PGB: Frida y Diego; Lexy and Jimmy; Frida y Yo
Life inadvertently intimidating in famous art
I was extremely nervous for the first real read through and critique of the most critical chapters of PGB from a group of editors who are helping me to push the proposal. A recent heartbreaking experience inspired me to rewrite the end for Jimmy and Alexia and the results took my breath away. Before presenting it to the team I let my best friend read it, the first time I’ve ever let anyone read my fiction writing. I was relieved they all seemed to love it nearly as much as I do, but in considering the whole story of the book’s central love story, it was suggested I study the relationship of one of Mexico’s most famous couples in history: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. One suggested my portrayal of Jimmy almost reads like a modern day version of Rivera, a notorious womanizer who loved Kahlo deeply, but was never capable of fidelity and never pretended to be. The comparison was shocking and almost painful when then applied (in my mind) to the real-life influences, but as I began to study, and then fall madly in love, with the real-life romance story, I realized that what my editors read as an overly machismo and heartless portrayal of Jimmy, is possibly more so a subconscious act of defensive against my own similarities to Kahlo and her side of the story. After watching the Selma Hayek lead film for the first time, later Saturday afternoon I was ecstatic to find a copy of The Diary Of Frida Kahlo and read it cover to cover in one sitting. I cried nearly all the way through it, reading and relating to her feelings of helplessness in her deep love for the infamous mujeriego.
Are Diego and Jimmy one and the same? Yes and no. In PGB, Jimmy represents the Mexicano machismo stereotype to bid. He is an exaggeration whereas his counterpart Alex is the more realistic Mexi-American charmer. Both have a heart and both mean well, but Jimmy is struggling with something more than just inherent charm. The overly outward characteristics of his personality are a direct reflection of insecurities that have nothing to do with being Latino. Diego Rivera in theory could have be constituting for the same thing. Rivera was not known has the most attractive of men in a culture where looks are prevalent and important. In the movie, his second wife Lupe says that while you couldn’t tell by looking at him, he has been with half the women in the room. She tells Frida, their attraction to him is the way he looks at you, the way he makes you feel important. While Jimmy’s insecurities are not as physical, his charm is similar.Jimmy, like Lexy, comes from humble beginning as shapes himself into a person of note and substance. He has a standard “game” that will work on most women on the room, but his tactics with Lexy, who has known him since childhood, are different. Her resistance to his charm and his love of a challenge catapults them both into an unexpected obsession that ultimately leaves Lexy both heartbroken and angered with herself.
Like Frida, Lexy finds herself enamored with a man with whom she knows she shouldn’t be. Her sane mind tells her there is no reason to care for this man and no reason not to move on. But there is something that tortures her heart when it comes to Jimmy, more so than any of the other men who would seem a much more likely fit. Like Frida, Lexy’s tragic love affects her day life and her tortures her for a longer period of time than her friends think it should. In the diary of Frida, the painstaken artist describes feelings of physically sensing her sanity leaving her. There are numerous nonsensical ramblings addressing Rivera. Tracing the actual (Spanish) hand-writing of Frida Kahlo in her darkest hour and reading the thoughts running through her head as she wrestles with her one-sided love for Rivera is heartbreaking and torturous for an artist who can relate to every word. For the past few days since, my heart has felt as heavy as it did in the moment I asked my own “Diego” to leave me be once and for all. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my lifetime. Years after the fact, I am shocked my heart can still hurt so bad.
Jimmy, as he is written in PGB, isn’t any one personal experience in my life, but rather a combination of experiences of mine and my friends, primarily with Mexcian and Latin men. (Keep in mind, I have lived in four of the five most Hispanic-centric metropolises in the country: Phoenix, Miami, Los Angeles and Las Vegas.) But like any heroine, I of course have one central love interest that has been a grand inspiration through it, mostly in a painful way. Yes, he is a gorgeous, charming, Hispanic man who I adore. He was the person who inspired me to pick up PGB and write again. He found the version of my I love most. He encouraged me in everything I did. And when the time came, while he never really wronged me, he hurt me worse than anyone ever could, by doing hardly anything at all. It’s not something I’ve talked about much since here, or in my personal life [insert sigh and rolling of eyes of my three closest friends here] but perhaps that plays in part too why years after the fact, it still hurts me every single day.
I wish I had the appreciation I have today for Frida Kahlo one year ago when I saw her exhibit at Las Bellas Artes in Mexico City. I even bought a journal covered in her art and wrote a few chapters of the book in it, but I had no idea just how much I actually have in common with the tortured artist who on the surface, I have nothing in common with at all. What we have in common: A vulnerable heart, passion for love, ability to love openly, unconditionally and forgive a need for growth. And of course, a determine for our individual arts.
After reading through The Diary of Frida Kahlo, I, like the commentators who narrate it, and the writers who have reviewed it, could say a lot about her. Passionate, creative genius, tortured, love sick. But insane will never be one of them. Frida, I get it. I. Get. It.
I’m no poet, and I haven’t decided yet if or how this might be incorporated into PGB, but the feelings the weekend’s studies have brought up inspired me nonetheless to write my own “letter”of sorts for my own Jimmy-Diego. Even if it will likely never see the light of his mailbox inbox, it is one of the most honest and painful things I have ever written outloud.
The years, they’ve passed. Time has come and gone. Again, and again, and again.
They said with time, this too, shall pass. Yours, it seems has grown less and less. Yet, mine, has only grown deeper, stronger.
Laying here, thinking of you. I feel myself paralyzed with pain. My sanity I feel, completely slipping away from me.
There is no turning back now. I struggle to find reason to breach ahead.
Time has refused to heal this wound.
How can Mother Nature be so cruel as to make the heart a one-way street? To allow one to love, so hard, so unjustly, unconditionally and for nothing in return. Only to be left with nothing more than tears and the hope that one day the pain shall at least, subside.
There is no longer hope for restitution for this love. Only that one day, the heartbreak will die.
One day.
With hope.
One can only hope.
