Summary

The Minister, hoping to erase any suspicion Ari has about his similarity to the Marlboro Man, once again announces that he is a student of human nature. The Marlboro Man sits quietly, thinking about what the Minister has said, and the Minister is reminded of his time in his village when Elena would tell his children stories about the Devil as a young man. This tendency was a low-class past-time of the people in his village, but the Minister, too, liked hearing the stories that Elena told. "In these tales," the narrator says, "the Devil was never quite an idiot, no, not quite. He was like this fellow to the Minister's left. A good student, very attentive, eager to get on, who nevertheless always learned the wrong lesson" (10). The Marlboro Man interrupts the Minister's reverie by exclaiming that they were so young, basically...