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

of rabies seemed to have been averted. The Marquis, grateful for his good fortune, resolved to rectify the past and win the girl’s heart with the prescription for happiness recommended by Abrenuncio. He devoted all his time to her. He tried to learn to comb and braid her hair. He tried to teach her to be areal white, to revive for her his failed dreams of an American-bornnoble, to suppress her fondness for pickled iguana and armadillo stew. He attempted almost everything except asking himself whether this was the way to make her happy.
    Abrenuncio continued to visit the house. It was not easy for him to communicate with the Marquis but he was intrigued by his lack of awareness in an outpost of the world intimidated by the Holy Office. And so the months of hotweather passed, Abrenuncio talking without being heard beneath the flowering orange trees, and the Marquis rotting in his hammock at a distance of 1,300 nautical leagues from a king who had never heard his name. During one of these visits they were interrupted by a baleful lament from Bernarda.
    Abrenuncio was alarmed. The Marquis pretended to be deaf, but the next groan was so heartrending hecould not ignore it. ‘That person, whoever it is, needs help,’ said Abrenuncio.
    ‘That person is my second wife,’ said the Marquis.
    ‘Well, her liver is diseased,’ said Abrenuncio.
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘Because she groans with her mouth open,’ said the doctor.
    He pushed her door open without knocking and tried to see Bernarda in the darkened room, but she was not in the bed. He called her byname, and she did not answer. Then he opened the window, and the metallic light of four o’clock revealed her, naked and sprawled in a cross on the floor, enveloped in the glow of her lethal gases. Her skin had the pale gray color of full-blown dyspepsia. She raised her head, blinded by the sudden brilliancestreaming in the open window and could not recognize the doctor with the light behind him.One glance was all he needed to know her destiny.
    ‘The piper is demanding to be paid, my dear,’ he said.
    He explained that there was still time to save her, but only if she submitted to an emergency treatment to purify her blood. Then Bernarda recognized him, struggled into a sitting position and let loose a string of obscenities. An impassive Abrenuncio endured them as he closed the windowagain. He left the room, stopped beside the Marquis’s hammock and made a more specific prognosis: ‘The Señora Marquise will die on the fifteenth of September at the latest, if she does not hang herself from the rafters first.’
    Unmoved, the Marquis said, ‘The only problem is that the fifteenth of September is so far away.’
    He continued with the prescription of happiness for Sierva María. FromSan Lázaro Hill they observed the fatal swamps to the east and to the west the enormous red sun as it sank into a flaming sea. She asked what was on the other side of the ocean, and he replied: ‘The world.’ For each of his gestures he discovered an unexpected resonance in the girl. One afternoon they saw the Galleon Fleet appear on the horizon, its sails full to bursting.
    The city was transformed.Father and daughter were entertained by puppet shows, by fire-eaters, by the countless fairground attractions coming into port during that April of good omen. In two months Sierva María learned more about white people’s ways than she ever had before. In his effort to transform her, the Marquis also became a different man, and in so drastic a manner that it did notseem an alteration in his personalityas much as a change in his very nature.
    The house was filled with every kind of wind-up ballerina, music box and mechanical clock displayed in the fairs of Europe. The Marquis dusted off the Italian theorbo. He restrung it, tuned it with a perseverance that could be understood only as love and once again accompanied the songs of the past, sung with the good voice and bad ear that neither