Hostage To The Devil

by Неизвестный

  There would now be a delay of four and a half weeks before Gerald could resume and successfully terminate the exorcism of Richard/Rita. The violent outcome of the first part of the exorcism would provoke many difficulties for Gerald. His own bishop entertained doubts about Gerald's competency. The psychiatrists involved in Richard/Rita's case decided that Gerald, a layman to psychology, was meddling dangerously with Richard/Rita's mental health. Gerald's own health was a continuing problem. And, as experience taught, even a partial failure to complete an exorcism meant that eventual completion of it would be doubly difficult.

  Yet—if at all possible—Gerald had to complete the exorcism of Richard/Rita. For two main reasons. If Gerald were not personally to do so, there would be no guarantee that he himself would be immune from at least harassment—if not worse—by the evil spirit that possessed Richard/Rita. As it happened, Gerald did not survive very long after his successful termination of the exorcism. Apart from that, there was now a definite possibility that an attempt at exorcism by another person would fail.

  Gerald's housekeeper, Hannah, showed me through the house into the garden and called out to the thin figure in shirt and jeans tending the flower beds at the far end of the garden. As I crossed the lawn, he waved to me: “Hi! Come over and chat. I want to finish this job before sunset.” It was about 5:30 P.M. The sun was beginning to cool, but its light was still gilding everything about me in warm yellow.

  “Out here among my tulips,” said Father Gerald to me with a wave of the trowel in his left hand, “I have great beauty. And peace, of course.” Still bending over his flowers, as he patted the earth: “Done much gardening, Malachi, in your time?” I said I had done a little. I asked if I might take notes of our conversation. He laughed lightly in assent. From the start, Father Gerald established an atmosphere of ease: I had been expected; I should take a welcome for granted.

  The last thing I had expected to find Gerald doing was tulip gardening. Sitting weakly in a deep armchair reading, perhaps. Or hobbling painfully on a stick to meet me with a wan smile. But enjoying life and tranquillity with obvious measures of physical well-being and quite evident inner happiness—this was almost a shock to me.

  There were three tulip beds. He was working the middle one. Beyond them, a row of yellow azaleas. Then the ground sloped down to rolling prairie fields and distant mountains. Somewhere in the sky a small airplane droned.

  His casualness was contagious. I asked: “What exactly do you like about your tulips, Gerald?” I was standing over him to one side.

  Without looking up, he went on working, answering me slowly and deliberately. “No claims. You see. They don't clamor at you. They just are there. Beautifully. Just are.” The slight emphasis on that last word had a faint French roll to it. “As you apparently know”—this last with a boyish grin, teasing himself wryly more than he was teasing me—“I have had some dealings with beauty. And the beast. After that, you know beauty when you meet it.” He paused, glancing up at the twin mountain peaks away to the far left. But the sun was in my eyes and his features were blurred to me. Then, finishing his thought: “And the beast.”

  After a minute or two, Gerald straightened up with an unhurried gentleness, facing me for the first time, his arms by his sides, his back to the sun. Now, four months after he had completed the exorcism of Richard/Rita, in retirement on the edge of a Midwestern town, Gerald, according to medical reports, had about five or six more months to live. At the age of forty-eight he had incurable heart disease and had already survived two strokes.

  The man looking at me was slightly taller than myself. Thin-shouldered, blond, gray-eyed, he stood in an askew fashion, as if the center of his torso had been twisted out of shape—a memento not of the strokes, but of the Girl-Fixer; an ungentle reminder of his exorcism of Richard/Rita. A scar ran vertically up his forehead into his hairline. What struck me particularly was his face shining like a beacon—a light all over it, without any visible source. Then there was a dark, oblong patch on his forehead between the eyes. Like a nevus. Mutual friends, referring me to him, had told me about it. “Gerald's Jesus patch” they had called it jokingly but affectionately. The new scar ran through the “patch.”

  Gerald, they had said, never looks into you, just at you. Not until now did I realize what they meant. Like when you look at a city on a map in order to find out where it is. It was your context that mattered to Gerald, where you were at. Only, I did not know then what he saw as context.

  “I know very little about you, except that I am supposed to trust you. Your name—Malachi Martin. Where you live—New York. You were a Jesuit once. Some books to your credit. You wanted to see me about Richard/Rita.” His tone was level and low. After a few moments and still looking at my eyes: “Nothing much else, beyond that you appear to have peace in you, but”—with a quick glance all over my face—“you strike me as not having paid all your dues.” He must have noticed some involuntary reaction in me, some unvoiced protest. “No. Not that. Those dues we hardly ever pay. I meant: you seem to have tasted beauty's sweetness, but not its awesomeness.”

  He stopped and looked down at the tulips. “I garden regularly. It relaxes. Tulips-well, I love their colors, I suppose.” Another pause. The boyish grin again. “Let's take some tulips in to Hannah for the dinner table.”

  He bent down again. There had been no tension between us, only briefly on my part, when he scrutinized me for the first time. And now the tension had disappeared. He had satisfied himself about some puzzle in me.

  “I do want to talk about Richard/Rita,” I said as he set to work again. “But my chief interest bears on you.” He worked on in silence for a few moments. An early-evening breeze bent the tulips. The sunlight had dimmed to a very light gray-blue.

  “You realize,” he said matter-of-factly as if to put to rest any tension I might still have, “you won't get away with it this time. Not scot-free, anyway. I mean, if ever you paid your dues, you'll pay them now—if you go ahead with your project.”

  “I have thought about all that.”

  “This is no mere fun and games, Malachi. You're treading on their turf. Dangerously. From their point of view. If I can believe my friends, that is.” I began to notice his staccato style of speaking. “But I suppose. You've calculated all that. Eh? Still set on taking the risk. Risk there is. Anyway. You have your own protection. That much I can see.”

  “I spent two days with Richard/Rita, Gerald.”

  “All going well?” We both were avoiding the sharp-toothed pronouns, he, she, his, her, and the like.

  “As far as I can judge. Of course. . .” Since his exorcism, Richard/Rita had lived in an in-between land of his mind. There was disquieting indefiniteness about him.

  “Of course. I understand. But Richard/Rita is at least clean.”

  “What would you say was the principal benefit to you from the whole matter?”

  “Before it all happened, I never knew what love was. Or what masculine and feminine meant. Really did not. Besides, I got rid of some deep pride in myself.”

  It was now getting chilly. I was happy to stroll with Gerald into the house for dinner. We talked continuously. And, as we did, it became clear to me yet again that, while true cases of Exorcism take their toll, they are not simple horror tales for frightening readers and moviegoers. For all that evening we were delving deeper not into horror, but into the frame of love that makes it possible to expel horror. And the case of Richard/Rita was important beyond many another, exactly because it centered on our ability to identify love, and on the dire risk of confusing that love with what we can only see as its physical or even chemical components.

  It became clear that for Father Gerald the importance centered on the same point. Richard/Rita had carried the confusion to ghastly extremes. But for those who could come to know and understand his case, there is a lesson to be learned. I was trying to understand through Gerald and through his entire experience, so bizarre and violent, what that gentle lesson was.<
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  “Gerald, I want to get back later perhaps to what you meant by 'clean'—you used the term when speaking of Richard/Rita before dinner. But just now, something else is on my mind.” We were sitting in his den after dinner. “Having read the transcript of the exorcism and talked extensively with Richard/Rita, my questions to you center around sexuality and love. For instance, why were you nicknamed the 'Virgin' in the seminary?” I had learned this from Gerald's friends.

  “I was the only one who didn't know the nickname for half my seminary days. As to their reason for it, it seems I gave the impression of not knowing anything about sex.” “Did you?”

  “Not really. I had seen diagrams and pictures, that sort of stuff. I could distinguish a passionate kiss from a friendly or affectionate one in the movies. But sex as such remained a hidden thing for me.”

  “But didn't you have the normal feelings about twelve or thirteen or fourteen?”

  “I don't know what you mean by 'normal.' I never had one of those nocturnal ejaculations. Never yet had one. When I started to grow hair on various places, it sort of wasn't there one day, and the next day it was.”

  “Did you ever masturbate?”

  “Never. Not that I wanted to. I didn't. Erections around the age of puberty and later just were taken by me as happening to me. It sounds funny”—he grinned boyishly—“but not as something about which I had to do something. Embarrassing. But then my father took me for a walk and gave me his set speech on sex which he gave to all my four brothers. It always began with the affirmation: 'Look, Gerry, you have a penis. And it is used for two things neither of which it does very well: urinating and copulating.' All of us knew the speech by heart. Then he explained clinically what copulation was.”

  I steered the conversation to the time just before Gerald had entered the seminary: had he gone out with girls or dated them or done anything more complicated than that? Apparently he used to take the sisters of his school friends to see a movie now and then, usually in a group. He went to some dances, but never really enjoyed them. He avoided them whenever he could. He was embarrassed by girls and by women in general.

  He was on his feet now. “Let's take a turn in the garden. It will help oil the wheels.” We went outside. It was already night. A few clouds lazed across the stars. There was no moon. The garden was partially lit by the lights from the house. As we walked down toward the tulip beds we entered greater darkness. A few lights could be seen winking on the distant mountainside. There was very little sound.

  “Ever kiss a girl?”

  “No. Not passionately. Never.” He had been looking away while talking. Now he glanced quizzically at me. “Why all the questions about my sexual life?”

  “This is my way—perhaps roundabout, but anyhow—this is my way of finding out what you now understand about love and masculinity and femininity, and what you learned in the exorcism on this score.”

  We stood for a short while taking in the calm of the night and the distant lights. Then I began again.

  “Let me put it like this, Gerald. I take it you entered adult life—even your life as a priest—with very flimsy notions of what sex was all about, and. . .”

  “There you go again,” he interrupted good-humoredly. We traveled a few paces in silence. “I suppose basically I was like that once—minus the experience. I mean: of course, I realized about eighteen or nineteen that there was a very powerful thing called sex. But”—he stopped and looked out over the tulip beds—“it was always something I knew about. In my mind. With concepts. In myself, I felt there was this mighty urge. Never gave it any leeway. Once a girl tried to kiss me on the lips. I was frightened by the—uh the—” He fumbled for the right word but couldn't find it. “Look. Something told me if I let it go inside in me, it would rule me.” Then triumphantly and raising his voice: “The rawness! That's it. The kiss felt raw.”

  “And dirty for you?”

  “No. Lovely raw. But too lovely. Kind of tumultuously lovely. Only I couldn't handle that tumult, I knew.”

  We turned around to stroll back toward the house. “Well, anyway, Gerald, what difference did the exorcism make to all this?”

  “I suppose the best way to say it is the simple way. R/R thought for years that gender and sex were the same thing, for all practical purposes. So did I, come to think of it. Don't know about you.” We were coming up to the house, and the light fell on his face. “You may remember from the transcript. The crux of the Girl-Fixer's resistance lay there. [”Girl-Fixer“ was the given name of the evil spirit expelled from Richard/Rita.] And it took all that talk and pain to let me see it.”

  He stood facing the windows, his face and eyes bright and clear. “In a nutshell, Malachi. As I now understand it since the exorcism, when two people—a man and a woman—love each other, are making love, I now understand they are reproducing God's love and God's life. Sound's banal. And it sounds trite. Even sounds evasive and vague and feathery. But that's it. Either that, or here you have two more or less highly developed animals copulating-rutting, whatever you want to call it—and the ending is just sweet sweat, a few illusions, perhaps, and then a let's-get-back-to-normal-existence sort of thing. Do-or-die. Now-or-never. Go bust in the effort. Anything you like. Could even learn from kangaroos, if that were the way with it.” He turned his head in a comical way and said: “Ever see two kangaroos courting and copulating? I did. In a documentary. Extraordinary. Extraordinary.” He shook his head.

  “Well, apart from any practical significance that might have for you now, Gerald, you being celibate and all that. . .”

  “And with a few more months to live,” he said gently but not testily, as if to make quite clear he took into account the deadline of his life. “Okay. Apart from that, maybe we'll get back to that subject. But explain something to me. Isn't there an in-between stage? I mean: men and women aren't just animals. But neither are they performing an act of worship of God. Or are they? Is that what you're saying?”

  “Aaaah! The good-and-natural-act business.” He was mimicking someone I did not know, probably some professor of his seminary days. “Well.” This last word was said with sardonic emphasis. “As I now understand us men and women, we go through this world finding our way through facts and facts and more facts. Mountains of facts. But no matter what we do or get to know, all the time we are experiencing spirit. God's spirit.”

  He looked across to the lights of the nearby town. “And sometimes it's an experience in thoughts we think. Or it comes in words we hear. More often, it's an experience by intuition. A direct 'looking-at.' Some of those perceptions come like messages sent you. You hear children laughing, or see a beautiful valley in the midday sun. But you're mainly passive. At other times, you're doing something. And that's better still. Like when you have compassion for someone, or forgive someone.”

  We were down again at the tulip beds. He stopped at the middle one, where he had been working earlier, and looked at the silent flowers. They gleamed with wisps of color in the distant reflection of light from the house. “But in love and lovemaking, it's the highest. Both are acting. Both taking. Both giving. Nobody's passive.”

  At this point I made an objection, saying I had no concept of how men and women reproduce God's love and God's life when they love each other. We might say that, perhaps, in a remote and metaphorical way. But, then, the tulips do the same. And the kangaroos. All these, including men and women, may not know they're reproducing God's life and God's love, metaphorically. But they do. Or don't they? This was my question.

  He turned away from me and faced the mountain range. His voice came in short murmurs, as if he were reading cue cards visible only to him. “You remember the Girl-Fixer, and my struggle with it. You remember?” The crux of that struggle between Gerald and the evil spirit possessing Richard/Rita had concerned the meaning of love and of loving. “Well,” he continued, “on the plateau of love—and I don't mean the climax of an act of love only, but the plateau of love itself-man and woman are both
caught up in a dynamic of love. No past. No standing still. No anticipation. No then, now, and next. Just the black velvet across which all stars flash. No oblivion. All. . .”

  “But, Gerald, God—where's God in all this? You started off talking about God, as if the lovers were locked into an intuitive sharing of God's life.”

  He wheeled around and said almost fiercely: “That's God! That's what God is like.” He turned away again, as if looking for inspiration. “God's no static and immutable quantum, as we understand those words. That's the God in books. But-an eternal dynamic, always becoming, without having begun, without going to an end. Becoming without changing. No then. No now. No next.” As he turned and started to walk back toward the house, I fell into step with him.

  “But there are two in our case. Man and woman.”

  “Ah,” he said, tossing his head backward in a slight gesture, “that's the condition we're in. And that's the price.”

  “The price?”

  “Yes, the price. In order to have that participation in God's being, the two must reproduce God's oneness. Must love. Truly love. You can't fake it.”

  “But what part—if you can speak like that—of God does a man reproduce and what part does a woman reproduce?”

  “None. By himself and by herself. Or in himself or in herself. None. Nothing that is physical. Only in love and loving.”

  “Well, in love and in loving, what do they reproduce?” We stopped halfway up the garden. Gerald was looking at me steadily, as if searching for something. After a moment, he drew in a deep breath and said softly: “As far as I know, God is beautiful, is beauty itself. Beauty in being. Being that is beauty. And God's will is in full possession of that beauty, that being. In human love, woman loving is that being's echo; and man desiring is that will's parallel. In their love, will is locked with being. They simply reproduce, know, participate in God's life and love, in God's self some way or other. Otherwise, let's go back to those kangaroos—or chimpanzees.”