“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 continued, “but I always called her Piesdepato in private, which means ‘duck feet’ in Spanish, and that name remained. Her godfather 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.