Of Love and Other Demons (16 page)

The girl raised her free hand with a determination that stopped the Abbess in her tracks.

‘I saw them leave,’ she said.

The Abbess was stunned.

‘She was not alone?’

‘There were six of them,’ said Sierva María.

It did not seem possible, and even less so that they could leave by the terrace, whose only point of egress was the fortified courtyard. ‘They had bat’s wings,’
said Sierva María, flapping her arms. ‘They spread them on the terrace, and then they carried her away, flying, flying, to the other side of the ocean.’ The captain of the patrol crossed himself in fear and fell to his knees.

‘Hail Mary Most Pure,’ he said.

‘Conceived without sin,’ they all said in a chorus.

It
was a perfect escape, planned by Martina in absolute secrecy and down to the smallest
detail, ever since she had discovered that Cayetano was spending his nights in the convent. The only thing she did not foresee, or did not care about, was the need to close the sewer entrance from the inside to avoid arousing suspicion. Those who investigated the escape found the tunnel open, explored it, learned the truth, and sealed both ends without delay. Sierva María was forced to move
to a locked cell in the pavilion of those interred in life. That night, beneath a splendid moon, Cayetano tore his hands trying to break through the seal on the tunnel.

Driven by a demented force, he ran to find the Marquis. He pushed open the main door without knocking and entered the deserted house, whose interior light was the same as the light in the street, for the brilliant moon made the
whitewashed walls seem transparent. Clean and neat, the furnishings in place, flowers in the urns: everything was perfect in the abandoned house. The groan of the hinges aroused the mastiffs, but
Dulce Olivia silenced them with a martial command. Cayetano saw her in the green shadows of the courtyard, beautiful, phosphorescent, wearing the tunic of a marquise, her hair adorned by fresh camellias
with a frenzied scent, and he raised his hand to form a cross with his index finger and thumb.

‘In the name of God: Who are you?’ he asked.

‘A soul in torment,’ she said. ‘And you?’

‘I am Cayetano Delaura,’ he said, ‘and I have come on bended knee to beg the Señor Marquis to listen to me for a moment.’

Dulce Olivia’s eyes flashed in anger.

‘The Señor Marquis is not interested in listening
to a scoundrel,’ she said.

‘And who are you to speak with so much command?’

‘I am the queen of this house,’ she said.

‘For the love of God,’ said Delaura. ‘Tell the Marquis that I have come to talk to him about his daughter.’ And with his hand on his heart, he came to the point and said, ‘I am dying of love for her.’

‘One more word and I will turn loose the dogs,’ said Dulce Olivia in indignation,
and she pointed to the door, ‘Get out of here.’

The power of her authority was so great that Cayetano backed out of the house in order not to lose sight of her.

On Tuesday, when Abrenuncio entered his cubicle at the hospital, he found Delaura devastated by mortal vigils. He told the doctor about everything, from the real reasons for his punishment to his nights of love in the cell. Abrenuncio
was perplexed.

‘I would have imagined anything about you except these extremes of lunacy.’

Cayetano, bewildered in turn, asked, ‘Have you never gone through this?’

‘Never, my son,’ said Abrenuncio. ‘Sex is a talent, and I do not have it.’

Abrenuncio tried to dissuade him. He said that love was an emotion
contra natura
that condemned two strangers to a base and unhealthy dependence, and the
more intense it was, the more ephemeral. But Cayetano did not hear him. He was obsessed with fleeing as far as possible from the oppression of the Christian world.

‘Only
the Marquis can help us with regard to the law,’ he said. ‘I wanted to get down on my knees and plead with him, but I did not find him at home.’

‘You never will,’ said Abrenuncio. ‘He heard rumors that you attempted to abuse
the girl. And now I see that from a Christian’s point of view, he was not mistaken.’ He looked into Cayetano’s eyes. ‘Aren’t you afraid you will be damned?’

‘I believe I already am, but not by the Holy Spirit,’ said Delaura without alarm. ‘I have always believed He attributes more importance to love than to faith.’

Abrenuncio could not hide the wonder caused in him by this man so recently freed
from the shackles of reason. But he made no false promises, above all when the Holy Office loomed.

‘You people have a religion of death that fills you with the joy and courage to confront it,’ he said. ‘I do not: I believe the only essential thing is to be alive.’

Cayetano raced to the convent. In the light of day he walked through the service door and crossed the garden, taking no precautions,
convinced he had been made invisible through the power of prayer. He climbed to the second floor, walked down a solitary corridor with low ceilings that connected the two sections of the convent, and entered the silent, rarefied world of those interred in life. Without realizing it, he had walked past the new cell where Sierva María wept for him. He had almost reached the prison pavilion when
a shout at his back stopped him.

‘Halt!’

He turned and saw a nun with a veil covering her face and a crucifix held high against him. He took a step
toward her, but the nun placed Christ between them. ‘
Vade retro
!’ she shouted.

He heard another voice behind him: ‘
Vade retro
.’ And then another, and another: ‘
Vade retro
.’ He turned around several times and realized he was in the middle of a circle
of phantasmagoric nuns with veiled faces who brandished their crucifixes and pursued him with their cries:

‘
Vade retro, Satana
!’

Cayetano had reached the end of his strength. He was handed over to the Holy Office and condemned at a public trial that cast suspicions of heresy over him and provoked disturbances among the populace and controversies in the bosom of the Church. Through a special
act of grace, he served his sentence as a nurse at the Amor de Dios Hospital, where he lived many years with his patients, eating and sleeping with them on the ground, and washing in their troughs with water they had used, but never achieving his confessed desire to contract leprosy.

Sierva María waited for him in vain. After three days she stopped eating, in an explosion of rebelliousness that
exacerbated the signs of her possession. Shattered by the downfall of Cayetano, by the indecipherable death of Father Aquino, by the public resonance of a misfortune that went beyond his wisdom and his power, the Bishop resumed the exorcism with an energy that was inconceivable, given his condition and his age. This time Sierva María, confined in a straitjacket, her skull shaved by a razor, confronted
him with satanic ferocity, speaking in tongues or with the shrieks of infernal birds. On the second day the immense bellowing of maddened cattle could be heard, the earth trembled and it was no longer
possible to think that Sierva María was not at the mercy of all the demons of hell. When she returned to her cell, she was given an enema of holy water, which was the French method for expelling
any devils that might remain in her belly.

The struggle continued for three more days. Although she had not eaten for a week, Sierva María managed to extricate one leg and kick her heel into the Bishop’s lower abdomen, knocking him to the ground. Only then did they realize she had been able to free herself because her body was so emaciated that the straps no longer confined her. The ensuing outrage
made it advisable to interrupt the exorcism – an action favored by the Ecclesiastical Council but opposed by the Bishop.

Sierva María never knew what happened to Cayetano Delaura, why he never came back with his basket of delicacies from the arcades and his insatiable nights. On the twenty-ninth of May, having lost her will to endure any more, she dreamed again of the window looking out on a
snow-covered field from which Cayetano Delaura was absent and to which he would never return. In her lap she held a cluster of golden grapes that grew back as soon as she ate them. But this time she pulled them off not one by one but two by two, hardly breathing in her longing to strip the cluster of its last grape. The warder who came in to prepare her for the sixth session of exorcism found her
dead of love in her bed, her eyes radiant and her skin like that of a newborn baby. Strands of hair gushed like bubbles as they grew back on her shaved head.

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

COLLECTED STORIES

IN EVIL HOUR

INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES

LEAF STORM

LIVING TO TELL THE TALE

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES

NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING

NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL

ONE HUNDRED YEARS
OF SOLITUDE

STRANGE PILGRIMS

THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH

THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH

THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR

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‘My favourite book by one of the world’s greatest authors. You’re in the hands of a master’ Mariella Frostrup

‘On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop
was coming on …’

When newly-wed Ángela Vicario and Bayardo San Román are left to their wedding night, Bayardo discovers that his new wife is no virgin. Disgusted, he returns Ángela to her family home that very night, where her humiliated mother beats her savagely and her two brothers demand to know her violator, whom she names as Santiago Nasar.

As he wakes to thoughts of the previous night’s
revelry, Santiago is unaware of the slurs that have been cast against him. But with Ángela’s brothers set on avenging their family honour, soon the whole town knows who they plan to kill, where, when and why.

‘A masterpiece’
Evening Standard

‘A work of high explosiveness – the proper stuff of Nobel prizes. An exceptional novel’
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