Rustico and Alibech's Relationship under Religious Pretense

Rustico and Alibech's Relationship under Religious Pretense is a comic encounter in which a young woman’s sincere search for religious instruction is redirected by a hermit’s sexual desire. Rustico disguises intercourse as service to God, but the deception does not remain under his control: Alibech adopts his invented theology so thoroughly that she becomes its more persistent advocate. Their unequal arrangement ends when Neerbale returns her to Capsa and marries her, while her account of the desert becomes a bawdy saying repeated beyond the city.

The Search for Religious Instruction

Alibech is the young daughter of a wealthy man in Capsa, in Barbary. Though not Christian, she hears Christians praise their faith and service to God, and asks how a person might serve God with the least hindrance. She is about fourteen, and the narrative describes her as simple and moved by a childish fancy rather than a settled, carefully reasoned purpose. After being told that those who leave worldly life for the deserts of Thebais serve God especially well, she sets out secretly, alone, and without telling anyone her intention.

The journey takes several days and considerable effort. At the first hermit’s cell, Alibech asks to be taught how to serve God. The hermit recognizes her youth and beauty, worries that accepting her might expose him to temptation, and directs her to another holy man. That man gives her the same answer. Only when she reaches Rustico, a young hermit whom the story presents as devout and good, does someone agree to receive her. Rustico makes her a small bed of palm-fronds in his cell and tells her to rest there. His hospitality creates the setting for the reversal that follows: the instruction she seeks is replaced by his effort to satisfy his desire.

Rustico’s Religious Pretext

Rustico initially treats the encounter as a test of his own constancy. The test quickly fails. Faced with Alibech’s youth and beauty, he abandons prayer and mortification and considers how to obtain what he wants without appearing to her as a debauched man. By questioning her, he learns that she has never known a man and is as inexperienced as she seems. He then builds a religious explanation calculated for her understanding: the Devil is God’s enemy, and the most acceptable service to God is to put the Devil back into Hell.

The deception depends on treating religious language as a literal guide to physical action. Rustico shows Alibech his erection and identifies it as the Devil, while describing her sexual organs as Hell. He then directs her through their first sexual encounter as if he were teaching her a devotional practice. Alibech accepts his explanation in good faith. When she experiences discomfort, she interprets it within the lesson Rustico has supplied, rather than recognizing that he has used her wish for spiritual service to secure sexual access. His authority as a hermit and teacher gives the disguise its force: he has not merely seduced her, but furnished her with a false account of what their actions mean.

A Lesson Turned Back on Its Teacher

Rustico’s invention changes the balance between them. Alibech comes to find the supposed service pleasurable and concludes that serving God in this way is exceptionally sweet. She begins to return to Rustico and urge him to resume it, speaking as though she were helping him perform a sacred duty. The language he devised to control her now gives her a reason to initiate their encounters. The reversal is comic, but it also makes the deception visible: the young woman adopts the hermit’s story so completely that she acts upon it more insistently than he does.

Her explanations extend the conceit through its repeated imagery. Alibech wonders why the Devil keeps escaping Hell when Hell receives and holds him so willingly. Rustico, meanwhile, grows physically exhausted. He explains that the Devil should be punished only when pride makes him rise, and claims that they have brought him to such a peaceful state that he wishes to be left alone. The story makes the mismatch concrete: Rustico lives on roots and water and lacks the strength to meet Alibech’s continued requests. He says that many Devils would be needed to appease Hell and manages to satisfy her only occasionally. Her complaint that the service is not being performed often enough exposes the practical limits of the theology he invented.

Separation and the Saying’s Afterlife

The arrangement ends through an unrelated catastrophe in Capsa. A fire kills Alibech’s father, along with the other children and members of his household, leaving her heir to his property. Neerbale, a young man who has spent his own wealth in gallantry, hears that she is alive and goes to find her. Before the authorities can claim her father’s estate as property left without an heir, Neerbale takes Alibech back to Capsa and marries her. The return is against her will and greatly pleases Rustico, but it ends the desert relationship by removing Alibech from his company and placing her inheritance within her marriage to Neerbale.

Before Neerbale has slept with her, women ask Alibech what she did in the desert to serve God. She describes the practice she learned from Rustico, using words and gestures to explain it. The women laugh and tell her that the same service can be performed at home, with Neerbale taking Rustico’s place. The private deception thus becomes a public joke and then a common saying in the city, eventually passing across the sea. Rustico’s religious pretext survives, but detached from his authority and recast as a bawdy proverb: the story ends not with spiritual instruction, but with the language of the hermit’s fraud circulating as popular comic wisdom.