Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman Read Free Book Online

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 ardorand 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 shewas 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 terraceswith 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 wasformal 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.
    ‘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 Marquisunderstood 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 wasattended 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 andunder 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 weddingnight. 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 motherhated 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 theslaves, 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 herwith a jubilant court of black slave women, mestiza maids and Indian errand girls, who bathed her in propitiatory waters, purifiedher with the verbena of Yemayá and tended the