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

her flesh. If I didn’t, it was only to keep death from taking her in such a sinful condition. Finally she told me that she planned that night to anoint herself with oils and go to one of her witches’ sabbaths, and that once there she planned to ask the Devil what my future held. I wanted to ask her what ointments she meant, and she must’ve read my mind, because she responded as if I had asked out loud:
    “This unguent we witches use to anoint ourselves is made from the juices of herbs, which are very cold, and not, as some vulgarly say, from the blood of children we smother. Here you may as well also ask me whatpleasure or profit the Devil takes in making us kill the innocent in the first place, since he knows that being baptized, and consequently immaculate and without sin, they go right to heaven, and he suffers excruciating torment for every Christian soul that escapes him. I don’t know how to answer this except with what the proverb says: ‘Some there are who would put out both eyes so long as their enemy loses one.’
    “He must encourage infanticide for the sorrow that killing children gives their parents, which is the greatest that can be imagined. What matters most to him is to make us commit cruel and perverse sins at every opportunity. And God permits all this as punishment for our sins, since without his permission, I’ve seen from experience that the Devil can’t even distract an ant. This is so true that once, when I begged our master to destroy a vineyard belonging to one of my enemies, he said he couldn’t touch even a leaf of it, because God wouldn’t let him. When you grow up to be a man, you’ll understand that all the woes bedeviling people, kings, cities, and towns—the sudden deaths, shipwrecks, comeuppances, in a word all the evils they call catastrophes—come from the hand of the Almighty, according to His will, and that all the cursed calamities and banes originate and proceed from ourselves alone. God is literally impeccable, without sin, from which we can only conclude that we are the authors of our own evildoing, and we conceive it in our own intentions, words, and deeds.
    “For our sins, God lets us commit them.
    “You may be wondering, my boy, if you’re still following this, who made me a theologian. Maybe you’re even saying to yourself, ‘Just listen to the old whore! Why doesn’t she give up witchcraft and return to God, since she knows so much? Doesn’t she know that He’s faster to forgive sins than to permit them?’
    “To this I would respond—if you’d asked me—that the habit of vice becomes second nature, and witchcraft becomes like a muscle. Even in the heat of its frenzy, which is extreme, it carries a chill that freezes and numbs the soul as it burns. It leads to a kind of oblivion, until you don’t recognize either the threat of God’s hell or the glory of His heaven. As a sin of flesh and appetite, inevitably it deadens the senses, warping and beguiling them and keeping them from working as they should. So our souls stay useless, lazy and dispirited, incapable of even a single good thought. Mired like this in the swamp of our misery, they refuse to reach up to God’s outstretched hand, extended in His mercy to lift us up. Mine is one of these souls I’ve painted. I see and understand everything, but because decadence has manacled my will, I have always been, and will always be, wicked.
    “But let’s leave this and get back to this business of the unguents. As I said, they’re so cold that they deprive us of our senses, and we stay splayed and naked on the floor. That’s when they say we hallucinate everything that only
seems
to be really happening. Other times, after anointing, it feels as if our shapes shift, and we turn into chickens, or owls or crows, and fly to the place whereour master awaits us. There we resume our original form and enjoy those delights that I refrain from confiding, since it scandalizes the memory to recall them, and the