The two small finches seemed out of place hopping around on the lawn. Especially with their red crowns and rumps, it seemed almost too scripted. Less than ten meters away from the small concrete monument where Leon Trotsky’s ashes lie, it seemed a bit peculiar that these two red house finches were picking around on the lawn. I recalled a line from Thoreau when he was talking about being a two hundred year old dead tree, “here stands Henry David Thoreau”, and the thought of finches was unavoidably cliché: here hops Leon Trotsky. One stopped to twist its head at me, uncertain of my sitting there lost in thought and alone in Trotsky’s garden.
Beyond the brick wall to the north the roar of capitalist domination was a bit much to ignore, the thousands of cars a minute on the Rio Churubusco. But here were these two inexplicable red finches, not a single other one like them among the dozen or so in the garden. Inexplicable too was the scarlet red bougainvillea in bloom behind the concrete monument adorned with the hammer and sickle and the red flag of the Soviet Union fluttering gently behind it. Here was Trotsky’s last stand, his last home, the chicken cages from which he drew so much peace and pleasure in those last days.
The story told here is one of unrelenting persecution by Stalin. First to Kazakhstan, then Turkey, France, Norway, until finally the Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas agreed to political asylum and his last days. Virtually the entire Trotsky family were eventually killed by Stalin and his cronies. The windows facing Morelos, the street to the east of the Casa Trotsky, were bricked halfway up while the portico to the south no longer existed behind the bricks. These fortifications came after the first attack on Trotsky’s life in May of 1940. Where there once was a door leading to the garden from the Trotsky’s room there is now only a small window and three doors of massive reinforced steel. Lazaro Cardenas ordered the bunker quality steel installed after the first attempt on Trotsky’s life.
The irony of the massive road to the north of Casa Trotsky, with all its constant rushing vehicles is like much of the irony in modern life. Here is this massive figure in the intellectual struggle that defined the twentieth century, and the most emblematic fruits of capitalism rush by in a constant stream and roar. What more could we do to punish the legacy of Trotsky and any lingering hope of a worker’s revolution? Build a McDonald’s next door, complete with a Trotsky slide? A maquila that produces cheap Trotsky t-shirts and boxer shorts? Or maybe just a Hummer dealership?
While Casa Trotsky was fortified like a bunker, Frida Kahlo’s nearby Casa Azul is its diametric opposite. Open, airy, light, the sound of water in the fountain whose bottom is tiled with the images of two frogs. Delicate white orchids and rough volcanic stone set off by a soft coolness of the strikingly blue walls. Amid the massive collection of sketches, books, photographs, and Aztec codex’s her house exudes her aura with both color and contemplativeness. Just as you can stare at the brushes she used, still twisted around together in their glass jars, the small paint jars, the huge mortar and pestle sitting on Diego Rivera’s own desk that sits beside hers. Every window opens to the outside, for a fluidity in the space that does not exist at Casa Trotsky, it is as if she just stepped out.
Are these the twin fates of the revolutionary and the artist? One persecuted until he built his own prison, the other imprisoned inside her painful body? And yet both created legacies that linger on in these two monuments to their lives, in bodies of work that live on. While Trotsky’s image and work have not been fetishized so completely as Frida’s have been, we still have this fetishism of their work and their lives that is so integral to capitalism and its commodification of both people and things. It is the very essence of capitalism that we now sell access to their homes. For a small price we can take home a t-shirt or two and steal a moment to wander through their houses so that we can understand who they were and how they lived.
The Soviet flag flutters delicately in the garden. The monument to Trotsky stands silent while the traffic roars. From the little bench I sit on I can see the trees and the house and the two red finches hopping about looking for bugs in the grass. But in my immediate memory and against the tide of the traffic, having just walked from Casa Azul to Casa Trotsky, all I can hear in my heart is the sound of blue water in a fountain of two frogs.
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