—VB
October 8, 1943
Asheville, North Carolina
Gringolandia
Dear Frida,
What you have done is a miracle. But how can any thanks be enough? Just words, brought here and heaped at your feet like a pile of cold mice with gnawed ears fetched in by a cat. You have restored a life. You will see.
This morning a white cat appeared here on the back step, and it seemed you must have sent her too. She didn’t cry but stood quietly, as if waiting for a well-known outcome. The wind tugged fingers through the creature’s coat, trying to unbutton the shaggy garment and pull it off. Think of how you would paint this cat: with her insides exposed, the delicate rib cage curved like a ring’s setting around a bloody gem of carnivorous love. This is how she seemed. When the door opened just a crack she slipped in, curling immediately on the hearth, declaring with her eyes: “Ha, you thought I was helpless! I own you now.” Of course she is Frida.
But her name will be Chispa. She is a muse, the spark you once accused me of having, now glowing quietly on this hearth. Otherwise the house is still, keeping secrets. The floors are made of the long, narrow hearts of trees brought down from mountain slopes, the chimneys are stones rolled round as biscuits in the Swannanoa River. The windows have interlaced panes like the ones in your father’s house, cracked here and there but holding. The mitered oak doorsills are like deep wooden picture frames, each holding a perfect view of the next room, where walls are touched with light, and life could be waiting. The grain of the wood tells a story of years in the mountains, all the rains and droughts leading to the beginning of my life, when these trees were felled. The house was built the same year as my birth.
So we’re well-matched companions, sheltering roof and solitary soul, crouched in a domestic forest of elms and maples. The other houses along this leafy street are also bungalows with gabled roofs and trussed eaves, an architecture that is here known as Arts and Crafts. It’s the opposite in every way from Diego’s beloved Functionalismo, nothing modern or shocking. Probably you would both find it boring. But now your mind’s eye can see your old friend where he lives: making tamales in a kitchen of his own, with shining white tiles and green-painted trim. Picture him in stocking feet padding happily through golden rooms where bookcases reside directly in the walls, and amber lamps hang on chains from the ceiling. Then, picture him upstairs with your treasure glowing before his eyes, as in a storybook when the child lifts the lid of the magical trunk.
It is a good place, Carolina, built of mountains and river valleys. Did you receive the postcard? The tall buildings you see in it are full of banks and bakeries, the usual things. But look carefully at the background of the picture: mountains. They stand behind every view, like a mother offering a blanket in which to wrap everyday life and shelter it from useless dreads. In June they are walls of white rhododendron blossom. In autumn the forests set themselves aflame with color. Even winter has its icy charms. This you will refuse to believe. But you might like the changeable nature of this place, and its people, who have the modesty of Mexican villagers. The backyards here are divided by slim wire fences like tiny farm fields, and the women tending them shout across fence lines, “hollowing” they call it, to comment on the weather. They pin dungarees to clotheslines and speak in a dialect that sounds like the plays of Shakespeare. It isn’t the Gringolandia you remember. You might not find it as despicable as New York.
Congratulations on your successes there, especially the exhibition at Miss Guggenheim’s. For you to be chosen among the thirty-one most important women painters in the century must make Diego proud, and you, jealous of the other thirty. The man who wrote about you in Vogue was an idiot—of course you don’t have inferiority complexes or blood-obsession or anything like that. That man spent fifteen minutes looking at your paintings. Could you drive a car for fifteen minutes, then write a psychological analysis of Henry Ford? All right then, don’t think of it any more.
Have you agreed now to be a Surrealist? Because, as it happens, the French Relief Society intends to sponsor your paintings in their program on surrealism. Do you wonder how this news reached your friend’s ears? Who is the mysterious one now, and how long will he make you burn with suspense? Not very long. Here is the news: your former Shipping Shepherd now holds the same post for the Civilian Corps, a wartime position overseeing movements of art treasures and government-sponsored exhibits. The wage is forty dollars a week, every one of them welcome. So you see it’s only thanks to you: this job, this house. These debts mount, all to you.
The real purpose of this letter is to acknowledge the debt most infinite: for saving my notebooks and papers. Frida, you always said the most important thing about any person is what you don’t know. Likewise, then, the most important part of any story is the missing piece. What you gave me is everything. A self, the simple yo soy, I am. I am saved. I drowned, it seemed, and then came the light. Here I am.
I discovered it four days ago. I’ve only now opened the crate, for the first time. You must have wondered that I said nothing about it in the telegrams from New York. I remember mentioning the painting you gave me, thanking you in some duplicitous way. I’m sorry. You must think I had no curiosity about your gift. If you’ve already sent me to hell, it’s fair enough, but you sent me for the wrong reasons. Disinterest in your work is not my crime; your paintings are thrilling. My faults lie elsewhere.
The truth of what you did, and what I now possess as a result (have possessed for three years without knowing) is slow to dawn. The last three mornings I’ve wakened to sense it arriving like a marvelous visitor coming on the train. I get dressed, I pace. I can’t imagine how you bribed the police. I wonder how much of the manuscript you had time to read, and what you thought of it. But I ask for no more than what you’ve done already. You held faith in me as an artist. Not as a child, or servant, but as your peer. My pulse rushes, to think I will now have to earn that faith.
Here is the first step: I have got myself a typewriter. I own almost nothing else, due to the war shortages. My furniture is a few sad handprints of a foreclosed family: children’s beds stripped of all but the narrow mattresses, an avuncular parlor chair with holes in its elbows. An electric stove, a wooden icebox that goes hungry for ice. (I’m told we’ll get it in winter.) But my lair is the little upstairs room overlooking the street from beneath the gabled eave. My writing table is the bathroom door, taken off its hinges and set across two defunct radio cabinets I found in the alley. (Eviscerated in the last wire-and-copper drive.) And my prize: a typewriter gleaned from the rummage room at the school where I teach Spanish lessons. Probably the last such machine in the city, what with all the old ones melted down for bullets, or else urgently needed in North Africa and the Coral Sea, evidently, along with all sugar, cellulose tape, and ethyl gasoline. My relic lacks only a few of its keys, and with its help I plan to finish the book whose life you spared. It’s the story we talked about, Cortés in the empire of the Azteca. The scandals of the ancients will be known.