Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle. Carlos Allende

and sent her to bed without eating, the same.

      On Christmas Day, the young girl and the drunkard joined them at Harris and Magnolia’s apartment in Bunker Hill. Harris felt sorry for the widower and his unattractive daughter, but Magnolia didn’t. She had heard too many horror stories about the man and the vicious little brat from the sisters; thus, she always ended asking the two of them to move to a place where they wouldn’t obstruct the traffic. Rosa reckoned that the best place for their Old Pa was on a chair next to the window. For their youngest sister, it was out in the corridor. More than once, dinner began and ended without either one at the table. The drunkard would have fallen asleep in his chair, and no one remembered to call the young girl, and she was too shy to come in and sit on her own. It was only after the last guest had left and they needed her help to clean off the table that someone remembered to call her.

      “Your sister—what’s her name? Where is she hiding?”

      It only seemed fair that she repaid for the invitation by helping Magnolia do the dishes.

      As for Christmas presents, our little friend never got any.

      “You never get nothing because you’re naughty,” Rosa teased her.

      “Because you don’t say your prayers,” Victoria added, shuffling a new deck of cards they had received as a present.

      “When you die,” Rosa continued, taking the deck from Victoria and offering it to her little sister to cut, “you will go straight to Hell. The goat will come and get you. You will burn for all eternity inside a pit of boiling pitch.”

      “The Devil will come and fart on your face and cover you in vomit.”

      “And we’ll go straight to heaven,” Rosa continued, putting down one half of the deck and revealing one card at a time from the other half.

      “Because we repented, like Mami.”

      “Because we believe in Jesus.”

      “And in the Holy Trinity.”

      “And in the purity of Virgin Mary—ah, the Hierophant!”

      “Next to the Five of Pentacles. It means you’ll end up alone.”

      “And in poverty.”

      Divination in the form of tarot-reading was the only flair the two girls still cultivated.

      The rest of their magical skills had been lost from lack of practice. Some blame is to be placed on Magnolia, who ceaselessly fostered in them the practice of praying as well as the fear of men and of anything sexual, but saw no harm in visiting psychics and asking the cards what the Holy Spirit wouldn’t respond to her directly: whether her husband would ever be forgiven.

      “The Tower. You’ll never get to achieve nothing of nothing. You didn’t have what it takes to be a witch and you don’t have what it takes to be a good Christian… The Fool—what a surprise.”

      The drunkard died in 1918, one year after the sisters’ graduation. After his death Rosa and Victoria’s visits to Venice became more and more sporadic, and no one missed the young girl when she stopped attending Victoria’s godparents’ house for the holidays.

      7

      In which the sisters return to Venice