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

singing. The Abbess raisedthe crucifix she wore around her neck.
    ‘Hail Mary Most Pure,’ she said.
    ‘Conceived without sin,’ they all said.
    The Abbess brandished the crucifix as if it were a weapon against Sierva María. ‘
Vade retro
,’ she shouted. The slaves retreated and left the girl isolated in her space, eyes fixed and on her guard.
    ‘Spawn of Satan!’ shouted the Abbess. ‘You became invisible to confound us.’
    Theycould not make her say a word. A novice tried to lead Sierva María away by the hand, but the terrified Abbess stopped her. ‘Do not touch her!’ she shouted. And then to everyone, ‘No one is to touch her.’
    In the end they took her by force, kicking and snapping at the air like a dog, to the farthest cell in the prison pavilion. On the way they realized she was soiled with her own excrement andwashed her down with buckets of water at the stable.
    ‘So many convents in this city, and His Grace the Bishop sends us turds,’ the Abbess protested.
    The cell was large, with rough walls and a high ceiling that had termite tracks in the coffers. Next to the only door was a full-length window, its stout bars made of lathed wood and its frame secured by an iron crosspiece.On the far wall, facingthe sea, a high window was sealed by a wooden lattice. The bed was a concrete base covered by a canvas mattress filled with straw and stained with use. A built-in stone bench and a work table that also served as an altar and washstand were beneath a solitary crucifix nailed into the wall. They left Sierva María there, drenched all the way to her braid and trembling with fear, in the care of a wardertrained in winning the millenarian war against the demon.
    Sierva María sat down on the narrow bed, looking at the iron bars on the reinforced door, and this is how the servant found her when she brought a supper tray at five o’clock. The girl did not stir. The servant tried to remove her necklaces, and Sierva María seized her by the wrist and forced her to let them go. In the acta of the conventwhich began to be recorded that night, the servant declared that a supernatural force had thrown her to the ground.
    The girl sat motionless while the door was closed, and the chain rattled and two turns of the key sounded in the lock. She looked at the food: a few shreds of dried meat, a piece of cassava bread and a cup of chocolate. She bit into the cassava bread, chewed it, spat it out. Shelay down on her back. She heard the gasp of the sea, the wind heavy with rain, the first thunder of the season approaching. At dawn the next day, when the servant returned with breakfast, she found the girl sleeping on the straw stuffing of the mattress she had disemboweled with her teeth and nails.
    At midday she allowed herself to be led to the refectory for those who had not yet taken theirreclusive vows. It was a spacious room with a high vaulted ceiling andlarge windows through which the brilliance of the sea came clamoring in and the uproar at the cliffs sounded very close. Twenty novices, most of them young, were sitting at a double row of long, rough tables. They wore ordinary serge habits, their heads were shaved and they were cheerful and silly and did not hide the excitementof eating their barracks rations at the same table as one possessed. Sierva María sat near the main door, between two distracted warders, and ate almost nothing. They had dressed her in a gown like the ones worn by the novices and in her slippers, which were still damp. No one looked at her while they ate, but when the meal was over, several novices gathered around to admire her beads. One triedto take them off. Sierva María went into a rage. She shoved away the warders, who attempted to subdue her, climbed onto the table, and ran from one end to the other in a rampage of destruction, shrieking as if truly possessed. She broke everything in her path, then leapt through the window and wrecked the arbors in the courtyard, upset the beehives