This story is part of a collection, tentatively called “Ghost Whisperer: Stories from a Nordic Witch Stranded in the South.” They were mainly written during my first year in the Appalachian Mountains, having moved from Sweden, living at the end of a road, with no green card to allow me to work and my husband, Michael, working at the Monroe Institute. Being a stranger in a strange land those days, ghosts started to talk to me. And so did the ghost of Frida Kahlo. The patron of creativity.
The ghost of Frida Kahlo was my absolute favorite. As far as ghosts go. Most ghosts I had met showed up with a certain gloom, carrying regret, fear and pain as dirty veils hanging around their sloping shoulders. But Frida always showed up with colors, flowers and passion, being an ultimate manifestation of the celebration of life. Viva la Vida she painted on the flesh of watermelons while she herself was also still in flesh. And she stands true to her words, even beyond physical life.
This day she had a monkey on her shoulder, monkey tail wrapped around her neck as a furry necklace. She wore a wide white blouse, three strands of semiprecious stones against the ruffles, and several layers of orange-colored skirts. When she sat down on the porch chair beside me, she leaned back and stretched out her legs, revealing a pair of dark red boots with patchwork of dragons. In a delicate crystal cut glass in her hand sparkled tequila. I drank rum in a not-so-delicate ceramic cup.
I was pretty sure I had figured it out. The famous people, the legends, and the icons. They are shining stars constantly infused by the dreams woven around them. This is why I could talk to Frida. Not because she singled me out, but because she is singled out. Like the demi-goddess she is, she probably sat around the world in thousands of versions at that point, talking to disenfranchised art students and grandmothers of the revolutions the same. Every graffiti painting depicting Frida, every feud about the smallest scrap of an original photo of her, radiates energy right into her multicolored soul.
I was fascinated by the concept, but it also made me feel rather small. The shivering everyday existence of me who wanted to be so brave and reckless, but in reality, was a ball of cotton waste, a bundle of anxious thoughts slithering around the smallest challenges.
“Don’t you think I was afraid?” said Frida.
Wiping drops of tequila from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand she looked at me we a hint of a smile,
“After all, why shouldn’t I have been afraid?”
The monkey had fallen asleep, arms wrapped around Frida’s neck, face pressed against her chin. Frida was thoughtful and still now, despite monkey fur in her face.
“I was afraid that my children wouldn’t live,” she said. “They didn’t. I was afraid of being betrayed by the people I loved the most. I was. I was afraid I would devastate women the way that women had devastated me. I did. And more afraid of anything that I would not be able to dance. As you know, I ended up in a wheelchair. There is really no meaning for me to go on, is there?”
“No,” I answered quietly, sipping my rum in tiny, cautious sips.
I once saw an exhibition with Frida’s art in Stockholm, together with one of my older sisters. Coming in from the serene green half island where it was situated, the pumping heart connecting the two versions of Frida in her incomparable double self-portrait hit us with two different bricks in our heads.
“I think they are a bit uncomfortable,” said my sister.
“Do you?” I asked, adding thoughtfully, “I really don’t’”
I tried to convey a cool detachment that I didn’t possess. I did not even convince myself.
“I did all my paintings in-between trying out what life had to offer,” said Frida on the porch. “I am not as proud of my paintings, as I am off my life.”
Her life. Her legendary life.
“It wasn’t so much the parties, or the politics, or even the lovers – though I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on them.”
She lifts her chin ever so slightly.
“Was it love then?” I asked.
That made her smile, a broad shiny smile.
Of course, it was the love!” she exclaimed. “But not so much the love I received, though I received plenty, even from the man who tried to break my heart. It wasn’t even the love I felt for him. I was in love with life itself, and the longer I lived the deeper in love I fell.”
“That doesn’t make the fears go away though, does it?” I asked.
“No, it doesn’t. But it surely makes them feel less important.”
The monkey woke up, stared at me when sitting up, and then showed all his sharp teeth in a big yawn.
“And now, now that you are dead?” I asked.
Frida raised an eyebrow, while rubbing the monkey on its pouty stomach.
“Oh honey,” she said. “I just keep falling.”
