Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve (16 page)

C
AIN HAD TO LEAVE FOR THE LAND OF NOD.

He said that was what Elokim had ordered him to do.

Adam refused to wait to see him leave. He returned alone to the cave without memories. He had only daughters left, he said. His two sons were dead.

Eve reproached his harshness. With his own hands, to avenge the death of his dog, he had killed a bear that was defending her cub. He knew the irrational rage of losing what he loved.

“May the time you dream of, Eve, the time without cruelty, come to pass.”

“Forgive Cain.”

Adam did not yield. She remembered having once wondered if Elokim had formed him of a slab from a mountain.

Eve stayed with her children in the cave of the drawings.

Cain and Luluwa barely exchanged a word. They prepared the tools and seeds and coverings they would take with them to the east of the Garden of Eden. Cain had discovered those
lands in one of his wanderings. It was green, he said. Even if nothing sown by his hands gave fruit, Luluwa would not be hungry or thirsty.

Aklia had not spoken since the death of Abel. Curled up in the hollow of a rock, in the dark depths of the cave, she did not answer Eve's calls. When Eve went near her, she saw Aklia's sweet, terrified eyes. Her speech forgotten, Aklia also seemed to have lost reason and conscience in order to surrender herself with no misgivings to live as a simian. Eve watched Aklia closely. She barely slept, afraid that her daughter would go off with the troop of monkeys that prowled around the cave at night.

One morning, Eve observed Cain and Luluwa washing in the stream, preparing to set off for the uncertainty of their vagabond lives. She saw Cain's hands and felt as if she were again touching the deep wound in Abel's head. Without ceasing to love him, she wanted difficulties for him that would force him to humility and shame. She possessed the terrible knowledge of her son's being; she knew the precise instant in which his branches twisted and his roots thirsted, never to be watered. She understood the origins but did not come to an understanding of the violence. That violence, especially. The violence that made him capable of killing his brother.

Luluwa sobbed when she bid Aklia good-bye, but her younger sister merely looked at her. Aklia lifted her arms, not to embrace Luluwa, but to touch her own head; her brilliant, tearless eyes fixed on her sibling with curiosity. Luluwa did not weep when she said good-bye to Eve. She was proud, reluctant to admit fragility. She protected herself behind her beauty,
but, more than anything, she loved Cain and did not want to show any fissure between them in front of her mother.

Eve watched the blurred figures of her children growing smaller as they crossed the plain, and she missed Adam. She had hoped he would come.

Pain left her immobilized. Gradually her staring eyes focused on the cave with the walls covered with paintings. She thought of the trail those figures had imprinted on her heart before they existed on stone. Every rough or graceful symbol recaptured for her a part of her past she had wanted to save from oblivion. Because following Abel's death, her whole being was open and unprotected, Eve recapitulated her uncommon existence without falseness or invention. She recognized that despite having been ripped from Paradise, she and Adam had brought much more than memories from it. It kept following them, circling and floating over their lives. They had never lost it. They would not lose it as long as its indelible traces were left drawn inside them.

The Serpent appeared one more time.

Before going back to Adam, Eve took Aklia to know the sea. In only a few days, her daughter's hair had again covered her cheeks. The skin of her hands and her long, delicate feet had hardened, turning a dark tone. She seemed determined to let the night inhabit her. She walked holding Eve's hand, docile and awkward, bereft of words. At times along the way, she dropped Eve's hand and ran on her own, putting part of her weight on her arms. She was dazzled by the sea. Happy, she leaped about over the sand and covered her eyes with her arm to shield them from its splendor. Eve let her play, and threw shells for her to pick up.

Eve sat down on the rock on which she'd dreamed she had seen a woman clothed in feathers, whose face had turned into her own. She heard the voice of the Serpent before seeing her.

“Look at little Aklia. The past and the future are running with her along the beach.”

“What do you mean?”

“She has returned to innocence, Eve, an innocence preceding the Garden, the antecedent to the Garden. History has jumped from you to her now, and a long, slow time is about to begin.”

“I don't know if I believe you. Why Aklia? Why not Cain and Luluwa? Why not Adam and me?”

“We have all fulfilled our designs, Eve. Just as you have drawn the codes of your past on the walls of the cave, Elokim has drawn on us the symbols with which humanity will come to know itself.”

“And Aklia?”

“Aklia is Elokim's reality. We are his dreams.”

“You said that in the beginning was the end.”

“The end for Aklia's descendants will be to reach the beginning. To recognize it as the persistent memory of what they thought they would find in making and destroying their own history.”

“They will return to the Garden? And then what? Will they wonder what there is beyond it? Will they be bored?”

“Perhaps not. They will not suffer the blindness of innocence, the desire to know. They will not need to taste the forbidden fruit to know Good and Evil. They will have it in them. They will know that the only real Paradise will be the one in which they possess freedom and knowledge.”

“Do you think they will ever be truly free? Do you think that Elokim will allow them that?”

“Existence is a game to Elokim. If your species finds harmony, Elokim will move on. I believe that secretly he wants to be granted the gift of forgetfulness so he can be freed from the solitude of his power. With that he will be able to go on to construct other universes.”

“Will you go with him?”

“I will if your species succeeds in understanding the signs. I will go if it happens that he and I do not end up as victims of our own creations.”

Eve looked at the Serpent with sadness. As she watched, the skin of scales became covered with white feathers, and the flat face grew finer. Within a few seconds the soft, brilliant plumage covered the Serpent completely. Again, as in her old dream, Eve saw her face reflected in that of the creature, instants before the Serpent dissolved forever.

Eve called to Aklia. She took her hand and began the walk back to the cave. They left the scent of the sea behind. They crossed gentle hills. They spent the night embraced beneath a ledge of rocks. At dawn they descended to the thick vegetation in which Eve had been lost long ago. The gold of autumn illuminated the foliage of the oaks. Eve held Alika's hand tight. Restless, Aklia looked toward the treetops. She made little leaps. She scratched her head.

Eve saw the troop of large, graceful monkeys swinging through the branches. Her eyes grew moist. How much I have lost! she thought.

Aklia released Eve's hand. Before she let her go, Eve bent down and hugged Aklia to her heart. “Remember me, Aklia,” she
said. “Remember everything you have lived. Someday you will speak again. Go now. Run, daughter, run and recover Paradise!”

Eve walked on alone. A light drizzle began to fall over the world. And then came the rain.

Managua–La Finca–Santa Monica
2007

Jacket design by Jason Ramirez

Jacket painting: Eve, by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY