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

by Belli, Gioconda

  “I have never felt this pain I have in my feet, on my skin. My mouth is filled with sand; my throat burns. Don’t you think this is death?” Eve moaned, inconsolable.

  “Death is the opposite of life,” Adam said. “You are feeling all this because you are alive. This is what you wanted, Eve, isn’t that true?” he heard himself say despite himself, as he sat down beside her. “You wanted knowledge. This is knowledge: good and evil, pleasure and pain, Elokim and the Serpent, each image has is opposite reflection.”

  It’s because of her that I know I am alive, he thought. Although their bodies no longer radiated light, although they were diminished in size and the delicate tail that had formerly protected their hidden orifices had disappeared, the desire to touch her prevented him from confusing death with the anguish of profound abandonment. Eve listened. However often she wiped her eyes, they filled with water again and again. She was unable to regain her tranquillity, or calm her hands, her feet, her mouth. Her pain flowed into words. The scratches, cuts, burns. Perhaps Adam’s body was stouter. Or perhaps the pain hadn’t penetrated and contaminated his thoughts. She felt that the heat from the wounds in her skin had leaped to the hollow space inside her, a precipice equal to the one that separated them from the Garden. Elokim’s cruelty and what was happening to them had squeezed the life out of her, leaving her with no spirit, no energy to understand why what she had done deserved the whiplash of fire that had driven them here.

  “I’m thirsty,” she said. “Thirst is what the thing that has left our mouths so dry is called. Help me look for water. Water satiates thirst.”

  She could barely speak. She had an unbearable burning in her throat, a grainy dryness on her teeth.

  Adam explored the cave. He had heard the faint sound of water when he entered. Toward the back he found a tiny spring that threaded down one of the walls and ran along a narrow channel to empty into the hollow of a rock. They took turns dipping their heads and faces into it, opening their lips and washing the sand from their teeth. The water soothed their parched mouths. They filled their cheeks but did not dare swallow the water. It was cold, the opposite of fire, but it burned just as much. They both spat at the same moment. They were afraid that the water would burst open their chests.

  On a rock they found long pieces of a strange substance covered with hair, like that on the skin of sheep. They covered themselves with it, tying it around the waist. The hair was soft and lustrous. Slowly they began to warm. They lay down on the rock. Adam watched Eve’s eyes close. He lay down beside her, put his arms around her, and his eyes, too, closed.

  Eve awakened. She did not want to wake completely because she had dreamed she was back in the Garden and her consciousness still did not clearly distinguish between reality and imagination, but curiosity to know whether or not the terrible things she remembered had happened opened her eyes. She saw nothing. She opened them as wide as she could, and still could not see. She thought about crows. The color of their wings inundated everything. She held out her hands to touch the dense darkness. She sat straight up. Her fingers closed on black, blind air. Her eyes were no longer useful. She touched her face to be sure she was awake. She fumbled with her hands, with rising panic.

  “Adam. Adam! Adam!” she shouted. She felt him move, wake, groan. Then a long silence and a yell. “Where are you, Eve? Where are you?”

  “Can’t you see me?”

  “No. I don’t see anything. Everything is black.”

  “I think we’re dead,” she moaned. “What else could this be?”

  She groped around her until she touched him. He felt her cold fingers. He could not understand that she had disappeared. He could not see her. A croaking sound escaped his throat.

  “I don’t like death, Eve. Get me out of this.”

  Within them, as in the first time of Paradise, they heard the voice. It sounded both ironic and gentle.

  “It is night,” the voice said. “I made it so you would rest, for now you will have to work to survive. At night you will sleep. You will have no volition. That way you will be able to enter your consciousness. Simultaneously know it and forget it.”

  Eve perceived that communication with the voice was open for her. She was not afraid.

  “You are cruel,” she said.

  “You disobeyed.”

  “Don’t tell me that you didn’t plan this. You did not conceive us to be eternal. You knew as well as I that this would happen.”

  “Of course. But that was my challenge. Not to intervene. To allow you your freedom.”

  “And to punish us.”

  “It is too early to make that judgment. I admit that I always knew what would happen. But it had to be this way.”

  “Give us back the light.”

  “Go later with Adam to the cave entrance. The light will be there, waiting for you. Day after day. From now on you will exist in time.”

  “At least we’re not dead,” Eve sighed when the voice stilled.

  At dawn, Adam watched as the shadows lifted and dispersed like mist. Eve was sleeping. Was she perhaps looking inside her consciousness? Where was it one went when sleeping? Did she understand what to him was incomprehensible? He didn’t like to see her asleep, or to sleep himself. He didn’t like it when his eyes closed and his mind no longer belonged to him. And yet, in the darkness of the cave it had been a relief to abandon himself to that strange immobility, to listen to the cry of his body to lie quietly and cease to feel pain and nostalgia, fear and uncertainty. Suddenly his anxiety returned. Had Elokim carried out his promise to bring back the light?

  He walked to the cave entrance, and what he saw frightened him so badly he could not contain a cry. The whitish sky of the previous day was now blazing from end to end; even the clouds were on fire. He called Eve. She came quickly, moving unsteadily, as if she had only recently learned to walk. She looked at the red sky. She stepped past him and went outside, holding out her arms to the warm air. On the sky she saw the red circle of the sun rising from the horizon.

  “The sky is in flames, but the fire will not reach the Earth,” she said.

  Adam went to her. His eyes were filled with tears.

  Eve nestled against his chest. He, who was taller, rested his head on hers and broke into sobs. What would they do? he asked. How could they exist so far from the Garden now that their bodies ached and they were thirsty? What have we done, Eve? What have we done? What use is knowledge to us in the midst of this desolation? Look at the vastness around us. What will we do? Where will we go?

  Eve did not know what to answer. Nothing was as she had imagined. She put her arms around Adam. She did not want to see him suffer. His sorrow resonated inside her, gave her shivers. She wanted to wrap herself around him, grow more hands to caress him. The impatience he often provoked in her dissipated. In its place she felt a wish to console him and love him that was both strong as the wind and as gentle and singing as the murmur of water in the river. She wondered whether his skin could perceive what she felt, if he could smell it, if knowing her tenderness for him would calm his worries.

  “Let’s try death, Eve,” said Adam, suddenly standing upright. “Maybe if we die we can return to the Garden.”

  “You just said that you don’t like death.”

  “I thought that the night was death. Perhaps it is not knowing what it is that frightens us.”

  “And how will we manage to die? It won’t be easy,” said Eve, bewildered.

  “I have an idea. Let’s climb to the top of this mountain,” he said, pulling himself together, animated by his resolve.

  He started up the mountain. She followed, reluctantly. She didn’t know what it was to die. The Serpent had said that death was feeling nothing, but no explanation had been given about what followed. Maybe it was worth a try. Maybe the best way to bring an end to their doubts was to find out whether death was really so terrible. Better to know than to suffer the uncertainty of ignorance.

  The mountain rose high above the cave. Gre
at stones protruded here and there, and among them the ground was sandy and dotted with thorny bushes. As they climbed, their bodies felt heavier. Their feet, the palms of their hands burned against the rough sand. The sky had changed. It was blue now. With no clouds. The fire had been extinguished and the disk of the sun shone with an intense white light impossible to look into. Again they felt intense heat lacerating their skin. Eve’s feet were bleeding. I can’t go any farther, she said. You go on alone, but Adam picked her up, threw her over his shoulder, and kept plodding on, panting, sweating, completely drained. He could not comprehend his fatigue, how laborious it was to do what previously had cost no effort. Eve moaned, whimpered. Her laments crept into his nostrils, his eyes, his ears, and tore at him inside. Silently, he cursed Elokim. At last they reached the top. They could view endless land, smoking volcanoes, the island of the Garden of Eden, rivers running toward the sea.

  Eve said nothing. Although it was different from Paradise, the landscape was beautiful. Beautiful and strangely hers.

  “If we die now, we will never see all this again,” she said.

  “I went with you to eat the fruit,” said Adam. “You come with me now.”

  After a wordless and fleeting moment of doubt and lamentation, Adam leaped from the promontory into the void. Eve jumped after him.

  They fell headlong, air whistling in their ears. Eve closed her eyes, clamped her lips shut.

  Adam watched as the red dust of the ground stirred and rolled into a dizzily whirling wind tunnel that enveloped them, broke their fall, then transported them through the air and gently dropped them into a current of water.

  Again the voice spoke within them.

  “This is not the time to die,” it told them. “You will know death at its proper moment. And when it comes, you will wish for it to hold off a little longer.”

  CHAPTER 9

  SHIVERING, THEY SWAM TILL THEY EMERGED FROM the water. They recognized the palms, cedars, and pines, the banks of the river they had seen from a distance. So this was where Elokim had carried them. On the grass they found more dry skins to clothe themselves. The sun shone high in the sky. They lay on the riverbank, not speaking, confused but wiser from the experience. Little by little, warmth enveloped their bodies and calmed the trembling caused by vertigo and the fearful fall.

  “I was terrified,” said Eve. “Don’t ask me again to give death a try.”

  Adam nodded. He had swallowed a lot of water. The crystalline liquid was good; it cooled his throat, his mouth. Cautiously, he waited a while to be sure that nothing bad had happened to him, and then urged Eve to drink.

  “Drink, Eve, drink. Nothing will happen to you. It tastes very good,” he said, taking her hand and helping her bend down from a rock to take the water in the hollow of a hand and bring it to her lips.

  Eve drank. She sipped the liquid with pleasure, sucking the last drop from her fingers and dipping in again and again. Adam smiled. He admired how she never did anything halfway. Whether she did it out of trust or defiance, he wasn’t sure. But this time her face unequivocally signaled pleasure.

  “See how Elokim saved you when you had decided to die! Who can understand him! I told you he was erratic. He acts one way and then regrets it. One thing is for sure: he is very curious to see what you will do with the freedom you took.”

  They looked up. The Serpent was coiled around the branch of a shrub whose trunk leaned out over the river.

  “You again,” said Adam.

  “I’ve been alone, too. I’m bored.”

  “If we had died, would we have gone back to Paradise?” Eve asked. “Is that why he saved us, to prevent us from returning?”

  “From death there is no returning. Better not to try that again. You haven’t lived long enough. It is life that will bring you closer to Paradise.”

  “Tell us how,” said Adam.

  “I can’t help you. Elokim no longer confides in me. I am alone.”

  “But you know a lot.”

  “Knowledge is not the solution to everything. You will discover that as you go along. I’m leaving. I’m tired of answering so many questions.”

  She slipped agilely through the tree branches and disappeared.

  Eve lay back on the grass, pensive. Adam lay beside her.

  For a long time they said nothing, staring at the blue, concave sky through the leaves of the trees.

  “I wonder if perhaps the Serpent is Elokim’s Eve,” she said. “When we were in the Garden she told me she watched him create and forget constellation after constellation. They have known each other a long time.”

  “Maybe she was inside him the way that you were in me.”

  “Why do you think Elokim separated us?”

  “He thought that we could exist as a single body, but it didn’t work out. You were in too deep. You couldn’t see or hear. That is why he decided to separate us, to take you out of me. That is why it feels so good when the two of us are one again.”

  “But you still believe that I am responsible for everything that’s happened because I gave you fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. You could have refused to eat it.”

  “True. But once you had eaten it, I had to eat. I thought you would cease to exist. I didn’t want to be left alone. If I hadn’t eaten of the fruit and the Other had banished you from the Garden, I would have left to look for you.”

  Eve’s eyes filled with water.

  “I never doubted that you would eat,” she said.

  “And that day I saw you as if I had never known you till then. Your skin was gleaming, all soft and shining. And you looked at me as if suddenly you remembered the exact place you existed inside me before the Other separated us.”

  “Your legs impressed me. And your chest. So broad. Yes, I did want to be inside you again. I see you in my dreams. You have a body like a tree. You protect me so the sun won’t burn me.”

  As one, they got up together and went back into the water to cool off.

  “Euphrates,” said Adam. “That’s the name of this river.”

  They floated in the current, abandoning themselves to the sensation of the crystalline liquid. It was not difficult to understand the joy of the fishes whose colors they had often admired. Adam opened his lips and slowly sipped the cool fluid. He thought about the taste of the forbidden fruit and reached for Eve. They kissed as one entered the other, astounded at the amazing sensations they received from their light, slippery bodies. For a long while they were quiet, tightly embraced, each attempting to recover the lost memory of being a single creature, to grasp the images each of them guarded inside and pour into those the river of their own. Unsuccessfully, they traveled the dim passageways of their minds, wanting to penetrate the other’s sensations but unable to transcend the space where each of them existed irreparably alone within the limits of their bodies. As much as they tried, they could not glimpse the intricate landscape in which their most intimate thoughts dwelled. It was recognition of this impenetrable barrier that finally enveloped them and caused their muscles and bones to open without misgivings and engage in only intimacy fully conceded to them, the one they reached on the riverbank, amid the mud and algae on the shore.

  When they started walking back to the cave, the splendor of the day gave way to the soft, welcoming, light of evening. A breeze was blowing. They left behind the trees on the riverbank and cut through open field toward the mountain. On the way they sighted in the distance a group of elephants and a herd of long-horned oryx. The oryx seemed, like them, to be disoriented, just wandering. They too had eaten the forbidden fruit, she thought. Maybe they held Adam and her responsible for being expelled from the Garden. Adam remembered the hyenas. He wondered whether these oryx would be docile or would attack them. Eve suggested that they not go too close.

  “I miss Cain,” said Adam, remembering the faithful dog who had been his companion in the Garden.

  “And I the cat,” said Eve. “Come, let’s go to the Garden and look for them.”

 
CHAPTER 10

  WHEN THEY WERE AGAIN WITHIN SIGHT OF THE precipice and the distant mystery of the enclosed Garden, Adam surrendered once more to the weakness of tears. If he had been an animal, he would have howled with pain as he stood before that mirage whose inexplicable beauty was a constant flame in his memory. Internally he struggled to silence his reproaches against the woman, the Serpent, and Elokim. It did little good to rationalize, or to talk with her; in his innermost being he could not ease the weight of having been dislodged from that place where he had been created to exist as the most special and happy of creatures.

  He watched Eve walk along, occasionally stopping at some flowering bushes to smell the blossoms. He noticed that her skin was darker, golden, as if somehow she had managed to preserve the glow of Paradise. He caught up with her. They should not go too close to the precipice, he said. They didn’t want the fire to lash out at them again and force them to retreat.

  They walked to a prudent distance from the abyss, one toward the east and the other toward the west. The plants that during the cataclysm had been torn from the fertile soil of the Garden were taking root in the red earth, refusing to perish. As they went, they encountered in their path high grasses, brush, plants with saw-toothed, spiny leaves that tore at their legs, making it difficult for them to pass. They learned the poison of the ants and the bite of gnats and mosquitoes. Eve talked to the insects, telling them to obey and leave her and Adam in peace. After realizing that this had no effect, Adam just kept going, swiping right and left. They saw rabbits, pheasants, squirrels, and mice that instead of approaching when they called fled in fear. In the distance, Adam heard the howling of wolves and pictured them cringing, far away. He wondered if the ones he had encountered might have met others like them, already experienced in living outside the confines of the Garden. He missed the lions with their golden manes, the giraffe with its long neck and sweet eyes, the magnificent phoenix, and, of course, his strong, clever dog, always obedient to his wishes.