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

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 themost 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 herprosperity 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 thefirst 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. Theteacher 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 sinceshe 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, watchingher 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 thesmall hours of the morning, dying of