Free Some of My Lives by Rosamond Bernier

that one.
    By this time Diego and Frida had left the double-cube house. Home was now the Casa Azul in Coyoacán—at least for Frida. This house was built by her father; she was born there in 1907, although she always fudged on her birth date and pretended she was born in 1910, the year of the Mexican Revolution.
    Since 1958, it has been the Frida Kahlo Museum, and as such it has also soaked up a certain amount of amiable nonsense along with the Mexican sunshine, as Hayden Herrera pointed out in her pioneering biography of Frida.
    Many a visitor has gone away believing what we read in the inscription
at the entrance to the museum—that Frida and Diego lived together here from the day of their marriage in 1929 until her death in 1954.
    Not mentioned is the year of great upheaval in which they separated, divorced, and remarried. Or the many stays in New York and Paris, San Francisco and Detroit. Or the long periods when Diego found it more convenient to live in his studio, or elsewhere.
    Frida did not on the whole care for “gringos,” as we are called in Latin America. If I was exempt from that, it may have been because of our shared love of animals.
    Frida’s garden in Coyoacán had thickets of trees and splashes of flowers and hanging vines, populated by a cherished cast of monkeys, parrots, little Mexican dogs ( escuincles ), and even a small deer.
    Living in the tropics with plenty of room, I too collected animals. I had a large and varied menagerie. She would ask me for news of my boarders as if they were family members.
    Diego had lent the Blue House, rent free, to Leon Trotsky (Diego and Frida were still in the O’Gorman double house at the time) when Trotsky and his wife arrived in Mexico in 1937, very much thanks to Diego having interceded for them with the Mexican president, Lázaro Cárdenas.
    Trotsky at that time was the world’s most unwanted man. As an agitator in the service of worldwide revolution he had no equal. But when Diego was thoroughly roused, there was no limit to his generosity.
    Diego and Trotsky were the best of friends, and when Diego was away, as he often was, Trotsky enjoyed the attentions of the brilliantly costumed Frida.
    Trotsky’s enemies seemed for a time to leave him alone. In fact, he led “a normal life,” and as part of that normal life he went to bed with Frida Kahlo. That came naturally to both of them.
    Frida was never in love with Trotsky, but undoubtedly she saw him as a considerable catch. Once it was over and done with, life went on as before, minus the love letters that Trotsky had slipped into her hand and the assignations in a house nearby.
    The affair had been brief. “I have got sick of the old man,” Frida wrote to a friend.

    But in April 1939, Trotsky broke with Diego Rivera on political grounds. The visitors moved out, just down the street, as it were.
    The new villa was turned into a fortress: windows blocked up and lookout posts overhead. But to no avail. In August 1940 a trusted associate who doubled as an agent for Stalin came into Trotsky’s study, took out an ice pick, and thrust it deep into the back of Trotsky’s skull.
    I visited the house recently. Nothing has been moved. His heavy bulletproof vest still hangs in the closet; the old-fashioned Dictaphone is still on his desk. Trotsky was buried in the garden in which he enjoyed taking little walks, his only diversion.
    When I lived in Mexico in the early 1940s, we became bona fide members of the Rivera-Covarrubias circle. There was Diego’s old friend Roberto Montenegro, who had lived in Europe and spoke nostalgically of Juan Gris and Jean Cocteau. Roberto was an early enthusiast for Mexico’s endlessly varied and inventive folk art.
    Roberto’s contemporary Adolfo Best Maugard, Fito to us, was another pioneer in the reassessment of mexicanidad . He was an elegant dancer; I can still see his narrow brown suede shoes moving through a