A spirit that speaks in bold tones

I was married at the time, and my husband and I were in Mexico City to visit his frail, mentally removed old aunt in her disintegrating house, filled with Riveras and Orozcos and Tamayos now corrupted under ever-thickening layers of dark soot. To witness these sad endings wasn’t easy.

I wished I could hear the stories Dorothea might have told, bound to be good ones: A flame-haired bohemian who lived it up and didn’t worry about living it down, she had known or met just about all the famous and infamous who had lived in or visited Mexico in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Her much older sister, Anita Brenner, who always considered herself Mexican because she had been born in Aguascalientes just before the family moved to Texas, was a writer and historian (“The Wind That Swept Mexico,� “Idols Behind Altars�), Edward Weston nude model (the torso that looks like a ripe pear), Trotskyite and intimate of the international intelligentsia -- everyone from Andre Breton to Pablo Neruda to Trotsky himself -- before she accidentally plunged to her death when driving on a narrow mountain road.

Anita was particularly close to Frida Kahlo. Both were daughters of Jewish fathers who immigrated from Europe to Mexico, and both were keenly, stubbornly, independent. They once took a madcap six-day flight to New York on a private plane flown by a pilot they had met only the night before at one of Rivera’s dinner parties. And when Rivera asked Kahlo to remarry him after their divorce, Anita urged her not to give in.

“It’s natural to want to return to him,� she wrote in a letter, “but I wouldn’t do it, since what attracts Diego to you is what he doesn’t have, and if he doesn’t have you tied down completely, he will keep on looking for and needing you.... Don’t let yourself be tied down completely; do something with your own life; that is what cushions us when the blows and falls come. Above all, inside, the blow is not as strong if there is something which allows one to say: Here I am, I am worth something. I am not so completely identified as someone else’s shadow that when I cannot be in their shadow I am nothing.... Basically what I am saying is that one depends only on oneself, and from there must come everything that is needed to be able to put up with things and to do things, for good humor, for everything.�

Kahlo didn’t listen, of course. She married Rivera again late in 1940, on his 54th birthday. From 1941 until her death in 1954, they lived in the house where she was born and grew up, and where she went on to have many liaisons, most colorfully, with Isamu Noguchi.

The day before we left Dorothea’s, I went to that house, by then the Museo Frida Kahlo. It was a flat-roofed, U-shaped, one-story stucco in an old residential section called Coyoacan, hidden behind blue walls and still housing Kahlo’s belongings. The house breathed life, long past the point when it had been lived in.

When I returned to our apartment in San Antonio, I wanted nothing more than to turn it into Kahlo and Rivera’s Casa Azul. Bold colors on the walls, a different one for each room. Vivid blue. Vivid red. Green, yellow, purple, wherever they’d work, I didn’t care. Well, nowhere, apparently. Give me Mexico, I told a still-life painter moonlighting as a color consultant. Folly, he countered. The way the light overcame the curtainless penthouse, I might as well move into the interior of a neon sign. And so we compromised. I got terra cotta, periwinkle, pinkish cream, a suede-like fawn. Lovely, but not at all Mexico. Obsessively, I collected Mexican folk art. I got my red in watermelons of every material, hundreds of them: papier-mache, wood, alabaster, glass. I got my yellow in primitive, carved animals. Blue in pottery. These bright and shining objects made me impossibly happy until I forgot about the Blue House, eventually moving on to other styles, other airy caprices, and, at last, leaving behind all the folk art but my watermelons when I was forced to move on to another life entirely.

And then, a few weeks ago, I was shown an empty loft in the Westinghouse building on San Pedro Street, with its two walls of big, industrial, many-paned windows trimmed in dark green on the outside. Frida Kahlo’s studio! Her tall, paned windows with their green shutters!

Not really, of course. It was just an evocative suggestion, a passing moment, thrusting me backward and turning me momentarily inward as I stood in the barren, light-filled space. I thought about how seductive the Latina aesthetic is to me, the almost reckless abandon with color, the sheer alegria. When I lived, ever so briefly, in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and traveled up and down and across the country, I saw art everywhere, inside the simplest houses. Bottle caps, tin cans, wood scraps, the most humble objects were made beautiful by everyday artisans who turned them into still-humble works of art. It occurred to me that, with the exception of an interlude in Carmel, I have lived in Spanish cities -- San Antonio, Santa Fe, L.A. -- for more than two decades. All along the way, I’ve picked up bits and pieces of the cultures, mostly stuff, but in that stuff you can’t help picking up some of the spirit too.

My favored possessions, the ones I’d save from a fire after my dogs, are a couple dozen photos taken by a war photographer during the Mexican Revolution, but not of the war, of fishermen, cattle herders, architecture, cathedrals, the earth and sky. And I’d take the vintage silver bracelets from Taxco, and the milagros crosses, and the wonderful, sacred/profane ex-votos of breasts and other body parts. I’d grab Kahlo’s published notebooks to pretend to myself I could do my own, and then maybe I’d head over to Rose Portillo’s and see if she’d take me in for a while, just to be around that decorative joya. I’ve faced it: That’s about as close as I’ll get.

Much as I’d like to imagine myself swashbuckling enough to plaster my doors with broken china and paint my ceiling in swirls of purple and red, I’ll probably never pull off more than a periwinkle and pinkish cream kind of dash. But at least I will do my best to pull it off depending on myself, as Anita advised Frida, and that’ll be all I need for good humor, for everything.

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Barbara King is the editor of the Home section. She can be reached at [email protected].