“‘Well,’ I said brusquely, ‘now that I am so fat, I cannot clip my own toenails.’ And, indeed, Father, I looked as big then as if I was about to explode with triplets.
“The boy responded with an offer to do it himself.
“I shouldn’t have accepted, Father, I know that now; but I did. I went back inside the house to fetch a nail clipper. When I came back, I gave him the clipper and sat on the doorstep. The boy took my shoes off, then my stockings, then he clipped off my toenails; first the left foot and then the right foot, and when he finished, he started massaging my knuckles.
“‘That feels good,’ I remember I said, closing my eyes and letting my head fall to one side in a blissful gesture.
“‘Let me do something that will feel much better,’ said the boy, who, despite the corns and callouses on my feet, but much in accordance to a male his age, had become aroused, and started licking my toes.
“I let him do so for a moment. But then I feared that letting him kiss my feet would lead to some other business. I took the clipper back, put my shoes on, and commanded the boy to leave. I pointed to the faces of my girls inside, spying through the window.
“‘I’m still cross at you,’ I said. ‘Because of what you did to me.’ I pointed to my belly. ‘Now I can’t walk straight without waddling like a boat amidst the sea.’
“I hated that baby just as much as I hated my husband, Father. I couldn’t wait for it to be born and get rid of it. And now this boy was kissing my feet and wanted to lay with me in front of my two daughters and insult my honor?
“The boy got upset and responded that I should be grateful, if anything, for I would be a mother for the third time and that no one but him, a ‘handsome man of wits and not a half-cut clown,’ which was a clear reference to the miserable state of my husband, was to thank. He also said that babies are a gift from God, whatever the circumstances in which they are conceived, and that I should have naught but words of affection for the one inside me.
“I attended mass regularly, for sure, Father, every Sunday, yet I still found the mention of God offensive. I got mad. But I had thought of something. I responded to the boy that an elegant reasoning like that deserved to be prized, and let him inside my house… You can see that we’re poor, Father. Neither my girls nor I have ever known any riches. Back then, when we still lived in the old house, we were even poorer. Poorer than a rat cornered by the cat of a pauperized widow. The interior of that house was as sad as you could imagine: a table and a couple of chairs by the fireplace, a bed with a cast-iron headboard, a cupboard against the wall, and in the middle of the room, a galvanized tub full of dirty water.
“‘Show me,’ I said to the boy.
“The boy pulled his pants down.
“‘Here it is,’ I said, searching under the hair in his crotch and pinching between my fingers a little bulb the size of a lentil.
“My two little girls approached to see what their mother had found in the young man’s body. I showed them and they laughed giddily.
“‘It’s been there all the time,’ I said, to the boy. ‘You never lost it. However, I am afraid there is no solution to its size.’
“‘There must be one!’ the boy cried, pulling up his pants.
“‘Is there one to mine?’ I asked, pointing to my swollen belly. ‘Is there one to my grief?’
“The boy grabbed me by the neck. ‘You whore!’ he cried. ‘Unless you give me back my health, you shall die at my hands!’
“I didn’t expect that, Father. I only wanted to see him suffer. I got scared and so did my two daughters. They jumped against the boy to help their mother. One punched the boy’s bottom repeatedly, while the other tried to bite his leg. He kicked them off with a swish, but lost his grasp of me. I hurtled across the room, trying to reach a poker.
“Now the boy held my daughters by their braids, one on each hand. He lifted them up from off the floor and asked: ‘Which one of your daughters should I kill first?’
“I must say this, now, Father, in the boy’s defense. He was just as frightened and upset by how far things had gone as my daughters and I were. He snorted like a beast cornered by a hunter. His face was red and his eyes filled up with tears. He had reason to be upset. A man’s tool is a man’s pride. The girth and the length of a man’s bone are the girth and the length of his honor. He had been complimented often on the bulbous, mushroom-shaped head of his cock and the upward curve of his shaft and he wanted it back. But back then I didn’t see that; what I saw was that he was shaking my two girls as if they were rag dolls. I got terribly scared. I didn’t think that things would turn violent. All I wanted to do was to see him suffer. To make him pay for everything I had suffered in the hands of my husband. I begged the boy to stop, but he wouldn’t.
“The Devil came to my rescue. I saw the goat spying through the window, and inside my head I heard the voice of the Little Master whispering instructions.
“He told me to pretend to be defeated and then to open the back door of the house and point to a fig tree full of fruit that I had planted the year of my marriage. I did as told and to my surprise, instead of fruit, from the branches of the tree now grew male organs.
“‘Climb up,’ I repeated to the boy the Devil’s instructions, ‘and choose the one that fits best.’
“The boy let go of the two girls, who scrambled to hide underneath the bed. He stepped outside and climbed the tree…there were so many different members hanging from that tree! You would have found it very interesting, Father. There was one of every length, shape, and color as there are men of different sizes, shapes, and colors on this Earth. It took the boy some effort to find which one would be the most appropriate replacement for the one he had lost.
“His first choice was one with a big mushroom head, like the one he used to have. Repeating what the Devil instructed, I said: ‘You must not take that one; it belongs to a parish priest.’
“The boy chose another one, thick and veiny, much more so than the one he had before. As he was climbing down with it, I said: ‘You mustn’t take that one either, for you will get his flaws, which were many.’
“Not wanting to be ill again, the boy let the member fall to the ground. He climbed up again and reached for a third one, rosy and slick, like a dog’s penis.
“He said: ‘I think I want this one.’
“‘That will be then,’ I replied, ‘but that is the tool of a dog,’ and it truly was, Father, you could tell that easily, ‘and so a dog you will be.’
“And as I finished pronouncing these words, the tree withered. All the leaves fell off and all the fruits shriveled up and disappeared, as if winter had returned in an instant. The branch where the boy had been standing snapped, he fell down, and, the moment his body touched the ground, the boy was transformed into a small brown pup.
“I grabbed the dog by his scruff and handed it to my daughters, who sprung out of their hiding as if they’d been offered gold. They laughed, sucking up their snot, same as any child when they see their tantrums rewarded, that much they liked their present. Yet, instead of petting the pup and blowing kisses on its snout, as most children would do, they started to pull its tail and ears, and to pinch it.
“‘What are you going to call it?’ I asked, laughing.
“‘Nothing,’ said Victoria.
“‘It’s just a dog,’ replied Rosa.
“‘Dogs shouldn’t have names. They’re only animals!’
“‘They do not feel, they do not speak, they don’t have a soul. They’re worth nothing!’
“You could tell that the little pup felt terrified in his new form. He wailed and trembled, afraid of my two daughters. Eventually,