Two weekends ago, I went to Mexico City where I met Brenda Lopotro, another Fulbright Exchange teacher.

On Thursday night, after a six-hour bus trip, I arrived at the bus terminal and took a taxi to the Hotel Calinda Geneva located in the Zona Rosa, an area close to Mexico City's historic center. It’s also the gay district and offers tourist a lot of shopping and restaurants.

On Friday, Brenda took me to see some of Diego Rivera’s murals. We got our big disappointment of the day out of the way quickly: we’d gone to the SEP (Secretaría de Educación Pública) building to see the three floors (!) of Rivera’s murals displayed on the walls there, but we were turned away by guards who said the building was closed and wouldn’t be open to visitors again on Monday—alas, we’d be gone from Mexico City by then. Brenda told me that the last time she’d tried to see the murals several months ago, guards had told her the same thing.

But onward and upward. Next, we headed for the Palacio Nacional, an historical building where Hernán Cortez once lived and where Mexican presidents have an office, at least nominally, for formal occasions. It’s also the building where the president gives the grito (in remembrance of Miguel Hidalgo’s grito, or battle cry in 1810) on September 15, on the eve of Mexico’s Day of Independence from Spain. September 15 is actually the day its war for independence began in 1810. It wasn’t achieved until 1821.

One of Rivera’s murals in the National Palace spans the three walls that rise above the double staircase leading up to the second floor. Brenda and I stood on the second floor landing to view this epic depiction of Mexico’s history and Rivera’s vision of a socialist state in which, finally, Mexico’s poor and indigenous people would rise to the level of their deserving. To read more about this mural, click on these links:

Right wall
Center wall
Left wall

The mural—and all the other murals covering the walls on the second floor of the palace—deserved much more time and study than we gave them. Brenda had seen these murals before, and she helped me see certain details that I probably wouldn’t have noticed or understood without her help. And she herself noticed new details that she hadn’t discovered before. The paintings are so rich in history and symbolism that, I think, if I could take in everything they contain, I’d understand Mexico’s history and culture in great depth.

Next we went to the Museo Mural Diego Rivera, which houses “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park,” one of his most well-known murals. In fact, the museum was built to display this one mural. It covers one whole wall, and in front of it, at viewing distance, a line of armchairs and two comfortable couches invites people to sit and study it. Brenda, again thegood guide, helped me identify some of the people in the mural, and I had fun trying to figure out the identities of others on my own. Rivera wasn’t a bit subtle in his depictions of the good and the bad guys. Still, I know I missed a lot by not knowing more about Mexican history and culture.

I was intrigued by Rivera’s death mask and a sculpture of his hand—actually, I think it was a mold—displayed at this museum, too. The face and the hand showed that he was a smaller man in the flesh than I had imagined him to be. Perhaps I was misled into thinking he was a big man by the photos of him with Frida Kahlo, who must have been petite, judging from her tiny torso brace that I saw the next day hanging in her museum, the Casa Azul. Certainly Rivera was big around the waist and big in artistic stature, but if the mask and sculpture are to be believed, he wasn’t big-boned.

Behind the sofas and chairs were two maps of the mural—one in Spanish, one in English—with all the outlined figures numbered to help viewers identify them and learn a little about them and their relevance in the scheme of the mural.

After we left, we did some shopping in nearby stores featuring the work of Mexican artisans—Brenda bought a beautiful top and a turquoise bracelet, shown here—and then we headed to the Museo Dolores Olmedo Museum. Dolores Olmedo was a wealthy woman who was also a friend of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (as well as his model and probably his lover at some point; Rivera was a notorious womanizer). Olmedo shared Kahlo and Rivera’s political views, and when she died, she gave her lovely home and fabulous art collection to the Mexican people.

The grounds around the house are beautiful—large expanses of green grass, flowers, trees, sculptures of Juan Soriano, and peacocks ambling around. Mexican hairless dogs are also kept there, the same breed whose image appears in all of Diego Rivera’s murals. This breed dates back to the time of the Aztecs.

Although visitors are allowed to take photos of the museum grounds, unfortunately photos aren't permitted to be taken inside.

The rooms of the house are divvied up between those devoted to Kahlo’s art and those devoted to Rivera’s. Interspersed among the paintings in each room are prehispanic sculptures and religious artifacts as well as religious icons of Spanish origin.

I was especially interested in a painting—Diego Rivera’s last—of watermelons after Brenda told me that Frida Kahlo’s last painting was of the same subject—watermelons—on which she inscribed the words Viva la Vida ("Long live life"). The fact that Kahlo was in pain much of her life, to me, gives those words a triumphant and defiant ring. And did Rivera make a conscious choice to echo her last creative act? Surely he did, joining her in affirming life--and also affirming her--by using the same symbol.
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Brenda had to leave Mexico City the next day early in order to make her flight back to the U.S. at 7:00am. I woke long enough to see her off, and then I went back to bed. When I woke later at the civilized hour of 9:00, I dressed and went to the Starbucks on the corner to get coffee and a sandwich for breakfast. Then I walked two blocks to the nearby subway station (Insurgentes) to get to Coyoacán, an artist community/suburb of Mexico City where Frida Kahlo grew up and died, and where Trotsky and his wife Natalie lived for several years—and where he was assassinated.

It wasn’t easy to get to the Casa Azul, the house (and now museum) where Frida Kahlo was born and died. From the guidebook I was using, I knew I’d have to take a pesero (a bus) from the Metro station to a bus stop on a major street, and from there I’d have to walk or take a taxi.

So when I emerged from the Metro, I asked directions of several people, none of whom knew the street I was looking for. Then I asked a woman who told me to board a certain pesero across the street from where we were standing. I crossed the street and waited for that particular bus—and another helpful woman asked the driver of a bus that she thought was the right one if his bus was the one I needed, and he said it was. (This same woman told me a Mexican dicho that I don’t want to forget: “Preguntando, se llega a Roma.” ["By asking questions, one arrives in Rome.”])

So I boarded—only to find out a couple miles down the road that the bus driver had thought I was looking for the Coyoacán Metro station, not the suburb. So I got off the bus and backtracked partly by foot and partly by Metro to my original stop, where I started over again. I reflected on the dicho my helper had told me not long before--Preguntando, se llega a Roma—and I decided that the saying was still true, but I realized one might have to travel through Singapore first.

This time I asked a zapatero (I’m not sure this is the correct word in Spanish), a shoe-shine guy located outside the Metro stop, and he told me where to find the correct street corner to find the correct pesero. Whew! Soon I was walking along Calle Tres Cruces heading toward Casa Azul.

Along the way, I ran into a used bookstore, Librería Tres Calles, which looks more like a book warehouse than a bookstore. I felt like I’d stumbled into heaven. I found a large section of books in English on the second floor, where I chose a few books for my friend and fellow English teacher Luís Méndez, who has been so generous about lending me books in English from his personal library over the past year. (I typically read the newspaper and books in Spanish in the afternoon, but before I go to sleep at night, I like to read in English.)

Then I forced myself to leave the bookstore—I could have spent hours there—and pressed on to the Casa Azul. And it was worth wrenching myself away from the books.

Fast forward: This weekend, I watched the movie Frida that another English teacher here, Josefina, lent me, and I was delighted to see in the first and last scenes of the movie the same Casa Azul I saw last weekend. In the movie, I saw scenes that included the Mexican hairless dogs, the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon at Teotihuacán, Frida’s bed with a mirror overhead that allowed her to paint some of her self-portraits, and a cast and back brace that she wore at different times in her life.

One of the most startling and poignant sights in the Casa Azul, for me, was Kahlo's tiny bedroom whose windows and the door on one wall look out onto the patio in the center of the museum that was once her home. I could imagine that she needed to be able to look out and see sunlight, trees, and flowers from that tiny room where her many operations imprisoned her. Now, on her single bed, there rests a black death mask of her face, surrounded by a rebozo that gives the illusion of covering her hair and neck. If you click on the photo here, you can see a larger although blurry image. Next to the pillow, you can see the death head, and at the foot of the bed is a plaster torso cast Frida once wore.

I also saw her last painting, the watermelon-Viva-La-Vida painting in one of the rooms of the house that serves as a gallery. Because it isn't permitted to take photos inside the house, I took the photos of Frida's bedroom and the watermelon painting from outside.

When I left the Casa Azul after spending about two hours there, I walked the six blocks or so to the house where Trotsky and his wife lived after they fell out with Diego and Frida—but not before, it’s said, that she and Trotsky had an affair.

Trotsky’s house intrigued and touched me even more than Kahlo’s. The museum made it clear that Trotsky was very much in danger from Stalin—and the movie Frida provides a scene in which Trotsky tells Frida that four of their—his and Natalie’s—children were hunted down and killed after he fled Russia. Two attempts on his life were made in Mexico, one unsuccessful—that left gouges in the bedroom walls, visible still, where he and his wife escaped death by ducking into a corner next to the window where Mexican artists/Stalinists attempted to shoot him. The second attempt successfully ended his life. He was killed by an axe for cutting ice that was plunged into his skull by a Stalin supporter who gained entry and acceptance in the house by wooing one of Trotsky’s secretaries.

I saw Trotsky’s study and his library, and I saw the papers on his desk that were there on the day he was killed. (He was writing a book on the life of Stalin that he never finished.) I saw the cot in that room where he rested when his headaches became acute—he suffered from high blood pressure. I saw the dictation machine he used to dictate his book to his secretaries, and I saw the rabbit hutches that held the rabbits he cared for himself and some of the cacti he gathered from the nearby Mexican hills to decorate the garden of his home. And I saw the hammer-and-sickle symbol that crowns the concrete monument marking his and his wife’s grave in the garden of their Mexican home. Unfortunately, I ran out of space on my camera's memory card right before I entered the house, so I wasn't able to photograph any of it. The photo here shows the Trotskys' house with the garden in the foreground and the monument marking their graves.

It was almost 6pm when I left to return to the hotel by Metro.

A note: taking the subway in Mexico City is an adventure in itself. It is easy to navigate and cheap—2 pesos, or 20 cents US—to get around in this huge city of 20 million (or more) people.

Unfortunately, some of these people take advantage of the captive audience. On almost every stop, a new vendor will board the car and try to sell pirated CDs or DVDs by playing them on portable players, with the volume turned up LOUD, strapped on his/her person. Beggars and the disabled also use the Metro to ask for limosnas (charity). I enjoyed and gladly paid to hear a blind guitarist sing and hear his impassioned song as he moved slowly and unsteadily through the car.

Then there are those who bring theatre or, more correctly, the carnival to the Metro. Brenda had already told me about these guys, thank goodness, so I wasn’t quite so shocked as I would have been otherwise. Here’s what I witnessed twice: a young man, shirtless, entered the car while carrying his shirt like a sack. His back was scarred, and this is why: He lay his shirt in front of the doors of the subway car revealing the broken glass of beer bottles. All the while he was talking like an announcer or a barker. Then he moved away from the broken glass and—with a quick turn—made a gentle somersault, landing on his back in the broken glass.

The crunch of it made me flinch the first time.

But with hardly a pause, the young man rose and enfolded the glass in his shirt again. And then he walked throughout the car with his hand extended, asking for money. And although his back had red marks on it, there was no blood, probably because of all the scar tissue he'd built up over his career.

I didn’t give the young man anything either time because I didn’t want to encourage him to continue to make his living thus.
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I left Mexico City on Sunday afternoon, taking the bus back to Xalapa. It took only five hours to return (six hours to arrive), and it was good to get back home as usual. But I would love to return to Mexico City one more time before I return to Albuquerque on July 31.