Jestor

Jestor does not know what he is, but he does know what he’s for. He hounds people into identifying their “original sin”—in the sense of unique, personal and non-transferrable—and makes them decide whether or not to do it. Jestor had a strange “birth”, and his incarnation took an unusual form: he has a jester’s cap-and-bells which he cannot remove, and which sports three peculiar baubles: a scrotum; an eye; and an apple. The Eye and Balls are permanent fixtures, with distinct personalities, while the Apple varies depending on who he's visiting. He also has a tail with a vulva at its tip. However doggedly Jestor insists that he is “not a Democracy”, the Appendages have far more power over him than he cares to admit. When we first meet him, it’s the eve of Carnival and he is in the idyllic town of Paraty, on the Rio de Janeiro coast, where he is about to drop in on the architect Zé. Introductions rarely go smoothly with Jestor, but once Zé gets over the initial shock, the pair go on to develop a rapport. Jestor is a multitasker, so he is simultaneously working three other apples: Mac, a non-practicing pedophile; Gamal, a whirling Dervish who is having trouble actually whirling; and Lucy, an elderly widow with a drink and attitude problem. Jestor is an old hat at this, and he quickly finds an approach for each of these very different characters. When he realizes that bullying is not helping with Mac, a Goya specialist, he opts for something more symbolic—with positive results. Gamal, a devout Sufi, is pretty sure Jestor is an evil Djinn, and refuses to engage. But he’s being sexually abused by the director of the Nile Cruiser he performs on, and Jestor needs to get him to abandon ship, literally. Lucy is bitter and self-righteous, and Jestor will ultimately fail to trigger change in her. Lucy's dead husband, who she detested, kept budgies in an aviary in the garden. Since his death he has been returning to visit the birds, which makes her furious. So, one drunken/hungover dawn, she goes into the shed with a nut-cracker and crushes all their little heads. As Jestor knows, original sins can be very banal, even silly—but a whole life goes into making them all the same, and their effects can be devastating. Jestor hates losing, but as Gamal sets off for the Sufi town of Humaithara, and Mac realizes that commitment and care can trump even the strongest desire, Jestor decides that two out of three isn’t bad going into the final quarter. He’s still got Zé, who the Eye and Balls have not been able to decipher at all, and the situation is beginning to remind him of a disastrous experience he had with a young Irish woman back in the 1920s: Maeve. Maeve got up to all sorts, but she did not commit or resolve her sin, so instead of falling, her apple rotted back into Jestor’s hat with all the venom of snakebite. It almost killed him, and he’s afraid Zé might turn out to be a similar case. To make matters worse, there’s a throbbing lump in the back of his head that is throwing him off his game. All in all, despite the carnival bromance, he’s not making progress with with Zé, who has severe OCD, but nothing that speaks to the Apple on his hat. So Jestor rushes things and miscalculates. He tries to take a tougher line with Zé, and it backfires. In a fit of rage the Brazilian does something thousands have tried in vain to do before: he rips the apple from Jestor’s hat and throws it away. And that’s the last he sees of him…until Halloween, when he receives one final visit. A much changed and irate Jestor turns up in Zé’s kitchen with the hat completely eviscerated. His face and hands have also been pecked and scratched to a pulp. A huge raven has hatched out of the back of Jestor’s head and remains attached with an umbilical chord (a “mammalian ignominy” for a bird). Jestor blames Zé and wants revenge, but Zé cuts the bird free and Jestor’s transformation is complete. He fully internalizes the Eye and the Balls and ascends to a higher plane of perception. Jestor spends the night in Zé’s garden, getting the hang of his new eyes and mind, while Zé buries the shredded hat, bringing to a close its long and painful history. The following morning, Jestor explains to Zé that the apple must have been his own all along, and that he—the obstetrician of sin—was the one needing a little midwifery, which the Brazilian provided in his own "original" way.