In the slave market in a tropical Colombian seaport, venturing to buy a string of bells, the Marquis’s twelve-year-old daughter, Sierva María, is bitten by a rabid dog. “No medicine cures what happiness cannot” the wily physician Abrenuncio advises her father. García Márquez’s magical novel of doomed love tells of Sierva María’s incarceration in the convent of Santa Clara where Cayetano Delaura, the young priest sent to exorcize the virulent demon of her sickness, falls in love with her.