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

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 bearingsin 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 thepoor 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 forgoods 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 cacaoever 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 shewas 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 theNao 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 becamea 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, hefought 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 plantationsaid 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 pursuedher. 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