Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve

by Belli, Gioconda

  What would Adam do when he couldn’t find her? What would she do if she couldn’t find her way out of this place? The sounds increased as the light faded. Cicadas and crickets emitted their long, sustained twilight songs. She heard the hoarse croaking of frogs and sensed the awakening of nocturnal butterflies. She might have to spend the night and wait for the following day. If up till now she hadn’t succeeded in making her way out, she couldn’t imagine how she would be able to do so in the darkness. Suddenly she heard a great jabbering and felt a commotion in the tree branches. A band of monkeys made their appearance. They were swinging through the branches, but gradually they settled to devote themselves to the fruit. Eve observed that they weren’t the small monkeys with pale faces and slender, agile bodies she used to see in her explorations with Adam, the ones that had always made her think of spiders, perhaps because of the designs they made as they swung to and fro. These were large animals, with broad backs and arms. She saw their gleaming eyes, looking at her.

  Strange, she thought. She didn’t remember having seen animals like them in the Garden. After a long pause filled with shrieking, the monkeys reached an accord and one by one they came toward her. The most daring came down from the tree and surrounded her, silently. From time to time one of them emitted a sharp, repeated sound. Eve was impressed by their expressive, almost human faces, and the sweetness of the eyes that were looking her over with curiosity. She had never felt looked at in this way by any other animal. One of the male monkeys, the largest, the one with most authority, came nearer. She smiled at it, not knowing what to do. She was more fascinated than afraid, wondering what the animal had in mind. It stood up tall and held out one of its arms and softly, with its large, wrinkled hand, touched the hair that fell around her face. The other monkeys began to leap about and make little shrieks.

  The monkey that had touched her took her hand. It wanted her to climb the tree with it. She said no, shook her head. Had it confused her with one of them? Surprised, Eve tried to communicate with it by signs, indicating that climbing was not her way of moving through the world. She could only walk, and could not find a way to get out of there. The monkey watched her intently. She turned around to show it that she did not have a tail, gesticulating so it would understand that she could not climb trees. After a while, several of the monkeys climbed back up the tree trunk and squatted in the branches. Finally, they all left. It was totally dark in the forest when she realized she was again alone. Later, cuddled against the tree, resigned to the night, she felt that they were throwing figs, and she saw the monkey that had touched her before. It came very close. It jumped about and scratched its head, making little shrieks as if it wanted to tell her something. She watched it start away from the tree, moving between the trees, resting its weight on its arms and legs. It looked at her and waved its arms. She took a while to understand, but she got up and began to follow it.

  IT WAS FAR INTO the night when Eve saw the cave in the moonlight. She found Adam beside the fire. He was hoarse from yelling, from calling her so long. He had looked for her at the river, near the mark left by the Garden, and had only recently come back to the cave, hoping she had returned.

  “I tried to go to the sea. I wanted to see it,” she said. She told him how she had lost her way, her attempts to find her way back, and her encounter with the monkeys.

  “One of them showed me the way. It led me to the edge of the forest. It left me there, as if it had understood me. Do you think it understood me, Adam?”

  “I don’t know, woman,” said Adam, embracing her.

  He slept with his ear on Eve’s belly, clinging to her legs, thinking that the only Paradise he wanted was to be near her like this, listening to the sea that was growing inside her, where it seemed to him he could hear the song of dolphins.

  CHAPTER 16

  EVE WAS AFRAID THAT HER INTERNAL SEA WOULD drown her. The creatures in it were more and more restless; they beat against the walls of her belly and milled about under her ribs. The round moon she had inside her just kept growing. Moving around with the weight she was carrying was more uncomfortable every day. She wondered if at some moment she would come to a standstill, condemned to exist like some grotesque plant that had a memory of being a woman. She did not know what it was that was so agitated inside her, or if this state was temporary or permanent. Her greatest fear was that one day she would vomit up a marine monster, a new species, that would eat her and Adam and then inhabit alone the land where surviving perhaps required more ferocity than they were capable of.

  “I have seen other animals swollen like you, Eve. You aren’t the only one. The goats are like that. I saw a wolf, too. Something will come out of you.”

  “Little rabbits,” Eve laughed. “Only rabbits make more rabbits. Will we multiply, Adam? Is it our reflection that is forming inside me? Sometimes I think that I am filled with water, and that all the fish I’ve eaten will come out to prey on us.”

  “I was never small. Neither were you. Our reflection wouldn’t fit inside you.”

  “There are little rabbits. They grow later. What I have inside is moving.”

  “It must be the white petals, or fish to feed whatever appears when we sleep.”

  “And you, Adam, don’t you feel anything?”

  “I’m worried, Eve. I wonder if one day we will do something other than think of not being hungry or how not to die of the cold. I can’t think of anything else.”

  In the frozen world of winter, Adam found himself forced to forage among the prey left by other animals, competing with vultures for the spoils. Sometimes he was surprised to find whole chunks of meat among the bones. He imagined that the large quadrupeds—the tigers, bears, lions—still held in the silence of their memories the bond he had forged with them in the Garden, and that this was their way of showing him they had not forgotten everything. He was overjoyed with these finds, but he also wept. At the same time he was salivating, thinking about eating, he wailed. He remembered the time when it would have been impossible for him to imagine a world populated by creatures that were a threat to one another and driven to mutual distrust by the necessity of surviving. He wept as he gobbled down food, tearing off meat, moaning from the hunger of days, graceless, humiliated, and at the same time elated to be able to go back to the cave and feed Eve, the cat, and the dog.

  Eve was touched when she saw him return. Hunger had at last brought her to try whatever he found. She asked no questions. She laid the pieces of meat on the fire and ate almost without taking a breath. Often while she chewed, she cursed Elokim. Her heavy body prevented her from going with Adam, and she had to resign herself to going out mornings to collect fallen branches to feed the fire, and during the day to stitching the skins they wore for warmth.

  The solitude, however, suited her well. She didn’t mind being alone as long as she was confident that he would return, and she preferred not to doubt that. Despite the hyenas, Adam was safe. “Don’t be afraid,” she told him, “the hyenas have moved on.” “I’m not afraid,” he told her, “you are the one who hasn’t recovered from that fright.” Eve knew that it was her own fear talking. The encounter with the hyenas had stored in her memory the horror of confirming the end of their complicity with the animals, the need to know anew everything they thought they knew. When Eve was alone in the cave, her sadness sometimes overwhelmed her. Again and again she went over every experience she had lived, and the reasoning that had led her to bite into the fig. The visions, the assurance with which she had believed in the History that supposedly she would inaugurate, filled her with anguish and rage against herself. The landscape sometimes reminded her of the beauty of the Garden, but beauty could not compensate for the pain of injured skin when it bled; it was not as strong as hunger and thirst and cold.

  One day the need to shake off anguish caused her to invent a way to be able to look at it and to set it aside. From then on, she realized that even her sadness had a purpose.

  Eve discovered that with the dry, blackene
d wood from the fire she could draw black lines on the walls of the cave. She began by testing the effect on one of the smoothest walls. As time passed, the first clumsy lines became more fluid. As she tried to transfer images from her memory onto the wall, her arm filled with warmth and her enthusiasm grew. Her hand lost its timidity and flew along, drawing figures with the charcoal. As she drew she experienced a different, inexplicable contentment that had the quality of making her feel less alone. Everything that was hidden within her came out to keep her company. Then she drew other figures: the deer sighted among the trees, the magnificent bison lowering its large head. With the red powder from the rocks she made the sun. She sketched the course of the river and the stones on its banks, and it was as if the murmur of the water were sounding in her ears.

  She also depicted Adam in his explorations. She made him tall, monumental, larger and stronger than any animal he might come across. She drew him crossing through benevolent country, sleeping in the shelter of rocks where nothing menaced him, sure that reality would find a way to resemble her drawings.

  “And I who spent nights afraid that hyenas or coyotes would devour me,” he had said, mocking himself to veil the awe he felt when he saw the images of reality on the wall.

  It wasn’t long, however, before he was aware of the power of the figures. To envision the drawings, to know that Eve would be sketching out his return, comforted him. Every time he came back, he narrated the details of his adventures so that when she drew them, she would live them with him. He marveled as he watched her hand move, as from her fingers flowed lines that, without being a deer or a tiger, seemed to possess the essence of a deer or a tiger. In the firelight, Adam found pleasure in telling her about his forays. Often he yielded to the temptation to add his fantasies to reality. He enjoyed seeing her hanging on his words. It was like taking her with him, and living all of it at her side.

  Toward the end of winter, thin and weak, the man stopped going out from the cave. Day after day all they ate was straw, plants, and insects. Two pairs of bats came to live in the cave. They heard them fly. They watched them sleep, upside down. Eve lost her compulsion to draw. Exhausted from their attempt to survive, they prepared to die.

  “We must not fear death anymore,” she said. “That may be why the animals are happy, Adam, because they don’t fear it.”

  “Maybe we never were eternal. Perhaps we simply weren’t aware that we would die. Maybe that was Paradise,” he said.

  Eve wept. She wept easily now. She thought that weeping would lighten the water in her stomach. Adam embraced her. His arms did not completely reach around her anymore and he was afraid that if he entered her he would be caught by the creature that lived in her belly, but he cuddled her against his chest. Sleeping was a relief. The gray, dull days blended into moonlit nights. The more they slept, the more they wanted to sleep. They barely woke to slake their thirst, urinate, and relieve their bowels. Numb with cold, Adam would look out of the mouth of the cave and wonder if the stars were the luminous sands of a dark sea on the other side of the sky they would finally sink into.

  They were startled from dreams in which they were always dying, tumbling down precipices or failing in their attempt to return to the Garden, by the sound of the downpour they heard through the opening of the cave.

  Eve felt the warm breeze. She opened her eyes. She looked at Adam, sleeping listlessly, with his arm over his face. She touched her belly to be sure that it wasn’t her internal sea that was overflowing. She sat on a stone and watched the water streaming down outside in transparent, shining threads. She shook Adam.

  “It’s raining. It’s raining,” she exclaimed in a tone of celebration. She was sure that now they would not die of the cold.

  They had survived their first winter.

  CHAPTER 17

  ADAM AND EVE BATHED IN THE RAIN. THEY WERE thin. They looked at each other and pointed to their bones. They laughed. The cold water washed away the sandy crust in their eyelashes, the dust, the rancid odor. Eve looked at him and knew that he was thinking the same thing she was, remembering the moment when he knew he had come to be, and also when she woke at his side and they realized they were man and woman. They had never talked about that, but they had a way of looking at each other in which they recognized the presence of that memory. They dried themselves in the sun. They had regained the upright walk and happy gaze of their earliest existence. Adam wondered how many days it might have rained while they dreamed they were dying, because the world was once again green and opulent. As soon as the rain stopped, the clouds were dragged away by the wind, and above them the sky was intensely blue, with the splendor of a sunny day.

  Eve used Adam’s help in getting over puddles the water had left like shining eyes on the earth. Not only had the land recovered from the cold, the branches of the fig tree that had been left blackened by the fire had sprouted new leaves that showed no trace of the damage. The tree was bursting with fat, juicy figs. They cut them and sat down to eat. The fruit had the flavor of their last day in the Garden of Eden, and also of their first intimacy. Adam put aside his ephemeral rancor as he recalled Eve’s delicate, perfect hand holding out the forbidden fruit. Their tenacious nostalgia gave way before their relief at being alive and seeing the colors of the world recover their intensity.

  Adam helped Eve climb a section of mountain from which they looked out over a large number of animals placidly grazing on the grass again growing on the plain. Eve pointed out goats, horses, deer, antelope, sheep. There were identical, but much smaller, creatures beside them, gamboling and nibbling grass.

  “Your time is coming soon.” The Serpent was coiled around the branch of a thorny bush.

  “You!” Eve exclaimed.

  “I slept all winter. A long sleep. A lot of wasted time.”

  “Will the cold come again?”

  “As punctual as hunger, but before that the plants will grow again and it will be very hot. Winter comes after the leaves fall.”

  “What time are you saying will come for me?”

  “You can’t guess?”

  “What will come out of me?”

  “Twins, Eve. Male and female. Son, daughter. That is what your offspring, the ones that will follow you, your descendants, will be called.”

  “Sons, daughters,” Eve repeated.

  “When will they come?” Adam asked.

  “Very soon.”

  “How will that be?”

  “With pain.”

  Eve looked at the Serpent with irritation. More pain? Hadn’t it been enough to see what they had already suffered from hunger and cold?

  “I’m sorry, Eve. I thought I should warn you about it. That is how Elokim arranged it. I do not know why he has a certain affinity for pain. Maybe he would like to feel it. He must think that the pain of the body is easier to bear.”

  “Do you imagine him suffering?”

  “I think that he wouldn’t have created what he doesn’t know.”

  “Maybe he imagined it. Maybe that’s why he can’t gauge the suffering of others.”

  “Don’t get upset. It isn’t good for you. I will go. It wasn’t my intention to ruin your spring.”

  Her long, golden body glided along the ground; she slipped beneath some rocks and disappeared.

  Adam felt like an intruder in Eve’s affliction. Standing beneath the wide, luminous sky, he found it difficult to think about pain. It would be best not to think about that, he told Eve. If the animals had young, there was no reason why it would be more difficult for her.

  “I am not an animal, Adam.”

  “Precisely,” he agreed, conciliatory. “You will do it better than they.”

  Eve did not want to think about pain. They descended from the foothills of the mountain and slowly walked to the river. They wandered along the bank beneath the tender green of new leaves. They sneezed from the invisible pollen floating in the air. Wild yellow, purple, and orange flowers poked their heads up among the grasses. Everything smelled o
f roots, of sated earth, and the air was filled with the sudden flutter of butterfly wings and the sustained song of insects that unexpectedly sprang from the undergrowth. Who understood Elokim? Adam thought. The land to which he had exiled them had a Garden beneath its skin. The so suddenly abundant green filled his eyes with tears.

  Sated with seeing, hearing, and smelling the unfolding of the life they had given up for dead, they started back toward the cave. A sharp moaning sound came from some nearby clumps of brush. Eve parted the branches. On the grass, with her hooves pawing the air, lay a mare twisting with pain. Eve noted that the mare’s belly was as swollen as her own, and that her sex was inflamed.

  “I have to see what she’s doing, Adam. I think her time has come.”

  Cautiously, Eve went closer. She knelt beside her. The mare made some movement as if to get up, but nearly immediately fell back. Eve moved her hands delicately in order not to frighten the mare, and ran her fingers lightly over the surface of the large belly. The stretched, taut skin, mysteriously grainy and mineral, was like hers when it contracted. With her right hand she stroked the mare’s long muzzle. The horse’s eyes were enormous, frightened. Eve kept passing her hand over the distended belly, the muzzle, the hair on the tight cheeks, repeating the sounds she used to soothe Adam.