Mexico City — Rising steeply above the narrow sidewalk, the Casa de la Malinche resembles a 16th century fortress, and over the years this hulking edifice has seen its share of invasions and alterations, not all of them friendly. Its oldest sections are believed to date back 500 years. Legend has it that the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes used an earlier version of the house as a retreat while he and his soldiers lay waste to the Aztec empire. In one of its several previous lives, the structure served as a municipal jail. Later, it was a monastery.
At another stage, part of its ground floor was chopped up and converted into a pharmacy. "It had many uses throughout all its history," says Rina Lazo, who has lived in the Casa de la Malinche with her husband and fellow artist Arturo Garcia Bustos for the last four decades.
Even today, the couple say, the old house functions as a kind of impregnable citadel in this noisy, pushy, smog-choked metropolis of 20 million. Strategically situated on the edge of a placid park in the city's historic Coyoacan district, the Casa de la Malinche is a tranquil and civilized buffer against the slings and arrows of outrageous auto traffic, raucous street vendors and the thousands of day-trippers and tourists who troop through the neighborhood on weekends.
The house has a complex symbolic pedigree. Its namesake, La Malinche, was a Nahuatl-speaking Indian woman who became Cortes' translator and also shared the conqueror's bed ("la malinche" is translated as "the captain's woman"). Because she assisted the Spaniards in their defeat and subjugation of Mexico's native peoples, she has long been regarded as a national traitor, a femme fatale foil to the beloved national heroine, the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Today, the limestone, brick and adobe house is not only an oasis for its owners, it's also a bastion of traditional Mexican cultural values, which Lazo and Garcia believe are currently under siege. It's filled from floor to ceiling with art: pre-Columbian sculpture, antique furniture and a stunning array of paintings, drawings and prints, including works by three of Mexican Modernism's founding godparents: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
For Lazo and Garcia, the connection with this legendary artistic patrimony is both palpable and personal. Lazo spent 10 years working as an assistant to Rivera, whose monumental murals helped define the nation's post-revolutionary identity and whose iconic bulk looms over 20th century Mexican art like the volcano Popocatepetl on the city's southeastern fringes.
Garcia was a student and disciple of Kahlo, Rivera's on-again, off-again spouse. In the years since her death in 1954, Kahlo's tragedy-scarred life, colorful fashion ensembles and eccentric, introspective art -- so different from her husband's -- have turned her into an international feminist martyr and posthumous style diva. They've also made her a film star, in the person of actress Salma Hayek, who portrayed Kahlo in the 2002 Miramax release "Frida."
But let's not go there just yet.
Oops -- too late. As Lazo and Garcia guide a visitor through their art-studded salon, a casual mention of the movie about the first couple of Mexican art sets Lazo off on a spirited monologue. "It's sad, because it's a good movie that could have been much better," she says. Yes, Lazo acknowledges, there were lots of alcohol-fired late-night parties in the old days, but not the libidinous bacchanals that the movie would have you believe. Lazo and Garcia ought to know, having been regular guests at Kahlo's former home, the Casa Azul (Blue House), now a museum less than a dozen blocks away in Coyoacan.
The couple also feel that the movie shortchanged Kahlo and Rivera's ardent commitment to leftist political causes. "And lesbianism, there was none of this," Lazo insists, contradicting the conventional wisdom about Kahlo's bisexuality. "This is an absolute invention." Or rather, she says, this image of Kahlo might have been fostered by her mischievous husband, Rivera, who loved dropping social bombshells, even fabricated ones. "Frida was very enamored, but of men, not of women," Lazo says with "case closed" finality.
A sprawling, multilayered matrix that fills up a quarter of a city block, the Casa de la Malinche was conceived on a dramatic scale that fits its current owners. The master bedroom, with its jaguar skin-draped bench and raised platform bed, could be a stage set for a production of "Arabian Nights." The library, packed to the rafters with art books, overlooks a bougainvillea-framed courtyard.
As you reach the landing at the top of the main staircase, you're greeted by a large, professorial-looking owl named Tecolotzin, after an Aztec ruler. "It has an intelligent face, but who knows if this is true," Garcia says playfully, eyeing the beast in its enormous cage. "It has not written 'Don Quixote,' nor anything of that style."
