The title was: The Devil in the Drawer, and it began like this:
I tremble at the mere thought of having set this story on paper. For a long time I held it inside me, but in the end I had to unburden myself from a weight that threatened to compromise my mental equilibrium. Because it is certainly a story leading to the brink of madness. Yet I listened to it through to the end, without ever doubting the words of that man. All the more so because he was a priest.
I can understand that to the reader’s eyes all this has the appearance of a narrative device; literature is full of manuscripts, diaries, letters, and memos found in the most unexpected places and in the most unforeseen ways. But when you think about it, all stories begin by being drafted or printed on paper; everything we read begins with a ream of sheets, or rather, a manuscript, one of the many that pile up on a publisher’s desk or that of whoever is responsible for reading them for him. There was nothing extraordinary, therefore, in the discovery of this one: that bundle of pages was in the right place, only it had escaped my attention. The only thing strange about it was the anonymity.
The incipit seemed promising. And so, sitting right smack in the middle of all kinds of tattered texts, leaving my clean-up work half finished, I went on reading.
Though the author avoids revealing his name, he nevertheless sets the scene for the beginning of his story by specifying the date and location. It all goes back to September 1991, during a brief stay in Switzerland, specifically in Küsnacht, a small town that overlooks Lake Zurich, where our author traveled to attend a conference on psychoanalysis.
I was there as a consultant for a small publishing house that wanted to include in its catalog a series dedicated to this fascinating as well as controversial subject. Put that way, one might think that I played an important role. In reality, the publishing house belonged to my uncle who, already the owner of a typography shop, after having printed thousands of volumes on behalf of third parties, had been seized by the sudden ambition to become a publisher himself, hiring me more out of familial obligation than for any recognized merits.
A few words to tell us something about himself. He immediately reveals his condition as an orphan: his mother died giving birth to him, his father passed away a few years later, the victim of an accident on the job, and he himself was raised by his paternal uncle. We also discover that he is devoured by a passion for writing, and thanks to these disclosures, we are able to attribute an age to him: rather young, one would say, around twenty-five or thirty. Speaking in the first person, the author has no need to reveal his name, but to avoid unnecessary circumlocutions, I will assign him one. I will call him Friedrich: a name that I feel suggests a pale, blondish, aspiring writer rambling through the valleys of Switzerland.
Speaking of his uncle, Friedrich says and I quote:
Books were the only thing we had in common: he aspired to publish them, I to write them. In fact, I found myself in that blessed larval state that we all pass through as soon as we discover (or delude ourselves) that we are called to one of the arts. For a certain time, I had been the errand boy at a local newspaper in exchange for a wage that was barely enough for cigarettes. I edited the obituary page and occasionally minor news briefs. I had published a short story or two in that paper, just to fill up the page. If there was a scarcity of news and some free space still remaining, the editor-in-chief would then have me dash off a little narrative no longer than 700 words. So, I had never written anything that went beyond the short story, never published except on the pages of that provincial newspaper, but deep within me I nurtured a dream; I endured that fallow period waiting for a seed sown in the ground to sprout, until before long it might reach the size of a lush, fruit-bearing plant.
When I was later hired by my uncle in the publishing house, with the job of reading manuscripts and correcting page proofs, I felt like I had taken a step forward. I lived surrounded by books, breathing in the scent of printers’ ink that to me was as intoxicating as a drug. I assumed the airs of a writer, with a notebook and pencil always in my pocket, ready when needed. I observed people, trying to read in each of them his individual story … and yet I doubted that anyone would ever think of telling it to me someday. In any case, I had a permanent job in a publishing house and, though it was poorly compensated, I held on tightly to it. And this was my first important out-of-town mission. My uncle had assigned me this task thanks to my command of the German language—though it has little similarity to the local parlance.
Carl Gustav Jung had lived and died in Küsnacht, and that year, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his death, there was a three-day conference that involved experts from all over the world. Listening to the speakers, famous in their circles but to me completely unknown, I might perhaps come upon some text to publish, one not too pretentious, thereby inaugurating the new editorial series. Possibly I would not find anything of interest, and if that were the case—so be it!—I would enjoy a brief vacation at the company’s expense.
I had not thought about booking a hotel, so I had to settle for staying at the Gasthof Adler, a clean, quiet inn, somewhat out of the way. An ideal place to write, I immediately thought—at that time I assessed everything with the eye of an ambitious writer. The inn was a few kilometers from the town center, where the conference was being held in a municipal auditorium. There was a postbus that came by every hour, but even on foot it wasn’t a very long walk, and if you wanted to shorten it, you could take a path that cut through a dense fir wood. The weather was beautiful, the lakeside air invigorated the lungs, and in the sunlight the palettes of the rosebushes that adorned every house—from the villas to the more modest dwellings—were an enchantment for the eyes. So, that morning I had decided to go on foot. I could not yet know that something would soon cloud the idyllic image that I had formed of the place. It was an encounter that took place under peculiar circumstances. I was walking toward town along the path that went through the woods, when all of a sudden I heard a scuffling coming from the underbrush. I stopped, curious. My first thought was that some frightened animal—perhaps a deer—would suddenly dash out in front of me. Instead, I soon saw that it was a man whose body was so enormous that he appeared misshapen. Wearing a split leather smock, he was stumbling through the trees holding a plastic bucket filled with a reddish pulp and flinging handfuls of it on the ground. When he became aware of my presence, he looked up at me: the receding chin and drooping lower lip made me think of a mentally retarded person who had been assigned a task that no one else would want to do. As soon as he saw me, the man waved his arm as if warning me of some danger. What was he trying to tell me with that gesture? I continued along the path gripped by a growing sense of unease, as if I had trespassed on private property. I wanted nothing more than to get away from that place