The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna is my latest infatuation. It satisfied my desire to get to know Frida intimately... and to know if she and Trotsky really did oof. The book is in the comprised of diary entries, newspaper clippings and letters by writer Harrison Shephard, once plaster-mixer and cook for Diego and secretary to Trotsky, whose celebrated career was ruined by his supposed un-American activity.

Favorite lines:

"'Dumb kid, your are a writer. Cesar tried to get you fired for always writing in your notebooks, and Diego tried to make you stop, too. It killed me to see him try. Now these men want to make you an efficient secretary. But you keep writing about soft hearts and scandal. The question is, why do ou think you can't be a writer?'

'To be a writer, you need readers.'

'I'm no painter, then. Who ever looks at my dumb little pieces of shit?'"

-----
"It was a true conversation. About whether our ancestors had more important lives than we do. And how they've managed to trick us, if they did not. Frida felt it helped them not to put anything in writing. The people at Teotihuacan had no written language, according to Dr. Gamio. 'So we can't read their diaries,' she pointed out, 'or the angry letters they sent their unfaithful lovers. They died without telling us their complaints.'

She is right about that. No regrets or petty jealousies. Only stone gods and magnificent buildings. We only get to see their perfect architecture, not their imperfect lives. But it's a strange point to argue for an artist whose paintings are rants and confessions. Without regrest and jealousies, she would have blank canvas.

'You'd better burn all your paintings then, Frida. If you want people in the future to think you were heroic.'

She fingered her beads and knit her eyebrows. Raised her glass up to the light and rolled the red liquid around, studying it. 'I think an artist has to tell the truth,' she said finally. 'You have to use the craft very well and have a lot of discipline for it, but mostly to be a good artist you have to know something that's true. These kids who come to Diego wanting to learn, I'll tell you. They can paint a perfect tree, a perfect face, whatever you ask. But they don't know enough about life to fill a thimble. And that's what has to go in the painting. Otherwise, why look at it?'

'How does an artist learn enough about life to fill a thimble?'

'Soli, I'm going to tell you. He needs to rub his soul against life. Go work in a copper mine for a few months, or a shirt factory. Eat some terrible greasy tacos, just for the experience. Have sex with some Mexican boys.'"

----
(about the atomic bomb)
"For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a cloud, the world was lost.
You blood for mine. If not these, then those. War is the supreme mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing we have pressed the most monstrous quantities into a balanced equation."

-----
"Two words put together, curtain and iron, have worked alchemy on a kettle of tepid minds and anxious hearts. The power of words is awful, Frida. Sometimes I want to bury my typewriter in a box of quilts. The radio makes everything worse, because of the knack for amplifying dull sounds. Any two words spoken in haste might become law of the land. But you never know which two. You see why I won't talk to the newsmen.

Frida

The movie, like the artist, is vivid, raw, poetic. My favorite verses: Frida's love letter to Diego and the speech Diego gave at Frida's opening show in Mexico.

On a postcard to Diego:
Dear Diego,
How are you, panzon?
Why didn' you tell me Paris was such a nightmare?
The French are the most pretentious bores in the world
I'd rather sit on the floor of a market in Toluca
selling tortillas than have to listen to the prattling
of the artistic bitches of Paris.
There really hasn't been as much interest
in the exhibition as Breton promised.
Mexican artists are nothing but an exotic curiosity here.
All in all, it's been lonely
and I crave news from home.
Diego, this letter's a lie.
Paris has been good to me,
but without you, it means nothing.
All the rage of our 12 years together passes through me,
and I'm left knowing that I love you more than my own skin.
And though you may not love me as much,
you do love me a little,
don't you?
If this is not true,
I'll always be hopeful that it could be.
I adore you.
Frida.


Diego at her exhibition:
There was this skinny kid with these eyebrows shouting up at me, "Diego, I want to show you my paintings!" But of course, she made me come down to look . I did, and I've never stopped looking. But I want to speak about Frida not as her husband, but as an artist. I admire her.

Her work is acid and tender
hard as steel
and fine as a butterfly's wing
loveable as a smile
cruel as the bitterness of life.
I don't believe that ever before
has a woman put such agonized
poetry on canvas.


For the moment, these are holding my eyes captive, and wouldn't doubt that they will arrest my dreams tonight as well: