The Devil and Miss Prym: A Novel of Temptation Page 13

  "The only weapon you can be sure will be loaded is mine, because I can't choose for myself. Nor will I keep my share of the gold. I'm doing this for other reasons."

  Again, the mayor did not like the way the priest spoke. He was trying to impress on the people of Viscos what a courageous man he was, a generous leader capable of any sacrifice. If the mayor's wife had been there, she would doubtless have said that the priest was preparing to launch himself as a candidate for the next elections.

  "Wait until Monday," he told himself. He would publish a decree announcing such a steep increase in tax on the church that it would be impossible for the priest to stay on in the village. After all, he was the only one who claimed he didn't want to be rich.

  "What about the victim?" the blacksmith asked.

  "She'll be there," the priest said. "I'll take care of that. But I need three men to come with me."

  When no one volunteered, the priest chose three strong men. One of them tried to say "no," but his friends stared him down, and he quickly changed his mind.

  "Where will the sacrifice take place?" the landowner asked, addressing the priest. The mayor again sensed authority slipping away from him; he needed to regain it at once.

  "I'm the one who decides that," he said, shooting a furious look at the landowner. "I don't want the earth of Viscos to be stained with blood. We'll do it at this same time tomorrow night up by the Celtic monolith. Bring your lanterns, lamps and torches, so that everyone can see clearly where they are pointing their shotgun, and nobody misses."

  The priest got down from his chair--the meeting was over. The women of Viscos once again heard footsteps in the street, the men returning to their houses, having a drink, staring out of the window, or simply collapsing into bed, exhausted. The mayor returned to his wife, who told him what had happened in Berta's house, and how frightened she had been. But after they--together with the hotel landlady--had analyzed every single word that had been said, the two women concluded that the old woman knew nothing; it was merely their sense of guilt making them think like that.

  "Make-believe ghosts, like the rogue wolf," the mayor said.

  The priest went back to the church and spent the whole night in prayer.

  Chantal breakfasted on the bread she had bought the day before, since the baker's van didn't come on Sundays. She looked out of her window and saw the men of Viscos leaving their houses, each carrying a weapon. She prepared herself to die, as there was still a possibility that she would be the chosen victim; but no one knocked on her door--instead, they carried on down the street, went into the sacristy, and emerged again, empty-handed.

  She left her house and went down to the hotel, where the hotel landlady told her about everything that had happened the previous night: the choice of victim, what the priest had proposed and the preparations for the sacrifice. Her hostile tone had vanished, and things seemed to be changing in Chantal's favor.

  "There's something I want to tell you; one day, Viscos will realize all that you did for its people."

  "But the stranger still has to show us the gold," Chantal insisted.

  "Of course. He just went out carrying an empty rucksack."

  Chantal decided not to go to the forest, because that would mean passing by Berta's house, and she was too ashamed to look at her. She went back to her room and remembered her dream of the previous night.

  For she had had a strange dream in which an angel handed her the eleven gold bars and asked her to keep them.

  Chantal told the angel that, for this to happen, someone had to be killed. But the angel said that this wasn't the case: on the contrary, the bars were proof that the gold did not exist.

  That was why she had insisted to the hotel landlady that the stranger should show everyone the gold; she had a plan. However, since she had always lost every other battle in her life, she had her doubts as to whether she would be able to win this one.

  Berta was watching the sun setting behind the mountains when she saw the priest and three other men coming towards her. She felt sad for three reasons: she knew her time had come; her husband had not appeared to console her (perhaps because he was afraid of what he would hear, or ashamed of his own inability to save her); and she realized that the money she had saved would end up in the hands of the shareholders of the bank where she had deposited it, since she had not had time to withdraw it and burn it.

  She felt happy for two reasons: she was finally going to be reunited with her husband, who was doubtless, at that moment, out and about with Miss Prym's grandmother; and although the last day of her life had been cold, it had been filled with sunlight--not everyone had the good fortune to leave the world with such a beautiful memory of it.

  The priest signaled to the other men to stay back, and he went forward on his own to greet her.

  "Good evening," she said. "See how great God is to have made the world so beautiful."

  "They're going to take me away," she told herself, "but I will leave them with all the world's guilt to carry on their shoulders."

  "Think, then, how beautiful paradise must be," the priest said, but Berta could see her arrow had struck home, and that now he was struggling to remain calm.

  "I'm not sure about that, I'm not even sure it exists. Have you been there yourself, Father?"

  "Not yet. But I've been in hell and I know how terrible that is, however attractive it might appear from the outside."

  Berta understood him to mean Viscos.

  "You're mistaken, Father. You were in paradise, but you didn't recognize it. It's the same with most people in this world; they seek suffering in the most joyous of places because they think they are unworthy of happiness."

  "It appears that all your years spent sitting out here have brought you some wisdom."

  "It's been a long time since anyone bothered to come and chat with me, and now, oddly enough, everyone has discovered that I still exist. Just imagine, Father, last night, the hotel landlady and the mayor's wife honored me with a visit; and now here's the parish priest doing the same--have I suddenly become such an important person?"

  "Very much so," the priest replied. "The most important person in the village."

  "Have I come into money or something?"

  "Ten gold bars. Future generations of men, women and children will give thanks to you. It's even possible they'll put up a statue in your honor."

  "I'd prefer a fountain, because as well as being decorative, it quenches people's thirst and soothes those who are worried."

  "A fountain it will be then. You have my word on it."

  Berta thought it was time to put an end to this farce and come straight to the point.

  "I know everything, Father. You are condemning an innocent woman who cannot fight for her life. Damn you, sir, and damn this village and all who live in it."

  "Damned indeed," the priest said. "For more than twenty years, I've tried to bless this village, but no one heard my calls. For the same twenty years, I've tried to inculcate Good into men's hearts, until I finally realized that God had chosen me to be his left arm, and to show the evil of which men are capable. Perhaps in this way they will become afraid and accept the faith."

  Berta felt like crying, but controlled the impulse.

  "Fine words, Father, but empty. They're just an excuse for cruelty and injustice."

  "Unlike all the others, I'm not doing this for the money. I know that the gold is cursed, like this whole place, and that it won't bring happiness to anyone. I am simply doing as God has asked me. Or rather, as he commanded me, in answer to my prayers."

  "There's no point arguing further," Berta thought, as the priest put his hand in his pocket and brought out some pills.

  "You won't feel a thing," he said. "Let's go inside."

  "Neither you nor anyone else in this village will set foot in my house while I'm still alive. Perhaps later tonight the door will stand wide open, but not now."

  The priest gestured to one of the men, who approached carrying a plastic
bottle.

  "Take these pills. You'll soon fall asleep, and when you wake up, you'll be in heaven, with your husband."

  "I've always been with my husband, and despite suffering from insomnia, I never take pills to get to sleep."

  "So much the better; they'll take effect at once."

  The sun had disappeared, and darkness was beginning to fall on the valley, the church, and on the entire village.

  "And what if I don't want to take them?"

  "You'll take them just the same."

  Berta looked at the three men and saw that the priest was right. She took the pills from him, placed them in her mouth and drank the entire bottle of water. Water: it has no taste, no smell, no color, and yet it is the most important thing in the world. Just like her at that moment.

  She looked once more at the mountains, now covered in darkness. She saw the first star come out and thought that she had had a good life; she had been born and would die in a place she loved, even though it seemed that her love was unrequited, but what did that matter? Anyone who loves in the expectation of being loved in return is wasting their time.

  She had been blessed. She had never been to another country, but she knew that here in Viscos the same things happened as everywhere else. She had lost the husband she loved, but God had granted her the joy of continuing at his side, even after his death. She had seen the village at its height, had witnessed the beginning of its decline, and was leaving before it was completely destroyed. She had known mankind with all its faults and virtues, and she believed that, despite all that was happening to her now, despite the struggles her husband swore were going on in the invisible world, human goodness would triumph in the end.

  She felt sorry for the priest, for the mayor, for Miss Prym, for the stranger, for every one of the inhabitants of Viscos: Evil would never bring Good, however much they wanted to believe that it would. By the time they discovered the truth, it would be too late.

  She had only one regret: never having seen the sea. She knew it existed, that it was vast and simultaneously wild and calm, but she had never been to see it or tasted the salt water on her tongue or felt the sand beneath her bare feet or dived into the cold water like someone returning to the womb of the Great Mother (she remembered that this was an expression favored by the Celts).

  Apart from that, she did not have much to complain about. She was sad, very sad, to have to leave like this, but she did not want to feel she was a victim: doubtless God had chosen this role for her, and it was far better than the one He had chosen for the priest.

  "I want to talk to you about Good and Evil," she heard him say, just as she began to feel a kind of numbness in her hands and feet.

  "There's no need. You don't know what goodness is. You were poisoned by the evil done to you, and now you're spreading that plague throughout our land. You're no different from the stranger who came to visit us and destroy us."

  Her last words were barely audible. She looked up at the one star, then closed her eyes.

  The stranger went into the bathroom in his hotel room, carefully washed each of the gold bars and replaced them in his shabby, old rucksack. Two days ago he had left the stage, and now he was returning for the final act--he had to make a last appearance.

  Everything had been carefully planned: from the choice of a small, remote village with few inhabitants down to the fact of having an accomplice, so that if things did not work out, no one could ever accuse him of inciting people to murder. The tape recorder, the reward, the careful steps he had taken, first making friends with the people in the village and then spreading terror and confusion. Just as God had done to him, so he would do unto others. Just as God had given him all that was good only to cast him into the abyss, so he would do the same.

  He had taken care of every detail, except one: he had never thought his plan would work. He had been sure that when the moment came to choose, a simple "no" would change the story; at least one person would refuse to take part, and that person would be enough to prove that not everything was lost. If one person saved the village, the world itself would be saved, hope would still be possible, goodness would be strengthened, the terrorists would not truly have known the evil they were doing, there could be forgiveness, and his days of suffering would be but a sad memory that he could learn to live with and he could perhaps even seek happiness again. For that "no" he would like to have heard, the village would have received its reward of ten gold bars, independently of the wager he had made with Chantal.

  But his plan had failed. And now it was too late, he couldn't change his mind.

  Someone knocked at his door.

  "Let's go," he heard the hotel landlady say. "It's time."

  "I'll be right down."

  He picked up his jacket, put it on and met the landlady downstairs in the bar.

  "I've got the gold," he said. "But, just so there's no misunderstanding, you should be aware that there are several people who know where I am. If you decide to change your victim, you can be sure that the police will come looking for me; you yourself saw me making all those phone calls."

  The hotel landlady merely nodded.

  The Celtic monolith was half an hour's walk from Viscos. For many centuries, people had thought it was merely an unusually large stone, polished by the wind and the ice, which had once stood upright, but that had been toppled by a bolt of lightning. Ahab used to hold the village council there because the rock served as a natural open-air table.

  Then one day the Government sent a team to write a survey of the Celtic settlements in the valley, and someone noticed the monument. Then came the archaeologists, who measured, calculated, argued, excavated and reached the conclusion that a Celtic tribe had chosen the spot as some kind of sacred place, even though they had no idea what rituals had been performed there. Some said it was a sort of observatory, others said that fertility rites--in which young virgins were possessed by priests--had taken place there. The experts discussed it for a whole week, but then left to look at something more interesting, without reaching any definite conclusions about their findings.

  When he was elected, the mayor tried to attract tourism to Viscos by getting an article published in the regional press about the Celtic heritage of the village. But the paths through the forest were difficult, and the few intrepid visitors who came found only a fallen stone at the end of them, whereas other villages could boast sculptures, inscriptions and other far more interesting things. The idea came to nothing, and the monolith soon resumed its usual function as a weekend picnic table.

  That evening, there were arguments in several households in Viscos all over the same thing: the men wanted to go alone, but their wives insisted on taking part in the "ritual sacrifice," as the inhabitants had come to call the murder they were about to commit. The husbands argued that it was dangerous, a shotgun might go off by accident; their wives said that the men were just being selfish and that they should respect the women's rights, the world was no longer as they thought it was. In the end, the husbands yielded, and the wives rejoiced.

  Now the procession was heading for the monolith, a chain of 281 points of light in the darkness, for the stranger was carrying a torch, and Berta was not carrying anything, so the number of inhabitants of the village was still exactly represented. Each of the men had a torch or lantern in one hand and, in the other, a shotgun, its breech open so that it would not go off by accident.

  Berta was the only one who did not need to walk. She was sleeping peacefully on a kind of improvised stretcher that two woodcutters were struggling along with. "I'm glad we won't have to carry this great weight back," one of them was thinking, "because by then, with all the buckshot in her, she'll weigh three times as much."

  He calculated that each cartridge would contain, on average, at least six small balls of lead. If all the loaded shotguns hit their target, the old woman's body would be riddled with 522 pellets, and would end up containing more metal than blood.

  The man could feel his stomac
h churning. He resolved not to think any more about it until Monday.

  No one said a word during the walk. No one looked at anyone else, as if this was a kind of nightmare they wanted to forget as quickly as possible. They arrived out of breath--more from tension than from exhaustion--and formed a huge semicircle of lights in the clearing where the Celtic monument lay.

  The mayor gave a signal, and the woodcutters untied Berta from the stretcher and laid her on the monolith.

  "That's no good," the blacksmith protested, remembering the war films he'd seen, with soldiers crawling along the ground. "It's hard to shoot someone when they're lying down."

  The woodcutters shifted Berta into a sitting position with her back against the stone. It seemed ideal, but then a sudden sob was heard and a woman's voice said:

  "She's looking at us. She can see what we're doing."

  Berta could not, of course, see a thing, but it was unbearable to look at that kindly lady, asleep, with a contented smile on her lips, and to think that in a short while she would be torn apart by all those tiny pellets.

  "Turn her around," ordered the mayor, who was also troubled by the sight.

  Grumbling, the woodcutters returned once more to the monolith and turned the body around, so that this time she was kneeling on the ground, with her face and chest resting on the stone. It was impossible to keep her upright in this position, so they had to tie a rope around her wrists, throw it over the top of the monument, and fasten it on the other side.

  Berta's position was now utterly grotesque: kneeling, with her back to them, her arms stretched out over the stone, as if she were praying or begging for something. Someone protested again, but the mayor said it was time to do what they had come to do.