Gabriel GarcÍA MÁRquez - Of Love and Other Demons

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JUNE 2008

Translation copyright 1995 by Gabriel Garca Mrquez

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Spain as Del amor y otros demonios by Mondadori (Grijalbo Comercial, S.A.), Barcelona, in 1994. Copyright 1994 by Gabriel Garca Mrquez. Copyright 1994 by Mondadori (Grijalbo Comercial, S.A.).

This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Garca Mrquez, Gabriel.

[Del amor y otros demonios. English]

Of love and other demons / Gabriel Garca Mrquez: translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman.

p. cm.

I. Grossman, Edith, [date]. II. Title.

PQ8180.17.A73D4513 1995

863dc20 94042904

Vintage ISBN: 978-1-4000-3492-5

Cover design by John Gall

Cover image: (dog) Mary Evans Picture Library, London

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

FOR CARMEN BALCELLS

bathed in tears

For the hair, it seems, is less concerned in the resurrection than other parts of the body.

THOMAS AQUINAS

On the Integrity of Resurrected Bodies,

QUESTION 80, CHAPTER 5

OCTOBER 26, 1949, was not a day filled with important news. Maestro Clemente Manuel Zabala, editor in chief of the newspaper where I learned the essentials of being a reporter, concluded our morning meeting with two or three routine suggestions. He did not assign a specific story to any writer. A few minutes later, he was informed by telephone that the burial crypts of the old Convent of Santa Clara were being emptied, and with few illusions he said to me:

Stop by there and see if you can come up with anything.

The historic convent of the Clarissan nuns, which had been turned into a hospital a century earlier, was to be sold, and a five-star hotel built in its place. The gradual collapse of the roof had left its beautiful chapel exposed to the elements, but three generations of bishops and abbesses and other eminent personages were still buried there. The first step was to empty the crypts, transfer the remains to anyone who claimed them, and bury the rest in a common grave.

I was surprised by the crudeness of the procedure. Laborers opened the tombs with pickaxes and hoes, took out the rotting coffins, which broke apart with the simple act of moving them, and separated bones from the jumble of dust, shreds of clothing, and desiccated hair. The more illustrious the dead the more arduous the labor, because the workers had to rummage through the remains and sift the debris with great care in order to retrieve precious stones and articles of gold and silver.

The foreman copied the information that was on each stone into a notebook, arranged the bones into distinct piles, and placed a sheet of paper with a name on top of every mound to keep them all separate. And so the first thing I saw when I entered the temple was a long line of stacked bones, heated by the savage October sun pouring in through the holes in the roof and with no more identity than a name scrawled in pencil on a piece of paper. Almost half a century later, I can still feel the confusion produced in me by that terrible testimony to the devastating passage of the years.

There, among many others, were a viceroy of Peru and his secret lover; Don Toribio de Cceres y Virtudes, bishop of this diocese; several of the convents abbesses, including Mother Josefa Miranda; and the bachelor of arts Don Cristbal de Eraso, who devoted half his life to building the coffered ceilings. One crypt was sealed with the stone of the second Marquis de Casalduero, Don Ygnacio de Alfaro y Dueas, but when it was opened they found it empty; it had never been used. The remains of his marquise, however, Doa Olalla de Mendoza, had their own stone in the adjacent crypt. The foreman attached no importance to this: It was not unusual for an American-born aristocrat to have prepared his own tomb and be buried in another.