Читать книгу Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle - Carlos Allende - Страница 11

6

In which the two eldest sisters move to the city

Oh despair! Oh misfortune! When the witch’s husband returned to the house the next morning, he was hit by the smell of marigolds and burning candles. He entered the house and saw the long faces of the three girls, his in-laws, and his neighbors all standing against the wall, and the body of his wife set on the dining table, dressed in her wedding gown, surrounded by flowers. He fell on his knees, asking for forgiveness.

“Why, oh Lord! Why did you have to take her?”

Cries, whimpers, and sorrow!

Everyone stepped aside. The drunkard reeked of beer and urine. He fooled none of the mourners in the room, not the way his wife had for all those years.

Someone whispered into the ear of another: “Poor Antonia! Married to this awful man who did not deserve her! What will become of the poor girls?”

“The two elder will end up in the streets, you’ll see. Selling their bodies.”

The first elbowed the second. Rosa had overheard them.

“You must be strong. For your daughters,” a kinder soul said to the drunkard.

“I’ll find a job,” the man announced, standing tall among the mourners. “I’ll become a gondolier and I’ll provide for them! I’ll give them everything they never had, to honor my wife’s memory.”

Rosa and Victoria bobbed their heads, extolling his decision.

“We’ll be good girls, too,” they said, with mournful faces.

“We’ll be kinder to each other, and to our youngest sister.”

“We’ll attend Church every Sunday. We’ll never fail, we promise.”

Hard to believe, but they meant it. Their mother’s death had been quite a traumatic experience. In particular, the brutish way in which the house familiar had tried to sequester her to the netherworld had frightened them immensely.

“We will never again attend the Sabbath,” Victoria hissed to her sister.

Rosa nodded.

“We will abandon the study of dark magic,” Victoria continued, making sure no one could hear them. “We will break our vows of fidelity with the Dark Lord and start over.”

“But we’re his wives.”

“We’ll get an annulment.”

After the funeral the priest had a private word with the drunkard and warned him about the peril in which the three girls were, without the guidance of a loving mother. With tears in his eyes, the man repeated the promises he had made before and the priest left the house with the satisfaction that after the tragedy, there was still hope for the family.

But hours later the man was drunk again, sleeping it off by their front door. The young girl attempted to wake him up and get him to go sit with them for dinner. He responded by throwing a punch to her nose.

“We can’t stay here,” Victoria cried from the table, aghast.

“He’ll never get a job,” Rosa responded.

“He’ll ruin our chances to marry.”

“We’ll end up selling ourselves on the streets to survive.”

Victoria sank her face into her hands and started crying.

“I know what we should do,” Rosa said. “We should write to our godparents!” The idea had just occurred to her. “Aren’t godparents supposed to take care of helpless orphans? We will ask them to take us in. We’ve been far too seen in Venice. I’ll move to England, with the fairy, and you’ll move to Los Angeles, with Harris. And—” she interrupted herself, as she and her sister usually did before referring to their little sister, “she could move to wherever the vampire lives, if he takes her—which I very much doubt. Who in the world would want her?”

“The vampire lives in New York.”

The young girl, sitting on the opposite side of the table holding a glass full of cold water against her swollen nose, raised her head. She knew nothing about her godfather.

“New York?” Rosa asked, intrigued. “That cannot be better than living in a castle, can it? My godfather is a fairy from Gloucestershire. What do you think?”

“Not a terrible idea,” Victoria said. “Harris is quite handsome.”

“Looks aren’t everything, sister. I pity you. A werewolf living in an apartment.” Rosa served herself some more soup. “Don’t take me wrong, I like Harris and all. I do think he’s handsome. But my godfather lives in a brugh. That’s Gaelic, for castle. The furniture is all velvet and gold. The walls are mother of pearl. The doorknobs are made of diamonds. And he’s almost two thousand years old. You can’t compare.”

Victoria replied with the condescending tone that elder sisters love to use: “In comparison, yes, Harris is poor. The fairy is the wisest and the most powerful. You are right. But the richest of all our godfathers is hers,” she used her spoon to point at her youngest sister. “The richest one is the vampire.”

The young girl gasped in surprise. She put down the glass of cold water. The man who had presented her at baptism was a vampire; that’s all she had ever known. He lives in New York? And he’s rich? Richer than the English fairy? These things were unbeknownst to her. How could she have a godfather if she didn’t have a name?

“That cannot be,” Rosa retorted, pretending to laugh. “My godfather lives in a beautiful castle built on the roots of a sycamore tree.”

“Yes, with the walls made of mother of pearl and doorknobs made out of diamonds,” Victoria continued. “But dust of diamonds. His brugh is a small hole in somebody’s yard. The dome of his grand salon is the shell of an acorn. The tapestries on its walls were loomed with the barbs of just one feather. You’d be living all curled up, exposed to the elements, for nothing larger than the tip of your little toe could fit inside his teeny little castle. If I remember well, the vampire lives in a life-size mansion.”

“He cannot be richer than a fairy, can he?” Rosa squealed.

He couldn’t, the young girl agreed. Fairies had more money than the pope in Rome. Why would a rich and powerful vampire care to present her at baptism? Perhaps he wasn’t a true vampire but a goblin.

“But he is,” Victoria replied. She took another spoonful of her soup. “He is immensely rich. He is a member of the aristocracy. He was born many centuries ago, in the old continent, and made his fortune marrying mortal princesses. He has so many nobility titles that his full name takes an entire page of his passport.”

“How do you know that?” Rosa shrieked.

“Mamá told me,” Victoria responded with a straight face.

“No!” Rosa cried. Her face had turned red and tears threatened to roll down her cheeks. “My godfather is the richest and the most powerful of the three. You stupid hag. You’re just saying this to hurt me! My godfather is an English fairy, for God’s sake! A fairy! His name is Gillespie Oakenforest, and he lives in a brugh with walls of gold and mother of pearl in Gloucestershire. He has an army of magical servants! One of his wives is related to the king!”

“Is she?” Victoria asked, feigning surprise.

“She is a distant cousin of King Edward.”

“King Edward?” Victoria repeated. “If that’s so, she must be very short. When was the last time you saw him, sister? I’ve never met him. Has he ever come visit us? Harris has. At least a few times. We went to his wedding.”

At this, Rosa threw her spoon at her sister, but she failed. Victoria reached over the table and smacked Rosa on the nose with her full palm.

Rosa covered her face with her hands, sobbing quietly. She had a good reason to cry, other than getting boxed. Her sister was right; in sixteen years, Mr. Oakenforest had never visited or even sent so much as a postcard.

“You are just one among hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of godchildren that Lord Oakenforest has,” Victoria explained, at this point truly pitying her sister. “Mamá wanted the best for us, and that’s why she asked him to be your godfather. He just happened to be in our garden the day they met. You are not that special. That, on the other hand,” Victoria pointed again to her youngest sister, “may inherit millions.”

The young girl almost fainted.

“Millions?” Rosa repeated twitching her face.

“The vampire does not have any children.”

They started their letters: Rosa and Victoria on beautiful stationery that they bought especially for that purpose; our nameless girl on the back of an old receipt.

To whom should she address the letter? The young girl wondered. She didn’t know her godfather’s name. She didn’t know anything but what Victoria had said at the table. Too afraid to ask, she simply wrote “To HRH The Vampire, My Godfather.”

And what should she say to him? Please take me with you sounded too desperate, but that’s exactly what she wanted to say. Take me away from this family, away from all their mistreatment, away from the yelling, the beating, the insults, the taunting, the mockeries, and the derisions; away from the hard days of doing chores cleaning up after her sisters, away from the ridicule of the freak show, away from everywhere. But why would he? Vampires aren’t particularly fond of ugly little girls, are they? She decided to write the facts as they were, without adornment. Mamá died, she wrote, and now my sisters and I are practically alone in this world, for the man we call father is an irresponsible drunk unable to provide. She scratched irresponsible. Then she scratched drunk.

She thought she could finalize with a request to move in with him. But what if the vampire thought that she was only contacting him because of his money? She couldn’t be that direct. He might take offense and decide not to respond to her letter. She wrote instead that she would love to hear from him, and that if he had the time, he should visit. I know how to bake a delicious pineapple upside down cake, she wrote. If you ever come to Venice, I can bake one for you to try.

That would do. Letting him know that she existed was sufficient. Vampires aren’t stupid. He would guess what a terrible existence she had and send for her.

Since she had no name herself, she signed with an X. If nothing else, the sender’s address would tell her godfather who the letter was from.

Finally, because she didn’t know where to send it, the young girl simply wrote New York on the envelope. Vampires live in secret, she reckoned, so it would be poor taste to write that title on the envelope. She gave the letter to Rosa in hopes that she would know where to send it.

“I know where he lives,” Rosa responded. “But I doubt he will respond.”

Two days later, a package appeared at their door with Rosa’s name written in fancy red letters. Inside, the sisters found a magnificent dress made of spider silk with thousands of fly wings embroidered with golden stitches. There was nothing else in the box—no card and no letter—but they knew instantly it could only be a gift from the English fairy. Only he could have responded that fast and send such an expensive present. The dress shone as bright as if the fabric had been spun out of moonbeams. It was the most beautiful garment they had ever laid their eyes on, and so light that if you threw it into the air, it took a full ten minutes for it to float down and hit the ground.

Rosa immediately tried on the dress, announcing to her sisters that maybe it would magically transport her to her godfather’s castle. It didn’t, and that was a true disappointment. The three girls knew well what the gift meant: a polite and awfully expensive way to say no, I cannot bring you into my tiny castle.

Hence, Rosa lied. She closed her eyes and reopened them a second later: “My!” she exclaimed. “It feels good to be back home after having spent an entire year at my godfather’s castle!”

Victoria and the nameless young girl exchanged a look of incredulity.

“My dearest sisters,” Rosa continued with an affected tone, “I am so happy to see you! Especially you, Victoria. You haven’t changed one bit in all these months. I’m so terribly happy to be back, but so seriously tired too, for I spent most of that time attending elegant balls and hunting. Do pull up a chair for me to sit on, darling,” she begged her youngest sister. The young girl did as requested.

“I have so much to tell,” Rosa continued, sitting down. “I witnessed so many riches and talked to so many elegant ladies at my godfather’s brugh—the silk, the rubies and diamonds! But first, my dearest, you need to bring me up to date. What has happened during my twelve-month absence? How’s that awful man we call father? Is he still alive? Did you ever got a response from your godfathers?”

Victoria replied that nothing had happened, that she had never left the room.

“Wonder of wonders,” was Rosa’s response. “Magically transported to and from my godfather’s brugh in an instant. An entire year in Albion in less than one second. Bloody bollocks,” she added, trying to sound British. “Cockles and mussels, Virgin of Brighton, isn’t that proof of Lord Oakenforest’s infinite power?”

Victoria didn’t, but everyone else bought her nonsense.

“Why did he send you back?” their friends at the Boardwalk asked.

“I chose to come back. I missed you girls terribly.”

“Did you go to London?” asked O’Leary.

“A few times. And every time the weather was rubbish.”

In any case, what a gorgeous, beautiful sight it was to see Rosa wearing that dress! Victoria laughed when she saw her dancing, and not with the bitter sneer common to antagonistic sisters, but truly content at Rosa’s gaiety.

Even the drunkard had a compliment for her. “You look nice,” he said. “You remind me of the Blessed Virgin.”

The young girl yipped in delight every time she saw Rosa standing against the afternoon light coming through the window. She truly looked like a Marian apparition, the young girl thought, feeling happy for her sister, especially now that Rosa referred to her no longer as a stinky ass but as a “dahling.” “Dahling” here and “dahling” there; Rosa still treated her like a servant, but it was nice to be given orders in a sweeter tone, accompanied with an affected “please” and followed afterwards by a “thank you.” Maybe she too would receive a dress like that sometime soon, the young girl dared to think. Maybe she too would be magically transported to New York in an instant. But, no, she wouldn’t come back. Not for the love of nothing. Not after one year, not after twenty. Not to this horrible house and not to this city. Not ever. Wonder of wonders, she kept repeating to herself, examining up close the fine embroidery in her sister’s dress but not too close as to actually touch it. She only needed to be patient.

Rosa forwent mourning attire and wore the dress every day and every night for a full ten days. She became the best dressed debutante in Venice; the most photographed, and the most solicited. Alas, the dress was so delicate it tore apart on the eleventh day, when she tried to wash it—more tears, more fists thrown into the air, and more heartbreaking drama!

Thank God she had not been appointed with the task to wash it, the young girl thought with horror. Rosa would have killed her.

A few days later, they received a telegram from Harris: “‘Magnolia and I delighted to have you,’” Victoria read aloud. “‘Rosa welcome too.’”

Anticipating that the fairy may not give a favorable response to her sister, Victoria had asked her godparents to also take Rosa.

“We fight, but we are the best of friends too, aren’t we? It would break my heart to live away from you. I wouldn’t wait a year to come back if I couldn’t take you. I wouldn’t ever leave if it was without my favorite sister.”

Rosa was stupefied. She would have preferred to move to England, of course, and Venice was still fun—the beach, the rides, the dance halls and the gaming houses—but it couldn’t compare to the thrill of living in the burgeoning city of Los Angeles, “a city of over three hundred thousand,” Victoria said, “a size commendable enough to justify our presence.”

Rosa begged for a tissue to clean up her nose. She was moved.

“Magnolia is a bore,” Victoria continued, “but Harris is a lot of fun. What do we have to lose? We’ve worn out all our welcomes in Venice. In the city, we will be incredibly happy!”

What other choice she had? Rosa said yes.

They obtained their father’s permission—it took only one trip to the liquor store—under the condition that the youngest would stay behind to take care of him and of the house.

“But she wasn’t invited,” the girls laughed.

They packed their bags, said good-bye to a few friends and acquaintances, and that same afternoon they took the Red Car to Los Angeles.

In little over an hour the two of them were trudging up the hill on Olive Street, singing Christmas carols (in mid-September!) and congratulating each other on their good fortune.

“We’ll go to the theatre every day,” Rosa commented, admiring the majesty of the high rises along their way.

“And to the opera,” Victoria stroked a column made of alabaster with the tip of her fingers.

“And to the shops on Broadway.”

Back then Bunker Hill was a petit paradis, a Mount Olympus on the outskirts of the city, full of tall apartment buildings, houses with intricate window frames, turrets, steep pitched roofs, and dainty rose gardens, all less than a five minute walk away from Central Park (today’s Pershing Square), a more suitable place, the two sisters reckoned, than Windward Avenue or the Boardwalk to trap a husband.

“I’m going to marry a millionaire,” said Rosa.

Why wouldn’t she? Los Angeles was full of millionaires!

“So will I,” replied Victoria.

“I will marry first, though. My husband and I will live in a two-story house with a grand salon and a piano.”

“We’ll have to be good,” Victoria reminded her sister one last time before they knocked the door.

“Of course.”

“Amenable,” Victoria adjusted her skirt. “Courteous—” she pinched her and her sister’s cheeks to make them look healthier. “And well mannered.”

“We’ll be so happy!”

“Happier that we ever were at the beach.”

“Happier than we would have ever been doing witchcraft.”

They had done one last thing before they left Venice that afternoon, their little sister found out when she entered to clean their bedroom: They had gotten rid of all their magic supplies: the dolls, the rusty knives, the books of incantations. Everything was gone. Everything the young girl had hoped to inherit. She ran downstairs to search in the mother’s closet. All of her notes, all of her potions, they had left nothing behind but a few worthless items.

“Welcome!” Harris hollered from the second floor window. “Welcome to Los Angeles,” he repeated one minute later, opening the downstairs door and lifting up both girls at the same time.

My, Harris was handsome! A well trimmed beard, a curled mustache, and just the right amount of hair coming out from his chest and arms to make a lady tremble, victim of her own lustful imagination.

He put the girls down and kissed both of them twice on the cheeks. He had the manners of a French gentleman and the build of an Irish boxer.

Magnolia came down, too. A comely face, but plain in comparison. She kissed the girls and then her husband, who immediately repaid her with another kiss. Victoria let out a few tears.

The apartment was smaller than the girls remembered it, but quite comfortable and equipped with all sorts of modern appliances: electricity and central heating, hot and cold running water; even a telephone line.

Magnolia showed the girls to their room. Small, too, and they would have to share a bed, but it had a magnificent view of downtown and the river.

“How do you like it?” Harris asked.

“It is beautiful!” the girls cried at once.

“We are so thankful!”

“We are not used to such kindness.”

“Our parents always gave the best things to our little sister. For us, there were only beatings.”

After supper the four of them went for an ice cream, and then for a long stroll downtown. It was a warm night, perfumed—how appropriately!—by the monkshoods and the sweet magnolias in the park. There were many good-looking families outside, but theirs, the girls decided, was the happiest and the best looking. Especially because of Harris. He drew everyone’s attention, but he only had eyes for his wife, and Magnolia had eyes for no one else but her husband. They called each other ridiculous names: My Dove, My Angel, and every time their eyes met, they winked at each other or blew a kiss.

“Pay attention, for this is what true love looks like,” Victoria said to her sister. “We need to find each other a husband. One just like Harris.”

Rosa opened her mouth to remind her sister that they were already married—to the Devil; but then she remembered that they had agreed not to ever talk about that, so she remained silent.

“We need to pray,” Victoria continued, guessing what her sister had left unsaid. “Every day. And to be good. So we can be forgiven.”

In Venice, their youngest sister sought refuge in prayer, too. What else could she have done? She knew well that she was evil, her mother had never let her believe otherwise. The gates of Heaven wouldn’t open for her, especially not after what she had done to her poor mother’s curtains, unless she repented. Those curtains were not the type you want your children to play with, not with their chubby, greasy, messy fingers. Burning inside a pit of pitch for all eternity sounded worse than what she had already endured during her first decade on this Earth, although she was no more afraid of the goat coming back for her than, say, her putative father coming home behind the cork every evening. Thankfully, he was getting older, and the older he got, the weaker, and the less abusive.

She went to church every Sunday, and continued working at the freak show, folding her small body inside a box, pretending to be a human spider. The drunkard never got a job, and with her mother and sisters gone, the young girl became the household’s sole provider.

She didn’t do too badly. Tourists felt pity for her and left as many tips in her box as for the sword swallower. However, she couldn’t save much of what she earned, for she had to send a monthly stipend to her two sisters. It would be quite unfair for poor Harris to have to take care of all our expenses, Rosa wrote her. Hence, insofar as money, there was never too much, just enough for some bread and coffee, sometimes sugar, and for her father’s medicine: a bottle of the strongest liquor.

One afternoon, a year or so after the mother’s passing, the young girl was in the kitchen washing dishes while the man she called father napped in the living room when she heard someone knocking on the front door. She crossed the room to open the door but found no one. When she turned around, she saw a well-upholstered gentleman, elegantly dressed, sitting next to the drunkard. The stranger grinned at her and waved hello with a heavily jeweled hand. The young girl curtsied and then, too shy to do anything else, rushed out of the living room back to the kitchen.

The man was her godfather.

She knew well it was him because after her sisters had left she had found a newspaper scrap with his picture inside her mother’s bureau drawers. Why else would her mother keep a picture of a rich man living in New York if the man wasn’t her godfather? The picture was from 1903, but he looked exactly the same as he did in that old photograph; not one single hair was different: a handsome, middle aged man; rather stout, but graceful in his movements—if that’s a quality that could be guessed from a smirk in a picture.

The young girl’s heart pounded so fast that she almost fainted. Leading a sad existence didn’t mean she had no faith in a better future. All those months, the hope that her godfather would come to her rescue had grown inside her mangled little heart like a tree growing from a seed that had fallen between cracks of pavement. Harris and his wife had taken her two elder sisters to live with them. The fairy had sent that magnificent dress made of spider silk. Why, if her mean sisters’ godfathers had proved to be so generous, would hers be the exception?

He would come for her one day. She had dreamed of it. He would show up in a silver carriage pulled by eight horses and he would take her to a palace built of white marble. He would invite her to live with him. They would have a ball, every night, and she would invite her sisters to live with them too, and they wouldn’t be mean to her; they would actually be quite pleasant, impressed by the luxury of her new home and her newly acquired refinements. And on her wedding day, to some handsome prince from an exotic, faraway land, her godfather would walk her down the aisle and give her his blessing. Or maybe he would be the one to marry her—could you marry your own godfather? If you could, she would say yes, yes, I do, by all means, I love you and I want to be your wife and I will give you a dozen babies. All of them would survive, she thought, she wouldn’t kill any, like her mother had, and they would live happily ever after…

After finding the photograph she had managed to piece some more facts together. The vampire lived between London and New York, but he had property in Southern California. He was an important man in both the realms of the dead and the living, with plenty of power and money. His name appeared often in the newspapers, attending some charity ball or the inauguration of a bank or a new factory.

And now he was here, sitting in her living room, wearing a tweed suit and a Panama hat, next to the man she called father. What else could he be here for if not to take with him his goddaughter?

She pushed the kitchen door ajar and peeked into the living room.

“My dear friend, let bygones be bygones,” she heard the vampire comfort the drunkard. “You were a better husband than I was ever a friend to your wife.”

“Me?” the drunkard asked. He was barefoot, wearing red flannel long johns. He looked groggy, annoyed by the unexpected visitor, but, as it happens with friends of wine and spirits, the urge to share his pain was bigger in him than his lack of trust in strangers.

“I never visited, did I?” the vampire asked. “I kept promising Antonia I would, but I never came. Anyhow,” he waved his hand, as if trying to dispel a bad thought, “about my cheeky goddaughter—”

My goddaughter, he said? The legs of the young girl softened as if made out of butter.

“What about her?” the man asked.

“Her future, of which”—the vampire rolled his eyes and giggled coyly—“I am doubtlessly responsible. I was hoping you would consider…”

He stopped talking. The young girl had pushed the door an inch further, making the hinges squeak.

“What’s going on in there?” the father asked.

The young girl closed the door. Her father was angry. And when he got angry, he got violent. And when he got violent… She had to hide! Where? As soon as the vampire left, the drunkard would grab a shoe and… But, no—her godfather had come to get her! She had just heard it! He was not going to let the man beat her. She felt a pain in her chest. Happiness hurts! she reckoned. She held to the stove to avoid collapsing. What should she do now? Wait? Step out and give him a thousand kisses? Wash his feet with her tears and promise to be ever grateful? She had waited for so long, but she couldn’t wait any longer! It would be better to start packing. She needed a sack, maybe her mother’s old suitcase. But—what to pack? She had nothing! The dress and the shoes she was wearing, a change of underwear she had inherited from Victoria, and a blue apron. She grabbed the latter from inside a drawer. Her second change of knickers was hanging from the line in the backyard. No need for luggage, she could wear both. She put on the apron, stepped out through the back door, pulled down the wet underpants and slipped her legs inside. They felt cold. But they would dry in a few hours. Now, maybe she could take one of her mother’s dresses as well; Daddy would have no use for them now… Maybe she could enter the room through the window, go through her stuff, step out and then get back in the kitchen… But how foolish of her—she wouldn’t need them! Not in her godfather’s mansion! Or did he live in a palace? Most probably he had a trunk full of freshly laundered clothes waiting for her. She needed stockings though, for the trip. She wouldn’t want the maids of her godfather’s palace to think she couldn’t afford good stockings, they would lose all respect for her and then she wouldn’t be able to give them orders…

The drunkard entered the kitchen.

“What the hell are you doing there?”

The young girl’s first reaction was to try to escape. She turned around to the alley.

“Your godfather wants to talk to you.”

He does? The young girl’s face brightened. She dashed into the living room.

The vampire waited for her with an ear to ear smile. “Sit down,” he patted the armrest of his chair. “How old are you, girl? Eleven?”

“The devil knows,” the drunkard responded in her place. “Fourteen—fifteen? I can’t remember.”

The young girl nodded.

“You look younger,” the vampire let go a silly laugh. “Fifteen, huh? That makes me—how old are her sisters now?”

“Rosa is seventeen now; Victoria will be nineteen in November.”

“Nineteen? My goodness!” The vampire made a brief pause. His expression turned glum, remembering events from another era. “How do twenty years pass by so fast?” He put a hand on his chest. “That’s how long ago I met your mother. She was expecting your oldest sister. Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked the girl.

Boyfriend? The girl started as if she had been asked if she had ever killed a man. She shook her head rapidly.

“She is not the marrying type, sir,” the drunkard intervened. “She comes back from work and takes care of her old Pa. That’s it. Her sisters—those are the pretty ones. Victoria looks like an angel and my Rosa, gee, she used to drive mad all the boys in Venice.”

“There’s a lid for every pot,” the vampire replied coldly. “Anyway,” he turned to the girl with a kittenish tone, “you know who I am, don’t you? I am your godfather.” His eyes had such an intense shine that the girl couldn’t look at them directly. “Your mother and I were close friends—so terribly close that she put a curse on me. I know that wherever she is, Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, she worries about you and your sisters. She would have liked that you had a better life than she had. That you grew to be a successful woman.”

He paused, then turned to his right, as if interested to see the effect that his words caused in the drunkard, but the man seemed to be dozing off.

“I know that you’re working right now, that you’re an attraction at the House of Freaks and World Marvels on the boardwalk. That’s not the best place for a young girl, I think. Then again, there is nothing to be embarrassed about it. I grew up poor too, many, many years ago. Knock on wood—I don’t like poor people,” he stole a glance from the drunkard. “I’m so disgustingly rich now,” he chuckled, “I wouldn’t know what to do if I ever had to use a pitchfork again. Anyhow, it’s not that you’re selling yourself on the streets for a few dollars, is it? Being an attraction in a freak show may not be the best place to be, but it’s honest. What I mean to say is that I’ve been thinking about you. As your godfather, it is my responsibility to look after you. I came here to—how should I phrase it? I have a proposal…”

The young girl raised her head and looked at his eyes directly, about to explode in tears of gratitude.

“Are you happy doing what you do?”

The girl shook her head.

“How would you like to leave the show and start over? I got your letter—written on the back of a store receipt, how charming,” he smiled bitterly. “I was touched by your situation. I thought that I needed to do something for you. Anything, but to take you away from your poor, aging father. So I wrote you a letter of recommendation to a friend of mine, Mrs. Lydia Green.” He pulled an envelope out of his jacket and offered it to the young girl. “You’re going to start a career cleaning houses. Won’t that be fantastic?”

The young girl didn’t move.

“Lydia’s husband works at the accounting offices at the Kinney Pier,” the vampire continued. “She needs help—she’s very young, just a couple of years older than you, I think. They recently moved to Venice and she has absolutely zero experience of how to manage a house; nada de nada. She’s overwhelmed by the responsibilities of managing a house all by herself in a strange city. You would be a perfect fit for the couple. You keep this place very clean. I’m astonished. I thought Mexicans were all dirty—it would be just once or twice a week, but once there, it will be easy for you to find a second or a third job in other houses.”

The young girl remained still.

“You’re welcome,” the vampire said after a moment, attempting to hide his disappointment at the girl’s lack of enthusiasm.

The vampire exchanged a look with the father.

“It is very generous of you, sir,” the drunkard spoke, taking the envelope from the hands of the young girl.

“Don’t even mention it. What else can one do?” the vampire asked, staring at the young girl like one might stare at milk one suspects has gone rancid. “My recommendation will open the doors of all the best houses in Venice for your daughter—my, what time is it?” he interrupted himself. “It is late, isn’t it? Is it already midnight?”

“It’s not yet seven.”

“My goodness, already seven? Time flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it? And I’ve had more than plenty. Where’s the entrance?” He glanced around. “It is a shame that you don’t live in New York. I could take you to all these fabulous parties—you wouldn’t have time to clean at all! People are so selfish; they expect me to go to their parties. I shouldn’t, but I don’t have the heart to say no. People take advantage of me all the time—you have no idea what it is like! Now, promise me you will go and see Lydia.”

The young girl couldn’t answer. She had turned into a marble sculpture. It felt as if an invisible hand had torn her chest open and squeezed her heart like a lemon.

“She will go,” the drunkard raised the envelope. “We need the money.”

“Excellent!” the vampire responded. “I must go now. I’ll visit again, I promise. Tomorrow is not a good day for me, but next week, or the next, at the latest. I will return, I promise. Where is the exit?” The vampire turned his head from one side to the other.

The drunkard pointed to the front door and the vampire hurried out of the house without further ado.

“That’s a relief,” the drunkard scratched his groin. “For a moment I thought that that fudge-packer clown was coming to get you.”

If life gives you lemons, you should make lemon juice—and hope one day for sugar. The young girl took the letter to Mrs. Lydia Green, and, as her godfather had told her, Mrs. Green hired her immediately.

“I am so grateful Mr. Wehr sent you, Miss Rivera,” the young wife said, addressing the young girl by the name that her godfather had used for her in the letter, the mother’s maiden name. She took her to the kitchen and pointed to a bunch of unpacked boxes. “A few things broke during the move,” she added guiltily.

The young girl spent the day arranging the kitchen cupboards and folding linens. Then she prepared dinner. Mrs. Green’s gratitude was immense. In a day, the young girl achieved what she hadn’t been able to do in weeks. She did not know how to cook, the young woman confessed, and had been feeding Mr. Green with cold meats and pickles.

“My mother says that if I don’t learn how to cook a decent meal, Athanase will get tired and leave me.”

Her appreciation felt the greatest because Lydia Green was one of the most beautiful women the young girl had ever seen: black hair, pale skin, eyes to inspire a sonnet; the young girl had grown to think that all beautiful women were evil. How could Mrs. Green not detest her? However, she remained silent. She did not know how to respond to Mrs. Green’s kindness other than to remain still, awaiting her next order. Sadly, her silence struck Mrs. Green as insolence. Who did this ugly little girl think she was to judge her? the young wife began to wonder, and by the end of the day she stopped being solicitous.

Still, she couldn’t hide her enthusiasm for having found help from her husband.

“I found a servant,” she announced the moment that Mr. Green opened the door that night.

“You did?” Mr. Green asked in reply, dropping his hat and his suitcase on the floor, then lifting up his wife in a hug and giving her a resounding kiss.

What a wonderful man, the young girl thought, spying on the couple from the kitchen. Tall and strong, not at all like an accountant, but more like one of those aerialists she had seen walking on tightropes at the boardwalk.

“She’s going to help me become a better wife for you.”

“But you already are the best wife in the world!” Mr. Green replied, without looking around to confirm if the house was clean. “I love you so much, I’m going to squeeze you!”

And his wife was so beautiful! Mrs. Green couldn’t cook, mend clothes, or do laundry. She didn’t really have any talent. But her skin was so even, her teeth were so white! Our little friend spent many days scrubbing her own so hard, trying to attain the same whiteness, until she made her gums bleed.

There was a lot that the young girl didn’t not know about cleaning houses, especially rich houses, with lots of vitrines, and chandeliers, and gilded furniture, but she was a fast learner. She proved to be a hard worker, dexterous in the use of a duster and a broom. Soon enough, Mrs. Green recommended her services to her friends, and they did so to others. In a few months, she had a few regular employers that paid a fair wage and did so punctually.

Don’t think that because you work hard you’re earning your way to paradise, Rosa wrote her after receiving news of her newly acquired profession along with a crisp five dollar bill. You need to repent and do penance. Maybe one day, if you’re good, God will forgive you. Like he will forgive us.

Maybe one day, our little friend thought, folding the letter. And maybe one day her godfather would return too.

Maybe one day she would become rich. Maybe one day she would wake up with a smaller nose, with a less pointy chin, and with thinner eyebrows. Maybe one day she would get rid of the pimples. Maybe, if she wished for it hard enough, if she waited patiently, she would become beautiful. As beautiful as Mrs. Green. As beautiful as either of her two sisters. And then a man like Athanase Green would lift her up from the floor, squeeze the air out of her lungs, and kiss her.

Now, not all had been flowers and candy for Rosa and Victoria in the city. The day after their arrival, a day the girls expected to spend eating cake and playing board games, Magnolia revealed to them her plans of getting them enrolled in school so they could learn all sorts of important subjects, “like geography,” the woman explained with a big smile, “that will help you become better persons and better Christians.”

Magnolia’s intentions were to help them finish grade school then get them enrolled into Normal School so they could become teachers. In the two sisters’ opinion, education could do nothing for them in their quest for marriage. “Who cares about this shit?” they complained with clenched teeth after the woman gave them a syllabus. “We don’t for one, that’s all!”

Fortunately, they said this in a low voice, for they soon learned that Magnolia had no patience for rude or rebellious people.

“Elbows, please. Off the table… Don’t scratch. A lady never scratches in public… Keep your hair up and in a bun… Stay out of the sun, you’ll get freckles… The meat is only for Harris.”

In that respect, she and her husband couldn’t be more different. School was boring, Harris agreed. Perhaps unnecessary.

“Second grade. That was it. Never liked it.”

But he kept from expressing his opinions in front of his wife for fear of starting a quarrel. Harris hadn’t had a steady job in ten years, the girls learned, and the couple relied heavily on Magnolia’s wages.

Magnolia worked as the deputy headmistress at the Immaculate Heart of Mary, an all-girls Catholic school. As her position demanded, she was a rather strict, restless disciplinarian, who kept in high regard the feminine virtues of diligence, submission, and obedience, virtues that, she waited no time in letting the two sisters know, albeit with an ear to ear grin and a mellifluous tone, hard to battle, the two lacked abysmally.

In addition to a series of rules at the table, Magnolia forbade the girls to leave the house unescorted, to enter her bedroom or the kitchen without permission—the icebox was especially off limits—and to ever put a foot inside the attic, the door to which remained, in any case, always locked. That left the bedroom that the two sisters shared and the living room as the only spaces in which Rosa and Victoria could roam freely. However, the only activities allowed inside the living room were “to pray, to study, or to work your embroidery.” Therefore, the girls preferred to remain inside their bedroom, where they could do as they pleased. More often than not, what they did was to keep their noses stuck to the window, wishing they were outside.

“We’ll never meet a man, locked up in here.”

“We’ll never marry!”

Outside abounded temptation. The bars and the theaters on Broadway were just a few blocks away. They could see the lights at night from their window. But temptation “leads to damnation,” Magnolia reminded them often, often enough to make them scared, sometimes after smacking their hands with a ruler.

And Rosa and Victoria knew well what Hell could be like:

“Not the carefree revelry of the Sabbath…”

“Not the dancing, the feasting, and the celebrating…”

“But sorrow…”

“Pain…”

“…and mortification.”

Their fear of damnation now was so deep and abiding that they became god-fearing Christians. They had seen the gates to the netherworld open up in their own front yard; they had seen it reflected in their mother’s eyes the night she died, and now the mere mention of the place struck them with terror.

At school, they were heedless, undisciplined and inattentive. They talked back to their teachers and got into fights with their classmates; however, they didn’t listen when Prince Beelzebub appeared in their dreams and encouraged them with a melodious voice to lock Magnolia in the attic with Harris. They were tempted, but they never dared to call the goat’s name against any of their schoolmates, and they chased away their old familiars—the swarm of flies and the toad, sent from the netherworld to lure them back to the dark side—with rosaries and novenas. They refused to feed them with their blood and, left to starve, the fiends eventually disappeared. Still, they knew that the Prince of Darkness wouldn’t let them go that easily. They had promised to love, cherish, and obey him for all eternity; they knew he wouldn’t let them go unpunished. They were damned, condemned to burn in Hell forever, unless God, in his infinite mercy, could forgive them. They had to pray every day, go to mass every Sunday, and carry a rosary with them constantly, to be protected.

An extraordinary transformation, you’ll think. The daughters of a murderous witch praying Hail Marys. But you’ll surely remember, dear reader, what it was like to be young and learn that everything we like and enjoy is a sin. You’ll sure remember the embarrassment, the guilt for doing as the body wants. If you’re a woman, the feeling is twice-fold. If you’re a woman, you’re sin itself. If you are a woman, you are less worthy of the pleasures of an afterlife in paradise, and the urge to please God by mortifying the flesh and relinquishing your own desires is thereby much stronger.

Harris’s unmentionable condition was a constant reminder of how perilous it could be to make a pact with the Prince of Darkness.

“He made a terrible mistake in his youth,” Magnolia explained to the girls on their first trip to the butcher. “A folly for which he should do penance, and for which the four of us have to pray to our Holy Mother, the Blessed Virgin, every night of the week, so she will intercede with her son for his forgiveness.”

“When I finally found the courage to confess to my beloved Magnolia about my condition,” Harris said to the girls, climbing the stairs up to the little room in the attic, “after an eight-year-long engagement, she took the news with resignation. That, and not a secret wife, as she had come to suspect, was the reason for my monthly absenteeism.”

“I believe in the power of prayer,” Magnolia had said back then, clinging to the chest of her fiancé. “I will pray every night for your recovery.”

“She cried,” Harris continued, “but she also laughed for all the times she thought I was cheating, when instead your mother and I were scavenging corpses.”

Magnolia had had only one condition before they got married: that Harris would stop eating human flesh.

“I agreed, but under two more: that we would keep a spare room in our home with bars at the door and the windows where I could be restrained during the nights of full moon, so that I wouldn’t be a threat to Magnolia, and that we’d never have children, so the curse would die with me. It was hard for her to say yes to this last request, but still she accepted.”

“It wasn’t what I dreamed,” Magnolia said later to the girls, during one of those moments of vulnerability in which one’s aching truths are shared with the least suspecting over a glass of sherry. “Why would I want to marry a man who once a month turned into a murderous beast? He killed my friend Christina. He killed George and Angus. But he was kind, and I was turning thirty. Had I said no, perhaps I would have not gotten another proposal. And I thought that maybe one day we could have a child if things changed. If a miracle were to happen.”

“I haven’t had the need to taste human flesh in almost ten years,” Harris preened.

“The more we pray to the Virgin,” Magnolia invited the girls to kneel behind her on the hard wooden floor, “the closer Harris is to achieving the Lord’s forgiveness.”

“But if God is all love and kindness,” Victoria asked her sister in a low voice, “why can’t He just fix him? And why do we have to talk to Him through his mother? Why does Magnolia have to pray so much and be so unhappy?”

God must be such a selfish, narcissistic bastard, she thought, if he needed so much begging and mortification to grant such a small favor.

“If He knows it all,” Victoria continued, making sure Magnolia couldn’t hear, “if He’s all-powerful and full of mercy, why cannot he cure Harris? Doesn’t He love his mother? Or is it the Virgin who does not want to help? Magnolia shouldn’t have to live in constant fear. The Devil allowed our mother to perform great acts of magic in exchange for just blood. You want so-and-so to fall sick? It will cost you a pint. You want that person murdered? Give me two pints and one tooth. And it worked.”

“Because He’s righteous,” Rosa responded, smacking her sister on the back of her head. “And praying an hour every day is easier, anyway, and much less painful than letting a fiend drink your blood for fifteen minutes. Once you lose a tooth, you lose it forever. They don’t grow back, stupid.”

“One tooth is worth Harris’s health,” insisted Victoria.

“Perhaps you’d need to give more than one.”

Harris must have done something really bad; something truly unforgivable and offensive; something that required as many prayers are there are grains of sand in the beach to be pardoned.

“Whatever Harris did to deserve his curse,” Rosa wasn’t sure but she had a strong suspicion it had something to do with masturbation, “cannot be half as bad as what we did to please the Little Master and his acolytes during the Sabbath.”

Victoria had to agree. If Harris’s sins hadn’t yet been forgiven, after all those years, would theirs ever be?

They could only pray. And pray they did, every night, the twenty Mysteries of the Rosary, right after dinner. And it killed them; it made them feel guilty and ungrateful; it made them terribly sad, especially on those nights when Harris didn’t pray with them, when if somebody called for him they had to lie and say that he was indisposed and had gone to bed early, when he was actually locked inside the room in the attic; because they could hear him howl; they could hear him curse and stomp on the floor above them; they could hear him call them all a pack of whores; they could hear him swear by all the legions of demons from Hell that he would come down and kill them—it made them feel spoiled, unappreciative, and undeserving, for neither one ever prayed for his absolution but only for their own, so that they, and not Harris, were the ones that would obtain God’s forgiveness.

“We should pray for him at least once, Rosa. Don’t you think?”

“Every night we pray for ourselves is a minute less in purgatory.”

Despite their mediocre marks, Magnolia managed to get the two sisters accepted into Normal School. They returned to Venice every few weeks for a weekend, and for a full two months during summer. The young girl had to work harder during these visits, but she tried to make the best of it. She had few distractions outside her work, and to see her sisters all dolled up, wearing brass jewelry and dressed in the latest fashions, to hear them talking about life in the city, about the traffic, about the movies, made her feel as if she too were living a fabulous life in the City of Angels. The two had eventually found ways to fool Magnolia, and, on Fridays, they sneaked out of the house through the fire exit to go dance the foxtrot at the Alexandria ballroom.

Besides the extra work, a downside to these visits was that our little friend had to suffer the lessons in English grammar and religion that, in her sisters’ opinion, she so urgently needed. Rosa and Victoria were harsher tutors than Magnolia. The pinching and the paddling came first; then the lecture. If the young girl made a mistake, say, to forget what Ecclesiastes 7:9 read, they sent her to bed without dinner, the same dinner she had spent an hour cooking. If she responded correctly—“Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the bosom of fools”—they accused her of cheating, 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.