Of Love and Other Demons (5 page)

‘Do you know what this is, Señor Marquis?’ he asked.

The Marquis did not know what to do with the weapon he was holding.

‘If I am not mistaken,
I believe it is a harquebus,’ he said. And he asked with genuine bewilderment, ‘What do you use it for?’

‘To defend myself against pirates, Señor,’ said the Indian, still not looking him in the face. ‘I have brought it now in the event Your Excellency wishes to do me the honor of killing me before I kill you.’

Then he looked straight at him. His narrow eyes were sad and silent, but the Marquis
understood what they did not say. He returned the harquebus and invited him in to celebrate their arrangement. Two days later the priest of a nearby church officiated at the wedding, which was
attended by her parents and both their sponsors. When it was over, Sagunta appeared out of nowhere and crowned the bride and groom with the wreaths of happiness.

One morning, during a late rainstorm and
under the sign of Sagittarius, Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles was born, premature and puny. She looked like a bleached tadpole, and the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck was strangling her.

‘It’s a girl,’ said the midwife. ‘But it won’t live.’

That was when Dominga de Adviento promised her saints that if they granted the girl the grace of life, her hair would not be cut until her wedding
night. No sooner had she made the promise than the girl began to cry. Dominga de Adviento sang out in jubilation, ‘She will be a saint!’ The Marquis, who saw her for the first time when she was bathed and dressed, was less prescient.

‘She will be a whore,’ he said. ‘If God gives her life and health.’

The girl, daughter of an aristocrat and a commoner, had the childhood of a foundling. Her mother
hated her from the moment she nursed her for the first and only time and then refused to keep the baby with her for fear she would kill her. Dominga de Adviento suckled her, baptized her in Christ and consecrated her to Olokun, a Yoruban deity of indeterminate sex whose face is presumed to be so dreadful it is seen only in dreams and always hidden by a mask. Transplanted to the courtyard of the
slaves, Sierva María learned to dance before she could speak, learned three African languages at the same time, learned to drink rooster’s blood before breakfast and to glide past Christians unseen and unheard, like an incorporeal being. Dominga de Adviento surrounded her
with a jubilant court of black slave women, mestiza maids and Indian errand girls, who bathed her in propitiatory waters, purified
her with the verbena of Yemayá and tended the torrent of hair, which fell to her waist by the time she was five, as if it were a rosebush. Over time the slave women hung the beads of various gods around her neck, until she was wearing sixteen necklaces.

Bernarda had seized control of the house with a firm hand while the Marquis vegetated in the orchard. Shielded by the powers of the first Marquis,
she set about restoring the fortune given away by her husband. In his day, the first Marquis had obtained licenses to sell 5,000 slaves in eight years, agreeing to import two barrels of flour for each black. Making use of masterful fraud and the venality of the customs agents, he sold the mandated flour but also smuggled and sold 3,000 more slaves than he had contracted for, which made him the
most successful individual trader of his century.

It was Bernarda who realized that the profitable business was not slaves but flour, although in reality the greatest profits lay in her incredible powers of persuasion. With a single license to import 1,000 slaves in four years, and three barrels of flour for each black, she made the deal of a lifetime: she sold the contracted number of slaves,
but instead of 3,000 barrels of flour she imported 12,000. It was the largest smuggling operation of the century.

During this period she spent half her time at the Mahates sugar plantation, where she established the center of her business affairs, since the proximity of the Great Magdalena River allowed for every kind of traffic with the interior of the vice-regency. Occasional reports of her
prosperity reached the house of the Marquis, but she rendered accounts to no one. When she spent time here, even before her crises, she seemed like another caged mastiff. Dominga de Adviento said it best: ‘Her ass was too big for her body.’

When her slave woman died, and the splendid bedroom of the first Marquise was prepared for her, Sierva María occupied a stable position in the house for the
first time. A tutor was named to give her lessons in Peninsular Spanish and impart some notion of arithmetic and the natural sciences. He tried to teach her to read and write. She refused, she said, because she could not understand the letters. A lay teacher introduced her to an appreciation of music. The girl showed interest and good taste but did not have the patience to learn an instrument. The
teacher resigned in consternation and said, as she took her leave of the Marquis, ‘It is not that the girl is unfit for everything; it is that she is not of this world.’

Bernarda had wanted to quiet her own rancorous feelings toward the girl, but it soon became evident that the fault lay not in one or the other but in the very nature of each. She had lived with her heart in her mouth ever since
she discovered a certain phantasmal quality in her daughter. She trembled at the mere memory of the times she would turn around and find herself face to face with the inscrutable eyes of the languid creature in filmy tulle, whose untamed hair now reached to the back of her knees. ‘Girl!’ she would shout. ‘I forbid you to look at me that way!’ When she was most involved in her business affairs,
she would feel on the back of her neck the sibilant breath of a snake lying in ambush and recoil in terror.

‘Girl!’
she would shout. ‘Make a noise before you come in!’

And the girl would heighten her fear with a string of Yoruban curses. At night it was worse, because Bernarda would wake with a start, sensing that someone had touched her, and there was the girl at the foot of the bed, watching
her as she slept. Her attempt to tie a cowbell around Sierva María’s wrist failed because the girl’s movements were so stealthy it did not make a sound. ‘The only thing white about that child is her color,’ her mother would say. This was so true that the girl changed her name to an African name of her own invention: María Mandinga.

Their relationship reached a crisis when Bernarda woke in the
small hours of the morning, dying of thirst brought on by excesses of cacao, and found one of Sierva María’s dolls at the bottom of the large water jar. She did not think it was really a simple doll floating in the water but something horrifying: a murdered doll.

Convinced that Sierva María had cast an evil African spell on her, she decided that the two of them could not live in the same house.
The Marquis attempted a timid mediation, and she cut him off: ‘It’s her or me.’ And so Sierva María returned to the slave women’s shack, even when her mother was at the sugar plantation. She remained as reticent as when she was born and as illiterate.

But Bernarda was no better off. She had tried to hold on to Judas Iscariote by becoming like him and in less than two years she lost her bearings
in her business and even her life. She would dress him as a Nubian pirate, as the Ace of Clubs, as King Melchior, and take him to the
poor districts, above all when the galleons were anchored in the bay and the city went on a binge that lasted half a year. Taverns and brothels were improvised in outlying districts for the merchants who came from Lima, Portobelo, Havana or Veracruz to contend for
goods and merchandise from all over the discovered world. One night, staggering with drink in a tavern for galley slaves, Judas came up to Bernarda in a very mysterious way.

‘Open your mouth and close your eyes,’ he said.

She did, and he placed a tablet of the magic chocolate from Oaxaca on her tongue. Bernarda recognized the taste and spat it out, for she had felt a special aversion to cacao
ever since her childhood. Judas convinced her it was a sacred substance that brought joy to life, enhanced physical prowess, raised the spirits and strengthened sexuality.

Bernarda exploded in laughter.

‘If that were true,’ she said, ‘the good Sisters of Santa Clara would be fighting bulls.’

She was already addicted to fermented honey, which she had consumed with her schoolfriends before she
was married and still consumed, not only by mouth but through all five senses in the sultry air of the sugar plantation. With Judas she learned to chew tobacco and coca leaves mixed with ashes of the
yarumo
tree, like the Indians in the Sierra Nevada. In the taverns she experimented with cannabis from India, turpentine from Cyprus, peyote from Real de Catorce and, at least once, opium from the
Nao of China brought by Filipino traffickers. But she did not turn a deaf ear to Judas’s proclamation in favor of cacao. After trying all the rest, she recognized its virtues and preferred it to everything else. Judas became
a thief, a pimp, an occasional sodomite, all out of sheer depravity because he lacked for nothing. One ill-fated night, in front of Bernarda, with only his bare hands, he
fought three galley slaves in a dispute over cards and was beaten to death with a chair.

Bernarda took refuge on the sugar plantation. The house was left to drift, and if it did not sink then, it was because of the masterful hand of Dominga de Adviento, who, in the end, raised Sierva María as her gods willed. The Marquis knew next to nothing of his wife’s downfall. Rumors from the plantation
said that she was living in a state of delirium, that she talked to herself, that she selected the best-endowed slaves and shared them in Roman orgies with her former schoolmates. The fortune that came to her by water left by water, and she was at the mercy of the skins of honey and sacks of cacao that she kept hidden in various places so she would lose no time when her relentless longings pursued
her. The only security she had left were two urns filled with gold doubloons, pieces of one hundred and pieces of four, which she had buried under her bed in the days of plenty. Her deterioration was so great that not even her husband recognized her when, after three uninterrupted years at the sugar plantation, she returned from Mahates for the last time, not long before the dog bit Sierva María.

By the middle of March the risk of rabies seemed to have been averted. The Marquis, grateful for his good fortune, resolved to rectify the past and win the girl’s heart with the prescription for happiness recommended by Abrenuncio. He devoted all his time to her. He tried to learn to comb and braid her hair. He tried to teach her to be a
real white, to revive for her his failed dreams of an American-born
noble, to suppress her fondness for pickled iguana and armadillo stew. He attempted almost everything except asking himself whether this was the way to make her happy.

Abrenuncio continued to visit the house. It was not easy for him to communicate with the Marquis but he was intrigued by his lack of awareness in an outpost of the world intimidated by the Holy Office. And so the months of hot
weather passed, Abrenuncio talking without being heard beneath the flowering orange trees, and the Marquis rotting in his hammock at a distance of 1,300 nautical leagues from a king who had never heard his name. During one of these visits they were interrupted by a baleful lament from Bernarda.

Abrenuncio was alarmed. The Marquis pretended to be deaf, but the next groan was so heartrending he
could not ignore it. ‘That person, whoever it is, needs help,’ said Abrenuncio.

‘That person is my second wife,’ said the Marquis.

‘Well, her liver is diseased,’ said Abrenuncio.

‘How do you know?’

‘Because she groans with her mouth open,’ said the doctor.

He pushed her door open without knocking and tried to see Bernarda in the darkened room, but she was not in the bed. He called her by
name, and she did not answer. Then he opened the window, and the metallic light of four o’clock revealed her, naked and sprawled in a cross on the floor, enveloped in the glow of her lethal gases. Her skin had the pale gray color of full-blown dyspepsia. She raised her head, blinded by the sudden brilliance
streaming in the open window and could not recognize the doctor with the light behind him.
One glance was all he needed to know her destiny.

‘The piper is demanding to be paid, my dear,’ he said.

He explained that there was still time to save her, but only if she submitted to an emergency treatment to purify her blood. Then Bernarda recognized him, struggled into a sitting position and let loose a string of obscenities. An impassive Abrenuncio endured them as he closed the window
again. He left the room, stopped beside the Marquis’s hammock and made a more specific prognosis: ‘The Señora Marquise will die on the fifteenth of September at the latest, if she does not hang herself from the rafters first.’

Unmoved, the Marquis said, ‘The only problem is that the fifteenth of September is so far away.’

He continued with the prescription of happiness for Sierva María. From
San Lázaro Hill they observed the fatal swamps to the east and to the west the enormous red sun as it sank into a flaming sea. She asked what was on the other side of the ocean, and he replied: ‘The world.’ For each of his gestures he discovered an unexpected resonance in the girl. One afternoon they saw the Galleon Fleet appear on the horizon, its sails full to bursting.

The city was transformed.
Father and daughter were entertained by puppet shows, by fire-eaters, by the countless fairground attractions coming into port during that April of good omen. In two months Sierva María learned more about white people’s ways than she ever had before. In his effort to transform her, the Marquis also became a different man, and in so drastic a manner that it did not
seem an alteration in his personality
as much as a change in his very nature.

The house was filled with every kind of wind-up ballerina, music box and mechanical clock displayed in the fairs of Europe. The Marquis dusted off the Italian theorbo. He restrung it, tuned it with a perseverance that could be understood only as love and once again accompanied the songs of the past, sung with the good voice and bad ear that neither years
nor troubled memories had changed. This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said.