Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle. Carlos Allende
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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 rushed 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.
“He decided to visit my house a second time and ask for a cure for his lost virility. He knocked on the door three times. I peered through the window. It was the time of the day when the shadows grow longer and the cicadas start chiming. Seeing my enemy outside, I thought first of not opening the door, but I had just finished with my chores for the day and I had nothing else to do before supper. I lifted the latch and asked the boy what he wanted.
“The boy wasn’t angry. He presented himself in a very gentle manner, identifying himself as one of my previous lovers, assuming that after him there would have been many more, perhaps, and that I might have some difficulties in keeping track of the number, and as the son of so-and-so, related to the Talamantes, from nearby.
“‘What do you want?’ I growled, impatiently. I cared not for his relationships and now that my belly had grown to the size of a watermelon, I had little patience for this sort of impertinences.
“The boy admitted his guilt and kindly expressed his remorse for getting me pregnant, but that he deserved not to be punished so severely, when he had pleased me and many more so greatly.
“I replied that I didn’t know what he meant.