Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress by Ximena Escobar

Warm tones hit the mahogany bed posts, struck by the sudden light entering the room. The French door moaned as the veil curtain swelled, and a leaf spiralled onto the crochet bed cover, the terracotta tiles, the dresser table.

Frida held a deep breath, albeit restrained inside the cast, until her ribs complained. As if she could capture the light within her lungs, the gap of blue that she envisioned open in the sky. Something inside her had changed; the narrowest ray of light had filtered through the fill of her darkness.

She breathed out cautiously and lost nothing. Shiny dust particles spun with piercing clarity, and angular corners gleamed on the hanging photo frames. She watched them fall in fractured fragments, fanning out like accordions of light—the apex of Father’s handkerchief, his necktie blade, Mother’s angular frown. Alejandro’s lapel. Cubist pieces of floating light, swinging across her vision like chimes, cutting and hurtful; not like shattered glass, but because she had suddenly regained the ability to feel something other than physical pain.

Light mattered.

Her pupils turned upwards to the large looking glass placed directly above her on the ceiling-panel. A yellow light shone like smouldering ash on her forehead, a rip like a third eye exuding minute rays of sunshine. Frida usually avoided her own reflection, but as she couldn’t move her neck, she used the mirror to see her bedside table, the silver bell shaped like a French paysanne, the cigarettes and matches under the etched glass lamp shade. Father initially hadn’t allowed her to keep any at hand, in case she lit herself into a blaze, but a year had passed, and things were much better since she’d started painting.

Now, at this very moment, she had a real, keen desire to do it.

She stretched her arm to the side, seeking the bell to call Juana.  She didn’t take her eyes off her reflection, as if the light would otherwise disappear. The room dulled as unseen clouds crossed the sun outside, but her bright spark remained, ever brighter in the shadowed light. A usual incessant headache beat in her eye sockets, like the clapper was rattling inside them as she rang the bell—her eyeballs did all the work, she supposed—or like she had nails stuck in her forehead.

“Doesn’t she walk Negro right about now?” asked a cherub’s familiar voice. That of the wooden figurine swinging at the far end of the panel ceiling. “Might be a bit longer in this sunshine. God knows I’d be out myself if I could. You know what it’s like.”

Frida knew.

Always hanging together, she and him. She by the head halter attached to the backrest—a hammock under her chin pulling her head from her neck—he by a tiny hook in the wood. And a rosary her mother insisted on hanging there too. Frida still heard the murmur of her countless Hail Marys, whether she be there or not, absorbed like a far ocean in each mother of pearl, warm and cold in her ear—it was a miracle she survived the accident.

Frida didn’t care to answer Cupid, seeing the sunlight surge again in the corner of her eye, as footsteps approached along the exterior corridor. Negro’s little steps too. He and his fleas were never allowed in her room anymore.

“Out! Out!” Juana shooed him away as she entered. Good dog knew to obey her, lying down to bask in the coolness of the shaded tiles, at the other side of the door.

Everybody always said Juana was like a ray of sunshine, but this was more extreme. The outside light was stuck to her like paint, a tangible halo smothered all over her.

“Señora, do you need anything before lunch?” Juana had practically raised her, but she insisted on calling her ‘Señora’ since the accident. “The tomatoes are absolutely wonderful; their smell lingers in my hands.”

“My canvas,” mumbled Frida. “And a smoke.”

“Yes. The light is in the air today! Even if it’s about to rain. September will be September…”

Juana rubbed her hands together and the glow swelled like a melon between her palms. Frida watched her wipe them on the surfaces like she was dusting, transferring the yellow to the bed posts, the wall, the curtain. Spreading the sunlight of the exterior— and more—all over the room.

“You look different, Señora. Is that a crown you’re wearing?”

Frida shifted her pupils to the mirror. Triangular pieces of glass defined on her head, stuck in her cranium and forehead. They shone brighter as Juana came near. “You’re the spitting image of Our Lady of Guadalupe!”

Juana squinted as she looked closer, her face hovering above Frida’s. She rolled her sleeves up and furrowed her brows, pulling out the glass from the central cut. Frida didn’t feel it, but a rivulet of blood trickled down her forehead. Juana inspected the glass, raising her eyebrows.

“Señora, you must be feeling better!”

Alejandro’s image was ingrained in the piece, as though he was standing at the other side of a bus window. The straight line of Frida’s lips remained still, and Juana’s curled downwards, weighed down with empathy.

“You miss him,” she sighed. “But that’s a good thing. You never said a word when he used to visit. He did come a lot, you know. In the beginning. It’s like you’re alive again.”

Frida’s eyes welled up. She didn’t feel such pangs anymore, insignificant in the context of her pain. But she saw her tears in Juana’s eyes, her sweet face blocking the reflection in the mirror.

“Let’s take these off,” she said.

Piece by piece she tweezed them out of her head, letting each fall silently into her apron pocket. Silently, except for the clinking of glass on glass and the sudden hiss as she cut herself.

“These are all of Alejandro. Very sharp memories, that’s for sure. Shall I ask your mamá to write to him for you?” She reached for the cigarettes, not expecting an answer.

“No,” Frida voiced intelligibly through her teeth—but her family had got accustomed to her mumbling, scarce as it was.

She looked at her reflection. A pattern of blood stained her forehead, like a henna tattoo; the light in the centre like a shiny bindi. She looked pretty, for once. A familiar face looking back at her as a flame flared noisily to her left, on the match head.

“Heute ist immer noch”, she said.

“What?” asked Juana, puffing the cigarette. “You know I don’t speak German, Señora. Such an ugly language that—aufmbaufnolder. What on earth does that mean?”

“Today still goes on,” said the cherub. “Nothing sensible, in any case.”

A cloud of smoke glided over Frida, eclipsing the bindi sun in the mirror. Cupid coughed as he swung, blowing into the smoke.

Like a black seagull, Frida’s furrowed brow flapped wings and took off her forehead through the grey—crow’s feet etched in the corner of her eyes, even if she was only 18. How could she expect Alejandro to visit?

No, she wasn’t the same girl.

“Piss off!” said Juana to the bird, shooing it away with her hand as it spiralled inside the room, black plumage absorbing the yellow waves her hand released in the air.

It flew out the French doors a golden beauty—Negro barking and chasing it to the interior courtyard.

“Today—” said Juana to the cherub, placing the cigarette in between Frida’s fingers, “as in, September 19, 1925. The day of the accident, before the accident. Isn’t that so, Señora? Before everything broke… You can recognise it in her face, the spark.”

Cupid couldn’t see, swinging all the way over there.

Frida listened as Juana retrieved the easel from behind Father’s armchair. He made the easel himself, soon after the accident, to show her there still was a future.

Frida only wanted the past.

She’d only used it a few times since she recovered some strength and movement in her arms. It attached to the ceiling panel, making each canvas a new mirror. Most of her pictures had been loose still-life sketches based on little arrangements her mother set on a little table by her bedside, with no other purpose than to get her muscles reacquainted with the paintbrush, and her eyes re enamoured of form and light; also, the awkward angle of her perspective was somewhat unique. But today she felt the determination to execute her first ‘proper’ work of art: a self-portrait for Alejandro. To show him, and herself, that she was still the woman he admired.

Had she not been impaled by a steel handrail.

Had it not penetrated her torso, leaving her with a fractured pelvis and collarbone, two broken ribs, a broken leg and a crushed foot -her spinal column broken in three places-, the 17^th of September 1925 may have not turned out to be a remarkable day. It had been a good day; she and Alejandro had compared Mannerist and Early Renaissance art on the way to the bus stop, and he’d placed his hand on hers as she held the handrail. A tingling sensation creeping up her spine, beautifully straight and whole, before they took their seat and a palm print faded off the steel cylinder. Thighs lay separately-together on the wooden seat, but each shuffled a little closer until they touched. Witnesses said a thousand butterflies exploded out of the bus when it crashed, released by the hole in Frida’s stomach.

All that, however, was no different to every other day. Most days were good then, full of discussion and discovery. Today could have easily blended into every other good day, like pigments disappearing in a new colour. But instead, every day before the accident blended into today, elevating the woman she was in that precise moment—making her the best version of herself. The perfect, completed Frida Kahlo in the height before the fall, for she would never be better than she was then; never happier; never more promising. Right there, sitting unknowingly on a terrible edge; on the finest line between life and life dying.

That is the woman she was going to paint. Not the corpse concealed behind the blank canvas. Not the bead-head hanging from the ceiling panel alongside Cupid, like an aborted foetus unable to shoot his arrow into Alejandro’s heart. She will never paint that Frida; she will only paint the beauty shining in Alejandro’s eyes—today.

A leaf flutters on the dresser, but Frida looks in the mirror as she cautiously dips it in the beautiful yellow on her forehead. Juana tweezes the leaf with her fingertips, returns with a pink butterfly. She pins it in her hair, and whispers she’ll be back with a little something to spoon into her mouth, without distracting her. Rice pudding. Lots of cinnamon. Frida stretches her arm up and reaches the canvas with the tip of the paintbrush.

The whole day passes; Father and Mother both sit quietly by her bedside, taking advantage of the wonderful light for reading and knitting. It’s getting dark outside, but the room still thrives in Frida’s light; a wound that will bleed all the colours.

I am your dreams. The outline of Frida’s figure is a continuous line, unbroken and complete on the canvas. I am your Botticelli.

Alejandro had a fascination for the Italian artist since the moment he discovered beauty; and only Frida knew of it.

I am the Birth of Venus, always reborn and completed. I am the swirling waves of the sea in the background; dark blue, to enhance the brightness of my skin. My single eyebrow, so that you will never confuse the goddess with anyone other than me.

Father, Mother and Juana love it—their admiration seeing Frida’s lips curl upwards for the first time since the accident. Alejandro adores it too, so much so, he holds on to it for years—but he doesn’t visit Frida again.

Juana scrubs Alejandro’s face from the glass fragments, glues the pieces together in the shape of a heart and hangs it close to Cupid—close to every pearl, that God will always hear the prayers within them, and the cherub’s arrows will always reach it.

She names the painting “Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress”. On the back of the canvas, she writes:

For Alex.

Frida Kahlo, at the age of 17, September 1926 —Coyoacán —.

Heute ist immer noch (Today still goes on). 

Ximena Escobar

Image by Free Photos from Pixabay – tubes of oil paints and artists brushes on a wooden background.