Twice a year, on the eve of May the first and on the eve of All Hallows Day, on October thirty-first, she renewed her vows of eternal fidelity to Satan with a sacrifice of her own flesh—a tooth, a pint of blood, or a finger nail. On Sundays, however, she wore a veil and attended Catholic mass. This is not uncommon among witches, to live a double public life, pointing the specks in the eyes of their neighbors, while carrying a log of hatred and shame inside. She received Communion, sang the Sanctus, and offered the sign of peace, just as Christian women commonly do, so well pretending to be afraid of the Church’s promises to prize the just and punish the vile with the agony of fire in the afterlife, with such an apparent conviction of her faith, that she fooled each and every one of the parishioners—all of them! From her husband, a rather ninny fellow and a drunk, to the priest, a quick-witted gentleman, well-traveled and not too old; from her sisters, rather femsy little dames, to her neighbors, rather proud; from her neighbors’ friends, rather stony, to her sisters’ husbands, rather boring, and—everybody! Except, of course, the One That Can See All, our Lord. Yet, He preferred to remain silent, neither deaf nor blind but consensual to free will and to the fact that it is human nature to sin and to be tempted.
Now, just as virtue brings along its own reward, evil brings its own penance. As time went by, the vileness in the witch’s soul and the constant sacrifices of blood took their toll on her constitution. She grew weaker and bitterer with the years, and eventually she fell ill. One morning, her bones felt so brittle that her legs didn’t have the strength to carry her out of bed, not even to go take a piss in the garden. A day later, she found she couldn’t raise her head from her pillow.
That day, Saturday, September 7, 1912, a sunny day perfumed by the honeysuckles, a day that called for sliced fruit and a lazy stroll by the water, the woman said to the youngest of her three daughters, with the conviction of a born-again Christian when questioned about the veracity of his faith: “I am dying.”
The born-again Christian would have said, “I believe,” instead of I am dying, and then condemned the way others conduct their own private business, but what we want to portray is not the ways of those who are ready for the rapture, but the similarity in the certitude of her tone to that of a man in possession of an unequivocal truth: “Me estoy muriendo,” the woman said in Spanish, her mother language, and that’s indeed what was happening. She was bound to leave this earth.
The young girl looked at her mother. Her little face furrowed with grief, but not a peep came out of her mouth. She feared that the sound of her voice would hurt her mother’s ears just like her mere presence hurt most people’s eyes. She was ugly. As ugly as her mother’s crimes: Too much hair and too much nose. A turnip for a chin. Toad-like eyes, teeth like a picket fence in the wake of a windstorm. A mouth as big as a purse. Her age? Unknown. Between twelve and fourteen. She looked ten. Raised with little love and many beatings, fed sporadically and poorly, she had grown rachitic and feeble.
“We have a nice house,” the woman said next, missing the desolation of the poor bedroom. Other than her bed and the chair her daughter was sitting on, a bare light bulb hung from the ceiling and an old armoire whose door refused to close was all the furniture the room consisted of. “Not as nice as the ones they’re building by the beach, perhaps, but much better than the old one, remember?”
The young girl nodded. For an instant she wondered whether the woman was speaking to her or to the invisible spirit of an unknown dead relative; her mother’s tone had never been so affable.
“After I die,” the mother continued, “this house will be for your sisters. You’ll stay if they let you stay; you’ll leave if they ask you to leave.”
The young girl nodded again.
“My two angels. In their white summer dresses. Call them. I want to see them.”
No more was needed. The young girl dashed out of the house through the kitchen and climbed the exterior staircase two steps at a time up to her elder sisters’ bedroom on the second floor.
The two of them were still in bed.
Eighteen-year-old Victoria dismissed her words as just rubbish. “Today is Saturday,” she complained, pulling the sheets over her head. She sounded like a morning bird.
Rosa nodded in agreement. “Nobody dies on a weekend.” She stretched her arMs. Her voice was the tinkling laughter of a brook.
She was sixteen.
“Tell her that we need to sleep.”
“Tell her we’re tired.”
The young girl’s heart shriveled with disappointment, but she dared to make no comment. Her sisters needed rest. Would it be too imposing to wait for them by the door? She slid her fingers over the chest of drawers and surveyed the room. Her sisters had such nice things! Lace curtains, a Chinese lamp, and colorful cards and illustrations pinned to the walls. And they were beautiful, indeed; they were as pretty as a dollar sign, as pretty as to force a stranger passing by to compliment their looks with a whistle, as pretty as to drive a man insane if they were kind enough to regale him with a wink. Brown eyes, dark and silky hair; mouths shaped like little roses, with teeth as white as pearls and lips as red as ripe tomatoes; noses like a pinch of fresh dough, and hands so delicate as if made to pull the feathers off a hummingbird without disturbing its flight. Not one freckle.
Victoria farted.
The young girl closed the door and hastily returned to her mother’s bedroom.
Neither of her sisters cared to go downstairs until it was time for breakfast, an hour later. The young girl was serving them at the table when they heard the mother howl a second time: “I don’t want to die!”
Rosa spilled some of her coffee.
Victoria’s fork fell to the floor.
“If I die, I will be dragged to Hell and remain there forever!”
The young girl rushed to clean the spill with a cloth napkin and then provided Victoria with a clean fork.
“For God’s sake, Mamá!” Rosa hollered. “It’s only a cold. We’re having breakfast!”
But the mother wouldn’t stop. She kept wailing and crying until the two sisters left the table and entered her bedroom, ready to give the woman a couple of strikes on the temples for ruining breakfast. Upon seeing the gray in the woman’s face, the purple spots under her eyes, and feeling the stench of blood and vomit coming from a bucket by her side, they were convinced about the seriousness of the matter, however. The witch was dying.
“¡Mamá!” The two sisters cried at once, throwing themselves to the woman’s bed, and the one that received the blows was their younger sister, for not having alerted them sufficiently.
Without their mother, they reckoned, they’d be the same as orphans.
“We cannot count on Papá!”
For their father was a ne’er-do-well drunkard whom no one had seen in the past three days.
“We’ll be all alone!”
And neither had felt the need to go look for him at the dives the man frequented.
“What will become of us without our mother?”
“Who will look after us?”
Tears
