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Immortal

by Shariann Lewitt

I had heard of Frida Kahlo, but had not seen her paintings or known that she was in Paris for a showing of them, included in the prestigious exhibit of Surrealists organized by Andre Breton. That was mostly Breton’s fault. He had met her in Mexico two years previously, in 1937, and spoke about her with such admiration that I was certain that he had been smitten by more than her art. Breton usually did some interesting things, but this exhibition was horribly organized, completely out of control. He hadn’t even secured a gallery until well after the date written on my calendar for the opening, and so I was not well disposed to attend when I finally received the notice.

But I knew the work of several of the artists exhibiting at the show and was friendly with most of them, and would have likely gone even had I not been obliged by my acquaintance with Duchamp’s lady friend Mary Renyolds. It was Marcel Duchamp who introduced me to Frida, after he told me that she was a genius and a Mexican and a surrealist. “I know Diego Rivera’s work,” I told him. “Mexican communist, far too good for his ideology.”

Marcel handed me a glass of champagne. “Frida is his wife. But you must come and see the show tomorrow. I think you will be surprised. Besides, I have a piece and Mary will be there.”

I sighed. A wife, with some ambition and, no doubt, some very minor talent. A good relationship with Rivera was worth hanging a few of his wife’s canvases, but I knew there would be nothing positive I could say about them. Still, a new piece from Duchamp was an event and probably worthy of an article all on its own.

From time to time, I would write some pieces on art for a current magazine. I can no longer paint, so to write about art is the closest I can come to producing it again. Though the essays were infrequent and the magazine had only a small circulation, they had garnered me something of a reputation as a critic. I found it quite distressing. In my own time I had been well received by the critics, but my time had been long ago. For decades at a time I avoided galleries and paintings because they made me sad in a distant, detached way. At times, looking made me remember what I had had and what I had chosen to give away. Still, that misery was less than the melancholy tht had threatened to kill me many times before debt and prison did the job for them.

“No, no Adam, Frida is not just a wife,” Duchamp insisted again when I arrived at the opening. “She is herself a painter, a brilliant painter in her own right. Nothing like Diego. Come, her canvases are hung just over there.”

He led me around a corner, and then I was struck by the most powerful paintings I had seen in almost a century, and it had been a great century for art. It was not the color or the design that entranced me, but the pain, the power, and the delicate balance between mortality and eternity. The unwavering strength of her gaze looked out through the bonds of torment and the victor all at once.

All the paintings were about women, women splattered with ruby blood lying in ochre beds while men watched, women surrounded by scarlet hearts and pale blue tubes and the steel gray paraphernalia of death, women’s faces on the bodies of babies and animals. But the most frightening, most arresting, were the women alone, rendered in colors that seared the brain, their gaze staring out, challenging the viewer. These women were all one woman, all with a singular face, angry and proud and intelligent and in pain.

The colors were frightening, pink and green and red jostling each in madness that still was harmonious. I did not know how she had done this, and I had been considered a good colorist. While her palette was clear and bright, the overall effect was neither happy or naïve. These paintings screamed with rage, with power, the women unseen by men, the Mexico unseen by Europe.

For four hundred years I have worshipped art. True art, the expression of spirit, the communication from a soul I no longer possess, is the one thing that has never lost the power to move me. I have loved in the shadows and at the edges of humanity, and in this long time I have come to feel distance from the truly living. But when I see a painting that speaks beyond the senses, that expresses the desires of an existence I have almost forgotten, then I come closest to the life that I have lost.

Indeed, the revelation of a truly great work will nourish me as deeply as blood. Blood is life, it is true, but so is art. Some very few others of my kind understand this.

And since art, like blood, comes from the center of livingness itself, our kind cannot produce it. It appears that whatever creativity or talent we had in life remains below when we rise from the grave. Oh, we have not lost the techniques, can paint perfectly good copies or play an instrument with great skill. But since we do not have pain, we cannot express longing to be free of it, nor, unburdened by mortality, can we create a response to survive an inevitable death.

These paintings that hung before me, these were the most vivid, most stunningly living images I had ever viewed. All of what it was to be human was contained, everything of fear and desire, of suffering and the desire to be immortal. To be remembered.

How long I stood before them, transfixed, I do not know. Only that Duchamp broke my communion by ushering over the subject of the portraits that had consumed me.

In the flesh, Frida Kahlo was as powerful as her work. Even she herself could capture only a pale imitation of her intensity in her eyes. I was shocked at how tiny she was, and thought that so much passion, so much fire condensed into so small a frame could only result in a volcano.

She wore the colors of a volcano, large yellow and blue flowers in her braided hair, and her blouse and shawl were embroidered with vines and trees and birds. A volcano at rest, seething underneath, Vesuvius biding its time to explode again. She was the only being in the room wrapped in red and green instead of the ubiquitous black, like a Madonna amid the saints.

“Frida, may I present Adam Mersel?” Duchamp was saying. “Adam is our conscience, which is to say, he will scald any painter whom he does not regard as honest. Unfortunately, we are all a passel of rogues. But we are fortunate that he is too erudite to descend from the Olympus of his taste to berate us for our inadequacies too often. So we invite him and keep his glass full and introduce him to the most beautiful women in the hopes that he will be too busy to write another one of his cruel and brilliant reviews.”

“Marcel, I protest,” I exclaimed. I would have said more had Frida not laughed just then.

“Well, then,” she said, slipping a delicate hand over my elbow, “we shall have to make certain that you are suitably convinced that all dishonesty among the artists here is only in bed and never on canvas. So tell me, honestly, what do you think?”

I drew a deep breath and stared deep into those burning eyes. “I think that yours is the most brutal and terrifying and utterly unforgiving work I have ever seen. It is also among the most beautiful.”

She searched my face for something, some hint that I was merely flattering her or lying.

“I have been accused of many things, and most of them are true,” I told her. “But I have never, in any way, been less than perfectly candid in my opnions about art. Ask Duchamp, if you like.”

“You would not be kind to a woman because you wished to seduce her?” Her voice was merely curious; there was no hint of judgment in her tone.

It was my turn to laugh. “I have rarely been called kind, and have never noticed that it would help a seduction in any case. No, if I want to seduce a woman I might flatter her beauty, but not her work. Usually it is best not to speak at all,” I told her. Strange, I thought at the time, that I felt so free to speak with candor.

“Yes,” she agreed thoughtfully. “Yes, you are right.” And then she laughed, rich and raucous, and grabbed two glasses of champagne from the waiter. She tossed one down her throat and raised an eyebrow when I did not do the same.

“Is there tequila in Paris, M. Mersel?” she demanded.

“There must be,” I answered carefully. “Everything eventually comes to Paris in the end, as it used to go to Rome. So if there is tequila in the world, there will be some in Paris.”

She took my glass from my hand and drained that as well before she spoke again. “At least you do not look like a banker,” she said, appraising me. “Too many of these Surrealists and Dadaists look like bankers.”

“Magritte certainly looks like a banker,” I agreed.

“He is Belgian, he can’t help but look respectable,” Duchamp said, having overheard us. “It isn’t his fault. Come on Adam, you cannot monopolize the lady of the hour. And you haven’t seen my latest yet.” I let Marcel steer me away toward his assemblage, a suitcase with sixty-four miniature reproductions of his earlier work. Ah, Marcel, if only you hadn’t stopped painting. Marcel Duchamp and Mary Reynolds are good people, and they are not so pretentious as most of their peers. Still, while I understand that it is sometimes necessary to break down meaning to break through it, I cannot find meaning itself entirely unnecessary. Dada in some form is adolescent, and Duchamp is so much better than that.

At the end of the evening I went to find Frida, to say good night, to ask where she was staying and if she might like to go for a drink some time, but she was already gone. “She went home early with Mary,” Duchamp told me. “Do you think I should worry? Frida likes women as well as men.”

“Ah, but does Mary?” I rejoined, and was rewarded with Duchamp’s smile. His mistress may not be entirely conventional, but he has no reason to doubt her loyalty. “She is staying with you and Mary, then?”

“For a month at least,” he told me.

“Well, I shall come and take her off your hands some time, then,” I said lightly. We both laughed, Marcel because he was still just a little drunk and me because I had not lost her.

Over the next two nights I wrote my column, combing the words, reworking the phrasing. I wanted to impress the artist as she had impressed me. I wanted to show her the depth of my appreciation, and to explain to the sophisticated of Paris that she was nothing of a Surrealist no matter what Breton might say. Surrealism is an intellectual pursuit and Frida’s paintings came from the fusion of heart and mind and faith altogether, something the world had lost since the death of Fra Angelico.

Over the period of two nights that I wrote I did not hunt, nor was I aware of any hunger. The art had been richer than any meal, than any night of blood, and so it was not until I had finished and sent the article to my editor that I realized it had been many days since I had last taken physical sustenance.

And so I hunted. It was not half so satisfying as looking at a truly good picture, but the body has its own demands. I took what I needed from a dark-haired girl in the Metro, staggering home after an evening of too much wine and too many cigarettes. If she noticed anything the next morning, she would ascribe it all to the late night and brilliant company.

On Friday, the magazine with my article appeared and its full printing, all four hundred copies, were gone before I even woke to the twilight. My own copy, delivered with the mail, lay on the table in the front hall. I phoned Duchamp, and he and Mary and Frida were just dressing to go to dinner with some American novelist whose name I have forgotten. Frida agreed to meet me later at a decently late hour, not that Americans care for such niceties. When I put down the receiver I felt like I had when I was still young and mortal and nervous and in love.

I showed Frida the city that night, my city, the secret Paris that breathes in the hours after midnight. We went down to the Quai d’Orsey when the moon had set and the Seine flowed like ink, lapping the stone and echoing under the arched bridges. I told her of the morning that river had turned red, choked with the bodies of a thousand wedding guests who had been massacred by their King four hundred years before my birth. We went to Montmartre and climbed the hundred white steps in the starlight, then turned to look at the city lying asleep before us.

“Have you always lived in Paris?” she asked, and I could see in her face that she understood that ‘always’ was far longer in my case.

“No. I was born in Germany and worked in Rome when it was the center of all things. Some day Paris will no longer be the center, it will be New York or Mexico City and I will move again.”

She nodded, and was for a brief moment sad.

I did not see her for many nights. There were rumors that La Baker had become her lover, for which I was merely envious, though I did not know of which of them. She dined with Picasso and he said that she painted as well as he did, and he published that, too. But Pablo has too high an opinion of himself to mean that, and besides, he has sex with every attractive woman he can find. Much like Frida’s Diego, in fact. Kandinsky possibly did not sleep with her, but still admired her work.

When I saw her next I took her to my apartment near Avenue St. Germaine-du-Pres. The building is old, with high ceilings and plumbing that rattles. She studied the paintings on my wall with attention and finally pointed to one small piece in a corner. “That is yours,” she said. She did not ask, she knew. The she looked more carefully, and I wondered how she, a master of pink and yellow and fevered hues, would find my soft shades and delicate interplay of light. That is what critiques praised most about my work when I had been alive, the light, and the fact that I did not follow the Mannerist style of emotionalism that bordered on sentimentality.

“What is your real name?” she asked after she examined the miniature.

“Adam,” I told her, which was the truth. “You would not have heard of me, few of the contemporaries have. Adam Elsheimer.”

She nodded, never taking her eyes from the painting. “And when were you born?”

She knew. She knew what kind of thing I was, though I had said nothing. She knew, and yet she had come here with me.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said, and she laughed loudly. “I liked older men. My mother was so angry when I married Diego, he is twenty-five years older than me. And Trotsky.”

“You married Trotsky?” I knew she hadn’t, but it seemed like the right thing to ask.

“No,” she replied when she regained her breath. “No, but he was my lover. Breton didn’t tell you?”

It was my turn to smile. “Breton alluded to it. To lose a woman he desired as much as he desires you was quite a blow for him, but he felt he could not compete with Trotsky.”

“And you?” she demanded.

“I would not try to compete with Trotsky,” I agreed. “But Trotsky is not here.”

“No, Trotsky is not here,” she said, and sighed. Then she drank the tequila I had bought for her, and took my hand and let me to my own bedroom in my own apartment.

She knew what I was and she invited, teased, dared me. I tasted her in passion, with my fangs deep in her flesh, her blood as brilliant as the flowers in her hair. The nourishment of her blood was rich and heady, more viscerally alive than any I had had in four hundred years. All of Creation was within her, the fruits and vines and birds in her veins, the flowers in her hair, the fragility and the fear, as well, subtle and piquant. I drank the livingness inside her, and the death as well, for the one lives within the other.

She knew what kind of a thing I was, but she did not truly know what that meant. I did not tell her until weeks later, after she became terribly ill with a kidney infection, and Mary and Marcel were afraid and called me.

She lay in a hospital bed with tubes and bandages like one of her paintings, her face whiter than mine and pinched with pain. When I tried to hush her and speak she waved her hand and tried to smile bravely.

“This is terrible,” I said softly. “That you should become so sick while you are here.”

She laughed, loudly even though she did not have the energy for it. “I have been sick or injured every other place I have ever been. Why not Paris? Perhaps I wouldn’t even know I had been here if I had been healthy all the time.”

The pain flared through her, and through her paintings. I could see it, taste it, and remember my own and feel ashamed. For I had never been so sick in my few years of life. I had never known the misery she had endured, her near death from polio, and then from the streetcar accident when the doctors said she would never walk again. Her delicately molded body was laced with the scars of operations, and wondered how she had endured. The misery that had undone me was now called depression, but I could not compare that pervasive unhappiness to her suffering. I had languished in a debtor’s prison, but she was forever imprisoned in her own broken body.

“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.