I Am God

by Giacomo Sartori

  It breaks my heart (figure of speech) to see her in this state. Of course I had the bus come right away and made sure she found a seat even though it was crowded. Take it easy, your bike will soon turn up, I wish I could say to her. And little by little all the rest will be resolved too, my sweetheart (my sweetheart!) But no, I’m mute as a fish. I am God, I tell myself. God.

  ‌The Angelic Indian from Paradise

  There’s a knock at the door of the old fishmonger’s, and Daphne, her spirits lower than her shoes, drags herself across to open up, convinced it will be the only person who ever stops by without telephoning first. And in fact, it is an Indian. But he’s younger than the fellow next door, and better looking. Actually, he’s gorgeous: two large coal-black eyes; wavy gleaming dark hair with a petroleum shine; smooth, luminous skin over cheekbones that are expressive but gentle; elegant, almost violet-colored lips that seem to be drawn with a single, very fine stroke of the pen; the whitest teeth, sparkling with saliva; a beautiful neck, beautiful clavicles, beautiful wrists, beautiful hands. I am the cousin of your neighbor, he says, his angel’s hand pressing his chest. She says nothing, overwhelmed by this unexpected masculine annunciation; for a moment she truly thinks she sees something glowing around his head. We need a cable to connect the computer to the printer, would you be able to lend us one? the angel goes on, as if reading her mind, and almost excusing himself. He traces a cable in the air, arms as light as a dancer, or maybe a funambulist, maybe a bit ironic and with a melancholy grace.

  I’m Aryaman, he says, holding out a hand as smooth and cool as a bolt of silk. His smile is the smile of an irresistibly friendly and appealing angel, a secular angel (I put myself in her shoes). Not even his voice seems earthly; it’s as enchanting as a baroque cantata (my comparison this time). Daphne’s mouth hangs open; so much beauty is disturbing, outrageous. She’s certain this apparition hasn’t appeared by chance; he’s the one she’s been waiting for a long time, forever. It’s him. I watch the words pop up in her left cerebral cortex, like huge red letters suddenly appearing on a screen.

  She invites him in, a steadfast smile on her face, euphoric, unmindful of the mess. He, too, seems to pay no attention to the graveyard of dead soda cans and the plates of decomposing leftovers that fill the room. It’s clear his thoughts soar very high, despite two magnificent feet shaped like slender dugouts that are firmly planted on the ground. He sits down on the polystyrene-chip sofa; she asks if he’d like tea, and he, extending his swan’s neck forward, says yes. She fills a pan with water and takes the teapot out of the chest full of crockery. But then, rather than light the burner, she grabs two large tumblers, pours in rum, adds some ice cubes, some liquid cane sugar and a squeeze of lemon. Then some pineapple segments that were in her electric cooler, and some cinnamon. And a mint leaf. She walks toward him, wagging her forefinger in the air to say wait, I had a better idea.

  The angel stares at the tumbler, a very fine line snaking across his faultless, very lofty brow. You might almost think it was the first time he’d ever held a glass of rum in his hand. As if he is wondering how the devil his cherubic body will take to this earthly substance. He sniffs it and drinks a minuscule sip. Excellent, he says (and he means it). He seems delighted to be there, seems to have forgotten all about the printer cable. He gazes at her the way you might some delicious dessert, but his anthracite eyes are also full of admiration, if slightly abashed by his secret appetites.

  My cousin tells me you’re pretty good with the computer, he says in a fluty voice. I understand you can find your way into any network. His delicious, slightly lopsided smile hints at IT skills and connivance. Once I was able to take down a large bank for a couple of hours, he adds, lifting his shoulders. She’s been concentrating on the Vatican site this year, Daphne tells him; it’s one of the most impregnable strongholds there is. It took her an age, but she was finally able to hack into the banking system and she’s also downloaded a bunch of reports from a top-secret investigation of pedophilia. Now she wants to publicize them, but she hasn’t figured out how to go about it yet.

  She doesn’t have a clue why she’s blabbing about such matters to this stranger; she hasn’t even told Aphra about the big flaw she discovered in the Vatican software, or the secret reports. Well, actually she does have a clue; she’s certain that this angel—even atheists are awed by angels—is the soul mate she’s been awaiting for years, forever. She knew it from the minute she saw him, she knew he’d been sent by magic. That’s why her heart is pounding like an African war drum, and at the same time she feels terribly calm, with that peace of mind that accompanies solemn moments and important decisions. She’s finally met the man of her life.

  Daphne looks at him and he looks at her, as when the conversation is about to undergo a change of topic. Instead, and without consulting her brain, she stretches out her long neck in his direction, and he, at the same time, moves his head toward hers. They suddenly find their mouths glued together as if the matter had been decided long ago. Taking possession of those hard, violet lips that taste faintly of bay leaves, she greedily drinks in other hints of incense and deep stellar space; he seems to like the vanilla-and-lightly-oxidized-copper flavor of her tongue. They drink in each other’s breath and exchange saliva. The boyish Indian is very grave; he seems to savor every least sensation with a surgeon’s concentration. It’s almost as if he were touching a woman for the first time.

  After a long appetizer of feverish kissing and touching, Daphne drags him confidently to her bed. He sinks into the fish tank, a kind of rough baptism. In no time they are half naked and she opens her legs for him. The speed of it all rather stuns him, maybe even intimidates; he doesn’t seem quite sure what to do next. However, he takes his courage in two hands and propels it stiffly toward her abdomen. Everything seems to suggest a long amorous skirmish, but then his pelvis suddenly jerks forward and he’s taken by violent shivers. He looks down, shocked, two long furrows lining his brow; he’s devastated, trying to understand. He can’t take it in; he’s terribly embarrassed.

  Daphne, when she understands what’s happened, begins to laugh. The more downcast he looks, the more she laughs uncontrollably. For her, the thing isn’t serious at all, it’s a gas. She wets her hand with his angelic sperm, and still laughing, spreads it on her thighs and belly. With her index finger she paints three lines across her forehead, and dots the lobes of both ears. Now he laughs too, not entirely willingly. She understands it’s better not to make too much of it, and begins to caress his head, his fine, very black hair. She kisses his neck and his lovely neatly shaped Indian nose. Sorry, she whispers between one kiss and another. Afterwards you get another chance, she says. It’s not easy not to laugh, but she’s determined to control herself.

  They begin to kiss and touch each other as before. He’s smiling now, but his breathing is a bit odd, like a dog when it’s terribly thirsty. Or as if he’s had a great fright, or is still fearful of something. She makes every effort to put him at his ease. She’s not worried; she’s known cases like this and they usually resolve themselves in no time at all. She kisses him all over, and touches his private parts very expertly. But he’s terribly awkward. He’s as gorgeous as the sun itself, and his head with its glints of petroleum seems to glow with a halo of purest light. But his body is as tense as a steel cable holding up a suspension bridge. And he’s not smiling anymore. He doesn’t want to look like a fool, but his member is just not getting hard. And he doesn’t think it will get hard later, and the more he thinks about it, the more unlikely it seems it ever will. This is why he feels bad. He’d like to be able to say Stand to attention right now, as a god could. But he is merely a normal human being.

  He’s young, full of energy, he knows he’s very attractive, he wants that girl above all things, but for some reason his member just lies there shriveled up like a punctured football. It doesn’t want to harden, not even a little. This is why he’s so ill at ease, why the cold sweat. He never dreamed something like this co
uld happen. He’d like to be somewhere deep underground, not in that fish tank made into a bed. Daphne tries again to rouse him, she changes position and takes him in her mouth, cupping his testicles in one hand and poking her naughty fingers between his buttocks—a recipe that’s usually infallible. The Hellenic member remains limp, while Aryaman has become a marble statue, his expression a baroque wince of pain. It’s beautiful, like everything about him, but still a mask of suffering. It’s clear he just wants to die. She switches out of sex mode, and draws him close, pats his back and his head to make him understand that it’s nothing serious. Actually, the thing makes her feel even more tender about him. And above all, she loves lying next to that beautiful body as night begins to fall. It makes her happy.

  Soon she’s asleep. It’s a very deep and slightly unnatural sleep: an immersion in the abyss of anesthesia, or a voyage to Hades. When she wakes it’s totally dark outside and there’s no one by her side. She sits up and leans over the edge of the tank to look around, but the Indian isn’t there. The events of the day pass through her mind, but as if they had taken place a long time ago, and the contours are vague. She tries to focus, asking herself how that heavenly young man could have known of her hacking activities, given that she’d never talked to anyone about them, and certainly not her neighbor. That too is very strange. But it was no dream: there’s a large stain on the sheet that’s still not entirely dry. She sniffs it: yep, it’s semen. And there are two empty glasses in front of the sofa. The printer cable is still looped over the back of the chair with the legs sawed off.

  The following afternoon when she returns from the supermarket she stops by her neighbor’s, and as always he receives her with heartrending smiles, patting the palms of his hands together like a man applauding. Her throat caught in a noose, she asks if his cousin is still staying there. He stares at her, blinking his deep-set eyes in their dark orbits; he doesn’t understand. Articulating her words carefully, she explains that she met his cousin the day before; he came by to ask for a printer cable, and she wanted to know if they had solved the problem. He continues to smile very politely, but he still doesn’t understand, if anything he understands less. Your cousin, she says, pointing a finger at him and looking around. I have many cousins, but they are not here, he says, pleased to have finally grasped what she’s saying.

  Okay, but yesterday afternoon your cousin came by to ask me for a printer cable, she says again, arms miming a printer and a cable. She thinks she may be going crazy. Her body seems to be leaving her, it seems to be turning to dry wood. With his usual delicious Hindu politeness, but also very firmly, he repeats that none of his cousins are in the vicinity. Maybe next year my cousin comes, he says, waving a hand to make it clear it’s still not certain. This time he doesn’t smile, he seems unhappy to disappoint her. She apologizes and drags her wooden legs over to the old fishmonger’s, looking around for some proof that yesterday’s otherworldly encounter indeed took place. But she had washed the glasses before going off to the supermarket and cleaned up in the hopes the celestial Indian would return. There are no other signs of his supernatural apparition. She goes to look at the sheet, but the stain is no more. She inspects it inch by inch passing the fabric between her hands, but no stain is to be found. By some strange set of circumstances (set of circumstances!) it disappeared when it dried out. Just evaporated. She hunkers down on the floor and begins to cry, and the blind cat leaps onto her knees, muttering in the furtive but high-strung language of cats that yes, it is a bad, bad moment.

  ‌Exterminate the Thoughts

  I’ve hit rock bottom. It’s language that reduced me to this state, it’s the agitating, incitement-to-riot effect of the written word and the smokescreen of uncontrolled feelings that words belch out, as the fire grows more and more enraged with each bucket of gasoline tossed on it. Every language contains all the folly that humans are capable of; language just spills it from their mouths. It makes no difference whether it’s coming from the oral cavity of a god or of the last clandestine migrant to arrive; the important thing so far as language is concerned is to foment, to befoul, to devastate. You write one sentence and you toss on the first bucket of gasoline, immediately the flames of hyperbole and intolerable grief flare up, and the more you write, the crazier you get, the more you’re convinced you believe what you’ve said, the more you’re on your way to pure madness, to plotting nefarious plots. Whereas if you never think, or worse, write, you won’t have moods or feelings, and you can live blissfully and serenely for billions of years. With no risk of screwing up.

  The problems arise with the very first thought, whatever it is. Because that first damn thought will immediately invite another, which will be: Am I right to think that? Not to mention the third, which will almost certainly contradict the first, without, however, dismissing the second. And the fourth will be Why do I exist? and the fifth, Do I really exist? and the sixth, Am I in love? and so forth and so on, and all the while you’re behaving ever more inappropriately, ever more rashly. Thoughts are infectious, they contaminate actions, they create monsters.

  Millions of human beings would cheat and steal to have even a millionth of my powers and my privileges, I know. They’d think this business (business!) involving the ex-inseminatrix with the purple braids is a non-event, insignificant. Nobody ever died of love! they’d say. He’ll get over it like everyone else gets over it! Of course, they’re all convinced that if they were in my shoes they’d fare better than I. I’m getting mighty tired of this arrogance of theirs. Ever since my supposed son persuaded them I’m a harmless social worker, if not actually an old fool, I’ve had to listen to their sermons.

  Everything would be simpler if I could just take off on a trip, some hike or safari to rest my brain and empty out everything to do with that woman. Or even if I could retire for a while to an isolated galaxy where omniscience and omni-foresight were out of order, like those places where there’s no phone signal. I’d concentrate solely and exclusively on my own affairs. Out of sight, out of mind, as the notorious proverb goes. But there’s no way I can run off somewhere else or look the other way: wherever I turn I see her, wherever I go, she’s there. Not to mention that my memory is perpetually infallible.

  What men have going for them is that they forget; little by little they forget everything. All those broken hearts capable of fastening onto substitute love objects in a flash; all those inconsolable widows who one day start to dance and flirt again. And then of course they die, and that’s the most radical type of oblivion there is. While I never forget and I don’t die. I can fool myself for an instant thinking about something else, but one part of my mammoth brain never lets go of the bone. And anyone who comes up with a better metaphor here, please let me know.*

  * This matter of addressing potential readers, as if anyone really could read this, and requesting their aid—well, I didn’t plan this, I swear.

  It’s easy to vow to do something, harder to get down to business without hesitating or changing one’s mind, even though in my case we’re dealing with metaphysical facts (if I may be permitted an oxymoron). I knew very well what I must not do, knew that I mustn’t allow myself to be tempted, and yet something went awry. The only solution at this point is to close up shop—mental shop I mean, exterminating those thoughts before they see the light of day. So that everything can return to normal. And I’ll recall these events as a terrible tempest, a dreadful Stations of the Cross. Maybe some doctor of theology will draw transcendent lessons from them, or even add them to the sacred texts of some religion, one of those slightly cheeky cults that always seem to be springing up these days.

  ‌The Not Quite Dead

  After a long ecumenical journey involving every known type of public transport, Daphne steps down in a distant village square dominated by a huge edifice as squalid as a seminary. (Yes, I know very well it is a seminary, and I know when it was built, et cetera; I’m just channeling my character’s point of point of view.) She slips into the sterile entry hall
and glances mechanically at several crucifixes. For a moment she’s tempted, although after the trauma with the Minotaur she had vowed to collect no more. (Human beings and their best intentions are not worth the paper they’re written on, as they say.) Then she decides she’d rather get it over with quickly.

  Down a corridor that smells of Catholic soups she passes a stocky nun with the yellow eyes of a panther, a type to be feared, she knows. She knows nuns like the back of her hand; she could draw up a taxonomy with a dichotomous key to distinguish the various species of hypocrisy, perfidy, and sexual frustration.* She tells the sister why she’s there, and the woman immediately drops her Counter-Reformation benevolence and examines her from head to foot, as you do with a shoe that’s stepped in some dog shit. Unable to find any good reason to throw her out, she turns and heads down the corridor at a fearsome pace. After various turns and penitentiary staircases, she knocks on a door and pokes her head in with pious deference, whispering loudly as only Catholics can. From inside, Daphne is invited to enter; the nun seems indignant, scandalized.