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
