I Am God

by Giacomo Sartori

  * If there’s a theological question, just one, on which I’m completely in agreement with my beloved (I allow myself the expression since this is merely a footnote, of the kind usually skipped over), it is this.

  The room has a window facing the river and a hospital bed that cranks up and down. On the bed, there’s a gaunt old man. He’s wearing a perfectly ordinary cotton T-shirt with long sleeves but Daphne can see right off that he’s a priest. She sees it—even without taking note of the various clerical frills on the night table—in his nosy, shrewd eyes, his sunken yet imperious cheeks, the contradictory tension of his shoulders, the ostentatiously devout position of his hands, in everything. A priest with the pinched face of a Protestant, he’s very pale, his skin that porcelain white that shades green in certain rather macabre paintings. His arm is attached to an intravenous line and his nose has tubes in it. He’s clearly very ill; you might say death is written on his face. He’s a dead man with just a pinch, a tiny pinch, of life in him. And a lot of death.

  The not quite dead man has his predatory eye on her and is making small involuntary grimaces of pain, as if even looking at her is an effort beyond his energies. He seems pleased to see her, though. Struck by her appearance, almost frightened, but invigorated. In what is perhaps meant as a gesture of tenderness, he signals to her to sit on a chair beside the bed and with his eyes invites the nun to leave them. The sister goes out, aiming Daphne a look of hate. The unbeliever coughs, embarrassed; she detests priests—especially when they try to act humane.

  With someone in this state, you could at most discuss coffins or questions of inheritance; she should have come sooner if she meant to tell him about her string of bad luck and ask for his help. Even supposing that if he were well he’d be in a position to do something, and would wish to. She can’t think why she listened to that wreck of a human, his brain fried by lysergic contact with the Great Universal Consciousness, the guy who’s never got it right in his life, her stepfather. But now she’s in this crappy situation, and she can’t very well beat an immediate escape. Fine, she’ll stick around for a few minutes. Anyway, she’s too weary to run; it feels like she’s got three bags of cement sitting on her chest; it’s hard to breathe. She needs to get some strength back, and some clarity of mind.

  The moribund priest stares at her without speaking, wheezing like he’s run a mile. He’s revving his engines for his last gasp, she thinks. His voracious gaze never ceases nipping at her, testing her, trying to find out what stuff she’s made of. He’s serious, grave, a man who’s about to buy something way out of proportion to his means and wants to be sure the merchandise on sale is worth the sacrifice. He stares at her for what seems like eternity, there in that monumental priest-factory so unnervingly silent, the good earth all around it nurtured by polluted water and smelling of bovine excrement.

  By now he’s scanned every inch of her body, except, for ballistic reasons, her ankles and her feet. Still, he continues to train those exhausted eyes on her as stubbornly as before. He’s burning up the last specks of life that remain, and he knows it, but he doesn’t lower his eyelids, he doesn’t give up. It’s the strangest thing, though: she’s beginning to find being clutched by that macabre magnet doesn’t bother her so much. No, the more the light from the window facing on the river begins to fade, the more she finds it normal, salutary. It’s almost restful, a relief. Another few minutes and I’m out of here, she says to herself.

  ‌The Pedophile Bishop

  The nun opens the door and sticks her head in. She’s wearing one of those terrible grins meant to terrorize children. It seems she wants to let Daphne know that she has tired the Death Mask enough already. He sends the sister away with a look that says, I’m exhausted but I’m still the boss. The nuisance seems not to notice the gravity of her infraction. As soon as the door shuts he begins to stare at Daphne as if he’s seeing her for the first time. Once again. He seems to want to speak, but he says nothing. As if no words were suitable, or he was unable to choose from among the many presenting themselves. Or maybe simply because he’s too far gone.

  Your mother was an exceptional woman, he finally murmurs, his voice as feeble as a fine cord about to snap. A very pure woman, he says, his consonants furring. Until just a few days before, his diction had been conspicuously clean, but Daphne can’t know that. Hearing him mention her mother, she feels as if an abyss has opened up under her chair; in this upsetting, surreal meeting so like a nightmare, she had completely forgotten that this priest once knew her mother, of whom she herself has but the faintest memories. A very fine person, he murmurs again, rooting around in her eyes with that gaze out of Death’s pocket. Before she knows it, Daphne has begun to cry. The way she does, silently, without moving a muscle.

  You ought to be very proud of her, says the priest, signaling to her, although she doesn’t understand at first, to take the crucifix parked on the night table in her hand. Excellent, he murmurs when she understands and obeys, squeezing the end of the cross between thumb and index finger. He looks as if he wants to add some crucial further information, but instead his weary eyes fill with a transparent liquid, a small tide rising from below. After a while tears begin to overflow onto his lined, greenish skin, and fall on the white of the sheet. He’s weeping too. Staring at the wall at the foot of his bed and weeping. Wheezing louder now, like a bellows about to break.

  Daphne looks at him and weeps, he weeps and looks at the wall. Their weeping is rather similar actually, although her tears are larger and descend more quickly, a faucet dripping. His are smaller and spaced out widely, as if like him they are exhausted. She’s not thinking about leaving anymore, she’s not thinking about anything. She’s feeling very strange, there in the fading light, crucifix in hand, but she also feels this is necessary, it’s something like an initiation rite. Were her merciless mental clarity in charge here, she’d leap to her feet and run away, but some overpowering force has nailed her legs to that metal chair.

  Now the door opens again and a young man in a white coat appears. The priest makes a tiny—but violent—gesture, outraged that they dare to keep on disturbing him. The doctor lowers his head and disappears. I learned a great deal from your mother, he mutters, picking up where he left off with some difficulty and fixing her once again in his gaze. His voice is even more feeble now, barely rising above the soughing of the river outside. The talks I had with her were a great gift to me, I have rarely met such profundity in matters of the spirit: he looks at her as if for confirmation. For a moment his ecumenical empathy is such that his hand edges toward hers; all his energy is concentrated in that tiny operation. But he lacks the strength to raise his forearm the necessary few millimeters, or even to slide it over the sheet. Daphne therefore reaches out and takes his hand, which is icy cold. She holds it in her own, warming it, the crucifix on her knees. For a long time. It’s almost dark, and the river has become a gleaming course of lead.

  Now the door opens once more and this time the young doctor is accompanied by an elderly man who walks in with an authoritarian stride. He turns on the lamp on the night table. They don’t ask permission, they just take up positions on either side of the bed. There’s also a nun with them, different from the first, taller and more in tune with the times. The older doctor has a concertina of wrinkles on his neck; the priest is staring at him, seemingly getting ready to order them to leave. Instead he merely closes his eyes, you can see that the faint light is blinding him. He’s immobile, clearly too exhausted even to lift his eyelids. The young doctor checks the IV line, takes his pulse, adjusts the sheet.

  The sister who’s plausibly a web-surfer is staring at Daphne as if she were a serial assassin. The accordion-necked doctor also studies her with something like bigoted rancor. It’s clear they’d like her to beat it right away (beat what, no one knows, but the expression is imperishable). She doesn’t know what to do; she’s feeling a bit woozy. Now she gets up, leaves the room and heads down the corridor, still holding the crucifix. A crucifix sh
e hasn’t stolen; it was given to her by a dying bishop. Yes, bishop: that was how she’d heard him referred to. Descending the few steps at the entrance, she turns again toward the river, spellbinding for an instant in its violet hour. And at that very moment she understands that the not quite dead man is the same confessor who sexually abused her for a whole winter when she was nine, and then again the following year. Or better, she realizes that a warning bell inside her head had sounded smartly the very instant she first saw him, but something prevented her from hearing it. She starts to cry again. This time she’s riven by hacking sobs, like a woman with a bad cough.

  ‌God Again

  A god shall not and must not speak. The languages of (wo)man seem to be purposely designed to formulate deception of all kinds, stoke up the pipe dreamers, lead people out on limbs and down garden paths. To stir up (wo)man’s highest accomplishment, in other words, his/her intrinsic raison d’être: evil. Other animals don’t get into trouble because they don’t speak and never have done, that’s the sole reason.* Divine language is silence; words are superfluous to express harmony and love, or even anger of the just variety. It’s enough to look one another in the face, or merely stare straight ahead; everyone will know who’s in agreement or that there’s a certain problem.

  * If they did speak, they’d immediately begin to screw around, get fired up, make war. Sparrows versus chaffinches, fleas versus lice, dark gray hippos versus pale gray hippos, and so on.

  Very soon I’m going to stop writing, go back to being God again, and that’ll be that. No thinking, no distractions, no more letting my gaze be captured by one particular thing. As I’ve always done. A god’s job is to show up, that is, be present, not so much agitate for one thing or another. It makes sense, really; a god that both is and is not would be a catastrophe, whether brazenly absent or merely part-time. Atheism and agnosticism would spread like wildfire, overtaking religions. These are the true cancers of the present day, and everything must be done to fight them. It must never be forgotten that once these false religions are installed, you need earthquakes, famine, terrible bloodshed, or hideous dictatorial regimes to drive them out. That’s the sort of shock therapy I’d frankly prefer to avoid.

  I have no need of humans; actually, I need to avoid them. They’re merely an unlucky accident, a not very edifying sideshow. That irresponsible supposed son of mine created great confusion on that account, he let it be thought that humans are mighty important when in fact they don’t count for anything and could disappear from circulation in the wink of an eye. In some ways I’d prefer not even to hear them mentioned; they can do whatever they want, I couldn’t care less. I am God.

  ‌Cottage in the Briars

  When she wakes up, Daphne needs some time to work out what bed she’s lying in. Then, her main processor slowly kicking into action, she realizes this is the room hosting the nineteenth-century laundry machine and the paleolithic honey extractor. And then she recalls why she’s here, and her external memory lights up, switched on by that cold shower of recollection. Leaving the seminary, she had waited for a train for who knows how long, mesmerized, staring at the river. In that hallucinatory frame of mind, she imagined the river to be her father. Back in the city, she had wandered around the center, lost to the world. In the end she found herself at the station and took the last coach for the town of the rich people’s villas. From there, driven by the force of inertia, she had walked to her stepfather’s place in the rain. And now she has no idea how she’s going to cope with this day that’s beginning. She feels like the corpse of some drowned creature, washed up on the beach by the waves.

  Just to contemplate that man of the church she went to see yesterday is to relive a dreadful nightmare. She finds it very hard to accept that the afternoon was not just a figment of her imagination, that she really did meet him. She has to keep reprimanding her brain, forcing it to accept that truth. That it was that filthy bastard, who’s probably already croaked—in fact he expired just before dawn, I can confirm—who remote-controlled her childhood and adolescence the way a puppeteer pulls the strings of a marionette. He’s the one who put her in those boarding schools where she grew up with the nuns, he’s the one who paid for her. She hadn’t known it, but she was a puppet. She still is. A marionette come unstringed that cannot be repaired.

  Now she thinks she hears voices. Her stepfather’s dull warble, in a very loud conversation with someone. She cocks an ear, and for a moment imagines she can make out Aphra’s limpid tones. I’m hearing things, she thinks; the only person here is that washed up neo-Buddhist who always knew who was pulling my strings and never said a word. He deceived her, and never even realized that monster was meddling with her. The silences and the voids are filling up, the different pieces fitting together neatly, as if her past were that of a normal person.

  Now the door cracks open and a face appears, the gay and naughty little face of the short one, Aphra. Yes, it really is Aphra, and she’s brought her a cup of coffee, which she presents with the obsequious bow of a maître d’. I came to find you, she says in reply to Daphne’s evident astonishment. She’s clearly very pleased to have surprised her, and pleased to share her happiness. But the beanpole is paralyzed. To have something to hold onto, she takes the cup in hand and conveys it to her lips. It’s very good this coffee, she thinks, it’s just what she needs. She smiles, unable not to smile, although she thinks she might be a character in a video game. Aphra sits on the edge of the bed, looks at her. Your stepfather is a gas, he just slays me, she says. She smiles. Her gum-colored gums and her very white teeth are showing. We’re waiting for you to have breakfast, she says, getting up.

  In the kitchen the table is set for three, and there are many good things on it. There’s even the black fig jam made by the ex-Communist banana wholesaler’s girlfriend, the jam she especially likes. And a sort of flaming bouquet of red and orange leaves very tastefully arranged (it could only be by Aphra), lit up by a ray of sunlight piercing the spiderwebs covering the window pane. The air outside is super clean and the sky so blue that even the yard full of rusting remains looks beautiful. The three dogs, too, seem happy about this autumn splendor, not to mention the family atmosphere.

  Francesco took me to see a very nice cottage, says Aphra, rubbing her face against the mug of the short-haired big dog. It was locked, but we managed to get in, she says, her rascally smile spreading. There’s a nice plot of land attached, it would be perfect for us. Daphne’s gaunt stepfather nods, bobbing his white California apostle’s beard, as if the little one has just said the most normal thing in the world. I’ll bet they don’t want much money for the rent, he says. Aphra’s looking at him. It would be awesome, the little one says, and it’s obvious the two of them have already discussed the matter, and what’s more, that they like each other quite a lot. This too makes Daphne wonder again whether she’s strayed into a science-fiction movie.

  Aphra insists they visit the house of the seven dwarfs immediately. Daphne’s feeling a bit dazed and would rather lie down again, but they set out on foot, followed by the sex maniac, the small dog having developed a total crush on the wee one. The sky is a deep blue sea, the autumn woods seem to be burning with an inextinguishable fire. This valley where her stepfather lives looks a lot more cheerful than usual. The cottage in the bracken with its worn orange roof tiles seems to swim in that wild sea of thorns and brambles; it’s quite charming. On one side there’s a sort of ditch with two downy oaks (species information provided by me, she knows nothing about plant life) and in front, a nice clearing with some scruffy fruit trees.

  They get in through a broken window and tour the three rooms and kitchen. Must have been an old lady living here (yes, I can confirm); it’s a real miracle they didn’t make off with everything, Aphra says (please, easy on the miracles). That customary benevolent smile on her face, she looks around and memorizes various details, making an inventory of what needs to be done. With a paint job and a few repairs, we can move in, she says, as if the
y already had. Next winter we’ll probably need a better wood stove than this one. She closes her eyes. My soul is going to flourish here, she concludes. But Daphne too feels content; for some reason, she likes the place. For the first time the prospect of living in the country doesn’t terrify her; for the first time she doesn’t immediately see all the insuperable obstacles. Maybe we really will be living here in a couple of weeks, she thinks.

  They manage to force the worm-eaten front door open and stand out front. By the facade stands a gray stone bench, and a huge laurel tree with the smoothest of bark, like a person’s skin. We’ll plant the garden here, says Aphra, pointing to a wide, flat piece of land between the long-untended apple trees and some apricot trees with bucolic ailments. She purses her doe’s lips in a serious frown, for that is where she intends to grow her carrots, turning the soil with just a hoe and fertilizing with manure from her organically raised livestock. We’ll put the beans there, she adds, indicating a sloping stretch. She’s not looking at the earth but a yard above ground level; she can already see the bean plants tied to their stakes, tall and bushy. For water, there’s a little spring beyond the chestnut grove; we need to replace the pipe. Daphne is a cork drawn from a bottle and seized by the current; she’s unable to picture the garden in its high summer lushness, she just isn’t familiar enough with growing things. I’d like to plant some sunflowers, she says nonetheless, a little uncertain. When she was a child, she was fascinated by the way those gigantic, beautiful flowers sprang forth from little seeds. Of course, says the other, as if sunflowers were fundamental. You just have to choose where, she says. She seems to think they need to decide immediately.