The Witch of Cologne

Abandoning all protocol, convinced now of their mutual adoration, he had flung his arms around her and kissed her passionately. ‘Mi corazón, mi tesoro, me llenas el alma. I knew you would come to me.’

Horrified, the girl pushed him away violently then slapped him. The stinging blow shocked Carlos to his very core. Deeply mortified he clutched his reddened cheek while, furious, the young girl stormed up and down in front of him.

‘I shall not betray your actions to my father only because you are a great teacher and a great musician, but if you place another finger on me I shall tell of your terrible impudence. What kind of a man of God are you to assume such a thing?’

‘Firstly, I am a man, despite these robes. Secondly, I had thought that—’

‘What? That I should love you? You are a peasant, señor, a peasant wrapped in a cassock. Do not forget your place.’

Humiliation scars deeper than the lash.

That night Carlos felt his abasement clawing his back like some hideous hag he could not shake off. Profoundly shamed, he twisted from side to side on the hay pallet in his small cell. When the talons of mortification finally lifted and sleep mercifully descended, a woman visited his dreams. A beautiful creature, seven feet tall, her black hair streaming behind her, her sex a pulsating scented bush that drew his eyes and fingers, her heavy breasts taunting pillows crowned with huge buttonlike nipples that seemed to dance before him as she rode him like a wild bucking mare. The young friar woke in the morning embarrassed to find his thighs stained with his own seed. A demon has visited me, he thought, crossing himself in an attempt to purify what had been made impure. She has stolen my seed and she will steal my sanity.

The next night he had one of the priests bind his wrists together to prevent him inadvertently touching himself during sleep. But the fiend came to him anyway, laughing derisively at the leather bindings, touching his sex with her mouth and hands until the struggling friar surrendered himself to the shuddering pleasures she brought.

After a week of hallucinations, Carlos, now hollow-eyed and thin, borrowed one of the friary donkeys and rode for three hours to visit the seminary at Villanueva de Gállego, famous for its library containing the largest collection of writings on witchcraft in Christendom.

As he turned the pages of an illustrated manuscript in the huge Gothic athenaeum, the vaulted arches above writhing with carved granite forests and imaginary monsters of Satanic proportions, Carlos finally recognised the evil spirit which had been possessing him. Lilith. First wife of Adam, Lilith the seducer, the murderess of newborn children, Lilith who used the nocturnal emissions of innocent men to beget her demon children. Lilith the grandmother of Satan. The discovery sent him running out into the sun-scorched grounds where, trembling, he vomited violently amongst the gnarled vines.

Shaking with a mysterious ague, the young friar walked for hours in the scrubland of the surrounding countryside until the burning eyes of the evil spirit and her musky fragrance fused with the scent of goats and cacti flowers and the searing heat of the midday sun, and finally he fainted into the soft sand.

He woke hours later in his own cell to the sensation of water dribbling into his mouth from a sponge placed between his burnt and peeling lips. He had been discovered by a shepherd who had recognised his order from his robes.

That night, as the shadows lengthened and darkness fell, he feverishly begged his prior to tie him to the bed to prevent him reaching out to the horror he knew would visit. The prior refused, sternly suggesting instead that the young friar should begin a spiritual incantation at the first sight of any visitation. Later, as Carlos tossed in sweaty turmoil, the demon came to him, but this time, as with slippery ease she mounted his writhing body, her face transformed suddenly into that of his young student. Cheeks flushed, her hair twisting away from her, Sara gazed down at him with sickening innocence.

With a great cry the friar woke himself. Determined to catch the witch at her art, he raced through the deserted streets of Zaragoza to the Navarros’ hacienda.

Darting past the bubbling fountain in the moonlit courtyard, he climbed a vine to Sara’s balcony and entered her bedchamber. He stood there peering around the dim room, looking for evidence that she had flown magically through the sky to reach him. There was nothing except a single feather cast carelessly upon the marble floor. An owl’s feather. A screech owl: Lilith’s totem. As Carlos bent to pick up the plume he heard the soft breathing of the girl from behind the veiled canopy of the bed.

The young friar walked over to gaze through the fine meshed silk at the girl’s white breasts, her black hair running like serpents across the pillow. Suddenly her sleeping face twisted violently into Lilith’s visage and Carlos, determined to finish the possession once and for all, threw himself on top of her, tearing off her nightdress to reach down between her legs.

Screaming, Sara woke and struggling wildly cut his face with her ring. The pain held him off long enough for the servants to hear her cries.

The next day Isaac Navarro dismissed the music tutor. The day after that Carlos Vicente Solitario went to the Inquisitional Council and standing before them condemned the Navarro family as false Christians and Satanists.

Ruth stands outside the narrow house squeezed between the tiny synagogue, the mikvah and the small hall which functions as a school for the Jewish boys of the town. She looks up at the window where she knows her father is sitting; she senses his hidden gaze. A boy pushing a hoop runs past, then stops and stares back at her.

‘The rabbi is inside but he won’t see you.’

‘I know.’

‘You are untouchable, they told us at the yeshiva, but you look harmless to me. My mother says you are a good woman.’

Ruth recognises the boy’s elfin features, the white skin and jet black hair, the Russian slant of the eyes.

‘You are Rebecca’s child, Benjamin? I knew your mother when she was your age.’

‘She has four sons now.’

‘God grants her a full harvest.’

Encouraged, the boy edges closer. He looks at the imposing oak door with the mezuzah fixed above it. The brass lion of Judah which serves as a doorknocker glares down at both of them. For a moment Ruth, looking through the child’s eyes, sees how the magnificence of the entrance is a symbol of unquestionable authority for the small community.

‘Why don’t you knock? You have nothing to lose but your pride,’ the child says with the lucidity of the innocent.

‘I have knocked before, therefore I know it will not open.’

Instead she presses her cheek against the cool stone and closing her eyes remembers her mother, Sara, with her wild hair. A young Spanish woman with her black eyes smeared with kohl, her head defiantly uncovered, the shining gold in her ear lobes that seemed to pull the Mediterranean sun into the grey northern sky. Her winsome grace had intimidated the Ashkenazi women and made them conscious of their own sturdy gaits as they paraded in their best clothes to the synagogue.