“The fact that my seducer had become a beast didn’t make me less pregnant, however. Twelve weeks later, I gave birth to my third daughter. Being the offspring of two humans, this one had a human face, a human body and two complete feet with ten chubby little toes, just as human babies ordinarily do. Yet, being the offspring of a rather plain woman, as I am, and a rather ordinary boy, as her father was, full of bumpy whiteheads and freckles, she came out a rather unattractive baby. Just look at her, Father. She’s quite ugly…”
One more time, the priest turned his head towards the door, this time to check on the third daughter. The young girl hunched up, embarrassed at her own ugliness.
The old witch went on: “Everyone that saw her commented on how poorly suited for terrestrial life she was, and recommended to instill in her from a very early age the idea of joining a convent. Even her godfather, a vampire with no intention of teaching her the ways of virtue, agreed to this. Can you imagine, Father? The daughter of a witch making a vow of celibacy to Jesus? Had she been a boy, I would have drowned her. But I thought that I might as well offer her in matrimony to the Little Master when she came of age. Alas, he too rejected her.”
The priest exchanged another look with the young girl, this time full of compassion. She was, admittedly, quite unsightly. To the poor gifts of nature—the hair, the mouth, the bulbous nose—you had to add the embarrassing gifts of adolescence: her face was covered with pimples. The girl reminded him of a featherless baby crow fallen from its nest to the ground, left to be eaten by the insects.
“What is her name?” the good man asked.
“Dumb-fuck?” the witch responded, trying to suppress a laugh. “Stupid girl? You-little-piece-of-shit? She doesn’t have one name, but many. Whatever insult is in vogue, whatever mockery sounds fit, whatever noun seems degrading and mortifying enough, whatever makes her cry and wish she had never been born, that is her name for the day. She was christened inside a church and wearing the family’s baptismal robe of white embroidery, an heirloom from before the Mexican war that had been in my family for generations, and she was given a name, in honor of the saint of the day of her birth; yet, nobody ever used it. The sad appellatives came from the beginning. Outside our family, everyone refers to her as Antonia’s third daughter, or as Rosa and Victoria’s little sister, or plain and simply with a contemptuous ‘you!’… ‘You!’ is what the nuns used to call me when I was a girl, during catechism class on Saturday mornings. ‘You, naughty little girl,’ they said, before swatting the back of my head with a ruler, ‘why can’t you be more like your brothers and sisters?’”
A coughing fit forced the woman to make a pause. The priest took advantage of the interruption to steal another look at the three girls. Rosa and Victoria had fallen asleep on the floor next to the young girl, who had hunched up as small as she could behind the door. The comparison couldn’t be crueler. The two elder were two angels, two swans, two diamonds; as selfish and ill-mannered as they were, they could only be easily loved and forgiven. The young ugly girl could only be hated. Why, she was as ugly as a tadpole! She was a reptile! Who could be so brave as to say he loved such a miserable creature? Not even the most heroic man on this Earth.
The priest guessed, and guessed correctly, that not one I-love-you had ever been dedicated to the poor girl. She was repulsive.
Yet, someone had loved her once.
“Only the little brown pup seemed to care for her,” the mother said, “wagging his tail, barking friendlily whenever he saw her approaching. He used to do the same with my two other daughters, if they were willing to play, and he used a similar type of bark to demand food from me as he used to demand it from her, if he was hungry, but no one else could approach his plate without being growled at; no one else could hold him in her arms and rock him like a little baby without getting bitten.
“Was it because he knew she was his daughter? I cannot say. After his transformation his thoughts became the thoughts of a canine. Maybe his devotion was only instinctual. Maybe because he was the only one below her, he was the only one to whom this unfortunate dummy didn’t shrug and frown but offered instead a smile, an ugly smile of missing teeth and green snot running down her nostrils, but still a smile; maybe he found her pretty, without really being so. Maybe it was just because of that silly insistence of dogs to love anything that seems remotely human.”
The priest noticed that the face of the young girl had brightened up as the witch spoke about her father.
“Love needs no spoken words,” contends a sentimental. We agree. The dog loved the little girl; one can tell these things with dogs, can’t you? Love can be expressed with a wet nose and tail-wagging, without the need of words. And the young girl had always known he was her father. The mother never hid from her or from her sisters the facts of their origins. “Give this to your dad,” she would say, handing her a bone, and the little girl knew well that her mother referred not to the sot sleeping it off by the stove, but to the dog scratching fleas on the porch.
For the most part, the little girl was nice to him. You could have said she loved him back. Every now and then, she held him tight, especially if it was cold and she had been left outside by her sisters; so tight, the poor dog needed to fight his way out to breathe, but once the air returned to his lungs, he licked her face gaily.
Sometimes, she scratched his belly and blew a kiss on his snout, or she searched his coat for ticks, or let him chase her down the shore until they ended up rolling on the sand, laughing. Yet, at other sorrowful, unhappy times, the little girl tied a rusty wire around the dog’s neck for a leash, or she pinched him, or she poked him with a stick, or she pulled his ears badly, as if to tear them off his little body, just because, out of boredom, for nothing else but vileness and lack of compassion had been taught to her by her parents; more so when she was mad than when she was happy, because her sisters had been mean to her, because the drunkard that thought himself her father had dragged her out of the house by the hair, or because her mother had slapped her, or sent her to feed the pigs without breakfast, all of which happened pretty much every morning. The little girl dared not fight her sisters, who doubled her in size, and she wouldn’t talk back to her parents, who smacked her at the least provocation, offensive as her little person was, but she could well abuse the beast, and she did so often, even if the little brown pup had proven to be her only friend.
That is the way of the world. The one you love will hurt you most.
Still and all, no matter how much harm the little girl could do to the little dog, he curled up next to her at night and licked her tears and boogers off whenever she cried.
“Oh, yes,” the witch resumed her confession, “that little brown pup endured the unendurable, with no more complaint than a high yip where other pets growl and show their teeth, until one time when, resentful because her two sisters had gotten candy after Sunday mass and she, instead, had gotten a box in the back of her head, the stupid girl took a heavy stone and let it fall upon the little pup while he rested. Luckily he saw it coming and slipped out just before the stone could smash his skull, although he couldn’t move fast enough to pull away completely; the rock fell on one of his back legs, breaking the bone in two.
“My husband had grown fond of the dog and made a splint out of two pieces of wood to save his leg. He knew how to immobilize a limb because he had broken Victoria’s arm once and learned from watching the doctor work how to fix it. The bone didn’t heal properly, however, and the poor beast lost the ability to stretch his leg all the way down and step on it. He was never able to walk on all fours again. Even so, he didn’t seem to care for the little girl any less. He continued curling up close to her at night and licking her tears whenever she cried; he still chased her down the beach barking gaily as if nothing had happened, same as before. The only difference was that the little girl now had to run more slowly.
“After her harrowing attempt at murder, she occasionally yanked his ears or threw dirt in his water bowl, but she never tried to kill the