Of Love And Other Demons

"It was a common occurrence for a stray dog to bite people as it chased after cats or fought turkey buzzards for the carrion in the streets…"

This first chapter sets the scene in colonial Santa María la Antigua as one of extreme poverty and waning prosperity, where death and decay are as common as disease. Turkey buzzards are scavengers, feeding on things that have already died.

The house adjoined the Divina Pastora Asylum for Female Lunatics."

Even before Sierva's alleged possession, questions of female sanity plague the Marquis and his family. The inmates singing provides an ongoing soundtrack for the Marquis' household and Dulce Olivia, the Marquis' first love and an inmate at the asylum, continues to have a relationship with the Marquis even after his marriages.

"Her soul was healthy and at peace, she said, because what she did not find in one faith was there in another."

Dominga de Adviento, the Marquis' head slave, seems to be the only person in the novel who remains unafflicted. A black African who became Catholic, Dominga deftly marries two cultures where those around her struggle to do the same, either because of their ancestry or position in life.

"In that oppressive world where no one was free: Sierva María was: she alone, and there alone."

Before her alleged possession, Sierva, like Dominga de Adviento, successfully navigates two worlds. Her birth status and race give her a certain privileged position, while her living situation, among the slaves, means that she doesn't have to adhere to the societal mores and expectations of the Spanish nobility.

"The city lay submerged in its centuries-long torpor."

Santa María de Antigua hangs in a liminal stateas a colony of Spain that's been subdued but never fully possessed or inhabited by the Spaniards. Rather than stage an uprising, its native and enslaved inhabitants exist in a kind of dull complacence, as do its wealthy clerics and nobility.

"The girl resisted when he tried to carry her in his arms to the bedroom, and he had to make her understand that a masculine order governed the world."

Sierva María experiences her first encounter with the “masculine order” of the world when the Marquis decides that she will come live in the house instead of the slave quarters. He has to physically remove her from the slave shack and bring her into her grandmother's room. This is the beginning of her captivity at the hands of men.

"The room was saturated with the springtime fragrance of her soaps."

Scents bombard the fecund and rotting world of Santa María de Antigua. Bernarda uses soaps to cover up the scent of her body's entropy and awful flatulence, bathing up to six times a day.

"I'm a dead woman."

Bernarda speaks this line when the Marquis asks her whether he has her permission for Abrenuncio to treat Sierva. Not only has Bernarda allowed herself to drift into decline, she recognizes and even embraces it. 

"Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning."

Arguing with his father, the Marquis uses this line to defend his love for Dulce Olivia. However, this line could also apply to many of the novel's characters, including Sierva María. Though never given a chance to defend herself, her upbringing by black Africans often gets offered as an explanation for her seemingly abnormal behavior, though it's never accepted.

"The only thing white about that child is her color."

Bernarda expresses this about Sierva María, and many others do the same. Though phenotypically white, Sierva doesn't learn how to be culturally white until she's twelve-years-old, and even then, she expresses resistance to it. She is the most comfortable among black slaves until the day she dies.

"He maintained an aloofness that over time was turning him into an unreal being."

In the surreal world Márquez constructs for his novel, some characters, like the Bishop, possess otherworldly qualities. In the Bishop's case, he maintains such a distance from the world around him that he lives in a secluded world of his own creation, while engaging with the real world only occasionally.

"I am burdened by the greatest misfortune a human being can suffer…I no longer believe."

The Marquis confesses this to the Bishop during their first meeting. This lack of belief drives the Marquis to try anything to cure his daughter's alleged affliction because he lacks faith that she will recover on her own. The novel reveals the torture found in both belief and non-belief.

"Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses."

Marquez contrasts the world of religion, based on faith, with the secular world, based on the senses. Father Delaura tries to remain firmly in the world of religion, but finds that, due to his love for Sierva, which the sensual world perpetuates, he cannot. 

"She had recovered her world."

In a rare moment of freedom after being brought into the Marquis' house, Sierva is taken in by the convent's black slaves as she waits for the Abbess. Among them, she feels like herself in "her world" (65) and even introduces herself using the name she's chosen: "María Mandinga" (65).

"Delaura was aware of his own awkwardness with women."

For Father Delaura, women hold a certain kind of mystique that he feels incapable of comprehending. Even a girl of twelve, like Sierva María, makes him break out in cold sweats. This fear of woman permeates the minds of most of the novel's male characters.

"Sometimes we attribute certain things we do not understand to the demon, not thinking they may be things of God that we do not understand."

Father Delaura, the Catholic most open to the unlikelihood of Sierva's possession by a demon, says this to the Abbess. He refers to the kind of superstitious thinking that leads Catholics like the Abbess to conclude that anything they can't understand about Sierva must be caused by demonic possession.

"In the center of the room stood a large table that held maritime charts, an astrolabe and other navigational instruments, and a globe of the earth with additions and emendations that successive cartographers had made by hand as the size of the world increased."

Abrenuncio, whose study the above quote describes, seems to be the novel's only character who accepts the many changes about to unfold for the Spanish Empire. He rejects the authority of the Catholic Church, the barbarity of slavery, and has a curiosity of knowledge unbounded by the limits of the Spanish Crown. It's fitting, then, that he updates his globe with the latest geographical 'discoveries.'

"For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying."

Reading like Biblical scripture, this quote comes from a love sonnet written by the Spanish poet Garcilaso. Father Delaura says this to the apparition of Sierva María when he first realizes he's falling in love with her. The two continue to quote the poet to each other as signs of their affections.

"That what seems demonic to us are customs of the blacks, learned by the girl as a consequence of the neglected condition in which her parents kept her."

Father Delaura says this to the Bishop in trying to defend Sierva María's sanity. Neither the Bishop, nor any other white person in the novel, aside from Abrenuncio, can put aside their racist beliefs and accept this as an explanation for Sierva's behavior, which they interpret as demonic.

"More than faith what Galileo lacked was a heart."

The Bishop says this to Father Delaura when he laments that access to more scientific knowledge has brought him nothing but fear. He would prefer to live in a world based on faith, rather than reason. 

"These are times of renovation."

The Viceroy's visit to Santa María de Antiqua heralds the potential dawn of a new era in the region. This era would be based on integrating the colonies into the technological, artistic, and scientific advances of the Western world via the Enlightenment and leaving behind reliance on superstition, religion, and other outdated forms of social control. 

"It is a demon, Father…The most terrible one of all."

Overcome by his love for Sierva María, Father Delaura can no longer contain himself and confesses his feelings to the Bishop. He characterizes this love as a demon because it tortures Delaura in the way that he imagines a demon might. 

"It was you who never saw me as I really was."

Though Dulce Olivia says this to the Marquis regarding her sanity, it might as well have been spoken by Sierva María to any of the men in her life. Severely misunderstood because of her cultural differences and limited by the status of her gender, Sierva never gets a fair shot at defending herself.