February 3, 1882 dawned stiflingly hot in Buenos Aires. For Xavier Durand—legendary painter, feared and revered figure in the city’s salons—it was not just a heavy day: it was the beginning of the end. At the height of his fame, despotic in public and in private, he saw his health fail and, with it, his illusion of dominance.

His body stopped obeying him, and the proximity of death became a painful certainty. The court of flatterers that surrounded him quickly dispersed. Only the faithful remained—not necessarily those who loved him—: his art dealer, his servant Juan, and Irene, that woman of fragile appearance and almost imperceptible steps. From then on, the past also began to reconfigure itself. The relentless Xavier, who had subordinated everything to his art, began to soften: out of remorse, out of weakness, perhaps out of a sincere intuition that he had erred too many times. Irene, always relegated to the shadows, became indispensable. Perhaps excessively so. But who is she really? Where does she come from? Is she trustworthy, or does she harbor a secret desire for revenge, something dark and devastating?

With refined prose and absolute mastery of atmosphere and narrative tension, Vlady Kociancich composed in Abisinia a story about the specter of posterity and the belated discovery of love. Considered an almost secret gem of Argentine literature, the novel recounts the encounter of two beings who come to each other out of time—and who perhaps could only meet in this way. A joyful and perhaps fatal bond, like so many loves, like the voracious passion that art demands.