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

Some lepers who were arguing with them over kitchen scraps also rushed toward the Marquis, their hands extended. He distributed meager alms, one coin to each of them until he had no more
cuartillos
left. The nun who guarded the gate saw him in his black taffetas, and the girl dressed like a queen, and she made her way through the crowd to attend to them. The Marquis explained that he was bringing Sierva María by order of the Bishop. The gatekeeper did not doubt it, because of the manner in which he spoke. She examined the girl and removed her hat.
    ‘Hats are forbidden here,’ she said.
    The nun kept it. The Marquis also tried to hand her the valise, but she would not accept it: ‘She won’t need anything.’
    The girl’s braid had not been pinned up with care and it unrolled almost to the ground. The gatekeeper did not believe it was real. The Marquis attempted to roll it again. The girl brushed him aside and arranged her own hair unassisted, and with a skill that surprised the gatekeeper.
    ‘Ithas to be cut,’ she said.
    ‘It is pledged to the Blessed Virgin until the day she marries,’ said the Marquis.
    The gatekeeper accepted his reasoning. She took the girl by the hand, without giving her time to say goodbye, and passed her through the turnstile. Since her ankle hurt when she walked, the girl took off her left slipper. The Marquis watched her move away, favoring her bare foot andholding the slipper in her hand. He hoped in vain that in a rare moment of compassion she would turn to look at him. The last memory he had of Sierva María was her crossing the gallery in the garden, dragging her painful foot, and disappearing into the pavilion of those interred in life.

Three
    The convent of Santa Clara faced the sea and had three floors of innumerable identical windows and a gallery of semicircular arches surrounding a dark, overgrown garden. There was a stone path through the banana trees and wild ferns, a slender palmthat had grown higher than the flat roofs in its search for light and a colossal tree with vanilla vines and strings of orchids hanging from its branches. Beneath the tree a cistern of stagnant water had a rusted iron rim on which captive macaws performed like circus acrobats.
    The garden divided the convent into two separate wings. To the right were the three floors occupied by those interredin life, where the gasp of the undertow at the cliffs and the prayers and canticles of the canonical hours almost never penetrated. This wing communicated with the chapel by means of an interior door that permitted the cloistered nuns to enter the chancel without passing through the public nave, and hear Mass and sing behind a latticed jalousie through which they could see and not be seen. The beautifulcoffered ceiling of noble woods, repeated throughout the convent, had been built by a Spanish artisan who devoted half his life to the work in exchange for the right to be buried in a vaulted niche of the high altar. There he was, crowded behind the marble slabs along with almost two centuries of abbesses and bishops and other eminent personages.
    When Sierva María entered the convent, the cloisterednuns numbered eighty-two Spanishwomen, all with their own servants, and thirty-six American-born daughters of the great viceregal families. After taking their vows of poverty, silence and chastity, their only communication with the outside world was a rare visit held in the locutory, where wooden jalousies admitted voices but not light. The locutory was situated next to the turnstile gate, andits use was regulated, restricted and always required the presence of a chaperone.
    To the left of the garden were the schools, every kind of workshop and a large population of novices and female teachers of handicrafts. The service building was located here, with its enormous kitchen and wood-burning stoves, a butchering shop and a great bread oven. At the rear was a courtyard, always floodedwith dirty wash-water, where several