Casa Azul, Mercado de Coyoacán , the Building across the Street

| Frida Kahlo, photo by C. Enns |

After school we took Metro line 3 to Coyoacán. If you know anything about Frida Kahlo or Diego Rivera, you probably know why. Coyoacán is home to Casa Azul, the couple’s residence, now a Frida Kahlo museum. The place, painted cobalt blue, takes up an entire city corner lot. It’s full of Kahlo’s work—her early childhood drawings, her learning phase paintings, her more developed paintings. 

We wandered the halls, reading about her life, her polio, her horrible accident that broke her body to pieces. We studied the back braces she wore to keep her fractured spine from collapsing in on itself, stood next to the day bed in which she painted, with a mirror fixed on the canopy so she could paint self portraits (her death mask is now resting on the bed cover, wrapped around with a scarf), stood next to the night bed with the butterflies above to fly with her in her dreams. We wandered the stone and leaf garden with lilies and a duck pond and indigenous stone figures, saw photos of Kahlo with Leon Trotsky, her guest, saw a self portrait of Kahlo with hammer and sickle on her chest.

“Revolution,” she said, “is the harmony of form and color and everything is, and moves, under a single law: life.”

She was not scared, or if she was scared, she pushed through it, through the despair and depression—too much pain endured, too much of life fleeting by, to worry about what others might think. She lived boldly in her bright Tehuana dresses, red, green, yellow, orange, blue. Street kids would call out, “Where’s the circus?!” She just smiled at them and kept living, kept expressing to the world that a bold spirit, despite a broken body, was still a majestic flower.

Mercado de Coyoacán

| Mercado de Coyoacán, photo by C. Enns |

After Kahlo’s house, we wandered the Mercado de Coyoacán—colorful, primary, bustling—through the tiny one-lane aisles to shop for colorful Mexican knick knacks like lacquered wooden animals, hybrids, and monsters, Dia de los Muertos skeletons hanging in bunches from wires above our heads, cheap black-light shirts and baskets and bags, silk flowers, miniature toy-house muebles and comestibles that could fit on a fingertip.

We taxied back to the metro, then crowded into the vagón. More people crammed in the closer we got to the city center. Hip to hip in the hot car with terrible ventilation, we all seem mind our own business, as if we are not in each other’s personal space, glancing around at each other's shirts. A sixty-something gentleman next to me tries to read La Prensa while standing in this clutch. I think he was hoping for a nice seat on the train but wasn’t so lucky. I read the headline over his shoulder, printed in red, “Que Horror!” I read a little more: a woman was found dead behind, or was it underneath, a stone wall, I can’t quite make out the details. We are too crammed for him to open the paper further, so he gives up and puts it under his arm.

Finally, the door opens, and we flow out, up the stairs and into the much-needed fresh air. 

The Building across the Street

A ten-storey Bauhaus-inspired apartment building across the calle, the kind with floor to ceiling glass and casement windows, is almost entirely abandoned, except for the ninth floor hold-out. My theory:  the pre-1976 buildings like this have either been condemned, or people don’t want to risk living and working in them anymore because of the earthquake risk. Some of them even have broken out windows that have never been repaired.

But this one guy is holding on. His shades are always drawn in the living half of his flat. I’ve only seen him once, moving around for ten seconds or so in the unshaded half that he doesn’t seem to use.

One day a  crew of movers carried in an assortment of office furniture to the seventh floor, up the glassed-in steps, and stacked it up. One of workers was dancing with his back to the window-wall, shaking his big guy mover hips.

Two days later, in the evening, the movers came back and took everything back down the steps and away. Someone had a change of heart. Now the place is completely barren again, like the skeleton of some picked-over carrion—well, save for the one guy on the ninth, the one bite left on the bones.