Chapter 12
He didn't have to travel very far to leave behind him the sad present of the land of uz and find himself, instead, surrounded by green mountains and lush valleys flowing with streams of such pure, crystalline water as eye had never seen nor mouth tasted. It could have been the garden of eden of now fond memory, for the passing years had taken with them many a painful recollection. And yet, there was something false and artificial about that dazzling landscape, as if it were a backdrop specially prepared for some purpose quite indecipherable to someone riding a very ordinary donkey and without a michelin guide to hand. Cain rode past a large outcrop of rock that concealed a broad section of the panorama and emerged on the other side at the entrance to another valley, less verdant perhaps, but no less attractive than those seen earlier, and there he saw a wooden construction, which, given the shape of its component parts and the colour of the materials it was made from, looked very like a boat, or, to be more exact, a huge ark whose presence there was all the more intriguing, because a boat, if it was a boat, is usually built near water, and an ark, certainly one of that size, isn't something one would leavein a valley, waiting for who knows what. Curious, cain decided to seek out a reliable source of information, in this case, the people building that enigmatic boat or no less enigmatic ark, either for their own use or under orders from someone else. He made his way with the donkey down to the shipyard, where he greeted those present and tried to strike up a conversation, Beautiful place this, he said, but the reply, as well as being a long time in coming, was given as succinctly as possible, a merely confirmatory, indifferent, impartial, non-committal yes. Cain went on, A grand construction like this is the very last thing any traveller, myself, for example, would expect to come across, but this intentionally flattering hint went unheeded. It was clear that the eight workers, four men and four women, had no desire to fraternise with the intruder and made no attempt to disguise the wall of hostility with which they defended themselves against his advances. Cain decided to stop beating about the bush and come straight to the point, So what are you making, what is it, a boat, an ark, a house, he asked. The oldest member of the group, a tall man, as strong as samson, said only, It's not a house, And it's not an ark either, said cain, because arks always have lids, and if this thing had a lid, no amount of human strength could lift it. The man did not respond and made as if to move away, but cain stopped him at the last moment, If it isn't a house and it isn't an ark, then it must be a boat, he said, Don't answer him, noah, said the older of the four women, the lord will be angry with you if you talk too much. The man nodded and said to cain, We have a lot to do and you're distracting us from our work, please leave us alone and go on your way, adding in a slightly threatening tone, As you can see, there are four strong men here, myself and my sons, Fine, replied cain, it would seem that the old rules of mesopotamian hospitality, which have always been respected in our land, have lost all value for the family of noah. At that precise moment, the lord appeared, with a deafening roll of thunder and accompanying pyrotechnics. He was wearing his work clothes, rather than the usual luxurious vestments that he could always rely on to reduce those whom he wanted to impress to immediate obedience without having to resort to divine dialectic. Noah and his family immediately prostrated themselves on the ground, which was covered in wood shavings, while the lord looked at cain in some surprise and asked, What are you doing here, I haven't seen you since the day you killed your brother, That's where you're wrong, lord, we did see each other, only you didn't recognise me, in abraham's tent by the oaks of mamre, before you destroyed sodom, An excellent piece of work that, clean and efficient, and more importantly, definitive, There's nothing definitive in the world you created, poor job thought he was safe from all misfortunes, but your wager with satan brought him poverty and made of his body a running sore, at least that was how he was when I left the land of uz, Not any more, cain, not any more, his skin has healed completely and his herds and flocks have doubled, now he has fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand asses, And how did he manage that, He bowed to my authority, he recognised that my power is absolute, limitless, that the only person I have to account to is myself, that I never have to concern myself with considerations of a personal nature, and that I am endowed, let me say this to you now, with a conscience so flexible that it agrees with whatever I do, And what about job's children, who died beneath the rubble of a house, A minor detail of little importance, he'll have another ten children, seven boys and three girls, to replace the ten he lost, Just like the animals, Exactly, after all, children are the same as flocks, nothing more. Noah and his family had got up from the ground now and were listening in astonishment to the dialogue between the lord and cain, which resembled that of two old friends meeting again after a long separation. You haven't told me what you came here to do, Oh, nothing special, lord, besides, I didn't come here, I found myself here, Just as you found yourself in sodom and in the land of uz, And at mount sinai, and in jericho, and at the tower of babel and in the land of nod, and at the sacrifice of isaac, You've done a lot of travelling, Indeed, lord, but it was not of my own choosing, I even wondered if these constant changes that have taken me from one present to another, now in the past, now in the future, were not your work too, No, it's nothing to do with me, such primitive skills, such tricks intended to épater le bourgeois, are beyond me, time does not exist for me, So you admit, then, that there is another force in the universe, different from and more powerful than yours, It's possible, but I'm not in the habit of indulging in such idle speculations, one thing is certain, though, you cannot leave this valley, and I would advise you not to try, from now on, each exit will be guarded by two cherubim bearing flaming swords and with orders to kill anyone who approaches, Like the angel you placed at the gates of eden, How do you know about that, My parents often spoke about him. God turned to noah and asked, Have you told this man what the boat is for, No, lord, may my tongue fall from my mouth if I lie, my family are my witnesses, You are a loyal servant, I did well to choose you, Thank you, lord, now, if you don't mind my asking, what should I do with this man, Take him with you on the boat and make him one of your family, that way you will have another man to give your daughters-in-law babies, their husbands won't mind, I hope, They won't, I promise, and I will do my best as well, for old as I am, I'm not so old as to turn up my nose at a good-looking woman. Cain decided to intervene, Would you mind telling me what you're talking about, he asked, and the lord responded as if repeating a speech he had given before and knew by heart, The earth is corrupt and filled with violence, I find in it only corruption, for all its inhabitants have strayed from the path, the wickedness of man is great, every thought and desire incline always and constantly towards evil, I repent ever having created man, for he has grieved me to the heart, the end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them, I will destroy them along with the earth, I have chosen you, noah, to start a new race, which is why I have ordered you to build an ark of gopher wood, and to make rooms in the ark, and to cover it inside and out with pitch, I commanded you to make it three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits in breadth, and thirty cubits high and to make a window for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above, and to set the door of the ark in its side, and to make it with lower, second, and third decks, for I am going to bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which there is the breath of life under heaven, everything that is on the earth will die, but I will establish my covenant with you, noah, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife and your sons' wives with you, and of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you, male and female, be they birds, quadrupeds or other animals, you must also take with you the different kinds of food eaten by each species, and store it up to serve as provisions for you and for them. This was the lord's speech. Then cain said, A vessel of that size and so heavily laden will nev
er float, when the valley begins to flood, no amount of water will be enough to lift the ark off the ground, everyone will drown and the hoped-for salvation will turn out to have been a mousetrap, Not according to my calculations, said the lord, Your calculations are wrong, a boat should be built next to water, not in a valley surrounded by mountains at a vast distance from the sea, normally, when you finish building a boat, you carry it down to the water, and it's the sea itself or the river, if you're by a river, that lifts the boat, you don't seem to realise that the reason a boat floats is because any object partially or wholly submerged in a fluid experiences an upward impulse equal to the weight of the volume of fluid dislodged, it's the archimedes principle, May I give my opinion, lord, asked noah, Speak, said god, who was clearly much put out, Cain is right, lord, if we wait here for the water to lift us, we will all end up drowned and there will be no new human race. Furrowing his brow in thought, 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 m
any 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.
Cain Page 11