“Frida,” I said, and touched her. Her skin was brittle and paper dry and warm like the fires within her were carefully banked but could not be concealed. “I wish to give you a gift.”
“Then give me the gift I want,” she replied fiercely. “Remember me. You must always, always remember me. You must always keep my painting on your wall, always, and remember who I was and these times we have had together.”
“I will do better than that,” I told her. “I will make you immortal.” And then I told her how.
She listened and said nothing, but her silence was not disbelief. She merely digested and considered, and questioned closely. “So I must finally die, and then will awaken after I am buried?” she asked. “And the pain? Will there always be pain? Because I do not want to exist for all eternity with these injuries, with this broken, useless body.”
Her body was far from useless, I told her. “If you take a little from me now, you will recover from this infection. And when you wake into our life, there will truly be no pain. All the scars, all the badly mended bone, all of it will be healed. The bodies of our kind are always perfect and stronger than those still living. You will never feel pain again, or the depths of despair. No disease will touch you. And you will see—such things. Our eyes are more sensitive and can see more distinctly. You will be amazed by how you can see.”
There was no thought to it, nothing planned. She knew, I had told her all and she was aware of what we did, and she had never refused my offer. She did not speak but her eyes flashed and she licked her lips and I was certain of her desires. Who would not become immortal? Who would choose to die?
I cradled her in my arms, careful of the needles and gauze. I fed her pears and Brie that I had smuggled in under my coat. And when she was full and weary and half insensible, I took the little paring knife and nicked my wrist. I held the well of blood to her lips and, half asleep, she licked gently. I felt the pain pass from her body, and though I knew she was not healed forever until her death, I was fiercely glad to give her even this brief respite.
The doctors were surprised at her recovery. She was well enough to leave the hospital the next day, and though they wanted her to stay she refused. Mary fetched her home and I came for her with the dark and brought her to me with all her things. For the rest of her time in Paris I wanted her to stay with me.
In those nights we had left, in the violence of passion, she told me to drink. Ordered me, insisted, and I could taste her curiosity and knew she craved the pleasure of it, she who had done every other thing a woman could do. I was not her only lover, even in Paris there were handsome men, the Communists, and at least two actresses.
The last few nights before she left she was more subdued than I had ever seen her, even in the hospital. I wondered whether she was ill again, and asked, but Frida said only that she was sad. “I miss Diego,” she said simply. “And I miss Mexico, and the sun. It is so gray here.” And then she laughed and I saw the ghost of the Frida I knew. “And I’m sick of these Surrealist intellectuals. All they can do is argue theory and they don’t have anything to say.”
It was time for her to go. And though I was sorry that she was leaving, I also knew that France was no longer safe, not for either of us, not for anyone. In Mexico I knew she would be away from the terror that was gathering. Two days after her departure I packed my own things and went to Geneva to wait out the war.
The invasion followed close upon her departure. I think she wrote some letters that I never received, and when I was settled again back in Paris in 1951 I wrote to her. She replied at length and though our correspondence was infrequent, it was no less the connection of hearts. I was not surprised when I did not get letters from her for several months at a time, but I was quite shocked to see another envelope from her address but not in her hand.
This letter was from Diego Rivera. He invited me to a show, Frida’s first major exhibition in Mexico. How dearly she had wanted this, how important it was to her to be recognized in her own country. But my great pleasure at this announcement was changed when I read the rest. Frida, Diego wrote, was very ill. Dying. He asked me, formally, to come to see her one last time. She wanted all of her dearest friends to say goodbye.
Travel over an ocean is not easy for my kind. But it was Frida, and she was about to die and wake again. I had to be there to receive her, to bring her gently into her new life, to teach her how to survive as one of us. I lived those nights in a frenzy of desire. Every second seemed forever before I was reunited with her, and yet every second was filled with preparation as well.
My passage was slightly delayed because the airline office was not open late and dark did not fall until after eight in June. I had never traveled by plane before, so it was with some trepidation I climbed into my coffin to be shipped by airfreight in mid July. Three days later I awoke, weak and retching, under a Mexican sky. Even after sundown the heat swam up from the pavement and permeated the air. While my servants carried out the rest of my instructions, I hunted and replenished myself, but the heat was still oppressive and exhausted me. By the fourteenth of July, the day celebrated by all friend of France as the birth of the Republic, I was fit to travel. As I dressed, my man handed me a newspaper.
There, in large print, was Frida’s name. But it was not the exhibition of her paintings that the article reported, but her death. And her cremation. During the service there had been some mistake and the doors of the crematorium had flown open. Her body had sat upright and her hair had caught fire like a halo of flame. The article reported that witnesses said her body smiled.
Frida Kahlo would never rise, never wake to eternal life, never laugh with me again or paint or turn her cutting wit against the efforts of some poor, third rate artist manqué. Frida, whom I had made immortal, was beyond my salvation. The knowledge of it went like a stake to my heart. I could feel the children of my blood, the very few I had made, no matter where they were. Frida was well and truly gone, a cauterized wound in the fabric of my making. I crawled back to my coffin and sobbed like a child until dawn.
From that day until this, I had always believed that it was Diego who had made the choice. He had unwittingly killed her. How could she have known that he would choose such a barbaric rite over burial in the sweet earth? Stupid, ignorant man, to deprive us all of her glorious being.
And so I believed until today. Her diary has been published, and while I do not approve I could not resist the temptation to read her most private thoughts. I am in Prague now, which is rapidly becoming one of the leading centers of art in Europe. Here her diary has just gone on sale in five languages almost fifty years after her death, and the large bookseller in Wenceslas Square has filled one of the windows with a display. While I fingered the copy and debated which language to purchase, two art students all in black came in and bought theirs.
If they could read her most private thoughts, I certainly must. I took my copy to a café near the Charles Bridge, where I read her words while ignoring my espresso as it grew cold. I remembered her so vividly, so warmly still, and my anger at her burning had never been blunted by the years. So it was with the greatest horror, the most profound regret, that I read her last entry.
I hope the leaving is joyful and I hope never to return.
It had always been her decision. She knew, after all. I had told her everything, and she knew, and she made her own choice. But I do not know how she could do such a thing. I could have made her immortal.
Another art student flounced by with a large portfolio book with Frida’s face on the cover. The girl wore a bright red flower in her hair and a flash of yellow and pink petticoat under her regulation black skirt.
The Thing in the Attic
By James