297. I Know Frida - Emily Rapp Black
Each night the body is reshaped with the removal of the prosthetic, placed next to the bed within easy reach, and each morning refashioned through the act of reattachment. Each day this rebirth.
The Casa Azul is on Londres Street in Coyoacan, which brims with ambient noise that is dignified and regal by virtue of its sheer magnitude and constancy. I am sitting now on the bench in the garden. Listening as the chime in the basilica marks the hours. Barking dogs patrol rooftops while others nose through bags of garbage piled between the street and the sidewalk. The knife-sharpener winds up and down the street, advertising his skill. Someone whistles while shaking out a heavy carpet beneath a blue tarpaulin. Sirens interrupt the sound of high heels striking pavement and cobblestones, followed by the almost funereal sound of a few half-hearted trumpet trills signaling the start of a jubilant parade. A Mariachi singer fastens and swings on a single note. The odor of frying food floats through the air like fog, like smoke, like a bad mood. Somewhere the sound of hammering lifts from unseen labor. No wonder Frida loved this enclosed space in the middle of the movement around her, especially when she was confined to her bed.
Here, in Casa Azul’s fragrant garden, families mingle and snap photographs, speaking to one another in languages I recognize and others that I do not. A man sweeps the clean sidewalk with a wiry broom and a tall dustpan. Walking around the garden, I feel my baby kick. The new shape moves inside the always shifting shape. Trickster love, trickster artist, trickster friend, trickster mother, trickster child. I love the one body inside the body I try to love. Can Frida teach me this magic trick?
Each night the body is reshaped with the removal of the prosthetic, placed next to the bed within easy reach, and each morning refashioned through the act of reattachment. Each day this rebirth. But the girl’s body in my belly is sturdy, active and—I hope, as I do not believe in prayer—perfect. If she is, the world will still be unsafe for her, but without this symmetry, a kind of perfection, it will hold within it a danger and power that I am just coming to realize in the first few years of middle age.
This girl inside me growing hair and fingernails, building organs and the passageways between them, is swimming in the remnant soup of my son’s faulty DNA, the freakish and delicate twining that rotted his brain and killed him. At night, and sometimes during the day, I track the living, hidden baby in her domain where my heartbeats write the score of her first recognizable music. Her hands and feet across the surface of my domed belly are like momentary flashes against the skin, prints of possibility, the tiny star of a hand appearing and then disappearing, here but not yet. Last night, I underlined this line in Rebecca Solnit’s book The Faraway Nearby: “To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.” We are inside Frida’s home, inside her story, her art, her world. Or are we?
I know Frida, I want to say to the people I watch emerging from the house, having looked at her bed and her empty wheelchair positioned in front of the canvas, as if waiting for her to arrive. I know her, and you do not. I am the secret friend of her long-ago dreams. She is waiting for me.
This is, of course, a fantasy. I might understand Frida least of all because I assume that I do, and therefore my lens is cloudy with the not-knowing of thinking that I know. It is a puzzle that can only ever be partially solved, for how could I possibly know her? Hegel might ask “how do we know that we know what we believe we know?” The answer is: we do not. And this is why poetry, why art.
- Emily Rapp Black
