Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle

by Carlos Allende

  The mother’s semblance changed from a gray tonality to a less-tragic yellow as she saw the priest enter her bedroom.

  “Father,” she cried, “I must give confession.”

  The man replied with an affirmative gesture. The young girl had done all the rowing, but it had been a great exertion to get in and out of the boat. He was panting and his face had turned red. He asked the young girl for a glass of water. “Or a cup of tea,” he stopped the young girl before she left the room. “And perhaps some cookies, if you have any.”

  He sat down and rummaged inside his traveling bag for a handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

  “I am a witch,” the woman said.

  The priest let out a sigh, shaking his head. “Not the time to be so harsh on yourself.” He took out his rosary and his Bible and browsed through the pages to the book of James.

  The young girl reentered the room with the requested tea and a plate of ladyfingers. The priest welcomed the food and, after giving a short blessing to the mother, he asked her to begin.

  “I am a witch, Father,” the woman repeated. “I danced with the fairies at the Sabbath, and I’ve ridden the night with Diana’s cavalry. I’ve made horses go mad under their riders, and loyal mutts turn against their owners…”

  Was she the victim of a hallucination, the priest wondered, dipping one of the cookies in his tea. The woman did look like a witch. Most of her teeth were missing. The one or two still inside her mouth seemed rotten. The room smelled like the lair of a gorgon.

  “Can I bother you for some milk?” he whispered to the young girl.

  The mother continued: “Once, I made three men die when I sunk their fishing boat by strangling a black cat and throwing it into the water. Another time I killed a baby inside his mother’s womb with a mere touch and an invocation to the Prince of Darkness, because I felt jealous…”

  The good man kept listening, eating his ladyfingers and drinking his tea in small sips. As the story progressed, it became difficult to swallow. The woman revealed details far too grim to be imagined. At last, the man understood that he had in front of him a true follower of Satan.

  “I baptized my three daughters under the sign of Evil,” the woman said, avoiding eye contact with the priest. “And I killed the one male born to me, after offering his soul to Satan, because I knew it would hurt my husband, whom I detest with all my heart.”

  These last words made the priest jump a little. He noticed Rosa and Victoria standing by the door, biting their nails with guilty faces. “Your own child?” He asked. A few crumbs fell from his mouth.

  “Yes,” the witch responded. “Three days after his burial, I unearthed his body and cooked him in a black cauldron to make a soup for my relatives. Next I crushed his bones into an unguent, which I used to anoint a piece of wood so I could fly into the air, which is one way the Little Master has to transport witches.”

  “The Little Master?”

  The witch pulled the sheets to her nose. “That is how we witches prefer to call the Devil.”

  The priest remained transfixed on his seat. He knew of members of the clergy that had committed some unmentionable things with altar boys; he himself had had some impure thoughts about a little one in particular, but he had never heard of crimes remotely as horrific as those the witch had just confessed. To kill her own child? To offer his soul to Satan, and feed his corpse to her family? His throat had gone dry.

  “I did so, Father, because I hate my husband. He claims to be a God-fearing man, a staunch supporter of the Church, afraid of the many torments of Hell, but he is a brute, a coward who prefers to express his feelings with his fists; a misfit who could never keep a job much longer than what it took to piss his pay up the wall. “Whore!” is a compliment that he gives to me often. And a bruise, a pinch, or a black eye his only Valentine presents.”

  “But you killed his son.”

  The woman’s face twitched with remorse. “Yes, but that, and that I am a witch, and that I have committed many sins, he doesn’t know. For all he knows, I have earned my place in heaven.”

  The priest returned his empty cup to the young girl. “What else?” he asked.

  “None of my three daughters is his. The two eldest are the daughters of a fiend who serves me as my familiar in the shape of a black goat.”

  “A black goat?” The churchman’s voice had become feebler with every question.

  “He only visits me at night, after my husband has fallen asleep. And I take care of having traffic with him on the left side of the bed only.”

  “The left side only?”

  “That is how we witches can have sex with spirits without our husband’s acquaintance.”

  “But how could a goat get you impregnated?”

  “Using the seed of other men. Men that I chose over my husband.”

  “I don’t understand.” The priest clutched the beads of his rosary.

  The witch squinted her eyes and slid down on her bed, as if what she was about to confess to the muddled churchman was ten times as unforgivable as what she had already told him.

  “Back then, when I got married,” she began with a painful sob, “there was nothing of this. No pier and no canals. Nothing. Santa Monica ended on Colorado Street. From what is now Ocean Park, it was all sand dunes and marshlands, unsuitable for raising cattle. A few ramshackle houses scattered around the moor. The main house had a chapel, but that was it. Our house stood where the Antler Hotel is now, a one-room made of adobe, at the end of the only road, behind a pool of water that is now the lagoon. My grandparents owned the ranch, but that was all they had. We were rich in land but poor as church mice… I knew I would never be able to love my husband from the first moment I saw him. My sisters tried to convince me he was a good catch. “A light-skinned Irishman,” they said. “Your children will be beautiful.” The two eldest are, Father, but precisely because they are not his. He’s a drunk. He is as unattractive as the prospect of spending eternity in Hell. His face looks like a cheese grater, full of scars and carbuncles. He’s hairy, fat, and short legged. He’s foul-mouthed and arrogant, and his breath stinks! My two elder daughters are beautiful precisely because they are not his. I was a virgin when I married him, Father! I was fourteen; he was thirty-five. Why would he want to marry a child? So he could get my share of the land. The only thing I was worth. So he could drink it!

  “For years I prayed to the Lord every night for him to die. I prayed to every saint, I made all kinds of bargains—I fasted for weeks, I bathed with icy cold water… It never happened. So I started praying to the enemy. I killed my firstborn because I couldn’t tolerate the idea of bringing my husband’s issue to my breasts. For years afterwards, whenever he wanted to have intercourse with me, I offered him my tighter end or used any other unnatural deceit so as to not become pregnant. He never noticed. Then, one night, I was doing my necessities outside, when I saw the goat licking his manhood over a pile of hay and I felt the urge to ask him to help me get impregnated. I wanted to have a baby girl from a man I’ve seen at mass. We settled a price in blood for his service, and the goat turned himself into a succubus—a female fiend—and walked all the way to Santa Monica, where the man lived, and had intercourse with this man. This had to be done first, Father, because demons can take the form of any animal, no matter how big or small, or of any person, male or female, if they have the need, but they cannot produce a drop of life themselves. Demons are made of thin air and not of flesh. They are forced to steal the seed from a living man first.”

  “And who was this man?”

  “I never knew his name. He was a vigorous man of handsome features. For that reason, my first daughter, Victoria, came out pretty and in good health. She’s my favorite,” the witch’s face brightened. “The one I love the most. However, as with any child produced this way, she was born with a monstrous feature too: her face and body, those of a
beautiful maid; her feet, the three-toed webbed feet of a duck.”

  The priest turned to Victoria, curious to confirm what the witch had just said, but the girl hid her feet behind the door.

  “We gave her my husband’s mother’s name,” the woman continued, “but I always called her Piesdepato in private, which means ‘duck feet’ in Spanish, and that name remained. Her godfather is a werewolf that I knew from the Sabbath.”

  “A werewolf?” The priest mouthed.

  The witch smiled, amused by the effect her words caused in the good man. “We used to visit the same burial ground in search of fresh corpses… One year later,” the woman continued, “to help conceive Rosa—for whom I always felt a little less loving, for we witches are not like good mothers who often say I love you all the same—the goat stole his seed from a rather common man. Neither the handsomest, nor the strongest, nor the wisest, as it had been my desire, but from a quick one. A man who could fool the demon, at that time transformed into an alluring girl, with just one word. He said, ‘I am rich,’ when he was actually not, and the goat-turned-dame, who could neither talk nor fight, transformed then into a nymph, let herself be mounted by this man—her legs up in the air, her silky dress up to her chest, thinking rich might be as good a fit as handsome to his mistress, to later push himself inside of me, once he changed the dress, the ribbons, and the locks, for knots of wool and hooves, and an un-goatly tool the size of a man’s foot…”

  The priest let out a little squeal. The witch smiled again, but immediately changed her expression to one of contrition after crossing eyes with the man.

  “Her godparents were an English fairy from Gloucestershire and one of his wives, an enchanted princess from the Yemen, who were hunting ladybugs in my garden. Rosa is a beauty, as you can see, but like her sister, she has beastly feet. One has only three toes and a spur, like a chicken’s foot; the other is furry and spongy with five black claws, like a cat’s paw. I call her Piedepollo in private, which means ‘chicken foot,’ and sometimes Piedegato, which means ‘kitten foot,’ but more often the first, so that name prevailed over the other.”

  Again, the priest couldn’t resist stealing a glance at Rosa’s feet. Unlike her sister, Rosa didn’t make any attempt to hide them; instead, she glared back defiantly. The priest couldn’t tell whether there was anything wrong with her feet, however, because of her shoes. He reckoned that the girls ought to keep their shoes always on, in order not to raise questions from strangers. But how did the witch explain their deformities to her husband?

  “I put a spell on him,” the woman responded, showing her blackened gums to the terrified priest. “One of a nature that, where there were webbed feet and three long toes, he saw only precious cherub boats, the likes of which any other father would have kissed and pressed against his face to fill his lungs with their scent. Being himself a rather horrid man, my husband wouldn’t care for kissing the girls much more than a lizard cares for kissing its own babies, though.”

  “What about the third?”

  “The third was fathered by a dog.”

  “A dog?” the priest asked with alarm.

  “A man that I turned into a dog.”

  The Father crossed himself, immediately regretting having asked this last question. The explanation that the witch gave of her third daughter’s origin was far more detailed and far longer.

  3

  In which we are told how the third daughter was conceived

  The witch explained:

  “I had a niece whom I once cured of scabies by rubbing the fat from a skunk on the red spots in her privates while she recited the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Because of this, she came to suspect that I practiced witchcraft. However, she couldn’t tell that to her parents for fear of revealing how she had gotten sick in the first place. Thus, she only shared her suspicions with the boy that had given her the disease originally. This was a putty-faced fifteen-year-old lad with long limbs that made him resemble a walking windmill, a pointy chin, the fever of a dog and, apparently, the brains of one, for he decided to visit my home not to get rid of his itch, but to request a magical misdeed.

  “What the boy wanted was a hand of glory, a lamp made from the amputated hand of a man hanged for stealing, whose purpose is not to disperse the shadows in a room when lit, but to immobilize people, and unlock any door the porter came across. What couldn’t he do with such a thing? Spy on young ladies when they took a bath? Steal the wallets from their husbands?

  “The boy had learned of the five-finger candelabrum from a carny, and thought that if I were, indeed, a witch, I would be able make such a lamp for him if he provided the material.

  “Coincidentally, a close relative of the boy had just died in a neighboring town, suspended by a rope for thieving cattle. Considering that a dead person needs not two hands to rest in peace, especially if one can be reused as a master key, he chopped one of the mitts from the body. ‘¡Perdón, papá!’ he said, and consoling himself with the thought that heaven would provide the deceased with a pair of white wings in the afterlife, he trudged the long way to the beach with the bleeding hand wrapped in a pall.

  “He arrived at my house by nightfall. A thick layer of fog had settled onto the marsh. He knocked on the door three times. No one answered. He spied through the windows, but couldn’t see anything inside. He walked around the house and found the black goat that served me as my familiar sleeping on a pile of hay. The fiend had promised to stay home all night and watch my two girls and my drunken husband, sleeping it off inside, while I attended the Devil’s Ball.

  “The boy decided to sit down and wait. To pass the time, he started throwing rocks at the goat. The beast wouldn’t move. It looked so tamed, the boy thought of mounting it as if it was a horse, just because, to have some fun. He grabbed the buck by the horns and passed a leg over its back. All of a sudden, he found himself traveling through the air, faster than a bullet, high above the clouds, high and high above, until he and the goat landed thousands of miles away on top of a hill where the Master of all Badness presided over an infernal ball, seated on a wooden stool thirteen feet in height.

  “That night was Halloween, and hundreds and hundreds of bare-breasted women danced around the Devil, singing hurrays to his evilness, spitting on the Christian cross and celebrating mayhem and mischief as others celebrate friendship and love in May, while double the number of spirits flapped their wings above them.

  “Such a vision would have scared the bravest soldier on this Earth, but to the boy, an orphan used to sleeping in stables, with no better place to go than jail, the smell of roasted pork—a child being broiled alive on a stick, he’d reckon later—the abundance of wine and liquor, the beating of the drums, the crying, the howling, the stomps, and the vision of half-naked women running around the throne, some on all fours, pointing their bottoms up, some walking backwards, like a crab, arching their backs to the ground, sweeping the grounds with their hair and thrusting their hips upwards, the vision of all this, convinced the boy that the place he landed in couldn’t be such a bad place after all, and he joined the unclothed merriment in good spirits.

  “He had been drinking and dancing for a while when he saw me, at that moment surveying the ground for dandelions, my head bent down and my rear end pointing upwards. Feeling aroused, the boy approached me from behind. Thinking, on my part, that it was a demon-friend who so unexpectedly claimed my body, for it is not uncommon that, during the feast of Sabbath, when the abundance of fumes and liquor has driven women to the edge of sanity, witches engage in the sport of fornication with all sorts of aerials, as well as with other witches, male and female, and even with animals or elongated objects, like pokes or door knobs—thinking it couldn’t be but a fiend, the one that courted me so unforeseenly, one with the noblest of intentions, for as mean as Satan worshippers are, they’re never so inconsiderate as to make a witch a mother without her knowledge and permission, I rush
ed to pull my knickers off and salivate my parts. I closed my eyes, tightened my fists and bent to my lowest.

  “As said, whenever my husband wanted to have intercourse with me, I presented to him the wrong conduit, so as to not become pregnant. This time, however, thinking it was a fiend who poked me, I offered the attacker what a poet would have called my rose—I feared the cold, scaly member demons have, and how painful it can feel inside the anus. Yet, the thing that the boy stuck inside of me felt rather warm, and it hurt much less than a demon’s instrument. I became concerned… ‘Why, I didn’t know a woman’s smell could be stronger than a dog’s!’ the boy exclaimed aloud. Hearing this, I confirmed my suspicion: the one inside me was a mortal man.

  “I tried to pull off, Father, but the chap held me even tighter. He told me not to worry, that he would do as Judah’s son, Onan, and pull out at the last minute. I resisted at first, I said I didn’t want to, but the rhythm was not unpleasant; rather appealing. And the music was wild. And the air was inviting. And I had drunk so much, I had smoked so much, I had danced so much, and I had suffered so much for so many years at the hands of a man that didn’t love me, a man that battered me at the least provocation, a man that smashed my face against the wall should I dare to speak before I was spoken to, that I simply let go…

  “I became expectant. That would have been it for the boy, but about a month later, before I realized I was with child, he got invited a second time to the Sabbath, so popular the ardor of a fifteen-year-old lad can be among certain women. He mounted the goat again and flew across the space, high and high above, to land on top of the hill of sin and idolatry in the middle of a party to mischief, and clumsily as he could walk with his trousers to his knees, he chased witch after witch, hag after hag, promising to please them all with his teenage vitality.

  “He made a trip like that once more, on the eleventh night after Christmas, and after that he stopped. He had a rather fertile disposition and not one, but four of us had become pregnant, and so much in trouble were we now, one being the niece of a bishop, the second the servant of a devoted clergymen, the third the sister of a Cardinal, and the fourth, your humble servant, Father, an active member of my parish who wanted no more cheeky, impertinent gamines to make my life more difficult—so heavily in disgrace were we, that we decided to punish the felon cursing his parts with a disease so bad that he would feel no desire to be with a woman ever again. His manhood started to squirt a putrid squim when he peed, and began getting smaller and smaller, until one day, six weeks afterwards, it disappeared. As much as the boy looked for it within his bush, he could find no trace of it.