Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle

by Carlos Allende

  “After her harrowing attempt at murder, she occasionally yanked his ears or threw dirt in his water bowl, but she never tried to kill the little pup again. For one thing, because she truly cared for him—he was her only friend—but especially out of fear, because the one time she had tried and broke his leg, my husband grabbed her by her neck and shook her head so rashly, she thought he would break her body in two, and she knew well that no one, not even the loyal little brown pup, would know how to make a splint to fix her.”

  “What happened to the dog?” the priest asked, realizing he had yet to meet the man turned into a sack of fleas.

  “He died a couple years ago,” the witch responded. “A pack of coyotes killed him. He was old, and very small, and with only three good legs he couldn’t run too fast. He was easy prey for the wild canines. My two elder daughters laughed so hard when they learned how the poor dog had died that they slightly wet their undergarments. I laughed, too. It’s hard not to laugh when they do; their laughter is like lilting water. But I felt his passing. I too had become fond of him. He had a name. We called him Skinny.”

  4

  In which we are invited to a ball inside of a cemetery

  As each of her two elder daughters turned nine, the mother continued her explanation, she took them to their first Sabbath, where they vowed to love and honor Satan and all things foul in a ceremony equivalent to the one nuns have when they commit to love the Lord and his church. Instead of wearing a bride’s white dress, a decked veil, and pearls and flowers woven in their hair, however, the two girls wore black gowns and bones of dead animals in their hair; and to complete the ceremony, instead of kissing a crucifix, as a bride of Christ would have done, they bent and kissed the Devil’s second mouth, the one in his posterior. The Devil found them agreeable and pretty, and after eating their offerings—a chubby unchristened baby each—he gave them a swarm of flies and a black toad as their familiars, to serve them in every matter in return for blood.

  One year later, around the time the youngest turned six, the witch reckoned that the little girl was old enough to be introduced to the pleasures of infernal partying and began preparing her for the occasion of her first Sabbath. They walked to Third Street in Santa Monica and the woman bought for her a black dress and a pair of shoes at a pawn shop for twenty cents.

  “It was a complete waste of money,” the woman interrupted her own story with a growl.

  Getting new clothes made the little girl shiver with excitement. To her innocent eyes, the raggedy dress looked like an elegant gown, even if it was half-eaten by moths and had a few holes through which you could insert your fingers. She liked her new shoes especially. They happened to be her very first. Unlike her sisters, who had secrets to hide, she ran barefoot. If you have no secrets to hide, you can be spared a pair, was the mother’s reasoning behind it. Glass, nails, or hot pavement were not a real concern because, with the years, she had developed thick soles full of calluses. The new shoes were one size too big, but the mother wouldn’t pay for any better. It didn’t matter. The little girl squirmed with happiness the moment she tried them on. A little uncomfortable at first, she learned to walk in them gracefully, and before you could say la fée carabosse recoule, recule, recoula! she was running in them, jumping in them, clapping and dancing. Had she known what a princess ballerina looked like, she would have felt like one, but never had she seen any real dancer.

  The mother had, however, and thought that her daughter looked ridiculous. When the little girl approached to say thanks with a curtsy, as she saw her sisters had done earlier for their presents, a silk ribbon for Victoria and a Japanese paper doll for Rosa, the witch gave her a box in the side of the head that caused her to stumble.

  “You look like a monkey!” Victoria scowled at her when, back at home, the girl tried on her new garments.

  “You look like a monkey’s butthole covered in vomit!” added Rosa.

  It was an unfair comparison, to be honest, since neither one had ever seen a real monkey.

  “SHUT UP!” the drunkard yelled from the bed, where he had been sleeping. “Shut up or I’ll give you good reason to cry!”

  At night, while their parents slept, the two sisters bragged to the little girl about the countless delights of being the Devil’s servants. The two of them slept on a cot at the foot of their parents’ bed; the little girl slept on the floor over some damp rags by the hearth. From above, the sisters commented on how pleasant was the smell of sulfur that emanated from the demons, on how much fun it was to dance naked around the bonfire, how tasty were the bat-wings soup and the cake of lizards, how much wine and liquor they had drunk, and how much candy they ate during the Sabbath. All of this in a quiet voice, for they feared awakening their parents. They celebrated especially the qualities of the Devil: how brave, strong and beautiful he was; how powerful he looked as he munched unchristened babies in his jaws; how tall and dark he was, how thin was his waist, and how firm, round and hairy were his buttocks.

  “It pains so much the way we love him!”

  They expounded upon how much more charming and alluring the Devil was compared to the pale and bony Jesus that hung inside the Church they attended on Sundays, that looked down at you and knew all of what you did at all times.

  “Even when you fart.”

  “The Little Master closes an eye to all your misdemeanors.”

  “He respects your privacy.”

  “He doesn’t care about your noises.”

  “He likes them.”

  “He likes you the way you are. You don’t have to be nice—”

  “—or to do nice things.”

  “He likes it when you lie—”

  “—and when you steal—”

  “—or when you hurt people.”

  “And he is so handsome!”

  Victoria insisted that the Devil looked the best as a black dog; her sister, that as a buck he looked the most attractive. Both rejoiced in the memories of how low hung his balls and how thick was his penis. What a pleasure it was to celebrate his rise, drinking wine and cursing in all directions, dancing back to back with all the other witches, swearing by all high and mighty to cause grief and unhappiness to others!

  The little girl listened in total fascination. The stories frightened her, but she wished with all her heart to succeed at the Sabbath.

  “I made out with Prince Baal,” said Victoria, referring to the fiend as if he were a boy she’d met at one of her catechism classes.

  “I kissed his buttocks,” said Rosa.

  “I kissed the palms of his hands, his horns, and hooves,” argued again Victoria.

  “Little thing,” Rosa played with her curls. “Unless you kiss his seat, no honor is transferred upon thee.”

  On Friday morning, the three girls went to church. They were to take communion, bring the hosts back home, and mix them with baby blood and excrement to make biscuits for the Devil.

  “It will be yummy!” Victoria laughed, spilling out of her mouth parts of her breakfast.

  The little girl planned to obey her mother’s instructions to a T. Of course she did; one does not plan to fail, even if one is prone to failure. She thought all this as she played hoppity-hop with her new shoes, jumping over the ponds and running through the marshes on their way to the parish: She would confess her sins first. She would say that she had been mean, and that she had called her sisters bad names, as recommended by her mother; that she had fought with them, and that she’d been vain and disobedient. She wouldn’t tell the priest that she and her sisters had peed on her neighbors’ roof to make their son die of measles, however.

  “Mami will be mad if we don’t keep that a secret,” Victoria reminded her with a threatening fist.

  She would take communion, without salivating too much, lest she ruin the wafer, and she would hide it. Back at home, she would pee on it and mix it with chicken dro
ppings and blood from the little brown pup, who still counted as a baby. She wouldn’t hurt him, just pull a few ticks off his pelt and squeeze them in the mix.

  When she offered her biscuits to the Devil he would bob his head down and say, “You did fine. Yours is the best present.” That would make her sisters turn green with envy, she reckoned. And then all of the witches and warlocks, she fantasized, and all of the demons and goblins and corpses brought to life that night at the ball would try her biscuits too, and they too would find them yummy and nutritious. Everyone would compliment her shoes and her dress and the mice tangled in her hair as well, and they would shake hands with her, instead of giving her a box on her temple. That alone would make her happy. Not being abused just once would make her heart swell. She would thank them all with a curtsy, and they would like her even more, the poor fool dreamed, because, she had noticed, people liked well-mannered people. Maybe they would think she wasn’t that ugly after all. Oh, yes, maybe they would find her pretty and everyone would love her. The day of her wedding to the Little Master would be the finest day of her life!

  “What are you grinning about?” Rosa tried to hit the little girl in her shins with a long twig of grass, but the little girl saw it coming and ran faster.

  Victoria hid the Holy Bread in the hem of her skirt, lowered herself onto the kneeler and prayed: “Please, please Jesus, please, please, Mary: let the Prince of the Damned like me the best tonight. I promise I’ll be a good girl and go to mass every Sunday, for all the rest of my life.”

  “Please, please, Saint Joseph,” prayed Rosa, “let the Devil take me instead as his favorite.”

  “Please, please, Saint Judas,” insisted Victoria, “let the Devil find me more beautiful than my sister, so my Mami will like me better.”

  “Please, please, Saint Cecilia,” prayed Rosa, wrinkling her nose at Victoria, “let the plague and sickness fall upon Victoria. Make the Little Master take my Papi, so he stops beating Mami. Please, please, God, make the Devil kill my two sisters, and all my enemies, too. Amen!”

  Too nervous about her task, the little girl didn’t pray.

  She should have, though, for the one thing she ought to have done right, she did wrong. Dumb-fuck little ugly girls never do anything right, she learned that night, and would remember it forever: she had been so hungry during mass that she could feel her gut stuck to her backbone, and the priest took so long in telling people to feel guilty and embarrassed for what made them feel right, so long in telling them not to drink and not to dance, so long in telling them not to do this and not to do that, and so hungry she was, so to the point of starvation, the long tapeworm inside her little tiny gut begging for a grain of rice soaked in soup seasoned with a grain of pepper, that she had a teensy bite of the wafer—just a very little one, an eensy-weensy tiny bite, enough to learn what the body of Christ tastes like, and then…she swallowed.

  One bite alone couldn’t expose her to all the delights of paradise, but it seemed enough for her. She was used to being hungry. The rest of the wafer went to the safety of her knickers. And that would be it, for there was still enough of the bread to make the cakes of chicken caca, but a crumb remained between her teeth, and while it wouldn’t bother her too much—she never flossed, nor had she ever heard of flossing—it would be enough to prove to her that you must do as your parents say, exactly and to the T, because, no matter how evil your mother may be, no matter how perverted and corrupted she is, mothers know best, and hers, a consummated witch, murderer of thousands, knew better than anybody.

  That night, the mother stuffed a potato sack with old rags to make a life-sized doll and put it under the blanket on her side of the bed, which is a way witches have to deceive their husbands of their presence. She put Rosa’s toad next to the doll, so it could say “Move!” if the man got too close and started groping the doll in his sleep. Sometimes a full-size demon stayed instead, but that night was special, that night was the eve of October 24, year of the Lord of 1903, thirty-two years after the Chinese massacre on Nigger Alley, that put so much joy in the heart of the Devil, and no spirit with a rank higher than Earl of Hell would want to miss the party.

  “I think I should go,” the amphibian expressed his disappointment on being left behind. “I am a Captain, with a full legion of thirty-two demons under my orders.”

  But it was his duty to stay vigilant, the mother reminded him, and guard the drunkard’s sleep next to his pillow.

  “Be a good toad,” said Victoria, kissing the pout-lipped demon, “and spare my dad of wily spiders.”

  Two minutes before midnight, the mother’s familiar appeared outside, again in the shape of a black goat. On his back, he carried a basket with two beautiful five-year-olds inside, a little boy and his twin sister; two little blond and blue-eyed German cherubs, who had been naughty.

  “Mommy—,” the children cried, slurping their snot.

  “My, oh my!” The mother celebrated the demon for his catch. “These children look so fat and lovely!”

  She chained the basket to the goat’s neck, then she and the three girls mounted the beast. Whoosh, it lifted up, with one jump, and up they went, flying through the sky, up above the clouds, high and high above, up to the mother’s three-thousand-and-ninety-eighth—and her youngest’s first—Sabbath.

  Victoria rode by the goat’s neck, holding onto its horns with both hands, pushing her head forward to feel the cold air pull her cheeks towards her ears. The witch sat just behind, pressing her chin against her daughter’s shoulder, clenching the goat’s long hair. Just behind, rode Rosa, grabbing her mother by the waist. The little girl rode on the goat’s rear end. Afraid to offend her sister with her touch, she held instead to the beast’s hairy rump as tight as she could. Every time the goat went up or down, the two elder sisters celebrated with a hurray, and the mother laughed. Even the two children inside the woven basket celebrated the thrills of the ride—then returned to crying. The little girl prayed to the twelve apostles not to fall.

  As they flew, the mother gave her daughters a few recommendations about the party: “You must insult all witches,” she said, raising her voice over the wind, “including the old.”

  “Yes, Mother,” responded the two elder, sounding miffed, like a child when reminded how to behave in front of others.

  “You must be ungrateful if anyone hands you food or candy. Don’t forget to spit on the Cross, and interrupt people when they speak. Clean your noses on the tablecloth and dance around the throne, cursing and swearing by all that is saintly or divine.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “For the Sabbath is the time to do all anti-Christian things, the worse the better. I tell you now; I’ve been to many. I know well, and I know better—Did you write down your lists of evil deeds?”

  “Yes we did!” the two elders responded with enthusiasm.

  The little one gave a firm nod.

  “I have such a long list of awful things I did this week…” began Victoria.

  “My list is longer,” interrupted Rosa.

  “Is it?” the first asked. “I poisoned the cow of a poor man and I killed a granny’s only cat.”

  “I made a woman lose her baby.”

  “I made a man lose his mind.”

  “I made a man kill his wife.”

  “I ruined the wedding of a rich man.”

  “I made a rich man murder his brother and then marry his bride.”

  “I made the bride of a rich man kill his sons, then eat them, then spit them out, then bring them back to life and marry the three of them and have their babies.”

  “I did just the same the previous month.”

  “I did it twice.”

  “I did it blindfolded.”

  “I did it in my sleep.”

  The mother laughed at their boasting. Her two daughters could not have done so much badness in just one week.

&
nbsp; “Lying is an evil feat,” she said. “And we the wicked love to do mischief.”

  The little sister didn’t laugh. Innocent as she was, she listened in awe to all that her sisters had to say, and believed every single word that came out of their mouths as a man of faith believes the words from the Bible.

  As they approached the site where the Sabbath would take place, they saw other witches flying along. Here, one in her birthday suit mounted a horse flying backwards; over there, two more shared a dog’s back while a third hung from the tail. Yonder, one drifted alone, without mount, dragged by the winds. Half a dozen others, reduced in size to fit their mounts, flew on top of dragonflies fitted with reins and saddles, as if they were tiny horses taking them to mass.

  Some of the women mounted wooden objects: a broom, a chair, or a barrel; most rode on the backs of animals, goats and dogs being the preferred conveyance. Some were empty handed but most carried a basket containing children, like our witches, as an offering to their infernal master.

  The goat landed at the base of a hill inside a walled cemetery. As they arrived some distant church bells chimed midnight.

  There were already six hundred sixty-six witches inside the cemetery and about seven times that number of aerial spirits flying around them. Every nationality was represented, from the Spanish meigas to the Turkish cadilar, every shape, every size, and every color, all fellow enchantresses from all corners of the planet.

  Those on the ground greeted the recently arrived with lots of clapping. “Welcome, my friends!” they said, opening their arms, as if the recently arrived were royal envoys greeting ambassadors from another kingdom.

  The little girl felt a sudden chill as one of these women approached them. She looked like one of those ladies one could see strolling down the Linda Vista Park in Santa Monica on Sundays, wearing a shawl and a dress with a lace collar.