“Life will break you,” wrote Louise Erdrich in her beautiful emphasis that “you are here to risk your heart.” The price we pay for danger is a great measure of humanity. In heartache, everyone is humiliated, everyone follows the same path of kneeling: willfully blind to the first signs of abandonment, which are very obvious to any unbiased observer; sad pleas for love to return; negotiating for a different conclusion; a desperate denial of the end, to the end. And yet it is there, in the pit of powerlessness and humiliation, that we find the great dignity that comes from shedding the shiny exoskeleton of pride – the dignity of opening the heart fully and surrendering it completely, as it is peeled by the cool blade of indifference, broken on the dull edge of possible passion. (Although, of course, the heart does not break.)
It is this kind of dignity, the kind found without despair, that appears in Frida Kahlo's letters to the lover who took her most famous photo – the Hungarian refugee Miklós Mandl, who became Nickolas Muray when he arrived at Ellis Island in the last year of the First World War with an English vocabulary of twelve words and determination. He would go on to become an aviator, a pioneer of color photography, and a telegrapher, photographing some of the great lights of the twentieth century and twice competing on the US Olympic team.
She was twenty years old when she met him while traveling in the United States with Diego in the early years of their tumultuous open marriage. Frida and Nick remained pen pals, but as he spent more time in Mexico during the 1930s, they became lovers.
Although the love letter was her first fine art, Frida's letters to Nick are the most playful and romantic of all her writings, and the most tender. He signed them Xóchitl – “flower” in the native Náhuatl language – and it was at the height of their love that he began to draw his passion for electricity Flower of Life.
In a fierce and scathing letter written from Paris, where he had just been introduced to André Breton and his child (“you don't know who these people are”) trying to show his paintings, he writes to Nick about the last winter of peace before the war, addressing him as “child” despite being twenty-five years older:
Listen child, do you touch the 'whatchamacalit' fire that hangs in our stairwell every day? Don't forget to do it every day. Don't forget to sleep on your little pillow, because I love it. Do not kiss another person while reading the signs and words on the streets. Don't take someone else for a ride to our Central Park. Only for Nick and Xóchitl. Don't kiss anyone on your office couch. Only Blanche Heys [Nick’s friend] he can give you a massage on your neck. You can kiss as much as you want, Mom. Don't make love to anyone, if you can't help it. Only if you find a real FW but don't like him.
He did so.
By the end of spring, Nick was engaged to another woman. Frida had just returned to Mexico when she received the news. Heartbroken, she wrote to him, first thanking him “a million times” for sending him the photo that would become her most iconic photo, with a sweet memory of the spring morning of their love, and then she poured out her grief without boasting or pretense:
When I received your letter, a few days ago, I did not know what to do. I have to tell you that I couldn't help but cry. I felt something in my throat, as if I had swallowed the whole world. I don't know yet whether I was sad, jealous or angry, but the feeling I had was in the first place of great despair. I have read your book many, many times, I think, and now I notice things that I could not see at first. Now, I understand everything clearly, and the only thing I want, is to tell you in my best words, that you deserve the best in life, the best, because you are one of the few people in this dirty world who are loyal to them, and that's the only thing that matters… No matter what happens to us in life, you will always be, for me, the same Nick that I met one morning in New York at 18.
Then he adds a list of requests for how to honor his broken heart, touching and almost childish to his basic desire for a undo button:
I want to ask you a big favor, please mail me a small pillow, I don't want anyone else to have it. I promise to make you another one, but I want the one you have now on the sofa on the floor, by the window… Take down my picture that was on the fireplace, put it in Mam's room in the store, I'm sure she still loves me as she did before. Besides, it's not so good for another lady to see my picture in your house. I wish I could tell you many things but I think there is no point in bothering you. I hope you will understand without words all my wishes.
[…]
Regarding my letters that I will write to you if they are on the way, just give them to Ma'am and she will send them to me. I don't want to be a problem in your life no matter what. Please forgive me for doing it to an old lover, please give me back my books, it's bad for me but I'm doing it for you and not for me because I feel like you're not interested in having those papers with you.
As he was writing this very letter, he was interrupted by a call from his friend informing him that Nick had just gotten married. Frida clearly acknowledges this and adds:
I have nothing to say about what I heard. I hope you will be happy, very happy… Thank you for the beautiful picture, again and again. Thank you for your last letter, and for all the treasures you have given me.
love,
Frida
By that fall, Nick was having problems in his new marriage as Frida and Diego's relationship was deteriorating. In October, shortly after the divorce proceedings began as Diego accused her of “the worst things imaginable and dirty insults,” she wrote to Nick:
I have no words to tell you how much I have been suffering… I feel so rotten and lonely that it seems that no one in the world has suffered as much as I do, but it will be different, I hope, in a few months.
He still calls her “dear” and “baby,” she adds:
Thank you Nickolasito for all your kindness, for dreams about me, for your sweet thoughts, for everything. Please forgive me for not writing sooner after receiving your letters, but let me tell you, my child, that this has been the worst time of my entire life and I am amazed that anyone can live with it… Don't forget me and be a good boy.
I love you,
Frida
He did not forget her. He never stopped wishing her the world, which may be the deepest measure of love – to continue to desire the greatest happiness of another, their best possible life, even if it takes it out. It is an illusion, a dangerous myth, that this desire must be dizzy – letting go can be as passionate as love itself, as an act of devotion, because only a strong feeling can ensure not the dissolution but the transformation of the relationship.
Frida and Nick remained lifelong friends, tenderly until the end.
