The South Carolina Modern Language Review

Volume 2, Number 1

Del amor y otros demonios: García Márquez’s Silent Dialogue with the World of El carnero

by David Bost
Furman University

Throughout his long literary career, Gabriel García Márquez has often used historical events to inspire his fictional world.Such texts as Relato de un náufrago (1970), Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981), and Las aventuras de Miguel Littín clandestino en Chile (1986), among others, share the conceit of historical, journalistic, or testimonial documentation authenticating the fictional depiction of unique and intriguing circumstances.His most recent novel, Del amor y otros demonios (1994) follows the trademark Marquezian pattern of constructing a novelistic world based loosely upon past occurrences “verified” by texts, word of mouth, or his own experience as a young journalist in the 1940s and 1950s.In this particular case, García Márquez draws upon his own memory as a reporter who, in 1949, witnessed the disinterment of the remains of Sierva María de Todos los Angeles, a girl he imagines to be the same one his grandmother told him about as a child: “la leyenda de una marquesita de doce años cuya cabellera le arrastraba como una cola de novia, que había muerto del mal de rabia por el mordisco de un perro, y era venerada en los pueblos del Caribe por sus muchos milagros” (11).

With his own experience and his grandmother’s legendary tales in mind, García Márquez (re)constructs the world of Colombian colonial society, a world fraught with political, religious, and social oppression, a time and place of tremendous cultural conflict between the hegemonic rule of the Spanish creoles and their African and/or indigenous servants.García Márquez does not paint a pretty or idealized picture of the colonial community that ostracized the twelve-year old Sierva María, ostensibly for incipient rabies but more likely for her rebellious, independent nature brought about by her formative childhood years spent among the African servants of her father’s large estate.García Márquez’snovel follows the pattern of such contemporary Latin American historical works as Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante (1992), Antonio Benítez Rojo’s El mar de las lentejas (1979), and Augusto Roa Bastos’ Vigilia del Almirante (1992) that deal with the conquest and colonization of the Americas: it demythologizes the era by uncovering some of the dark, seedy, and violent traits of a society obsessed with control, order, and conformity of thought, particularly in the religious sphere.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the world that García Márquez portrays in Del amor y otros demonios is strangely similar to Juan Rodríguez Freile’s description of colonial Santa Fe de Bogotá in El carnero (1636).Like García Márquez, Rodríguez Freile uses the historical circumstances as an occasion to construct fully-developed stories based upon his own experiences as well as legends and tales from the era.Ostensibly a history of Bogotá’s first one hundred years, El carnero carefully chronicles the appointment of important people who held significant political and eccelsiatical positions, meticulously recording the comings and goings of Bogota’s ruling elite.Yet El carnero is much more than a dry inventory of names and dates: it is also a rich repository of narratives that bear every mark of fictional creations with its many tales of intrigue, betrayal, and adventure.In some regards, there is a silent but nevertheless identifiable dialogue between García Márquez’s fiction of colonial Cartagena and El carnero, Colombia’s paradigmatic text of colonial history interlaced with fictionalized accounts of Bogotá’s more colorful residents.

The story of Sierva María illustrates clearly that colonial Latin America’s obsession with religious and social control could sometimes have devastating results.Bitten by a rabid dog on her twelfth birthday, Sierva María is subjected to the largely ineffective and brutal medical practices of the time.Though it is quite unclear that she actually contracts the feared disease, Sierva’s mother and father, frustrated and mystified by Sierva María’s absorption into Yoruban culture and advised that she was demonically possessed, succumb to the will of the local bishop to send her to the Santa Clara convent, the same place where García Márquez observed her remains centuries later.In the convent Sierva María is treated like a criminal: she is essentially imprisoned in a place of no escape.To protect herself from mistreatment and to manipulate the gullible nuns, she plays the role of a demoniac, thus striking a mixture of fear and fascination into the superstitious nuns who blame Sierva María for real and imagined disorder within the convent.The bishop eventually sends Father Cayetano DeLaura to tend to the girl’s spiritual needs, but Cayetano soon is interested in far more than Sierva María’s soul; he falls in love with the girl and thus begins a series of semi-erotic encounters that typify all that is prohibited in colonial Catholic society.Their relationship is short lived; he is banished to work in a leper hospital; she undergoes a savage exorcism and dies shortly thereafter from a hunger strike.

What joins Del amor y otros demonios to El carnero is their depiction of colonial society as fundamentally corrupt and, in the opinion of Freile, fallen, in the theological sense of the word.García Márquez paints a vividly cruel society unable to examine itself critically or judiciously.Sierva María’s parents are guilty of neglect, especially her mother, who spends her days in a drug-induced stupor dreaming about past lascivious exploits with many partners.Yet she never feels the slightest remorse for abandoning her daughter, neither does she understand her role in Sierva María’s particular social development among the African servants of the estate.Similarly, Rodríguez Freile, with his interest in crimes, adultery, and social misconduct, finds little about New Granada to praise.As Raquel Chang-Rodríguez writes, “En Nueva Granada autoridades virreinales y eclesiásticas así como simples ciudadanos roban, matan, y engañan” (56).While Rodríguez Freile and García Márquez differ on the causes and sources of corruption—the author of El carnero is apparently a devout Catholic who bemoans the absence of real virtue in the ecclesiastical and political hierarchy—ironically, they both portray a somewhat tragic sense of life during the colonial era, even though their particular motivations are probably diametrically opposed.García Márquez, never a friend of the institutional church, finds fault in its systemic and chronic persecution of all who fall outside its orthodox practices.Rodríguez Freile, equally fascinated with those individuals whose behavior puts them at odds with the church’s accepted practices, condemns them as sinners, particularly the women.

Both authors create a number of characters whose extraordinary conduct distinguishes them from the norm.Bernarda Cabrera, Sierva María’s neglectful mother, typifies decadence and unrepentant self-absorption:

Había sido una mestiza brava de la llamada aristocracia de mostrador; seductora, rapaz, parrandera, y con una avidez de vientre para saciar un cuartel.Sin embargo, en pocos años se había borrado del mundo por el abuso de la miel fermentada y las tabletas de cacao.Los ojos gitanos se le apagaron, se la acabó el ingenio, obraba sangre y arrojaba bilis, y el antiguo cuerpo de sirena se le volvió hinchado y cobrizo…(15)

The novel chronicles in some detail her impressive sexual exploits outside of marriage particularly with an African named Judas Iscariote whom she met while gazing upon him lustfully as he danced.Ultimately, Bernarda falls victim to her own insatiable desires for more and more sex and an unceasing addiction to coca leaves, marihuana, and, above all, fermented honey.Her life has been wasted on her own indulgences to the detriment of her family, with whom she ultimately has no contact.

There are a number of precedents to Bernarda Cabrera in Juan Rodríguez Freile’s chronicle, particularly women whose extramarital affairs had tragic consequences.The narrator of El carnero seems to take perverse, misogynist delight in showing how women who misuse their beauty can expect severe retribution.Perhaps the clearest, most egregious example of a woman whose misdeeds with men lead her and others to a tragic conclusion is the story of Inés de Hinojosa.Her initial description, with an emphasis on her beauty and social station, is somewhat reminiscent of Bernarda Cabrera: “Mujer hermosa por extremos y rica, y el marido bien hacendado” (150).Amid many historical and moralistic digressions, Rodríguez Freile tells a story of adultery, conspiracy, and murder that ends with the execution of all the involved parties, including Hinojosa.Both Bernarda and Inés fall for dancers whom both use for their own purposes: Bernarda uses Judas for sex and drugs; Inés, after seducing the local dance instructor, Jorge Voto, convinces him to murder her husband.Inés later conspires to have Voto killed.Her spree soon ends and all of the accomplices receive capital punishment.While Del amor y otros demonios clearly lacks the self-righteous tone which runs throughout El carnero, both books’ characterization of wayward women is similar.Bernarda has very little to contribute to society and becomes a recluse in her husband’s enormous but dilapidated mansion.Her lack of interest in anyone but herself is a contributing factor to her daughter’s ultimate alienation.Inés’s actions are also far afield of accepted social practices, and her licentious ambitions have an explosively destructive effect upon many lives.

Bernarda’s chronic neglect of her daughter Sierva María provides the impetus for the girl to associate freely and happily with the African house servants, to the degree that the girl becomes fluent in several African languages and intimately familiar with Yoruban customs and rituals.Aware of the cultural mosaic that represents her upbringing, she refers to herself as “María Mandinga,” paying homage to the syncretic nature of colonial New Granadan society.Del amor y otros demonios is a literary elaboration of the profound influence of Yoruban culture in the formation of the Caribbean reality.On several occasions, it is clear that the book defends the legitimacy of African traditions and practices in the colony, especially in contrast to the brutalizing authority of the Catholic Church and its militant arm, the Holy Inquisition.Abbrenuncio, a local doctor of probable Jewish origin who represents perhaps the only enlightened viewpoint in the novel, finds little difference between the “savage” African religious rituals and those of the Church, except that instead of sacrificing chickens to a panorama of gods, the Church “se complace descuartizando inocentes en el potro o asándolos vivos en espectáculos vivos” (98).El carnero, while of course avoiding any criticism of church doctrine or policy, is noteworthy in that it is one of the earliest Latin American texts with an African character, Juana García.In a story of sexual intrigue and fantasy, Rodríguez Freile anticipates García Márquez’s fascination with the image of Africans as necromancers living in their own world on the margins of polite and accepted society.The story of Juana García, almost certainly the most anthologized tale from El Carnero, tells about how Juana uses her magic to convince a young wife, pregnant with another man’s baby, to carry the baby to term, since her philandering husband would not return from his business trip in time to witness the pregnancy.“Juana García” is, not surprisingly, a morality lesson.The New World Celestina is judged by the Bishop and banished from the realm.But she may not easily be contained.In her confession, Juana García brags that she had the ability to fly; while living in Bermuda, she attested: “dijo que…se echó a volar desde el cerro que está a las espaldas de Nuestra Señora de las Nieves…” (143).García Márquez uses a similar recourse in his novel.Sierva María, an accomplished storyteller, embellishes the facts regarding the escape of Martine Laborde, an incarcerated nun who befriends the girl.Sierva María, perhaps with Juana García’s legendary exploits in mind, tells the authorities that Martina, along with five accomplices, “[t]enían alas de murciélago….Las abrieron en la terraza, y se la llevaron volando, volando, hasta el otro lado del mar” (192).Both Juana García and Sierva María rely on the credulous nature of the religious authorities with regard to such magical transformations.They become ironic narrators who, despite their imprisonment, succeed in manipulating their captors into believing what they had suspected all along: Juana García and Sierva María either had or were witness to incomprehensible supernatural forces.

Such characters as Bernarda Cabrera, Sierva María, Inés de Hinojosa, and Juana García function in both texts to illustrate an underlying commonality: colonial society was an extremely hierarchical, male-dominated, repressive world that did not easily tolerate individuals who deviated from the clearly articulated social norms promulgated primarily by the Church.In the case of Sierva María and Juana García, the presiding bishop makes the determination deciding the ultimate fate of the two: Sierva María endures an exorcism; Juana receives exile.Each person finds that her way of life violates religious society’s sense of propiety.Sierva María’s deep immersion into Yoruban ways completely alienates her from her parents who are baffled by their daughter’s strange fascination with practices, languages, and artifacts from what was then considered at best a marginal culture.In a world that was so overwhelmingly and militantly Catholic—this is the time of the Inquisition—there could be only one outcome for an individual whose resistance to conformity was so complete, and we therefore anticipate Sierva María’s final act of rebellion against her oppressors: a hunger strike that finally takes its toll on her abused, tired body.Juan García finds herself in a similar situation.As an African midwife who dabbled in black magic, she is a virtual alien within a world that valued religious and social homogeneity.Juana García, like Sierva María, represents deviance from a norm that looked upon their behavior as demonic, and thus subject to control, if not annihilation.Curiously, however, both García Márquez and Rodríguez Freile finish these stories with an ironic twist: Sierva’s brilliant red hair burst forth from her shaved head soon after her death; and Juana attests to her ability to fly.These two details symbolize a final gesture toward liberation and freedom on the part of both individuals.Sierva María continues to express herself in an individualistic and authentic way, even after her death, thereby having the last laugh at the expense of the bishop and his minions.And Juana García’s reputed ability of flight suggests that the authorities’ desire to exert control over her will ultimately be futile.True or not, the assertion that she can fly ridicules the bishop who stands above all for propriety, obedience, control, and order.

The stories of these women, all of whom rebel in their own way against the standards imposed upon them by colonial society, lead to a thematic polarization within each text representing an irreconcilable conflict between oppressors and those who seek freedom from control.The conflict between freedom and oppression is present in virtually all of García Márquez’s works, but it is somewhat more problematic in a text like El carnero.If we assume a close association between Rodríguez Freile and the narrative voice of El carnero, since much of the work is autobiographical, then what are we to make of the ironic tone of “Juana García”?After all, Rodríguez Freile never hides his own religious orientation, and doctrinal Catholics would find much to fault in Juana’s activities.Yet the turn toward fantasy at the end of the story suggests a hint of ambivalence toward this woman who did so much to defy the rich and powerful of her day.

Sierva María and Juana García (and to some degree, Inés de Hinojosa and Bernarda Cabrera) represent individuals who openly defy the standards of colonial society in virtually every aspect of their lives, especially their theological formation.Both Sierva María and Juana García occupy what theologian Sallie McFague refers to as a “wild space,” a way of life that does not fit neatly into stereotypical, conventional, hegemonic patterns easily identifiable within any culture (48).Sierva María is an Africanized daughter of the European ruling elite; her command of exotic languages, ritualistic practices, and African attire push her to the borders of “proper” comportment among the upper-class creoles in New Granadan society.Sierva María moves freely between one world and the other, the Yoruban experience serving as a wild space for someone who also had a nominal Catholic upbringing, representing for Sierva María a place where she is relatively free from the normative restrictions of the dominant society.Juana García’s very life typifies a wild space in contrast to the very staid environment in which she lived.There is a suggestion in El carnero that Juana was not just a midwife; she was also an abortionist, someone who “solved” problem pregnancies for upper-class women.That she was African and a necromancer as well puts her squarely into a wild space completely beyond the clearly-defined norms of her time.Part of the attraction of “Juana García” is that the main character is so different from the mainstream.We learn at the end of the story that other upper-crust creoles had apparently committed some indiscretions that they did not want made public, and they intervened with the bishop to go light with his sentencing.Obviously drawn to the wild space characterized by Juana García and others from the margins of colonial society, such noteworthy figures as Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada (one of the founders of Bogotá) nevertheless felt that they needed to protect the image of their “virgin” land from public scandal and thus maintain an unstained appearance of the New World.In spite of the obvious hypocrisy of such political pressure, the bishop ceded to their wishes and concentrated his prosecution on Juana García, whose low social standing could offer her little protection from such powerful authorities.

García Márquez’s novel is emblematic of a general tendency within the genre of contemporary historical fiction not only to probe deeply into unexplored corners of Latin America’s complex past, but also to dialogue, directly or indirectly, with texts from the era, as Seymour Menton and others have illustrated, especially Elzbieta Sklodowska and Philip Swanson.In the case of El carnero and Del amor y otros demonios the relationship is both contextual and thematic.Each work presents characters and situations that angle themselves against certain prevailing conventions of the time, especially with regard to the institution of the Church.Both texts speak, in their own way, to some of the more pervasive issues present throughout Colombia’s history, particularly the struggle for autonomy within an environment of oppression and control.

Works Cited

Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel.Violencia y subversión en la prosa colonial hispanoamericana, siglos XVI y XVII.Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1982.

García Márquez, Gabriel.Del amor y otros demonios.New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

McFague, Sallie.Life Abundant: Rethinnking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril.Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.

Menton, Seymour.Latin America’s New Historical Novel.Austin: U of Texas P, 1993.

Rodríguez Freile, Juan.El carnero.Bogotá: Editorial Bedout, 1973.

Sklodowska, Elzbieta.La parodia en la nueva novela hispanoamericana (1960-1985).Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991.

Swanson, Philip, ed.Landmarks in Modern Latin American Fiction.New York:Routledge, 1990.