Of Love and Other Demons

by Gabriel García Márquez

  Four

  Father Cayetano Delaura was invited by the Bishop to wait for the eclipse beneath the canopy of yellow bellflowers, the only place in the house with a view of the ocean sky. The pelicans, motionless in the air on outspread wings, seemed to have died in mid-flight. The Bishop, who had just finished his siesta, moved a slow fan in a hammock hung from naval capstans on two wooden support beams. Delaura sat beside him in a wicker rocking chair. Both were in a state of grace, drinking tamarind water and looking over the rooftops at the vast cloudless sky. Just after two it began to grow dark, the hens huddled on their perches, and all the stars came out at the same time. The world trembled in a supernatural shudder. The Bishop heard the fluttering wings of laggard doves searching for their lofts in the darkness.

  ‘God is great,’ he sighed. ‘Even the animals feel it.’

  The nun in his service brought a candle and several pieces of smoked glass for looking at the sun. The Bishop sat up in the hammock and began to observe the eclipse through the glass.

  ‘You must look with only one eye,’ he said, trying to control the whistle of his breathing. ‘If not, you run the risk of losing both.’

  Delaura held the glass in his hand but did not look at the eclipse. After a long silence, the Bishop scrutinized him in the darkness and saw his luminous eyes indifferent to the enchantment of the counterfeit night.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked.

  Delaura did not reply. He looked at the sun and saw a waning moon that hurt his retina despite the dark glass. But he did not stop looking.

  ‘You are still thinking about the girl,’ said the Bishop.

  Cayetano was startled, despite the fact that the Bishop made this kind of accurate guess with almost unnatural frequency. ‘I was thinking that the common people will relate their troubles to this eclipse,’ he said. The Bishop shook his head without looking away from the sky.

  ‘Who knows, they may be right,’ he said. ‘The cards of the Lord are not easy to read.’

  ‘This phenomenon was calculated thousands of years ago by Assyrian astronomers,’ said Delaura.

  ‘That is the answer of a Jesuit,’ said the Bishop.

  Cayetano continued to observe the sun, not using the glass out of simple distraction. At twelve minutes past two the sun looked like a perfect black disc, and for an instant it was midnight in the middle of the day. Then the eclipse recovered its earthbound quality, and dawn’s roosters began to crow. When Delaura stopped looking, the medal of fire persisted on his retina.

  ‘I still see the eclipse,’ he said, amused. ‘Wherever I look it is there.’

  The Bishop considered the spectacle finished. ‘It will go away in a few hours,’ he said. He stretched and yawned as he sat in the hammock and gave thanks to God for the new day.

  Delaura had not lost the thread of their conversation.

  ‘With all due respect, Father,’ he said, ‘I do not believe the child is possessed.’

  This time the Bishop was alarmed in earnest.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I believe she is only terrified,’ said Delaura.

  ‘We have an abundance of proof,’ said the Bishop. ‘Or have you not read the acta?’

  Yes. Delaura had studied them with great care, and they were more useful for understanding the mentality of the Abbess than the condition of Sierva María. They had exorcised the places where the girl had been on the morning she entered the convent, as well as everything she had touched. Those who had been in contact with her had submitted to fasting and purification. The novice who had stolen her ring on the first day was condemned to forced labor in the garden. They said the girl had enjoyed quartering a goat whose throat she slit with her own hands and had eaten its testicles and eyes with spices as hot as fire. She had displayed a gift for languages that allowed her to talk with Africans from any nation better than they could among themselves, or with any sort of animal. The day after her arrival, the eleven captive macaws that had adorned the garden for twenty years died for no apparent reason. She had charmed the servants with demonic songs sung in voices other than her own. When she learned that the Abbess was looking for her, she had made herself invisible only to her eyes.

  ‘I believe, however,’ said Delaura, ‘that what seems demonic to us are the customs of the blacks, learned by the girl as a consequence of the neglected condition in which her parents kept her.’

  ‘Take care!’ the Bishop warned. ‘The Enemy makes better use of our intelligence than of our errors.’

  ‘Then the best gift we could give him would be to exorcise a healthy child,’ said Delaura.

  The Bishop bristled. ‘Ought I to assume that you are in a state of defiance?’

  ‘You ought to assume that I have my doubts, Father,’ said Delaura. ‘But I obey in all humility.’

  And so he returned to the convent without having convinced the Bishop. Over his left eye he wore the patch that the doctor had prescribed until the sun imprinted on his retina was erased. He sensed the glances following him through the garden and along the series of corridors that led to the prison pavilion, but no one said a word to him. The entire convent seemed to be convalescing from the eclipse.

  When the warder opened Sierva María’s cell, Delaura felt his heart bursting in his chest, and it was all he could do to remain standing. To test her mood that morning, he asked the girl whether she had seen the eclipse. She had, in fact, from the terrace. She did not understand why he had to wear a patch over his eye, when she had looked at the sun without protection and felt fine. She told him that the nuns had watched on their knees and that the convent had been paralyzed until the roosters crowed. But to her it had not seemed anything otherworldly.

  ‘What I saw is what I see every night,’ she said.

  Something had changed in her that Delaura could not define, and its most visible symptom was a trace of sadness. He was not mistaken. As he began to treat her wounds, the girl stared at him with troubled eyes and said in a tremulous voice, ‘I’m going to die.’

  Delaura shuddered.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Martina,’ said the girl.

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  She told him that Martina had come to her cell twice to teach her embroidery and that they had looked at the eclipse together. She said that Martina was good and gentle, and the Abbess had allowed her to hold the embroidery lessons on the terrace so they could watch the twilights over the sea.

  ‘Aha,’ he said without blinking. ‘And did she tell you when you are going to die?’

  The girl nodded, her lips closed tight to keep from crying.

  ‘After the eclipse,’ she said.

  ‘After the eclipse could be the next hundred years,’ said Delaura.

  But he had to concentrate on the treatment so she would not notice the lump in his throat. Sierva María said no more. He looked at her again, intrigued by her silence, and saw that her eyes were wet.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she said.

  She collapsed on the bed and burst into heartrending tears. He moved closer and comforted her with the palliatives of a confessor. This was when Sierva María learned that Cayetano was her exorcist and not her physician.

  ‘Then why are you healing me?’ she asked.

  His voice trembled.

  ‘Because I love you very much.’

  She was not aware of his audacity.

  When he left Sierva María, Delaura stopped at Martina’s cell. Close to her for the first time, he saw that she had pockmarked skin, a shorn head, a nose that was too large and the teeth of a rat, but her seductive power was a material current that could be felt at once. Delaura chose to speak to her from the doorway.

  ‘That poor child already has enough reasons to be frightened,’ he said. ‘I beg you not to add to them.’

  Martina was taken aback. She would never dream of predicting the day of anyone’s death, least of all that of a girl who was so appealing and defenseless. She had only
asked about her circumstances, and had realized after three or four answers that she lied out of habit. Martina spoke with so much gravity that Delaura knew Sierva María had lied to him as well. He asked her to forgive his rashness, and begged her to demand no explanations from the girl.

  ‘I will know what to do,’ he concluded.

  Martina enveloped him in her charm. ‘I know who Your Reverence is,’ she said, ‘and I know you have always known very well what to do.’ But Delaura was wounded by this evidence that Sierva María needed no help from anyone to nurture a horror of death in the solitude of her cell.

  In the course of that week Mother Josefa Miranda sent the Bishop a formal memorandum of complaints and protests written in her own hand. She asked that the Clarissans be relieved of the guardianship of Sierva María, which she considered a belated punishment for faults that had already been purged many times over. She enumerated a new list of extraordinary occurrences that had been cited in the acta and could be explained only as the consequences of shameless complicity between the girl and the demon. She ended with a furious denunciation of Cayetano Delaura’s arrogance, his freethinking, his personal animosity toward her and the abusiveness of his bringing food into the convent in defiance of the prohibitions of their rule.

  The Bishop showed him the memorandum as soon as he returned, and Delaura read it where he stood, not moving a muscle of his face. When he finished he was in a rage.

  ‘If anyone is possessed by all the demons, it is Josefa Miranda,’ he said. ‘Demons of rancor, intolerance, imbecility. She is detestable!’

  The Bishop was surprised by his vehemence. Delaura observed this and tried to speak in a calmer tone.

  ‘What I mean,’ he said, ‘is that she attributes so much power to the forces of evil that she seems like a worshipper of the demon.’

  ‘My investiture does not permit me to agree with you,’ said the Bishop. ‘But I would like to.’

  He reprimanded Delaura for any excess he might have committed, and asked for his patience in enduring the Abbess’s unfortunate nature. ‘The Gospels are filled with women like her, some with even worse defects,’ he said. ‘And yet Jesus exalted them.’ The Bishop could not continue, because the thunder resounded over the house and then rolled out to sea, and a biblical downpour cut them off from the rest of the world. The Bishop lay back in the rocking chair and was shipwrecked in nostalgia.

  ‘How far we are!’ he sighed.

  ‘From what?’

  ‘From ourselves,’ said the Bishop. ‘Does it seem reasonable to you that a man should need up to a year to learn he is an orphan?’ And since there was no answer, he confessed to his homesickness: ‘The very idea that they have already slept tonight in Spain fills me with terror.’

  ‘We cannot intervene in the rotation of the earth,’ said Delaura.

  ‘But we could be unaware of it so that it does not cause us grief,’ said the Bishop. ‘More than faith, what Galileo lacked was a heart.’

  Delaura was familiar with these crises that had tormented the Bishop on nights of melancholy rain ever since old age had assailed him. All he could do was distract him from the attack of black bile until sleep overcame him.

  Toward the end of the month, a proclamation announced the imminent arrival of the new viceroy, Don Rodrigo de Buen Lozano, who would stop here for a visit on his way to the seat of government in Santa Fe de Bogotá. He was traveling with his entourage of magistrates and functionaries, servants and personal physicians, and a string quartet presented to him by the Queen to help him endure the tedium of the Indies. The Vicereine, a distant relative of the Abbess, had asked to be lodged at the convent.

  Sierva María was forgotten in the heating quicklime and steaming pitch, the plague of hammering and the shouted blasphemies of all kinds of people who invaded the house as far as the cloister. A scaffolding collapsed with a deafening crash, killing a bricklayer and injuring seven other workers. The Abbess attributed the disaster to the malevolent spells of Sierva María and took advantage of this new opportunity to insist that she be sent to another convent until the festivities were concluded. This time her principal argument was the inadvisability of allowing someone possessed to be in close proximity to the Vicereine. The Bishop did not respond.

  Don Rodrigo de Buen Lozano was a mature, elegant Asturian, a champion at pelota and partridge shooting, who compensated with his other attractions for being twenty-two years older than his wife. He laughed, even at himself, with his entire body, which he lost no opportunity to display. From the moment he felt the first Caribbean breezes intermingled with nocturnal drums and the fragrance of ripe guava, he removed his springtime attire and wandered bare-chested among the gatherings of ladies on board ship. He disembarked in shirtsleeves, with no speeches and no salutes by the Lombard cannon. In his honor, fandangos, bundes and cumbiambas were authorized although they had been prohibited by the Bishop, and bullfights and cockfights were held outdoors.

  The Vicereine, an active and somewhat mischievous girl just past adolescence, burst into the convent like a windstorm of change. There was no corner she did not examine, no problem she did not consider, nothing good she did not wish to improve. She wandered through the convent, wanting to see everything with all the eagerness of a young novice. The Abbess, in fact, thought it prudent to spare her the unpleasant impression of the prison.

  ‘It is not worth the visit,’ she said. ‘There are only two inmates, and one is possessed by the demon.’

  That was enough to awaken the Vicereine’s interest. She did not care at all that the cells had not been prepared and the inmates had not been notified. As soon as her door was opened, Martina Laborde threw herself at the Vicereine’s feet, begging for a pardon.

  It did not seem probable, after one failed escape and another that had succeeded. She had attempted the first six years earlier, along the terrace overlooking the sea, in the company of three other nuns condemned for diverse reasons to a variety of sentences. One of them escaped. This was when the windows were sealed and the courtyard beneath the terrace was fortified. The following year, the three remaining prisoners tied up the warder, who at that time slept in the pavilion, and fled through a service door. Martina’s family followed the advice of their confessor and returned her to the convent. For four long years she had been the only prisoner, with no right to receive visits in the locutory or hear Sunday Mass in the chapel. A pardon seemed impossible. The Vicereine, however, promised to intercede with her husband.

  In Sierva María’s cell the air was still harsh with quicklime and lingering traces of pitch, but a new order prevailed. As soon as the warder opened the door, the Vicereine felt bewitched by a glacial breath of wind. In a corner illuminated by its own light, Sierva María sat in her torn tunic and stained slippers, plying a slow needle. She did not look up until the Vicereine greeted her. In the girl’s eyes she saw the irresistible force of a revelation. ‘By the Blessed Sacrament,’ she murmured, and stepped into the cell.

  ‘Take care,’ the Abbess whispered in her ear. ‘She is like a tiger.’

  The Abbess seized her arm. The Vicereine did not go in, but one glimpse of Sierva María was enough for her to resolve to save the girl.

  The governor of the city, an effeminate bachelor, gave a luncheon, for men only, in honor of the Viceroy. The string quartet from Spain and a bagpipe-and-drum ensemble from San Jacinto played, and blacks in costume performed bold parodies of white dances. As a finale, a curtain at the back of the room was raised to reveal the Abyssinian slave purchased by the Governor for her weight in gold. She wore an almost transparent tunic that heightened the peril of her nakedness. After showing herself to the ordinary guests she stopped in front of the Viceroy, and the tunic slipped down her body to the floor.

  Her perfection was alarming. Her shoulder had not been profaned by the slaver’s brand, the initial of her first owner had not been burned on her back, and her entire person breathed an air of intimacy. The Viceroy turned pale, inhaled deeply and with a
movement of his hand erased the unbearable vision from his memory.

  ‘Take her away, for God’s sake,’ he ordered. ‘I do not want to see her again for the rest of my days.’

  Perhaps in retribution for the Governor’s frivolity, the Vicereine presented Sierva María at the dinner the Abbess gave in her private dining room. Martina Laborde had warned them: ‘Don’t try to take away her necklaces and bracelets, and you’ll see how well she behaves.’ It was true. They dressed her in her grandmother’s gown, the one she had worn when she came to the convent, they washed and combed her unbraided hair so that it trailed behind her, and the Vicereine herself led her by the hand to her husband’s table. Even the Abbess was stunned by the girl’s elegance, her physical brilliance, the prodigy of her hair. The Vicereine murmured in her husband’s ear, ‘She is possessed by the demon.’

  The Viceroy refused to believe it. In Burgos he had seen a possessed woman who defecated without pause the entire night until she filled the room to overflowing. Trying to avoid a similar fate for Sierva María, he had her examined by his physicians. They confirmed that she showed no symptom of rabies and they agreed with Abrenuncio that it was improbable she would contract the disease now. But no one believed himself authorized to doubt she was possessed by the demon.