A forthright account of St. Drogo’s return
Three Hunting Dogs, by Konrad Witz, circa 1440/1445
You asked me to report about the current state of Spurl Editions. I believe you thought to do this because you believed I would have positive things to say, now that St. Drogo is back, and thus you could communicate positive news to the shareholders. You could issue platitudes like, now that St. Drogo is back at the helm, Spurl Editions is looking forward to its best season yet. And Spurl Editions has put its controversies with the interim editor behind it. St. Drogo is making top-notch acquisitions. Etc. Of course I am an honest person and I will only tell you the truth, which is that the St. Drogo who returned is not the same St. Drogo who left. I was St. Drogo’s apprentice for many years before he went into the desert. He abused me on a regular basis and called me the harshest names. Of course he blamed me for the mishap with the copyright page of Thomas Bernhard’s The Cheap-Eaters. (It is by now well-known that there is a glaring omission on the page; the words printed on acid-free paper are nowhere to be seen.) He told me every day that I would never be anything more than an incompetent apprentice because he personally would never recommend me for another job. No matter what I did, he was unhappy. He was a glum, ugly little man. In his letter of resignation he complained about being kept in a cave and forced to eat the strictest diet, but he couldn’t have lived any other way, as everything made him miserable, even the wood carving of a sea-monk that I made and gave him to decorate his area, which he refused to accept because it would be a distraction to him, so he said. Still, I loved him. If it weren’t for him, I would have had no intellectual job at all. I would have been working at the stables or cobbling shoes, not proofreading literary fiction deep into the early morning hours. He took me under his wing and sustained me. He told me to cut off my family and my friends, to never speak to them again, because he was my family and friends now. And he became all of those things to me. I dedicated myself to him and I never regretted it until he returned.
He has a gruesome little animal with him now. I can only describe it as a cross between a ferret, a rat, a lamb, and a dog. It is skinny, jittery, bald in spots, and has an incredible overbite and bloody gums. He thinks that in this awful creature he has found his symbol, just as St. Jerome has his lion and St. Christopher his little child. But a lion is a beautiful animal, and this hideous thing of St. Drogo’s climbs up his arms and perches on his shoulder, licking the inside of his ear and making horrific semi-sexual whimpering sounds. St. Drogo does not correct the thing and in fact takes the creature everywhere with him. He claims that the creature sustained him while he lived in the desert. He says the creature went out every morning and killed some other animal, surely even more disgusting than it, and brought the carcass back to him, wholly untouched, to St. Drogo’s amazement, and that this was how he survived those many days and nights out there. When the cold set in, the creature would go out and find a place to nestle in, then lead him there. When he became thirsty and, hallucinating, went rambling through the sand dunes, the creature would find him an oasis. He never calls the creature by the same name twice, but always refers to it as some fruit or vegetable; my sweet pea, my little banana, blueberry shortstacks; it is all equally nauseating. And of course, with such a distraction circling him at all times, yawning and gnawing its scabs, St. Drogo hardly works. It is as though he is not responsible for a publishing company at all. Instead I do all the work of responding to the increasingly hateful correspondence we receive. I package our books to be shipped to the nearby villages, although our shipping materials are growing low, as St. Drogo has not arranged for them to be replenished. I man the one book stall we have left by the river, which no one visits anymore because they don’t find my conversation appealing. Now I hear rumors that the board of directors would like to expand my role even more. But unless I am finally given a position with the corporation, I want no more responsibilities. This apprenticeship has gone on long enough, and today all I feel toward St. Drogo is the deepest resentment.