Her only hope, she said, was that Sierva María had dealings with demons. She wanted to know who they were, what they were like, how to negotiate with them. The girl named six, and Martina identified one as an African demon who had once troubled her parents’ house. She was cheered by renewed optimism.
‘I’d like to talk to him,’ she said. And she specified the message: ‘In exchange for my soul.’
Sierva María took delight in the deception. ‘He can’t speak,’ she said. ‘You just look into his face and know what he’s saying.’ With utmost seriousness she promised to inform her of his next visit so she could meet with him.
Cayetano, for his part, had submitted with humility to the vile conditions at the hospital. The lepers, in a state of legal death, slept on dirt floors in palm hovels. Many could do no more than crawl. General treatment was administered on Tuesdays, which were exhausting. Cayetano imposed on himself the purifying sacrifice of washing the most disabled bodies in the troughs at the stables. This is what he was doing on the first Tuesday of the penance, his priestly dignity reduced to the coarse tunic worn by nurses, when Abrenuncio appeared on the sorrel the Marquis had presented to him.
‘How is that eye?’ he asked.
Cayetano gave him no opportunity to speak of his misfortune or pity his condition. He thanked him for the eye wash that had, in effect, erased the image of the eclipse from his retina.
‘You have nothing to thank me for,’ said Abrenuncio. ‘I gave you the best treatment we know for solar blindness: drops of rainwater.’
He invited him for a visit. Delaura explained that he could not leave the hospital without permission. Abrenuncio attributed no importance to this. ‘If you know the ills of these kingdoms, you must know that laws are not obeyed for more than three days,’ he said. He placed his library at Cayetano’s disposal so that he could continue his studies during his punishment. He listened with interest but with no illusions.
‘I leave you with this enigma,’ Abrenuncio concluded as he spurred his horse. ‘No god could have created a talent like yours to waste it scrubbing lepers.’
On the following Tuesday, he brought him a gift of the volume of the Lettres philosophiques in Latin. Cayetano leafed through it, smelled its pages, calculated its value. The more he appreciated it the less he understood Abrenuncio.
‘I would like to know why you are so kind to me,’ he said.
‘Because we atheists cannot live without clerics,’ said Abrenuncio. ‘Our patients entrust their bodies to us, but not their souls, and like the devil, we try to win them away from God.’
‘That does not go along with your beliefs,’ said Cayetano.
‘Not even I know what those are.’
‘The Holy Office knows,’ said Cayetano.
Contrary to expectations, the barbed remark delighted Abrenuncio. ‘Come to the house and we can discuss it at our leisure,’ he said. ‘I sleep no more than two hours a night, and only for brief periods, so anytime is fine.’ He spurred his horse and rode away.
Cayetano soon learned that the loss of great power is never partial. The same people who once had courted him because of his privileged position drew back as if he had leprosy. His friends in secular arts and letters moved aside to avoid a collision with the Holy Office. But it did not matter to him. He had no room in his heart for anything but Sierva María, and even so it was not large enough to hold her. He was convinced that no oceans or mountains, no laws of earth or heaven, no powers of hell could keep them apart.
One night, in a stroke of audacious inspiration, he escaped from the hospital to find some way into the convent. There were four entrances: the main gate with the turnstile, another gate of the same size, which faced the sea, and two small service doors. The first two were impassable. From the beach it was easy for Cayetano to identify Sierva María’s window in the prison pavilion because it was the only one no longer sealed. From the street he examined every centimeter of the building, searching in vain for a tiny breach that would allow him a foothold.
He was about to give up, when he remembered the tunnel used to supply the convent during the Cessatio a Divinis. Tunnels under barracks or convents were typical of the period. No fewer than six were known in the city, and over the years more were discovered, all of them worthy of a romantic adventure novel. A leper who had been a gravedigger told Cayetano about the one he was looking for: an abandoned sewer that connected the convent to an adjacent plot of land where the cemetery of the first Clarissans had been located a century before. The opening was just under the prison pavilion and faced a high, rugged wall that seemed inaccessible. But Cayetano managed to climb it after many failed attempts, just as he believed he would accomplish everything through the power of prayer.
The pavilion was a still water in the small hours of the morning. Certain that the guard slept elsewhere, Cayetano’s only concern was Martina Laborde, snoring behind a half-closed door. Until that moment the tension of the adventure had held him aloft, but when he found himself outside the cell, the padlock hanging open in the ring, his heart went mad. He pushed the door with his fingertips, stopped living as the hinges creaked and saw Sierva María asleep in the light of the Sanctuary Lamp. She opened her eyes, but it took her a moment to recognize him in the burlap tunic worn by those who nursed lepers. He showed her his bloodied fingernails.
‘I climbed the wall,’ he said in a whisper.
Sierva María’s expression did not change.
‘What for?’ she asked.
‘To see you,’ he said.
Dazed by the trembling of his hands and the cracks in his voice, he did not know what else to say.
‘Go away,’ said Sierva María.
He shook his head several times for fear his voice would fail him. ‘Go away,’ she repeated. ‘Or I’ll scream.’ By now he was so close he could feel her virgin breath.
‘Even if they kill me I will not go,’ he said. Then all at once he felt as if he had passed beyond his terror, and he added in a firm voice: ‘And so if you are going to scream, you can start now.’
She bit her lip. Cayetano sat on the bed and gave her a detailed account of his punishment but did not tell her the reasons for it. She understood more than he was capable of saying. She looked at him without fear and asked why he did not have the patch over his eye.
‘I don’t need it anymore,’ he said, encouraged. ‘Now when I close my eyes I see hair like a river of gold.’
He left after two hours, happy because Sierva María agreed to his returning if he brought her favorite pastries from the arcades. He came so early the following night that the convent was still awake, and she had lit the lamp in order to finish some embroidery for Martina. On the third night, he brought wicks and oil to keep the lamp burning. On the fourth night, a Saturday, he spent several hours helping her kill the lice that were proliferating again in the cell. When her hair was clean and combed, he felt the icy sweat of temptation once more. He lay down next to Sierva María, his breathing harsh and uneven and found her limpid eyes a hand’s breadth from his own. They both became confused. He, praying in fear, did not look away. She dared to speak.
‘How old are you?’
‘I turned thirty-six in March,’ he said.
She scrutinized him.
‘You’re an old man,’ she said with a touch of derision. She stared at the lines on his forehead and added with all the pitilessness of her years, ‘A wrinkled old man.’ He took it with good humor. Sierva María asked why he had a lock of white hair.
‘It is a birthmark,’ he said.
‘Artificial,’ she said.
‘Natural,’ he said. ‘My mother had it too.’
He had not stopped looking into her eyes, and she showed no signs of faltering. He gave a deep sigh and recited, ‘O sweet treasures, discovered to my sorrow.’
She did not understand.
‘It is a verse by the grandfather of my great-great-grandmother,’ he explained. ‘He wrote three eclogues, two elegies, five so
ngs and forty sonnets. Most of them for a Portuguese lady of very ordinary charms who was never his, first because he was married, and then because she married another man and died before he did.’
‘Was he a priest too?’
‘A soldier,’ he said.
Something stirred in the heart of Sierva María, for she wanted to hear the verse again. He repeated it, and this time he continued, in an intense, well-articulated voice, until he had recited the last of the forty sonnets by the cavalier of amours and arms Don Garcilaso de la Vega, killed in his prime by a stone hurled in battle.
When he had finished, Cayetano took Sierva María’s hand and placed it over his heart. She felt the internal clamor of his suffering.
‘I am always in this state,’ he said.
And without giving his panic an opportunity, he unburdened himself of the dark truth that did not permit him to live. He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her. He continued to speak without looking at her, with the same fluidity and passion as when he recited poetry, until it seemed to him that Sierva María was sleeping. But she was awake, her eyes, like those of a startled deer, fixed on him. She almost did not dare to ask.
‘And now?’
‘And now nothing,’ he said. ‘It is enough for me that you know.’
He could not go on. Weeping in silence, he slipped his arm beneath her head to serve as a pillow, and she curled up at his side. And so they remained, not sleeping, not talking, until the roosters began to crow and he had to hurry to arrive in time for five-o’clock Mass. Before he left, Sierva María gave him the beautiful necklace of Oddúa: eighteen inches of mother-of-pearl and coral beads.
Panic had been replaced by the yearning in his heart. Delaura knew no peace, he carried out his tasks in a haphazard way, he floated until the joyous hour when he escaped the hospital to see Sierva María. He would reach the cell gasping for breath, soaked by the perpetual rains, and she would wait for him with so much longing that only his smile allowed her to breathe again. One night she took the initiative with the verses she had learned after hearing them so often. ‘When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me,’ she recited. And asked with a certain slyness, ‘What’s the rest of it?’
‘I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end,’ he said.
She repeated the lines with the same tenderness, and so they continued until the end of the book, omitting verses, corrupting and twisting the sonnets to suit themselves, toying with them with the skill of masters. They fell asleep exhausted. At five the warder brought in breakfast, to the uproarious crowing of the roosters, and they awoke in alarm. Life stopped for them. The guard placed the food on the table, made a routine inspection with her lantern, and left without seeing Cayetano in the bed.
‘Lucifer is quite a villain,’ he mocked when he could breathe again. ‘He has made me invisible too.’
Sierva María had to use all her cunning to keep the guard from coming back into the cell during the day. Late that night, after an entire day of play, they felt as if they had always been in love. Cayetano, half in jest and half in earnest, dared to loosen the laces of Sierva María’s bodice. She protected her bosom with both hands, and a bolt of fury appeared in her eyes and a flash of red burned on her forehead. Cayetano grasped her hands with his thumb and index finger, as if they were in flames, and moved them away from her chest. She tried to resist, and he exerted a force that was tender but resolute.
‘Say it with me,’ he told her: ‘Into your hands at last I have come vanquished.’
She obeyed. ‘Where I know that I must die,’ he continued, as he opened her bodice with icy fingers. And she repeated the lines almost in a whisper, trembling with fear: ‘So that in myself alone it might be proven how deep the sword bites into conquered flesh.’ Then he kissed her on the mouth for the first time. Sierva María’s body shivered in a lament, emitted a tenuous ocean breeze, and abandoned itself to its fate. He passed his fingertips over her skin almost without touching her, and experienced for the first time the miracle of feeling himself in another body. An inner voice told him how far he had been from the devil in his sleepless nights of Latin and Greek, his ecstasies of faith, the barren wastelands of his chastity, while she had lived with all the powers of untrammeled love in the hovels of the slaves. He allowed her to guide him, feeling his way in the darkness, but at the last moment he repented and in a moral cataclysm fell into the abyss. He lay on his back with his eyes closed. Sierva María was frightened by his silence, his stillness of death, and she touched him with her finger.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Let me be now,’ he murmured. ‘I am praying.’
In the days that followed they had no more than a few moments of calm while they were together. They never tired of talking about the sorrows of love. They exhausted themselves in kisses, they wept burning tears as they declaimed lovers’ verses, they sang into each other’s ear, they writhed in quicksands of desire to the very limits of their strength: spent, but virgin. For he had resolved to keep his vow until he received the sacrament, and she with him.
In the respites of passion they exchanged excessive proofs of their love. He said he would be capable of anything for her sake. With childish cruelty, Sierva María asked him to eat a cockroach. He caught one before she could stop him, and ate it live. In other senseless challenges he asked if she would cut off her braid for his sake, and she said yes but warned him, as a joke or in all seriousness, that if she did he would have to marry her to fulfill the terms of the promise. He brought a kitchen knife to the cell and said: ‘We will see if it is true.’ She turned so that he could cut it off at the root. She urged him on: ‘I dare you.’ He did not dare. Days later she asked if he would allow his throat to be slit like a goat’s. He answered with a firm yes. She took out the knife and prepared to test him. He started in terror, feeling the final shudder. ‘Not you,’ he said. ‘Not you.’ She, overcome with laughter, wanted to know why, and he told her the truth, ‘Because you really would do it.’
In the still waters of their passion they also began to experience the tedium of everyday love. She kept the cell clean and neat for the moment he arrived with all the naturalness of a husband returning home. Cayetano taught her to read and write and initiated her into the cults of poetry and devotion to the Holy Spirit, anticipating the happy day when they would be free and married.
At dawn on the twenty-seventh of April, Sierva María was just falling asleep after Cayetano had left the cell, when with no warning they came to begin the exorcism. It was the ritual of a prisoner condemned to death. They dragged her to the trough, wet her down with buckets of water, tore off her necklaces, and dressed her in the brutal shift worn by heretics. A gardener nun cut off her hair at the nape of the neck with four bites of her pruning shears and threw it into the fire burning in the courtyard. The barber nun clipped the ends to a half-inch, the length worn by Clarissans under the veil, and tossed them into the fire as she cut them. Sierva María saw the golden conflagration and heard the crackle of virgin wood and smelled the acrid odor of burned horn and did not move a muscle of her stony face. Then they put her in a straitjacket and draped her in funereal trappings, and two slaves carried her to the chapel on a military stretcher.
The Bishop had convoked the Ecclesiastical Council, composed of distinguished prebendaries, and they selected four of their number to assist him in the proceedings concerning Sierva María. In a final act of affirmation, the Bishop overcame his wretched ill health. He ordered the ceremony to be held not in the cathedral, as on other memorable occasions, but in the chapel of the Convent of Santa Clara, and he himself assumed responsibility for performing the exorcism.
The Clarissans, with the Abbess at their head, had been in the ch
ancel since the small hours of the morning, and there they sang Matins to an organ accompaniment, moved by the solemnity of the day that was dawning. This was followed by the entrance of the prelates of the Ecclesiastical Council, the provosts of three orders and the principals of the Holy Office. Aside from these last-mentioned officials, no civil authority was or would be present.
The last to enter was the Bishop in his ceremonial vestments, borne on a platform by four slaves and surrounded by an aura of inconsolable affliction. He sat facing the high altar, next to the marble catafalque used for important funerals, in a swivel armchair that made it easier for him to move his body. At the stroke of six the two slaves carried in Sierva María, lying on the stretcher in the straitjacket and still muffled in purple cloth.
The heat became intolerable during the singing of the Mass. The bass notes of the organ rumbled in the coffered ceiling and left almost no openings for the bland voices of the Clarissans, invisible behind the lattices of the chancel. The two half-naked slaves who had brought in Sierva María’s stretcher stood guard next to it. At the end of the Mass they uncovered her and left her lying like a dead princess on the marble catafalque. The Bishop’s slaves moved his armchair next to her and left them alone in the large space in front of the high altar.
What followed produced unendurable tension and absolute silence, and seemed the prelude to some celestial prodigy. An acolyte placed the basin of holy water within reach of the Bishop. He seized the hyssop as if it were a battle hammer, leaned over Sierva María, and sprinkled the length of her body with holy water as he intoned a prayer. Then he uttered the conjuration that made the foundations of the chapel shudder.
‘Whoever you may be,’ he shouted, ‘I command you in the name of Christ, Lord God of all that is visible and invisible, of all that is, was, and will be, to abandon this body redeemed by baptism, and return to darkness.’
Sierva María, beside herself with terror, shouted too. The Bishop raised his voice to silence her, but she shouted even louder. The Bishop took a deep breath and opened his mouth again to continue the exorcism, but the air died inside his chest and he could not expel it. He fell face forward, gasping like a fish on land, and the ceremony ended in an immense uproar.
Of Love and Other Demons Page 12