Abstract

The Exorcist

This article discusses the book "Of Love and Other Demons," by Gabriel Garcia Márquez. As a cub reporter in Cartagena in 1949, Gabo is assigned to cover the opening up and emptying out of the burial crypts of the Santa Clara Convent. What emerges from the third niche of the high altar at the shattering blow of a pickax is "a stream of living hair the color of copper," twenty-two meters of it, attached to the skull of a 12-year-old girl. Gabo's obliged to imagine the 200-year-old story of Sierva Maria, chained to her bed in a cell, and the young priest who loved her more than God. This means imagining as well the vice regal court, the decaying aristocracy, the ruined palace of the bishop, medicine and the slave trade in an eighteenth century port city, and the Spanish Inquisition.