On a farm in Mazmela, a village in the depths of Gipuzkoa, a woman was spinning until dawn. As it was winter and cold enough, she worked near the fireplace in the kitchen. One night, our spinner, absorbed in her work, had a huge fright when she realized that a big black cat was staring at her, standing in the middle of the living room.
The spinner and the black cat
At the time, the woman could react, terrified by fear. But the cat not moving in the least, motionless and even seeming to challenge her, the spinner tried to make him leave:
- Get out! Get the hell out of here! she shouted at him.
The cat turned around and quietly disappeared, getting lost in the darkness passing through a corner of the kitchen. After this incident, the spinner could not continue working and went to bed with her heart racing. The following night, still focused on her work, she noticed again that the same black cat settled in the same place as the day before, looking at the woman with a smirk. She jumped again and in the same way tried to scare the animal away by stamping her foot on the ground.
– Get lost! get lost! she shouted at him again but this time the cat didn't move. get lost! get lost! she repeated even louder. The animal showed no intention of moving, staring defiantly at our spinner and snorting in a way that looked like it was laughing sinisterly.
The woman ran to the bedroom, shaking with fear, and got into bed fully dressed. Her husband woke up with a start and, seeing his clothed wife near him, he could not hide his surprise.
– What’s happening to you, you’ve probably seen the devil? he asked her.
– Poor me, if it wasn’t the devil, what I saw was undoubtedly a friend of him! replied his wife, choking.
She then told her husband about her misadventure with the big black cat, how he had been able to enter the kitchen twice in a row without making the slightest noise, how he stared at her. The husband frowned, very concerned, went to the kitchen to check on himself even if the animal was still there or if it had gone. Returning to the bedroom, he proposed to his wife:
– Tomorrow you go to bed after supper, I will stay and run to the kitchen with the clothes on my back.
They did so. When supper was over, the man disguised himself in his wife's clothes while she went to bed. At daybreak, when the man, who did not know how to spin, pretending to work by the fire, noticed out of the corner of his eye that an enormous black cat was approaching him. The animal stood in front of the false spinner, looking at her very strangely, very surprised to see that that evening she had big whiskers.
Unable to contain his curiosity, the cat asked the false spinner:
– How is it that a man slips away?
And he answered:
– How come a cat talks?
Then the man resolutely took the firebrand and delivered a violent blow to the cat, killing it instantly. When he saw that the animal was dead, and dead, he took it by the tail and threw it out of the window towards the garden. The man went to bed, told his wife what had happened and they both slept peacefully. But the following morning they had an unpleasant surprise when they got up because in the garden, instead of finding a cat, they saw an old woman dressed in red. It was a neighbor, no doubt a witch, who in the evening went about doing her mischief transformed into a black cat.
