The Snake’s Venom Awakened Something in Me
I always dreamed of taking the veil, and from the morning I spoke my vows I felt I no longer walked: I floated. Living in the convent of Santa Brígida, on the outskirts of the town, was a peace I had never known. At twenty, I had married my best friend, with God, and nothing in the world seemed cleaner to me than that.
As a teenager I had a boyfriend, though I always knew we would never go anywhere. I was saving myself for something greater. When he wanted what we had to move past some clumsy caresses over our clothes, I left him. Not for lack of desire, but because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to resist temptation, and that doubt already seemed like sin enough.
My father and brothers opposed my entering the convent. My mother, by contrast, could hardly contain her pride. In time they all surrendered to my happiness, because they saw me serene for the first time in years, finally free of the town’s stares.
Because my body, they said, had been made for sin. Not because of my long hair or my lips, but because of a chest too generous and hips the habit could never quite disguise. My family had grown tired of driving men away from our door. Since I took my vows, none ever came near again: I suppose out of fear of God, or of the cloth that covered me from throat to ankles.
Life at Santa Brígida kept time like a clock. We prayed at dawn, helped in the town, returned to pray, ate, did our chores, and prayed again. We had supper and, before sleeping, prayed one last time. I shared a cell with three other sisters, and my only belongings were a couple of sets of underwear I washed by hand. So on hot nights, I slept with nothing beneath the white long-sleeved nightgown, a symbol of purity that covered me from neck to feet.
The nightmares began that spring. Fire, faceless men trying to take me, sweat and moans that were not mine and yet came from my throat. I woke with shame wet between my legs and guilt weighing on my chest.
***
That full-moon night I could take no more. I slipped barefoot out of the cell so as not to wake my sisters and went down to the chapel, seeking comfort. I lit three candles, knelt before the crucifix, and began to ask forgiveness for my worldly impulses.
Then I heard it. A low, patient hiss coming from behind the cabinet where we kept the tapers. I moved the piece of furniture aside to see what was there, and something cold suddenly coiled around my ankle and climbed to my knee.
I tried to pull away and fell onto my back on the flagstones. The thing took advantage of it to creep up my thigh, tightening around my leg like a living rope. I managed to sit up just enough to make out, at the hem of my nightgown, the rattle of a snake. I felt its tongue probing the entrance to my still-intact sex, and then its fangs sinking into the very center of my modesty.
I looked at the crucifix while my legs trembled between pain and something I didn’t dare name. The venom ran through my veins like liquid fire. A voiceless scream lodged in my throat and, before I fainted, I felt it climb up my belly and wind around my neck.
***
I woke in my bed, surrounded by whispers, naked and drenched in fever sweat. I didn’t even notice that my breasts and sex were exposed before half the convent. I only writhed amid visions of a black horse, of a door pounding, of flames and screams.
What I did feel with unbearable clarity were the hands. One of my sisters was pressing hard on my clit, convinced that would draw out the poison. She squeezed, let go, rubbed in circles, trying to force out whatever was consuming me.
—We have to get it out of her —murmured another voice, and a second pair of hands joined the first.
Two sisters held my legs apart to make the task easier. Another, my closest friend among the novices, wrapped her arms around my shoulders to comfort me. I could barely see her, but I recognized her scent. She kissed my cheek and I turned my face away, burning with shame and with something worse.
They touched me faster and faster and, to my horror, I resisted less and less. In my delirium, someone was battering a gate atop the black horse, and the blows matched the ones my sex was taking. My friend kissed me on the mouth, as if she knew I was about to lose consciousness and might not come back to myself.
And my body betrayed me. I thought of God, cried out his name, and came hard in front of them all. It was my first orgasm, torn from me by my own sisters’ hands. I broke apart in moans against my friend’s lips, and at the exact moment the last spasm ran through me, I heard the convent gate give way and fainted again.
***
He said he was a healer. That he had sensed danger among us, that he had come to save me and knew how to draw out the poison. He claimed to have had visions of my torment, just as I had dreamed of his arrival. He was very tall, strong, with strange features, the first man without a cassock to cross those doors.
Some sisters objected. They said his arts came from the devil, that I was already possessed because I had let myself be carried away. But the rest of the novices begged for my life, and they agreed to let him take me on the condition that he not leave me alone.
He set me on his horse uncovered, completely naked, my sensitive sex pressed against the black animal’s back. He settled himself behind me, one firm hand on my waist, whispering in my ear that everything would be fine if I let myself go. I asked God for forgiveness and entrusted myself to the healer, hoping for a miracle.
As we crossed the courtyard, my sisters ran after us, and I knew with certainty it was the last time I would see them like that. The horse’s back drove into my groin with every step, a friction that both relieved me and stoked me at the same time.
As soon as we reached the road, the healer changed. He grabbed the horse’s mane and my hair with the same fist, as if the animal and I were one beast he meant to dominate. He said he needed to make sure I was the right one. He bent me over the horse’s back, my breasts hanging on either side and bouncing with the gallop, my body exposed.
He pressed his sex, still covered, against my soaked one, and with every leap of the horse I felt something waking in me that the convent had never touched. He yanked my hair, clawed my back from top to bottom, and I, delirious with fever, had never felt so roughly handled. I was about to come again.
Far off I saw my sisters running toward us, and a huge bonfire burning inside some strange circle. But I forgot everything when he struck me hard and the horse reared up on its hind legs, neighing, mingling its cry with my moans. When it came down again, the second orgasm swept through me and left me trembling against the animal.
The healer pulled me from the trance by yanking my hair and whispered:
—You are what I was looking for. You will be a nun, but there is something wild in you. Perfect for the lord.
His words raised the hair on my skin. He lifted me in his arms and got me down from the horse.
***
He took me to the bonfire. My sisters were already there, staring in horror, not understanding what had just happened. He opened my legs with his own and held my wrists above my head. For an instant I thought he was going to throw me into the flames.
Then I heard it again. The hiss. The same hiss that had unleashed all that torment. And instead of saving me, the healer offered me to the snake.
The animal crept up my leg, already knowing the way, and passed over my sex, torturing me slowly. It climbed my belly to my breasts, circled them in an eight with its body, and went on to my neck, tightening, until its head was facing mine. It looked me in the eyes and flicked its tongue. Worst of all was its rattle: it fell right over my clit and vibrated without rest, keeping me on the edge of the abyss.
The healer recited something I didn’t understand, a litany about offering the virgin novice to the lord of shadows. He drew symbols on my back with the pads of his fingers. I had no time to be afraid, only to feel.
He took me from behind in one brutal thrust, holding me by the nipples like someone mastering an animal. I could see my sisters through the flames, kneeling, praying for my soul. But between him and the snake I could hardly think. I only wanted more, and as if he guessed it, the rattle vibrated even harder.
Pleasure split me in two. I felt orgasm after orgasm as I moved to the rhythm of both, letting myself be choked and taken at the same pace. My entire body burned like the bonfire, and the fire seemed to grow, fed by my surrender.
When the last spasm left me in a state of perpetual trance, the snake descended to the ground and waited. The healer called my sisters, who gathered around the fire trembling, and he laid me in the center, naked, panting. He spread my sex open and checked, satisfied, that my virginity remained intact.
He rested the tip of his shaft at my entrance, without penetrating me, respecting that final threshold. At that instant the snake bit me in the neck, and a vision shot through me: a painful birth in that very chapel, a creature that must not be born. It looked at me almost with pity before sliding toward the fire, and something inside me burned with it.
I looked down and saw him pouring over my belly, filling me without breaking my seal, as if he possessed the power of the black horse already disappearing into the shadows. I felt a dark glory flood me as I convulsed in gratitude. The venom finally left my body at the same time a new orgasm shook me.
He kissed my forehead and spoke to my sisters in a grave voice:
—Give her all the pleasure she asks for and hold her when madness comes after her. Obey her, tend to her in childbirth, and let no one from outside see you until the child is born. Until that day, she must remain a virgin.
And he vanished into the darkness of the night.
***
I woke alone in my bed. Two weeks had passed and I no longer shared a cell with anyone. I looked at myself in the mirror: my habit hung untouched on the wall, and I knew I would not dress that day either. My neck burned where the snake had marked me, the night before the sisters decided to isolate me and turn Santa Brígida into a cloistered convent.
My closest friend came in and calmed me with her tongue, as she did every morning. At first I accepted, afraid the others would find out. Now they took turns doing it, because I had become insatiable and no one knew any other way to soothe the fire living inside me.
Another sister came to relieve her, bringing breakfast. But barely had I come near the food when nausea seized my belly. They laid me down, stroked me until they pulled another of my countless orgasms from me, and then they placed their hands on my stomach and looked at one another.
—You’re with child, sister —they said softly—. Just as he wanted.
They ran to get the others. When they all gathered in the chapel, they touched my belly one by one to confirm what we already knew. The promised creature was growing in my womb, and while I floated between horror and a pleasure that would no longer leave me, their voices rose together in a prayer that sounded like condemnation.
