Frida by Barbara Mujica

Author:Barbara Mujica [MUJICA, BARBARA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC014000, FIC041000, FIC056000, FIC019000, FIC051000
ISBN: 9781468300994
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2012-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Endings and Beginnings

THEY SAY I’M A RECLUSE. THEY SAY I DON’T LIKE PEOPLE. AFTER ALL I’VE been through, can you blame me? Ever since Frida left … I mean, ever since she died … I’ve felt so alone. I don’t even see much of my own children. They’re not interested in me. Nobody is interested in me. Now that Frida isn’t here anymore, it’s as though I never existed. I was someone only as long as I was standing there by her side. I was the other sister, the other Kahlo sister, the dumb one, the one who never did anything. But at least I was a living, breathing person.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this. After all, I don’t really know you. Why are you still bombarding me with questions? You’re beginning to annoy me.

You want to hear about Frida’s marriage, don’t you? Isn’t that what you said? Don’t forget that I was married too, although things weren’t going so well. In fact, things went badly right from the beginning. I thought I was doing everything right. As soon as Isolda was born, I got pregnant again. That’s what girls were supposed to do, wasn’t it? Give their parents grandchildren? None of my sisters had managed to do it, so I thought I’d be the queen of the Kahlo hive, because I was the only Kahlo girl who could produce babies. I thought that, for once, I’d be the favorite. But I guess Frida’s health problems had left Mami exhausted, because she didn’t really seem to have much energy left for me.

Diego and Frida went to live at 104 Reforma. It was a French-style house, the kind they built when Díaz was in power and everyone still believed that everything European was better. It was an elegant house on an elegant street, because Diego was a national treasure. After all, just because he and Frida identified with the masses didn’t mean they had to live like them. Diego was always interested in archaeology, and he had hundreds of little pre-Columbian figurines, including one of a man sitting astride a snake that’s really a gigantic penis. Ha! Diego loved that kind of thing. Anyhow, he explained to me that, in the Maya-Quiché culture, the snake was a fertility symbol. See, that’s what I mean. He explained things to me. He didn’t treat me as though I was too dumb to understand. He was the only one who made me feel that I mattered, that I was beautiful, that I was actually there.

They had a house full of people. Naturally, there was a servant, because even though they were communists, they still had to be waited on. What I mean is, everybody had servants, even after the Revolution. Even though the radicals talked about people all being the same and nobody having to kowtow to anybody else, Indians still flocked to the cities, and women took jobs as domestics for a couple of cents a day. Now, three decades later, it’s still the same.

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