Free The Dialogue of the Dogs by Miguel de Cervantes Page A

to believe that you are Montiela’s son. So it’s with great pleasure that I can finally tell you your origins, and how to recover your true form. I only wish you could restore yourself as easily as Apuleius prescribed in The Golden Ass, namely, by eating a rose. But your transformation depends on other people’s actions, not yours. What to do, my boy, is to commend yourself deep in your heart to God and hope that these, I don’t want to call them prophecies, that these poetic divinations will come true. This will surely happen, since the great Camacha said it would. You and your brother, if he’s alive, will finally see yourselves as you desire.
    “What grieves me is that, with my end just around the corner, I won’t have the chance to see it. Many times I’ve wanted to ask The Horned One how your predicament will turn out, but I haven’t dared, because he never gives a straight answer to what we ask, only rejoinders vulnerable to different readings. There’s no point asking our dark lord and master anything, because he mixes truth in with a thousand lies. I’ve decided he doesn’t know anything of the future for certain, but only by conjecture.
    “Still, he has us witches so enthralled that, even after all his heinous deceits, we can’t leave him. Instead we go a long way to see him and, on a great lawn, we come together in a numberless throng, witches and warlocks both. They give us insipid food, and otherthings come to pass that for the sake of truth, God, and my very soul, I dare not tell, so filthy are they, and I don’t want to offend your chaste ears.
    Some suppose that we only go to these sabbaths in a trance, and there the Devil merely clouds our minds with pipe dreams, which afterward we describe as if they’d really happened to us. Others say no, that we really go, body and soul. I hold that both these opinions are true. We can’t know the difference, because everything that happens to us in our imagination is so intense that there’s no telling what’s really true. The Inquisition has performed experiments on some of us in their dungeons, and I think they’ve demonstrated the truth of what I say.
    “My child, I’ve wanted to swear off this evil, and I’ve tried a thousand times. I take solace in my work as a matron and nurse to the poor, and some who die keep me alive with what they bequeath, or what I find among their rags, which I have the responsibility of delousing. I pray rarely, and in public. I gossip often, and in private. I’d rather be a hypocrite than a confessed sinner. The sight of my good works is starting to erase my past crimes from the memories of those who know me. In short, feigned sanctity doesn’t hurt anybody but the one who feigns it. Look, Montiel, I give you this advice: be as good as you can, and if you’re going to be wicked, hide it as well as you can. I’m a witch. I don’t deny it. Your mother was a witch and a sorceress, also undeniable, but the eminently noble front we put up did us credit all over.
    “Three days before she died, the two of us were traipsing through a valley of the Pyrenees on a grand tour. When she died, though, she looked so peaceful and serene that, if not for a wince or two she made a quarter of an hour before her soul departed, she lay on her deathbed as if it were a bridal bower. What pierced her heart was the thought of her two sons, and she was so firm and unshakable that, even at the hour of her death, she couldn’t forgive Camacha. I closed her eyes and accompanied her to the grave, and there I left her for the last time, though I haven’t lost all hope of seeing her before I die. They say she walks through cemeteries and crossroads around here in different guises, so maybe someday I’ll find her, and ask her if she’d have me do anything to put her soul at rest.”
    Every last thing the crone told me in praise of the woman she called my mother was a lance through my heart, and I wanted to leap at her and sink my fangs into