VIII

Antonym hoped a good night’s sleep would be enough to erase the feeling of delirium brought on by the dinner at Hemistich’s restaurant. But it only made it grow. It hadn’t been a dinner, but a ritual in which he’d unintentionally taken part. Why had Hemistich invited him? To persuade him to swell the ranks of his Christian hedonism? The expression ‘Christian hedonism’, an apparent paradox, had come into his mind because it had been the subject of an interview he’d done some two years earlier with a historian of religion who’d written a book about it. The only reason Antonym had been chosen to interview him was that he’d studied at a Catholic school. The result had been a mess but, luckily for Antonym, no one read the cultural section of the Sunday paper.

From what he could remember, this so-called ‘Christian hedonism’ was based on simple logic: if it is God’s will that all men be happy, and it is natural that men want to satisfy Him, the most logical thing to do is to make the most of the sensorial experiences provided by the Creator. Could Hemistich, therefore, be defined as a Christian hedonist? Antonym decided he couldn’t. This was because both the tenets and the consequences of hedonism, whether Greek or Christian, were moral — and there certainly wasn’t any morality in Hemistich’s deeds, discourse, or sensorial orgies.

In fact, the very idea that Hemistich had become religious struck him as absurd. He remembered that he only used to make reference to God, pretending to believe in Him, to impress those girls who made the sign of the Cross when they passed in front of a church. ‘It’s worth it; they’re the hottest ones,’ the sleaze used to say. As Antonym had already witnessed, Hemistich spoke about religion in a way that sounded highly original to the girls. Between one glass of wine and another, he borrowed from Pascal’s Wager, using the sophism born of the seventeenth-century French philosopher’s fertile imagination. While the lass he wanted to bed looked on questioningly, Hemistich would explain that, in order to rationally prove the existence of God, Blaise Pascal had argued that, from the point of view of mathematical probability, not to mention pragmatism and voluntarism, it didn’t make sense to believe He didn’t exist.

‘The argument goes like this, my dear: if you believe God exists and it turns out to be true, you’ll be rewarded with salvation, glory, eternal life and whatever else. If you believe God exists, but it turns out He doesn’t, you don’t lose anything for having believed. The opposite, however, offers no advantage: if you believe God doesn’t exist and it turns out He does, all you have to look forward to is damnation and misery. If you believe God doesn’t exist and He doesn’t, you don’t lose anything for having been a sceptic. It thus makes more sense to believe in God seeing that, in the best-case scenario, one has everything to gain and, in the worst, won’t suffer because of it. To us, my gorgeous. Cheers.’

The girls who made the sign of the Cross when they passed in front of a church were enchanted by Hemistich Pascal’s words — and started to believe in the existence of his feelings when they had much more to gain by not believing.

No, Hemistich hadn’t changed. He was the same bullshit artist as always, although he claimed the opposite. But what about his friendship with Farfarello? Perhaps ‘friendship’ was too strong a word. Nevertheless, the priest had suggested that Hemistich place the biblical quote over the restaurant door — and there was that line about God creating sin, which Hemistich had uttered as if it were an echo of something he’d heard with his own ears from Farfarello’s mouth … Everything suggested an intimacy that went beyond mere acquaintance. The priest’s spiel about Hegel — the Idea, great men — didn’t fit … Or did it? Antonym had asked Hemistich how he knew Farfarello, but he’d avoided the question. ‘I’m late for an appointment,’ he’d said, quickly excusing himself. It was some coincidence that he’d run into Farfarello shortly before the dinner at the steakhouse. Coincidence … Was it really a coincidence? Now, that would be really silly: believing in Destiny with a capital ‘D.’

Antonym was confused.