That night Cayetano found Sierva María shivering with fever inside the straitjacket. What incensed him most was the mockery of her cropped head. ‘God in Heaven,’ he murmured with silent rage as he freed her from her bonds. ‘How can you permit this crime?’ As soon as she was free, Sierva María threw herself on his neck, and they embraced while she wept. He allowed her to give vent to her feelings. Then he raised her face and said, ‘No more tears.’ And coupled this with Garcilaso: ‘Those I have wept for your sake are enough.’
Sierva María recounted her terrible experience in the chapel. She told him about the deafening choirs that sounded like war, about the demented shouts of the Bishop, about his burning breath, about his beautiful green eyes ablaze with passion.
‘He was like the devil,’ she said.
Cayetano tried to calm her. He assured her that despite his titanic corpulence, his bellowing voice, his martial methods, the Bishop was a good and wise man. And so Sierva María’s fear was understandable, but she was in no danger.
‘What I want is to die,’ she said.
‘You feel enraged and defeated, and so do I because I cannot help you,’ he said. ‘But God will reward us on the day of resurrection.’
He took off the necklace of Oddúa that Sierva María had given him and put it around her neck to replace all the others. They lay down side by side on the bed and shared their rancor, while the world grew quiet until the only sound was the gnawing of termites in the coffered ceiling. Her fever subsided. Cayetano spoke in the darkness.
‘The Apocalypse prophesies a day that will never dawn,’ he said. ‘Would to God it were today.’
Sierva María had been sleeping for about an hour after Cayetano left, when a new noise woke her. Standing before her, accompanied by the Abbess, was an old priest of imposing stature, with dark skin weathered by salt air, coarse bushy hair, heavy eyebrows, rough hands, and eyes that invited confidence. Sierva María was still half asleep when the priest said in Yoruban, ‘I have brought your necklaces.’
He took them from his pocket, just as the superior of the convent had returned them to him in response to his demands. As he hung them around Sierva María’s neck, he named and defined each one in African languages: the red and white of the love and blood of Changó, the red and black of the life and death of Elegguá, the seven aqua and pale blue beads of Yemayá. He moved with subtle tact from Yoruban to Congolese and from Congolese to Mandingo, and she followed suit with grace and fluency. If at the end he changed to Castilian, it was only out of consideration for the Abbess, who could not believe that Sierva María was capable of so much sweetness.
He was Father Tomás de Aquino de Narváez, a former prosecutor of the Holy Office in Seville and now parish priest in the slave district, whom the Bishop, his health impaired, had selected to replace him in the exorcism. His record of severity left no room for doubt. He had brought eleven heretics, Jews and Muslims, to the stake, but his reputation was based above all on the countless souls he had wrested away from the most cunning demons in Andalusia. He had refined tastes and manners and the sweet diction of the Canaries. He had been born here, the son of a royal solicitor who married his quadroon slave, and he had spent his novitiate in the local seminary once the purity of his lineage over four generations of whites had been demonstrated. His distinguished achievements earned him a doctorate at Seville, where he lived and preached until he was fifty. On his return to his native land, he requested the humblest parish, became an enthusiast of African religions and languages and lived among the slaves like a slave. No one seemed more capable of communicating with Sierva María and better prepared to confront her demons.
Sierva María recognized him at once as an archangel of salvation, and she was not mistaken. In her presence he took apart the arguments in the acta and proved to the Abbess that none of them was conclusive. He informed her that the demons of America were the same as those of Europe but that summoning them and controlling them were different. He explained the four common rules for recognizing demonic possession and helped her see how easy it was for the demon to manipulate these so that the opposite would be believed. He took his leave of Sierva María with an affectionate pinch of her cheek.
‘Sleep well,’ he said. ‘I have dealt with worse enemies.’
The Abbess was so well disposed that she invited him to have a cup of the celebrated aromatic chocolate of the Clarissans, with the anisette biscuits and confectionary miracles reserved for the elect. As they ate and drank in her private refectory, he imparted his instructions for the measures that were to be taken next. The Abbess was happy to comply.
‘I have no interest in whether or not things go well for that unhappy creature,’ she said. ‘What I do beg of God is that she leave this convent at once.’
The priest promised he would make every effort to have that be a matter of days, or hours, God willing. Both were content when they said goodbye in the locutory, and neither could imagine they would never see each other again.
But that is what happened. Father Aquino, as his parishioners called him, set off on foot for his church, since for some time he had prayed very little and made amends to God by reviving the martyrdom of his nostalgia every day. He lingered at the arcades, overwhelmed by the hawking of peddlers who sold everything imaginable, and waited for the sun to go down before crossing the bog of the port. He bought the cheapest pastries and a partial ticket in the lottery of the poor, with the incorrigible hope of winning so that he could restore his dilapidated temple. He spent half an hour talking to the black matrons who sat on the ground like monumental idols beside handmade trinkets displayed on jute mats. At about five he crossed the Getsemaní drawbridge, where they had just hung the carcass of a large, sinister dog so that everyone would know it had died of rabies. The air carried the scent of roses, and the sky was the most diaphanous in the world.
The slave district, at the very edge of the salt marsh, was staggering in its misery. People lived alongside turkey buzzards and pigs in mud huts with roofs of palm, and children drank from the swamp in the streets. But with its intense colors and radiant voices it was the liveliest district, and even more so at twilight, when the residents carried chairs into the middle of the street to enjoy the cool air. The priest distributed the pastries among the children of the marsh, and kept three for his supper.
The temple was a mud-and-cane shack with a roof of bitter palm and a wooden cross on its ridge. It had rough plank benches, a single altar with a single saint, and a wooden pulpit where Father Aquino preached on Sundays in African languages. The parish house was an extension of the church behind the altar, where the priest lived in austere conditions in one room that held a cot and a crude chair. In the rear were a small, rocky courtyard and an arbor with clusters of blighted grapes, and a fence of thornbushes that separated the courtyard from the marsh. The only drinking water was in a concrete cistern in one corner of the yard.
An old sacristan and an orphan girl of fourteen, both converted Mandingos, assisted him in the church and in the house, but were not needed after the Rosary. Before he closed the door, the priest ate the three pastries with a glass of water, and then, with his habitual formula in Castilian, he took his leave of the neighbors sitting in the street: ‘May God grant all of you a blessed good night.’
At four in the morning, the sacristan, who lived a block away from the church, began to ring the bell for Mass. Before five o’clock, in view of the fact that the priest was late, the sacristan looked for him in his room. He was not there or in the courtyard. He continued looking in the vicinity of the church, for the priest sometimes visited nearby courtyards very early in the day to talk to the neighbors. He told the few parishioners who came to the church that there would be no Mass because the priest was nowhere to be found. At eight o’clock, with the sun already hot, the servant girl went to the cistern for water, and there was Father Aquino, floating on his back and wearing the breeches he kept on when he slept. It was a sad, widely mourned death, and a m
ystery that was never solved, which the Abbess proclaimed as definitive proof of demonic animosity toward her convent.
The news did not reach the cell of Sierva María, who waited for Father Aquino with innocent hopefulness. She could not explain to Cayetano who he was, but she did convey her gratitude for the return of the necklaces and his promise to rescue her. Until that moment it had seemed to both of them that love was enough to make them happy. In her disenchantment with Father Aquino, it was Sierva María who realized that their freedom depended only on themselves. Late one night, after long hours of kisses, she pleaded with Delaura not to go. He did not think she was serious, and said goodbye with one more kiss. She leaped from the bed and stretched her arms across the door.
‘Either you stay or I’m going with you.’
She had once told Cayetano that she would like to take refuge with him in San Basilio de Palenque, a settlement of fugitive slaves twelve leagues from here, where she was sure to be received like a queen. It seemed a providential idea to Cayetano, but he did not connect it to their escape. He put his trust instead in legal formalities. In the Marquis’s recovering his daughter with undeniable proof she was not possessed and in his obtaining the Bishop’s pardon and permission to join a lay community where the marriage of a priest or nun would be so common it would shock no one. And so when Sierva María forced him to choose between staying and taking her with him, he tried once again to distract her. She clung to his neck and threatened to scream. Day was dawning. A frightened Delaura managed to break away with a shove and fled just as they were beginning to sing Matins.
Sierva María’s reaction was ferocious. She scratched the warder’s face at the most trivial provocation, locked herself in with the crossbar and threatened to burn the cell and herself inside it if they did not let her go. The warder, in a rage because of her bloodied face, shouted, ‘Just you dare, you beast of Beelzebub.’
Sierva María’s only reply was to set fire to the mattress with the Sanctuary Lamp. The intervention of Martina and her soothing ways prevented a tragedy. In any event, in her daily report the warder requested that the girl be transferred to a more secure cell in the cloistered pavilion.
Sierva María’s urgency heightened Cayetano’s own longing to find an immediate solution other than flight. On two occasions he attempted to see the Marquis, and both times he was stopped by the mastiffs, out of their cages and roaming free in the house with no master. The truth was that the Marquis would never live there again. Conquered by his interminable fears, he had tried to seek refuge in the shelter of Dulce Olivia, but she did not open her door to him. Ever since the onset of his solitary grief, he had called on her by every means at his disposal and had received nothing but mocking responses on little paper birds. Then, without warning, she appeared, unsummoned and unannounced. She had swept and cleaned the kitchen, in a shambles through lack of use, and on the stove a pot bubbled over a cheerful flame. She was dressed for Sunday in organza flounces, and brightened by the latest cosmetics and ointments, and the only sign of her madness was a hat with an enormous brim trimmed in fabric fish and birds. ‘I thank you for coming,’ said the Marquis. ‘I was feeling very lonely.’ And he concluded with a lament, ‘I have lost Sierva.’
‘It’s your fault,’ she said in an offhand way. ‘You did everything you could to lose her.’
Their supper was a stew in the local style, with three kinds of meat and the best of the vegetable garden. Dulce Olivia served it as if she were the mistress of the house, her manners well suited to her costume. The fierce dogs followed her everywhere, panting and winding themselves around her legs, and she beguiled them with the murmurings of a bride. She sat across the table from the Marquis, just as they might have been when they were young and not afraid of love, and they ate in silence without looking at each other, dripping with perspiration and eating their soup with an old married couple’s lack of interest. After the first course Dulce Olivia paused to sigh and became aware of her age.
‘This is how we could have been,’ she said.
The Marquis found her bravado contagious. He looked at her: she was fat and old, two teeth were missing, and her eyes were withered. This is how they could have been, perhaps, if he had found the courage to oppose his father.
‘When you are like this you seem to be in your right mind,’ he said.
‘I always have been,’ she said. ‘It was you who never saw me as I really was.’
‘I picked you out of the crowd when you were all young and beautiful and it was difficult to choose the best,’ he said.
‘I picked myself out for you,’ she said. ‘Not you. You were always what you are now: a miserable devil.’
‘You insult me in my own house,’ he said.
The brewing argument excited Dulce Olivia. ‘It’s as much mine as yours,’ she said. ‘As the girl is mine, even though a bitch whelped her.’ And not giving him time to reply, she concluded, ‘And worst of all are the evil hands you’ve left her in.’
‘She is in the hands of God,’ he said.
Dulce Olivia shrieked in fury.
‘She is in the hands of the Bishop’s son, who has made her into his pregnant whore.’
‘If you bit your tongue you would poison yourself,’ shouted the Marquis, appalled.
‘Sagunta exaggerates but she doesn’t lie,’ said Dulce Olivia. ‘And don’t try to humiliate me, because I’m the only one you have left to powder your face when you die.’
It was the invariable finale. Her tears began to fall into her plate like drops of soup. The dogs were asleep but the tension of the quarrel woke them, and they raised their watchful heads and growled deep in their throats. The Marquis felt as if he did not have enough air.
‘You see,’ he said in a fury, ‘this is how we would have been.’
She stood without finishing her meal. She cleared the table, washed the dishes and casseroles with sordid fury, and as she washed each one she smashed it against the basin. He let her cry until she threw the pieces of crockery, like an avalanche of hail, into the trash bin. She left without saying goodbye. The Marquis never knew, and no one else ever knew, just when Dulce Olivia had stopped being herself and become no more than a nocturnal apparition in the house.
The fiction that Cayetano Delaura was the Bishop’s son had replaced the older rumor that they had been lovers ever since Salamanca. Dulce Olivia’s version, confirmed and distorted by Sagunta, said in effect that Sierva María, sequestered in the convent to satiate the satanic appetites of Cayetano Delaura, had conceived a child with two heads. Their saturnalias, Sagunta said, had contaminated the entire community of Clarissans.
The Marquis never recovered. Stumbling through the quagmire of the past, he searched for a refuge against his terror and found only the image of Bernarda, ennobled by his solitude. He tried to conjure it away by recalling the things he hated most about her: her fetid gases, her ill-tempered remarks, her bunions as sharp as a rooster’s claws, and the more he tried to vilify her the more idealized his recollections became. Defeated by nostalgia, he sent exploratory messages to the sugar plantation at Mahates, where he supposed she had gone when she left the house, and she was there. He sent word that she should forget her anger and come home, so they might at least each have someone to die with. When he received no reply, he went to see her.
He had to find his way back along the streams of memory. The estate that had been the best in the vice-regency was reduced to nothing. It was impossible to distinguish the road from the undergrowth. All that remained of the mill was rubble, machinery eaten away by rust, the skeletons of the last two oxen still yoked to the wheel. The pool of sighs in the shade of the calabash trees was the only thing that seemed alive. Before he could see the house through the burned brambles of the canebrakes, the Marquis smelled the scent of Bernarda’s soaps, which had become her natural odor, and he realized how much he longed to be with her. And there she was, sitting in a rocking chair on the front veranda and eating cacao, her unmoving eyes fi
xed on the horizon. She wore a tunic of rose-colored cotton, and her hair was still damp from a recent bath in the pool of sighs.
The Marquis greeted her before climbing the three stairs to the gallery, ‘Good afternoon.’ Bernarda replied without looking at him, as if it were no one’s greeting. The Marquis went up to the veranda, and from there he looked out over the brambles and searched the entire horizon in a single, uninterrupted glance. For as far as he could see, there was nothing but wild brush and the calabash trees at the pool. ‘Where are all the people?’ he asked. Bernarda, like her father, answered a second time without looking at him. ‘They all left,’ she said. ‘There’s not a living soul for a hundred leagues around.’
He went inside to find a chair. The house was in ruins, and plants with small purple flowers were breaking through the bricks of the floor. In the dining room he saw the old table, the same chairs devoured by termites, the clock that had been stopped at the same hour for longer than anyone could remember, all of it in an air filled with invisible dust that he could feel with each breath. The Marquis carried out one of the chairs, sat down next to Bernarda, and said in a very quiet voice, ‘I have come for you.’
Bernarda’s expression did not change, but she nodded her head in almost imperceptible affirmation. He described his life: the solitary house, the slaves crouching behind the hedges with their knives at the ready, the interminable nights.
‘That is not living,’ he said.
‘It never was,’ she said.
‘Perhaps it could be,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t say that to me if you really knew how much I hate you,’ she said.
‘I have always thought I hated you too,’ he said, ‘and now it seems I am not so certain.’
Of Love and Other Demons Page 13
