Translation by Bianca Godina
This story was originally printed in Spanish in Sol del Valle. It’s been translated for our English readers.
“Viva la Vida, Watermelons 1954” was Frida Kahlo’s last oil painting. At the end of her life, Frida moved away from her usual themes and painted more still lifes because her health no longer allowed her to create more detailed works. In 1953, just a year before her death, she had to have her right foot and part of her leg below the knee amputated due to gangrene. From this event came the famous saying, “Pies para que los quiero, si tengo alas para volar meaning “What do I need feet for if I have wings to fly?” Frida is symbolic not just for her talent, nor even for the feminism she now represents, but for her determination to live.
Like many fans, I spent most of my life dreaming of the day I could visit La Casa Azul in Coyoacán. Many warn, “Don’t meet your heroes,” in case they aren’t what they appear to be once you’re face-to-face. Frida, for me, like for many others, was a strong, free-thinking and independent figure who cared little about what others thought of her. She lived her life to the beat of her own drum and savored the disdain of others.
The day I had the opportunity to visit the house that was once her home, now a museum preserving her legacy and history, I thought it would be like entering the hideout of a revolutionary akin to Pancho Villa. I imagined perhaps something colder or more rigid, something that would show the same harsh facade she projected.
Instead, each room had an air of tenderness and vulnerability. I felt as if I were invading something private, as though around every corner she might be there, demanding an explanation for why I was in her house.
Despite being on a tour where you walk in line with an endless flow of people ahead and behind you, I had the impression of being alone. Like when you enter your grandmother’s bedroom without permission and, through her belongings, start discovering her “secret” life. If it was a hideout, it was one that allowed her to take off the mask.
I saw her dolls and thought of the little girl with polio and how hard it must have been not to play like all her sisters; the loneliness that led her to create imaginary friends. I saw her bed, and all I saw were the hours that turned into years bedridden with chronic pain that only worsened over the years. I saw her dresses and thought of everything she wore underneath to hide the mutilated body the tram accident had left her with. I walked through her garden and recalled a video taken of her with Diego Rivera, the great love of her life, and imagined her life if she could have fulfilled her dream of being a mother and having her little ones running around the yard.
Her pain is neither new nor unknown. Some might say she narcissistically shouted it to the wind, painting tragedy after tragedy in an attempt to process her own life.
At the end of my tour, I came upon the framed notebook page, the famous amputated foot surrounded by thorns with the resilient and certainly defiant phrase, “Pies para que los quiero…”
If life has already taken so much from you, what’s one more foot?
Who wouldn’t be filled with rage and bitterness with so many misfortunes?
Nevertheless, despite a lifetime of misfortune, she was still in love with life. The next painting was also her last, “Viva la Vida,” carved into a watermelon — a fleeting and final message of resistance. Frida died on July 13, 1954, at 47 years old, the same year she completed this work. Despite all the pain, her desire to live was greater. Of all her works, this one has become my favorite. Everything comes to an end; Frida concluded her life with the determination and stubbornness to live despite everything, giving thanks to life — her final love letter but in true Frida style, letting us know that in the end, she won.
