María In Between My Eyebrows

by Mitzi Ceballos

You bring out the primordial exquisiteness in me. The nasty obsession in me.

Sandra Cisneros, “You Bring Out the Mexican in Me”

Last night I dreamt of the Aztec star deities called Tzitzimime: I remember now. (Sometimes, when she’s around, I forget my dreams.) There were three Tzitzimime, with eyes on their palms, knees, and ankles. Their feet and hands were clawed. Their skirts were decorated in crossbones. Itzpapalotl, the queen, was the one closest to me, and I had reached for her skull of a face. In my dream my hands came up empty.

I look out to the blue countryside; the late afternoon sun licking at the nopal in my garden. I want to tell María about them, the star deities, but not while Diego is here. María is sitting in the chair next closest to mine, smoking a cigarette and laughing with dark red lips. Her milky skin, her dark hair, the blue smoke curling upward like an arched back. Suddenly she swings her legs so she can rest her ankles on my lap.

“Frida agrees with me” she says. “Don’t you, mi cielo?”

In remembering my dream I could no longer hear the conversation. I hold on to María’s legs so they won’t fall, smile at her as she leans back.

“You will have to persuade me.” I say, tapping a finger against the bottom of her shoe. My ring clacks as it hits the surface.

Diego is the one that answers, having noticed I wasn’t paying attention. “I was saying that of all the portraits of Maria, mine will be the most like. Though its tough work. You are too beautiful, Maria.”

María shrugs. “What do you want me to do? I can’t be ugly.” She offers me her cigarette and winks.

“María thinks the artist that can’t paint her portrait is too stupid.”

“I do agree with that.” I say. “People only paint what they know to be true.”

María sits up so her feet are off my lap. The deer, Granizo, has wandered over, licking my palm. (Where the eye should be.) She takes her cigarette back, her fingers brushing against mine.

“We will see when it’s finished,” she says. The sun dips down and warms my skin.

My Diego has María stand with one high heeled shoe propped up on the chair in front of her. Her hand is on her hip, her white lace dress brushing the floor beneath her. She arches her eyebrow. Diego loves it when she does that. I do, too.

I can’t stay in the room while he paints her, so I head back to my own portrait. “Pain and paint are very similar,” the man from the apartment below mine told me when I was in New York. He thought he was being so clever with his English, crunchy like apples. “One letter off. Maybe one brushstroke off. Do you ever think about the color orange?” he is handing me a marigold for my hair. Was. Did hand me a marigold. Sometimes, when I think about the past, it’s like it’s happening right in front of me. I wish the New Yorker was here so I could tell him that he hasn’t figured me out. He was thinking of my heart. I am thinking of my body, the slow breakdown of my bones. In the back of the house I can hear María and Diego laughing.

I take five painkillers. With tequila. In my peripheral vision, the Tzitzimime are crawling, their eyes squelching on my floorboards. When I turn they are gone. Tell this to no one.

In the evening María comes to see me. She’s changed back into her regular clothes, a cigarette in hand.

“I have to tell you about this dream I had.”

I am about to respond when the pain rises, like a red dress billowing on the clothes line in the breeze. I can’t speak for a few minutes, María takes it as a sign that I don’t want to hear it.

“Diego is a son of a bitch,” she says casually, “When Leo painted me she had me sit, and she’d bring me chocolate in between the hours.” She’s talking about Leonor Fini. The Argentinean. This is the last subject change I wanted. Tell me about your dream, I want to say.

Instead, “You’re telling me that Diego doesn’t treat you right?” I reach out a hand for the cigarette. This time she doesn’t hand it over. She’s standing in front of one of my canvases, tapping her right foot slowly while she takes a drag.

“Sabes, what I love about Leo is her surrealism. She paints me like a goddess. Diego paints me like an ordinary woman.”

I can’t help myself. “Surrealism is bourgeois art.” I reach for the tequila again, in the back of my mind I remember I have something to tell her. “Diego paints you as you are. And you are no ordinary woman.”

María gestures toward the canvas. “I like the orange,” she says, though the color is really saffron. Sometimes, her indifference kills me. And then, because María cannot let anything go, “Who told you that surrealism belongs to the bourgeois?”

“Nobody told me. I know it by looking at it. They’re all false intellects.”

I don’t think she likes it when I insult her precious Leo. María points to another canvas, a self-portrait with Diego on my forehead, my hair around my neck like a noose. “You’re saying this isn’t surreal?”

“What I paint is real.”

She looks at the self-portrait a little sadly, the smoke from her cigarette curling too close. “I’m not real to you, then…I’m going home now. But come talk to me tomorrow. The painting’s almost done, and it’s boring to just stand there.”

That was why I hoped. That was why I thought that this time, it might be different. María with her dreams of alligators, diamonds, her own mother. She used to whisper to me, so Diego couldn’t hear. Diego who thought he was in on the joke. Since before the paint touched the canvas, this was what I had told Granizo when we sat in the garden together. “This time there will be nothing. This time it’s mine, too.” One painkiller after the other. I could see it in my head: María Félix, self-proclaimed bitch: one high heeled shoe on the chair, her hand at her hip, snake-like, telling Diego to go fuck himself. I’ve seen her in the films, sinking into Jorge Negrete’s arms while the mariachi music swelled. The kiss was always deep, her knuckles white from pressure. Where Negrete is tall, my Diego is short. “He is plain and small and ugly,” I tell Granizo. Granizo takes a marigold in between his teeth. I am lying, of course; Diego is deep green and the rush of a waterfall where others are thick charcoal lines. My little luna. María and Diego both tug at my rib cage like the tide, completely indifferent to the fact that it’s been unraveling. The red dress billows on the clothes line all the time now.

Today I am going to tell María about the Tzitzimime. They offered to push my wheelchair for me, but I said I’d do it myself. My arms are straining as I make my way down the hall to the back room. The painting is almost finished; María said she’s not coming in to pose anymore. Today is the last chance.

Sometimes, I am deeply glad for this Judas of a body. It’s slower. The pain ebbs and flows in my tissues, like seawater, and it magnifies everything else. The smell of sweat hits first. Then, when I get a little closer to the door, I hear it. Maria, who had loved Luis Miguel the bullfighter, the French writer with the last name that starts with a C, Jorge Negrete, all these men…now having sex with this son of a bitch Diego. Diego who faintly resembles a disoriented pig. The wheels feel rubbery underneath my palms. When I push to turn around and go, the effort causes a spark in my spine. I have to stop for a minute. Where did I leave the painkillers? Suddenly I remember that I won’t be able to stand; how do you slap a person across the face if you can’t stand? I see the color of my own house. The blue is blinding. Tequila heals all wounds. I push until I get back to my own studio, I slam the door shut and I like it when the sound echoes. If I could I’d tear the room apart. Instead, my atoms tremble and shift, my wrist shakes when I pour the paint. Jesus fucking Christ.

***

I have decided to say nothing. If anybody asks I am going to laugh and say, “What’s one more?” I chuckle to myself when I paint María on the forehead of my self- portrait. Nobody is going to understand. I mess up twice; accidently get the eyebrow wrong, then the nose, I have to start over.

Diego comes in without knocking. I don’t want him to see. I move to cover the canvas but I am too slow nowadays. Diego gestures to my forehead.

“That crazy bitch Maria! I don’t know why I bothered to do her portrait in the first place, ¡maldita sea!”

It takes me a minute to realize he is the one talking, not me. I never know anymore. “It’s because you wanted to sleep with her.” I say. “Isn’t that the way you work?”

Diego carries on as if though he didn’t hear me. “She’s not giving it back! I told everyone the portrait was going to première at the retrospective of my life’s work y esta puta won’t give it to me!” He moves towards my own portrait then stops. “She says she hates it. She says its muy malo.”

María never told me she hated the painting. Did she ever tell me anything? I struggle to remember. There is a pain tapping in the back of my eyes that makes it hard to concentrate. I lean forward in my seat. No, she never told me anything. Frida, eres tan estupida… She’s barely spoken to me since she first came to pose. I haven’t even seen the goddamned portrait.

“Was she good, at least?”

Diego does not look happy. “Friducha…”

“Too bad.” I move to take my brush, then remember the shaking. I don’t want him to see, so I pick up my tequila instead. “But maybe it was just you.” I wonder what else I can say to get him to leave. I want to see this painting for myself, but everybody seems to think I can’t move around on my own anymore. “I want you gone before I’m finished with this,” I warn.

“Why don’t you ask her to let me borrow it?”

I swear to Jesu Cristo the Tzitzimime are reaching for my ankles. What do I do? What will even happen if I tell her about the deities; will she laugh in my face and tell me I need to stop mixing the medicine with alcohol?

“I’ll ask. But I’m going by myself.” I decide, only because I want to get the eyebrow in my portrait right. And because I want to see Diego’s painting. If I’m going to be sitting here with my rib cage unraveling obsessing over it I may as well have something to picture.

“You don’t have to go right now, Friducha.” Diego says when he sees me struggling, but I want everything finished.

“When I die,” I say to him before I leave, “I want you to burn my body.” Diego does not respond.

The girl that pushes the wheelchair to Maria’s front door looks nervous. I think she overheard the comment about me dying. How funny. I see the Tzitzimime all the time but she’s the one that’s scared. When María opens the door the girl gasps. I almost do, too, but the bones in my chest protest a bit.

“Well?” María says, stepping aside to let me in. She’s wearing a dark blue silk robe that brushes the floor. Her nightdress is white silk. Her eyebrow arches.

“I want to see the painting,” I say, then gesture to the girl, “Wait for me here.”

“Did Diego send you?” María asks, walking down the long crisp hall, barefoot, while the wheels follow. At my house you can always hear the parrot, or the two monkeys. This place is underwater quiet.

“I’m not going to tell you what he asked, so I guess it doesn’t matter,” I say. There’s a box of matches on hallway table. I take them, thinking that maybe I can light a cigarette for her, if that is how the rest of my life pans out.

María opens the parlor door, and there I see it. The portrait is huge. Diego has painted her sitting with a golden sandaled foot resting on a box next to her. There’s some sort of letter at her feet. Her dress is white lace, and you can see her milky skin beneath. The darker skin of her nipples. A snake bracelet curled around her wrist. Her eyes are ochre brown.

“I hate it.” María says quietly. Her arms are crossed over her chest, her bare foot tapping lightly on the wooden floor. She looks like she’s about to say more, but doesn’t.

“I don’t know what you were expecting.” I say, drawing a little closer to the painting. “It was Diego painting you, not me.”

“How would you have painted me?” she asks, reaching into her robe pockets and sighing when her hands come up empty.

“Not like this… ” I turn away from the painting and to the real Maria. María with her dark hair. Her eyes the color of blood after it’s dried on your skirt, the bus pole having broken bone and gone through skin.

“I would have given you a little doe to cradle…more than two eyes…”

María Félix, self-proclaimed bitch, does not look impressed.

“I would have painted you like an Aztec goddess disguising herself in court. Like a beautiful woman, with Tzitzimime at her feet.”

“Why Tzitzimime, precisely? Because they eat men during the eclipse?” María asks. She has found her cigarette case but nothing to light them with. She looks around the room.

“Because I see them all the time now. Todo el tiempo.”

María looks back at me, letting her hands drop to her sides. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“Ayi esta uno sitting underneath the portrait now.”

María comes to me slowly, like she think I’m hiding a knife underneath my rebozo. I’ve put a hand on the side of my rib cage because it hurts and I think it’s going to fall. María folds herself, kneeling slowly by the wheelchair.

“Frida… ” She reaches into her robe pockets again. She’s moving slowly, too. So this is how it ends. I hand her the box of matches. I gesture to the painting.

“Can María Félix burn herself?”

It takes twice the effort to leave the room. The house girl is waiting in the living room, staring at the Leonor Fini portrait. I am about to say something when I see Itzpapalotl, with her butterfly wings and many eyes.

“My mother used to tell me that a kiss could heal wounds. Ven aqui.” I take her skeleton face in my hands, this time she’s here. When we kiss, I can hear the rest of the Tzitzimime look away. Tell this to no one.

***

Disclaimer: While this work utilizes real people as characters, it is a work of fiction.