Of Love and Other Demons (4 page)

The
girl nodded without blinking: ‘From the swing.’

The doctor began to speak to himself in Latin. The Marquis interrupted: ‘Say it in Spanish.’

I am not talking to you,’ said Abrenuncio. ‘I think in Low Latin.’

Sierva María was delighted by Abrenuncio’s wiles until he put his ear to her chest. Her heart pounded in alarm, and her skin released a livid, icy dew that had a faint onion odor. When
he was finished, the doctor gave her an affectionate pat on the cheek.

‘You are very brave,’ he said.

When he was alone with the Marquis, he told him that the girl knew the dog was rabid. The Marquis did not understand.

‘She told you many falsehoods,’ he said, ‘but that was not one of them.’

‘She did not tell me, Señor,’ said the doctor. ‘Her heart did: it was like a little caged frog.’

The
Marquis lingered over the inventory of his daughter’s other surprising lies, not with displeasure but with a certain paternal pride. ‘Perhaps she will be a poet,’ he said. Abrenuncio did not agree that lying was an attribute of the arts.

‘The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry,’ he said.

The only thing he could not interpret was the smell of onions in the girl’s perspiration.
Since he knew of no connection between any odor and the disease of rabies, he rejected it as a symptom of anything. Caridad del Cobre later revealed to the Marquis that Sierva María had given herself over in secret to the lore of the slaves, who had her chew a paste of
manajú
and placed her naked in the onion cellar to counteract the evil spell of the dog.

Abrenuncio did not sweeten the slightest
detail of rabies. ‘The first attack is more serious and rapid the deeper the bite and the closer it is to the brain,’ he said. He recalled the case of one of his patients who died after five years, although there was some possibility he had contracted a subsequent infection that had gone unnoticed. Rapid scarring meant nothing: after an indeterminate time the scar could become inflamed, open
again and suppurate. The agony was so awful that death itself was preferable. The only legal thing one could do then was turn to the Amor de Dios Hospital, where they had Senegalese trained to control heretics and raging maniacs. Otherwise the Marquis himself would have to assume the dreadful burden of keeping the girl chained to her bed until she died.

‘In the long history of humankind,’ he
concluded, ‘no hydrophobe has lived to tell the tale.’

The
Marquis decided there was no cross, no matter how heavy, that he was not prepared to carry. The girl would die at home. The doctor rewarded him with a look that seemed more pitying than respectful.

‘One could expect no less nobility on your part, Señor,’ he said. ‘And I do not doubt that your soul will have the strength to endure.’

Again he insisted that the prognosis was not alarming. The wound was far from the area of greatest risk, and no one recalled any bleeding. The most probable outcome was that Sierva María would not contract rabies.

‘And in the meantime?’ asked the Marquis.

‘In the meantime,’ said Abrenuncio, ‘play music for her, fill the house with flowers, have the birds sing, take her to the ocean to see the
sunsets, give her everything that can make her happy.’ He took his leave with a wave of his hat and the obligatory sentence in Latin. But this time he translated it in honor of the Marquis: ‘No medicine cures what happiness cannot.’

No one ever knew how the Marquis had reached a state of such neglect or why he maintained so unharmonious a marriage when his life had been disposed to a peaceful widowerhood. He could have been whatever he wanted to be, given the extraordinary power
of his father, the first Marquis, a Knight of the Order of Santiago, a pitiless slave trader and a heartless slave driver, whose king spared him no honors or sinecures and punished none of his crimes.

Ygnacio, his only heir, gave no indications of being anything. He grew up showing undeniable signs of mental retardation, was illiterate until he reached his majority and loved no one. He experienced
the first symptom of life at the age of twenty, when he courted and was prepared to marry one of the Divina Pastora inmates whose songs and shouts had been the lullabies of his childhood. Her name was Dulce Olivia. The only child in a family of saddlers to kings, she had been obliged to learn the art of saddle-making so that a tradition almost two centuries old would not die out with her. So
unusual an incursion into a man’s trade was the explanation given for her losing her reason, and in so drastic a way that teaching her not to eat her own filth was a formidable task. Except for this, it would have been an excellent match for an American-born marquis of limited intelligence.

Dulce Olivia had sharp wits and a strong character and
it was not easy to detect her madness. From the
first time he saw her, young Ygnacio could pick her out in the noisy crowd of inmates on the terrace, and that very day they communicated by signs. An expert in the art of paper-folding, she sent him messages in little paper birds. He learned to read and write in order to correspond with her, and this was the beginning of a legitimate passion that no one was willing to understand. The first Marquis
was scandalized and ordered his son to make a public denial.

‘Not only is it true,’ Ygnacio replied, ‘but I have her permission to ask for her hand.’ And in response to the argument that she was crazy, he countered with one of his own: ‘Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.’

His father banished him to his country estates with the authority of lord and master, which he did
not deign to exercise. It was a living death. Ygnacio was terrified of all animals except chickens. But on the estates he observed a live chicken at close quarters, imagined it grown to the size of a cow and realized it was a monster much more fearsome than any other on land or sea. He would break into an icy sweat in the darkness and wake at dawn unable to breathe because of the phantasmal silence
of the pastures. More than any other danger, the unblinking hunting mastiff that guarded his bedroom unnerved him. He said it himself: ‘I live in fear of being alive.’ In exile he acquired his lugubrious appearance, cautious manner, contemplative nature, languid behavior, slow speech and a mystic vocation that seemed to condemn him to a cloistered cell.

At the end of his first year of exile he
was awakened
by a noise like rivers in flood: the animals on the estate had abandoned their beds and were crossing the fields in absolute silence beneath the full moon. Without making a sound they trampled everything in their path as they moved straight across pastures and canebrakes, torrential streams and flooded marshlands. At their head were the herds of cattle and the work- and saddle-horses,
followed by pigs, sheep and barnyard fowl, in a sinister line that disappeared into the night. Even birds of flight, including the pigeons, were leaving. Only the hunting mastiff remained at his post outside the master’s bedroom. This marked the beginning of the almost human friendship the Marquis maintained with that dog and with the many mastiffs who succeeded him in the house.

Beside himself
with terror on the deserted estate, Ygnacio the Younger renounced his love and submitted to his father’s plans. But his father, not satisfied with the sacrifice of love, required in a clause in his will that his son marry the heir of a Spanish grandee. This was how he was joined, in a sumptuous wedding, to Doña Olalla de Mendoza, a very beautiful woman of great and varied talents, whose virginity
he kept intact so as not to confer on her even the grace of having a child. For the rest, he continued the life of what he had always been since the day of his birth: a useless bachelor.

Doña Olalla de Mendoza brought him into the world. They attended High Mass, more to be seen than for reasons of faith, she in ruffled skirts and splendid shawls and the starched lace headdress of a white woman
from Castille, with an entourage of slave women dressed in silk and covered in gold. Instead of the house slippers that even the most fastidious ladies wore to church she
put on high boots of Cordoban leather decorated with pearls. Unlike other distinguished men who favored anachronistic wigs and emerald buttons, the Marquis wore cotton clothing and a soft biretta. His attendance at public events,
however, was always a matter of obligation, because he never could conquer his horror of social life.

Doña Olalla had been a student of Scarlatti Domenico in Segovia and had obtained with honors her certificate to teach music and singing in schools and convents. She arrived from Spain with the disassembled parts of a clavichord, which she put together herself, and various string instruments that
she played and taught with great virtuosity. She formed an ensemble of novices who sanctified the afternoons in the house with new airs from Italy, France and Spain, and people said they were inspired by the lyricism of the Holy Spirit.

The Marquis seemed unfit for music. It was said, in the French manner, that he had the hands of an artist and the ear of an artilleryman. But from the day the
instruments were removed from their crates he was attracted by an Italian lute, the theorbo, because of the strangeness of its double neck, the size of its fingerboard, the number of its strings and the clarity of its voice. Doña Olalla resolved that he would play it as well as she did. They spent the mornings stumbling through exercises under the trees in the orchard, she with patience and love
and he with the obstinacy of a stonecutter, until the repentant madrigal surrendered to them without regret.

Music so improved their conjugal harmony that Doña Olalla dared to take the step that was missing. One
stormy night, perhaps feigning a dread she did not feel, she went to the bedchamber of her virgin husband.

‘I am mistress of half this bed,’ she declared, ‘and I have come to claim it.’

He stood firm. Convinced she could persuade him by reason or by force, so did she. But life did not give them time. One ninth of November, when they were playing a duet under the orange trees because the air was pure and the sky was high and cloudless, a sudden flash blinded them, a seismic detonation startled them, and Doña Olalla was struck down by lightning.

The horrified city interpreted
the tragedy as an explosion of divine wrath in response to some unconfessable sin. The Marquis ordered a queen’s funeral, at which he made his first appearance in the black taffeta and waxen color he would wear forever after. When he returned from the cemetery, he was surprised by a storm of little paper birds falling like snow on the orange trees in the orchard. He caught one of them, unfolded it
and read:
that lightning bolt was mine
.

Before the nine days of mourning were over he had made a donation to the Church of the lands that sustained the grandeur of his inheritance: a cattle ranch in Mompox and another in Ayapel and 2,000 hectares in Mahates, just two leagues from here, with several herds of riding-and show-horses, a farm and the finest sugar plantation on the Caribbean coast.
The legend of his wealth, however, was based on an immense, idle landholding, whose imaginary boundaries, lost in memory beyond the marshes of La Guaripa and the lowlands of La Pureza, extended all the way to the mangrove swamps of Urabá. The only thing he kept was the seignorial mansion with
its slave courtyard reduced to a minimum and the sugar plantation at Mahates. He handed over the governance
of the house to Dominga de Adviento. He maintained old Neptuno’s rank as coachman, which had been granted him by the first Marquis, and put him in charge of the little that remained of the domestic stables.

Alone for the first time in the gloomy mansion of his forebears, he did not sleep well in the darkness because of the congenital fear of American-born nobles that their slaves would murder
them in their beds. He would wake with a start, not knowing if the feverish eyes at the transoms were of this world or the next. He would tiptoe to the door, open it with a sudden movement and surprise a slave spying on him through the keyhole. He heard the blacks, naked and smeared with coconut oil to elude capture, slip away with tiger steps along the corridors. Overwhelmed by so many simultaneous
fears, he ordered that the lamps be kept burning until dawn, ejected the slaves who, little by little, had been taking over the empty spaces and brought into the house the first mastiffs trained in the arts of war.

The main entrance to the house was closed. The French furnishings, their velvet stinking of dampness, were banished, the Gobelin tapestries and porcelains and masterpieces of the clockmaker’s
art were sold, and string hammocks were hung in the dismantled bedchambers to fend off the heat. The Marquis did not hear another Mass or go on another retreat, he did not carry the pallium of Our Lord in processions or observe holidays or respect fasts, although he continued to be punctual in paying his tithes to the Church. He took refuge in his hammock, sometimes in the bedroom during
the lethargy
of August, and almost always under the orange trees in the orchard for his siesta. The madwomen would throw down kitchen scraps and shout tender obscenities at him, but when the government offered him the courtesy of moving the lunatic asylum, he objected out of gratitude to its inmates.

Conquered by the rebuffs of the man she had wooed, Dulce Olivia found consolation in nostalgia
for what had never been. Whenever she could she would escape from Divina Pastora through breaches in the orchard. She tamed the hunting mastiffs and made them her own with the food of her chaste love, and devoted the hours when she should have been sleeping to caring for the house she never had, sweeping it with brooms made of sweet basil for good luck and hanging strings of garlic in the bedrooms
to frighten away mosquitoes. Dominga de Adviento, whose right hand left nothing to chance, died without ever discovering why the corridors were cleaner at dawn than they had been the night before and why the things she had arranged one way were in a different order the next morning. The Marquis had been a widower for less than a year when he discovered Dulce Olivia in the kitchen for the first
time, scrubbing pots and pans that she believed the slave women had left dirty.

‘I did not think you would dare so much,’ he said.

‘That’s because you’re still the same poor devil you always were,’ she replied.

And so they resumed a forbidden friendship that at one time, at least, had resembled love. They would talk until dawn, without illusions or rancor, like an old married couple condemned
to routine. They thought they were happy, and perhaps they were, until one of them said one
word too many, or took one step too few, and the night rotted into a battle between Vandals that demoralized the mastiffs. Then everything would go back to the beginning, and for a long while Dulce Olivia would not return to the house.

The Marquis confessed to her that his contempt for the goods of this
world and the changes in his way of life were the result not of devotion, but of the fear caused by his abrupt loss of faith when he saw his wife’s body charred by lightning. Dulce Olivia offered to console him. She promised to be his submissive slave in both the kitchen and the bed. He did not yield.

‘I will never marry again,’ he vowed.

Before the year was out, however, he had been married
in secret to Bernarda Cabrera, the daughter of one of his father’s former overseers who had made a fortune in imported foods. They had met when Bernarda’s father sent her to the house with the pickled herring and black olives that were Doña Olalla’s weakness, and when she died, Bernarda continued to bring them to the Marquis. One afternoon she found him in the hammock in the orchard and read the
destiny written on the palm of his left hand. The Marquis was so impressed by her accuracy that he kept sending for her at siesta time even when he had nothing to buy, but two months passed and he made no move of any kind. And so she did it for him. She stormed the hammock, mounted him, gagged him with the skirts of the djellaba he was wearing and left him exhausted. Then she revived him with an ardor
and skill he could not have imagined in the meager pleasures of his solitary lovemaking and without glory deprived him of his virginity. He was fifty-two years old and she
was twenty-three, but age was the least pernicious of the differences between them.

They continued to make hurried, heartless siesta love in the evangelical shade of the orange trees. The madwomen encouraged them from the terraces
with indecent songs and celebrated their triumphs with stadium ovations. Before the Marquis was aware of the dangers that pursued him, Bernarda woke him from his stupor with the news that she was in the second month of pregnancy. She reminded him that she was not a black but the daughter of an astute Indian and a white woman from Castille, and the only needle that could mend her honor was
formal matrimony. He held her off until one siesta when her father knocked at the main door, an ancient harquebus slung over his shoulder. He was slow of speech and gentle of manner, and he handed the weapon to the Marquis without looking him in the face.