An evening with Frida Kahlo de Rivera.....
The ancient dust covered melike a shroud.
The drive down from thehighlands of Popocatepetl in the clatter of the old ford pick up was not made any more comfortable by having to share the back with freshly chopped pinas of agave, oozing sour, sticky sap that leaked from the butchered trunks like clear treacle.
I was warned not to let any of the milk near my eyes as it would cause painful blindness, and we were nowhere near any water as we descended into the haze that was Mexico City.
I was fortunate to be rescued by a quiet gentleman with an amiable face and incredibly lively eyes. But absolutely no English. None whatsoever. Nadda. Ninguno.
Don Julio Gonzalez-Frausto Estrada had just started a newly reputed estate called ‘La Primavera’ with his new wife, where he personally baked the pinas he harvested from his uncles farm, in large brick ovens slowly for several days, to concentrate the sap.
His house was permeated by the stench of yeast fermentation and the sickly sweet agave beer attracting thousands of midges, but he kindly allowed me to wash the road off my face and then showed me around his newly manufactured distillery that magically created an elixir from the acrid mush, to be aged in wooden barrels for sale to anyone who brought their own bottles.
To be honest, I had to guess the production technique as I am without any Spanish, so I smiled politely as he passionately told me about his tequila, punctuating each statement with a little rise in his feet and vast amounts of gesticulating. I smiled, and nodded and smiled and nodded some more, feeling somewhat like an idiot.
I bought two odd bottles straight from the wooden barrel for 18 pesos, tipped my hat and bowed gently and thanked him repeatedly as I left, making my way into Coyoacan, an ancient barrio of Mexico city.
The air was so hot and humid. You had to ingest it, and there was no respite from the midday sun. Sparse Indian bay leaf trees wilted in the well preserved narrow streets, paved with red and black volcanic stone, whilst the cacophony of battling franeleros argued over the few parking places.
Fortunately for me, I had bunked, during my years at Thornton as a boarder, with a direct descendent of Hernan Cortes, who had used Coyoacan, as his headquarters whilst he raped and pillaged the Aztec empire, whose scion now was the current Marquis of the Valle de Oaxaca, and who happened to be a friend and associate. I asked around where I would find his house and was directed to a large square, where according to popular belief, my friend's forefather had Cuauhyemoc tortured to find out where he could procure more treasures.
I rang the doorbell, which I heard far way within the house and waited with sweaty palms clutching my two bottles of tequila in brown paper bags that were about to no longer serve their purpose. The door was eventually answered by a uniformed gorgon with a face she surely deserved. She curtly informed me that my friend was at their summer home in the mountains. I asked kindly if I may have a glass of water and be able to freshen up and take advantage of the shade inside. The crone said no. I have learnt never to entertain a conversation with a harridan, and I was rather exhausted to converse with the staff. So I wrote on a calling card, blew the ink dry and placed it in a requested envelope, lamenting to my friend that we wouldn’t see each other, and extolling her virtues, of which she had none!
I took advantage of the street vendors selling flavoured ice and chose to explore the Colonia del Carmen, reputed for its intellectualism and cultural residents.
The streets were still festooned with red flags, and bunting hanging forlorn in the gutters from the latest communist rally. Leon Trotsky’s house stood at the end of the road like a fortress, its walls still bearing the pockmarks of an assassination attempt. The house was derelict since Leon and his wife were murdered in his study with a mountaineer’s ice axe. This city’s streets seemed to be tainted by violent blood.
The sadistic sun started to set, and I was negotiating the steep Londres street, pondering its incongruent name, so far from home, when I came upon a large blue house adorned with lanterns and its gates wide open.
Its courtyard floor, blood red , sweating and oozing in this pulsating heat was surrounded by tall walls, covered in art. All of them of a striking woman, glaring at you, whilst experiencing, what seemed like intolerable torture and loss. Images of her, corseted in crude braces, bed ridden, naked, in childbirth, stillborn children, bleeding. But resilient and strong.
The images, of uncompromising pain and passion, the throbbing heat and the plangent red floor and rotting oranges seemed to bring out the mosquitoes.
I had found myself amongst a party. Guests were crowded into the dining room, and a large, corpulent, decrepit man, who I found out later was Diego Rivera, wrapped his sweaty, odourous arms around me and grabbed the bottles from my person, shouted loudly “Welcome to the place of coyotes. Behold my wife, the witch, born a bitch, born a painter..... She will eat your pain and sorrow! Kiss her a happy birthday!”
In the yellow room, on the yellow dining table amongst a fawning hackling crowd, sat Frida Kahlo, still, amongst the cigarette smoke and noise. Her purple and yellow peasant blouse, speckled with pigment from having to paint lying down, could not hide her uncomfortable wooden corset clacking against the yellow chair when someone drunkenly fell against her. She didn’t move. She sat expressionless. Melancholic. Staring at the yellow, cigarette stained walls of the room, devoid of any art. Her hair lacquered smooth on her long upright exposed neck, with long gold earnings and a necklace that seemed to hang, jaundiced from her body, producing no lustre, no shine. Her skin seemed the only cold thing in the whole room.
Diego roared, like a force majeure through the room, ensnaring her younger sister in an inappropriate embrace, flaunting his past infidelity to the crooning babble, and caroused everyone into a raucous cacophonic rendition of ‘happy birthday’
As everyone started braying, she looked up, our eyes locked. She did not look at me, she looked through me, and then into me, judging my naked viscera.
Her eyes were colourless, predatory, shark like. It was as if, all her soul, had leaked from her paint stained fingers, through her brushes, onto the canvases.
Impassively, like she was the only person in the room, she took a swig of tequila with her yellow cigarette stained fingers, off the yellow table, and bit into a slice of orange. As the last of the chorus was shouted into the room, she struggled herself upright, wooden, negotiating a crutch with a painfully thin arm. The long yellow costume speckled with red, could not hide the fact that her leg had recently been amputated because of gangrene. Hobbled painfully up to me, I caught a glimpse of her perfume, cloves and pepper, along with the smell of her cigarette and the rotting oranges outside, she spoke into my ear....
”I want to be inside your darkest everything...Para ser feliz, hace falta coraje”. As I turned, she disappeared into the darkness that was her side of the house they shared.
They finished the horrays without her, and roared with drunken abandon, but the life had left the room.
Some people have no idea how beautiful the darkness is.
Every person is mystery to themselves, and then they die, unsolved, which she did seven days later. Forty seven years old.
I had chosen to leave the city. It had lost its lustre, its soul, all the treasures where gone now.
She was cremated the day after she died, without an autopsy. And as legend would have it, as the cries of the grieved filled the room, a sudden blast of heat from the open incinerator doors, forced her body to bolt upright, her hair on fire like an ordained halo. Horrified mourners ran out screaming.
Her last entry in her diary read, “I hope the end is joyful – and that I never return” -
Frida’s Revenge, was conceived using the notes from her perfume, using a cinnamon and clove syrup, Don Julio Tequila, created by Don Julio Gonzalez-Frausto Estrada, whom I’m sure she would have appreciated, and oranges, muddled from the orchard at ‘the blue house’ and flamed in the true spirit of her dramatic passing.
Frida Kahlo de Rivera once said “I paint flowers, so they won’t die”. One of History’s grand divas. A tequila slamming, dirty joke-telling bohemian will live on in her signature art and this signature cocktail at Harry’s.
