by Jane Yolen
The next day Doña Pepa disappeared from human ken for a month, “She had a dreadful abscess on her finger,” his uncle said, “which had kept her awake for many nights, and she must lie by for a time and have it lanced.”
“I can guess what ails her,” thought Don Luis, and went to his friend the hermit to report matters.
On the way he met an old servant who had been in his grandfather’s family, and had lived with Don Juan after his marriage, but had been amongst the first to leave. The old servant stopped him and said:
“I have been anxious for a long time about my master and you. Is he well? and what is going on there? I did not like to call at the house, as I left of my own accord. But I had to leave, for I could not bear to live with that horrid snake in the house, Doña Pepa.”
“What do you mean by ‘snake in the house,’ Jorge?” asked Don Luis. “Did you ever see a snake in that house?”
“Indeed I have,” replied the old servant indignantly. “She followed me all over the house, until I nearly lost my wits. If I went into the kitchen, it was there; in my room, it was there; and at last I went away because when I spoke to my master about it, he grew angry that I saw he thought I was lying. Have you never seen the snake yourself, señor? for everyone else who lived there has.”
“Yes, I have seen the same thing myself, if you press me so hard,” answered Don Luis; “but what can I do more than I have? In snake form, I have cut off one foot and one hand. What can I do more short of murder?”
“One thing more,” said old Jorge earnestly, “one thing more, and that is to watch until she is out. Go to the chest in the master’s room, under the left-hand window, and open it. You will find a queer skin, striped like a serpent’s, folded up in the right-hand corner. Burn that, and you will find that the snake will not torment you any more.”
“Are you sure?” inquired Don Luis, earnestly.
“Quite sure,” answered Jorge, as earnestly.
Then they parted.
But the more Don Luis thought over the advice of the old servant, the less inclined he felt to act upon it. It seemed a treacherous thing to do, to go into his uncle’s room, steal a serpent’s skin out of his chest, and burn it without knowing what might be the consequences of such a deed. So he resolved to go to his friend the hermit, and ask him what he thought. When he had told his story, the old man sat a long while musing and silent. At last he said, “I can quite understand your scruples, and sympathize with you in your feeling for your uncle. But I am afraid that there is no other way of destroying an influence so pernicious as that of Doña Pepa; for you are not the only one whom she has either utterly depraved or injured in some way. And such people are better out of the world than in it, as the mischief they do is incomparably greater than the pleasure they give by their beauty. However, for a month at least, she cannot do you much harm. She is too much injured to show herself until she can hide her misfortune. But if she begins her torments again, I should be inclined to tell the whole case to your uncle, and then say to him what you intend to do.”
Upon this advice Don Luis acted. For a month Doña Pepa kept her room, and he saw no more of the snake. After that time, however, she reappeared, and he watched to see how she concealed her wounded hand. It was all covered with a silk handkerchief, and he asked after it with apparent zeal. Doña Pepa colored deeply, but answered with much dignity; she looked thin and pale, and her face was worn with pain. Don Luis’s kind heart ached when he saw how he had hurt her. His uncle took great pains to tell every one that poor Doña Pepa had had to have her hand amputated for a wound which had mortified and which had threatened her life. Very few people believed the story, for somehow or other Don Luis’s adventures with the serpent had got wind and everyone suspected that Doña Pepa’s sufferings were the first punishment for her many deeds of sorcery.
But after a short interval the same troubles began again. Don Luis found the serpent rolled up anywhere and everywhere: in the courtyard, on the stairs, in his room, in every nook and corner, in his boots, under his rug, over his clothes, until he began to think that he was going mad and saw snakes everywhere. One morning, however, he awoke and found the snake on his bed, winding itself around his body. He gave it several hard blows, and wounded it in various places, till it glided quietly out of the room. He then at last decided that the time had come to tell his uncle the whole story. When he saw him in the dining hall, he asked him how Doña Pepa was.
The old man looked very much disturbed, and said hesitatingly:
“I have not seen her this morning. But I suppose she is well.”
“Have not seen her this morning!” repeated Don Luis, feigning surprise. “Is she not at home?”
“Well, yes, she is at home,” replied his uncle, more embarrassed than ever. “But sometimes she is not well enough to see me.”
“Oh,” said Don Luis significantly; and the matter dropped for the time.
Later in the day, however, Don Luis contrived to find his uncle alone, and then he told him all that he had heard. At first Don Juan was very angry, but as his nephew proceeded and he heard the long list of annoyances and torments to which he had been subjected under his roof, he became very pale and silent.
There was a long pause after Don Luis had finished, and then his uncle said:
“Well, I can say nothing—nor can I help you in any way. This much I can tell you, that I sympathize most deeply with you—for—for that snake has been the bane of my life.”
“Then,” said Don Luis earnestly, “you will not blame me if I punish the snake the next time as it deserves.”
“No, I should not blame you, if you can do it,” sighed old Don Juan, little dreaming that his nephew already possessed the secret of killing her.
And the conversation ended.
For his uncle’s sake Don Luis bore with patience the annoying attentions of the snake as long as he could; but after a month more of torment he watched his opportunity when Don Juan and Doña Pepa were out, and went into his uncle’s room. There he found the chest under the left window, just as old Jorge had said. On one side was a queer striped skin, which he immediately recognized as the snake’s. He was preparing to light a fire and burn it, when he heard his uncle and Doña Pepa returning. He had only time to close the chest, slip away to his room, and hide the skin, before they entered their room.
As soon as he heard them descend into the hall, he prepared and lit a fire, and took out the skin, rolling it in his hands to make it smaller, when he heard fearful shrieks below. He rushed out to learn the cause, and was told by one of the servants that Doña Pepa had had fearful cramps, as though her body had been folded up. Then Don Luis knew that what he had heard was true; and, without giving himself time to think, he threw the skin upon the fire. In a moment it was in a blaze, and crisped and curled into nothing.
Having watched it burn to the end, he went down to his uncle. Don Juan was walking up and down the room, wringing his hands. Doña Pepa was stretched out upon a couch, looking very white and ill. The family physician was sitting beside her, holding her hand and feeling her pulse.
“What has happened?” asked Don Luis. “Is Doña Pepa ill?”
“She is dead,” replied the physician solemnly, “and I cannot discover what was the matter nor what can have killed her. She was in excellent health, as far as I could make out, an hour ago, when I was called in to see her for convulsions; and now, with no bad symptoms at all, she has suddenly died. I cannot understand the cause at all.”
Don Luis thought to himself that he perhaps could throw a good deal of light upon the subject. But he held his tongue.
When Doña Pepa was laid out for burial, the old nun who had prepared her for her last resting place confessed that she had seen the figure of a large snake distinctly traced upon the entire length of her body.
Don Luis and Don Juan lived very happily together for years after the death of Doña Pepa. His uncle seemed like a boy again, so light-hearted and gay was he. When his friend
s came to see him, he would say, “I have not been so happy for many a long year.”
And Don Juan’s friends thought it strange, but Don Luis did not. The hermit and one or two others only knew the secret of the serpent-woman.
THE SNAKE’S LOVER
Peru
There was once a young girl who was the only daughter of a married couple. Because her mother and father had no other children, they would send her up the mountain every day to take the cattle to pasture. The girl was now old enough to be married, well developed and very beautiful.
One day, at the top of a hill, a very refined and very thin young man approached her. “Be my lover,” he said. And he kept on talking to her of love.
Seeing that he was tall and strong, the girl consented. From then on they met on the mountain, and there they made love.
“I wish that you would bring me freshly toasted flour to eat,” said the young man to the girl. She did what her lover asked her and brought him freshly cooked flour every day. They ate together and served each other. They lived like this for a long time.
The young man walked and ran with his nose to the ground; he crept along, because he had many tiny little feet. This was because he was not a man—he was a snake. But in the girl’s eyes he seemed always to be a tall and thin young man.
After some time had gone by, the young girl told her lover, “I am pregnant. When my parents find out, they will scold me and ask me who is the father of my child. We must decide whether we will go to your house or mine.”
The young man answered, “We’ll have to go to your house. But I can’t enter it openly—that’s not possible. Tell me, is there a hole in the wall by the mortar where you grind the flour in your house? Isn’t there always a hole next to the mortar to hold the rag for cleaning the stone?”
“Yes, there’s a hole next to the mortar,” she answered.
“Then you must take me there,” said the young man.
“But what will you do in that hole?”
“I will live there, day and night.”
“You won’t fit,” she said. “It’s a very little hole.”
“It will do—it will serve me for a house. Now I want to know where you sleep, in the kitchen or in the storeroom?”
“I sleep in the kitchen,” she said. “I sleep with my parents.”
“And where is the mortar?”
“It’s in the storeroom.”
“When I come, you must sleep on the ground next to the mortar.”
“And how am I to get away from my parents?” she asked. “They won’t want me to sleep alone.”
“You must pretend to be afraid that thieves will come and steal from the storeroom. Tell them, ‘I’ll sleep there to keep watch.’ And you must be the only one to use the mortar—don’t let your parents use it. Every time you grind the flour, you must throw a little into the hole where I’ll be living—I won’t eat anything else. And you must take care to cover the hole with the cleaning rag so nobody will see me.”
Then the young girl asked, “Can’t you present yourself openly to my parents?”
“No, I can’t,” he answered. “Little by little, I will appear to them.”
“And how are you going to live in that hole? It’s so small that only a tuft of wool would fit.”
“You’ll have to make it bigger from the inside.”
“All right,” she said. “You know what’s best for you.”
“But you’ll have to take me there,” the young fellow said, “and leave me behind the house. Then at night you can take me to the storehouse.”
“Good,” his lover answered.
That night the young girl went home alone. She sneaked into the storehouse and made the hole by the mortar bigger. The next day she went to the mountain with the cattle and met her lover in the usual place. “I’ve made the rag-hole bigger,” she said. At nightfall they went to her house. She left the young man behind the house by the corral. In the night she came for him and took him to the hole by the mortar. As the young fellow went into the hole, the girl said to herself, “Impossible! He’ll never make it.” But the young man slid in smoothly.
That very night the girl said to her parents, “Father, Mother, it’s quite possible that thieves may come to steal everything we own. From now on I’m going to stay in the room where we keep our food.”
The parents nodded. “Go, daughter,” they said.
The girl took her bed into the storeroom and spread it out on the ground next to the mortar. The serpent slipped into the bed, and the lovers slept together. And they were together every night from then on.
When there was flour to be ground on the mortar, the girl wouldn’t allow anyone else to do it. She would throw handfuls of flour into the rag-hole, and before going out, she would cover the hole with the cleaning rag, so neither her parents nor anyone else could see what was in there.
The parents suspected nothing; they didn’t think to uncover the hole and look inside. Only when they realized their daughter was with child did they begin to worry and decide to speak of it. “It looks like our daughter is pregnant,” they said. “We’ll have to ask her who the father is.”
They called her to them and said, “You’re pregnant. Who is the father?” But she would not answer. Then the father and the mother each asked her separately, one by one, but still she kept silent.
Soon she began to feel birth pains, night after night. Her parents took care of her. And those nights the snake wasn’t able to slide into the young girl’s bed.
The serpent no longer lived in the hole in the wall—he had grown so enormous that he couldn’t get into it. Sucking the young girl’s blood had made him red and swollen. He scratched out a cave in the base of the mortar and moved in there. In this new home of his the serpent grew so fat that he spread out sideways; he was all bloated. But still in his lover’s eyes he was no snake—he was a young man. A young man who kept getting fatter and fatter.
The lovers were no longer able to cover their cave under the mortar, so the girl folded her blankets every morning and piled them around the stone base. In this way they were able to hide the serpent’s nest from the mother and father.
Because their daughter remained so stubbornly silent, the parents decided to question the people of the ayllu.
“Our daughter has gotten pregnant, out of nowhere,” they said. “Have you ever seen her talking to anyone, anywhere, maybe in the fields where she tended the cattle?”
But the people all answered, “No, we’ve seen nothing.”
“Where do you let her sleep?” one of them asked.
“She used to sleep in the same room with us, but now she insists on sleeping in the storeroom. She makes her bed on the ground next to the mortar. And she doesn’t want anyone else to grind the flour—she won’t let us come near the mortar.”
“And why won’t she let you come near it?” the people asked. “What does she say about this?”
“She says, ‘Father, Mother, don’t go near the mortar, you’ll get my bed dirty. I will do all the grinding myself,’ ” the father answered.
“She has already begun to suffer birth pains,” the mother said.
Then the people told them, “You’ll have to go to the Guesser and ask him to look into this. We common folks can’t tell what is going on.”
So the father and mother went to see the Guesser. They gave him a little package of coca leaves, and begged him to find out about their daughter. “She is not feeling well,” they said, “and we don’t know what the trouble is.”
“What is going on with your daughter?” the Guesser asked. “What ails her?”
“She has become pregnant, we don’t know by whom. She keeps on suffering birth pains night after night, but she cannot give birth. And she won’t say who the father is,” answered the mother.
The Guesser consulted the coca leaves. After a while he said:
“I can see something! Something under the mortar in your house! And that thing is the father! You see,
the father is not like us, he’s not a man.”
“Then what is he?” cried the old folks, very much frightened. “Keep on guessing—find out more, we beg you!”
So the Guesser went on:
“What’s in there is a snake, not a man!”
“But what shall we do?” the parents asked.
The Guesser pondered a few minutes, and spoke again, to the father:
“Your daughter won’t want you to kill the serpent. She will say, ‘Kill me before you kill my lover!’ So you must send her away someplace, a day’s journey away. And even that she will refuse, so you must tell her like this, using the name of some town: ‘They say that in this town there is a remedy that will help you give birth. Go and buy it and bring it back to me. And if you don’t obey me, I will hit you, I will beat you to death’—tell her that, it’s the only way you will make her go. Next, you must hire some men armed with sticks, with machetes and big clubs. Make your daughter carry out your orders, and when she is far away, you and the men go into the storehouse and push over the mortar. Underneath it you will find the snake. You must beat it to death. Take care it doesn’t jump on you, for if it does, it will kill you. Chop off its head and then dig a grave and bury it.”
“Very good, sir,” said the father. “We’ll do just as you tell us.”
The father went at once to look for strong men who would help him kill the serpent. He hired ten men armed with clubs and sharp machetes.
“Tomorrow, when my daughter is gone, you must come to my house,” he told them. “But don’t let anybody see you.”
The next morning the parents made the girl get up early and fix herself a lunch basket. To make it look good, they gave her money and said, “Here is the money to buy the remedy we told you about. You will find it in Sumakk Marka, that town on the other side of the river.”
But the girl didn’t want to obey them. “I can’t go,” she insisted. “I don’t want to.” So the parents threatened her: “If you don’t go, if you don’t fetch the remedy, we we’ll kill you with our sticks. We will beat you until we destroy what you carry in your belly.”