You’ll excuse me if I don’t dwell. The same questions, this time with torturous inducements to answer differently. For two minutes and eight seconds Marta holds out. There are precisely two minutes eight seconds’ worth of faith in her tank. But, understandably, after they’ve broken the second finger and the crucified Christ has shown no sign of superheroically coming down to her rescue, nor the Virgin of surrounding her with an impenetrable corona of maternal protection, Marta starts to blab. Not that that helps, since the Inquisitors’ agenda has nothing to do with her admission of guilt. The two younger Brothers, Clement and Martin, know it’s me. They know, deep down, it can’t really be God’s work to tear off a woman’s nipple with pincers. They know it’s me – but to Hell with it anyway, since it feels better than anything they’ve felt before, since there’s nothing, nothing like it on earth (nor, they’ll wager later, over the rough local wine and peppered fish, in Heaven, either). Abbot Thomas, on the other hand, manages on and off to wrap mutilations in psalms. There are flashes of doing God’s will like patches of blue in an otherwise dirty and flocculent sky. He can’t quite give himself over to the truth of himself, and his absurd oscillation between bloodlust and bogus rationalization is piquant to me, vastly to be preferred over Clement and Martin’s white bread surrender.
You might wonder, by the way, what God and the angelic host in Heaven are doing while all this is going on. Wonder no more. I, Lucifer, can tell you. Nothing. They’re doing nothing. They’re watching. The infinitely merciful part of His nature swallows a sob or two, it’s true, but the infinitely indifferent part keeps its gaze steady. There is a tradition, established by those blathering early martyrs and all but vanished in modern times, of offering one’s suffering up to God. The winkled out eyeball, the screwed thumb, the plucked tongue and toasted bot – the right disposition can lift them from the body and send them floating up to God like exquisite perfumes. The Divine nostrils inhale them and sweet indeed is their odour. (You might think there’s something obscene about it, but it will get you into Heaven.) So should you find yourself under vexatious interrogation one day, offer your shocked bollocks up to God. Next time your hole’s rudely invaded by a red hot poker lift your eyes to Heaven and say: ‘This one’s for you, my Lord.’
Marta, I’m sorry to say, isn’t offering her sufferings up to God. Marta’s providing her Franciscan hosts with confirmation that the other names they have on their list (Bertolt’s list, complete with colour of hair, age, vital statistics, and likelihood of intact maidenheads) are those of her sisters in witchcraft. You should hear her description – or rather her endorsement of their description – of the Sabbat. Christ, I wish I’d been there. Butchered babies, bestiality, coprophilia, necrophilia, paedophilia, incest (Abbot Thomas is looking forward to interviewing those twin Schelling sisters), sodomy, desecration of holy objects, blasphemy – a five-star knees-up if ever there was one. When this confession is read out publicly in three days’ time the good people of Uffenstadt are going to see Marta in a whole new light. (It’s going to put some pep back into stagnant boudoirs, too, so that’s nice.) In three days’ time, Marta, or what’s left of her, will state that this is her true confession, given freely, without compulsion of any kind (else there’ll be compulsion all over again, of a by now familiar kind) shortly before they march her up to the stake. Günter, restrained by civic officers, will watch, screaming, while they cut open his wife’s womb and rip out the foetus – redundantly, since mum’s going up in smoke anyway – to keep the mob happy and their crowd-pulling clout intact.
This is a Big Picture operation. Three hundred years, quarter of a million dead, all in God’s name. After about 1400 I barely needed to put in an appearance. The System was up and running. Everybody (apart from the innocent victims) won. The sadists got a piece of ass, the Church increased its loyalty to Mammon, the liars got paid for their lies, taverns groaned under the weight of drawn crowds, and the mob – the name-and-shame mob basked in righteous relief that it was her (bloody witch) and not them. Tell me that wasn’t an achievement. Not a patch on what I was warming up to, but you know . . . promising. I really think God was annoyed with me. What with it being His Church and all.
There. I’ve dwelt, in spite of myself.
At a party to celebrate the paperback release of Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest, Penelope stands in the shadows with her arms folded. She’s not drunk, not reeling drunk, but she is blessed now whether she wills it or no with that grim, fifth-glass perspicacity. Nor is she deliberately not adding her own contribution to the applause for Gunn as he makes his way to the tiny, elevated stage with its lone reader’s microphone; it’s just that her entire consciousness is given over to watching him, the length of his stride, the tilt of his shoulders, the pulled-in corners of his deeply satisfied mouth. She’s watching, standing with her weight on one leg and her left hand cradling glass six at an about-to-spill angle, while Gunn does his best, through gesture, movement, and facial expression, to appear exactly as he is not: unprepared, bemused by the attention, shy of the limelight, and incapable, actually, of taking any of this nonsense seriously. There has been a flattering introduction from Sylvia Brawne, his editor, to which Gunn has listened with his head down and his eyes glued to the floor, as if – Penelope knows – he is hiding chronic blushing. Then the applause, his faux exasperation at the ridiculousness of Sylvia’s hyperbole, and the back-slapped, Christ-how-embarrassing-but-let’s-just-get-it-over-with journey to the stage.