“Are you here for the conference?” he asked.
With that question he made things easier for me, giving me the opportunity to brag a little.
“I’m a consultant for a publishing house,” I said. “I’m here hoping to find a text to publish in our new series. In fact, I have to say that when I listened to your talk today I found it very interesting. Your literary references: Goethe, Mann, Hoffmann, symbolist painting … At times though I had the impression that the things you left unsaid were more numerous than those you did say. It seemed to me that you were speaking about the devil as if he were a real existent being.”
“In fact that is the case. Only I couldn’t say it openly to an audience of psychoanalysts. I would likely have been subjected to analysis right then and there.” He acknowledged the weakness of his joke with a faint smile.
“Do you mean you’ve met him?”
“Of course,” the priest replied with great seriousness.
“Are you an exorcist by any chance?”
“Nothing of the kind. I’m talking about the devil-made-man, flesh and blood like me and you.”
“How can that be? I mean, a devil registered in the census, complete with name and surname, driver’s license and health-care card.”
The priest frowned.
“The one does not exclude the other. In fact for all intents and purposes he is a man: he is born of a father and a mother, almost always pious, decent people who accept the burden of such an offspring as expiation. Others, however, can’t tolerate it and manage to get rid of the devil when he is still in swaddling clothes. That’s why many of them are foundlings, children abandoned by their parents, not out of economic necessity, but for having manifested their malevolent nature from the very first days of their lives. And ultimately they are adopted by childless couples longing to have a baby. The devil thus exploits his parasitic position, and most of the time he causes his parents’ deaths, whether by a simulated accident or a broken heart, so he can inherit their possessions and dedicate himself to his own mission. A devil’s career, however, is not always crowned with success. Very often these subjects, whom we might rightly call poor devils, have a short life, and most times they end up behind bars where there are few opportunities to exercise their evil arts. On the other hand, many are born into legitimate, aristocratic families, who suspect nothing of their scions’ peculiar natures, often justifying and even encouraging their unseemly behavior, as if it were a mark of power. And these individuals procreate actual diabolical genealogies. We don’t know how many of them there are roaming around the world. Probably many more than we think.”
“And how can they be recognized?”
“There are signs that presage an evil nature. Recurrent signs that not everyone is able to recognize, however.”
“For example?”
“They are behaviors that are manifested from early childhood, such as a tendency toward excessive lying, or gratuitous cruelty toward animals. Of course, all children lie to avoid punishment, or because they live in an imaginary world, just as everyone has a legitimate curiosity to find out how a living creature is made inside, but when dissection becomes a habitual practice and its purpose is solely to inflict pain, in that case the child requires vigilance. Anyway, that’s the most obvious sign, but there are dozens of others that develop later on, which there’s no need to speak of. One says it all: the ability to make your thoughts turn against you.”
Father Cornelius seemed to search my face to study the effect of his statement. Reading a trace of skepticism there, he continued:
“First the Church, and later romantic literature, gave the devil prominence: they portrayed him in various ways, they gave him a face, a character, they provided him with a job, a mission, they clothed him in all kinds of attire, to the degree of making him visible, alive. In short, they humanized him.”
I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. I felt like I was listening to the ravings of a madman. In any case, I played along.
“So the devil was created in our image and likeness?”
“Precisely. There is nothing in the world that was not first conceived of by a mind, even before it existed. You write, I suppose …”
Taken by surprise, as if writing were a sin to be ashamed of, I felt myself redden: “Is it obvious by looking at me?”
“It’s not hard to see,” Father Cornelius replied with a smile, “and besides, last night I heard the clacking of a typewriter.”
It was true: the night before, right after supper, I had gone up to my room to make a clean copy of some notes scrawled in pencil in a notebook. I had typed a few lines on my old portable, but then, thinking it was too noisy for that quiet place, I had put it back in its case. But the fact that my secret passion was written on my face didn’t sit too well with me.
“I’m trying at least, with no appreciable results,” I replied, with some embarrassment.
“You are still young and have every possibility ahead of you. But be careful about the choices you make.”
“What do you mean?”
“Literature is the greatest of the arts,” the priest continued, “but it is also a dangerous endeavor.”
“In what sense, dangerous?”
“Each time we pick up a pen we are preparing to perform a ritual for which two candles should always be lit: one white and one black. Unlike painting and sculpture, which remain anchored to a material subject, and to music, which in contrast transcends matter altogether, literature can dominate both spheres: the concrete and the abstract, the terrestrial and the otherworldly. Moreover, it propagates and multiplies with infinite variations in readers’ minds. Without knowing it, the writer can become a formidable egregore.”
“Egregore? What’s that?”
The priest assumed a patient attitude.
“Today the meaning of the term has been greatly diminished. It means a chain reaction caused by univocal thinking. There is an exemplary tale about it: it is said that in an old friars’ monastery a gust of wind had lifted into the air a monk’s habit that had been laid out to dry in the sun. After a brief flight the garment glided like a kite to the bottom of a crag, getting tangled in the branches of a bush not far from the path that the friars took early in the morning on their daily walk. And each day, in the monks’ imaginations, that habit increasingly assumed the form of a man. Someone then suggested that it could be the devil, stationed at that spot to count souls. From that moment on, in the mind of the monks, the figure grew more and more menacing, until it took on material form and drove the whole monastery into a frenzy. And only the bishop’s intervention was able to make the devil go away and resume his earlier form: that of a mere bush. The writer, therefore, can initiate a chain of thought capable of attributing life and intelligence even to a figure everyone considers to be imaginary, such as the devil.”
At that precise moment we heard the front door of the inn open. Someone had come in, but from the spot where we were sitting we could not see him. Only his heavy steps could be heard treading the floorboards; evidently he was a customer who had stopped for a drink. For a moment the man appeared in the doorway of the dining room, his profile filling the entire space. Seeing him, I jumped in my seat. The man, in fact, was the same fellow I had run into in the woods, busily flinging that gory pulp on the ground. This time, however, his menacing figure was refined by a clean shirt, revealing a brawny neck, and a checked jacket that seemed to have been made