Authors: José Saramago
The
following day, adam went with his wife to the garden
of eden. At
her suggestion, they had washed themselves as
best they could in the stream,
although their best was very
little, almost nothing really,
because without the aid of soap,
water can give only an illusion
of cleanliness. They sat down
on the ground and discovered that
the angel azael wasn't one
to beat about the bush, You are
not the only human beings
on earth, he began, Not the only
ones, exclaimed adam,
astonished, Please, don't make me
repeat myself, Who created
those other beings, where are
they, They're everywhere, Did
the lord create them as he created
us, asked eve, That I can't
say, and if you ask the same
question again, our conversation will end right here, and we will each go our
separate
ways,
I to my job of guarding the garden of eden and you
to your cave
and your hunger, In that case, we'll be dead in
no time, said adam, no one has
ever taught me how to do
anything, I can't dig or work the
land because I have no hoe
and no plough, and if I had, I
would have to learn how to
use them and there's no one in
this desert to teach me, we
would be better off as the dust
we came from, with no will
and no desire, You speak like a
book, said the angel, and
adam felt pleased to have spoken
like a book, he who had
never studied. Then eve asked, If
other human beings already
exist, why did the lord make us,
As you know, the ways of
the lord are mysterious, but, as
far as I can make out, you
were an experiment, Us, an
experiment, exclaimed adam,
an experiment to prove what,
Since I do not know for certain,
I cannot tell you, but the lord
must have his reasons for
keeping silent on the matter, We
aren't a matter, we are two
people who don't know how we're
going to survive, said
eve, Wait, I haven't yet
finished, said the angel, Speak then,
and please give us some scrap of
good news, however insignificant, Not far from here is a road occasionally
frequented by
caravans
of traders travelling back and forth to the markets,
and my idea
is that you should light a fire that produces a
lot of smoke, enough to be seen
from a distance, We haven't
anything to light it with, said
eve, You don't, but I do, What,
This burning sword, which will
finally be of some use, I just
need to apply the tip to some dry
thistles and some straw
and you'll have a bonfire that
can be seen not just by a
passing caravan, but even from
the moon itself, although
you must take care not to let the
fire spread, because a
bonfire is one thing and a whole
desert in flames quite
another, it might reach the
garden of eden, and then I'd be
out of a job, And what if no one
comes, asked eve, Oh, they
will, they will, don't you worry
about that, replied azael,
human beings are naturally
curious, they'll want to know
who lit that fire and why, And
then, asked adam, Then it's
up to you, I can't do anything
more, you simply have to
find a way of joining the
caravan, just tell them that you'll
work for your keep, I'm sure that
two pairs of hands in
exchange for a dish of lentils
would be a good deal for all
concerned, both for employer and
employee, but when that
happens, don't forget to put out
the fire, that way I'll know
you've gone, and that, adam, will
be your chance to learn
all the things you don't know. It
was an excellent plan, some
cherubim are a real boon, and
whereas the lord, at least as
regards this experiment, cared
nothing about the future of
his two creations, azael, the
angelic guard charged with
keeping them out of the garden of
eden, welcomed them in
christian fashion, gave them food
and, above all, equipped
them for life with a few precious
practical ideas, a true road
to salvation for the body and,
therefore, the soul. The couple
could not thank him enough, eve
even shed a few tears when
she embraced azael, a display of
affection that greatly
displeased her husband, and later
on, he couldn't help but
ask the question that was
bursting to be asked, Did you give
him something in exchange, What
and to whom, asked eve,
knowing full well what her
husband meant, Who do you
think, to him, azael, said adam,
carefully omitting the first
part of the question, He's an
angel, one of the cherubim,
replied eve, and felt it
unnecessary to say anything more.
Some say that this was the day on
which the battle of the
sexes really began. The first
caravan of traders did not appear
for three weeks. Rather than them
all trudging up to the
cave where adam and eve were
living, they sent an advance
guard of three men who had the
authority to negotiate any
work contracts, they, however,
took pity on the luckless pair
and made room for them on the
donkeys they were riding.
The leader of the caravan would
decide what to do with
them. Despite this uncertainty,
adam, like someone closing
a door as he says goodbye, put
out the fire. When the last
wisp of smoke had disappeared
into the atmosphere, the
angel said, Ah, they've gone,
safe journey.
Life
treated them fairly well. They were accepted into the
caravan
despite their evident lack of labouring skills and were
not required
to give too many explanations about who they
were and where they came from.
They had got lost, they said,
and that, after all, was the
truth of the matter. Apart from the
fact that they were the children
of the lord, the work of his
own divine hands, something which
no one there could
possibly
know, there were no obvious physio-gnomic differences between them and their
providential hosts, you would
even think they belonged to the
same race, black hair, olive
skin, dark eyes, striking
eyebrows. When cain is born, all the
neighbours will be surprised by
the pale rosy complexion
with which he comes into the
world, as if he were the son
of an angel, or an archangel, or
even, perish the thought, the
son of one of the cherubim. They
never lacked for a dish of
lentils, and it was not long
before adam and eve began to
earn a wage, nothing much, a
purely symbolic amount really,
but it nevertheless represented a
start in life. Not only adam,
but eve as well, who had not been
born to be a duchess, were
gradually being initiated into
the mysteries of manual
labour, into operations as simple
as making a slip knot in a rope or as complex as handling a needle without
pricking
your
fingers too often. When the caravan arrived at the settlement from which it
had set out some weeks before, adam
and eve were given a tent and
some mats to sleep on and
it was thanks to that and to
other periods of stability in
their lives that adam could, at
last, learn to dig and delve,
to sow seed in a furrow, and even
to perfect the sublime art
of pruning, which no lord and no
god had thought to invent.
He began to work with the tools
that others lent him, then
slowly acquired his own and,
after only a few years, was
considered by his neighbours to
be a good farmer. The days
spent in the garden of eden and
in the cave in the desert,
the days of thorns and thistles
and muddy streams, faded
from his memory until sometimes
they seemed like gratuitous inventions that had never actually been
experienced
or
even dreamed, but, rather, intuited as if they came from
a life, a
self, a destiny that might have been. Eve, it is true,
kept a
special place in her memory for azael, the angel
who had disobeyed the lord's
instructions in order to save
his creations from death, but
that was their secret, vouchsafed to no one else. Then came the day when adam
could
buy
a piece of land, call it his own and build, at the foot of
a hill, a rough
adobe house, and there his three sons were
born, cain, abel and seth, all of
whom, at some point in
their lives, crawled between
kitchen and living room. And
between the kitchen and the
fields as well, because the two
oldest boys, as soon as they were
big enough, and with all
the ingenuous guile of their few
years, used every pretext,
valid or not, to get their father
to take them with him,
mounted on the family mule, to
wherever he was working.
It became clear early on that
they had very different vocations. While abel preferred the company of sheep
and lambs,
cain's
great joy lay in hoes and pitchforks and scythes, one
was clearly
destined to make his way raising livestock, the
other to forge a path in
agriculture. It has to be said that
the division of labour in the
household could not have been
better, given than it covered the
two most important sectors
of the economy at the time.
Everyone agreed that it was a
family with a future. And so it
would prove, as would shortly
be shown, with the invaluable
help of the lord, of course,
for that is what he is there for.
Ever since they were but
tender infants, cain and abel had
been the best of friends,
to the degree that they did not
even seem like brothers,
where one went, the other followed,
and they did everything
by mutual agreement. Those the
lord loves, he preserves,
said jealous mothers in the
village, and so it seemed. Then
one day, the future decided that
it was about time it put in
an appearance. Abel had his
livestock, cain his fields, and in
accordance with tradition and
religious obligation, they
offered to the lord the first
fruits of their labours, with abel
burning the delicate flesh of a
lamb and cain the products
of the earth, a few ears of wheat
and some seeds. Then something happened that has still not been explained. The
smoke
from
the meat offered by abel rose straight up and vanished
into infinite
space, a sign that the lord accepted the sacrifice
and was well
pleased, but the smoke from cain's vegetables,
nurtured with just as much love,
hardly rose up at all and
dispersed when it was barely a
few feet above the ground,
which meant that the lord had
rejected it out of hand.
Concerned and perplexed, cain
suggested to abel that they
change places, perhaps it was the
wind causing the problem,
but when they did change places,
the result was the same.
It was clear that the lord held
cain in contempt. It was then
that abel revealed his true
nature. Instead of feeling for his
brother in his misfortune and
consoling him, he mocked
him and, as if that were not
enough, began to put on airs,
proclaiming himself, to cain's
astonishment and bafflement,
to be the lord's favourite, the
lord's chosen one. Poor cain
had no alternative but to swallow
the insult and go back to
work. The same scene was repeated
unvaryingly over a whole
week, with one plume of smoke
rising up to the heavens
and one rising only as high as a
man could reach before it
dispersed. And abel always
reacted with the same lack of
compassion, the same disdainful remarks,
the same scorn.
One
day, cain asked his brother to go with him to a nearby
valley where
it was said that a fox had its lair, and there,
with his own hands, he slew him
with the jaw-bone of an
ass that he had previously
hidden, with treacherous intent,
in a bramble patch. At that very
moment, that is, after the
event, the voice of the lord rang
out, indeed, he appeared
to cain in person. Not a word for
years and suddenly there
he was, dressed as he had been
when he drove the two
brothers' unfortunate parents
from the garden of eden. He
was clothed from head to foot in
a richly woven robe, on
his head the triple crown and in
his right hand the sceptre.
Where is your brother, he asked,
and cain responded
with
another question. Am I my brother's keeper, You killed
him, Yes, I
did, but you are the one who is really to blame,
I would have given my life for
him if you had not destroyed
mine, It was a question of
putting you to the test, But why
put to the test the very thing
you yourself created, Because
I am the sovereign lord of all
things, And of all beings you
will say, but not of me and my
freedom, What, the freedom
to kill, Just as you had the
freedom to stop me killing abel,
which was perfectly within your
capabilities, all you had to
do, just for a moment, was to
abandon that pride in your
infallibility that you share with
all the other gods, and, again
just for a moment, to be truly
merciful and accept my
offering with humility, because
you shouldn't have refused
it, you gods, you and all the
others, have a duty to those
you claim to have created, This
is seditious talk, Yes, possibly,
but I can guarantee you that if I
were god, I would repeat
every day Blessed are those who
choose sedition because
theirs is the kingdom of the
earth, That's sacrilege, Maybe,
but no more sacrilegious than you
allowing abel to die, You
were the one who killed him,
True, but you were the one
who pronounced sentence, whereas
I merely carried out the
execution, That blood over there
wasn't spilled by me, you
could have chosen between good
and evil, but you chose
evil and must pay for it, The
person who stays to keep watch
over the guard is just as much a
thief as the one who actually goes into the vineyard, said cain, That blood is
crying
out
for vengeance, insisted god, In that case, you will have
your revenge
both for a real death and for another that did
not take place, Explain yourself,
You won't like what you
hear, Don't worry about that,
speak, It's simple enough, I
killed abel because I couldn't kill
you, so, in intent, you are
dead too, Yes, I see what you
mean, but death is forbidden
for the gods, Oh, I know, but you
gods should still take the
blame for all the crimes
committed in your name or because
of you, God is innocent, it would
be just the same if I didn't
exist, But because I killed
someone, I could now be slain by
anyone who meets me, No, I'll
make an agreement with you,
God make an agreement with a
reprobate, asked cain, unable
to believe what he was hearing,
Let's say it's an agreement
based on our shared
responsibility for abel's death, So you
recognise your share in the
blame, Yes, I do, but don't tell
anyone, it will be a secret
between god and cain, This can't
be true, I must be dreaming, That
often happens with gods,
Is that because your ways are, as
they say, mysterious, asked
cain, No god I know ever said
such a thing, it would never
even occur to us that our ways
are mysterious, no, that was
something invented by men who
presume to know god
intimately,
So I won't be punished for my crime then, asked
cain, My portion of the blame
does not absolve yours, you
will have your punishment, Which
is, You will be a fugitive
and a vagabond upon the earth, In
that case, anyone will
have the right to kill me, No,
because I will put a mark upon
your forehead, and no one will
harm you, but to repay me
for my benevolence, you must try
to do no harm to anyone
else, said the lord, and with the
tip of his index finger he
touched cain's forehead on which
there appeared a small
black mark, That is the mark of
your condemnation, added
the lord, but it is also a sign
that for the whole of your life
you will be subject to my
protection and to my censure too, I will be watching you wherever you are, All
right, I accept,
said
cain, You have no option, When does my punishment
begin, Now, May I say goodbye to
my parents, asked cain,
That's up to you, I don't involve
myself in family matters,
but they will certainly want to
know where abel is and I
don't imagine you're going to
tell them you killed him, No,
No what, No, I won't say goodbye
to my parents, Off you
go, then. There was nothing more
to be said. The lord disappeared before cain had even taken his first step.
Abel's face
was
covered in flies, there were flies on his open eyes, flies
in the
corners of his mouth, flies on the wounds on his
hands which he had held up to
protect himself from the
blows. Poor abel, deceived by
god. The lord had made some
very bad choices when it came to
inaugurating the garden
of eden, in this particular game of
roulette everyone had
lost, in this target practice for
the blind no one had scored.
Of course, eve and adam could
always have another child
to make up for the loss of their
murdered son, but how sad
to be someone with no other goal
in life than to keep making
children without knowing why or
for what purpose. In order
to propagate the species, say
those who believe in a final
objective, in an ultimate reason,
although they have no idea
what those might be and have
never bothered to ask themselves why the species should keep being propagated
as if it