“Obviously you had a miserable time. But you can’t blame anyone for seeing you as a spectacle.”
She looked puzzled. Her earrings today were a pair of heavily embossed golden snakes, but with her newly shorn, glossy head she looked like a sea lion. With gold teeth. “What spectacle?”
Carmen Frida Kahlo de Rivera. Who could explain her to anyone, least of all herself? “You play a certain role. You have to admit that. Mexican peasant, queen of the Azteca or what. You don’t dress to blend in.”
Her gold incisors flashed. “If I don’t choose, they choose for me: Wife of the Much-Discussed Painter. The newspapers would wrap me in gauze and make me a martyred angel, or else a boring jealous wife. Above all, a victim—of Diego and life. Of disease. Look at this leg.” She yanked up the green silk to reveal her naked, lame leg. It was a more awful sight than the infected hands: thin as a stick because of the childhood polio, bent and scarred from the accident, years of limping and indignities uncountable.
“You’ve never seen it, have you?” she asked.
“No.”
“How long have you known me?”
“Nearly ten years.”
“And in that time, have you thought of me as this?”
It was hideous: the leg of a leper, a street beggar, a veteran of wars. Anything but the leg of a beautiful woman. “No.”
She tossed the long silk skirt back down, like covering a corpse. “People will always stare at the queer birds like you and me. We only get to choose if they’ll stare at a cripple, or a glare of light. The jewelry and everything makes people go blind. The gossips will say a million things, but they never ask, ‘That Mexican-Indian-Azteca girl, why does she always wear long dresses?’”
With the points of her naked toes she carefully set about pushing the locks of hair on the ground into a round pile. Everything with her is an artful project, flowers laid out on a table, even her own self-destruction. “So,” she said, “how is your wonderful story, the scandals of the ancients? Are you working on it every day?”
It was tempting to tell her about the writing desk in the guardhouse room, a newly oiled typewriter, a pile of pages growing higher every night. It would excite Frida to make her an accomplice. But she is no good at secrets. “What do you mean, queer birds like us? Nobody is staring at me.”
“So you think.”
The cat circled warily near her feet, eyeing the strange black pelt.
“And your dear comrade Van. How is he these days?”
“Not staring at me. That is for sure.”
The cat decided the new animal between his mistress’s feet was neither predator nor prey, so he crept away over the ivy, lifting his feet as if walking through shallow surf.
“Being a peacock is not the only way to hide yourself, Frida. A pigeon can hide.”
“Is that what you are? A pigeon hiding in a little hole in the bricks?”
“I’m a typist. And a cook. Sometimes now I get to clean rabbit cages.”
She sighed. “What a waste of time. I thought you had chispa. A spark, or some kind of discipline. It turns out you’re a little gray pigeon.” She smoothed her skirt over her leg and pulled her shawl around her shoulders, composing herself against what she had revealed.
“I’m sorry about your leg. I’d heard different things.”
“Sóli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.”
Twelve people living in this household now, and only one bathroom. Miss Reed calls it The Dance of the Hours. The four Americans always stay up late—the strange, funny Miss Reed (who dresses like a boy) and her husband sleep in one of the guard-house rooms but rarely retire to it until dawn, the same time Lev rises for his morning exercise. Joe and Reba still have their apartment, and take field trips to its bathroom. For everyone else the clock is ruled by quick dashes and rationed cups of coffee. Lorenzo and the other three guards have been known to piss over the side of the roof, declaring that the GPU must be defeated by every known weapon. But some weapons they hold in reserve. The competition of morning is not for the weak-hearted.
The secret hour is seven forty-five. Lev has long finished his ablutions by then, and Natalya as well. The late risers are no threat as yet, and the morning shift are still holding off, respecting Natalya’s privacy. It’s possible then to slip from the dining room into Lev and Natalya’s wing, tiptoe through Lev’s study. Lev will soon be in there, as surely as the map of Mexico will be on the wall. But at seven forty-five he’s still outside feeding the chickens.
The narrow bathroom runs alongside Lev’s study and bedroom under a tin shed roof, added on the house some time between Porfirio Diaz and modern plumbing. Its fixtures stand in a row like soldiers at attention: the bathtub on clawed feet, the lavatory on its pedestal, the cabinet with Lev’s medicines and everyone’s shaving things in a jumble. The pitcher and bowl on a stand. The dreadful hairy rug someone should throw out. Lev should write a paper: “The Political Challenge of a Commonly Held Bathroom: No One Has the Authority to Throw Out the Rug.” And at the end, the captain of this army: the commode. Its tank above, the pull chain awaiting the private’s salute.
Rather than exiting by the door into Lev’s study (he might be there now), it’s less awkward to exit through the empty end room Natalya calls “Seva’s room,” still hoping their orphan grandson can be brought here from Paris. For now it houses a wooden wardrobe of coats and jackets. This morning it also contained Natalya, standing at the laundry table folding a pile of Lev’s striped silk pajamas. Awkwardness sometimes cannot be escaped.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning.”
It seemed necessary to say something else. “Lev has a lot of pajamas.”
“Yes, he does.”
“Nice ones. Most people don’t dress as well, even during the day.”
She said, “Most people don’t have to think of dying in their pajamas. And being photographed for the papers.”
“Dear God.”
“Don’t apologize. We’re accustomed.” She lifted her eyes briefly, a pair of gray stones, then looked back to her work. “I’ve been wanting to tell someone, and probably rather than Van, I should mention this to you. His blood pressure is higher.”