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

by Belli, Gioconda

  Adam overtook her on the path. He was carrying hide pouches filled with lances, hooks, arrowheads. He had noticed her slow steps, her bowed head, her reluctance.

  “We can go back to the old cave anytime we want.”

  “But not to that time, Adam.”

  “Why would you want to go back to that time?” he asked. “To that solitude, to that bewilderment?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It must be because we were younger there. It must be because the days seemed newer and we thought that we would be able to do more than devote ourselves to surviving. Sometimes I feel that surviving is the only thing we do.”

  The way he saw it, that was the challenge, he said. To demonstrate that they could survive.

  Survive for what, she asked. What was the sense in being different from the animals if surviving was all there was? If she had eaten the forbidden fruit, it was because she thought there was something more.

  Maybe there was, and the object was to discover it, he said. She worried, she said, that they would never discover it. You are sad, said Adam. Sadness is like smoke. It clouds your vision.

  They reached their refuge. Eve found that the busyness of the children was contagious. The result of their labors was good. They had tied slim tree trunks together with vines so the footbridge would not be too heavy and they could draw it back at nightfall. The trench was deep enough; the cave was roomy and had more light. The animals could wander outside, of course, but they could not get in.

  It did not take long to get settled. Eve watched as each person claimed a place for belongings. It was interesting to see them define their space, arrange their treasures: the stones they had labored on and refined bit by bit, the slim poles with sharp tips for hunting, the instruments they used for cutting and skinning. Luluwa had gold beads she treasured, straw and grasses for making baskets. Aklia had bits of animal bone for hooks and even implements for combing the knots from sheep’s wool. Abel, staffs and shepherd’s canes to tend his flocks. Cain the tools to sow the seeds he collected.

  The moon turned red the first night they spent in the new cave. Abel came in yelling. The sky is eating the moon, he said. They all ran out. High in the firmament they saw the full moon and a black mouth that was eating the edge. The mouth opened wider and wider; a mouth of smoke blocking out the splendor of the pale, defenseless sphere in the center of the sky. Inexplicable. A sign, Adam thought. Out of concern for Eve’s anxieties, he had not carried out Elokim’s mandate: Abel with Luluwa, Cain with Aklia. Now the Other was going to eat the moon. The nights would be blacker. He looked at Eve. Even in the darkness he could make out her pale face.

  What is that? What is happening? the children asked. Waves of pain gripped Eve’s stomach. Abel was right. No matter what she thought, this time she could not go against Elokim’s wishes or dismiss Adam’s dreams when in hers she wholeheartedly believed she saw and talked to the Serpent. Impossible to foresee what punishments Elokim would impose if they disobeyed once again, if she was again the one who instigated the man’s disobedience. And yet, for days a dark premonition of misfortune had been spreading through her body. The moon took on the color of almonds. Reddish and round, it seemed posed upon a luminous pedestal high in a sky whose scintillating surface suddenly resembled the sea.

  “It’s a cloud,” said Eve, to calm the twins. “It’s as if it was cold and the moon wrapped itself in a cloud.”

  Adam walked over to her. He pointed to the sky and looked deep and long into her eyes. She understood.

  “Do it,” she said. “Speak with them.”

  Shortly after, they watched as the moon emerged from behind the coppery veil. The whole moon. Unscathed.

  CHAPTER 25

  TO THE NORTH, FOLLOWING THE TRAIL OF THE bears, Adam had some time ago come across a mountain-enclosed valley of plenty where there was abundant hunting. He would take his sons there, talk with them, and inform them which of their sisters they would couple with. Eve wanted to protect Aklia. She was afraid that Cain would reject her as a substitute for Luluwa. She begged Adam to be sure to placate Cain before they returned.

  They left a few days later, at daybreak. Eve went out to see them off, veiling her sorrow. She walked with them until the bright sun was high above. In the distance she could see the dark mountains beneath the unpredictable autumn sky. The ocher leaves lining the ground crunched beneath her footsteps. The water of the river was running dark, muddled by the rains that loosened the earth, the roots, the stones along its banks. When they took leave, Eve asked them to raise their hands when they reached the edge of the valley where the vegetation began to thin. That way she would be able to see them once more from a distance. She saw that her sons were puzzled, as they were used to her seeing them off without ceremony. Cain probably imagined she was doing it for him, she thought. Usually the three men did not go out together. It was rare for his father to ask him to come along. Adam and Abel usually went together and left Cain to go with the girls, or alone, looking for mushrooms, or for fertile land where he could plant his seeds. Clearly he was pleased that his father had asked him this time. Abel was also in good spirits. He loved his older brother. As a boy he always tagged along after him, imitating what he did. Often Abel’s attempts to keep up with Cain ended in the inevitable accidents of childhood. Then Cain had to bear the wrath of his father, who scolded him for not taking care of his brother.

  Eve waited on a promontory until after the men waved, the agreed-on salute, and disappeared into the distant vegetation. Then she sat down on the ground and burst into tears.

  “Eve, Eve, don’t cry.”

  The Serpent was sitting beside her. She was not crawling on the ground. She had the same form she’d had when Eve first saw her in the Garden of Eden.

  “I dreamed about you,” said Eve, amazed. “I dreamed about you as you were before, just as you are now. Did Elokim forgive you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think he will forgive us, too?”

  “In his way, perhaps.”

  “What will happen to my children?”

  “They will know Good and Evil.”

  “Will they suffer?”

  “I told you that knowledge leads to suffering.”

  “You always say things so I can’t understand you.”

  “I know no other way to talk.”

  “Tell me what evil is. Are you evil?”

  The Serpent laughed.

  “Me? Don’t be ridiculous. Evil, Good, all the things there are, and will be, on this planet, originate right here: in you, in your children, in the generations to come. Knowledge and freedom are gifts that you, Eve, were the first to have and that your descendants will need to learn to use for themselves. Often they will blame you, but without those gifts their existence will be intolerable. The memory of Paradise will run in their blood, and if they succeed in understanding Elokim’s game, and do not fall into his traps, they will close the circles of time and will recognize that the end can be equal to the beginning. To arrive there they will have nothing except freedom and knowledge.”

  “Are you saying that we will create Good and Evil on our own?”

  “There’s no one else. You are alone.”

  “And Elokim?”

  “He will remember you from time to time, but what he forgets is as vast as what he remembers.”

  “We are alone.”

  “The day you accept that, you will be truly free. And now I must go.”

  “Will you fade away like the Garden? Will we see each other again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think we will. I don’t think you will forget me.”

  “Accept your solitude, Eve. Don’t think of me, or of Elokim. Look around you. Use your gifts.”

  The Serpent evanesced in the afternoon air. Eve walked back the way she’d come. A strong wind was blowing. A storm was approaching. She wondered if they would endure the reality of being alone. Would they be that alone? She remembered the skins they had c
overed themselves with after they left the Garden, the wind that saved them from death when they had leaped from the mountain, the recent round, occult moon. Why those signs? Could it be that the Serpent wanted them to forget Elokim? It was true that if they were alone there would be no one but them to recognize Good and Evil, or to learn not to expect anything other than what they could provide for themselves, or to determine on their own, unaided, the purpose of life. Perhaps that was the freedom the Serpent was talking about. If Elokim had enticed them to take it, so he could forget them and go forth to create other worlds, then knowledge, everything that had happened since their expulsion from the Garden, would have been a gift and not a punishment; it would show he trusted that they, and those who issued forth from them and lived and multiplied and inhabited those expanses, would find for themselves, and would construct, a way of life that would console them for the certainty of death. But then how could she explain Elokim’s mandates? Cain with Aklia, Abel with Luluwa? How would their freedom survive if they had to go against their hearts and obey unknown designs like those? Why did they always have to face the anxiety of such dilemmas—obey or disobey—and punishments? No, thought Eve. We are not alone. We would be better off if we were.

  She returned to the cave. It was drizzling. She found Luluwa and Aklia weaving palms for the baskets they used to collect fruit. The silence of premonitions weighed over them. Ever if Eve or Adam had not said anything, Aklia and Luluwa had sensed that their father’s trek with his sons was more than a hunting trip. They had bled. They were women. Life waited inside them.

  “When will they be back?” they asked. “It won’t be long,” said Eve. She knew the hearts of the girls as well as she knew her own, but she could not bring herself to warn them of what lay ahead. She formed the words, chewed them, felt them move in her mouth, but something in her refused to speak them. She wanted the girls to be light of heart, wanted to delay their pain, to keep them wrapped in the tightly knit fabric that had enveloped their lives, and which now, as soon as words were spoken, would be ripped apart. She had never thought she would experience greater pain that what she had suffered when her children were born, but the pain that in recent days filled the air she breathed was as cruel as the pain locked in her memory. To know that there was precious little she could do to console the suffering they would endure brought a feeling of tightness to her chest. She dreamed herself following them along edge of precipices, roaring rivers, fires. She dreamed that her voice lay dead in her throat when she tried to warn them of the danger, the abysses, the tigers.

  CHAPTER 26

  THE DAYS WENT BY. EVE WENT TO THE RIVER TO catch fish and crabs. The leaves were beginning to pale in the trees; there was a smell of wet earth, and a sad air of dying summer floated over the land. She squatted beside the riverbank with her palm basket to wait for fishes to come closer. She saw the gleam of the water, its transparency, the foam of the current milling around the edges of the rocks. Perhaps she was exaggerating her worries, she thought. What is happening to me? She did not recall a time when she had been so dispirited. Why not expect her sons to be content with their mates? They all would love each other. They were siblings. They would not have to separate, or to renounce love. Not knowing the intimacy of the flesh, perhaps they would bear the change with less pain than she foresaw. Perhaps it was the depth of her desire for Adam that led her to imagine an equal passion in Cain, in Luluwa. Abel would not object to his mate. Aklia preferred Cain. Much as she tried to convince herself, however, she could not imagine Luluwa and Cain resigned to ignore the instinct that had bound them together from the time they were young. She heard footsteps on the dried leaves. The Serpent, she thought. She looked up. It was Cain.

  He came spilling over with words. Each with the impact of a sharp pebble. He threw them out in a hailstorm of feeling, without catching a breath. Jeering, passion, the cutting incisiveness of what he was saying was new in the air of the Earth. When did Cain’s saliva turn bitter? Eve asked herself. She came out of the water, holding the basket, a couple of fishes jumping inside. She straightened her back and looked at him, eyes wide, the thumping of her heart pounding in her ears. Cain looked like he had been turned into stone. Hard. His face, hard, his mouth wide, down-turned, as if words took up more space than his teeth could hold. He spoke of beating, tearing, crushing, burying. He accused her for having given birth to him, for eating the fig, for losing Paradise, for allowing Adam to love only Abel. Idiot Abel. Only when he said “Luluwa” did his voice stumble, and he, aware of the effect, paused to recover the tone of injury and to describe, without a hint of brotherly love, Aklia’s small, strange face that Eve, as long as she lived, could never consider any less beautiful than any of her other children’s. It was hearing him say the things he said about Aklia that pulled Eve from her stunned, mute surprise.

  “Go to the old cave, Cain, and do not come back until you are ready to ask for my forgiveness.”

  Straight as a staff, with her hand pointing into the distance, blazing with pain and fury, she watched Cain shrink before her icy stare. She heard his footsteps crushing leaves when he turned and marched off, striking rocks, tree branches, anything in his path, with the staff in his hands.

  ADAM’S DECISION, ELOKIM’S WILL, had like a cataclysm ripped apart the intimate fabric of their lives. Screams, imprecations, laments, Aklia’s devastated face, and Abel’s frightening silence were what Eve found when she came back from the river. Adam was pacing back and forth, bewildered.

  “His rage reminded me of the time I killed the bear with my bare hands. Cain fell on me. Then he turned on Abel. Blind. Abel did nothing. He covered his face with his hands. I had to pull Cain off him. They both ended up sobbing. Cain came back running. Abel said nothing. He didn’t speak all the way back here. I talked to him. I explained. He just looked at me. It was terrible,” he said.

  Eve led him from the cave. She took him to some rocks beneath the shade of a group of palm trees that grew in line with their new refuge. Still trembling, filled with anguish and anger. She sat down with her back against a stone. She didn’t know about broken bones, but she imagined invisible bones that could fracture and make one crumple.

  “This is like a new punishment.”

  “We obeyed. We saw the signs in the sky. You conceded.”

  “We lost Paradise. What will we lose this time?”

  “I don’t know, Eve. Perhaps this test is for them, for our children. Elokim must want to test their freedom, to know if they will obey him.”

  “They are very young. They won’t understand.”

  Eve shook her head. She covered her face with her hands. She could not cry. She wanted to protect her children. She could not resign herself to believe this was the trap that would make them lose their innocence. Liberty was a gift, the Serpent had said. But it seemed that Elokim himself did not understand freedom. He wanted them to be free, but he trapped them in those incomprehensible mandates. What was he made of? she asked herself. Of doubts, like us?

  “What shall we do, Adam? How can we soothe Cain?”

  “Time, Eve. Cain and Abel are brothers. Cain will understand that it wasn’t Abel’s decision,” said Adam. “He will have to understand that there are bloods that must not be mixed. I will send them to make offerings together. You and I will make them see that they must reconcile, that they must understand Elokim’s designs.”

  “As well as you and I understood?” Eve asked ironically.

  The next day Cain still had not returned.

  “I will send Aklia to look for Cain,” said Adam.

  “No! Don’t send Aklia,” she burst out. “I’m afraid he will do her harm. I will send Luluwa. He will listen to her. It will do the two of them good to talk.”

  Eve had Luluwa get up from the corner of the cave where she had been rolled in a ball since the previous night, her legs drawn to her chest, face between her knees, sobbing. She looked at Luluwa. She was so young. Her body and face had just left childhood behind; her bod
y was still babbling a new language. Eve wondered what it was like for her children to grow and mature. Neither she nor Adam had experienced that. But she did know the fierce desire to disobey demands whose reasons one could not discern. And she also knew the consequences.

  “Go look for Cain, Luluwa.”

  Aklia burst out crying. Abel’s confused face was filled with quiet sorrow.

  Luluwa went out to look for Cain. She went at midday and returned with him at dusk. It had been many hours. Eve looked at their faces cleansed of pain. They had disobeyed, she thought. They, too.

  Cain knelt before Eve. He asked her forgiveness. Eve embraced him. She clasped him to her bosom. What will your punishment be, my son? she thought.

  CHAPTER 27