Frida Y Yo

On bad days I think of Frida, nailed to her bed by pain, staring up at the ceiling, wondering when her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, a man as round and fat as the sun, would come home, and if he was finished making love to her sister. 

She dressed in Mexican folk costumes, partly because the long skirts hid her polio-withered leg, and decorated herself with chunky necklaces made from broken Aztec beads.  She braided her hair with colored wools and piled it on top or her head and put big bows and flowers in it until it looked like an altar to some garish god.  She wore all this while she lay in bed, recovering from one or another of 30 operations to repair her spine and pelvis, which were broken in a streetcar accident when she was a girl. 

She had a mirror attached to the underside of the bed canopy so she could paint while lying down with her canvas propped up against her knees.  Over and over, she painted herself against backgrounds of glossy leaves and fruits, embraced by monkeys and surrounded by butterflies and parrots, hummingbirds and a little hairless, gray-skinned Xoloitzcuintle dog. 

Critics say that she lacks universality, that her art is only about herself.    Prolonged illness turns you inward, and what else can you do while everybody else is out going about their business but ruminate about yourself?  "I paint myself because I am so often alone," she said.

She didn't make it to 50.  She died of a clot in her lungs, having recently undergone the amputation of a gangrenous leg, and of the alcohol and pain killers to which she was addicted--though for the latter, who can blame her?


I lie in bed with Bisou asleep on my stomach and wonder, how did Frida keep from getting oil paint all over herself when she painted lying on her back?  Were her monkeys and her dog allowed on the bed? With her appalling pain, how did she manage that impressive string of love affairs with men and women, cabaret dancers, movie stars and intellectuals, and were they just a way to get back at Diego? 

Most of all I wonder, what kept her going?  What reservoir of grit and rage drove this tiny hirsute woman to paint 140 pictures that, even if you don't like them, you will never forget?

She was not a nice person, as she was the first to admit.  Yet to me she is a saint of sorts, the patron saint of those whose bodies have betrayed them but who struggle to make their stories be about something more than just that.

A Little Respect, por favor

For the last couple of decades, multiculturalism has been a revered concept in this country.  Little children in kindergarten are taught that difference is to be not only respected, but admired.  Authors from places no one heard from before write about those places and rise to bestseller status.  And authors from right around the corner, not to be outdone, buy airplane tickets and do years of research so they too can write authoritatively about places and people heretofore ignored.

It is mostly a good thing.  But unfortunately this regard for other cultures often does not extend to their most significant artifact:  their language.

I have been reading Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, published in 2009 by HarperCollins.  The first part of the book takes place in that most colorful of foreign lands, Mexico, in the colorful 1920's and 30's.  And it involves the era's most colorful trinity, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky.

The author has done a huge amount of research, and has surely traveled in Mexico.  There are endless virtuosic details about the temperament of tides, the smells of food, the sounds of monkeys  that she had to witness in person in order to transcribe them.

To intensify those bright hues and make them seem even more "real," she does what many other writers do:  she lards the text with Spanish words.  Open the first third of the book at random, and your eye immediately jumps to the italicized words and phrases sprinkled over the page:  pez volador (flying fish), el tiempo cura y nos mata (time heals and kills us), sergente...wait--what?  No such word in Spanish.  She must mean sargento (sergeant).  Just a typo that nobody caught.  But no, sergente appears in page after page--it's not a typo.

Then there are the accent marks.  Sometimes they are put where they're needed.  Often, they are neglected.  And sometimes they are applied where they don't belong, for sheer effect.

Worse than the accent problem are major grammatical mistakes such as--to mention just one--lo fugar (which makes no sense) for lo fugaz (which means, that which is fleeting).  Strange how that last  consonant makes such a difference.  The main character is given several opportunities to reflect on the fleetingness of things in general, and every time the mistake is repeated.

If the writer could not trouble herself to straighten out her Spanish, surely HarperCollins could have spared a few hundred dollars to hire a graduate student to proof for language errors?  Literate Spanish speakers are as close as the nearest college. We're not dealing with Serbo-Croatian here, but with a language that some say will soon be spoken by more Americans than English.

I have often laughed at the way restaurant menus scatter accent marks randomly over their lists of entrees* for flavor, the way chefs sprinkle thyme over the wild-caught salmon.  But The Lacuna is not a menu, and HarperCollins is a premier publishing house.

Obviously, neither the writer, nor the editors and publishers cared enough to make sure that the Spanish was correct, and that is a depressing thought.  Americans are enamored of multiculturalism, but multilingualism doesn't seem quite as romantic, and it is a lot of work.

I would have much preferred the book to use English throughout, reserving Spanish for proper names and where absolutely necessary.  It's the use of Spanish as a decorative artifact that offends me, and that surely has Sor Juana Ines* de la Cruz, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and other Mexicans of genius writhing in their graves.

(* Both words need accents, but my software doesn't allow it.  But then, I'm not HarperCollins.)