Rustico Deceives Alibech with “Putting the Devil Back into Hell”

Rustico’s deception of Alibech turns the language of religious instruction into a cover for sexual exploitation. A young woman who has gone into the desert seeking to serve God asks Rustico to teach her; he recasts intercourse as a spiritual duty, claiming that it puts the Devil back into Hell. The joke initially depends on Alibech’s innocence, but its balance shifts when she adopts Rustico’s metaphor and begins to demand the supposed service herself. Her eventual return to Capsa through marriage closes the episode with a sharp contrast between the hermit’s religious pretense and the material inheritance that determines her departure from the desert.

The Hermit’s Opportunity and Deception

Alibech has been seeking a teacher who can show her how to serve God. Other holy men direct her onward, and Rustico, a young hermit, receives her into his cell. He means at first to test his constancy, but the sight of her youth and beauty defeats his resolve. Rather than send her away, he considers how to obtain what he desires without appearing to her as a debauched man. Her inexperience becomes the opening for his plan: after questioning her, he understands that she has never known a man and is as simple as she seems.

Rustico builds the deception from religious concepts Alibech accepts in good faith. He first presents the Devil as God’s enemy, then tells her that the most pleasing service to God is to put the Devil back into Hell. When she asks how to do this, he offers his own body as demonstration. The lesson’s force comes not from any actual religious rite but from his control of its vocabulary: he gives a sexual act the appearance of obedience to God, making Alibech’s devotional purpose serve his desire.

The narrative makes the disguise particularly plain by showing how his supposed spiritual discipline gives way. Rustico lays aside prayer and mortification and uses the language of a holy father while arranging the encounter. Alibech accepts his explanation rather than recognizing it as a ruse. The scene thus turns the hermit’s authority into an instrument of manipulation: he is not merely yielding to temptation but actively devising a religious rationale that will make her participate.

The Metaphor Changes Hands

Alibech initially experiences discomfort and interprets it within the instruction Rustico has supplied. She reasons that the Devil must be wicked because his entry into Hell causes pain. Rustico reassures her, and in their first encounter they repeat the act six times before leaving the bed, supposedly to humble the Devil’s pride. The repeated performance makes the invented religious explanation seem, within the comic logic of the tale, like a lesson with rules and stages.

With repetition, however, Alibech’s response changes. She begins to find the practice pleasurable and regards it as a particularly delightful form of service to God. The shift is comic because she still understands her experience through Rustico’s false theology, but it also reverses the original arrangement: she no longer waits passively for his instruction. She comes to him herself, insisting that she has not come to the desert to be idle and urging him to resume their supposed devotional work. Her words return his own metaphor to him, now as a demand.

Alibech even observes that the Devil keeps escaping from Hell, and wonders why he does so when Hell receives and holds him so readily. The image that Rustico had invented to disguise his desire becomes a way for her to describe their repeated encounters. He eventually claims that the Devil need be corrected only when pride makes him troublesome, and that they have now brought him to a quiet state. This explanation temporarily silences her, but it does not remove her desire. When Rustico stops initiating the practice, she tells him that her Hell gives her no peace and asks him to use his Devil to calm it, just as her Hell has helped humble his Devil.

Exhaustion and Reversal

The balance between them changes further because Rustico cannot meet Alibech’s repeated requests. He lives on roots and water and tells her that it would take too many devils to appease Hell, though he will do what he can. He satisfies her only occasionally; from her perspective, these efforts are barely enough. Their exchange keeps the scene’s bawdy metaphor in view while exposing the gap between her appetite and his dwindling capacity. The supposed religious exercise has become a negotiation in which the woman who was first deceived presses the man who devised the deception.

This reversal does not erase the original manipulation. Alibech continues to understand the encounters through a spiritual explanation Rustico deliberately created, while he tries to regulate the practice by changing the terms of that explanation. The comedy therefore depends on two contrary movements: Rustico’s metaphor grants him access to Alibech, then Alibech’s wholehearted acceptance of it turns his own device against his strength. The episode’s language of service and correction is repeatedly undercut by the bodily circumstances it is meant to conceal.

Return to Capsa and the Ending

While Rustico and Alibech are still caught in this dispute, a fire breaks out in Capsa and kills Alibech’s father along with the children and other members of his household. She consequently becomes heir to his property. Neerbale, a young man who has spent all his substance in fine living, hears that she is alive and goes to find her before the authorities can take the estate as the property of a man believed to have died without an heir.

Neerbale brings Alibech back to Capsa against her will, to Rustico’s great satisfaction, and marries her. Through the marriage he succeeds to her father’s ample inheritance. The ending abruptly replaces the desert’s invented spiritual economy with inheritance, court procedure, and marriage: Alibech’s future is redirected by the deaths in her family and by the claim to her property. Rustico is relieved to lose her, while the tale leaves the contrast between his religious disguise and his worldly desire unresolved as a comic exposure of clerical hypocrisy.