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On the 12th of August, 1949, I headed for the Villa of San Angelín, a few kilometers from Mexico City, where Diego had his studio. The object was to interview him on the basis of his Exposition at the Palace of Bellas Artes.
I lost most of the day. Rivera showed up late and had to deal with several people who had arrived before me. Most were tourists, the kind that touch his hands and prove to themselves that geniuses still exist.
I wanted to talk with him face to face, to observe him and obtain a private sense of his personality. I hadn’t made any concrete plans, not even formulated a special set of questions since experience had taught me that an initial contact involving a spontaneous chat can yield the most faithful impression of an individual.
On the way to San Angelín it occurred to me to ask Rivera the simplest things, the most humble, that which being known is ignored. Like, “What is a painter?” “What is a painting?” and “How do you make a mural?” It hadn’t occurred to anyone, facing Rivera, to technically take advantage of that childish restlessness when a child arrives at that tremendous age of “why this, why that.”
“Father, what is a car?” “What are trees made of?”
Really, the matter was settled. I would interview Rivera about the most fascinating issues of the craft with the greatest simplicity. I would face the monster in his own labyrinth and stretching my hand past the bars of his intimacy, ask him for the facts of his life.
On the way there, I decided to wander about a while around his castle, that Aztec castle where one feels and senses the palpitating heart of the past. The studio-home of Rivera, intact at this date, is different from the other buildings in the area. To the right are the servants’ quarters, and to the left the three-story studio connected to the main building by a cement bridge. On the top floor is a workroom reached by an outdoor stairway. In front, making do as a barrier, is a row of cacti, the representative plant of Mexico.
Rivera’s studio presented the typical disorder of an artist’s dwelling, but all working materials were in their place, most carefully guarded by Manuel, his faithful servant.
In a corner of the room one could see a shelf with pre-Hispanic sculptures, but the best of the priceless, 30,000-piece collection was on the first floor, from where they were transported to the pyramid at the Pedregal, where he planned to be interred with his treasures, like the famous pharaohs of Thebes.
For years, Rivera invested large amounts of money collecting pre-Hispanic pieces and he had at his service an army of Indians in charge of finding him monoliths or Aztec deities from anywhere in the republic. He was the most conspicuous visitor of tombs in America; his nails were black with earth thousands of years old.
The study had little furniture, but in his private rooms he had an astonishing collection of highly colorful silk shawls, which he used on his models when he was ready to paint them. Also to be found there were stuffed birds, Andean and Tibetan caps, stone pipes, and musical instruments. But the things that caught a visitor’s attention the most were the Judases, colossal dolls made from cardboard and sticks created by anonymous artists, to be burned after Easter. Among these figures were also devils to be found; and Death herself, the perennial beloved of the Mexican people, who used to adorn pre-Hispanic temples thousands of years ago. Rivera loved these products of popular art passionately.
In this room we are describing, so well protected from street noises, the painter would work twelve to fourteen hours daily. There he painted naked women, African blacks, famous artists, indigents and beggars. Clara Bow and Paulette Goddard posed there for hours. The man who was then Treasury Minister, Ramón Beteta, the Canadian poet Phileas Lalane, Mrs. Rubenstein, the Mexican movie star María Féliz, they all sacrificed whole days of immobility just to be painted by Rivera. No one forgets to this day the scandal provoked by the painting of the poet Guadalupe Amor, of Mexico City, when she appeared on canvas totally naked in a local gallery.
When the artist was at work, only people he trusted could gain entrance to his inner sanctum. He would admonish his servants severely if they allowed someone in not previously announced, or anyone he didn’t know. I saw government functionaries, professors and American students waiting for hours without being received by the San Angelín dictator.
At eight p.m. the night of August 12, a slow, heavy-set, parsimonious Diego came in to where I was, speaking his Guanajuato version of English and kissing women’s hands. I was able to explain my idea to him and he was immediately interested. He invited me into his studio, and while taking off his jacket, said, “Ask me…”
And I asked one, two, twenty…I don’t know how many questions ‘til the small hours of the night, with him answering from memory, with an incredible accuracy, without pausing, without worrying much about what he might be saying, all of it spilling out in an unconscious and magical manner.
Since the material I obtained was so abundant, the next day I decided to divide the interview into three parts for the newspaper El Nacional, where I was a collaborator. I was finishing the third and last part, when the Satan of journalists tempted me. Rivera was able to talk without respite for weeks and weeks on end on life issues, his art, the violent and passionate world in which he lived. Why not take advantage of that mental machine, so full of delicious sound bites, beautiful, human, including contradictory notions of atheism and ferocity? Darkness and lightning bolts inhabited his soul, larger than life passions, thick as jungle vines, tenderness, unconformities and revelations. All that besides his work, his gigantic achievements…. Wasn’t this divine liar one of the most interesting artists on the continent, not to mention the many scandals accompanying what he did? Didn’t he practice the art of lying in an exquisite manner never heard of before? Weren’t his cape and sword scandal itself, his political radicalism and his demon the flame of the savage past? All of this meant that I had to arm myself with patience.
I got in touch with him by phone, telling him that I wanted to continue our chats, and he agreed. He was delighted to accept, of course, because now he’d have a loudspeaker to propagate his views, unburden himself, criticize, theorize, and unwrap before a sharp mirror his life as an artist, so intense and vital that today, even as a dweller of the night, he casts no shadow.
This is the way my newspaperman’s task began, one I thought would last one day and ended up taking fifty-two weeks; each Sunday for a whole year. El Nacional kept publishing everything and when Rivera was out of town I’d make the interview up, at my own risk, talking at him.
I wrote the articles at all hours, in different places and ways: in cabarets, at my desk, in busses, up on scaffoldings, in private cars and taxis, using pencils, pens, typewriters, telephones and television. Rivera would dictate without moderation, vertiginously, without pausing, sometimes without breathing. Other times he’d dictate reluctantly. My job at such a time was limited to placing my hands on a little table without nails and invoking the spirit. The table would move and I would interpret its movements. The development of the talks was my own, all questions were my inspiration. I’d present him with specious questions to trip him up and have him reveal some invaluable confidence. But I would do it with respect for his person and admiration for his genius.
All this with the joyful anticipation of someone beneath an apple tree, waiting for the fruit to fall in bunches, for whole sentences would come from his mouth one after the other, and I would have to grab them as they went by. What a way to speak! Without the least sense of what a limit might be, or a pause. He loved his notions and would speak like a deranged orator, like a medium, like an oppressive loudspeaker spewing its propaganda. But what a difference between a logomaniac without sense and this precious disorder of the aesthetic lover, of a Rivera presenting himself! I had to write down his words with idiomatic mendacity, jotting down theories, observations, and the names of foreign personages and artists whose correct spelling would cause endless problems. When transcribing my notes I would be in serious trouble until I could take refuge in encyclopedias and reference