The Shape of a Pocket

has the impression that she was holding the nails between her teeth and taking them one by one to tap in with a hammer. Such is the acute sense of touch which makes her painting unique.
    And so we come to her paradox. How is it that a painter so concentrated on her own image is never narcissistic? People have tried to explain this by quoting Van Gogh or Rembrandt, who both painted numerous self-portraits. But the comparison is facile and false.
    It is necessary to return to pain and the perspective in which Frida placed it, whenever it allowed her a little respite. The capacity to feel pain is, her art laments, the first condition of being sentient. The sensitivity of her own mutilated body made her aware of the skin of everything alive – trees, fruit, water, birds and – naturally – other women and men. And so, in painting her own image, as if on her skin, she speaks of the whole sentient world.
    Critics say that Francis Bacon’s work was concerned with pain. In his art, however, pain is being watched through a screen, like soiled linen being watched through the round window of a washing machine. Frida Kahlo’s work is the opposite of Francis Bacon’s. There is no screen; she is close-up, proceeding with her delicate fingers, stitch by stitch, making not a dress, but closing a wound. Her art talks to pain, mouth pressed to the skin of pain, and it talks about sentience and its desire and its cruelty and its intimate nicknames.
    One finds a comparable intimacy with pain in the poetry of the great living Argentinian poet, Juan Gelman.
    that woman begs for alms in a twilight of pots and pans
that she’s washing furiously / with blood / with oblivion / to ignite her is like putting a gardel record on the phonograph /
streets of fire fall from her unbreakable
barrio /

and a man and a woman walking tied
to the apron of pain we put on to wash /
like my mother washing the floors every day /
and the day would have a little pearl at its feet. *

    Much of Gelman’s poetry has been written in exile during the 1970s and 1980s, and much of it is about the
compañeros –
including his son and daughter-in-law whom the Junta made
disappear.
It is a poetry in which the martyred come back to share the pain of those bereaving them. Its time is outside time, in a place where pains meet and dance and those suffering grief make their assignations with their losses. Future and past are excluded there as absurd; there is only the present, only the immense modesty of the present which claims everything ever, except lies.
    Often the lines of Gelman’s poems are punctuated by strokes, which somewhat resemble the beat of the tango – the music of Buenos Aires, his city. But the strokes are also silences which refuse entry to any lie. (They are the visible antithesis to censorship which is invariably imposed in order to defend a system of lies.) They are a reminder of what pain discovers and even pain cannot say.
    did you hear me / heart? / we’re taking
defeat someplace else /
we’re taking this animal elsewhere
our dead / somewhere else /
    let them make no noise / quiet as they can be / not
even the silence of their bones should be heard /
their bones, little blue-eyed animals /
who sit like good children at table /
    who touch pain without meaning to /
saving not a word about their bullet wounds /
with a little gold star and a moon in their mouths /
appearing in the mouths of those they loved *

    This poetry helps us see something else about Kahlo’s paintings, something that separates them distinctly from Rivera’s, or any of her Mexican contemporaries. Rivera placed his figures in a space which he had mastered and which belonged to the future; he placed them there like monuments: they were painted for the future. And the future (although not the one he imagined) has come and gone and the figures have been left behind alone. In Kahlo’s paintings there was no future, only an immensely modest present which claimed everything and to which the things painted momentarily return whilst we look, things which were already memories before they were painted, memories of the skin.
    So we return to the simple act of Frida putting pigment on the smooth surfaces she chose to paint on. Lying in bed or cramped in her chair, a minute brush in her hand, which had a ring on every finger, she remembered what she had touched, what was there when the pain wasn’t. She painted, for example, the feel of polished wood on a parquet floor, the