Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle

by Carlos Allende

  The change became so apparent that even her sisters had a few favorable comments: “You smell nice,” Rosa said, but with a scared look in her a face, as if suggesting the opposite.

  However, no matter how many creams she applied to her face or how many recipes she followed, no matter how hard she scrubbed her skin or how much water she drank, the mirror still returned the image of a sad, ill-favored little woman of indefinite mature age. A duller, if healthier version of her two crippled sisters, and not the ethereal, nineteen-year-old virgin she wished to be. For if our nameless little friend wished for one thing in this world, it no longer was to be rescued by a vampire and move to his magical castle, but to be young again. And to be beautiful. To be as young and beautiful as Miss Josie García.

  Mrs. Bell’s house on Park Avenue had four bedrooms, two stories, and a large backyard. The little woman barely had any time to catch her breath after the bike ride from Dr. Nishimura’s office. She had to do the dishes and clean the kitchen after the family’s breakfast, make the beds, organize the pantry, empty the kitten’s litter box, help Mr. Bell’s old mother in case she had had an accident, sweep the floors, and vacuum the carpets, all before a short break between twelve and one, during which she had to climb on her bike again and rush back home to prepare lunch for her sisters, then back to the Bells’ to rake the leaves outside, water the plants, do the laundry, etcetera. She was never done before five.

  Ms. Cummings lived in a tiny one-bedroom cottage, with a beagle for her only company; she did her own laundry. Normally, the little woman finished cleaning her house by one, but on Tuesdays she had to return by four and stay until seven, because Ms. Cummings, a Seventh-Day Baptist, had a Bible-reading circle every Tuesday afternoon, for which she needed the assistance of the little woman to make baloney sandwiches and serve tea for her guests, and on Thursdays, the godly woman volunteered at her church to spread the word of God door-to-door among the less fortunate families of Venice, and she needed the little woman’s help to carry a heavy box full of Bibles that she sold for twenty-five cents apiece.

  “I almost feel no pity for them,” Ms. Cummings said, more to herself than to her word-frugal helper, whenever they had to cover the streets inside the Oakwood Pentagon, a semi-rural, poverty-stricken black and Hispanic neighborhood in the northernmost part of Venice. “Unwed parents, with six or seven children living in a shack made of scrap lumber. What can you expect from people living like that with no dignity? They’re like animals!”

  They sure presented a curious sight, those two, patrolling the streets of Venice. Ms. Cummings was a tall, slender woman in her mid-fifties; plain, but with a face easy to distinguish among the crowd because of her undefiled whiteness and an ever-present smile, all teeth and gums, product not of an amiable disposition but of too big of a denture to fit a closed mouth. Next to her, short, plump, and dark, our little friend seemed as insignificant as an ant.

  Ms. Cummings wasn’t kind, to say the truth. She was harsh, economical in words, and trusted nobody. The little woman had been helping her for almost ten years now and still the spinster wouldn’t give her a key to her house. However, she always had good advice.

  “One must set her goals clearly,” the little woman heard the spinster say once, over the phone, to a friend of hers, Mrs. Tortellini. “Know what you want, Agnes. What you want and what you aspire to be. That’s all you need to know when you know nothing.”

  Mrs. Tortellini had called to ask what to do about her husband’s nocturnal escapades to town, but, the little woman thought, Ms. Cummings’ words applied to her too.

  She had a goal, the little woman thought, staring at the bottom of a pot she had been scrubbing. To be young again. And an aspiration. To be loved. Loved and praised. Loved and desired. Loved and protected. She wanted to sit on a chair outside her porch and watch a line of men begging for one word, one sight, one kiss. She wanted to have nice things: a silk robe, ostrich-feather house shoes, maybe a cigarette box made out of silver. She wanted to fall asleep in the arms of another person.

  When had she stopped dreaming that her godfather would come back for her? She couldn’t remember. Rosa and Victoria had laughed so hard when the man she used to call father told them that the only thing she got from her godfather’s visit was a letter of recommendation. “To become a servant,” he said, spitting food out of his mouth, his whole body trembling with laughter. But he had promised to come back, hadn’t he? She just needed to be patient. “I’ll tell you when he’s coming back,” Rosa used to tell her. “NEVER!” she added in unison with her sister.

  And yet, she had remained hopeful. All those years. Her sisters were just jealous. Victoria’s godfather had killed his wife and disappeared, never to be seen again. The fairy had sent the dress and taken Rosa to live with him for a year in England, but they never heard back from him after she returned. The little woman just needed to be patient. Millionaires have many affairs to attend to. She ought to work hard, to remain faithful. He would return. Not tomorrow, he even said so, but the following week or the week later.

  She had invented a game at Mrs. Green’s, she remembered, reaching for the steel wool to scrub the burnt parts on the pot, a game that she kept playing at all her other employers’ houses: the harder she scrubbed the tiles, the better she mopped the floors, the more potatoes she peeled, the sooner he would return. If he hadn’t returned yet, it was only her fault, because she wasn’t ready. The days in which she was the most tired, going uphill on her bike, when she was sick, when her bones ached, when it was cold, or scorching hot, when the hampers full of wet clothes were too heavy, the memory of her vampire godfather looking at her with those intense blue eyes sitting next to the drunkard was what kept her going.

  She didn’t play that game anymore. She hadn’t thought of the vampire in years; maybe in an entire decade. When was it? She turned on the faucet to rinse the pot. When did she stop dreaming of his return? When did she lose all hope of being rescued? When was the last time she imagined returning home to find her godfather sitting on the front steps, a flower bouquet in one hand and two train tickets to New York in the other? She couldn’t remember.

  “And what does it matter if she’s younger than you, Agnes?” Ms. Cummings raised her voice. “You’ve been married to that man for twenty years. He’s not going to leave his wife for a silly girl he just met… Have some confidence, Agnes, I know you’re not young, but what really matters is the inside!”

  That didn’t apply to her, the little woman reckoned. The burnt parts hadn’t come off. She kept on scrubbing. What fool could love her for her inside? She was rough and clumsy and slow-witted. She was rotten inside, her sisters said so repeatedly. And she wasn’t honest. Just the week before, Mrs. Bell had lost count and paid the little woman a dollar seventy-five cents more than she should have paid for the week, and the little woman had said nothing. She knew well what Mrs. Bell had done; she knew that she and her husband were tight with money; she knew that they were saving for their trip to Europe, but she hadn’t considered giving it back. She had spent it. On what? Body lotion. That hadn’t been honest. Who could be so stupid as to love her, the little woman espied her reflection on the clean casserole, when she was so ugly and so evil?

  “Are you done with the dishes?” Ms. Cummings asked, covering the receiver. The little woman nodded. “Then go start with the bathroom. The shelves need to be dusted.”

  The little woman grabbed a brush and a bucket from below the sink, and entered the bathroom.

  She didn’t like Ms. Cummings. She didn’t like Mrs. Bell either, or Dr. Nishimura’s wife. None of her employers, for that matter. They paid little and they demanded too much. And she was old. She was tired.

  Her sisters were evil too, she scrubbed the tiles. They pretended to be devout Christians, but they couldn’t fool anyone. They were selfish and rude. She poured ammonia inside the toilet bowl. That wasn’t Christian. They were lazy and too greedy
. They kept the money that the priest sent for her to play bingo. They had always been evil and mean to her. Ever since she could remember. No one cared for them now because they were old, but everyone used to love them. Men used to do all sorts of stupid things for them. They offered them money, they bought them expensive presents. In exchange for what? Nothing. Even she used to like them, when they were young. She used to do all sort of things for them, she wanted nothing else but to please them. Why? Because they were beautiful.

  She wished she could have the same.

  Everyone loved the girl too, because she was pretty. But she was a liar.

  “I’m broke,” Josie kept repeating. Of course she was, she had spent all of her money buying trinkets and paying for her drug addict boyfriend. “Can you tell your sisters to wait until next week?”

  The little woman flushed the toilet. Everyone took advantage of her. Everyone, all the time. Because she was old and ugly and stupid.

  Ordinarily she put the blame on herself. Ms. Cummings was right. She should have been working harder instead of spying on her private conversations. But today she was mad. She couldn’t help it. She felt deeply unappreciated. And sometimes, when she was mad, certain unpleasant thoughts crossed her little mind. Evil thoughts, thoughts that little old ladies shouldn’t have—to leave a burnt mark in her mistress’s blouse, to steal one of her silver spoons, to drown the baby that wouldn’t stop crying—but they still do, when they have the time, and busy as she was, shuffling things from one place to the other, sweeping, folding, washing and scrubbing, for almost fifty years now, she had had the time. What else could you occupy your mind with as you scrub the bathroom tiles on your knees or vacuum a carpet? What else could you entertain yourself with when days could pass before one person acknowledged your presence? Love is a privilege of the winsome. Hate and jealousy are natural to everyone else.

  It is common knowledge among practitioners of black magic that to acquire someone else’s mental or physical attributes, you must eat the flesh of that one person you admire.

  The Aztecs did it. They ate the extremities of their enemies after offering their hearts to their gods, and they made ferocious warriors. And isn’t it a major gesture of love, to feed oneself of the one we love? Italian mothers say to their babies: ti mangio di baci, I’ll eat you with kisses. An overly jealous lover wishes to be a blood sucking tick on his beloved’s shoulder.

  What is not so commonly known is the actual procedure. Baked or fried? Battered or breaded? In a blood pudding, or warm and fresh, directly from the body? How you can make yourself live eternally eating the thighs of strong men or drinking the blood of innocent damsels is not explained in easy-to-follow dinner recipes found in the newspaper’s Sunday edition, but a secret known only by the most powerful nigromancers. Our little friend’s education on the matter had been dramatically truncated at such an early stage that she had no idea where to begin.

  She had to eat the girl in order to steal her youth; that much she knew. Whether she had to devour her completely or in part, and how she was supposed to fix this meal, she didn’t know. If it was as simple as to kill, pluck, broil, and garnish, she would have done it long before.

  “Do you mind helping me rat my hair up?” Josie asked her that night at home. “I want to look stunning tonight, for Russell.”

  Would she need a full leg? The little woman wondered, standing on her toes so she could brush the girl’s hair all the way up. Perhaps she only needed a lock of her hair and a few drops of blood to perform the incantation. She could start with a wisp of hairs stolen from her hairbrush. But what to do with them? Add them to a soup or spread them over a piece of toast and have it with butter? If only she had a familiar. She could have asked him directly for the recipe.

  She knew so little about nigromancy! To summon a demon is not as simple a task as it sounds. You cannot simply invoke the name of a demon and expect him to arrive in a cloud of smoke and start chatting. One must perform an incantation. One has to draw certain circles, to recite certain words, half of them backwards, half of them in Latin, and when your education in the dark arts has been so abruptly and tragically interrupted as hers had been, you do not know what those words and those circles are.

  Our little friend was a splendid maid, but in her sixty-something years of life she hadn’t made more of a hex than that one time when she peed on their neighbor’s roof to kill his son with measles, and that because her mother had been there to explain to her when to crouch and what grisly thing to say to offend God and the realm of Christendom. Alone she couldn’t have done anything.

  Her sisters had talent. They could foresee the future, couldn’t they? But they were scared and had lost all interest in practicing magic.

  She didn’t have any natural talent. Unlike her sisters, though, she had every incentive in learning how to become one with the Devil. She wanted someone to love her.

  One must set her goals clearly.

  The first step was to put her thoughts in order. She wanted men to bring flowers and candy to her door. She wanted a husband. She wanted a baby. She wanted jewels and gifts and whatnots. No man would love her the way she was. Hence, she needed to be young again. And to be beautiful. As young and beautiful as Josie García.

  Using the girl’s pen, she sat at the dining table and wrote down those words on a piece of paper. Just below, she wrote a one word question: how? And then an answer: the Little Master will tell me.

  She needed the assistance of the Devil, no question. A witch cannot perform an effect of magic but through intimate cooperation with her master. But did it have to be him, or could it be any demon? To invoke the name of that who-must-not-be-named-lightly seemed ambitious. She scratched the word “the” and wrote an “a” in its place. A Little Master.

  That was as much as she knew.

  How in the world was she going to summon a demon? She asked herself that question day and night, night and day, while she rode her bike, while she swept the steps of the church, while she plumped the cushions and organized the magazines at Dr. Nishimura’s office. It became an obsession.

  Maybe she could just kill the girl, bathe in her blood and see what happened. Would that be necessary? She liked her, despite her lying. Josie was the only person that talked to her as if she existed. She was the closest thing to having a friend.

  She looked back at her piece of paper. How? She retraced each letter in that word and then underlined it.

  She dug her nails into her scalp. She was so angry at herself. She should have asked herself those questions years before. She had spent all those years doing nothing, waiting for a godfather that never came, knitting doilies, tending for a drunk then for her two selfish sisters, fattening stray mutts that reminded her of her real father.

  A putrid smell made her turn to the sack of fleas, sleeping under the dining table. Her dog Cautious stood up, disconcerted by the potency of his own fart, and left the house.

  Josie was but her latest whim. Before her, it had been a young girl she saw every morning at a bus stop on her way to the market; before her, a patient at Dr. Nishimura’s office; before her, Mrs. Bell’s eldest daughter; before her, Mrs. Bell, when she was still Miss Huber; and before her, Mrs. Green, her first employer. She still remembered the rustling noise of her skirts and her smell of fresh jasmine. But it wasn’t until Miss García moved into her sisters’ house that the little woman started wondering how to earn back the Devil’s trust. Josie was a constant reminder of what life had denied her.

  If not the solution, soon she found the way that led to solution: the printed word. She had been standing before Mr. Bell’s tall bookcases, her mouth wide open, wondering how she was going to reach the upper shelves, when Mr. Bell said, taking her gesture for awe by the vast number of volumes: “Books contain the answers to all of life’s puzzles.”

  His supercilious words had been inspired more by a sudden whim to impress a fool with a
sharp-sounding remark than by a true desire to share knowledge; nonetheless Mr. Bell was absolutely right. Isn’t a book written almost three thousand years ago more truthful and exact than modern-day research and experimentation? Most people she knew were convinced so, especially Ms. Cummings. Isn’t the absolute truth, the beginning and the end, already written? Her two sisters insisted so during their psychic sessions.

  Mr. Bell wouldn’t let her borrow any of his books, but she had a library card. She started reading. Anything she could find about witches, demonology, and magic. Anything, including anthologies and novellas—entire books, complete from the foreword to the index, cover to cover.

  “It is never too late to read a book and start learning,” Dr. Nishimura said, when he caught her browsing through an anatomy book in his office.

  She found nothing. Not one recipe for a charm that truly worked. Not one phrase that successfully explained how to become an instrument of harm through the Devil. Nothing. Until she started reading the books that Ms. Cummings told the attendees of her Bible-reading circle of every Tuesday not to read, and in the manner she warned them especially not to…

  The truth had always been there. Hidden between the lines of these forbidden tomes. All the demonic codes, all the verses that you must recite, the full rituals, tucked away between ordinary words, concealed to the eyes of the uninitiated. It was not so much about finding the right books but about finding the way to read them properly; what lines to skip, what words to underline, how to count the letters, how to read the unreadable in the texts of otherwise unsuspecting writers. Baptists are known to have an extraordinary ability to find evil where there is none apparently, and our little friend had been present at Ms. Cummings’ lessons of morality for almost a decade now, enough time to learn about disguised evil.