MARK POLIZZOTTI
407
Whatever regret the Bretons might have felt over their daughter,
however, seems to have been outshone by their experience in Mexico -
both the splendor that awaited them on arrival and the mishaps that ac–
companied them. On April 18, the couple arrived in what Breton
dubbed "the Surrealist place par excellence," to be welcomed by a lone,
bemused functionary from the French Embassy. Despite the official invi–
tation, it soon became clear that the embassy had made no provisions for
lodgings. Furious, with only a few francs and return passage in his
pocket, Breton was ready to take the
Orinoco
back to France then and
there, but at that moment, the Mexican painter and muralist Diego
Rivera, also in Veracruz to meet the Bretons, stepped up and offered
them the use of his own home for the duration of their stay. He also
carried a message from his friend and mentor Leon Trotsky, inviting
Breton to visit in several days' time.
At the age of fifty-one, Rivera was the most famous Mexican artist
of his generation, a national legend whose paintings and murals earned
him a comfortable living at home and numerous commissions abroad
(not all of them successful: five years earlier in New York, a celebrated
controversy had erupted when Nelson Rockefeller, who had hired
Rivera to decorate the RCA Building, destroyed the work because
Rivera had included a likeness of Lenin) .
It
was Rivera who had per–
suaded Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas to welcome Trotsky after his
expulsion from France. And it was he who now lodged the exiled revo–
lutionary - along with his wife, Natalia, their grandson, and numerous
bodyguards and secretaries - in the so-called Blue House in the Mexico
City suburb of Coyoadn, which was owned by Rivera's wife, Frida
Kahlo.
Grateful for the rescue, Breton and Jacqueline moved into the upper
floor of the Riveras' home in the fashionable suburb of San Angel.
Jacqueline later described it as "one of the most modern houses of the
time: two white cubes half made of glass, linked by an outside stairway
without a banister and a passageway at the top .. . An Indian woman,
the caretaker, prepared the family meals in the garden over a wood fire;
quite visible beneath the trees, and in complete freedom, ran a giant
anteater" - Breton's totem animal. Breton, delighted with the accom–
modations, excitedly wrote Peret: "Everything is marvelous, life with
Diego and Frieda Rivera
[sic]
is as fascinating as can be."
Breton took an immediate liking to the stout, jovial muralist, and
even more of one to Frida Kahlo . He was impressed upon discovering
Kahlo's violent, allegorical paintings, which combined a Mexican
iconography with Bosch-like overtones - seeing them, Breton immedi-
