Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman

of Martina Laborde, a former nun condemned to life imprisonment for having murdered two of her companions with a carving knife. She never confessed her motive. She had spent eleven years there and was better known for her failed escape attempts than for her crime. She never accepted that being imprisoned for life wasthe same as being a cloistered nun, and in this she was so consistentthat she had offered to serve the rest of her sentence as a maid in the pavilion of those interred in life. Her implacable obsession, to which she devoted the same zeal she brought to her faith, was to be free even if she had to kill again.
    Delaura could not resist his rather puerile curiosity and peered into the cell throughthe iron bars at the window. Martina’s back was to him. When she sensed someone looking at her, she turned toward the door, and Delaura felt at once the power of her charm. An uneasy Abbess moved him away from the window.
    ‘Take care,’ she said. ‘That creature is capable of anything.’
    ‘So much a threat, even behind bars?’ said Delaura.
    ‘That much and more,’ said the Abbess. ‘If it were up tome, she would have been released long ago. The perturbation she causes is too great for this convent.’
    When the warder opened the door, Sierva María’s cell exhaled a breath of decay. The girl lay on her back on the stone bed with no mattress, her feet and hands bound with leather straps. She seemed dead, but her eyes held the light of the sea. Delaura thought she was identical to the girl inhis dream, and a tremor took control of his body and soaked him in icy perspiration. He closed his eyes and prayed in a low voice, with all the weight of his faith, and when he finished he had regained his composure.
    ‘Even if she were not possessed by any demon,’ he said, ‘this poor creature is in the most propitious environment for becoming so.’
    The Abbess replied, ‘This is an honor we do notdeserve.’ For they had done everything to keep the cell inthe best condition, yet Sierva María generated her own dung heap.
    ‘Our war is not against her but against the demons who may inhabit her,’ said Delaura.
    He entered on tiptoe to avoid the filth on the floor and sprinkled the cell with the hyssop of holy water, murmuring the ritual formulas. The Abbess was terrified by the stains the waterleft on the walls.
    ‘Blood!’ she screamed.
    Delaura challenged the frivolity of her reasoning. Just because the water was red, that did not mean it had to be blood, and even if it were, that did not mean it had to be diabolical. ‘It would be more reasonable to assume this is a miracle, and that power belongs only to God,’ he said. It was neither one thing nor the other, however, for when the spotsdried on the whitewashed walls, they had changed from red to an intense green. The Abbess blushed. Not only the Clarissans but all the women of her day were forbidden any kind of formal education, yet from the time she was very young she had learned scholastic argumentation in her family of distinguished theologians and great heretics.
    ‘At least,’ she replied, ‘let us not deny to demons the simplepower to change the color of blood.’
    ‘Nothing is more useful than a timely doubt,’ was Delaura’s immediate retort, and he looked straight at her. ‘Read Saint Augustine.’
    ‘I have already read him with great care,’ said the Abbess.
    ‘Well, read him again,’ said Delaura.
    Before turning his attention to the girl, he asked the warder in a very courteous tone to leave the cell. Then,without thesame sweetness, he told the Abbess, ‘You too, please.’
    ‘On your responsibility,’ she said.
    ‘The Bishop is the highest authority,’ he said.
    ‘There is no need to remind me of that,’ said the Abbess with a touch of sarcasm. ‘We know by now that you are the masters of God.’
    Delaura granted her the pleasure of the last word. He sat on the edge of the bed and examined the girl with the thoroughnessof a