Witches

by Brenda Lozano, Heather Cleary - translator

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror

Synopsis

Paloma is dead. But before she was murdered, before she was even Paloma, she was a traditional healer named Gaspar. Before she was murdered, she taught her cousin Feliciana the secrets of the ceremonies known as veladas, and about the Language and the Book that unlock their secrets.



Sent to report on Paloma's murder, Zoe meets Feliciana in the mountain village of San Felipe. There, the two women's lives twist around each other in a danse macabre. Feliciana tells Zoe the story of her struggle to become an accepted healer in her community, and Zoe begins to understand the hidden history of her own experience as a woman, finding her way in a hostile environment shaped by and for men.



Weaving together two parallel narratives that mirror and refract one another, this extraordinary novel envisions the healer as storyteller and the writer as healer, and offers a generous and nuanced understanding of a world that can be at turns violent and exultant, cruel and full of hope.

Release date: August 16, 2022

Publisher: Catapult

Print pages: 240

Sample

It was six at night when Guadalupe came to tell me they had killed Paloma. I don’t remember times or dates, I don’t know when I was born because I was born like the mountain was, go ask the mountain when it was born, but I know it was six at night when Guadalupe came to say they killed Paloma as she was getting ready to go out, I saw her there in her room, I saw her body on the floor and the shine for her eyes on her fingers and I saw her hands they were two in the mirror and the shine was on both like she had just put it on her eyes, like she could get up to put some on mine.

Paloma loved many men who didn’t love her back and she loved many men who did, they came one after another to her vigil and her vigil was like a vela. My sister Francisca and I had Paloma from my father’s side, she was the only thing we had from his family, she was the daughter of my father’s brother Gaspar, who also is dead. Paloma was the only one who carried the curandero blood of my father and my grandfather and of my great-grandfather the curandero, she was the one who taught me what I know, she was the one who told me, Feliciana, you’re a curandera because you carry it in your blood. She told me, This is how you do this thing or the other and that’s not how you do that, and she told me, You have the Language, love, she was the one who said, Feliciana, you are the curandera of the Language because yours is the Book. Paloma healed many men who didn’t love her and many men who did, she healed many people and told others their future and told them the future of affections in bloom or of affections that had wilted and turned to hate, and people liked her for that, because she was good at giving advice about love, people laughed with her and they went to her because she was good at giving advice about love.

Death called to Paloma three times. The first time it called to her was when she fell in love with a politician, death laid its egg in her then. It called for her the second time when she loved a loveless man and that time death trilled its song in her ear. The third time death called to her was when she loved a man from the city who had a disease still unborn but soon to be, and death sang to her as clear as the sun that it would come to her at six the night Guadalupe came to me to say they killed her with the shine on her fingers and I saw her in the mirror two times and two times she looked so alive except for the stain of blood spreading under her. A terrible hour, I remember that terrible hour. For me, it was six at night everywhere in the world, six at night today and yesterday and tomorrow, and for all time, and even though each place has its own clock, its own time and its own tongue, for me the only time and tongue and the only words were those ones because Guadalupe had come to say they killed Paloma. It was six at night and  shadows fell across the milpa, it was exactly six at night when the Language left me.

2

Iagreed to write the article about Paloma’s murder because gender-based violence sends me into a rage. I couldn’t take the unending stream of news stories about femicide, rape, and abuse anymore—or the sexist jokes I’d hear around the office, for that matter. Any situation or remark that targeted a woman or someone who identified as one would set me off, and I wanted to do whatever I could from the  I’d dug at the newsroom. Plus, I wanted to meet Feliciana. ...