Deep in the night between February ninth and tenth, 1937, the last Carnival crowd holdouts in Quito had given up. Tucked away in their beds before Ash Wednesday's liturgical, if not actual, repentance commenced, they mostly hoped for enough sleep to make their inevitable headaches at least bearable. This was not true for Yma Otón, the twenty-year-old Otavoleño native who served as live-in nanny for the young daughters of the city's alcalde, Hugo Alvarez, and his wife. She stared blankly wide-eyed at her slowly rotating ceiling fan as she lay stickily naked under a light sheet, lost in heartfelt prayer that she had dispatched a ripe egg to welcome the seed flotilla that the mayor, barely six hours earlier, had launched into her at the Hotel Plaza Grande.
Yma sighed softly. Twice, and sometimes three times, every week since she had turned eighteen on the day before Maria Alvarez entered the hospital in labor with little Dolores, the alcalde had made love to her. Her fingers twitched beside her bare hips as she did the math while thinking of the multiple ways that she had given herself so fully to her passionate lion. But this last time, the briefest and most desperate that she could remember, was different from all the others.
Hugo Alvarez was keenly conscious of the possible consequences when he enjoyed Yma's sweet sexual favors. Always, he had inquired when she had had her last period. If he thought the risks were too great, he ignored The Church and put a rubber sleeve on his carajo to corral his potency. However, last evening in the hotel suite, with baby Dolores snug in the next room, there had been no time for such a question and so, on her cycle's most fertile day, no protection had been used.
Outside Yma's open window, in the huge tree-like banana plant which dominated the Casa Alvarez inner courtyard, an Andean Potoo perched solemnly on a great stem. As its periodic querulous wails, interspersed with quieter calls, pierced the darkness in her room and registered in her brain, she wondered, "Is this an omen of change, Mamá, as you so often said when you heard the ghost bird's poignant voice? And, if so, what will the change be? Is it my time to become a madre?"
Suddenly a thick green misty haze filled Yma's bedroom. Doubting her senses, she raised up sluggishly onto her elbows and asked aloud, "What is this strange colored fog? Am I awake or dreaming?"
At once, a clear distinct voice answered, "Awake enough, but lay back unalarmed."
Yma did as she was told, as if she had no other option. As soon as her head hit her pillow again, all mobility left her body, but behind her closed eyes she listened intently for more information. The voice was beautiful and commanding; oddly familiar, yet completely unknown. For all its imperiousness, it filled her with confident calm.
Esmeralda Verde, the immortal Green Witch, condensed her illusion form into a small cloud, then hovered near her mesmerized subject's placid face and gently continued, "Yma Otón, I am here to help you fulfill your hope, if that is what you would want. Are you truly seeking change? Will you welcome my assistance?"
Without understanding her excitement, Yma cried out in her mind, "¡Sí! ¡Ayúdame! ¡Por favor!" Inside her frozen frame her heart thundered and her panting breaths rushed in a gale.
La Hechicera smiled her satisfaction and praised, "Good girl! That is all I needed to hear. Ahora duerme un poco..."
Yma soughed quietly as she drifted obediently into dreamless slumber. In the corridor, the sorceress silently shimmered her way to the Alvarez nursery where she discarded her veiling vapor and targeted there the mayor's four young daughters in their beds. Touching their brows and muttering arcane foreign words over each child in turn, she made certain the girls would not wake before their nanny roused them to dress for breakfast.
At the long hall's end, in the master suite, Esmeralda surveilled Hugo Alvarez and his heavily pregnant wife, Maria sleeping soundly in their grand four-poster. Back-to-back, with an air pocket a half-metre wide between them, no part of one's body touched the other. Moving first to Dona Alvarez' head, the magician deepened her oblivion just as she had done for Alba, Beatriz, Carlota and Dolores in their room. Then, she moved around the bed to the curled-up alcalde, leaned close to his left ear and tugged his dark caballero-style goatee with her right hand while she whispered a different incantation.
As his lids fluttered and his glazed eyes half-focused on the enchantress, the forty-year-old submissively rolled a quarter-turn onto his back. Esmeralda dropped her left hand lightly onto his forehead, as if to check his temperature, while she let go his beard and then flipped the linen sheet off him onto his wife. Maria did not notice the new double coverage on her hefty hip, nor the sudden cool draft on her bared shoulders, except, without waking, she swam on the mattress surface closer to its edge, tightened her fetal posture and widened her distance from her entranced husband. Hugo, somnolently unfolding, laid out his arms beside his hips and straightened legs.
"Gracias, mi mascota," the Green Witch cooed, as she stroked her left fingers into the alcalde's wavy black hair and opened his pajama shirt's top button with her right hand. "Now, let's talk about your mission." Moving to the next button, and the two beyond that, she chuckled thoughtfully as she corrected herself, "Well, I'll talk. You listen."
Esmeralda spread apart Hugo's undone pajama top's plackets and then massaged slow circular swaths from his budding middle-age pot upward to his chest. As she scratched his scalp and burrowed in the wiry thatch between his soft pectoral muscles, she whispered matter-of-factly, "You have been both very lucky and very unlucky in love, my pet. But that is about to change. Your daughters are all darling, however they are obviously not the son that you have always wanted. How unfortunate. On the other hand, you have been regularly fucking their delicious nanny for two years and she has so far remained childless. "¡Hay buena suerte para ti!"
Esmeralda smiled and toyed with Hugo's nipples. He rolled his shoulders responsively while his nerves jangled and a heat began in his gut. His pantaloons tented slightly at the crotch. A low moan emanated from behind his closed lips.