The Devil Knows My Name
The devil follows me day and night
because he is afraid to be alone.
– Francis Picabia
Last night, the Devil came to see me
I don’t know if I was sleeping or awake. It was evening and I was lying on my right side, when suddenly I felt someone sitting on the bedside at my back. I turned and saw an unfamiliar silhouette, a slender figure. It didn’t scare or make me uneasy. I wasn’t even surprised, as if it were all completely normal for someone to come into my bedroom at that hour. The man said he wanted to talk to me, to be my friend.
He had a way of speaking that I found seductive. It disturbed my resolve and my spirit, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
When he started kissing me, I didn’t resist at all.
He approached my body in a way no man had ever done before. He knew where to touch and where to kiss me. He could tear away the deceptive veil from my eyes and see me in the dark. And he knew how to make me overcome my shame, to help me tap into the womanly instincts that had lain dormant all this time, in my deepest crevices. Like some newly discovered species of dinosaur, my pleasure had never existed before last night, when the Devil ripped off my clothes and gave me the courage to forget myself completely and be my true self for the first time in my life.
When I told the Devil how I felt with him, he mocked me and said, “That’s what they call sin.”
The Devil knows my name
He knows everything about me. My future, my past. All the mistakes I’ve made, all my accomplishments. What I need and what I long for. He knows my name but never says it.
Today he came back to make a pact with me. He says he can wipe my mind and life clean of anything that isn’t necessary. He can offer me a new life free from memories and give me a brand-new, unused brain. And since the brain controls the heart, I’ll have a sufficient lack of emotion to make whatever decisions I want, without any bothersome sentimentality. To be analytical, mathematical—a perfect machine that can’t experience suffering.
“But the Devil always demands a price,” I tell him.
He laughs, says he likes talking with me because I have a perfect head for business and understand things without needing too much of an explanation. Which always makes things easier.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “The price won’t be too high.”
“No one believes a word the Devil says,” I say. “Why should I trust you?”
He laughs and then he leaves.
The Devil is my lover
It’s hard not to give in to his insinuations. He takes on the body of a strong, handsome man, the same figure from the first night. Here there is no sign of little demons or pitchforks or goat’s hooves or the smell of sulphur. When the Devil takes your soul you can’t deny him anything, you don’t know how to. You do what he asks. He makes you feel that nothing has ever pleased you like being with him. You act out of passion, instead of by force or a sense of duty.
He made me love him. At first, my love was proof of his beauty. The Devil is very vain and needs to assert himself all the time. The first night he loved me, it was to fill me with a need for him. So that I would call out for him with both my mind and heart.
Now I’m the Devil’s woman. We don’t speak as much anymore. We burn up in each other’s bodies. I’ve turned into the most beautiful of female creatures. I can feel with my body, for the first time ever. I’ve no more use for words. Or time. I don’t need morale or sin to feel alive or to believe that I am happy.
The Devil tells me everything
He comes to see me every day. He talks a lot. He tells me stories from every country in the world. About how human beings struggle and how they fear Evil, about how they spend their lives making up excuses so that they can give in to temptation and so be on good terms with both God and the Devil.
He tells me that he was once a charming prince, a man of flesh and bone like everyone else. Elegant and intelligent. Handsome. Wonderful. To such an extent that God chose him to become his favorite angel.
“But,” he says, “the problem is that I can’t stand taking orders from anyone. The only one I will ever obey is myself. I don’t have enough time or interest for anything else. So I do whatever I want. God didn’t seem to like this attitude very much. Ever since then—ever since our misunderstanding—all I’ve done is roam the earth in search of human beings who might understand and share my point of view. In some places they call me the Vagabond of Fire. You know, all those names that people come up with. I get a kick out of them. I look for people like you. I know you think that life is hell. And you’re not so far off the mark there. Now I’m the one who has to laugh. Nervously. Because it’s true. I’m always telling myself that life is hell. But I’ve never said this to anybody else. How could he have known?
The Devil plays me
He never showed up last night. I guess I should admit that I miss him. I think about him too much. He knows me. To the Devil I’m an open book and this makes me afraid of him. I’m weak at his side, under the spell of his voice. I cannot, I do not know how to lie or hide things from him.
Sometimes without knowing it, I can sense that he is nearby. I feel his presence. Maybe he is watching me at this very moment to see how I behave when he doesn’t come to see me. To know what I’m doing and what I’m feeling.
He is testing me.
I have lived without the Devil my entire life. So why do I suddenly feel that I cannot be without him?
The Devil has slept in my bed
He never sleeps in anyone’s bed. Sleeping for him is dangerous. Someone might hurt him. But the Devil trusts me.
When the Devil is sleeping, I use the time to think.
As long as he is asleep, he can’t know what I’m thinking. Two years have passed since the first time he came to see me. We’ve told each other many things. I don’t know what it is that’s happened, but I’m afraid that my love may come at a price. In some way, he has wrapped me up in his game: I do not think or feel, I no longer need or live for anyone else but him. But the Devil doesn’t love anyone and someday he will demand his price. His love does not come free.
Then I realize that he has already decided for me. Long before I can even regret it. The Devil is a swindler. He has trapped me in his game. There is no other man who can interest me. I don’t have any worries. People suddenly seem so dull. The only conversations that matter to me are those I have with the Devil. I don’t remember anyone or anything special in my life. No one else but him.
He has changed my life, my way of being. I feel lucid. Clear Headed. “That’s because you’ve stopped wasting time and energy on useless things. Now you’re close to brilliance, to genius,” the Devil says.
Fire is brilliant, I think to myself.
The Devil follows me day and night
The Devil says he followed me for several days without my noticing him. He wanted to see how I am in day-to-day life when unaware of his presence.
“You’re nothing special,” he says. “You’re not different. There isn’t even a spark in your eyes. The only light that glows in your spirit is the one I stoke inside you. I give you life every waking minute, every second. I overflow with life inside your body.”
“But I don’t want to have the Devil’s spawn!”
“Don’t worry about that,” he says. “You know I hate motherhood as well as children. I want you as my lover. Leave it to others to deal with children.”
The Devil wants an answer
I haven’t thought too much about his bargain because he still hasn’t quoted me a price, and the price is important to me. Burning in fire and brimstone for all eternity isn’t exactly a future I picture for myself. Even though heaven seems boring as well. That whole idea of sitting on a cloud all day surrounded by cherubs playing their little harps—how boring to think that this is forever, that this is all that there is to time, to eternity. And that it will always, always be like that.
The Devil explains that things are not the way it says in the Book. In reality, it’s life that is the real hell. You test yourself against the history of Good and Evil. You gain points, you lose them. When you die, depending on your score, you’re born again to be the same person, time and again, until you start behaving the way God wants you to, the way He expects you to. But human beings always commit the same mistakes, we give in to the same temptations, we fall in love with the same person, and we go back to doing everything exactly as before. Those who do manage to break the cycle are rare exceptions. If that’s you, God turns you into an angel and you come back to earth to shield some human being from temptation. So you never finish being here. The Devil calls this “slavery.”
“Someday,” he says, “I will liberate the world. Human beings have lost their sense of rebellion. They settle, conform, resign. They pray, they cry, accept everything. They commit suicide or get drunk. They do anything to forget themselves and never escape their own misery and mediocrity. Though really, I shouldn’t worry so much about all of you. If you want to be mediocre, go right ahead. Only true rebels will ever attain happiness. The ones who won’t put up with any orders imposed on them. None whatsoever.”
“Not even the Devil’s?”
The Devil looks at me gravely. I see that I’ve been indiscreet. In a few words, without meaning to, I’ve managed to defy him. I think it wise to clarify.
“It’s impossible for you to liberate the world,” I say. “There will always be a struggle between Good and Evil.”
“For the Devil,” he retorts, “nothing is impossible.”
The Devil doesn’t kiss me goodbye
One day, he runs into me far from my house. He says he needs to talk to me.
“I have to go away,” he says. “So give some thought to the things we talked about.”
“And your price?”
“You’ll pay it.”
“You’re such a swindler,” I say. “I told you I wanted to know what it was first.”
“Yes, but things didn’t turn out exactly the way I planned. Now I have to go, and you have to pay up.”
That’s when things become clear. But something inside me makes me tell him I know he will be back and that I will wait for him. I don’t know how or when, but I know he will come back to me.
The years pass very slowly. I have spent them chasing time, second after second. Waiting. Remembering and discovering, over and over, the meaning of his words and actions.
I feel lonely.
I miss him.
Last night, the Devil came back
So much time had passed since the last visit. Years.
I was so surprised I didn’t know what to do, or what to say. He didn’t, either. The two of us were a little nervous.
At first we stared at each other in silence for a long while.
Then with our bodies we remembered things that had happened long ago.
The Devil says he doesn’t understand things anymore.
“Of all the countries I was in, of all the women, of every soul I corrupted and every soul God won from me, of all the memories of the centuries I have wandered—none could make my days feel as full as they were when you and I were together.”
“I knew you’d be back someday,” I tell him happily.
“What made you so sure? How could you endure so much time waiting, without being certain about anything?”
“I knew the wait would be the price you’d make me pay and that no matter how high it was, one day I’d cancel my debt and you would come back.”
But he is no longer the same. An ivy of sadness has wrapped around his heart.
The Devil tells me he is tired, that he will sleep in my bed as before and stop going out in search of souls for his hell.
“There is so much evil in the world that human beings have no more need of my services,” the Devil says sadly. He turns over onto his side and goes to sleep.
Jacinta Escudos was born in San Salvador, a writer whose body of work includes novels, short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, and journalistic chronicles, published in such Central American daily outlets as La Nación (Costa Rica), La Prensa Gráfica (El Salvador), and el Nuevo Diario (Nicaragua). While she primarily writes in Spanish, she is fluent in English, German, and French, having worked as a translator for several years.
Yvette Siegert was born in Los Angeles to parents from Colombia and El Salvador. She holds degrees from Columbia University and the Université de Genève. She is currently completing a doctorate in medieval and modern languages at the University of Oxford. Siegert is the author of Atmospheric Ghost Lights, selected by Monica Youn for the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship Award. Siegert’s debut collection, Late Antiquity (Bloodaxe Books, forthcoming), traces the civil war in El Salvador. It was the winner of the James Berry Prize. She is a translator from French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Her translations have been shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the John Dryden International Prize. Siegert’s volume of Pizarnik’s poetry, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 (New Directions, 2016), won the Best Translated Book Award.A CantoMundo Fellow and Ledbury Poetry Critic, Siegert is the recipient of fellowships and support from Bread Loaf, the Jan Michalski Foundation, Hedgebrook, the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation/Pro Helvetia, Macondo, PEN/Heim, Arts Council England, the National Centre for Writing, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Siegert lives in the United Kingdom.
