay, flying buttresses. At the heart of the One World all the temples, pyramids destroyed. She closes her eyes to the ruins still.

Now flying buttresses.

The arrogance of their touch.

The Spanish army had so overloaded their horses with gold and treasure that hundreds were drowned as they crossed Lake Texcoco.

The arrogance of their touch — Ferdinand, Isabella, Santa Anna, Cortes. Blood and blood and greed and ruin.

And the French.

My dog people: heart, heart. The hundred lamentations. Father Hildago dreaming liberation …

All the tyrants loss and blood and sorrow.

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