Read Some of My Lives for Free Online

hostess.
    Although I had done my best with my limited student’s wardrobe, Frida took a quick look at me and would have none of it. “Come on, kid, I’ll fix you up,” she said.
    Next thing I knew, I had been transformed from an anonymous college girl to a transplant from a Tehuantepec market. Multicolored swaying skirt, embroidered huipil , pre-Columbian necklaces galore, and her masterpiece: my hair became a bright tapestry of flowers and ribbons.
    Frida laughed a great belly laugh of satisfaction at her work (she could laugh like a trombone in rut), tossed down one more little
shot of tequila, and called Diego over to admire me, and off we went to sit in their usual box for the Chávez concert.
    You couldn’t mistake Diego Rivera. He was well over six feet tall. He had been known to weigh more than three hundred pounds. And, as he himself admitted, he had a face like a gargantuan frog.
    Frida, by contrast, stood five feet three and was delicately built. An attack of polio in childhood had left her with a withered right leg, and she was never to recover completely from a horrendous traffic accident in 1925 that had left her more dead than alive. Surgical and other painful treatments went on most of her life.
    But she did not strike me as an object of pity who shrank from being looked at too closely. On the contrary, she drew attention to herself by adopting the spectacular costume of the women of Tehuantepec, of which she had made me a pale reflection—full-length swaying skirts ruffled at the hem and the embroidered overblouse called a huipil . Usually a big shawl went along with it, a rebozo. I still own a deep blue rebozo Frida gave me, and I have worn it onstage at the Met. Sometimes, as can be seen in some of the self-portraits, she added a face-framing extravaganza of ruffles and pleats that was the traditional Tehuana headdress. And she usually wore her hair entwined in a thicket of flowers and ribbons improvised every time. This was often topped off by garlands of heavy pre-Columbian necklaces. She didn’t stint on the rings, either, on both hands.
    She often painted her nails—orange, purple, green, whatever went best with the outfit of the day. Incidentally, Frida had never been to Tehuantepec; she just liked the becoming costume, it played to Diego’s mexicanidad , and it made her the most noticeable kid on the block.
    I was to discover she had a great sense of mischief. No one was more fun to be around. Her vocabulary in both Spanish and English would have made a truck driver blush.
    Rare was the man or woman who was not seduced by her, and seduction was her specialty.
    After such a beginning, how could I not fail to fall in love with Mexico?

Some Animals I Have Known
    A fter my marriage to Lew, my new life in Mexico began.
    As a child, I didn’t have any pets. No dog, no cat. I’m not counting two personable pink-eyed white mice that my Francophile father named Aglavaine and Selysette (these were characters out of a Maeterlinck play, I believe). The pet shop had guaranteed both were male, but one day Aglavaine or Selysette, I’m not sure which, produced sixteen offspring. That strained my schoolroom capacities. I think they were banished. (I had lessons at home tutored by a French governess.)
    My first real pet came into my life in Acapulco in 1938. My young husband and I (we were respectively twenty-one and twenty-three) were staying in a small hotel in the town while our house was being built. This was long before the painful tourist boom that defaced a once-tranquil little port.
    There was a knock on the door. An Indian boy, holding something, said to me, “Buy this, señora, and I will kill it and give you its skin.” It was a baby ocelot. I was horrified and without another thought said, “Don’t kill it. I’ll buy it.”
    So I found myself in a small hotel room with a little snarling, hissing creature. My husband was out at the