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

made his breathing heavyand stony, and his phrases were interrupted by inopportune sighs and a harsh, brief cough, but nothing could affect his eloquence. He established an immediate, easy exchange of trivial commonplaces. Sitting across from him, the Marquis was grateful for this consolatory preamble, so rich and protracted that they were taken aback when the bells tolled five. More than a sound, it was a vibration thatmade the afternoon light tremble and filled the sky with startled pigeons.
    ‘It is horrible,’ said the Bishop. ‘Each hour resonates deep inside me like an earthquake.’
    The phrase surprised the Marquis, for he had responded with the same thought at four o’clock. It seemed a natural coincidence to the Bishop. ‘Ideas do not belong to anyone,’ he said. With his index finger he sketched a series ofcontinuous circles in the air and concluded, ‘They fly around up there like the angels.’
    A nun in his domestic service brought in a decanter of thick, strong wine with chopped fruit and a basin of steaming water that filled the air with a medicinal odor. The Bishop closed his eyes and inhaled the vapor, and when he emerged from his ecstasy he was another man: the absolute master of his authority.
    ‘We had you come,’ he told the Marquis, ‘because we know you are in need of God and pretend not to notice.’
    His voice had lost its organ tonalities, and his eyes had recovered their earthly light. The Marquis drank half a glass of wine in one swallow to give himself courage.
    ‘YourGrace should know that I am burdened by the greatest misfortune a human being can suffer,’ he said with disarminghumility. ‘I no longer believe.’
    ‘We know, my son,’ the Bishop answered without surprise. ‘How could we not know!’
    He said this with a certain joy, for he too, as a King’s Cadet in Morocco, had lost his faith at the age of twenty, surrounded by the din of battle. ‘It was the thundering certainty that God had ceased to exist,’ he said. In terror he had dedicated himself to a life of prayer andpenitence.
    ‘Until God took pity on me and showed me the path of my vocation,’ he concluded. ‘What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you. And regarding that there can be no doubt, for it is He in His infinite diligence who has enlightened us so that we may offer you this consolation.’
    ‘I have tried to endure my misfortune in silence,’said the Marquis.
    ‘Well, you have in no way succeeded,’ said the Bishop. ‘It is an open secret that your poor child rolls on the floor in obscene convulsions, howling the gibberish of idolaters. Are these not the unequivocal symptoms of demonic possession?’
    The Marquis was aghast.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘That one of the demon’s numerous deceptions is to take on the appearance of a foul diseasein order to enter an innocent body,’ he said. ‘And once he is inside, no human power is capable of making him leave.’
    The Marquis explained the medical alterations in the bite, but the Bishop always found an explanation thatfavored his position. He asked a question, although there was no doubt he already knew the answer, ‘Do you know who Abrenuncio is?’
    ‘He was the first doctor to see the girl,’said the Marquis.
    ‘I wanted to hear it from your own lips,’ said the Bishop.
    He rang a little bell that he kept by his hand, and a priest in his mid-thirties appeared with the suddenness of a genie liberated from a bottle. The Bishop introduced him as Father Cayetano Delaura, nothing more, and asked him to sit down. He wore a simple cassock because of the heat and sandals like those of the Bishop.He was intense and pale, and had spirited eyes and deep black hair with a streak of white at his forehead. His rapid breathing and feverish hands did not seem those of a happy man.
    ‘What do we know about Abrenuncio?’ the Bishop asked him.
    Father Delaura did not have to think before