Cain (17 page)

the lord considered the matter and finally came to the same
conclusion, all that work to invent a valley that had never
existed before, and for nothing. Then he said, I have a solution,
when the ark is ready, I will send my worker angels
to carry it through the air to the nearest bit of sea, It's
very
heavy, lord, the angels won't be
able to lift it, You don't
know
how strong my angels are, they can lift a mountain
on one finger, fortunately, they're highly disciplined, otherwise
they might easily have organised a plot to depose me,
Like satan, said cain, Yes, like satan, but I've found a way
of keeping him sweet, I give him a victim to amuse himself
with now and then, and that seems to satisfy him, Just as
you did with job, who didn't dare to curse you, but who
carries all the bitterness of the world in his heart, What do
you know of job's heart, Nothing, but I know all about mine
and a little about yours, retorted cain, Oh, I doubt that, we
gods are like bottomless wells, if you lean over us, you
won't
even see your own image reflected
back, Eventually, all
wells
dry up, and your hour will come as well. The lord
did not reply to this, but he looked very hard at cain and
said, That mark on your forehead has grown bigger, it looks
like a black sun rising up above the horizon of your eyes,
Bravo, cried cain, applauding, I had no idea you went in
for poetry, There, you see, you know absolutely nothing
about me. With this aggrieved comment, god departed far
more discreetly than he had arrived, by simply vanishing
into another dimension.

Prompted by a
discussion in which, in the opinion of any
impartial
observer, he had not cut the finest of figures, the
lord decided to change his plan. Destroying humanity wasn't
what you could call an urgent task, the inevitable extinction
of that man-beast could wait another two or three or even
ten centuries, but having made the decision, he felt a kind
of tingling in his fingertips, which was a sign of grave impatience.
He decided, therefore, to mobilise his legion of worker
angels with immediate effect, and instead of just using them
to carry the ark to the sea as he had now decided to do, he
ordered them to help noah's exhausted family whose labours,
as anyone could see, had left them more dead than alive. A
few days later, the angels arrived, in ranks of three, and
set
to work at once. The lord was not
exaggerating when he
boasted
about how strong his angels were, you only had to
see how easily they picked up a thick plank under one arm,
as if it were the evening paper, and carried it, if
necessary,
from one end of the ark to the
other, three hundred cubits
or,
in modern measurements, nearly five hundred feet,
almost the length of an aircraft carrier. The most surprising
thing, though, was the way in which they hammered the
nails into the wood. They didn't use a hammer, they simply
put the nail in place, point downwards, and hit the head
hard with their fist, and the nail would slide easily in, as
if
the extremely hard wood were butter
in summer. Watching
them
plane a plank was even more amazing, they would
simply run the palm of their hand back and forth, without
producing any shavings or even a hint of sawdust, until the
plank was the desired thickness. And if they had to make a
hole for a dowel, they just used their forefinger. It was a
real
experience watching them work. It's
hardly surprising, therefore, that the work advanced with previously
unimaginable
speed, so fast that there was
scarcely time to appreciate the
changes.
During this period, the lord appeared only once.
He asked noah how things were progressing and enquired
as to whether cain was helping the family, oh, indeed he
was, he had already slept with two of the daughters-in-law
and was preparing to sleep with the third. The lord also
asked if he was managing to gather together the animals
who would be travelling with them in the ark, and noah
told him that most had been found and that, as soon as the
ark was finished, they would find those that were still
missing.
This was only a very small part of
the truth. There were
some
animals, the most common ones, kept in a paddock
at the far end of the valley, but they were a tiny fraction
of
those envisaged by the plan set out
by the lord, namely,
every
living thing of all flesh, from the pot-bellied hippopotamus to the most
insignificant of fleas, not forgetting the
even
smaller creatures, all the way down to microorganisms,
who are also flesh. In the same ample, generous interpretation
of the word flesh, there are also those creatures widely
spoken of in certain exclusive, esoteric circles, but whom no
one can claim to have seen. We are referring, for example,
to the unicorn, the phoenix, the hippogryph, the centaur,
the minotaur, the basilisk, the chimera, and that whole
prodigious, composite class of animals with only one
justification for their existence, that of having been
created
by god in a moment of extravagance,
as was the common-
or-garden
donkey, with whom these lands are teeming.
Imagine
the pride, the prestige, the respect noah would gain
in the eyes of the lord if he could persuade just one of
those
animals to enter the ark,
preferably the unicorn, always
supposing
he could find one. The problem with the unicorn
is that there are no females, and so it cannot reproduce via
the normal routes of fecundation and gestation, although,
on second thoughts, perhaps that isn't necessary, after all,
biological continuity isn't everything, it's enough that the
human mind can create and recreate whatever creature it
obscurely believes in. For the remaining tasks, gathering
together the animals and the necessary food supplies, for
example, noah is hoping to be able to rely on the efficient
help of the worker angels, who, all honour to them, continue
to work with praiseworthy enthusiasm. Among themselves,
the angels were happy to acknowledge that life in heaven
was the most boring thing ever invented, with the chorus
of angels constantly proclaiming to the four winds the lord's
greatness, generosity and even his beauty. It's high time
that
these and other angels began to experience
the simple joys
of
ordinary people, it shouldn't always be necessary, in order
to generate a little excitement, to rain down fire on sodom
or to sound their trumpets and bring down the walls of
jericho. In this case, at least from the point of view of the
worker angels, happiness on earth was far superior to that
in heaven, but the lord, of course, being a jealous god, must
never know this, because if he did, such seditious thoughts
would merit the severest of reprisals with no regard for the
perpetrators' angelic status. Thanks to the harmonious
atmosphere that reigned among the people working on the
ark, cain, when the time came, was able to get his donkey
on board, as a stowaway, thus saving him from the general
drowning. It was also thanks to this cordial relationship
that
he became privy to the angels'
doubts and perplexities.
Cain
asked two of the angels, with whom he had established
what, in human terms, would be described as bonds of
camaraderie and friendship, if they really thought that, once
this humanity had been destroyed, the race that followed
would not fall into the same errors, the same temptations,
the same follies and crimes, and they answered, We are mere
angels, we know little about this incomprehensible charade
that you call human nature, but to be perfectly frank, we
don't see how the second experiment will be any more satisfactory
than the first, which ended in the long string of
miseries we see before us now, in short, in our honest
opinion
as angels, and considering all the
evidence, we don't believe
that
human beings deserve life, Do you really believe that
man doesn't deserve to live, asked cain, shocked, That isn't
what we said, what we said, and we repeat, is that given the
behaviour of human beings through the ages, they do not
deserve life, with its many dark sides, in all its beauty,
grandeur and magnificence, replied one of the angels, So
saying one thing is not the same as saying the other, added
the second angel, It may not be the same, but it almost is,
But the difference lies in that almost, and that difference
is
enormous, As far as I know, we men
never ask ourselves
whether
or not we deserve life, said cain, If you had, perhaps
you wouldn't be about to vanish from the face of the earth,
Well, there's no point crying about it now, said cain, giving
voice to the sombre pessimism acquired during his successive
journeys into the horrors of past and future, if the
children who were burned to death in sodom hadn't been
born, they wouldn't have had to scream the screams I heard
while fire and brimstone fell from the heavens on to their
innocent heads, That was their parents' fault, said one of
the angels, There was no reason why the children should
suffer because of that, Your mistake is to assume that guilt
is understood in the same way by god and by men, said one
of the angels, In the case of sodom, the guilt lies with a
god
who was in such a ridiculous hurry
that he didn't want to
waste
time selecting for punishment only those who, in his
eyes, were the evil-doers, besides, where did the strange
idea
come from, that god, simply because
he is god, has the right
to
govern the private lives of his believers, setting up rules,
prohibitions, interdictions and other such nonsense, asked
cain, We don't know, said one of the angels, We're told
almost
nothing about such things, we're
only called in to do the
heavy
work, added the other in a tone of complaint, when
the time comes to lift the boat and carry it to the sea, you
can be quite sure that there will be no seraphim, cherubim,
thrones or archangels around, That doesn't surprise me, cain
started to say, but the words were left hanging in the air,
suspended, while a kind of wind beat in his ears and he
suddenly found himself inside a tent. A naked man was lying
on the ground, and that man was noah who was plunged
in the deepest of drunken sleeps. Another man was having
carnal relations with him, and that man was ham, his
youngest son, who was, in turn, the father of canaan. Ham
saw his father naked, which was an elliptical, rather
discreet
way of describing the embarrassing
or reprehensible thing
that
was actually happening. Worse still was the fact that
the guilty son then went and told shem and japheth, who
were standing outside the tent, but they compassionately
took a blanket and, walking backwards, so that they would
not see their father's nakedness, covered him over. When
noah wakes up and realises the shame ham has brought on
him, he will let fall upon his son the curse that will harm
all the people of canaan, Cursed be canaan, he will be the
servant of servants to his brothers, and blessed be shem by
the lord god and let canaan be his servant, may god enlarge
japheth and he shall dwell in the tents of shem and let
canaan
be his servant. Cain, however, will
no longer be there, the
same
gust of wind brought him back to the door of the ark
just as noah and his son ham were approaching with the
latest news, We leave tomorrow, they said, the animals are
all in the ark, the foodstuffs are safely stowed, we can
weigh
anchor.