The Narrator Imprisons and Tortures the Man Summoned by Magic

The narrator’s decision to imprison the man begins with a hidden spellbook and an experiment she expects to fail. What starts as curiosity becomes a sustained effort to use the book’s spells, with the summoned man held inside a chalk circle as she pursues them.

Discovery and Summoning

The narrator finds the spellbook behind a shelf in a library. It is not a conventionally bound volume but a bundle of photocopied pages stapled together, without a cover or library barcode. She slips it into her pocket and takes it home. Its instructions invite her to make a wish of the heart, although she is unsure whether she has such a wish.

In her cellar, she draws a chalk circle and combines crushed basil and blackberries with a lock of burned hair and a drop of blood from her thumb. She follows the directions carefully, not because she expects the spell to work but because the discovery of a hidden book of spells seems worth testing. Nothing happens at first. She reads on, considers the other kinds of wishes the book offers, and prepares to leave for a bar; the cellar’s smell of burned hair is one mundane consequence of the failed attempt.

Then a man appears within the circle. Startled, the narrator runs upstairs and falls against the door. Her first response is fear, but after looking at her phone she also feels exhilaration: the apparent impossibility confirms her belief that the world is more interesting than it pretends to be. She puts on a leather jacket, brings knives downstairs, and finds the man still inside the circle, where he remains confined by its boundary.

The man asks her to erase or wash away part of the circle so that he can leave and they can talk. He promises to do what she asks and not hurt her. The narrator refuses, saying she cannot risk releasing someone who might be a demon. Instead, she uses the circle to maintain control and begins testing what the summoned man is and what the book’s instructions will allow.

Testing the Spells and Establishing Control

The narrator begins testing the man and the book through a controlled injury: after asking him to hold out his arm, she cuts him with a knife. He recoils against the circle’s invisible boundary, and the wound proves deeper than she intended. When she later asks for his other arm, she has discovered why the spell she tried first did not work. She had mistaken the book’s title, Desideri del cuore, for the name of its opening spell; the following spell, Wealth, calls for heart’s blood rather than ordinary blood. A small cut she had made on her own thumb while testing it had produced no result, so she concludes that she needs the summoned man’s blood.

She performs the wealth spell in the cellar while the man eats breakfast. No money appears in a miraculous heap, and she is preparing to call the police about an intruder when a call from an unknown number informs her that a distant relative has died and left her everything. The inheritance gives her a new reason to keep working through the spells, while the man remains confined within the chalk circle.

The narrator supplies him with a blanket, a pillow, shorts, a portable toilet, water, and food, but makes his comfort conditional on cooperation. A week after the summoning, he tries to take her knife and pull her into the circle; she has already performed the spell for strength, one day earlier. She then changes how she obtains what the book requires. Rather than continuing to cut his arms, she makes shallow cuts across his back and bandages them afterward. The marks heal into fine silver lines, making the accumulating cost of the spells visible on his body.

The confinement lasts for weeks, and the narrator registers his repeated startle at her presence as a painful response in herself. That distress does not lead her to release him: her explanation that she is treating him as well as she can sits alongside the continued use of his fear and suffering to pursue the book’s instructions. The spellwork has become an escalating exchange in which his involuntary responses supply what she needs, while the circle and her growing strength keep him from leaving.

The Year of Spells and the Final Demand

As the spells continue, the narrator finds it harder each night to obtain the tears the book requires. She pleads with the man and sometimes cries in his place; at one point, she insists that she is doing it for both of them. Her methods and their relationship remain inseparable: on some nights she enters the circle, holds him while he cries, and describes a future in which they will finally be together. The gestures of comfort do not end his confinement; they become part of her promise that his suffering serves a shared future.

After a year, the spells have brought her everything she wants—or thinks she wants—and she invents new desires simply to satisfy them. When she reaches the book’s final page, she gathers the remaining ingredients, including herbs from a farmers’ market and miscellaneous items from a dollar store. She finds the man pale, silent, and lying still, and wonders whether the last spell will erase his silver scars and restore his skin. Her hope of making him new gives way when the spell’s instructions change before her eyes and demand something more from both of them. She laughs at the reversal and reflects that a heart cannot have everything it desires without losing the moral promised by the story.

The change in the spell leads her to act rather than wait: she enters the circle and carries the weakened man out. The balance between them has reversed since his arrival; she now has the strength, while he is nearly weightless. She arranges him on the floor, removes his ragged shirt, and places herself over him with a knife against his chest. Still convinced that the book promises another love who will truly answer her heart’s desire, she urges him not to be afraid. The scene ends at that point, with the final spell’s demand unresolved.

Narrative Perspective and Moral Reversal

The episode is filtered through the narrator’s first-person account, which makes the reader follow her shift from skeptical experimentation to certainty that the spells work. She directly invites readers to imagine the summoned man for themselves, then insists that his appearance answers her desires rather than theirs. That insistence exposes the gap between a seemingly universal wish and the narrator’s private, particular longing. Her admission that she mistook the book’s title for the name of its first spell also makes interpretation part of the plot: she acts on instructions before understanding them, and each correction comes only after the man has become subject to her experiments.

The account’s central reversal lies in the distance between the narrator’s language of shared purpose and the unequal conditions she creates. She imagines a future together while keeping the man confined, and her efforts to comfort him do not restore his freedom. By the final spell, the physical balance has changed, but the promise of a desired love remains the narrator’s interpretation of what the book offers, not an outcome the scene confirms. The closing reassurance therefore leaves the action suspended between a claimed promise and an imminent act of violence, refusing to resolve whether the narrator’s faith in the spell can justify what she is about to do.