Of Love and Other Demons (10 page)

Martina asked no more questions, assuming that the girl lied or had been lied to, not realizing she was one of the few white women to whom Sierva María had told the truth. She gave her a demonstration of the art of embroidery, and the girl asked to be freed so that she could try it too. Martina showed her the scissors she carried in the pocket of her gown
along with other items used for needlework.

‘What you want is for me to free you,’ she said. ‘But I
warn you: If you try to hurt me, I have the means to kill you.’

Sierva María did not doubt her determination. She was freed and she repeated the embroidery lesson with the facility and good ear with which she had learned to play the theorbo. Before Martina left, she promised to obtain permission
for them to watch the total eclipse of the sun together on the following Monday.

At dawn on Friday the swallows took their leave, making a wide circle in the sky and showering the streets and rooftops with a foul-smelling indigo snowstorm. It was difficult to eat and sleep until the midday sun dried the stubborn droppings and the night breezes purified the air. But terror prevailed. No one had
ever seen swallows shit in mid-flight or heard of the stink of their excrement interfering with ordinary life.

In the convent, of course, no one doubted that Sierva María had the power to change the laws of migration. On Sunday after Mass Delaura could even feel the hardness in the air as he crossed the garden with a little basket of pastries from the arcades. Sierva María, remote from everything,
still wore the rosary around her neck but did not respond to his greeting or deign to look at him. He sat beside her, chewed a cruller from the basket with delight, and said, his mouth full, ‘It tastes like heaven.’

He brought the other half of the cruller to Sierva María’s mouth. She turned her head, not facing the wall as she had on other occasions but indicating to Delaura that the warder
was spying on them. He made an emphatic gesture with his hand in the direction of the door.

‘Get away from there,’ he ordered.

When
the warder moved away, the girl tried to satisfy her long-standing hunger with the half of the cruller, but spat out the piece she had bitten off. ‘It tastes like swallow shit,’ she said. Still, her humor changed. She cooperated when Delaura treated the painful
raw spots on her back, and paid attention to him for the first time when she saw his bandaged hand. With an innocence that could not be feigned, she asked what had happened.

‘I was bitten by a little rabid dog with a tail more than a meter long.’

Sierva María wanted to see the wound. Delaura removed the bandage, and with her index finger she touched the crimson halo of swelling as if it were
a burning coal, and laughed for the first time.

‘I’m worse than the plague,’ she said.

Delaura responded not with the Gospels but with Garcilaso:
‘Well may you do this to one who can endure it
.’

He burned with the revelation that something immense and irreparable had begun to occur in his life. When he left the warder reminded him, on behalf of the Abbess, that it was forbidden to bring in
provisions from the street because of the danger the food might be poisoned, as it had been during the siege. Delaura lied and said he had brought the basket with the permission of the Bishop, and lodged a formal complaint about the bad food served to those confined in a convent famous for its fine cuisine.

During supper he read to the Bishop with renewed enthusiasm. As always, he joined him
in the evening prayers, closing his eyes to make it easier to think of Sierva María as he prayed. He retired to the library earlier than usual, thinking of her, and the more he
thought the stronger grew his desire to think. He recited aloud the love sonnets of Garcilaso, torn by the suspicion that every verse contained an enigmatic portent that had something to do with his life. He could not sleep.
At dawn he was slumped over the desk, his forehead pressing against the book he had not read. From the depths of sleep he heard the three nocturns of the new day’s Matins in the adjacent sanctuary. ‘God save you, María de Todos los Ángeles,’ he said in his sleep. His own voice startled him awake, and in her inmate’s tunic, with her fiery hair spilling over her shoulders, he saw Sierva María
discard the old carnation and place a bouquet of newly opened gardenias in the vase on his work table. Delaura, with Garcilaso, told her in an ardent voice: ‘
For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying
.’ Sierva María smiled without looking at him. He closed his eyes to be sure she was not an illusion of the shadows. When he opened them the vision had
disappeared, but the library was saturated with the scent of her gardenias.

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.