Of Love and Other Demons
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Translated by Edith Grossman
Knopf, 147 pages, $21
Love can strike like lightning and devastate like disease. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short new novel, love is the very devil, possessing two poor souls unto death.
Garcia Marquez frames their romantic tale with a brief story of an event he says he witnessed as a young journalist in Colombia almost 50 years ago. The burial crypts of an old convent were being dismantled, uncovering the bones of abbesses and artists and viceroys.
“The surprise lay on the third niche of the high altar, on the side where the Gospels were kept. The stone shattered at the first blow of the pickax, and a stream of living hair the intense color of copper spilled out of the crypt.”
The splendid tresses were attached to the skull of a young girl, and Garcia Marquez remembers “the legend of a little twelve-year-old marquise with hair that trailed behind her like a bridal train, who had died of rabies caused by a dog bite and was venerated in the towns along the Caribbean coast for the many miracles she had performed.”
From this beginning, Garcia Marquez imagines how such a legend might have been born in the long-ago colonial days, starting with the fateful moment an ash-gray dog nips the ankle of young Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles in the marketplace.
As it intertwines fate and passion and death, “Of Love and Other Demons” thematically harmonizes with Garcia Marquez’s earlier works, including “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.” But if those books are grand opera, “Of Love and Demons” is more an operetta, entrancing but ephemeral.
Sierva Maria is the unwanted only child of two parents totally unsuited to one another–a marquis “as pale as a lily because the bats drained his blood while he slept” and his wife, a once-seductive mestiza addicted to fermented honey and cacao tablets. Growing up in a decaying old house in the shadow of a lunatic asylum, the lonely girl is raised by the household slaves.
Although weeks go by after the dog bite without Sierva Maria exhibiting any signs of rabies, a slight fever brings in a parade of doctors, whose torturous ministrations leave her howling on the floor. Word of her ravings reaches the bishop, who convinces the marquis that his daughter has been possessed by demons. Sierva Maria is incarcerated in the Convent of Santa Clara, and the scholarly Father Cayetano Delaura is sent to oversee her exorcism.
But love for the copper-tressed girl, who spits in his face and tells extravagant lies, soon possesses Delaura, who spends “delirious nights and sleepless days writing unrestrained verses.” Eventually, the bishop finds him “writhing on the floor in a mire of blood and tears.
” `It is the demon, Father,’ Delaura said. `The most terrible one of all.’ “
The poetic flourishes one expects from Garcia Marquez are in ample evidence–an eclipse where “the world trembled in a supernatural shudder”; a gardenia-scented dream; a shared, enigmatic vision of a snow-covered field. And there are memorable secondary characters. But just as there is less story here than in previous Garcia Marquez novels, there is less magic, and the ending transpires in a flurry.
Alas, too, nothing else in the book ever quite lives up to that initial, startling image of living copper hair among scattered bones, Rapunzel in the ruins.
