The Bike Ride to the Blue House.
From Roma to Coyoacán: Finding Frida in Physical Space.
This adventure starts with a time crunch, and Tati is not a fan of time crunches. She’s a double Virgo. She likes control, for everything to fit nicely into its place. She does not like to be rushed. So, my suggestion that we just “try our luck and go with the flow” does little to calm down all 5 feet and 2 inches of condensed nuclear Latina rage sitting in front of me. We didn’t know that the museum closed so soon, and if we had, then maybe we wouldn’t have lazily finished our work that morning before taking a long lunch. Now, as she frantically tries to make one of our cards work on the website before the museum closes, she is damn near pulling her hair out.
I realize that my boyish optimism is annoying her more than it’s helping. So, I walk down our spiral staircase from our rooftop loft and smoke a cigarette in the courtyard. Better to give Tati all the time she needs, I decide. It would be better to stick to our original plan: a bike ride from Roma to Coyoacán than it would be to frantically call an uber and still miss it.
Tati collects herself, get’s ready, and meets me down in the courtyard. She looks great. I mean, really fucking gorgeous. Part of the reason I travel so much is to gratify this James Bond Fantasy I have, so having a literal Bond girl with me on these adventures just tickles me inside. But the fun doesn’t last for long, because it’s my turn to have a little meltdown of my own.
I can’t get the fucking bike rental machine to work and in the back of my mind, I hear a ticking clock. Even though I was pretending to be Mr. Cool back there at the apartment the voice in the back of my head keeps saying “One hour before the museum closes! You’ll have come all this way and STILL you’ll have missed it!”
Tati takes my card and handles the evil bike rental robot while I do everything but ball up in the fetal position at her feet. Luckily, it’s more or less a straight line from here to Coyoacán. If we ride fast and don’t stop, then we might be able to slide right into the closing gates and see the house after all.
I am super strong and buff, so I can bike much faster than Tati and her tiny, gorgeous Colombian legs could ever hope to do. She makes me promise that I’ll stay with her and not ride away into the glorious sunset. But that go-with-the-flow mindset I had a few minutes ago has flown completely out the window. Now, with that ticking clock in the back of my mind, I feel like a puppy whose tail is pounding hard against the floor. I want to ride fast and pee on everything I see, but I reluctantly agree to keep her pace seeing as she could be kidnapped or hit by a bus or something while I’m not looking. And so, we begin our journey.
Mexico City is a true metropolis. A concrete jungle and an actual jungle crammed into the same space where only one of them should fit. We can feel the life force of both jungles bursting towards us from every bustling street corner we ride by as the clocks tick against us. We see the long rows of street vendors and taco stands that wind with the calles, or outside of the parks or business plazas. Directly to our right is a bazaar of assorted goods. Everything from clothing to jewelry to pornography to the bootlegged DVD of Disney’s new Mulan movie can be found there.
A young boy comes up to us to show off the slingshots he’s selling while we we’re stopped at a traffic light. At the next light, we see a man juggling bowling pins he has set on fire. At the next one, two young men are standing in the intersection. One is holding a sign saying “Ayúdanos a pagar para continuar nuestra escuela!” and the other one is on the floor, using his elbow to prop his back up in the air by only his shoulder blades as he juggles the ball on his tippy toes.
When the light turns green the boy hops up on cue and pulls out a hat that was in his pocket, and both boys go from car to car holding out their hats and collecting propinas. Tati has to chime her bike bell at me a few times to get me moving again, but I can’t stop staring in amazement.
By some stroke of miracle, we make it to the house just minutes before the museum closes, but the closest bike dock is a quarter-hour walk away. Before Tati even has d a minute to freak out I look back at her and say “Hey! We’re just going to go to the house and see what happens before we get too excited.”
At the gate, we meet Bartosz, the security guard. He looks like the Mexican version of robocop but is an absolute sweetheart. I try to explain our situation and thank the universe for all the time and headaches I’d invested into learning Spanish leading up to this exact moment. Of course, having a beautiful Colombian Bond girl by your side can only help when you’re asking for favors from a man with riot gear and a machine gun in his hands, but without the Spanish, none of it would have been possible.
“Leave the bikes right there,” he said in Spanish, “they’ll be safe until you get out of the museum. And yes, the museum closed a few minutes ago but I will talk to the ticket lady, and she will sell you a ticket.”
I have a moment of doubt, I think about what so many people have told me about the Mexican police and how I shouldn’t trust them. But I had just blown my thighs out peddling as fast as Tati would let me across Mexico city to make it to my favorite painter's house in time, so I decide to risk it. The museum guide boy and the ticket lady assuring us over and over again that the bikes will be there when we return help to ease my doubts a little, too.
Bartosz is a true gentleman and escorts us through the huge doorway of the exterior wall. It’s the same doorway that armed guards would sit atop with shotguns almost a century earlier, protecting the communist refugee Leon Trotsky. This house did its job to keep him safe, and it was only after he left it that he was beaten to death by an ice pick sent from Russia with love. Bartosz chats us up as he walks us into the huge courtyard filled with trees and fountains and giant papier-mache dolls of devils and skeletons and spirits. After a while, while we’re waiting in line, I ask him where he got a name like Barstosz and he tells me that it’s Polish.
I look at the tallest Mexican man in existence, with his dark brown skin and squishy cheeks, and ask him: “… are you Polish?”
“No.”
“Do you speak Polish?”
“Que no.”
“Then why did your parents give a Polish name, polaco?”
“No tengo ni puta idea, güey.”
The rooms of the house are all uniform, square, and symmetrical. How they built most houses back then. It reminds me of my Nina Susie’s old house of Adobe in Tucson, Arizona. One long tunnel of stone taking you deeper and deeper in time. What really strikes me is the kitchen because, after the few bedrooms that had been completely emptied out to make room for all the paintings, the cave opens up into a huge grove of a room that drops much deeper into the ground. I can see the giant fireplace and the giant stove, with its chimney built into the wall of the mosaic-covered kitchen walls. Two names spelled out on either side in huge red letters: Diego y Frida.
What really surprises me is how much she read, and it’s great to see so many books on her shelves. Strange, illustrated encyclopedias. Novels in English that she probably picked up while she was living in the U.S., or Gringolandia, as she called it. Books of poems. Children’s books. Books on art and socialism.
By the time we get to the bedroom, I can only feel claustrophobic. So many affairs, so much pain and heartbreak, and I can feel it all, looking into the walls that feel darker as if lit by a lantern in a cave. I can feel all of that energy still eeping out of the stone. The affairs, including Diego's tryst with Frida’s sister, and Fida’s late-night proletariate pulsings with Trotsky, are still difficult for me to think about. Not because infidelity is uncommon among the giants of history, but because Frida has never felt like a giant of history to me. No matter how many murals, and stickers, and movies they make about her. Despite having the demon of creativity itself living inside of her womb, this woman still seems like she was just here yesterday, and that makes the heartbreak in her life that much harder for me to stomach. But I guess that’s a lesson that she spoke to: pain teaches you that you can withstand a lot more than you think you can.
After walking through the courtyard and her collection of custom dresses and hand-painted body casts, we exit the giant cobalt blue gate to find the bikes happily sitting exactly where we left them. Bartosz drops his machine gun, letting it hang loose on its harness, and gives us two huge thumbs up like a soccer mom at the sidelines on gameday.
Across the street from the house, we buy a coconut from a coco-cart and Tati gets to try her first bite of chamoy. The coco-man hacks at the coconut with his giant machete until he can drain all the liquid and pulpy chunks of its contents into plastic bags for us. He puts two straws in the coco water bag and slathers the coconut guts with the sweet, blood-red Mexican sauce in the other. After that, he sprinkles the coconut with tajin and squeezes a fresh lime over it to top it off. Tati says she likes the chamoy, and that makes me happy. The Coco Man says he thought we were from Mexico city until we said otherwise, and that makes me even happier.
We walk from the coco-cart to the center of Coyoacán, where the bustling continues. The old buildings of the original square are still standing and I can easily imagine away all the modern clothing and picture what this place would have looked like in the ’20s when Frida might have taken a walk from her house down to the market to buy a coconut or the traditionally fried grasshoppers called Chapulines.
After swimming through the crowds of people buying churros or toys or clothing, we’re able to find a bar called Mezcalito and decide to stay for dinner. I had worn myself out physically on the bike and emotionally in the house but Tati tells me not to worry, to sit back and that she would order everything.
She finds a special that comes with three extra shots of mezcal from different regions of Mexico and a taco platter for each of us. Those shots, plus the one she had ordered us the minute we got there to start, plus the beer, had me feeling quite energetic again before even the guacamole arrived.
Tati dips a chip deep into the guacamole and when she bites into it, she closes her eyes and lets all the stress of the day melt away. She takes bite after bite, telling me to dig in and that it’s delicious. She tells me that they must have mixed fried chili peppers into this guacamole because it’s extra crunchy. But I can tell without having to look too hard that the delicious guacamole is stuffed with chapulines and I can’t help but laughing inside because I know she’s going to hate this. I hold her hand, smile, and say:
“Mi amor…”
“…Yeah?”
“…Those aren’t chili peppers…”
She doesn’t even have to look down to realize what I’m saying. She gives me a panicked look and screams for just a second before pulling herself back together. I smile at her, dip a chip in, and take a bite. “It’s just as delicious as it was before,” I say.
“I know, I know okay!? I know it’s 100% a mental thing but I’m not doing it. I’m not eating anymore bugs.”
Grinning, I pull the bowl to my side of the table, happy that I’ve just won an entire serving of guacamole for myself.
“If you insist,” I say, and I bite into guacamole, feeling the seasoned exoskeleton of the grasshoppers crunch beneath my teeth. It’s delicious.
