Fridas Cook – Florencia Etcheves

Nothing. A tiny bit and nothing at all. Just a short list, shreds of a life that Nayeli recited by heart, as though it were someone else’s. Someone else she barely knew. I knew what I had to do. I squeezed the tube even tighter and went down the stairs. I didn’t look back. I should have.

OceanofPDF.com San Francisco, September 1940 The room in St. Luke’s Hospital was small. Everything was white: the walls, the sheets, the linoleum floor, the ceiling. “Nayeli, I think you’ll have to bring me my paints and pencils. It’s terrible being surrounded by all this white,” complained Frida from her bed. “Everything about it is begging for a bit of color.

They’ve left me wrapped in this cloud; it feels like a provocation.” She had refused to wear the hospital gown, which was also white. With imploring gestures, Frida had persuaded the nurses to let her wear a simple Tehuana dress. That small, broken body, dressed in blue and purple, was the only sign of life in the room.

Nayeli soothed her and promised to talk to Diego to arrange some drawing materials. The doctor, a short man with dark, coarse hair, entered without knocking. One hand clutched a pile of papers and the other held a violin, polished to a shine. Frida’s face lit up. As she struggled to sit up against the pillows, she exclaimed: “How wonderful!

My friendly quack has come to visit! Look, my Tehuanita. This is Dr. Eloesser, the man who’s going to make me as good as new.” The doctor walked up to Nayeli, who regarded him with interest. Dr. Eloesser had the most charming smile she had seen since she set foot in the United States, a country she didn’t understand very well. The doctor solemnly held out his hand and told her he was entirely at her disposal.

“Play us a song, quack, something nice to celebrate this gathering,” said Frida. “It’s the only way we can celebrate. Those sourpuss nurses took my flask of tequila.”

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You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. OceanofPDF.com OceanofPDF.com Preface This book was born from a proposal from the editors at my Mexican publisher, Planeta México, who wanted me to write a novel with Frida Kahlo as a main character. As an Argentinian journalist who built her author career writing detective novels, this seemed like a wild proposal.

As a fiction writer you can make up characters and stretch reality; that all changes when you insert real figures, especially ones as interesting and iconic as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Ultimately, I decided that writing about a distant time and a faraway country is a journey into the unknown. But if the traveling companions are Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and the destination is Mexico, the challenge turns into an adventure.

OceanofPDF.com FIRST PART OceanofPDF.com 1 Buenos Aires, August 2018 My grandmother was an expert on other people’s deaths. Mexicans have an intimate, almost carnal relationship with the art of dying, and that made her something of an authority on the subject. As though hoping to offend it or drive it away, she gave death mocking nicknames that turned it into a skeletal, hairless old crone: La Huesuda, La Parca, La Chingada, La Pelona.

But no amount of defiance could hold off the inevitable. “The party’s going on without me, mi niña,” she murmured as I rested my hand on hers. The powerful torrent of her voice had weakened to barely a trickle. “La Huesuda is close by; I’ve seen her. Can’t you smell her?” On the nightstand, a glass jar with water and slices of orange and ginger filled the room with the smell of citrus, an aroma that took me back to childhood afternoons, those hours sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table following her precise instructions: cut limes and grapefruits into nice thin slices, combine rosemary, bay, thyme, and mint in piles no bigger than my palm, and crush vanilla pods and cinnamon sticks in the stone mortar until you have a powder like fine sand.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 3168e10e844abc28
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 5,599,856 bytes (5.34 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 364
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 552.63 minutes
• Total Words: 110,526
• Total Characters: 619,315
• Average Words per Page: 303.64
• Average Characters per Page: 1701.41

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