Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  “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. Sounds 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.”

  “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 crippled 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 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 love making 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.