The Witch's Dream. ©1985 By Florinda Donner-Grau.

Part 2 - Chapter 08.

I was anticipating the loud sounds that usually reverberated through the house every Thursday morning as Candelaria rearranged the heavy furniture in the living room.

Wondering whether I had actually slept through the commotion, I walked down the silent corridor to the living room.

Shafts of sunlight filtered through the cracks in the wooden panels that covered the two windows facing the street. The dining table with its six chairs, the dark sofa, the stuffed armchairs, the glass coffee table, and the framed prints of pastoral landscapes and bullfighting scenes on the walls were exactly as Candelaria had arranged them the previous Thursday.

I walked out into the yard, where I found Candelaria, half-hidden behind a hibiscus bush. Her frizzy, red-dyed hair had been brushed out of her face and was held in place by bejeweled combs. Twinkling gold loops dangled from her earlobes. Her lips and nails were a glossy red and matched the colors of her brightly printed cotton dress. Her large eyes under lids that never opened all the way betrayed a dreaminess that was at odds with her sharp angular features and her crisp, almost brusque manner.

"What made you get up so early, Musiua?" Candelaria asked. Rising, she tidied her wide skirt and the low-cut bodice of her dress that revealed a generous amount of her ample bosom.

I said, "I did not hear you move the furniture this morning. Are you going out?"

Without answering she hurried into the kitchen, her loose sandals slapping on her heels as she ran. "I am behind with everything today," she declared, stopping momentarily to get her foot back into the sandal that had slipped off.

"I am sure you will catch up," I said. "I will help you." I lit the wood in the cooking pit, and set the table with the mismatched pieces of china.

"It is just seven-thirty," I remarked. "You are only half an hour late."

As opposed to dona Mercedes, who was totally indifferent to schedules, Candelaria divided her day into precisely timed tasks.

Although no one ever sat down for a meal at the same time, Candelaria fixed breakfast at exactly seven. By eight o'clock she was mopping the floors and dusting the furniture. She was tall enough that she had to stretch only her arms to reach the spider webs in the corners and the dust on the lintels.

And by eleven o'clock the daily pot of soup was simmering on the stove.

As soon as that was accomplished, she tended to her flowers. Watering can in hand, she first walked up and down the patio, then the yard, sprinkling her plants with loving care.

At two o'clock sharp she did the laundry, even if she only had one towel to wash. After the ironing was done, she read illustrated romances.

In the evenings, she cut out magazine pictures and pasted them in photo albums.

She whispered, "Elio's godfather was here last night. Dona Mercedes and I talked with him till dawn."

She reached for the mortared corn cooked the evening before, and began to knead the white dough for the corn-cakes we ate for breakfast.

"He must be over eighty years old. And he still has not gotten over Elio's death. Lucas Nunez blames himself for the boy's death."

"Who is Elio?" I asked.

"Dona Mercedes' son," Candelaria murmured, shaping the dough into round patties. "He was only eighteen when he died tragically. It was a long time ago."

She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear, then added, "You had better not mention to her that I told you she had a son."

She placed the corn-cakes on the grill spanning the cooking pit, then faced me, a devilish grin on her lips. "You do not believe me, do you?" she asked, but stopped me from responding by holding up one hand.

"I have to concentrate now on the coffee. You know how fussy dona Mercedes gets if it is not strong or sweet enough."

I regarded Candelaria suspiciously. She was in the habit of telling me the most outlandish stories about the healer, such as the time when dona Mercedes was apprehended by a group of Nazis during the Second World War and held captive in a submarine.

"She is a liar," dona Mercedes had once confided. "And even if she is telling the truth she exaggerates it so much that it might as well be a lie."

Candelaria, thoroughly unconcerned about my suspicions, wiped her face on the apron she had tied around her neck, then with a swift, abrupt movement, she turned around and hurried out of the kitchen. "Watch over the corn-cakes," she cried out from the corridor. "I am behind with everything today."

Around midday, Mercedes Peralta finally woke up after sleeping through Candelaria's Thursday commotion, which was noisier than usual because of the hurry.

Undecidedly, dona Mercedes stood at the door of her room, squinting her eyes to adjust to the brightness. She rested against the door frame for a moment before venturing out into the corridor.

I rushed to her side, and taking her arm, I led her to the kitchen. Her eyes were red. She had a frown and a sad look around her mouth.

I wondered if she, too, had spent the night awake. There was always the possibility that Candelaria had indeed been telling the truth.

Seemingly preoccupied, she studied the plateful of corn-cakes, but instead of taking one, she broke off two bananas from the bunch hanging on one of the rafters. She peeled them, cut them into slivers, then daintily ate the bananas, one sliver at a time.

"Candelaria wants you to meet her parents," she said, delicately wiping the corners of her mouth. "They live in the hills, close to the dam."

Before I had a chance to say that I would be delighted, Candelaria came sauntering into the kitchen. "You will love my mother," she affirmed. "She is small and skinny like you, and she also eats the whole day long."

I voiced the idea that, somehow, I had never thought of Candelaria as having a mother.

With a rapt smile the two women listened attentively as I tried to make them understand what I meant by that. I assured them that categorizing certain people as the motherless type had nothing to do with age or looks but with some elusive, remote quality that I could not quite explain.

What seemed to delight Mercedes Peralta the most about my elucidation was that it failed to make any sense. She sipped her coffee pensively, then looked at me askance.

"Do you think I had a mother myself?" she asked. She closed her eyes, and puckering up her mouth, she moved her lips as if she were sucking from a breast. "Or do you believe I was hatched from an egg?"

She glanced up at Candelaria and in a serious tone pronounced, "The musiua is quite right. What she wants to say is that witches have very little attachment to parents or children. Yet, they love them with all their might but only when they are facing them, never when they turn their backs."

I wondered if Candelaria was afraid I would mention Elio, for she stepped behind dona Mercedes, gesticulating wildly for me to remain silent.

Dona Mercedes seemed to be determined to read our thoughts. She first looked at me, then at Candelaria, with fixed unblinking eyes.

Sighing, Dona Mercedes wrapped her hands around her mug and sipped the rest of her coffee. "Elio was only a few days old when his mother, my sister, died," she said, looking at me.

"He was my delight. I loved him as though he were my own child." She smiled faintly, and after a short pause, she continued talking about Elio.

She said that no one would have called him handsome. He had a wide sensuous mouth, a flat nose with sprawling nostrils, and wild kinky hair. But what made Elio irresistible to young and old alike were his big, black, and lustrous eyes, which shone with happiness and sheer well-being.

At great length dona Mercedes talked about Elio's eccentricities. Although he was to become a healer like herself, he rarely spent any time thinking about healing. He was too busy falling in and out of love.

During the day, he chatted the hours away with the young women and girls who came to see her.

In the evenings, guitar in hand, he went to serenade his conquests. He hardly ever returned before dawn except when he was unsuccessful in his amatory ventures. Then, he was back early and entertained her with his witty, but never vulgar, renditions of his failures and successes.

With morbid curiosity I awaited for her to talk about his tragic death.

I felt disappointed when she glanced up at Candelaria. "Go and get me my jacket," she murmured. "It gets windy in those hills where your parents live."

She rose and, leaning against my arm, shuffled out into the yard.

She confided, "Today, Candelaria will surprise you. There are all kinds of delightful quirks about her. If you were to know only half of them, you would probably faint with shock."

Dona Mercedes chuckled softly like a child trying hard not to give away a secret.

The Witch's Dream. ©1985 By Florinda Donner-Grau.

Part 2 - Chapter 09.

Laughter, excited voices, and the blaring sound of jukebox music spilled from the small restaurants and bars that lined the street leading out of Curmina.

Beyond the gas station, before the street joined the road, large trees on either side interlinked their branches to form arches, creating a dream-like stillness.

On the road we passed solitary shacks made out of cane plastered over with mud. They all had a narrow doorway, a few windows, and a thatched roof. Some of the huts were whitewashed, others just mud colored.

Flowers, mostly geraniums growing in discarded cooking pots and tin cans, hung from deep eaves.

Majestic trees aglow with golden and blood-red blossoms shaded meticulously swept yards, where women were doing their wash in plastic tubs, or were spreading clothes to dry on bushes. Some greeted us with a slow smile; others with a nearly imperceptible nod of their heads.

Twice we stopped at a roadside stall where children sold fruit and vegetables picked from their gardens.

Candelaria, sitting in the backseat of my jeep, gave me directions. We passed a cluster of huts in the outskirts of a small town, and within moments a blanket of fog enveloped us; a fog so thick I could barely see beyond the hood of the jeep.

"Oh Lord Jesus Christ," Candelaria began to pray. "Come down and help us get through this devilish fog. Please, Holy Mary, Mother of God, come here to protect us. Blessed Saint Anthony, Merciful Saint Theresa, Divine Holy Ghost, gather around to help us."

Dona Mercedes cut in, saying, "You had better stop it, Candelaria. What if the saints are indeed listening to you and answer your prayers? How are we going to get them all into the car?"

Candelaria laughed, then burst into song. Over and over she repeated the first few lines of an aria from an Italian opera.

"Do you like it?" she asked me, catching my glance in the rear-view mirror. "My father taught it to me. My father is Italian. He likes opera and taught me arias by Verdi, Puccini, and others."

I glanced at dona Mercedes for confirmation, but she had fallen asleep.

"It is true," Candelaria insisted, then proceeded to sing a few lines from arias of different operas.

"Do you know them, too?" she asked after I had correctly guessed the opera to which some of them belonged. "Is your father Italian, too?"

"No." I laughed. "He is German. I do not really know much about operas," I confessed. "The only thing he taught me about music was that Beethoven was nearly a demigod. Every Sunday, for as long as I lived at home, my father played all of Beethoven's symphonies."

The fog lifted as abruptly as it had descended about us, unveiling chain after chain of bluish mountains. They seemed to extend forever across an emptiness of air and light.

Following Candelaria's directions, I turned into a narrow dirt lane angling sharply from the road. It was barely wide enough for the jeep.

"Here it is," she cried out excitedly, pointing at the two-story house at the end of the lane. The whitewashed walls were yellow with age, and the once red tiles were gray and mossy.

I parked, and we got out of the jeep.

An old man clad in a frayed T-shirt was leaning out of an upstairs window. He waved at us and then disappeared, his loud excited voice ringing through the silence of the house. "Roraima! The witches are here!"

Just as we reached the front door, a small, wrinkled woman stepped out to greet us. Smiling, she embraced Candelaria, then dona Mercedes.

"This is my mother," Candelaria proudly said. "Her name is Roraima."

After a slight hesitation, Roraima also embraced me.

She was barely five feet and very lean. She wore a long black dress. She had thick black hair and the bright eyes of a bird. Her motions, too, were birdlike, dainty and quick as she ushered us inside the dark vestibule where a small light burned under a picture of Saint Joseph.

Beaming with contentment, she told us to follow her along the wide L-shaped gallery bordering the inside patio where a lemon and guava tree shaded the open living-dining room and the spacious kitchen.

Mercedes Peralta whispered something in Roraima's ear, and then continued down the corridor that led to the back of the house.

For a moment I stood undecided, then followed Candelaria and her mother up the stone stairs to the second floor, past a row of bedrooms; all of which opened onto the wide balcony running the length of the patio.

"How many children do you have?" I asked as we passed the fifth door.

"I have only Candelaria." The leathery wrinkles in Roraima's face deepened as she smiled. "But the grandchildren from Caracas come to spend their holidays here."

Aghast, I turned to Candelaria and stared into her dark, guarded eyes in which a glimmer of amusement was just discernible.

"I did not know you had any children," I said, wondering if this was the surprise dona Mercedes had hinted at that morning. Somehow it was a letdown.

"How can I have any children?" Candelaria retorted indignantly. "I am a maiden!"

I burst into laughter. Her statement not only implied that she was unmarried but that she was also a virgin. The haughty expression on her face left no doubt that she was very proud of the fact.

Candelaria leaned over the railing, then she turned and looked up. "I have never told you that I have a brother. Actually he is only a half brother. He is much older than I. He was born in Italy. Like my father, he came to Venezuela to make his fortune. He has a construction company. He is rich now."

Roraima nodded her head emphatically. "Her half brother has eight children. They love to spend the summers here with us," she added.

In a sudden change of mood, Candelaria laughed and embraced her mother. "Imagine!" she exclaimed. "The musiua can not conceive that I have a mother." With an impish smile she added, "And what is even worse, she does not believe that I have an Italian father!"

At that very instant, one of the bedroom doors opened, and the old man I had seen at the window stepped out onto the balcony.

He was stocky with sharp angular features that strongly resembled Candelaria's. He had dressed in a hurry. His shirt was buttoned up askew, the leather belt holding up his pants had not been fitted into the loops around the waist, and his shoe laces were untied.

He embraced Candelaria.

"Guido Miconi," he introduced himself to me, then apologized for not welcoming us at the door. "As a child, Candelaria was as pretty as Roraima," he said, holding his daughter in a warm embrace. "Only when she grew up did she start to resemble me."

Clearly sharing a private joke, all three burst into laughter.

Roraima, giving a satisfied nod, regarded her husband and her daughter with unabashed admiration. She took my arm led me downstairs, and suggested, "Let us join dona Mercedes."

The yard, bordered by a stake fence, was enormous. At the farthest end stood an open hut with a thatched roof.

Sitting in a hammock fastened to the crossbeam of the hut was Mercedes Peralta. She was sampling Roraima's homemade cheese. She congratulated Roraima on her success.

Guido Miconi stood irresolute in front of dona Mercedes. He seemed unsure whether to shake her hand, or to put his arm around her. She smiled at him, and he embraced her.

We all sat around the hammock, except for Roraima who sat in it beside Mercedes Peralta.

Roraima asked her questions about me, which dona Mercedes promptly answered as if I were not there.

For a while I listened to their conversation, but soon the heat, the stillness of the air, and Guido Miconi's and the women's low voices interspersed now and then by faint giggles made me so drowsy I stretched out on the ground.

I must have dozed off, for dona Mercedes had a hard time making me understand that I was to check with Candelaria about lunch. I had not heard Candelaria and her father leave.

I went inside the house. A deep soothing voice murmuring an incantation came from one of the bedrooms.

Afraid that Candelaria was entertaining her father with one of my tapes of a healing session, I rushed upstairs. On a previous occasion she had played a tape and promptly erased it by pushing the wrong button.

I stopped short at the half-opened door. Speechless, I watched Candelaria massage her father's back and shoulders while she softly mumbled an incantation.

There was something about her stance- the concentrated, yet fluid beauty of her moving hands- that reminded me of Mercedes Peralta. I realized then that Candelaria was also a healer.

As soon as she finished massaging her father, she turned to face me; a glimmer of amusement in her eyes. "Did dona Mercedes ever tell you about me?" Her voice had a curious softness that I had never heard before. "She says that I was born a witch."

There were so many questions running through my mind, I was at a loss where to begin.

Candelaria, aware of my bewilderment, shrugged her shoulders in a sort of helpless gesture.

"Let us fix lunch," Guido Miconi offered, heading for the stairs.

Candelaria and I followed behind him. Suddenly, he turned around and faced me.

"Mercedes Peralta is right," he said, then bent his head and stared fixedly at the lacy shadows of the guava tree on the brick patio.

For a long time he just stood there shaking his head now and then, unsure what to say or do next.

He looked up, smiled faintly, and then began to walk about the patio, his hands lightly touching flowers and leaves, his shiny eyes seeming not quite to take me in when they focused on me.

"It is a strange story," he said to me in an excited voice that made his Italian accent more pronounced. "Candelaria says that dona Mercedes wants me to tell it to you. You know that you are welcome here. I hope you come often, so we can talk."

I was at a loss. I looked at Candelaria, hoping for some kind of explanation.

"I think I know what dona Mercedes wants to do with you," Candelaria said.

Taking my arm, she led me to the kitchen. "She likes you a lot, but she can not give you her shadow because she has got only one, and she is giving it to me."

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"I am a witch," she replied, "and I am following in dona Mercedes' footsteps? Only by following in the spiritual footsteps of a healer can you be a healer yourself. That is what is called a junction, a link. Dona Mercedes has already told you that witches call it a shadow.

"Shadows are true for everything," she continued, "and there is only one heir to anyone who has real knowledge.

"Victor Julio had real knowledge about killing dogs and made an unwitting link for Octavio Cantu. I have said to you that Octavio sat too long in Victor Julio's shadow and that dona Mercedes is giving me her shadow.

"By letting certain people tell you their stories, she is trying to put you, for an instant, under the shadow of all those people so that you will feel how the wheel of chance turns, and how a witch helps that wheel move."

Unsuccessfully, I tried to tell her that her statements were throwing me into deeper confusion. She stared at me with bright, trusting eyes.

"When a witch intervenes, we say it is the witch's shadow that turns the wheel of chance." she said thoughtfully;

Then after pausing for a moment, she added, "My father's story would fit, but I should not be present when he tells his story to you.

"I inhibit him. I always have." She looked back at her father and laughed. Her laughter was like a crystalline explosion. It reverberated through the whole house.

The Witch's Dream. ©1985 By Florinda Donner-Grau.

Part 2 - Chapter 10.

Mercedes Peralta accompanied me on my last visit to Guido Miconi's house. When we were about to return to town at the end of the day, Roraima took me by the hand, and led me through a patch of canebrake up a narrow trail to a small clearing enclosed by yucca plants whose flowers, straight and white, made me think of rows of candles on an altar.

"Do you like it?" Roraima asked, pointing to a seed bed roofed with a framework of thin, dry branches that were held at the corners by slender, forked poles.

"It looks like a doll's vegetable patch!" I exclaimed, examining the ground covered with feathery carrot shoots, tiny heart-shaped lettuce leaves, and curly, lacy parsley sprigs.

Beaming with delight, Roraima walked up and down the neatly ploughed rows in the adjacent field. Pieces of dry leaves and bits of twigs clung to her long skirt.

Each time she pointed out the spot where she would plant a lettuce, a radish, a cauliflower, she turned toward me, her mouth arched in a faint, ethereal smile, her sharp eyes glinting between lids half-closed against the already low afternoon sun.

"I know that whatever I have is due to a witch's intervention," she suddenly exclaimed. "The only good point that I have is that I know that."

Before I had a chance to take in what she had said, she approached me with her arms wide open in an expansive gesture of affection.

"I hope you do not forget us," she said and led me to my jeep.

Mercedes Peralta, seated in the front seat, her head reclining on the backrest, was sound asleep.

Leaning out from one of the upstairs windows was Guido Miconi, waving farewell in a gesture that was more a beckoning than a good-bye.

Shortly before we reached Curmina, Mercedes Peralta stirred. She yawned loudly, then absentmindedly looked out the window.

"Do you know what really happened to Guido Miconi?" she asked.

"No," I said. "All I know is that both Miconi and Roraima call it a witch's intervention."

Dona Mercedes giggled. "It certainly was a witch's intervention," she said. "Candelaria already told you that when witches intervene it is said that they do it with their shadows.

"Candelaria made a link; a junction for her father. She made him live a dream. Since she is a witch, she moved the wheel of chance.

"Victor Julio also made a link, and he also moved the wheel of chance, but since Victor Julio was not a witch, the dream of Octavio Cantu- although it is both as real and unreal as Miconi's dream- is longer and more painful."

"How did Candelaria intervene?"

"Certain children," dona Mercedes explained, "have the strength to wish something with great passion for a long period of time."

She settled back in her seat and closed her eyes. "Candelaria was such a child. She was born that way.

"She wished her father to stay, and she wished it without a single doubt. That dedication, that determination, is what witches call a witch's shadow. It was that shadow that would not let Miconi go."

We drove the rest of the way in silence. I wanted to digest her words. Before we went into her house, I asked her one final question.

"How did Miconi have such a detailed dream?"

"Miconi never wanted to leave, not really," dona Mercedes replied. "So that offered an opening to Candelaria's unwavering wish. The details of the dream itself, well, that part had nothing to do with the witch's intervention. That was Miconi's imagination."