The Saint

This was a quick sketch/painting attempt I did for one of my favorite short stories, "La Santa" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

During the movement of his town's cemetery, the body of Margarito Duarte's young daughter is unearthed intact, the roses even still fresh in her hands, twelve years after her death from a fever. The people of his village proclaim that she is a saint, and Margarito travels to Rome in order to campaign for her canonization. As her body has also become mysteriously weightless, he carries it in a cello case.

Margarito is constantly turned away, and nothing seems to come from his inexhaustible attempts to have his daughter viewed by the pope or beatified: though his story, as you would imagine, leaves an impression on everyone he meets.

He loses contact with the narrator of the story, a tenant at the boarding house where he takes up residence, only for them to reunite twenty-two years later; by this time, Margarito has outlasted four popes and still refuses to give up.

The narrator concludes that it is, in fact, Margarito who is the saint:

"Without realizing it, by means of his daughter's incorruptible body and while he was still alive, he had spent twenty-two years fighting for the legitimate cause of his own canonization."

I'm not terribly pleased with this, but I wanted to get it out of my system. Plus, it's an excellent story.