“Getting the newspapers on our side, oh, my boy. That is a career for circus acrobats and worthless politicians.”
“Sorry, sir.”
He smiled. “Well, it would win the Russians. Our brains have a weakness for morose and thrilling plots.” He snapped the book closed. “What is the subject of yours?”
He listened carefully to the idea of a historical adventure about ancient Mexicans, even if it is more adventure than history, and will never be any good. He pulled a pile of books out of his shelf that might inspire a novelist just starting off.
“Do you read Russian? No. Well, Jack London, certainly. And Colette, for the female view. Oh, and this one by Dos Passos, it’s called The Big Money.” He also offered one of his typewriters, the spare one that only needs a little oil to get working again, and a small table for use as a writing desk in the guardhouse room at night. “So you won’t again have to creep into headquarters on the sly,” he said. “With Lorenzo as nervous as he is, he might shoot you through the window by mistake. A fine potboiler you would make of yourself then, my son. And who would write it?”
Alejandro, the village boy, almost never speaks. Yet claims he wants to learn English. One quiet assertion at a time, he begins: I am. You are. His room is the one at the opposite end of the guard house, but he comes to this one every morning at four, after finishing his shift of pacing the roof with his rifle cocked in darkness. This room that has housed no secrets up to now, except for a box of things hidden under the bed: a small stolen idol. A partly written, entirely dreadful novel. The little woven finger toy called a trapanovio, souvenir of a remarkable humiliation.
Alejandro is the first one to see the trapanovio since that day in Xochimilco, and he didn’t laugh when he heard the story. He inhaled sharply, fists on his face, and wept.
At four o’clock while the world sleeps off its judgments, reliably he arrives. He has, they have. A strange kind of love it is. Or no kind of love at all. A solace of the soft tissues only, not the first or last of anything, grateful and urgent and terrified by turns. Afterward, in plain sight of his unsettled accomplice, Alejandro prays.
Frida is home a month, and unraveling like a yarn doll. Diego wants a divorce. She suspected it last autumn, but her plan was to stay away so long, he would learn he couldn’t live without her. Such plans rarely succeed. She’s moved out of the Double House, living in Coyoacán now, and it’s odd to see the Blue House filling up with her things. She has layered on more paint, the colors of blood and the depths of the sea. The bedroom that was Lev and Natalya’s, spare as a servant’s back then with its woven rug and neatly made bed, now is crammed with her dressing table, jewelry, doll shelves, and trunks of clothes. Lev’s former study holds her ruckus of easels and paints. It should not seem strange, as it was her house all along, and her father’s before she was born.
This morning Perpetua sent Belén running down the block for help because the mistress had gone mad. Frida spends madness the way she spends money; it was all over by the time help could arrive. Perpetua answered the gate, pointed without a word, and returned to the kitchen. Frida sat on a stone bench in the courtyard with her hair all cut off. It lay in thick black parentheses on the bricks, all around her feet.
“Natalya sent me to ask if there’s anything you need.”
Frida smiled insincerely at the lie, revealing new gold caps on her incisors. It seemed she might have been drinking, even at this early hour.
“What I need is to castrate the son of a bitch and be done with it.” She made some menacing snips at the air with her scissors, startling the black cat that had been disguised in the nest of hair. It stood and arched its back.
It seemed pointless to mention she has also been having affairs, in New York and Paris. At least, such things were much discussed in the press. A handsome Hungarian photographer. “Sorry, Frida. But with Diego and women it’s nothing new, right?”
“Is this the kind of mierda you walked over here to tell me? I’ve been miserable for a long time already, so I should be used to it now? Thank you, my friend.”
“Sorry.” The cat slunk away into the laurel bushes.
“Sóli, you’ll never guess: now I have fungus on my hands. A new ailment! One thousand operations, plaster corsets, medicines that taste like piss, collapsed organs, and there’s still something new that can go wrong with me. Maybe I could be a little miserable about this?” She held up her hands, mottled pink, raw and dreadful.
“All right. If you need permission.”
Even in her disconsolate state she looked like a peacock, perfectly dressed in a green silk skirt and enough jewelry to sink a boat. Even drowning, Frida would cling to vanity. “Don’t forget Paris and New York, Frida. They loved your show. Yesterday Van showed me a fashion magazine with you on the cover.”
“The opinion of me in Paris and New York, if you want to know, was the same as for a talking pony. Imagine it, a Mexican girl who dresses funny and curses like a soldier! Every day was, what do you call it? A bowl of fish.”
Translating Frida is no easy trick. “A kettle of fish? That means you’re in bad trouble. Or else a goldfish bowl, which means people are looking at you all the time.”
“Both. I was in a kettle of goldfish. People pointed on the street.”
“Because you’re famous. People saw your paintings.”
“Listen, don’t ever become famous. It’s killing. You should see what they wrote in the papers, those reviewers. They hardly bothered to look at the paintings, they only wanted to write about the painter herself. ‘She should be making nice pictures of nature instead of these nightmares. And always herself—she’s not even that good looking!’”
“We saw the reviews. A lot of them were good. Diego says Picasso and Kandinsky think you’re a bigger talent than both of them combined.”
“Okay, but that cockroach André Breton didn’t bother to pick up my paintings from the customs house until I got there and screamed at him. And it’s true what I’m telling you about the reviews. They write what they think you should be painting.”
That courtyard seemed more than ever like a fairy-tale house, with tree leaves for its ceiling and an ivy-covered floor. White calla lilies rose up through the ivy carpet, all of them bending their hooded heads toward Frida, like charmed cobras.