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

by Belli, Gioconda

  Adam was contemplating the mysterious lunar outlines of the woman and the curved elevation of the mare’s belly. Animal and woman stared into each other’s eyes; Eve’s long black hair framed her tilted head.

  What do they know that I don’t know? Adam thought. He felt the same reverence he experienced when he saw the Tree of Life for the first time.

  Man and woman held their breath when two small extremities appeared in the sex of the mare. A moment later, after a painful whinny, the mare expelled a tiny foal, perfect, made in her image and likeness. Enclosed in a white, bloody membrane, the miniature horse lay on the weeds. Neither Adam nor Eve dared touch it. An hour passed. The mare broke the foal’s wrapping with her teeth. The little creature made an attempt to stand on its feet. It fell and got up several times before it succeeded. Huffing, the mare, she too standing now, conscientiously began to clean her foal.

  Eve touched her roundness. Air escaped from her lungs with a sigh of relief and amazement. That was how it was, she thought. Adam was right. If the animals could do it, she would do it better.

  CHAPTER 18

  EVE BARELY SLEPT THAT NIGHT, IMAGINING THE TINY offspring the Serpent had announced to her. She laughed quietly, not to wake Adam, thinking how in her early imaginings, and then his, she had populated her inner self with fish, dolphins, and even marine monsters. She encircled her belly with her arms. She thought of her small, moist sex as a fleshy mollusk. She shivered. Maybe everything would have to tear apart. She closed her eyes tight to calm her sudden fearful agitation. The mare had got to her feet after her labor. She would do the same. She refused to think of the pain. She tried to imagine her daughter and her son. Would they be like her and Adam? Or would they be different, as she and Adam were different from Elokim? She rubbed her hand over her taut, round stomach. She waited. She felt the watery movement, the light bumpings. They were there, just as she had been on Adam’s rib. But he would not give birth again. Why her now? Why was she the one who would populate the solitude in which they lived? And living, was that a privilege or a punishment? Why was Elokim making her the accomplice in his creation?

  What will the little ones be like? When will I know them? When will they let themselves be seen? What, exactly, will happen? How will they announce their coming? How will I know the day it will happen? Which of them will come out first? What will come out first, the feet, the hands, the head?

  The next day Eve besieged Adam with questions. What could he tell her? he answered. He could barely grasp in his own imagination what was going to happen. Thinking that their young would come out the way the foal did from the mare triggered an involuntary contraction in his groin. He would rather think that the creatures would appear one morning beside them, just as Eve had appeared beside him. Eve was convinced that it wouldn’t happen that way.

  “It will be with pain. That is what the Serpent told me. Maybe my skin will split apart. Maybe my stomach will break open like an egg. Or maybe they will emerge from my abdomen like flowers.” She was amused to see Adam’s bewilderment.

  Clumsy and heavy, she went outside in the afternoons. In the branches of the fig tree she found the nest of a pair of thrushes and watched them bring back insects and worms in their beaks to feed the scantily feathered chicks. Standing behind a tree on the bank of the river, she watched sheep, bison, goats, and donkeys bring their young to know the water. She thought she could see the herds and swarms of insects increasing in number; she was deafened by the hubbub of life frenetically reproducing itself. Little by little she closed into herself. She kept silent, thinking that she would hear the voice of the beings inside her announcing that their time had come.

  Adam stitched together several rabbit skins, and every night he put them beside Eve in case the little things should appear at her side.

  Not much time passed. It was early morning. Eve got up to urinate, and as she did a flow of water spilled down her legs. She was disturbed. Had she been mistaken and was it after all a sea inside her? She was afraid she might find herself surrounded by fish, but in the shadows that radiated from the light of the fire she did not see a fish, not any marine creature.

  She went back to lie by Adam. She did not wake him until a little later.

  “It hurts, Adam. The way it did when I bled.”

  He was quickly awake. The luminous breath of dawn was visible at the cave entrance. Eve paced back and forth, holding her lower abdomen with both hands.

  “What do we do now?” Adam asked.

  “I am the cave. They will come from there. You have to be on the other side so they won’t drop on the stones of the floor and be hurt.”

  “Do you think they will like living outside the Garden?”

  “I suppose that since they don’t know the Garden, they will never miss it,” she said, without interrupting her pacing.

  “Don’t you think they will remember everything we remember? They are our reflection.”

  “We don’t remember Elokim’s memories.”

  “No.”

  “Only that his memory may have been the voice we’ve heard. Sometimes I think that the impetus we have to do things with our hands comes from him.”

  Eve suddenly panted. She stopped. She bent over.

  “Adam, they’re biting me!”

  Just then, pain filled her completely. Adam helped her down to the stone where they slept, but Eve did not want to be lying down. She slipped to where she could prop her back against some rocks. The pain had lessened.

  “I thought they were eating me.” Eve smiled, bathed in sweat.

  But she thought the same thing a while later, and then again. The pain came and went. “It’s a bit like the sea,” she told Adam. “It moves in waves. Every wave pulls something from me; maybe the son and the daughter are connected to my flesh, and Elokim is using a sharpened stone to get them out.”

  The pain grew stronger. The explanations she had come up with as she tried to understand what was happening to her body came to an end. Instead of reasoning, she began to resist ferociously, gritting her teeth, drawing up, protectively embracing her abdomen, crying and yelling at the top of her lungs. Behind her, patting her head, stroking her hair, Adam was crying and yelling, too. The bats, of which there were now many, woke from their daytime sleep and flew to the highest part of the cave. The tone of the screams, the man’s and the woman’s weeping, swelled in proportion to the increasing pressure of the clenched fist Eve feared would end by crushing her. Her cries were far-reaching, unrestrained sounds repeated by the cave and sent out to the world through the opening that served as a skylight. Adam’s were hoarse, bewildered howls of impotence and rage. Every part of his body was filled with the woman’s pain. He wept inconsolably as he watched her suffer.

  The wind carried Adam’s and Eve’s cries to the great plain, where animals were grazing, spread them through the mountains, lowered them onto the river. Golden and feline beasts, horses, foxes, rabbits, the bear, the lizard, the partridge, cows, goats, the buffalo of the plain, the monkeys; animals of every species and size began to follow the lament as if it were a summons. Clouds of dust rose beneath the hooves of the horses, the swift paws of the tigers, the bears and bison, as if the wordless sound had penetrated the forgetfulness that had possessed them when they left the Garden. Falcons, eagles, doves, blackbirds, woodpeckers, and bluebirds were the first to enter and light on rocks projecting from the walls of the cave, now covered with Eve’s drawings. Little by little, all through that day crisscrossed with laments, large quadrupeds, the donkeys, the coyotes, the wolves came in silently. Adam had a moment of panic when he saw tigers, boars, and leopards cross the threshold of the cave. His yells turned into moans of surprise and sobs of relief and awe when he saw horses, goats, and deer file in one after the other; hunter and prey suddenly free of the hunger and the instinct that made them enemies. Leaning against the stone, sunk in her pain, with her head between her knees, rocking back and forth, Eve sensed them before she saw them; she felt enveloped in a warm
breath, in a dense, gentle air that softened the space that surrounded and sustained her. She looked up and saw the animals pressing close in a tight circle around her with an air of reconciliation and recognition, as if nature had suddenly regressed to the time that had no surprises or death, when they had all shared the freshness and the while petals of Paradise.

  A horse nudged Adam’s shoulder with its muzzle, and an ocelot licked Eve’s face. In all the time since Elokim had ejected them from the Garden, Eve had not felt so fully accompanied. The solid bodies of the animals, their gentle expressions, made her feel nostalgic for her own innocence. She sobbed with a strangely happy sadness. She became aware of how much she had missed the quiet simplicity of the beasts. She felt such profound gratitude and tenderness to think that her pain had moved them so that she let go of everything that was holding her back. In that emptying, she relaxed the muscles with which, by trapping his creatures in her belly, she had defiantly refused to share Elokim’s creation. Surrounded by the animals, looking into Adam’s expression of awe and wonderment, she made a supreme effort, and screamed with all her might; and it was thus that the first woman brought forth her children to live upon the Earth.

  CHAPTER 19

  AN ENORMOUS YELLOW MOON WAS FLOATED HIGH in the night. Adam cut his daughter’s and his son’s umbilical cords. The eagle and the falcon carried off one of the placentas; the other was eaten by a small tiger and a nanny goat. The scent of blood shattered the quiet. Low growls followed, and the most vulnerable animals hastily scurried away. The fiercest slunk from the cave, dazed, with the stunned expression of having been wakened from a dream, not knowing where they were. In the cave the only animals left were the dog, the cat, and the bats hanging upside down overhead.

  Adam and Eve wept as they watched the animals leave. They continued to weep, unable to control their tears, a noiseless, unending stream, the overflow of accumulated emotions. They were never to forget that rare and ineffable event.

  At last they came back to reality. Adam watched Eve fall in and out of sleep. She was having trouble resting. Her wish to closely inspect the tiny, naked little bodies that Adam had laid beside her kept her awake. He was looking at them, too, but was unable to concentrate. He was thinking about the animals. My animals, he kept telling himself. My animals came back. How lonely I have been without them! They are mine, but they came for her, for that pain I was not allowed to share.

  The tiny beings moved their hands, their feet. From time to time they started, as if they were having nightmares. They opened their eyes a bit and closed them again. Adam lay down beside the skin where the little ones were. At last, Eve went to sleep. He tucked his toes between hers and he too fell asleep.

  Eve woke many times during the night. She had stopped crying. Her body hurt, but the pain was tolerable, mild. How I yelled, she thought. Everything I didn’t know how to say I shouted to the air. She regretted that it had occurred to her to block the twins’ way out when she was furious about the pain Elokim had arranged for her. Only the arrival of the animals had managed to dissolve her rancor and washed it away from her heart.

  It was early morning when Adam opened his eyes. Eve smiled at him. The man and the woman looked at the son and the daughter.

  “They are different from us,” said Adam. “I doubt they can walk.”

  “Maybe in a few days,” said Eve. “The foal did.”

  “And what will they eat?”

  Eve looked at their faces. She leaned closer. She looked inside their mouths.

  “Adam, they have no teeth!”

  “The foal and the calf are eating from their mother’s teats.”

  Eve touched her breasts. They hurt. They were large, and swollen. She lay back and closed her eyes. What did Adam expect? That her body not only make the offspring but also feed them? She was so tired. Her time had already come and passed. Now she wanted to sleep for days, regain her strength, feel that her body belonged to her again. The little ones began to cry. Their wailing pierced her skin, as if it were inside of her. She lay still, with her eyes closed. It was a sad sound, frail, helpless.

  “They’re hungry, Eve,” Adam said. “Give them whatever that is that comes from your breasts.”

  “Why don’t you do it, Adam? You have nipples, too.”

  Adam looked at her, not knowing what to think. He picked up one of the twins. Eve watched as the little thing searched for its father’s breast. She got up. It hurt to walk but she went outside the cave to escape the wailing. Adam called her. “Eve, Eve, where are you going?” but she didn’t answer, and she didn’t turn back. She wanted to sleep, rest. She sank down beneath the shade of one of the fig trees. She rested her back against the trunk of the tree. She could barely hear the wailing of the twins. She closed her eyes. Straight overhead, from the center of the sky, the sun was illuminating a blue springtime. Her consciousness wound into a black ball and rolled toward the quiet of sleep

  “This isn’t the time for sleep, Eve; wake up.”

  She felt the cold body of the Serpent brush her arm. When she was able to pull herself out of the heavy sleep in which she had taken refuge, she was quickly alert. She saw the reptile’s tail coiled around a low branch, her head floating in the air close by.

  “You had to wake me up.”

  “I couldn’t miss this event. You have made a man and a woman for Elokim.”

  “It hurt a lot.”

  “Have you noticed that animals walk on four feet?”

  “You drag yourself along.”

  “Leave me out of this for the moment. You do not have the large body of a mare or a cow. You walk upright. That is why the young of your species will be born small and helpless. You will have to give them food, take care of them until they’re grown.”

  “And you, like Adam, are going to tell me that I have to give them what comes out of my breasts.”

  “When he took you two from the Garden, Elokim reversed the direction of time. In the Garden you were eternal. You would never have had children. It wasn’t necessary for you to reproduce, since you would never have died. Now reality must be re-created. Creation must return to the point where it can begin again.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your children, Eve, your children will return time to its beginnings. You must feed them.”

  “My children will know hunger and thirst, and what about knowledge? Will they dream? Have imagination?”

  “They are your reflection.”

  “If I was eternal and perfect, then why was I was consumed in the Garden by the desire to know? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “You are very perceptive,” the Serpent said with irony. “Eternity does not require knowledge. For life and survival, that knowledge becomes indispensable. Questions must be answered. Yet in the absence of uncertainty, fear, knowledge becomes irrelevant. If one is happy, if one lacks for nothing, why is knowledge necessary? Abundance is permanent. But perhaps you were nostalgic.”

  “Nostalgic? I didn’t know any other life. It was you who told me there was another way to live.”

  “It’s possible to feel nostalgia for what one has never lived. Maybe Elokim instilled nostalgia in you so you would eat the fruit.”

  “I no longer know what I think. I don’t understand why he did it.”

  “He gets bored, I told you. Imagine how entertaining it can be to create a creature in your image and likeness, give it nothing except knowledge, give it a world, and then wait to see if it is capable of returning to the perfect point of departure.”

  “And you were his accomplice?”

  “I was not aware of things I know now. He has explained them since to mortify me. I have also been punished. He has made me regress farther than you and Adam. Look how I have to crawl. Future generations will blame you, but as your descendents acquire more knowledge, you will regain your prestige. In contrast, no one will be the advocate for a pitiful serpent. I will be made the incarnation of evil.”

  “I’m sorry,” said
Eve.

  “I thought that it wouldn’t be long before Elokim took me out of this ridiculous disguise, but his rage has not yet ebbed.”

  “It could be that he suffers more than we imagine.”

  “He knows too much. Knowledge and suffering are inseparable. I should be going,” she said, sliding down the trunk of the tree. “You go and tend to your young. Yield to your animal instinct. No one is better equipped than you to do it,” she muttered sarcastically, disappearing into the undergrowth.

  On the way back to the cave, Eve heard the twins yelling so loudly that she thought she would find them already grown. She walked faster. When she got there, Adam held one of them up, listless, its head lolling.

  “Let me try,” said Eve. She held it in the crook of her arm. It was the girl child. Eyes closed, her face bright red, she was screaming at the top of her lungs. As soon as the heat of the little body burrowed against her side, the milk in Eve’s breasts flowed like water from a spring. Stunned, she took the child’s head and guided the tiny mouth to her nipple.

  “Give me the other one, Adam. Be careful. Put your hand beneath its head.”

  Eve sat down on the rock. The girl sucked ravenously. Tickles ran down Eve’s spine. Adam laid the boy child in her other arm. He squatted behind Eve so that she could lean against his legs. At last there was silence. Adam drew a breath of relief.

  “I met the Serpent out there. She says our children will be helpless. We will have to care for them until they are grown,” she murmured.

  “A long time?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “It’s strange,” said Adam. “You’re doing what animals do, but you’re not at all like them.”