The doorbell at Esther Escudero’s house has been programmed to sound like a wave. Acilde, her maid, engaged in the day’s first tasks, listens while downstairs somebody at the door of the building pushes the button to its limit and unleashes the sound over and over, canceling out the beach-like effect of the bell. Bringing her thumb and index finger together, Acilde positions her eye and activates the security camera that faces the street, where she sees one of the many Haitians who’ve crossed the border, fleeing from the quarantine declared on the other half of the island.
Recognizing the virus in the black man, the security mechanism in the tower releases a lethal gas and simultaneously informs the neighbors, who will now avoid the building’s entrance until the automatic collectors patrolling the streets and avenues pick up the body and disintegrate it. Acilde waits until the man stops moving to disconnect and return to cleaning the windowpanes, encrusted on a daily basis with sticky soot. As she smears the windows with Windex, she sees a collector across the street hunt down another illegal, a woman who tries to hide behind a dumpster, unsuccessfully. The machine picks her up with its mechanized arm and deposits her in its main container with all the diligence of a gluttonous child picking up dirty candy from the floor. A few blocks up, two other collectors work ceaselessly; from this distance Acilde cannot make out the men they’re chasing. The yellow machines look like bulldozers at a construction site.
She touches her left wrist with her right thumb to activate the PriceSpy. The app tells her the brand and price of the robots in her field of vision. The brand is Zhengli, and there’s a translation, To clean up, which appears below, next to the news and images. China’s communist government donated the collectors “to help ease the terrible circumstances affecting the islands of the Caribbean after the March 19 disaster.”
A flood of data blocks her vision and complicates the cleaning of the Lladró ceramics she’s now turned to, so she turns off the app.
To make sure Acilde is doing her work, Esther, whose rustling at the bathroom sink can be heard in the living room, usually runs a finger somewhere in search of dust. In the old woman’s collection, marine motifs predominate: fish, ships, sirens, and shells, gifts from her clients, in-laws, and terminal patients for whom the powers of Esther Escudero are a last hope. According to the media, President Bona’s victory and continued power via the presidency are the work of this gray-haired woman who shuffles along in her blue silk slippers into the kitchen and pours herself a cup of the coffee Acilde has prepared for her moments before.
In her first week, Acilde broke one of these figurines, a pastel-colored pirate that pulverized when it hit the floor. Contrary to what she expected, Esther didn’t scold her. “Don’t touch it, something bad has left us,” she said with the ceremonious gesture she used for almost every occasion. The old woman poured some water in a fig gourd and threw it all over the smashed ceramic mess. Then she gave her an order: “Find the dustpan and broom and sweep it out to the streets through the back door.” For her boss, a black butterfly meant a dark death; a burnt-out bulb, Changó needing to talk; a car alarm going off at the end of a prayer was a sign that her petition had been heard.
Before she worked at Esther’s house, Acilde sucked dicks at El Mirador, without ever taking off her clothes, under which her body—with its small breasts and narrow hips—passed for that of a fifteen-year-old boy. She had a regular clientele, mostly married men, sixtyish, whose dicks only perked up in a pretty boy’s mouth. She’d usually wear a polo shirt a size too big so she’d look even younger and, rather than assiduously pacing the block like her colleagues, she’d sit on a bench under an orange streetlight pretending to read a comic. The more disinterested she made her boyish self seem, the more clients she had. Sometimes she took such great pains to come off like a schoolboy out for fresh air, just leaning back on the bench, her legs crossed with a foot on her knee, that she’d forget what she was there for until a booming car horn brought her back to El Mirador and the desperate men checking her out from behind the windows of their BMWs.
This was how she’d met Eric, Esther’s right-hand man, and shaken him up. A Cuban doctor with movie-star good looks, Eric didn’t need to pay for sex but he was crazy about those middle-class white boys who sold themselves so they could buy the pills they were addicted to. That night in the presidential suite—what they called the patch between the bushes where the grass was softest—Acilde sucked him and let him grab her head. Eric touched her hairless cheeks and pumped them with cum, recovering his erection almost immediately. “Get naked cuz I’m gonna stick it in you,” he ordered, while Acilde spit to the side, brushed off the knees of her Levis with both hands, and asked for the five thousand pesos the blow job was worth. “I wanna screw you,” Eric said, jerking off as the car lights raced over his chest and belly. Acilde hadn’t quite finished saying “gimme my money, faggot” when Eric launched himself on top of her, immobilizing her, face down, and stifling her screams of “I’m a girl, shithead” with the gravel stuffed in her mouth. At this point, Eric didn’t care what she was and just shoved his dry dick up her ass. When he finished and Acilde stood to pull up her pants, he flicked a lighter and approached her to confirm it was true that she was a woman. “I’m gonna pay you more for the special effects,” he said. And when she saw how much more, she accepted his invitation to breakfast.
All the flimsy fried food stands the 2024 tidal wave had washed away from the Malecón reappeared in Mirador Park like flies buzzing. This new sea wall, just off a beach contaminated by unsalvageable corpses and sunken junk, felt like an oasis compared to some of the neighborhoods higher up, where the collectors pursued not only their usual targets but also the homeless, the mentally ill, and the prostitutes. She and Eric sat on plastic chairs under a colorful umbrella and ordered tostones and pork sausages. “There’s nothing worse than a junkie faggot,” Acilde told Eric as she swallowed the food she’d barely chewed. “They throw away their money, because mommy and daddy earn it for them, but not me. I want to study to be a chef, to cook in a fine restaurant, and save enough to get these cut off.”
She was touching her breasts with both hands while Eric, now aware of their existence, thought they looked like bee stings under her T-shirt. “I can get you a better job than that, with someone who’ll need you,” he said.
“I don’t want a husband to keep me,” Acilde responded, and wiped her mouth with her sleeve.
Eric explained the deal: “It’s this old santera, a friend of the president’s, who needs somebody like you, young, quick, who’ll cook for her and clean her house.”
Acilde was perplexed. “Why would she want a dyke like me?”
Eric thought a few seconds before responding. “I can get her to pay for culinary school for you.”
Acilde brought her index and middle fingers together to open her mail, then extended her ring finger, which Eric touched with his so he could see the file she wanted to share with him in his eye. It was an ad for an Italian cooking class, on sale that week, with the celebrity chef Chichi De Camps, with his chin and cashew-shaped nose, wearing an apron with his logo on it.
Acilde’s room at Esther’s was one of those typical rooms found in Santo Domingo’s twentieth-century apartments, from when everybody had a servant who lived with them and, for a salary well below minimum wage, cleaned, cooked, washed, watched the kids, and attended to the clandestine sexual requirements of the men of the house. The explosive growth in telecommunications and factories in the Free Trade Zone had created new jobs for these women who had fled their bondage, one by one. Now, these service rooms—as they were called—were used for storage or as offices.
This job had come like a gift from heaven. Her rounds up at El Mirador had barely paid for food and data, without which she couldn’t live. During her turns up there, she’d switch on the PriceSpy to check out the brands and prices of her clients’ wardrobes, charging them for her services with that in mind. For her working hours, she’d prep a playlist that always ended with ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” At the end of the night, she’d challenge herself to find a client, service him, and get paid before the live version of the song was over. When she did it, she’d reward herself with a plate of four-cheese ravioli at El Cappuccino, a trattoria a few blocks from the park. She’d order in the poor Italian she’d learned online during dead time at El Mirador and imagine whole conversations with the guys who ate at El Cappuccino every day, Italians in shoes that cost more than three digits and talked about business and soccer.
In her mind, one of them, a friend of her father’s, recognized the resemblance. But that was pure bullshit. Her father had stayed by her mother’s side just long enough to get her pregnant. Jennifer, her mother, a brunette with good hair who’d gone to Milan with a modeling contract, had gotten hooked on heroin and ended up selling her ass on the metro in Rome. She’d had six abortions when she decided to go through with the seventh pregnancy, returning to her country so she could dump the baby on her parents, two bitter peasants from Moca who’d moved to the city after La Llorona and its two years of rain that had destroyed their homestead forever.
They beat Acilde for no reason, for being a tomboy, for wanting to play ball, for crying, for not crying. She’d compensate for the beatings at school with whoever glanced her way, and whenever she fought she’d lose track of time and a reddish light would fill her line of vision. In time, her knuckles swelled from the many scars forged from going against foreheads, noses, and walls. She had the hands of a man but that wasn’t enough: she wanted the rest.
Her family detested her masculine ways. Her grandfather, César, decided to cure his granddaughter and brought over a young neighbor to see to her while he and her grandmother held her down and an aunt covered her mouth. That same night, Acilde ran away from home. She asked Peri, the class queer, if she could sleep at his place, a studio in Roberto Pastoriza, like the kind Peri’s mom, Doña Bianca, rented out to students in town. The day of the tidal wave, Acilde went down to El Mirador, along with thousands of others who were curious or who’d managed to escape still in their pajamas, to see how that terrible wave swallowed her grandparents in their smelly little apartment in the Cacique.
Peri knew entire dialogues from twentieth-century comedies no one had seen, like Police Academy and The Money Pit. In these movies, Acilde could see the easy life of fifty years ago, and it surprised her that people lived without an integrated data plan or anything. Kids from well-off homes dropped in at Peri’s to take pills and, sometimes for several days in a row, to play The Giorgio Moroder Experience. The Sony game let you go to a 1977 disco party and dance with other “fevers,” what the kids who preferred war games used to call the millions who went to the virtual party, combining the trip with pills so they could surrender to the palpitating, sensual synthesizer of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” which lasted a whole hour. By dawn, when the pills were gone as well as the money to buy them, Peri and his friend Morla would organize a stroll to El Mirador and, after a few hours of work, they’d come back for the second half of the party.
Morla was a kid from the neighborhood. He studied law and trafficked in whatever was available: fruit trees, those drugs that were still illegal, and marine creatures, a luxury coveted by wealthy collectors now that the three disasters had finished off practically every living thing under the sea. Morla’s dream was to get a government job; he lied about his background in front of Peri’s other friends, children of bureaucrats who looked down on him when, using their PriceSpys, they confirmed his Versace shirts were knockoffs. It was Morla who first talked to Acilde about Rainbow Brite, an injection making the rounds in alternative science circles that promised a complete sex change without surgery. The process had been compared to going cold turkey, although the homeless transsexuals who’d served as guinea pigs said it was much worse. In that instant, the fifteen thousand dollars needed for the drug became Acilde’s only goal: she had to make that money. And since nothing better had occurred to her, that same night she went with Peri and Morla to El Mirador.
Now at Esther’s, she dreamed of putting into practice what she’d learned in her cooking classes, paid for by Esther and Eric. At a restaurant in Piantini she would establish enough credit to ask for a loan and buy the wonderful vial. Her pastas drove the old woman crazy; she’d get up in the middle of the night for second helpings when she thought no one was looking. Since that terrible evening at her grandparents’ house, Acilde suffered from insomnia and she’d stay up lifting weights and searching the internet for her alleged father’s face. As she shaped her biceps, she’d enter the name of her progenitor into a search engine, looking for some resemblance: the wide chin or the thick eyebrows she’d inherited, which would serve her so well the day she managed to buy the drug. While searching these photos, her heart sped up, but then she’d imagine the brief email her circumstances would allow: “Hi, did you fuck a Dominican prostitute in 2008?” After her workout, she’d go to the kitchen and swallow the protein her muscles needed to grow, scaring the life out of the old woman as she ate directly out of a Tupperware container, bent in front of the freezer’s open door. They’d make coffee, which they’d sip sitting together at the little kitchen table, and then Esther would tell her stories about her life and her religious vocation.
Esther Escudero was born in the seventies, during Joaquín Balaguer’s twelve bloody years in power. “Almost as bloody as now,” Esther would say without lifting her eyes from her cup, ashamed of being so close to a regime the foreign press—still—did not dare call a dictatorship. “In 2004, I was thirty years old and I fell in love with my boss. I used to edit her investigative TV show on Channel 4; she was married and had a kid. Her husband wanted to kill us. I’d lived my whole life denying the things I saw and felt. It seems the husband paid for someone to put a curse on me, black magic, so I had my period nonstop. I thought I was going to die. I was already hospitalized when, one day, the woman who had been my nanny when I was a baby showed up, a woman called Bélgica, who never took off the purple handkerchief she wore on her head. She leaned down, mouth stinking of nicotine. ‘We’re going to Cuba,’ she said. I told her she was nuts, with what money?, but she had everything ready to go. She was a poor black woman from the countryside and I couldn’t understand a thing but I was so alone and so weak I let her convince me. It turns out my grandmother’s family had her things and Bélgica had promised to make sure I followed in her tradition. In Matanzas I met my padrino, Belarminio Brito, Omidina, child of Yemayá, and he was so bad, as noxious as gas. But he consecrated me and returned me to life. As soon as I entered his saint’s room, I stopped bleeding. Look, my hairs are standing on end. That man pulled me away from the dead souls who were trying to take me, dark souls who had been sent my way so my organs would get sick and fail. In the prophecy delivered at my initiation ceremony, it was revealed I had been cursed since I was in my mother’s womb. My father’s lover—a revolting bitch—had put the curses on me, and the new had joined forces with the old. These things work like that, mija, like chemistry. Omidina named me Omicunlé, after the cloak that covers the sea, because it was also prophesied that my followers would protect the house of Yemayá. Oh, Omidina, baba mi, it’s a good thing you died and didn’t have to see this.”
As soon as the sun came up, Esther took Acilde over to a corner of the living room and sat down on a mat on the floor. She tucked her gray mane under a pearl-colored knitted hat. She pulled a fistful of shells from a white cotton bag. With these in her hands, she began to rub the mat with circular movements. First, she asked for clarity: “Omi tuto, ona tuto, tuto ilé, tuto owo, tuto omo, tuto laroye, tuto arikú babawa.” Then she celebrated all the deities that reign over the others: “Moyugba Olofin, moyugba Olodumare, moyugba Olorun…” She paid homage to the religion’s dead: “Ibaé bayen tonú Oluwo, babalosha, iyalosha, iworó.” She paid homage to her dead masters: “Ibaé bayen tonú Lucila Figueroa Oyafunké Ibaé, Mamalala Yeyewe Ibaé, Bélgica Soriano Adache Ibaé…” And she paid tribute to those who’d initiated her: “Kinkamanché, to my padrino Belarminio Brito Omidina, to my oyugbona Rubén Millán, Baba Latye, Kinkamanché Oluwo Pablo Torres Casellas, Oddi Sa, Kinkamanché Oluwo Oyugbona Henry Álvarez…” She asked Elegguá, Oggún, Ochosi, Ibeyi, Changó, Yemayá, Orisha Oko, Olokun, Inle, Oshún, Obba and Babalú Ayé, Oyá and Obbatalá for their blessing and permission to carry out the consultation. “So there will be no death, or illness, or losses, or tragedies, or arguments, or gossip, or obstacles, and so all bad things will be kept away, and we’ll receive a triumphant iré, a healthy iré, an intelligent iré, a holy iré, a wedding iré, a money iré, a progressive iré, a business iré, an iré with what comes in from the sea, an iré of open roads, an iré of freedom, a work iré, an iré that goes all the way home, an iré that comes down from heaven, a balanced iré, an iré of happiness.”
Of the sixteen shells she threw on the mat, four had fallen with their mouths up. “Iroso,” said Esther, which was the name of the sign on the oracle, then she lifted her face and added the sign’s refrain: “Nobody knows what’s at the bottom of the ocean.” After throwing the shells several more times, she offered her diagnosis. “The sign is iré, which means good luck, all good. Don’t cheat. Don’t talk your business over with anyone, so no one knows what you’re thinking or what you’re going to do. Don’t pass over holes or go into holes, holes in the street or holes in the countryside, because the earth will swallow you up. People like you always have jealous and hypocritical people surrounding you, as though you were a child of traps and falsehoods. You’re friends with your enemy. The saint protects you from disgrace but you have to be careful and avoid prison. You’ll receive inheritances and hidden riches.”
Like in any good movie, Esther could make Acilde believe anything so long as she had her in front of her. As soon as she was gone, her faith would vanish too, disappearing into that world of betrayals, pacts, and dead scouts. One night, right after finishing her workout, Acilde heard a hum coming from the room where they kept the altar to Yemayá, the goddess of the sea to whom Omicunlé was devoted. Esther was sleeping. Acilde dared to go in. It smelled of incense and flower-scented water, of old fabric and the perfume of the sea held within conch shells. She approached the altar, whose centerpiece was a replica of a Greek jar some three feet tall. Eric liked to kid Esther that someday he’d inherit it; Acilde knew its exorbitant price from her PriceSpy. Depicted on the central band of the jar was an image of a woman holding a boy by the ankle as she goes to submerge him in a pool of water. All over the jar there were offerings and the attributes of the goddess: an old oar, a ship’s wheel, a feathered fan. Esther had told her never to open the jar, that whoever looked inside without being initiated into the sect would go blind, or some other crazy thing like that. But inside, perfectly illuminated and oxygenated by a mechanism adapted to the jar, Acilde saw a live sea anemone. Without putting the lid back, she looked around the bottom border of the jar to find the red eye that responded to the remote control and a small hole where a battery charger would fit perfectly. That’s what the old lady was doing when she “attended” to these saints: monitoring the salt levels in the tank where she kept an illegal and very valuable specimen alive. When Acilde tried to use the PriceSpy on the animal, it just loaded endlessly. It didn’t work very well with black market prices.
During the tryst that produced Acilde, her father had told her mother he wanted to get to know Dominican beaches. Back then the island was a tourist destination with coasts full of coral, fish, and anemones. She brought her right thumb to the center of her left palm to activate the camera and, flexing her index finger, she photographed the creature, then she flexed her middle finger to send the photo to Morla. She whispered a question to caption the image: “How much would they give us for this?”
Morla’s response was immediate: “Enough for your Rainbow Brite.”
Their plan was very simple. When the old lady left on a trip, Morla would find a way to get around the building’s security, disconnect the cameras, take the anemone away in a special container, and leave Acilde tied, gagged, and free of any blame. But when Esther left for a conference on African religions in Brazil, Eric stayed in the house. At first, Acilde thought the witch didn’t trust her, but later she understood the anemone needed special care, which Eric would dispense in her absence. This was confirmed when she saw him spend so many dead hours holed up in the saint’s room.
On her return, Esther found Eric sick, with diarrhea, the shivers, and a strange discoloring on his arms. She sent him home.
“He asked for it, that bugger,” she told Acilde. “Don’t take his calls.”
Despite Omicunlé’s warnings, Acilde visited Eric while he was sick to bring him food and the medicine he prescribed for himself. Eric stayed in his room, where a stink of vomit and liquor reigned. There were days when he was delirious, when he sweated terrible fevers, and when he continually called out to Omicunlé: “Oló! Kun fun me lo mo, oló kun fun.”
When Acilde returned to Esther’s she told her everything to try to soften her up but all she managed was to get the old lady to curse him even more, calling him a traitor, dirty, a pendejo.
All the while Morla was sending Acilde desperate texts every day, trying to find out when Esther was leaving the house, when they would carry out their operation, and when, finally, he could get his hands on that anemone. Acilde had stopped answering him.
Every Thursday afternoon a helicopter would pick Esther up from the roof of the apartment building and take her to the national palace to throw the shells for the president. The consultation usually went on past midnight because the priestess would make the sacrifices and carry out the cleansings the readings recommended on the same day. These absences seemed perfect for Acilde’s original plan, but recently the old lady had said and done things that had convinced her to think better of it.
Esther had brought her a blue bead necklace from Brazil; it was consecrated to Olokun, the oldest deity in the world, the sea itself.
“Master of the unknown,” Esther explained when she put it on her. “Wear it always because, even if you don’t believe, it will protect you. One day, you’re going to inherit my house. You won’t understand this now but, in time, you will.”
Omicunlé would get very serious and Acilde would feel very uncomfortable. She couldn’t help but feel affection for the old woman who took care of her with a tenderness her own family had never shown her. And, if she was going to let her inherit the house, couldn’t she also, perhaps, give her money for the sex change?
When the doorbell’s wave sounds again, Acilde is using a broom to sweep away the spiderwebs silently spun every day in the corners of the ceiling. She assumes it’s another Haitian and that the security mechanism will take care of him. But then there’s a knock on the apartment door. Only Eric, who has the code for the downstairs gate, could have come up. Not concerned that Esther might get mad, she runs to open the door, happy Eric is well and sure that with his cleverness he’ll soon charm the priestess again.
Morla points a pistol at her. Acilde makes a move to defend herself but Morla touches her in the middle of her collarbone, pressing his fingers together to get access to her data plan’s operating system. He activates both eyes, in full-screen mode, to bring up two different videos: in one eye, “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” and, in the other, “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” turning both up as loud as possible. Acilde tries to disconnect herself. Morla is too quick for her.
Blind, she screams: “Madrina, thief!” She rolls herself on the wall until she falls to the ground and feels, after a timid shot from a silenced revolver, the weight of another body falling on the marble floor.
Morla deactivates the screens. Acilde watches as he finishes off Esther. She watches him wipe off the sweat that runs down his forehead with the back of the hand that holds the gun.
“You left me hanging, cocksucker, where is the shit?”
Now that Morla doesn’t need the empathy of his little group of useless friends anymore, the killer’s voice is not the same as the one he used to use at Peri’s house. Acilde leads him to the saints’ room and shows him the giant jar. He opens the cylinder in which he will transport his new merchandise. He’s sleepless, shaking, and off his tits on coke.
“You should do another line to get yourself together,” Acilde advises him.
Morla agrees, pulling out a little pink plastic bag with a piece of rock from his pocket. With a single circular motion, Acilde breaks a Lladró dolphin she’s taken from the altar on his head. Morla falls to the side and the gold coins on the design of his shirt are sprinkled with blood and bits of porcelain. Acilde places the anemone in the cylinder and presses the button, activating the oxygen and the temperature the animal needs to survive.