Installment VII of The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen)! Yes, oh yes, oh, yes-yes-YESSSSS! I know, you’ve been holding your breath since last Saturday morning. But you can let it all out, Bad, Bad Lovers, right this very second, because our little moment of serialized-novella-narrative fun is here! This week, Livia the Bad-Ass Chef gets herself mixed up in some serious santería.
And before you go all like she don’t know what she’s talking about, she’s not From There, let me assure you that I absolutely do know what I am talking about: I had a close friend, Puerto Rican, who was wayyyyy into this stuff and I have seen some things that would make your eyes pop. Many of which found their way into this here little story we are telling… If you’re just recently arrived to the party, welcome, welcome, pour yourself a drink and get comfortable. You can either dive right in with the rest of us or, if you like, go back to the beginning, by clicking right here.
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Wanda (cont.)
When she was thirty-three, Livia had been living with a painter of Chilean nationality. Rubén. Rubén (at least according to Rubén) was a genius. His genius entitled him (again, according to Rubén) to fits of angry silence, disappearances lasting up to three days (Livia was never to invade his privacy by asking him where he had been; artists needed space), and women. Younger women (Rubén had been thirty-nine at the time. Livia had been younger than Rubén but, apparently, not young enough. Young, according to Rubén, meant twenty. Maybe twenty-five). Livia should try to understand, those girls were just for sex, they got him hot and made him want to paint.
Livia had spent hours contemplating the intensely phallic nature of the paintbrush, the insemination-like penetration of paint into the porous surface of the canvas. Trying to understand the rights Rubén had accorded to himself, trying to convince herself that they corresponded to reality and that if she wanted a man, she would just have to get used to a few things. But she was ultimately unsuccessful. Rubén had to go.
The day before her thirty-fourth birthday, Livia calmly and politely asked Rubén to leave. She was going to work. When she returned, she expected to find him, his canvases, his paints, and his genius, gone. Rubén cried. Rubén threw phallic paintbrushes, loaded with thick globs of paint, at a nearly-finished nude (for which Livia had not been the model). Rubén asked why. Because, Livia responded, I am not happy.
“¿Pero por qué, Livia, mi amor, mi vida? ¡No! ¡No me voy!”
Livia’s quiet, steely insistence, however, countered his protests, and Rubén conceded victory to her anger. With disheartening rapidity, Livia had realized as she prepared marinade for perfect cubes of steak an hour later.
But certain positive things had been reaped from her relationship with Rubén. There was her perfect Spanish. When she dropped something at work or, on very rare occasions, cut herself with a knife, she uttered expletives in that language that made the Mexican delivery boys blush.
And there was her friendship with Wanda. Wanda had been Rubén’s girlfriend before Livia met him; they had, for some reason inexplicable to Livia until Wanda revealed to her the secret of her tranquility, remained friends.
~
Livia had not questioned her impulse as she dialed Wanda’s number late on the night she had asked Rubén to leave. She had downed two shots of brandy after her shift; she was operating on instinct. Wanda 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… better for you, believe me. 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…bad vibes, ¿sabes?”.
Wanda was from Puerto Rico. She was tiny, petite, with long black hair and a face like a Murillo madonna. While Wanda opened 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 ax”, Wanda said. “It represents my saint, Santa Bárbara.”
Livia innocently inquired if Wanda had been born on the day of Saint Bárbara. Wanda laughed a laugh surprisingly big for her tiny body and took a drag off her cigarette.
“No, no, no…I chose her. You know…for, bueno, cosas de santería…”
Livia looked around the studio. Candles and herbs, medallions with saintly faces full of eternal suffering and infinite love. Complicated knots tied into twine, hanging from doorknobs, candelabras, and the ceiling. She was usually much more observant. The break-up with Rubén must be affecting her more than she would like it to. Wanda’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 Wanda’s paintings.
“They’re all self-portraits, de una manera u otra“, Wanda explained. “One way or another. They’re kind of about my father, too. He was schizophrenic, but my mother didn’t want to put him in an institution.”
Wanda’s mother had sacrificed the best years of her life to care for her husband who, often enough for it to have made a deep impression on her daughter, raved madly and had to be tied down. When Wanda’s mother had managed to calm him (whispering words that Wanda 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 Wanda 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.
Wanda 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 that made up the paper. Wanda’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 Wanda’s.
“My father was Spanish,” Wanda told Livia. “Well, he was the son of immigrants. My grandparents were from Madrid.”
They 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 Wanda was born. But Wanda’s father had stayed, and three years later he met Wanda’s mother. Wanda’s brother was born, and then Wanda; five years after Wanda’s birth, her father became ill.
Someone, Wanda’s mother told her after his death, when Wanda 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 whom he had left after she got pregnant. When Wanda’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. Wanda couldn’t remember him otherwise; her brother, three years her senior, barely could.
The paintings were about Wanda, 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.
“My mother was into it,” Wanda added. “She was Christian and everything, but down there it’s all the same…catolicismo, santería, everything. One doesn’t preclude the other.”
Why, Livia wanted to know, hadn’t Wanda’s mother tried to find an antidote for the voodoo through santería? Wanda had thought about that, wondered about it, never dared to ask her mother. But she suspected that her mother’s decision not to free her husband from the destructive vice of his spurned lover’s spell was due to the fact that she finally had him, and she wasn’t willing to give him up again.
“If she had freed him from the spell, he would have been right back out there, strutting up and down the streets of the old quarter of San Juan, buying tintos for the washing girls, inviting them to the cine in the late afternoons, wandering home at dawn…while he was sick, she could be sure of his fidelity.”
Livia could think of no suitable response.
The topic of santería had been abandoned for the moment as Wanda and Livia discussed Rubén. He had also cheated on Wanda; he’d left because she had terrified him. Wanda had considered putting a spell on him to render him impotent for a while (despite the possibility that he might, with the proper guidance, undo the spell and turn it back around on her). Once when he was asleep, Wanda had taken the opportunity to approach the vulnerable, prone form softly, stealthily, in order to clip a lock of his hair. Rubén, Samson to Wanda’s petite Delilah, had woken suddenly; he saw his lover’s small, dark form above him, with the glinting scissors held in her tiny hand, the hand outstretched toward his head.
“¡Coño!”
Rubén had run from the studio, taking only his wallet and his paintbrushes (he was afraid she might try to touch his genius through the silky tips). It was after Rubén that Wanda had made the resolution.
What resolution?
“Never to be in love again. To have men around, para el sexo, sabes, but never to give my heart to one of the bastards again. My mother was destroyed by a man. I won’t end up like her. She used to be so beautiful…diós mío, qué belleza…but my father’s illness took all the beauty out of her. And since he died, she hasn’t had the energy for another man.”
“But,” Livia argued, “you can’t just decide that. Every time I lay one of `em more than three or four times, I’m hooked. They can do whatever they like with me…but I’m through with them.” She took a rebellious swig of wine.
“Pero, escucha lo que te digo, you don’t have to do without the sex. Look, it’s easy. My magic–besides santería–is my painting, right? Every time I want to meet a man, I burn sage and rosemary together in an incense burner, and light a red candle. Then I paint. My figures always come out of the paint by themselves; when I paint while the candle is burning, siempre me sale un hombre…always a man. That’s how I know I’ll meet one. And I always do…I know it’s okay if I meet the man within twenty-four hours of the burning. I can bed him, and there’s no danger of my falling in love. Oye, Livia, I can make a formula for you, too, si quieres. I mean, I’m not a santera or anything, but I know my stuff pretty well…”
Livia had thought about Wanda’s offer as she allowed her friend to light a cigarette for her, as she smoked half of it. She didn’t miss the sex yet, but she would, and soon. Then she’d be right back there, letting some loser get in the way of her genius. There were certain, complex sauces that never came out right when she was unhappy with a man. Aunt Pearl had never, to Livia’s knowledge, ruined a dish. Of course. Aunt Pearl had never had a man.
“Okay. Yes. But I don’t want to…you know, to hurt anyone…”
“¡Pero, no, niña!” Wanda laughed. “Santería is white magic, not for hurting people…at least not permanently.”
They both smiled; they were thinking of Rubén’s very narrowly escaped impotence. Temporary, of course.
“Listen, here’s what you do. Your magic is your food, no? Bueno. You need to get a bunch of red candles, a bunch of yellow ones, too. But you can’t just buy them anywhere; they have to come from a botánica. The red calls up passion, the yellow tempers it. You should pick a recipe and stick to it, that’s part of the ritual. Let’s say, a dessert. You light the candles and make the recipe–it’s always better if you do the cooking around midnight–but you leave out the sugar. Instead, you put in un poco of this liquid…”
Wanda produced a small bottle from beneath the altar, where the pungent substance still smoldered. Livia started backward.
“Don’t be afraid of it, it’s magia blanca. I told you… White magic. Here’s how it works. Before you have sex with the man, you must make him taste the dessert. If his soul is dissimilar to yours, and there is no danger of love for you, he will tell you it’s delicious. He has not noticed the bitterness, and you can have sex with him. If he complains of the bitterness, never let him touch you.
“And you should never sleep next to the man, even if he eats twenty pieces. Sleep represents the unconscious–his soul can act on yours while you sleep, while you are vulnerable. And you should have a different wardrobe of clothing for sex. You only wear these clothes for sex, never for anything else, nunca. If possible, don’t take everything off while you are having the man–the clothes connect you to your own power.” Wanda lit another cigarette. “And now the most important part of all. When you are finished with the man, you leave, go directly home, and bathe. You wash the clothes–you should never wear them next to your skin again until they are washed. And never, never bring the man to your bed. Ah, y una cosa más. You know that hollow just at the base of your throat?”
Wanda’s small hand, with its surprisingly rough skin, reached out toward the shadowy, secret cavity at the base of Livia’s throat.
“Never let them kiss you here. Whatever you do. This spot is very potent; it connects their kisses to your heart and, in the most extreme of cases, even to your soul.”
Wanda gave Livia three of the tiny bottles, the fluid which was to replace the sugar in the recipe she would choose. Into the paper bag Wanda also placed several candles, “To get you started.” There was a santero in Livia’s neighborhood. Wanda knew him; sometimes she went to his botánica. She would take Livia the first time she needed more supplies.
“Es cubano,” Wanda cautioned. “From Havana. Don’t try to go by yourself at first–he doesn’t trust Chilean accents.”
~
More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.
Right here, next week, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…
Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.
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