Hostage To The Devil

by Неизвестный

  “Well, even granting all that,” I said to him as we started to walk again, “tell me, what does masculine and feminine mean for you now, in the light of all that?”

  “Remember Richard/Rita's crux?” He looked at me, knowing I did.

  This had been the center of the Pretense in the exorcism.

  Richard/Rita had presumed the ultimate source of masculinity and femininity was the same as that of sexuality—the body, the chemistry of the body.

  “And none of Richard/Rita's most extreme efforts, even the operation, worked for him. He wasn't basically androgynous. No one is, for that matter. We're basically and immutably masculine or feminine. Nature may goof and give us the wrong genitals for our gender. No matter. Apart from a mutant form of that kind, our sexual apparatus corresponds to what we are-feminine or masculine. Androgyny is baloney.”

  I laughed at the rhyme and the slang. But I had a real difficulty. According to Gerald the feminine-femininity-corresponded to God's being; the masculine or masculinity, to God's will. The essence of God, in our human way of thinking, would be feminine in that case. “If you are correct, Gerald, God, to speak in human terms, is feminine rather than masculine.”

  “Of course. More powerful. Creative, In her own being, the ultimate theater—not the object—of human longing.”

  “What about the He's and the Him's and the His's of the Bible? And Israel like a woman God loves and woos? And all that?”

  “Just a good dosage of Semitic chauvinism. Plus a lot of ignorance. And a good deal more of all men's chauvinism down the ages. Men have been in charge from the beginning. Even in Buddhism. Just because the Buddha was a man.”

  “So, feminine is something of the spirit essentially?”

  “Only of the spirit.”

  “And masculine also?”

  “Right. A bird doesn't fly because it has wings. It has wings because it flies. A man isn't masculine because he has a penis and scrotum, nor a woman feminine because she has vagina and womb and estrogen or whatever. They have all that—if they have it—because she's feminine and he's masculine. Even if they lack some or all of those things, they are still masculine and feminine.”

  We were back on the patio. Gerald was about to open the door, and I should have left it at that. It was already late. I had to travel back to the town and catch a bus to the airport. Gerald, under doctor's orders, should have been in bed over an hour ago. But chiefly, if I had not gone on talking and probing, I would not have had, as a consequence of my probing, to bear an almost intolerable pain on Gerald's account. I went on unknowingly: “Gerald, tell me one more thing before I leave you in peace. With all that we have said in mind, do you now regret that you never fell in love or that you never made love and never will make love with a woman?”

  As always when you make a mistake, you begin to sense it vaguely and go on in desperation trying to remedy the situation.

  “I know you don't regret your priesthood. I know your vow of celibacy is dear to you. But, all that aside for one moment, have you regrets?” Gerald let go of the door handle gently. His head bowed as he dropped his eyes. I could no longer catch his expression. The sudden silence between us was not merely an absence of words. It was the abrupt severance of all communication. I felt perspiration on my forehead.

  He stood for a moment in the patio light, looking thin, askew, frail, as if a great weight had been laid on him. I noticed age lines and a gauntness that had escaped me earlier. His face was immobile, but the “Jesus patch” was now of a deeper color. Then he stepped slowly onto the grass, limping, and started to walk with short steps down toward the tulips. I followed and started to say something, but he silenced me with a small, slow gesture of his right hand. A couple of yards from the flower beds he slowed to a stop. I did not dare look at him, and at first I heard no sound from him. But I knew he was crying. Then, as the minutes passed, I realized that this was not a sobbing or a voiced crying. He was not shaking, but very quiet and still. His tears were flowing steadily, ground out of him by some deep sorrow long ago accepted and whose pain he knew intimately. Merely, on this occasion, I had evoked that pain and its sorrow beyond his control. I knew he had to finish it in his own way. Nothing could console him and stop those tears. Seneca said once: “When a man cries, either he cries on his own mother's shoulder, or he cries alone.” Gerald was alone.

  It lasted several minutes. Then putting both hands to his eyes and wiping them, he said simply: “I know you understand the meaning of these.” His voice was strangely deep and very unlike the tones he had used all evening. Then it had come from someone alive and vibrant in his own way, walking and talking near me. Now it came from very far away; deep, grave, solemn, he was speaking clearly to me from another terrain where he alone had walked, where his fate had been decided, and where the very self of him had never ceased to be ever since. It was an exorcist speaking from the lonely world he must always inhabit, alone with his grisly knowledge, his bruised memories, and his blind trust locked desperately on to all-powerful love for a final cleansing.

  “Don't be sorry, Malachi. No reproaches. It's just that no one should have to put up with this in another. These are tears to be shed in solitude.” He straightened up and cleared his throat. I could see him take in the whole horizon, turning his head slowly and meditatively from side to side. “Somewhere in my world,” he said out loud, but as if speaking to himself, “somewhere, at some time during the years I have spent in it, there must have been or even now must be someone, some woman with whom love would have been possible. I shall never see her eyes or hear her voice or feel the touch of her fingers. I could have tasted God's eternity and ecstasy with her. And I could have seen God's comeliness on her hair and on her breasts. Somewhere. Someone. But I never shall. Not now. Not ever. I shall never share in her mystery of God's self-contained glory.

  “And you know well, I am not crying because of missed opportunity or frustration. So help me.” He wiped his eyes again. “In one way, I don't know why I am crying. And, at the same time, I do know very well. Once you finger the innards of a situation such as R/R was in, I think the terrible fragility of human love becomes more beautiful and you are frightened for its safety. Poor R/R and his delicate dreams! He really, genuinely yearned to be feminine and to love as only woman can.”

  He turned and faced toward the house. His eyes were still wet and glistening, but washed bright: “Is that why lovers sometimes cry tears at their happiest moments?” Apparently, at that moment, the tears started to flow again, because he looked away quickly toward the mountains.

  “Many a woman and many a man must have had R/R's same beautiful dream,” he said through the pain, “saw it within finger's touch, reached for it, and found it blighted before they held it.” A pause. “I don't know why I cry for them. Feeling for them, perhaps. For only Jesus can mend the fracture of their spirit.”

  I waited until he seemed to have stopped crying. There was one last question I wanted to ask him, about Jesus. But he spoke before I did: “Of course, I have regrets. I would be a liar if I said otherwise. The regrets I have are for the intuitions I never had. Any man or woman I've ever known who really loved, all told me that in really loving, the physical was a couch or bed for a flight of intuitions. He no longer felt himself merely in her or near her. She no longer felt herself merely around him or near him. It went beyond that into-what's this one woman said?-uh-an 'allness' she said. Or, as one man said to me, 'full togetherness.' He meant: with himself, with his wife, with God, with earth, with life.”

  I asked Gerald if, mingled in his knowledge and his partial regrets, he thought of the loss of children he might have had. He replied that his having or not having children was something else again. I pursued the point, however, suggesting that perhaps one lament of deep pathos and suffering for him in Richard/Rita's case was Richard/Rita's total inability to have children. No matter how much love Richard/Rita dreamed of and achieved, it could never be a life-giving love. His would always be a cripp
led dream.

  Gerald reminded me of what Richard/Rita kept screaming at the end of the exorcism as he thrashed back and forth. He had screamed again and again: “Life and love! Love and life! Life and love!” until they covered his mouth with masking tape. “Now,” concluded Gerald, “like Richard/Rita, I will have to wait until I cross over to the other side, in order to find life from love and love from life. At present, I am time's eunuch for life and love in eternity.” With the last sentence the timbre of his voice had subtly changed.

  He now sounded more or less like the Gerald who had entertained me earlier that evening. 'We started walking back to the house. As we passed out through the hall and front door, he quoted Jesus: “ 'In the Kingdom of Heaven, they neither give their daughters in marriage nor are given in marriage.' No marriage there,” he commented musingly. “No need for it.”

  “Gerald, about Jesus.”

  He broke in on me. “He was-is-God. No woman, no human lovemaking was needed to enrich him.”

  “Can we make love then, do we make love, because we are merely human?”

  “Only because we are human. Once possessed of God and possessed by God, there's no point in making love. You have all that human love can give you and much more. Love itself.”

  Nobody who had seen Gerald starting off life as a young priest would have guessed he would end as an exorcist condemned to an early death. Born in Parma, Ohio, reared in Dijon, France, until he was fourteen years old, educated from that time in Cleveland, ordained priest in 1948, Gerald was sent as an assistant to an outlying parish of Chicago.

  There and in other parishes Gerald served as an assistant for 23 uneventful years. During that time he acquired a reputation for solid common sense. He was unflappable even in the most trying circumstances. Sometimes he was criticized for being a little too unworldly—“Not very worldly-wise,” a colleague would remark now and then. But, whenever a crisis arose, Gerald's judgments and decisions generally proved to be the right ones.

  One day he was called by the pastor of a neighboring parish and asked to go there for a consultation. When he arrived at the priest's house, he was told the story of a young man, Richard O., an employee of an insurance company, who had recently come to live in the neighborhood. He was not Roman Catholic, but his two brothers and some close friends of his had gone spontaneously to the old priest for help and counsel. Their brother and friend, Richard, had been deteriorating for some time now. They had tried doctors and psychologists. Then Richard had been persuaded to visit a Lutheran minister. After that, a rabbi had prayed over him. But the deterioration still continued.

  Richard's brothers were quite frank when they talked to the two priests in the parlor of the rectory. They gave a brief sketch of Richard/Rita's life up to that moment. “Father, we are not Catholics. We don't believe in the Catholic Church, or in any church, for that matter. But we will do anything, anything at all, go to any length, in order to help our brother.” The old priest excused himself and Gerald for a moment. They went outside.

  The pastor had several questions for Gerald. Did he think Richard O. was a case of possession? Gerald did not know; he had never come across such a case. Shouldn't they alert the bishop? Gerald had already chatted with “young Billy” (the bishop's nickname among his priests). There was no official diocesan exorcist. The bishop knew nothing about it, and he wanted to know less. “Let's take it step by step from the top downward,” counseled Gerald cheerfully.

  They returned to the parlor and asked the two brothers for Richard O.'s medical and psychological reports. They could have them immediately, Gerald was assured. Gerald asked if Richard knew of the brothers' visit to see the pastor and himself. Bert said he did not think so.

  “He may,” Gerald rejoined. And then he went on to explain that, if Richard were really possessed by an evil spirit, he could easily know much more than his brothers told him.

  This conversation took place three days after Christmas. The reports arrived early in the New Year. With the permission of his own pastor, Gerald went to live temporarily in the rectory of his old friend in order to be near Richard O. At the beginning of February, having digested the reports and spoken to the doctors and psychologists, he accompanied Richard's two brothers on a first visit to Richard.

  Richard/Rita received them quite pleasantly in his house. That day he seemed inordinately happy. He spoke to them about himself and made no bones about his condition. He said that sometimes, as at that moment, he saw things clearly and knew he needed some kind of help. At other times, from what people told him, he went all funny. It was a constant change in him. And it was too painful and abrupt and unpredictable for him to carry on like that much longer. “Help me if you can,” he added. “Even if later I tell you to go to Hell, help me. I'll sign any documents necessary.”

  Willingly, Richard/Rita said in answer to Gerald's proposal, he would go to Chicago and undergo tests by doctors and psychologists of Gerald's choosing. The following day they went to Chicago together. By some happy circumstance the visit there and the tests conducted by the psychologists and doctors went off without incident. Richard/Rita had no lapse into his sudden fits.

  While they were in Chicago, Gerald and the old priest went to see the only exorcist they could track down within reaching distance. He was a Dominican friar, an ex-missionary, who lived in retirement in a Chicago suburb. He smiled grimly as they told him their story.

  “Better you than me, boys,” he said quietly. “Let me put you through the rite of Exorcism and give you a few tips of my own for yourself and the assistants. I learned a thing or two in Korea. It wasn't all wasted.”

  The old man inculcated the first principles of Exorcism. He warned Gerald not to try to take the place of Jesus. It was only by the name and power of Jesus, he emphasized, that any evil spirit could be exorcised. He schooled him in the various traps that awaited the unwary: the dangers of any logical argument with the possessing spirit; the need of strong, silent assistants; and the customary procedure of an exorcism.

  Gerald had to return several times to Chicago with Richard/Rita after the first occasion. He went by himself to see some theologians in order to get a more accurate knowledge of what went on during an exorcism. Richard/Pita himself had to make several trips in connection with his office work. All in all, it was the beginning of March before everything was in readiness. Gerald felt that he had taken all possible precautions. Intrigued as all the medical and psychiatric examiners were with Richard/Rita's history and transsexual operation, they had satisfied themselves that Richard/Rita was medically and psychologically as normal as any other person, and that he was not indulging in any strange fun and games in order to attract attention. This had been suggested by one of the psychologists. The rite of Exorcism, Gerald decided, would do no harm.

  For the actual exorcism, he had chosen five assistants. Richard/Rita's two brothers, Bert and Jasper, had volunteered for the job. The old pastor had secured the services of the local police captain and of an English teacher from the parish school. Richard's landlord, Michael S., a Greek-American, a good friend of the old pastor, had been told of the exorcism and spontaneously offered himself. Gerald chose as his own priest assistant a young man recently posted to his parish, a Father John.

  Only once or twice in the last month before the exorcism was Gerald's courage shaken. At one moment, the old Dominican friar took him aside as he and the pastor were leaving him after one of their visits. He asked Gerald if he was a virgin. He was, replied Gerald, but what difference could that make? The Dominican answered him rather offhandedly, trying to play down the import of his question. It made no difference, he said. It was just that Gerald would have more to suffer. At least, that is what he thought.

  Questioned closely by Gerald as to why he thought so, the Dominican looked at him for a moment; then he said in a still voice: “You haven't paid your dues. You don't really know what's in you. But”—he wandered over to the door and opened it—“They do. Now”—motioning to whe
re the old pastor was waiting for Gerald—“your friend is waiting. Go in peace. And don't be afraid. This is your lot.” As Gerald and his old friend drove back home, they chatted about the whole matter. It was clear to him, the pastor said, that when one spent years in a certain type of job—the pastor in his parish, the old friar in his missionary work—you got a special sense. You can't share it with anyone. You don't want to, really. And what it tells you isn't always pleasant. Sometimes you see dark, abiding presences where others see nothing but light. “It's all very funny,” the pastor remarked to Gerald, who had fallen silent and thoughtful. “Don't try to understand. You can't get old before your time. It would tear the heart out of you.”

  The nearer the mid-March date of the exorcism came, the more unreal it all seemed to the participants, especially to Gerald. This was chiefly because of Richard/Rita. There was in those last days no sign of deterioration in him, no fits. All was calm and normal. He even received them all in his house the night before the appointed day and served them a dinner he had cooked himself. Afterward, he helped them arrange the room where the exorcism would be done and chatted amicably with them before they left. Gerald had brought the paraphernalia of Exorcism with him—crucifix, stole, surplice, ritual book, holy-water flask. On the suggestion of the old Dominican, a stretcher had been borrowed from a local clinic; they might need it for Richard/Rita.

  All were to assemble at 8:00 A.M. the following morning. For Gerald there were some swift seconds with an awry note. He was the last down the pathway out to the road where he had parked his car. As he turned back to close the latch on the gate, he saw Richard/Rita silhouetted in the main doorway of his little house. Gerald could not at that distance read the look in Richard/Rita's eyes, but Richard/Rita's hands caught his attention.