Authors: José Saramago
Cain
Cain
Jos
é
Saramago
Copyright © 2009 by Jose Saramago & Editorial Caminho,
SA, Lisbon,
by arrangement with Literarische Agentur Mertin, Inh. Nicole
Witt e.K.,
Frankfurt am Main, Germany
English translation copyright © 2011 by Margaret Jull Costa
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
First published with the title
Caim
in 2009
by Editorial Caminho, SA, Lisbon
First published in Great Britain in 2011
by Harvill Secker Random House
CIP data TK
Printed in the United States of America
000 10
987654321
This publication was assisted by a grant from the
Direc
ç
á
o-Geral do Livro e das Bibliotecas / Portugal
For Pilar, of course
By faith Abel offered unto God a
more excellent sacrifice
than Cain, by which he obtained
witness that he was
righteous, God testifying of his
gifts: and by it he being
dead yet speaketh.
Hebrews 11:4
Book of Nonsense
Table of Contents
Translator's
Acknowledgements
. 19
When
the lord, also known as god, realised that adam and
eve, although
perfect in every outward aspect, could not
utter a word or make even the
most primitive of sounds,
he must have felt annoyed with
himself, for there was no
one else in the garden of eden
whom he could blame for
this grave oversight, after all,
the other animals, who were,
like the two humans, the product
of his divine command,
already had a voice of their own,
be it a bellow, a roar, a
croak, a chirp, a whistle or a
cackle. In an access of rage,
surprising in someone who could
have solved any problem
simply by issuing another quick
fiat, he rushed over to adam
and eve and unceremoniously, no
half-measures, stuck his
tongue down the throats of first
one and then the other.
From the texts which, over the
centuries, have provided a
somewhat random record of those
remote times, be it of
events that might, at some future
date, be awarded canonical status and others deemed to be the fruit of
apocryphal
and
irredeemably heretical imaginations, it is not at all clear
what kind of
tongue was being referred to here, whether the
moist, flexible muscle that moves
around in the buccal cavity
and occasionally outside it too,
or the gift of speech, also
known
as language, that the lord had so regrettably forgotten
to give them
and about which we know nothing, since not
a trace of it remains, not even a
heart engraved on the bark
of a tree, accompanied by some
sentimental message, something along the lines of I love eve. It's likely that
the lord's
violent
assault on his offspring's silent tongues had another
motive, namely,
given that, in principle, you can't have one
without the other, that of
putting them in contact with the
deepest depths of their physical
being, the so-called perturbations of the inner self, so that, in future, they
could, with
some
authority, speak of those dark and labyrinthine
disquiets out of whose window,
the mouth, they were already
peering. Well, anything is
possible. With the praiseworthy
scrupulousness of any skilled
craftsman, making up with
due humility for his earlier
negligence, the lord wanted to
make sure that his mistake had
been corrected, and so he
asked adam, What's your name, and
the man replied, I'm
adam,
your first-born. Then the creator turned to the
woman, And what is your name, I'm
Eve, the first lady, she
replied rather unnecessarily,
since there was no other. The
lord was satisfied and bade
farewell with a fatherly See you
later, then, and went about his
business. And, for the first
time, adam said to eve, Let's go
to bed.
Seth,
their third child, will only come into the world one
hundred and
thirty years later, not because his mother's
womb required that amount of time
to complete the fabrication of a new descendant, but because the gonads of
father
and
mother, the testes and ovaries respectively, had taken
more than a
century to mature and to develop sufficient
generative power. It must be
pointed out to our more impatient readers, first, that the fiat was given once
and once
only,
second, that men and women are not sausage machines,
and, third,
that hormones are very complicated things, they
can't just be produced from one
day to the next, nor can
they be found in pharmacies or
supermarkets, you have to
let matters take their course.
Before seth came into the world,
cain had already arrived,
followed, shortly afterwards, by
abel. By the way, one must not
underestimate the intense
boredom of all those years spent
without neighbours,
without
distractions, without some small child crawling
about between kitchen and living
room, with no other visitors but the lord, and even his visits were few and
very brief,
interspersed
by long intervals of absence, ten, fifteen, twenty,
fifty years,
so we can easily imagine that the sole occupants
of that earthly paradise must
have felt like poor orphans
abandoned in the forest of the universe,
not that they would
have
been able to explain what the words orphan and abandoned meant. It's true that
every now and then, although
again not with any great
frequency, adam would say to eve,
Let's go to bed, but their
conjugal routine, aggravated, in
their case, due to inexperience,
by the complete lack of alternative positions to adopt, proved to be as
destructive as an
invasion
of woodworm to a roof beam. You hardly notice
anything from the outside, just a
little dust here and there
falling from tiny holes, but,
inside, it's quite a different matter,
and the collapse of something
that had seemed so sturdy
will not be long in coming. In
such situations, there are
those who say that a child can
have an enlivening effect, if
not on the libido, which is the
work of chemicals far more
complex than merely learning how
to change a nappy, then
at least on feelings, which, you
must admit, is no small gain.
As for the lord and his sporadic
visits, the first was to see
if adam and eve had had any
problems setting up house,
the second to find out what
benefits they had gleaned from
their experience of country life
and the third to warn them
that he would not be back for a
while, because he had to
do the rounds of the other
paradises that exist in the heavens.
Indeed, he would not appear again
until much later, on a
date that has not been recorded,
in order to expel the
unhappy couple from the garden of
eden for the heinous
crime
of having eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
This episode, which gave rise to the
first definition of a hitherto
unknown concept, original sin,
has never been satisfactorily
explained. Firstly, even the most
rudimentary of intelligences
would have no difficulty in
grasping that being properly
informed about something is
always preferable to being
ignorant, especially in such delicate matters as good and evil, which could
put anyone at
risk,
quite unwittingly, of being consigned to eternal damnation in a hell that had
not yet been invented. Secondly, the
lord showed a lamentable lack of
foresight, because if he
really didn't want them to eat
that fruit, it would have been
easy enough simply not to have
planted the tree or to have
put it somewhere else or
surrounded it with barbed wire.
Thirdly, it wasn't because they
had disobeyed god's instructions that adam and eve discovered they were naked.
They
were
already stark naked when they went to bed, and if the
lord had
never noticed such an evident lack of modesty,
the fault must lie with a
father's blindness, an apparently
incurable infliction that
prevents us from seeing that our
children are, after all, neither
better nor worse than all the
others.
A
point of order. Before we continue with this instructive
and definitive
history of cain, undertaken with unprecedented boldness, it might be advisable
to introduce some
clarity
into the chronology of events. So, let us begin by
clearing up certain malicious
doubts about adam's ability
to make a child when he was one
hundred and thirty years
old. At first sight, if we stick
to the fertility indices of modern
times, no, he clearly wouldn't,
but during the world's infancy,
those same one hundred and thirty
years would have represented a vigorous adolescence that not even the most
precocious of casanovas would have sneered at. It is, moreover,
worth
remembering that adam lived until he was nine
hundred and thirty years old,
thus narrowly missing being
drowned in the great flood, for
he died when lamech was
still alive, lamech being the
father of noah, the future builder
of the ark. He would, therefore,
have had the time and leisure
to make all the children he did
make and many more if he
had so wished. As we said
earlier, adam's second child, born
after cain, was abel, a handsome,
fair-haired boy, who, having
been the object of the best
proofs of the lord's esteem, met
a very sticky end indeed. The
third child, as we also said,
was called seth, but he will not
form part of this narrative,
which we are writing step by step
with all the meticulous-
ness of a historian, and so we'll
leave him here, just a name
and nothing more. There are those
who say that the idea of
creating a religion was born in
his head, but we have given
abundant attention to such
ticklish matters in the past, with
reprehensible levity, according
to some experts, and in terms
that will doubtless prove
deleterious to us when it comes to
the final judgement at which
everyone will be condemned,
either for doing too much or too
little. We are only interested now in the family of which father adam is the
head,
although
he proved to be a very bad head, and we really
can't put it any other way, since
all it took was for his wife
to offer him the forbidden fruit
of the knowledge of good
and evil and our illogical first
patriarch, after a certain
amount of persuasion, more for
appearance's sake than out
of any real conviction, duly
choked on it, leaving us men
marked for ever by that
irritating piece of apple that will
neither go up nor down. There are
also those who say that
the reason adam didn't manage to
swallow the whole of that
fateful fruit was because the
lord suddenly turned up,
demanding to know what was going
on. Now before we
forget
about it completely or before our continuation of the
story renders
the fact redundant because it comes too late,
we will tell you about the
stealthy, almost clandestine visit
the lord made to the garden of
eden one hot summer night.
As usual, adam and eve were
sleeping, naked, beside each
other, not touching, a deceptively
edifying image of the most
perfect innocence. They did not
wake up, and the lord did
not wake them either. He had gone
there with the intention
of correcting a slight flaw,
which, as he had finally realised,
seriously marred his creations,
and that flaw, can you believe
it, was the lack of a navel. The
pale skin of his babies,
untouched by the gentle sun of
paradise, was too naked, too
vulnerable, and in a way obscene,
if that word existed then.
Quickly, in case they should wake
up, god reached out and
very lightly pressed adam's belly
with the tip of his forefinger, making a rapid circling movement, and there
was a
navel.
The same procedure, carried out on eve, produced
similar results, with the one
important difference that her
navel was much better as regards
design, shape and the
delicacy of its folds. This was
the last time that the lord
looked upon his work and saw that
it was good.