is protected by a corrupt senator and comes to live in 'viceregal splendour Instead of escaping with Ulisis, Erendira saysT can't leave for ten years'—and then Marquez writes : 'her instinct for freedom in the end prevailed over her grandmother's spelt. He has himself discovered her story after he came across her, cog-chained to a bed, exposed by envious whores to 'the terrible sun' in a public square. The matriarch increases in size, wealth and control. Poisoned by Erendira and Ulisis into losing her hair, and then bombed, she is 'more alive than ever', wearing 'a wig of radiant feathers', with her slave back within total debt When Ulisis stabs her to death, her blood is 'oily... shiny and green, just like mint honey'. As Erendira escapes with the matriarch's vest of gold bars, Mar-q^uez concludes with nature images of the category with which he opened—she runs into the wind, 'swifter than a deer', past 'the natural science of the sea', and into the desert, 'beyond the arid winds and thd never-ending sunsets'. She and her 'misfortune' vanish—but what 'beyond' is there in the text itself? The story codes the issue of debt, a major feature of capitalism and Christianity, and the nature of enslavement to family, law. Church and erotic passion. Hierarchical society convinces its members that they owe to it, endlessly. To use Delouze and Guattari's study of a social debt, what is encoded is the oedipalism of debt which enslaves the body, so that it appears under magic, superstition and nature rather than the pressures of historic society, and therefore the possibilities of escape into social change. Erendira vanishes into nature with the gold bars earned by prostitution. The Church and State, family and labour, exploitation and punishment, can be represented as bizarre fantasy because it is, precisely, irrational--the mayor shoots clouds to bring on rain. As Anti-Oedipus says, 'the law is the invention of the despot himself: it is the juridical form assumed by the infinite debt.' In The Sea of Lost Time' (1961), Mr. Herbert's wealth and fraud is enshrined in a fantasy of a thick rose smell and blood which attracts crabs. The priest, who bans 'everything that had come before him', says the roses are 'the smell of God' even before he has smelled them—part of his lies for authority : The Holy Scripture is quite explicit in regard to this smell'. Mr. Herbert claims his money will 'solve the problems of mankind' and then takes possession of his debtors totally while he sleeps, and at length, the town collapses without food. Then he and the crab-man, Tobias, swim into the sea for crabs, and discover turtles. They gorge themselves. Mr. Herbert leaves. Tobias is left with a fantasy, the village at the bottom of the sea 'with millions of flowers on the terraces'. The banana company figure of Mr. Herbert goes scot free. The fantasy on The Other Side of Death' (1948) shows Marquez's intertex-tuality with Poe, an earlier writer out of a confused culture under pressure. It is a story of enslavement to a twin double, 'an autonomous image that imposed itself on his thought in spite of the will and the resistances of the thought itself... over-20 January-June 1985