About love and other demons
About love and other demons ( Spanish: Del amor y otros demonios ) is a novel by the Colombian Nobel Prize winner for literature Gabriel García Márquez from 1994.
In the second half of the 18th century, the 36-year-old librarian Father Cayetano Delaura falls unhappily in love with the 12-year-old Sierva María. The priest is appointed by the bishop of the diocese of Cartagena de Indias from the viceroyalty of New Granada as an exorcist against the devil in the girl.
action
In Cartagena, Sierva María, the twelve-year-old daughter of the Marqués de Casalduero, is bitten in the left ankle by a rabid dog in the market . The doctor whom the concerned father consults abandons the child. Let it die at home. As medicine, he recommends happiness therapy. The girl should be given everything that could make her happy. This is a difficult task for parents because their marriage is deeply shattered.
The father's first marriage - that is the Marqués de Casalduero, a Creole - had remained childless. After his wife had a fatal accident, the mestizo Bernarda Cabrera had approached the 29-year-old widower, was soon pregnant and married by him for the sake of grace. Bernarda Cabrera had never loved her only child, Sierva María, but rather handed it over to the black slaves in the house of the Marquis of Casalduero and preferred to amuse herself extensively and continuously outside of wedlock. Sierva María spoke Yoruba fluently in her childhood and was given the name María Mandinga by the slaves. Sierva María can name six demons. If one of them appears, he cannot articulate himself, but Sierva María understands what he meant from his facial expression. The mother, noticing signs of demonic possession in the hated daughter, had left the house, trembling at Sierva María and her “African witchcraft”. It was only shortly before the dog bite mentioned above that she returned from the Mahates sugar mill, neglected and seriously ill . Bernarda Cabrera is torn. On the one hand she hates the daughter and on the other hand she fears for her life.
The marquis consulted other doctors. They turn out to be botchers and torment Sierva María, who shows no symptoms of rabies, with her treatments. The girl's screams cause public annoyance. The Bishop of Cartagena calls the father to him. The clergyman does not give the marquis - concerning the daughter's continued life - any hope either, but he wants to save her soul. The Marquis of Casalduero agrees to the admission of Sierva Marías to the Convent of the Poor Clares of Santa Clara in Cartagena and thus surrenders his child to the merciless practices of exorcism. The girl is locked in a cell, in the vicinity of which the nun murderess Martina Laborde sits for life. Doctors who arrive at the monastery in the wake of the visiting viceroy attest that Sierva María has no rabies.
Although Father Cayetano Delaura is not an exorcist, he is entrusted with the case by the bishop. Cayetano Delaura enters the cell, takes care of the wounds of the “maddened” Sierva María and then tells his bishop that the girl is not possessed by the devil. Because the bishop and the abbess of the monastery have a completely different view based on the "evidence", Cayetano Delaura has to go back. He falls in love with Sierva María. When the father confesses his sin to the bishop, the latter, with the Holy Office behind his neck , takes over the exorcism himself. Cayetano Delaura has to go to the Amor de Dios hospital as a caretaker for lepers . Despite trying to get infected, he remains healthy. During the day, the priest only thinks of Sierva María's demeanor and her bright charisma. In the evenings he regularly disappears from the hospital, gains access to Sierva María's cell, spends the night with her and returns to the hospital early in the morning. Love is finally returned.
The murderess Martina Laborde flees. After their escape route is discovered, the secret entrance to the interior of the monastery is walled up. Cayetano Delaura forgets all caution, is discovered when entering the monastery again and handed over to the Inquisition. As a punishment, he has to continue caring for lepers for years. He no longer sees the lover. Weakened by the torture, Sierva María dies shortly before the sixth exorcism session “of love” “with shining eyes”.
Form and interpretation
The subject of the narrow novel - the love between man and woman - is presented with tremendous force. The five chapters of the novel are preceded by a word from the author. On October 26, 1949, García Márquez was a young journalist in Cartagena when the remains of Sierva María were uncovered in the abovementioned Santa Clara monastery. In the short foreword, the author conjures up one of his big pictures: “the miracle of the flood of hair”. Sierva María's head had been shaved off on the day she died. The hair had grown a good twenty-two meters in the two hundred years in the burial chamber. The reader encounters the "hair mane ... like [the] train of a queen" in the text. The element of double repetition is also used in the grape-picking dream: As soon as Sierva María picks and eats the last berry, she has to die. The sequence is cleverly built. The lovers dream - each for himself, but fitting the construction of the novel - the same dream.
Through the completely new experience of love, the father becomes a new person. When depicting the love affair, the emphasis is more on Cayetano Delaura and less on Sierva María. This distribution of weight seems justified, because to the father - also according to the title of the novel - the love between man and woman seemed demonic until now.
Media adaptations
- The opera “Love and Other Demons” by Péter Eötvös was premiered on August 10, 2008 under Wladimir Jurowski based on the libretto by Kornél Hamvai at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera . Allison Bell sang Sierva María and Nathan Gunn sang Cayetano Delaura.
- On March 26, 2010, the Colombian film of the same name by Hilda Hidalgo premiered. Eliza Triana played Sierva María, Pablo Derqui played Cayetano Delaura, Joaquín Climent played the Marqués of Casalduero and Margarita Rosa de Francisco played Bernarda Cabrera.
literature
Text output
- Used edition
- About love and other demons. Novel. Translated from the Spanish by Dagmar Ploetz . Bertelsmann Club GmbH (licensor Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-462-02360-8 ), without ISBN
Secondary literature
- Dasso Saldívar: Journey to the Origin. A biography of Gabriel García Márquez. Translated from the Spanish by Vera Gerling, Ruth Wucherpfennig, Barbara Romeiser and Merle Godde. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1998, ISBN 3-462-02751-4
Individual evidence
- ↑ Edition used, pp. 12, 10. Zvo and p. 9, 1. Zvo and also Saldívar, p. 504, footnote 31
- ↑ Edition used, p. 63, 3rd Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 221, 2nd Zvo
- ↑ Edition used, p. 147, 3rd Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 12, 4. Zvo
- ↑ Edition used, p. 112, 17. Zvo
- ↑ Edition used, p. 112, 1. Zvu, p. 160 middle, p. 220 bottom
- ↑ eng. Love and Other Demons
- ↑ eng. Nathan Gunn