Excerpt: The Will of Venus: Éster’s studio

From The Will of Venus:

Livia did not question her impulse as she dialed Éster’s number late on the night she had asked Rubén to leave. She had taken two shots of brandy after her shift; she was operating on instinct. Éster was sympathetic; she invited Livia to her studio.

“Sí, es un hijo de puta. I could have told you that a long time ago, but people never want to hear that mierda while they’re still trying. Bueno, ya está… You’ve never seen my paintings, have you? I’ll get a bottle of wine; you can sleep here if you like. Maybe you don’t want to sleep there all alone tonight. Ya veremos.”

Éster was from the Dominican Republic. She was tiny, petite, with long black hair and a face like a Murillo Madonna. While Éster was opening a bottle of red wine, Livia observed a strange tattoo on the flesh of her new friend’s left arm, just below the shoulder. Livia asked her about it.

“It’s a double-edged axe,” Éster said. “It represents my saint, Santa Bárbara.”

Livia innocently inquired if Éster had been born on the day of Saint Bárbara.

Éster laughed a laugh surprisingly big for her tiny body and took a drag off of her cigarette. “No, no, no. I chose her. You know… For, bueno, cosas de santería.”

Livia looked around the studio. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed the candles and herbs, the medallions with faces full of eternal suffering and infinite love, before. She was usually much more observant. The break-up with Rubén must be affecting her more than she would like it to. Éster’s studio was dark, except for the tenuous light of flames from the candles placed at random around the trapezoidal space. There were solemn icons on the walls, interspersed with the somber colors and haunted faces of Éster’s paintings. “They’re all self-portraits, de una manera u otra,” Éster explained. “They’re kind of about my father, too. He was schizophrenic, but my mother didn’t want to put him in an institution.”

Éster’s mother had sacrificed the best years of her life to care for her husband who, often enough to have made a deep impression on her daughter, raved madly and had to be tied down. When Éster’s mother had managed to calm him (whispering words that Éster never completely heard), she placed him in a rocking chair, una silla mecedora. He stayed there for hours, moving the chair so slightly with his exhausted legs that Éster sometimes thought she had imagined those minute backward and forward motions. Then, and only then, would she dare to climb into his lap. Sometimes his sick hands held her weakly; sometimes there was no response at all.

Éster showed Livia a photograph of her father, taken the year before his marriage to her mother. The photograph was yellowed, a corner torn. The torn edge was feather-soft; you could see the individual fibers of the paper, silky like threads of gossamer. Éster’s father, in the photograph, was a young man of no more than twenty-five, with jet-black hair, longish. The face was slightly elongated as well, with pale, ivory skin like Éster’s.

“My father was Spanish,” Éster told Livia. “Well, he was the son of immigrants. My grandparents were from Madrid.”

Those grandparents had eventually returned to the narrow streets and late nights of their homeland, exhausted by the tropical heat and lethargy of the strange and beautiful island where Éster was born. But Éster’s father had stayed, and three years later he met Éster’s mother. Éster’s brother was born, and then Éster; five years after Éster’s birth, her father became ill.

Someone, Éster’s mother told her after his death, when she was old enough to possess such information, had put a spell on him; that was the explanation for his illness. Well, not just someone—a lover he had left after she got pregnant. When Éster’s father abandoned her, she put the spell on him. His spurned lover, in her vengeance, had painstakingly collected the dark hairs scattered on her pillow, among the bedclothes. She found one lying in an exaggerated S curve on her belly—that one had been the most detrimental to the father of her unborn child. Éster couldn’t remember him otherwise. Her brother, three years her senior, barely could.

The paintings were about Éster, about her father’s illness, about the foibles of men (not women, men), about the devastating effects of the other magic, not santería, but voodoo. There was an altar-like structure at the back of the studio with three candles, green, pink and white, all lit. There was an incense burner beside the candles, and a smell unlike any incense Livia had ever smelled. Of course. Santería.