The Devil and Miss Prym. Пауло Коэльо

hotel landlady got annoyed. There was no rogue wolf. It was just an ordinary wolf, and it was probably dead by now anyway.

      The mayor’s wife, however, would not give up so easily.

      ‘Regardless of whether or not it exists, we all know that there were no wolves howling last night. You work the poor girl too hard, up until all hours; she’s so exhausted she’s starting to get hallucinations.’

      Chantal left the pair of them to their argument, picked up her bread and went on her way.

      ‘A pointless exercise,’ she repeated to herself, recalling the comment made by the woman who made the conserves. That was how they viewed life, as a pointless exercise. She nearly told them about the stranger’s proposal there and then, just to see if those smug, narrow-minded people would be willing to take part in a genuinely purposeful exercise: ten gold bars in exchange for a simple murder, one that would guarantee the futures of their children and their grandchildren and return Viscos to its former glory, with or without wolves.

      But she held back. She decided instead to tell the story that very night, in front of everyone, in the bar, so that no one could claim not to have heard or understood. Perhaps they would fall on the stranger and march him straight to the police, leaving her free to take her gold bar as a reward for services rendered to the community. Perhaps they simply wouldn’t believe her, and the stranger would depart believing that they were all good, which wasn’t the case at all.

      They were so ignorant, so naïve, so resigned to their lot. They refused to believe anything that didn’t fit in with what they were used to believing. They all lived in fear of God. They were all – herself included – cowards when the moment comes to change their fate. But as far as true goodness was concerned, that didn’t exist – not in the land of cowardly men, nor in the heaven of Almighty God who sows suffering everywhere, just so that we can spend our whole lives begging him to deliver us from Evil.

      The temperature had dropped. Chantal hadn’t slept for three nights, but once she was preparing her breakfast, she felt much better. She wasn’t the only coward, though she was possibly the only one aware of her own cowardice, because the rest of them thought of life as a ‘pointless exercise’ and confused fear with generosity.

      She remembered a man who used to work in a chemist’s in a nearby village and who had been dismissed after twenty years’ service. He hadn’t asked for his redundancy money because – so he said – he considered his employers to be his friends and didn’t want to hurt them, because he knew they had had to dismiss him because of financial difficulties. It was all a lie: the reason the man did not go to court was because he was a coward; he wanted at all costs to be liked; he thought his employers would then always think of him as a generous, friendly sort. Some time later, when he went back to them to ask for a loan, they slammed the door in his face, but by then it was too late, for he had signed a letter of resignation and could make no further demands of them.