In 1994, between Strange Pilgrims (1992; see next chapter) and News of a Kidnapping (1996), García Márquez published the fifth of his brief novels – there would be six in all – this one entitled Of Love and Other Demons. His return to live in Cartagena had already produced Love in the Time of Cholera in 1985 and he turned to the city again to tell a compelling tale about an adolesecent girl tried by the Spanish Inquisition for sorcery. In the novel’s prologue he asserts that he has been thinking about this story since October 1949, when he was a young reporter and his boss sent him to the convent of Santa Clara in Cartagena to see the old tombs being opened. (At the time that García Márquez was writing this story he was having a mansion built across the road from the convent, which was itself being rebuilt as a five-star hotel.) One of the tombs, that of an adolescent girl, contained a stream of bright red hair more than twenty-two metres long.

The girl’s name – García Márquez asserts – was Sierva María. She was, he assures us, the daughter of the distinguished aristocrat the Marquis of Casalduero, who lived in one of the finest houses in the old walled city towards the end of the eighteenth century, during the last decades of the colonial period. Today this house is a must-see element of any tourist walk around the city; García Márquez has Juvenal Urbino’s family live in it in Love in the Time of Cholera and Bolívar dines there during his stay in Cartagena in The General in His Labyrinth, in which a few words from García Márquez anticipate the novel he would publish five years later: