Of Love and Other Demons (14 page)

‘Say it with me,’ he told her: ‘
Into your hands at last I have come vanquished
.’

She obeyed. ‘
Where I know that I must die
,’ he continued, as he opened her bodice
with icy fingers. And she repeated the lines almost in a whisper, trembling with fear: ‘
So that in myself alone it might be proven how deep the sword bites into conquered flesh
.’ Then he kissed her on the mouth for the first time. Sierva María’s body shivered in a lament, emitted a tenuous ocean
breeze, and abandoned itself to its fate. He passed his fingertips over her skin almost without touching
her, and experienced for the first time the miracle of feeling himself in another body. An inner voice told him how far he had been from the devil in his sleepless nights of Latin and Greek, his ecstasies of faith, the barren wastelands of his chastity, while she had lived with all the powers of untrammeled love in the hovels of the slaves. He allowed her to guide him, feeling his way in the
darkness, but at the last moment he repented and in a moral cataclysm fell into the abyss. He lay on his back with his eyes closed. Sierva María was frightened by his silence, his stillness of death, and she touched him with her finger.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Let me be now,’ he murmured. ‘I am praying.’

In the days that followed they had no more than a few moments of calm while they were
together. They never tired of talking about the sorrows of love. They exhausted themselves in kisses, they wept burning tears as they declaimed lovers’ verses, they sang into each other’s ear, they writhed in quicksands of desire to the very limits of their strength: spent, but virgin. For he had resolved to keep his vow until he received the sacrament, and she with him.

In the respites of passion
they exchanged excessive proofs of their love. He said he would be capable of anything for her sake. With childish cruelty, Sierva María asked him to eat a cockroach. He caught one before she could stop him, and ate it live. In other senseless challenges he asked if she would cut off her braid for his sake, and she said yes but warned him, as a joke or in all seriousness, that if she did he
would have to marry her to
fulfill the terms of the promise. He brought a kitchen knife to the cell and said: ‘We will see if it is true.’ She turned so that he could cut it off at the root. She urged him on: ‘I dare you.’ He did not dare. Days later she asked if he would allow his throat to be slit like a goat’s. He answered with a firm yes. She took out the knife and prepared to test him. He
started in terror, feeling the final shudder. ‘Not you,’ he said. ‘Not you.’ She, overcome with laughter, wanted to know why, and he told her the truth, ‘Because you really would do it.’

In the still waters of their passion they also began to experience the tedium of everyday love. She kept the cell clean and neat for the moment he arrived with all the naturalness of a husband returning home.
Cayetano taught her to read and write and initiated her into the cults of poetry and devotion to the Holy Spirit, anticipating the happy day when they would be free and married.

At dawn on the twenty-seventh of April, Sierva María was just falling asleep after Cayetano had left the cell, when with no warning they came to begin the exorcism. It was the ritual of a prisoner condemned to death.
They dragged her to the trough, wet her down with buckets of water, tore off her necklaces, and dressed her in the brutal shift worn by heretics. A gardener nun cut off her hair at the nape of the neck with four bites of her pruning shears and threw it into the fire burning in the courtyard. The barber nun clipped the ends to a half-inch, the length worn by Clarissans under the veil, and tossed them
into the fire as she cut them. Sierva María saw the golden conflagration and heard the crackle of virgin wood and smelled the acrid odor of burned horn
and did not move a muscle of her stony face. Then they put her in a straitjacket and draped her in funereal trappings, and two slaves carried her to the chapel on a military stretcher.

The Bishop had convoked the Ecclesiastical Council, composed
of distinguished prebendaries, and they selected four of their number to assist him in the proceedings concerning Sierva María. In a final act of affirmation, the Bishop overcame his wretched ill health. He ordered the ceremony to be held not in the cathedral, as on other memorable occasions, but in the chapel of the Convent of Santa Clara, and he himself assumed responsibility for performing the
exorcism.

The Clarissans, with the Abbess at their head, had been in the chancel since the small hours of the morning, and there they sang Matins to an organ accompaniment, moved by the solemnity of the day that was dawning. This was followed by the entrance of the prelates of the Ecclesiastical Council, the provosts of three orders and the principals of the Holy Office. Aside from these last-mentioned
officials, no civil authority was or would be present.

The last to enter was the Bishop in his ceremonial vestments, borne on a platform by four slaves and surrounded by an aura of inconsolable affliction. He sat facing the high altar, next to the marble catafalque used for important funerals, in a swivel armchair that made it easier for him to move his body. At the stroke of six the two slaves
carried in Sierva María, lying on the stretcher in the straitjacket and still muffled in purple cloth.

The heat became intolerable during the singing of the Mass. The bass notes of the organ rumbled in the coffered
ceiling and left almost no openings for the bland voices of the Clarissans, invisible behind the lattices of the chancel. The two half-naked slaves who had brought in Sierva María’s
stretcher stood guard next to it. At the end of the Mass they uncovered her and left her lying like a dead princess on the marble catafalque. The Bishop’s slaves moved his armchair next to her and left them alone in the large space in front of the high altar.

What followed produced unendurable tension and absolute silence, and seemed the prelude to some celestial prodigy. An acolyte placed the
basin of holy water within reach of the Bishop. He seized the hyssop as if it were a battle hammer, leaned over Sierva María, and sprinkled the length of her body with holy water as he intoned a prayer. Then he uttered the conjuration that made the foundations of the chapel shudder.

‘Whoever you may be,’ he shouted, ‘I command you in the name of Christ, Lord God of all that is visible and invisible,
of all that is, was, and will be, to abandon this body redeemed by baptism, and return to darkness.’

Sierva María, beside herself with terror, shouted too. The Bishop raised his voice to silence her, but she shouted even louder. The Bishop took a deep breath and opened his mouth again to continue the exorcism, but the air died inside his chest and he could not expel it. He fell face forward,
gasping like a fish on land, and the ceremony ended in an immense uproar.

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.’