love, magic realism style

She understood more than he was capable of saying. She looked at him without fear and asked why he did not have the patch over his eye.

"I don't need it anymore," he said, encouraged. "Now when I close my eyes I see hair like a river of gold."

I'm quite obsessed with the entire being-in-love concept thingy these days. Like I'm reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Of Love and Other Demons and I got to the part where Cayetano Delaura has admitted his love for Sierva Maria to her and he's inflamed because he can't see her anymore and the church has punished him for falling in love with her in the first place, as she's supposed to be possessed by the devil even though it was really just a slight case of rabies and Cayetano is supposed to exorcise the demon.

Soon, it's a regular relationship. He feverishly endures the day, working quickly with scrubbing up the lepers he is bound to as punishment, praying that night will fall early, to sneak into Sierva Maria's cell in the Clarissan abbey she is imprisoned in. She in turn impatiently waits for Cayetano all day, unable to breathe until he arrives. They spend the night in each other's arms, whispering romantic verses to each other in Spanish until they discover kissing and that's all they want to do. They get only around an hour of decent sleep before the sun rises and he has to leave. They do this every day. They also dream of the future, when the Bishop blesses Sierva Maria and declares her as a child of God again and Cayetano will live out his punishment and ask to be transferred to one of those new age parishes where priests can marry and it won't be thought of as strange. Normal stuff People In Love do.

And then the Bishop takes the responsibility of the exorcism upon himself and the pain and terror starts again. At this point, I closed the book and I'm not looking forward to continuing. I know I'll have to, but it just breaks my heart. This doesn't look like those happy ending things. That Gabriel Garcia Marquez sure knows his shit.

Have to admit, it's not a bad way for love to end. I'd rather whatever happens in the last pages of the book than just realizing that being far away from each other too much can really jump up and bite you in the ass. I'd rather whatever happens in the last pages of the book than disenchantment, demystification, falling out of love. Cayetano sees a river of gold when he closes his eyes, for goodness sake. Love rocks.