Interview with the Retired Devil

On a moonless night an invitation sealed with a mark of fire leads the narrator to the last house on a forgotten street at the edge of the city, where an old man beside a dying fireplace introduces himself as the Devil, with no horns and no flames in his eyes, only the weariness of a retired employee. Asked whether he still runs the world from behind the curtain, he laughs and says that humans have surpassed him: they build machines and then fear them, create idols and worship them, write lies and believe them, and have turned the illusions he once sold in narrow alleys into a global industry. At a window over a city of glittering towers he grants that it holds more technology, wealth and knowledge than ancient empires dreamed of, and still humanity has not learned to disagree without hatred or to win without humiliating the defeated. The room widens into a hall whose walls fill with the faces of kings, philosophers, warriors, migrants and the hungry, and the Devil says that nothing remains of their palaces, armies and wealth beyond the justice, mercy and truth they left behind. The book ends with his question to the narrator: humans have long asked whether the Devil exists, and almost no one asks whether conscience still exists.