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 rushed to pull my knickers off and salivate my parts. I closed my eyes, tightened my fists and bent to my lowest.
