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.
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 …
Adios
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