The Devil and Miss Prym. Пауло Коэльо
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all her personal problems, Chantal knew that she lived in a village of decent men and women who honoured their commitments, people who walked with their heads held high and were respected throughout the region. But it had not always been so. For over two centuries, Viscos had been inhabited by the very dregs of humanity, and everyone took this for granted, saying it was the consequence of a curse put on the village by the Celts when they were vanquished by the Romans.
And so things remained until the silence and courage of a single man – someone who believed not in curses, but in blessings – redeemed its people. Chantal listened to the clattering metal blinds and remembered the voice of her grandmother recounting what had happened.
‘Once, many years ago, a hermit – who later came to be known as St Savin – lived in one of the caves hereabouts. At the time, Viscos was little more than a frontier post, populated by bandits fleeing from justice, by smugglers and prostitutes, by confidence tricksters in search of accomplices, even by murderers resting between murders. The wickedest of them all, an Arab called Ahab, controlled the whole village and the surrounding area, imposing extortionate taxes on the local farmers who still insisted on maintaining a dignified way of life.
‘One day, Savin came down from his cave, arrived at Ahab’s house and asked to spend the night there. Ahab laughed: “You do know that I’m a murderer who has already slit a number of throats, and that your life is worth nothing to me?”
‘“Yes, I know that,” Savin replied, “but I’m tired of living in a cave and I’d like to spend at least one night here with you.”
‘Ahab knew the saint’s reputation, which was as great as his own, and this made him uneasy, for he did not like having to share his glory with someone so weak. Thus he determined to kill him that very night, to prove to everyone that he was the one true master of the place.
‘They chatted for a while. Ahab was impressed by what the saint had to say, but he was a suspicious man who no longer believed in the existence of Good. He showed Savin where he could sleep and then continued menacingly sharpening his knife. After watching him for a few minutes, Savin closed his eyes and went to sleep.
‘Ahab spent all night sharpening his knife. Next day, when Savin awoke, he found Ahab in tears at his side.
‘“You weren’t afraid of me and you didn’t judge me. For the first time ever, someone spent a night by my side trusting that I could be a good man, one ready to offer hospitality to those in need. Because you believed I was capable of behaving decently, I did.”
‘From that moment on, Ahab abandoned his life of crime and set about transforming the region. That was when Viscos ceased being merely a frontier post, inhabited by outcasts, and became an important trading centre on the border between two countries.’
‘Exactly.’
Chantal burst into tears, grateful to her grandmother for having reminded her of that story. Her people were good, and she could trust them. While she attempted to go back to sleep, she even toyed with the idea of telling them the stranger’s story, if only to see his shocked face as he was driven out of Viscos by its inhabitants.
The next day, she was surprised to see him emerge from the restaurant at the rear of the hotel, go over to the bar-cum-reception-cum-souvenir shop and stand around chatting to the people he met there, just like any other tourist, pretending to be interested in utterly pointless things, such as their methods of shearing sheep or of smoke-curing meat. The people of Viscos always believed that every stranger would be fascinated by their natural, healthy way of life, and they would repeat and expand upon the benefits of life away from modern civilisation, even though, deep in their hearts, every single one of them would have loved to live far from there, among cars that pollute the atmosphere and in neighbourhoods where it was too dangerous to walk, for the simple reason that big cities hold an enormous fascination for country people.
Yet every time a visitor appeared, they would demonstrate by their words – and only by their words – the joys of living in a lost paradise, trying to persuade themselves what a miracle it was to have been born there and forgetting that, so far, not one hotel guest had decided to leave it all behind and come and live in Viscos.
There was a lively atmosphere in the bar that night, until the stranger made one rather unfortunate comment:
‘The children here are so well behaved. There’s not a squeak out of them in the mornings, not like other places I’ve visited.’
After an awkward silence – for there were no children in Viscos – someone asked him what he thought of the local dish he had just eaten, and the conversation resumed its normal rhythm, revolving, as usual, around the wonders of the countryside and the problems of life in the big city.
As time passed, Chantal became increasingly nervous, afraid that he might ask her to tell everyone about their meeting in the forest. But the stranger never even glanced at her, and he spoke to her only once, when he ordered – and paid cash for – a round of drinks for everyone present.
As soon as the customers left and the stranger went up to his room, she took off her apron, lit a cigarette from a packet someone had left behind on the table, and told the hotel landlady she would do the clearing up the next morning, since she was worn out after a sleepless night. The landlady agreed, and Chantal put on her coat and went out into the cold night air.
Her room was only two minutes’ walk away, and as she let the rain pour down her face, she was thinking that perhaps everything that had happened was just some kind of crazy fantasy, the stranger’s macabre way of attracting her attention.
Then she remembered the gold: she had seen it with her own eyes.
Maybe it wasn’t gold. But she was too tired to think and – as soon as she got to her room – she took off her clothes and snuggled down under the covers.
On the second night, Chantal found herself in the presence of Good and Evil. She fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, only to wake up less than an hour later. Outside, all was silence; there was no wind banging the metal blinds, not even the sounds made by night creatures; there was nothing, absolutely nothing to indicate that she was still in the world of the living.
She went to the window and looked out at the deserted street, where a fine rain was falling, the mist barely lit by the feeble light of the hotel sign, all of which only made the village seem even more sinister. She was all too familiar with the silence of this remote place, which signified not peace and tranquillity, but a total absence of new things to say.
She looked at the mountains, which lay hidden by low cloud, but she knew that somewhere up there was buried a gold bar or, rather, a yellow object, shaped like a brick, that the stranger had left behind there. He had shown her its exact location, virtually begging her to dig up the bar and keep it for herself.
She went back to bed, tossed and turned for a while, then got up again and went to the bathroom where she examined her naked body in the mirror, spent a few moments worrying that soon she would lose her looks, then returned to bed. She regretted not having picked up the packet of cigarettes left behind on the table, but she knew that its owner was bound to come back for it, and she did not want to incur people’s mistrust. That was what Viscos was like: a half-empty cigarette packet had its owner, the button lost off a jacket had to be kept until someone came asking for it, every penny in change had to be handed over, there was never any rounding up the bill. It was a wretched place, in which everything was predictable, organised and reliable.
Realising that she wasn’t going to be able to get to sleep, she again attempted to pray and to think of her grandmother, but her thoughts had become fixed on a single scene: the open hole, the earth-smeared metal, the branch in her hand, as though it were the staff of a pilgrim about to set off. She dozed and woke up again several times, but the silence outside continued, and the same scene kept endlessly repeating itself inside her head.
As soon as she noticed the first light of dawn coming in through the window, she dressed and went out.
Although she lived in a place where people normally