Satan's Diary

“The money is at your disposal, my dear friend.”

Magnus looked at me thoughtfully.

“It’s not worth while,” he decided. “This miracle is old stuff. It requires too many police to compel belief. We shall perform a better miracle.”

“Oh, undoubtedly. We shall contrive a better device. In two weeks?”

“Yes, about that!” replied Magnus cordially.

We shook hands warmly in parting and in about two hours the gracious king sent each of us a decoration: some sort of a star for me and something else for Magnus. I rather pitied the poor idiot who continued to play his lone hand.

    April 16, Rome.

Maria is somewhat indisposed and I hardly see her. Magnus informed me of her illness – and lied about it: for some reason he does not want me to see her. Does he fear anything?

Again Cardinal X. called on him in my absence. Nothing is being said to me about the “miracle.”

But I am patient, – and I wait. At first this was rather boresome but recently I have found a new pastime and now I am quite content. It is the Roman museums, where I spend my mornings, like a conscientious American who has just learned to distinguish between a painting and a piece of sculpture. But I have no Baedecker with me and I am strangely happy that I don’t understand a thing about it all: marble and painting. I merely like it.

I like the odor of the sea in the museums. Why the sea? – I do not know: the sea is far away and I rather expected the odor of decay. And it is so spacious here – much more spacious than the Campagna. In the Campagna I see only space, over which run trains and automobiles. Here I swim in time. There is so much time here! Then, too, I rather like the fact that here they preserve with great care a chip of a marble foot or a stony sole with a bit of the heel. Like an ass from Illinois, I simply cannot understand what value there is in this, but I already believe that it is valuable and I am touched by your careful thrift, little man! Preserve it! Go on breaking the feet of live men. That is nothing. But these you must preserve. It is good, indeed, when living, dying, ever changing men, for the space of 2000 years, take such good care of a chip of marble foot.

When I enter the narrow museum from the Roman street, where every stone is drowned in the light of the April sun, its transparent and even shadow seems to me a peculiar light, more durable than the expensive rays of the sun. As far as I recollect it is thus that eternity doth shine. And these marbles! They have swallowed as much sunlight as an Englishman whiskey before they were driven into this place that they do not fear night at all… And I, too, do not fear the night when I am near them. Take care of them, man!

If this is what you call art, what an ass you are, Wondergood. Of course, you are cultured, you look upon art with reverence as upon religion and you have understood as much of it as that ass did on which the Messiah entered Jerusalem. And what if there should be a fire? Yesterday this thought troubled me all day and I went with it to Magnus. But he seems extremely occupied with something and could not, at first, understand what I was driving at.

“What’s the trouble, Wondergood? You want to insure the Vatican – or something else? Make it clearer?”

“Oh! to insure!” I exclaimed in anger: “you are a barbarian, Thomas Magnus!”

At last he understood. Smiling cordially, he stretched, yawned and laid some paper before me.

“You really are a gentleman from Mars, dear Wondergood. Don’t contradict, and sign this paper. It is the last one.”

“I will sign, but under one condition. Your explosion must not touch the Vatican.”

He laughed again:

“Would you be sorry? Then you had better not sign. In general, if you are sorry about anything – about anything at all – it would be better for us to part before it is too late. There is no room for pity in my game and my play is not for sentimental American girls.”

“If you please…” I signed the paper and threw it aside. “But it seems as if you have earnestly entered upon the duties of Satan, dear Magnus!”

“And does Satan have duties? Poor Satan! Then I don’t want to be Satan!”

“Neither duties nor obligations?”

“Neither duties nor obligations.”

“And what then?”

He glanced at me quickly with his gleaming eyes and replied with one short word, which cut the air before my face:

“Will. ”

“And…the current of high pressure?”

Magnus smiled patronizingly:

“I am very glad that you remember my words so well, Wondergood. They may be of use to you some day.”

Cursed dog. I felt so much like striking him that I – bowed particularly low and politely. But he restrained me with a gracious gesture, pointing to a chair:

“Where are you going, Wondergood? Sit down. We have seen so little of each other of late. How is your health?”

“Fine, thank you. And how is the health of Signorina Maria?”

“Not particularly good. But it’s a trifle. A few more days of waiting and you… So you like the museums, Wondergood? There was a time when I, too, gave them much time and feeling. Yes, I remember, I remember… Don’t you find, Wondergood, that man, in mass, is a repulsive being?”

I raised my eyes in astonishment:

“I do not quite understand this change of subject, Magnus. On the contrary, the museums have revealed to me a new and more attractive side of man…”

He laughed.

“Love for mankind?.. Well, well, do not take offense at the jest, Wondergood. You see: everything that man does in crayon is wonderful – but repulsive in painting. Take the sketch of Christianity, with its sermon on the Mount, its lilies and its ears of corn, how marvelous it is! And how ugly is its picture with its sextons, its funeral pyres and its Cardinal X.! A genius begins the work and an idiot, an animal, completes it. The pure and fresh wave of the ocean tide strikes the dirty shore – and returns dirty, bearing back with it corks and shells. The beginning of love, the beginning of the Roman Empire and the great revolution – how good are all beginnings! And their end? And even if a man here and there has managed to die as beautifully as he was born, the masses, the masses, Wondergood, invariably end the liturgy in shamelessness!”

“Oh, but what about the causes, Magnus?”

“The causes? Apparently we find concealed here the very substance of man, of animal, evil and limited in the mass, inclined to madness, easily inoculated with all sorts of disease and crowning the widest possible road with a standstill. And that is why Art is so much above Man!”

“I do not understand.”

“What is there incomprehensible about it? In art it is the genius who begins and the genius completes. You understand: the genius! the fool, the imitator or the critic is quite powerless to change or mar the paintings of Velasquez, the sculpture of Angelo or the verse of Homer. He can destroy, smash, break, burn or deface, but he is quite powerless to bring them down to his own level – and that is why he so detests real art. You understand, Wondergood? His paw is helpless!”

Magnus waved his white hand and laughed.

“But why does he guard and protect it so assiduously?”

“It is not he who guards and protects. This is done by a special species of faithful watchmen ” – Magnus laughed again: “and did you observe how uncomfortable they feel in the museum?”

“Who – they?”

“Well, those who came to view the things! But the most ridiculous phase of the whole business is not that the fool is a fool but that the genius unswervedly worships the fool as a neighbor and fellow being and anxiously seeks his devastating love. As if he were a savage himself, the genius does not understand that his true neighbor is a genius similar to himself and he is eternally opening his embraces to the near – human…who eagerly crawls into them in order to abstract the watch from his vest pocket! Yes, my dear Wondergood, it is a most laughable point and I fear…”

He lapsed into thought, fixing his eyes upon the floor: thus apparently do human beings gaze into the depths of their own graves. And I understood just what this genius feared, and once again I bowed before the Satanic mind which in all the world recognized only itself and its own will. Here was a god who would not share his power with Olympus! And what a contempt for mankind! And what open contempt for me! Here was a grain of earth that could make the devil himself sneeze!

And do you know how I concluded that evening? I took my pious Toppi by the neck and threatened to shoot him if he did not get drunk with me. And drunk we did get! We began in some dirty little café and continued in some night taverns where I generously filled some black-eyed bandits with liquor, mandolin players and singers, who sang to me of Maria: I drank like a farm hand who had just arrived in the city after a year of sober labor. Away with the museums! I remember that I shouted much and waved my hands – but never did I love my Maria so tenderly, so sweetly and so painfully as in that smoke of drink, permeated with the odor of wine, oranges and some burning fat, in this wide circle of black bearded stealthy faces and rapaciously gleaming eyes, amid the melodious strains of mandolins which opened for me the very vestibules of heaven and hell!

I vaguely remember some very accommodating but pompous murderers, whom I kissed and forgave in the name of Maria. I remember that I proposed that all of us go to drink in the Coliseum, in the very place where martyrs used to die but I do not know why we did not do it – I believe there were technical difficulties. And how splendid Toppi was! At first he drank long and silently, like an archbishop. Then he suddenly began to perform interesting feats. He put a bottle of Chianti on his nose, the wine running all over him. He tried to perform some tricks with cards but was immediately caught by the affable bandits who brilliantly repeated the same trick. He walked on all fours and sang some religious verses through his nose. He cried and suddenly announced frankly that he was a devil.