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

  Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand

  A Novel of Adam and Eve

  Gioconda Belli

  Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden

  This book is dedicated to the anonymous victims of the Iraq war.

  Once upon a time, somewhere in the land between the Tigris

  and the Euphrates, there was a Paradise.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Part 1

  Male and Female He Created Them

  Chapter 1

  AND HE WAS.

  Chapter 2

  LYING IN THE SUN AFTER A SWIM, THE MAN AND…

  Chapter 3

  EVE RAN TO LOOK FOR ADAM. SHE DID NOT FIND…

  Chapter 4

  THE SERPENT’S SMILE WAS SWEET AND IRONIC WHEN she saw…

  Chapter 5

  THE MAN WAS WALKING WITH LONG STRIDES. EVE hurried along…

  Chapter 6

  FOR THE SECOND TIME IN HIS LIFE, ADAM SLEPT. IN…

  Chapter 7

  WHEN THE EARTH STOPPED SHAKING AND THEY WERE able to…

  Chapter 8

  IT WAS A LARGE CAVE. IRREGULAR FLAT ROCKS PROTRUDED from…

  Chapter 9

  SHIVERING, THEY SWAM TILL THEY EMERGED FROM the water. They…

  Chapter 10

  WHEN THEY WERE AGAIN WITHIN SIGHT OF THE precipice and…

  Chapter 11

  THEY WALKED UNTIL THE GULLS AND THE SMELL OF salt…

  Chapter 12

  FIGS, PEARS, BITTER FRUITS, GRASSES WITH GOLDEN grains that satisfied…

  Chapter 13

  ADAM HAD KILLED MORE RABBITS. HE HAD SKINNED them. Eve…

  Chapter 14

  THE WALK BACK TO THE CAVE WAS SLOW, SPIRITLESS. It…

  Chapter 15

  SLOWLY, EVE RECOVERED HER STRENGTH. FROM THE mushrooms with intricate…

  Chapter 16

  EVE WAS AFRAID THAT HER INTERNAL SEA WOULD drown her.

  Chapter 17

  ADAM AND EVE BATHED IN THE RAIN. THEY WERE thin.

  Chapter 18

  EVE BARELY SLEPT THAT NIGHT, IMAGINING THE TINY offspring the…

  Chapter 19

  AN ENORMOUS YELLOW MOON WAS FLOATED HIGH in the night.

  Chapter 20

  THE NEXT DAY IT WAS RAINING LIGHTLY. ADAM LEFT the…

  Part 2

  Go Forth and Multiply

  Chapter 21

  ADAM LOOKED AT THE CUTS ON THE TREES. THERE were…

  Chapter 22

  IT HAD BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE ADAM HAD LAID…

  Chapter 23

  CONSTRUCTING THE TRENCH TOOK THEM TWO FULL cycles of the…

  Chapter 24

  THEY HAD THOUGHT THEY WOULD NOT HAVE MUCH to carry…

  Chapter 25

  TO THE NORTH, FOLLOWING THE TRAIL OF THE bears, Adam…

  Chapter 26

  THE DAYS WENT BY. EVE WENT TO THE RIVER TO…

  Chapter 27

  ADAM ORDERED HIS SONS TO PREPARE THE GIFTS they would…

  Chapter 28

  ISOLATED FROM THE OTHERS, CAIN DEVOTED HIMSELF to his seeds.

  Chapter 29

  THE FOUR OF THEM RAN WITHOUT STOPPING. THEY ran through…

  Chapter 30

  IT WAS NEARLY DAWN WHEN CAIN RETURNED WITH Luluwa. He…

  Chapter 31

  CAIN HAD TO LEAVE FOR THE LAND OF NOD.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Gioconda Belli

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  WHILE WAITING FOR my husband at the library in his father’s house in Virginia, I came upon an old collection of books I had never noticed. I knew that my father-in-law had been unpacking boxes of books that had been stored in a warehouse for years, and I became curious. These books looked ancient. Dust had joined with their yellow leaves and hard brown covers; the spines were dry and brittle. Among them was a fourteen-volume work titled Sacred Books and Literature of the East. Some were dedicated to Babylon, to Egypt, and to China, but the title of the last volume caught my eye: The Secret Books.

  Like many of you, raised in the Christian tradition, I was familiar with the story of Adam and Eve ever since I could remember. It never occurred to me, however, to wonder about what happened to them once they were expelled from Paradise. Yet inside The Secret Books I found The Life of Adam and Eve, a book that began exactly at that moment, and told the story of the trials and tribulations they faced once they were stripped of their privileges and left alone in a hostile and uncertain world.

  What I read in that book fueled my imagination. I set off to find out more about the apocryphal versions of Genesis and the history of Creation. In my research I discovered that The Life of Adam and Eve dates as far back as the Bible we know today. Apocryphal books such as this were not included in the “official version” of the Book or the ecclesiastical canon. Centuries ago, the Church Fathers, for reasons unknown, decided to leave them out. The study of such writings has been left to academics or archaeologists who, through the ages, have discovered more of these ancient books, written in parchment and hidden inside jars in caves in the Middle East. Such is the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or the scrolls from Nag Hammadi.

  Only the commentaries made to the Torah since antiquity by wise and learned rabbis, known as midrash, make use of this apocryphal approach to clarify or reflect upon the mysterious meanings and contradictions in Genesis and other biblical works.

  To Adam and Eve, Genesis dedicates only forty verses. After reading the many apocryphal versions of their lives and the life of their descendants, including the surprising Luluwa and Aklia, Cain and Abel’s twins, I decided to write this novel.

  To imagine the first man and the first woman discovering themselves and discovering life around them, to wonder what they would feel, think, and experience—about their joys and sorrows—ended up as not only a poetic, literary exercise but also a deep exploration of my own humanity, of the myths that shape us and the way we cling to them, despite the truths science sets before us.

  This novel is not Creationism, it’s not Darwinism. It is fiction. Fiction based in the many fictions humankind has woven around this story since time immemorial. It is a close look at the difficult and dazzling beginning of our species. A recounting of the questions Adam and Eve might have asked themselves and that are paradoxically similar to those we continue to ask ourselves many eons later.

  Part 1

  MALE AND FEMALE HE CREATED THEM

  CHAPTER 1

  AND HE WAS.

  Suddenly. From not being to being conscious that he was. He opened his eyes.

  He touched himself and knew he was a man, without knowing how he knew. He saw the garden and he felt someone watching him. He looked in every direction hoping to see another like himself.

  As he was looking, air spilled into his throat and its coolness stirred his senses. He could smell. He took a deep breath. In his head he felt the confused whirling of images seeking a name. Words, sounds, surged up inside him, clean and clear, and settled on everything around him. He named, and saw what he named recognize itself. The breeze moved the branches of the trees. A bird sang. Long leaves opened their finely drawn hands. Where was he? he asked. Why didn’t the one who was watching allow himself to be seen? Who was this Other?

  He walked, unhurried, until he had completed the circle of the place where he had come to be. The greens, the forms and colors of the vegetation, filled the landscape and flowed into his gaze, and he felt a happiness
in his chest. He named the stones, the streams, the rivers, the mountains, the cliffs, the caves, the volcanoes. He observed small things so as not to overlook them: the bee, moss, clover. At times, so much beauty left him dazed, unable to move: the butterfly, the lion, the giraffe. The steady beat of his heart accompanied him, independent of his wishing or knowing, a steady rhythm whose purpose was not his to divine. On his hands he experienced the warm breath of the horse, the coolness of water, the harshness of sand, the slippery scales of the fish, the soft fur of the cat. From time to time he looked up suddenly, hoping to surprise the Other, whose presence was softer than the wind though similar to it. The intensity of his gaze, however, was unequivocal. He sensed it on his skin, just as he perceived the unchanging, ever-present light that enveloped the Garden and illuminated the sky with its resplendent breath.

  After he had done everything he thought he should do, the man sat on a stone to be happy and to contemplate it all. Two animals, a cat and a dog, came and lay at his feet. He tried to teach them to speak, but to no avail; they just looked longingly into his eyes.

  Happiness seemed long-lasting and a bit monotonous to him. He could not touch it. He could not find a use for his hands. The birds flew past him swiftly, and very high. So did the clouds. All around him animals were grazing and drinking. He ate the white petals that fell from the sky. He needed nothing, and nothing seemed to need him. He was lonely.

  He touched his nose to the ground and breathed in the scent of grass. He closed his eyes and saw concentric circles of light beneath his eyelids. Lying on his side, he felt the moist earth inhale and exhale, imitating the sound of his respiration. A soft, silken drowsiness came over him. He surrendered to the sensation. Later he would remember his body opening, the split that divided his being to release the intimate creature that until then had dwelled within him. He could scarcely move. His body in its incarnation as chrysalis acted on its own; he could do nothing but wait in his state of semiconsciousness for whatever was to happen. If anything was clear, it was the extent of his ignorance; his mind filled with visions and voices for which he had no explanation. He stopped questioning himself and abandoned himself to the heavy sensation of his first sleep.

  He awoke and remembered being unconscious. He found it entertaining to examine the faculties of memory, amusing himself by forgetting and remembering, until he saw the woman at his side. He lay very still, observing her bewilderment, the gradual effect of air in her lungs, of light in her eyes, the fluid way she moved to recognize herself. He imagined what she was going through, the slow awakening from nothingness to being.

  He extended his hand and she held out hers, opened. Their palms touched. They measured their hands, arms, legs. They examined their similarities and their differences. He took her to walk through the Garden. He felt useful, responsible. He showed her the jaguar, the centipede, the raccoon, the turtle. They played; they watched the clouds roll by and change their shapes, they listened to the unvarying tune of the trees; they tried out words for describing what could not be named. He knew himself to be Adam, and he knew her as Eve. She wanted to know everything.

  “What are we doing here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who can explain to us where we came from?”

  “The Other.”

  “Where is this Other?”

  “I don’t know where he is. I know only that he is all around.”

  She decided to look for him. She, too, had felt that she was being observed. They would have to climb to high places. She thought the look must come from there. Might it not be a bird? Perhaps, he said, admiring her astuteness. Walking among fragrant bushes and trees with generous foliage, without hurrying, they reached the highest volcano. They climbed it and from the top saw the green circle of the Garden, surrounded on all sides by thick whitish fog.

  “What is that farther up?” she asked.

  “Clouds,” he answered.

  “And behind the clouds?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe that’s where the one who’s observing us lives. Have you tried to go outside the Garden?”

  “No. I know we are not supposed to go any farther than where it’s green.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just know.”

  “The way you knew the names?”

  “Yes.”

  It did not take long for Eve to reach the conclusion that the gaze of whatever was watching them did not belong to a bird. The enormous phoenix, with its red and blue feathers, had whirled above them, but like the rest of the creatures, had merely glanced toward them.

  “Maybe it’s that tree,” she ventured, pointing toward the center of the Garden. “Look, Adam, look at it. Its canopy brushes the clouds as if it were playing with them. Maybe the one that sees us lives beneath its shade, or maybe what we feel is the gaze of the trees. There are so many, and they are everywhere. It may be that they are like us, except that they don’t talk or move.”

  “The one observing us moves,” said Adam. “I have heard his footsteps in the foliage.”

  They made their way down the volcano, wondering what to do to find the Other.

  Eve began to call him. Adam was astounded that such a deep moan could issue from her, a lament of the air in her unwinged body. She had gone to stand at the bank of the river, with her arms opened wide. Her dark hair fell down her back. Her distant and perfect profile, her face with the closed eyes and open mouth from which that invocation issued, moved Adam. He asked himself whether they were wasting their time imagining an Other like them hidden deep in the luxuriant vegetation, where it was impossible to distinguish one tree from another. But both Adam and the woman had sensed not only his gaze but also his voice, whispering to them in the language that, more and more fluently, they used to communicate. And they even thought they had seen his watching shadow reflected in the eyes of the dog and the cat. Adam wondered if maybe they would see him when their eyes were more mature, less new. They still had difficulty distinguishing what existed only in their minds from what they observed around them. Eve especially was prone to confusing the one with the other. She claimed she had seen more than one animal with a human head and chest, lizards that flew, women of water.

  From beyond the confines of the Garden they often heard the sound of cataclysms. They saw distant darkness and intermittent eruptions, streams of comets blazing across the firmament. Yet above them the sky remained unchanged, glowing with a golden clarity whose tones increased or diminished in no predictable order. When the earth quivered beneath their feet, Eve would tiptoe toward Adam, playing at not losing her balance. He would watch her, entranced, the toes of her feet stretching and contracting, reminding him of fishes.

  Adam did not remember the tree in the center of the Garden. He thought it was strange that he hadn’t noted it before, since he believed he had explored the place from end to end.

  “The one watching us does not want to be seen. He is protecting himself, but we must find him, Adam. We must know why he is observing us, what it is he expects us to do.”

  Adam decided they would follow the course of one of the rivers. They walked into the humid jungle. Their nostrils were filled with the heavy, penetrating odors of the fertile soil where all sorts of ferns and mushrooms and orchids grew. The graceful, complex nests of golden orioles swung from the high branches from which lichens and mosses spilled like lace above their heads. They saw sleeping sloths hanging by their tails. Groups of raucous monkeys peered at them as they pirouetted through the treetops. Tapirs, wild pigs, and rabbits crossed their path, brushing against their legs in a friendly manner. Though the warm heart of encompassing green welcomed them, throbbing with life, they walked in silence, soaking up the atmosphere filled with the sounds and aromas of the hidden heart of their Paradise.

  The jungle was so dense that they walked in circles and lost their way again and again, but they persisted. At last they came out in the center of the Garden. They discovered
that this was the origin of all the paths that radiated from here and later forked, and of the two rivers that flowed to the east and the west. They found an enormous tree; beneath its trunk earth and water were joined together. As it stretched upward, its branches disappeared into the clouds, and they extended farther to all sides than their eyes could see. Adam felt an impulse to bow before its magnificence. Eve went straight to the tree. Instinctively Adam tried to stop her, but she turned and looked at him with an air of pity.

  “It can’t move,” she told him. “It doesn’t speak.”

  “It hasn’t moved. It hasn’t spoken,” he said. “But we don’t know what it’s capable of doing.”

  “It’s a tree.”

  “Not just any tree. It is the Tree of Life.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The moment I saw it, I knew.”

  “It is very beautiful.”

  “Imposing. And I would say that you should not get so close.”

  Although the tree seemed to paralyze him, she could barely contain her desire to touch its broad and robust, its soft and gleaming, trunk. Beauty flooded her eyes everywhere, and the man had proudly showed her a myriad of colors and birds and majestic beasts, but to her nothing seemed more beautiful than the tree. Its leaves filled her imagination. They were lustrous, their backs painted a luminous green that contrasted with the underside, which was purple with thick, bright, salient veins. Arrayed on the many branches, extending in every direction, the leaves swallowed the light and then exhaled it, distributing radiance all about them. The skin of the round, white fruit shone, caught in the scintillating phosphorescence that radiated from the tree toward every part of the Garden. As Eve approached, the fruit-scented breath of the great tree tingled like unfamiliar excitement in her mouth, a current of life that was transmitted throughout the surroundings. Like Adam, she was overcome with reverence, and she had second thoughts about her initial impulse to touch the bark and eat the fruit. She was very close, and the crinkled skin was within reach of her hand, when her eyes lighted on a twin image. It was as if she were seeing a reflection in a pond: another, identical, tree rising before her, strange and complicit. Everything that was light about the first tree was crepuscular in the second: purple on the back of the leaves, green on the reverse, the fig fruit dark. It was wrapped in dense air and a dull, opaque light.