Shades of Mexico

The blue of this place is, without doubt, the original blue. The primordial blue, the blue goo that always was and ever shall be. This blue emits a soft, sensual sigh and raises an eyebrow (an illicit blue of back alley transactions and lifted skirts.) This is the blue that takes your blues away.

This is not, as they say, your mama’s blue.

The walls of Frida Kahlo’s home are painted an effervescent, rich shade of sapphire that exists nowhere else on Earth. I know this not from extensive research of house painting trends, but because my heart tells me so. Even in her own neighborhood of Coyoacán, now a bustling borough in Mexico City, folks attempted to copy her hue. Strolling through the streets became a grown-up version of “I Spy.” Anything attempting that vivid color resulted in a quick sideways glance and the open-ended, “Is that it?” But it wasn’t. Until it so very clearly was.

There is no questioning, or comparing, with the former home of Frida. Stepping across the threshold of this now-museum transported me into the backdrop of so many of her paintings. If Burt, the hapless chimney sweep from Mary Poppins could create a world with his chalk, then Frida most certainly created one with her art… and I was standing in it. Blazing orange butterflies flitted around me. Dripping green leaves and winding, wiry vines covered the inner walls of her home. Palm trees popped up from corners. It smelled like life.

Frida Kahlo grew up in this place, one of six children to a German photographer and Mexican housewife. Her short life included the tumult of the Mexican Revolution, polio, two marriages to the same man, and quite the affair with the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky. Only a few short blocks away, curious visitors can step inside the room where he was assassinated, everything still in place, just as it was on that day.

But none of that can be felt there, within her haven of blue. In the Museo Frida Kahlo, the kitchen remains a joyful yellow. The walls are adorned with pre-Colombian art, placed by Frida herself. Tip-toeing upstairs, one can find her bed. A mirror is placed in the canopy, inspiration for her autoretratos. She so often painted herself, she said, because she was the subject she knew best.

I had hoped to see her that day. She’d be sitting in her wheelchair, smoking a cigarette and painting something to get lost in. That’s how I see her, inside her walls of blue.