\n
\n\t\t\t\u201cLife will break you,\u201d Louise Erdrich wrote in her exquisite insistence that \u201cyou are here to risk your heart.\u201d The price we pay for the risk is the great equalizer of humanity. In heartbreak, everyone is shorn of dignity, everyone follows the same pattern of self-prostration: the willful blindness to the first signs of being left, so obvious to any impartial observer; the pitiful petitions for the return of love; the bargaining for a different ending; the desperate denial of the end, until the end. And yet it is there, in the pit of helplessness and humiliation, that we may discover the greater dignity that comes from shedding the shiny exoskeleton of pride \u2014 the dignity of opening the heart fully and offering it completely, even as it is being flayed by the cool blade of indifference, broken on the blunt edge of an unrequited passion for the possible. (Though, of course, a heart is never broken.)
\nIt is this kind of dignity, the kind found beyond despair, that emanates from Frida Kahlo\u2019s letters to the lover who took her most famous photograph \u2014 the Hungarian refugee Mikl\u00f3s Mandl, who became Nickolas Muray upon landing at Ellis Island in the final year of the First World War with an English vocabulary of four dozen words and the unassailable determination to be an artist. He would go on to become a pilot, a pioneer of color photography, and a fencing champion, photographing some of the twentieth century\u2019s greatest luminaries and competing twice for the U.S. Olympic team.
\nNick and Frida. (Catalina Island Museum)
\nShe was in her early twenties when she met him while traveling through the United States with Diego in the first years of their tumultuous open marriage. Frida and Nick remained epistolary friends, but as he spent more and more time in Mexico throughout the 1930s, they became lovers.
\nAlthough the love letter was her first great art, Frida\u2019s letters to Nick are the most playful and most passionate of all her letters, and also the tenderest. She signed them X\u00f3chitl \u2014 \u201cflower\u201d in the indigenous N\u00e1huatl language \u2014 and it was at the peak of their love that she began painting her electrically erotic Flower of Life.
\nFrida Kahlo: Flower of Life, 1938-1943
\nIn a fierce and winking letter penned from Paris, where she had just been introduced to Andr\u00e9 Breton and his coterie (\u201cyou have no idea what kind of bitches these people are\u201d) trying to get her paintings exhibited, she writes to Nick in the last winter of peace before the war, addressing him as \u201ckid\u201d despite his being twenty-five years her senior:
\nListen kid, do you touch every day the fire \u2018whatchamacallit\u2019 which hangs on the corridor of our staircase? Don\u2019t forget to do it every day. Don\u2019t forget either to sleep on your tiny little cushion, because I love it. Don\u2019t kiss anybody else while reading the signs and names on the streets. Don\u2019t take anybody else for a ride to our Central Park. It belongs only to Nick and X\u00f3chitl. Don\u2019t kiss anybody on the couch of your office. Only Blanche Heys [Nick\u2019s friend] can give you a massage on your neck. You can only kiss as much as you want, Mam. Don\u2019t make love with anybody, if you can help it. Only if you find a real F.W. but don\u2019t love her.
\nHe did.
\nBy the end of spring, Nick was engaged to the other woman. Frida had just returned to Mexico when she received the news. Shattered, she wrote to him, first thanking him \u201ca million times\u201d for sending what would become her most iconic photograph, encoded with the bittersweet memory of a morning in the spring of their love, then pouring out her devastation without pride or pretense:
\nWhen I received your letter, few days ago, I didn\u2019t know what to do. I must tell you that I couldn\u2019t help weeping. I felt that something was in my throat, just as if I had swallowed the whole world. I don\u2019t know yet if I was sad, jealous or angry, but the sensation I felt was in first place of a great despair. I have read your letter many times, too many, I think, and now I realize things that I couldn\u2019t see at first. Now, I understand everything perfectly clearly, and the only thing I want, is to tell you with my best words, that you deserve in life the best, the very best, because you are one of the few people in this lousy world who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts\u2026 No matter what happens to us in life, you will always be, for myself, the same Nick I met one morning in New York in 18th E. 48th St.
\nAnd then she adds a list of requests for how to honor her broken heart, touchingly human and almost childlike in its underlying wish for an undo button:
\nI want to ask from you a great favour, please, send by mail the little cushion, I don\u2019t want anybody else to have it. I promise to make another one for you, but I want that one you have now on the couch downstairs, near the window\u2026 Take down the photo of myself which was on the fireplace, and put it in Mam\u2019s room in the shop, I\u2019m sure she still likes me as much as she did before. Besides, it is not so nice for the other lady to see my portrait in your house. I wish I could tell you many many things but I think it is no use to bother you. I hope you will understand without words all my wishes.
\n[\u2026]
\nAbout my letters to you, if they are on the way, just give them to Mam and she will mail them back to me. I don\u2019t want to be a trouble in your life in any case. Please forgive me for acting just like an old-fashioned sweetheart asking you to give me back my letters, it is ridiculous on my part, but I do it for you, not for me, because I imagine that you don\u2019t have any interest in having those papers with you.
\nAs she was writing this very letter, she was interrupted by a phone call from a mutual friend informing her that Nick had just gotten married. Frida acknowledges this plainly and adds:
\nI have nothing to say about what I felt. I hope you will be happy, very happy\u2026 Thanks for the magnificent photo, again and again. Thanks for your last letter, and for all the treasures you gave me.
\nLove,
\nFrida
\nFrida Kahlo by Nickolas Muray (Brooklyn Museum)
\nBy that autumn, Nick was already having troubles in his new marriage as Frida\u2019s relationship with Diego was deteriorating. In October, shortly after the divorce process began as Diego pummeled her with \u201cthe worst things you can imagine and the dirtiest insults,\u201d she wrote to Nick:
\nI have no words to tell you how much I have been suffering\u2026 I feel so rotten and lonely that it seems to me that nobody in the world has suffer the way I do, but of course it will be different, I hope, in a few months.
\nStill addressing him as \u201cdarling\u201d and \u201cbaby,\u201d she adds:
\nThanks Nickolasito for all your kindness, for the dreams about me, for your sweet thoughts, for everything. Please forgive me for not writing as soon as I received your letters, but let me tell you kid, that this time has been the worst in my whole life and I am surprised that one can live thru it\u2026 Don\u2019t forget me and be a good boy.
\nI love you,
\nFrida
\nHe never did forget her. She never stopped wishing the world for him, which may be the deepest measure of love \u2014 continuing to desire the other\u2019s greatest happiness, their best possible life, even if it excludes you. It is a fallacy, a dangerous myth, that this wish should be dispassionate \u2014 letting go can be as passionate as love itself, as much an act of devotion, for only a rigor of feeling can ensure not the termination but the transmutation of a relationship.
\nFrida and Nick remained lifelong friends, on tender terms until the end. <\/p>\n