I needed to calm myself, to make sense of everything I had heard.
I pulled out my cache of sketches and singled out every one I had done of Woman in those pieces of memory of her that were so vivid, those images etched for eternity into my mind.
I looked through each one, especially of that first night when she was anguished and desperate.
I thought back to that moment when I saw her in the lair of Ella Bandita, the heart of the Wanderer in her hand, while the hearts of all the men she had conquered howled around us.
The raw hunger in her face revealed the kind of desperation that belonged to a predator.
As Woman had taught me that first night, I put my fingers to my throat where my pulse beat in a steady rhythm, and took a few minutes to listen to my heart.
Then I started to draw.
Using the colored pencils Adrianna had given me, I sketched everything that came to mind from Adrianna’s stories - Addie, the Patron’s Daughter, the Noble Son, the Brute, and even the Sorcerer of the Caverns.
All of them were drawn in the backdrop of the fields, the ostentatious Big House, the spartan cabin, the river, and the woods of the Ancient Grove.
I drew the vivid scenes that lingered long after the stories were finished, imagining what they had all been like in that moment.
I imagined the Sorcerer as the cunning manipulator he had to have been, as well as the benevolent mentor to a desperate, young peasant named Addie.
I drew the monstrous behemoth of the Brute with his crude features and cold-blooded gaze.
I drew the haughty and spoiled Patron’s Daughter riding around the fields, with the Noble Son at her side; her expression was smug with a gleam of cruelty in her small, blue eyes as she gloated over Addie with a smirk.
In that sketch, the focus was only on her.
Addie and the Noble Son reduced to blurred, faceless beings, for in this scene, they didn’t matter; the only player who did was the Patron’s Daughter.
I drew a scene at the moment when the Patron’s Daughter spurned a gentleman who had just asked her to marry him. The malicious glee in her face made her radiant while the rejected gentleman was stripped of his dignity, his shoulders fallen and his head bowed low.
Although I had no urge to depict the raunchy intimacies of the Patron’s Daughter with the Brute, I did a close up portrait of her expression in one of those moments.
With the mingling of pain and pleasure, the Patron’s Daughter looked like a patient in an asylum with her face contorted from agony, the glassy eyes, flushed cheeks, and spittle at the corners of her mouth.
Yet she still seemed hungry.
Then I imagined the scene at the river.
I made the figures shadowy as the naked Patron’s Daughter raged over the collapsed form of a sobbing Addie.
Then I drew the Patron’s Daughter and Addie sitting side by side at the river as she confided her reasons for craving the cruelty and humiliation the Brute offered.
There was bewilderment on Addie’s face, but serenity in the Patron’s Daughter.
Then I drew only Addie in various portraits.
I drew her while she toiled in the fields, imagining the tight clamp of her mouth and the bitterness in her eyes.
I drew her while she yearned for the Noble Son, her eyes wide and sparkling from desire, and the dreamy hope that often came with desire.
I sketched her while she grieved and despaired after the Noble Son had gone.
I drew the hatred and envy in Addie as the Patron’s Daughter rode past her, while she toiled in the fields.
I made many likenesses of her, doing the best I could with the homely face and powerful form she described. But I focused mostly on her eyes and the emotions reflected there, her rage, powerlessness, resentment, and that obsession for something better.
I didn’t know if I got her features right, so I concentrated on capturing the essence of an embittered, envious peasant who would have stopped at nothing to escape her miserable fate.
I worked from dawn to dusk, often getting up earlier and staying awake later.
I worked all over the Casa, in the Joy Parlor, in the back patio, the garden during warmer afternoons, and in the theater whenever Adrianna was not there.
Servants, the young courtesans, and a few of the artistic protégées passed me often while I worked. They peered over my shoulder, and made vague expressions of appreciation of the drawings.
I was too consumed with my work to hear or respond, but nobody took offense. Any time I was absorbed in a scene, I couldn’t rest until I was satisfied.
I didn’t stop drawing until I distinguished the story of Addie from the story of Woman.
There was no denying the two women were so much alike.
But their histories were separate, happened at different times, and one didn’t lead to the other.
Finally, I was done.
I made twenty drawings.
When I looked up I had no idea if the darkness was because it was late at night or early in the morning.
