Of Love and Other Demons Read Online Free PDF Page B

by Abrenuncio’s wiles until he put his ear to her chest. Her heart pounded in alarm, and her skin released a livid, icy dew that had a faint onion odor. Whenhe was finished, the doctor gave her an affectionate pat on the cheek.
    ‘You are very brave,’ he said.
    When he was alone with the Marquis, he told him that the girl knew the dog was rabid. The Marquis did not understand.
    ‘She told you many falsehoods,’ he said, ‘but that was not one of them.’
    ‘She did not tell me, Señor,’ said the doctor. ‘Her heart did: it was like a little caged frog.’
    TheMarquis lingered over the inventory of his daughter’s other surprising lies, not with displeasure but with a certain paternal pride. ‘Perhaps she will be a poet,’ he said. Abrenuncio did not agree that lying was an attribute of the arts.
    ‘The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry,’ he said.
    The only thing he could not interpret was the smell of onions in the girl’s perspiration.Since he knew of no connection between any odor and the disease of rabies, he rejected it as a symptom of anything. Caridad del Cobre later revealed to the Marquis that Sierva María had given herself over in secret to the lore of the slaves, who had her chew a paste of
manajú
and placed her naked in the onion cellar to counteract the evil spell of the dog.
    Abrenuncio did not sweeten the slightestdetail of rabies. ‘The first attack is more serious and rapid the deeper the bite and the closer it is to the brain,’ he said. He recalled the case of one of his patients who died after five years, although there was some possibility he had contracted a subsequent infection that had gone unnoticed. Rapid scarring meant nothing: after an indeterminate time the scar could become inflamed, openagain and suppurate. The agony was so awful that death itself was preferable. The only legal thing one could do then was turn to the Amor de Dios Hospital, where they had Senegalese trained to control heretics and raging maniacs. Otherwise the Marquis himself would have to assume the dreadful burden of keeping the girl chained to her bed until she died.
    ‘In the long history of humankind,’ heconcluded, ‘no hydrophobe has lived to tell the tale.’
    TheMarquis decided there was no cross, no matter how heavy, that he was not prepared to carry. The girl would die at home. The doctor rewarded him with a look that seemed more pitying than respectful.
    ‘One could expect no less nobility on your part, Señor,’ he said. ‘And I do not doubt that your soul will have the strength to endure.’
    Again he insisted that the prognosis was not alarming. The wound was far from the area of greatest risk, and no one recalled any bleeding. The most probable outcome was that Sierva María would not contract rabies.
    ‘And in the meantime?’ asked the Marquis.
    ‘In the meantime,’ said Abrenuncio, ‘play music for her, fill the house with flowers, have the birds sing, take her to the ocean to see thesunsets, give her everything that can make her happy.’ He took his leave with a wave of his hat and the obligatory sentence in Latin. But this time he translated it in honor of the Marquis: ‘No medicine cures what happiness cannot.’

Two
    No one ever knew how the Marquis had reached a state of such neglect or why he maintained so unharmonious a marriage when his life had been disposed to a peaceful widowerhood. He could have been whatever he wanted to be, given the extraordinary powerof his father, the first Marquis, a Knight of the Order of Santiago, a pitiless slave trader and a heartless slave driver, whose king spared him no honors or sinecures and punished none of his crimes.
    Ygnacio, his only heir, gave no indications of being anything. He grew up showing undeniable signs of mental retardation, was illiterate until he reached his majority and loved no one. He experiencedthe first symptom of life at the age of twenty, when he courted and was prepared to marry one of