Cain

A Novel

José Saramago, Margaret Jull Costa

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780547519401
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A " winkingly blasphemous retelling of the Old Testament" by the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Gospel According the Jesus Christ ( The New Yorker ). In José Saramago final novel, he daringly reimagines the characters and narratives of the Old Testament. Placing the despised murderer Cain in the role of protagonist, this epic tale ranges from the Garden of Eden, when God realizes he has forgotten to give Adam and Eve the gift of speech, to the moment when Noah's Ark lands on the dry peak of Ararat.

Condemned to wander forever after he kills his brother Abel, Cain makes his way through the world in the company of a personable donkey. He is a witness to and participant in the stories of Isaac and Abraham, the destruction of the Tower of Babel, Moses and the golden calf, and the trials of Job. Again and again, Cain encounters a God whose actions seem callous, cruel, and unjust. He confronts Him, he argues with Him. "And one thing we know for certain, " Saramago writes, "is that they continued to argue and are arguing still."

"Cain's vagabond journey builds to a stunning climax that, like the book itself, isa fitting capstone to a remarkable career." — Publishers Weekly, starred review

This ebook includes a sample chapter of Jose Saramago's Blindness.

1

WHEN THE LORD, also known as god, realized that adam and eve, although perfect in every outward aspect, could not utter a word or make even the most primitive of sounds, he must have felt annoyed with himself, for there was no one else in the garden of eden whom he could blame for this grave oversight, after all, the other animals, who were, like the two humans, the product of his divine command, already had a voice of their own, be it a bellow, a roar, a croak, a chirp, a whistle or a cackle. In an excess of rage, surprising in someone who could have solved any problem simply by issuing another quick fiat, he rushed over to adam and eve and unceremoniously, no half-measures, stuck his tongue down the throats of first one and then the other. From the texts which, over the centuries, have provided a somewhat random record of those remote times, be it of events that might, at some future date, be awarded canonical status and others deemed to be the fruit of apocryphal and irredeemably heretical imaginations, it is not at all clear what kind of tongue was being referred to here, whether the moist, flexible muscle that moves around in the buccal cavity and occasionally outside it too, or the gift of speech, also known as language, that the lord had so regrettably forgotten to give them and about which we know nothing, since not a trace of it remains, not even a heart engraved on the bark of a tree, accompanied by some sentimental message, something along the lines of I love eve. It’s likely that the lord’s violent assault on his offspring’s silent tongues had another motive, namely, given that, in principle, you can’t have one without the other, that of putting them in contact with the deepest depths of their physical being, the so-called perturbations of the inner self, so that, in future, they could, with some authority, speak of those dark and labyrinthine disquiets out of whose window, the mouth, their tongues were already peering. Well, anything is possible. With the praiseworthy scrupulousness of any skilled craftsman, making up with due humility for his earlier negligence, the lord wanted to make sure that his mistake had been corrected, and so he asked adam, What’s your name, and the man replied, I’m adam, your first-born. Then the creator turned to the woman, And what is your name, I’m Eve, the first lady, she replied rather unnecessarily, since there was no other. The lord was satisfied and bade farewell with a fatherly See you later, then, and went about his business. And, for the first time, adam said to eve, Let’s go to bed.

Seth, their third child, will only come into the world one hundred and thirty years later, not because his mother’s womb required that amount of time to complete the making of a new descendant, but because the gonads of father and mother, the testes and ovaries respectively, had taken more than a century to mature and to develop sufficient generative power. It must be pointed out to our more impatient readers, first, that the fiat was given once and once only, second, that men and women are not sausage machines, and, third, that hormones are very complicated things, they can’t just be produced from one day to the next, nor can they be found in pharmacies or supermarkets, you have to let matters take their course. Before seth came into the world, cain had already arrived, followed, shortly afterwards, by abel. By the way, one must not underestimate the intense boredom of all those years spent without neighbors, without distractions, without some small child crawling about between kitchen and living room, with no other visitors but the lord, and even his visits were few and very brief, interspersed by long intervals of absence, ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty years, so we can easily imagine that the sole occupants of that earthly paradise must have felt like poor orphans abandoned in the forest of the universe, not that they would have been able to explain what the words orphan and abandoned meant. It’s true that every now and then, although again not with any great frequency, adam would say to eve, Let’s go to bed, but their conjugal routine, aggravated, in their case, due to inexperience, by the complete lack of alternative positions to adopt, proved to be as destructive as an invasion of woodworm to a roof beam. You hardly notice anything from the outside, just a little dust here and there falling from tiny holes, but, inside, it’s quite a different matter, and the collapse of something that had seemed so sturdy will not be long in coming. In such situations, there are those who say that a child can have an enlivening effect, if not on the libido, which is the work of chemicals far more complex than merely learning how to change a diaper, then at least on feelings, which, you must admit, is no small gain. As for the lord and his sporadic visits, the first was to see if adam and eve had had any problems setting up house, the second to find out what benefits they had gleaned from their experience of country life and the third to warn them that he would not be back for a while, because he had to do the rounds of the other paradises that exist in the heavens. Indeed, he would not appear again until much later, on a date that has not been recorded, in order to expel the unhappy couple from the garden of eden for the heinous crime of having eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This episode, which gave rise to the first definition of a hitherto unknown concept, original sin, has never been satisfactorily explained. Firstly, even the most rudimentary of intelligences would have no difficulty in grasping that being properly informed about something is always preferable to being ignorant, especially in such delicate matters as good and evil, which could put anyone at risk, quite unwittingly, of being consigned to eternal damnation in a hell that had not yet been invented. Secondly, the lord showed a lamentable lack of foresight, because if he really didn’t want them to eat that fruit, it would have been easy enough simply not to have planted the tree or to have put it somewhere else or surrounded it with barbed wire. Thirdly, it wasn’t because they had disobeyed god’s instructions that adam and eve discovered they were naked. They were already stark naked when they went to bed, and if the lord had never noticed such an evident lack of modesty, the fault must lie with a father’s blindness, an apparently incurable infliction that prevents us from seeing that our children are, after all, neither better nor worse than all the others.

A point of order. Before we continue with this instructive and definitive history of cain, undertaken with unprecedented boldness, it might be advisable to introduce some clarity into the chronology of events. So, let us begin by clearing up certain malicious doubts about adam’s ability to make a child when he was one hundred and thirty years old. At first sight, if we stick to the fertility indices of modern times, no, he clearly wouldn’t, but during the world’s infancy, those same one hundred and thirty years would have represented a vigorous adolescence that not even the most precocious of casanovas would have sneered at. It is, moreover, worth remembering that adam lived until he was nine hundred and thirty years old, thus narrowly missing being drowned in the great flood, for he died when lamech was still alive, lamech being the father of noah, the future builder of the ark. He would, therefore, have had the time and leisure to make all the children he did make and many more if he had so wished. As we said earlier, adam’s second child, born after cain, was abel, a handsome, fair-haired boy, who, having been the object of the best proofs of the lord’s esteem, met a very sticky end indeed. The third child, as we also said, was called seth, but he will not form part of this narrative, which we are writing step by step with all the meticulousness of a historian, and so we’ll leave him here, just a name and nothing more. There are those who say that the idea of creating a religion was born in his head, but we have given abundant attention to such ticklish matters in the past, with reprehensible levity, according to some experts, and in terms that will doubtless prove deleterious to us when it comes to the final judgment at which everyone will be condemned, either for doing too much or too little. We are only interested now in the family of which father adam is the head, although he proved to be a very bad head, and we really can’t put it any other way, since all it took was for his wife to offer him the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and our illogical first patriarch, after a certain amount of persuasion, more for appearance’s sake than out of any real conviction, duly choked on it, leaving us men marked forever by that irritating piece of apple that will neither go up nor down. There are also those who say that the reason adam didn’t manage to swallow the whole of that fateful fruit was because the lord suddenly turned up, demanding to know what was going on. Now before we forget about it completely or before our continuation of the story renders the fact redundant because it comes too late, we will tell you about the stealthy, almost clandestine visit the lord made to the garden of eden one hot summer night. As usual, adam and eve were sleeping, naked, beside each other, not touching, a deceptively edifying image of the most perfect innocence. They did not wake up, and the lord did not wake them either. He had gone there with the intention of correcting a slight flaw, which, as he had finally realized, seriously marred his creations, and that flaw, can you believe it, was the lack of a navel. The pale skin of his babies, untouched by the gentle sun of paradise, was too naked, too vulnerable, and in a way obscene, if that word existed then. Quickly, in case they should wake up, god reached out and very lightly pressed adam’s belly with the tip of his forefinger, making a rapid circling movement, and there was a navel. The same procedure, carried out on eve, produced similar results, with the one important difference that her navel was much better as regards design, shape and the delicacy of its folds. This was the last time that the lord looked upon his work and saw that it was good.

Fifty years and one day after this fortunate surgical intervention, which gave rise to a new era in the aesthetics of the human body under the consensual motto that everything about it can always be improved, disaster struck. With a crack of thunder, the lord appeared. He was dressed differently from usual, in keeping perhaps with what would become the new imperial fashion in heaven, wearing a triple crown on his head and wielding a scepter as if it were a cudgel. I am the lord, he cried, I am he. A mortal silence fell over the garden of eden, not a sound, not even the buzz of a wasp, the barking of a dog, the trilling of a bird, or the trumpeting of an elephant. Nothing, only the chattering of a flock of starlings that had congregated in a leafy olive tree, there since the garden was first created, and which suddenly took flight as one, so many, hundreds, if not thousands of them, that they nearly obscured the sky. Who has disobeyed my orders, who has eaten of the fruit of my tree, asked god, fixing adam with a look that can only be described as coruscating, a word which, though highly expressive, has sadly fallen out of use. In desperation, the poor man tried in vain to swallow the telltale piece of apple, but his voice refused to come out, neither fore nor aft. Answer, said the angry voice of the lord, who was brandishing his scepter in a most threatening manner. Plucking up his courage, and conscious of how wrong it was to put the blame on someone else, adam said, The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of that tree and I did eat. The lord turned on the woman and asked, What is this that you have done, The serpent beguiled me and I did eat, Liar, deceiver, there are no serpents in paradise, Lord, I did not say that there were serpents in paradise, but I did have a dream in which a serpent appeared to me, saying, So god has forbidden you to eat the fruit of every tree in the garden, and I said no, that wasn’t true, that the only tree whose fruit we could not eat was the one that grows in the middle of paradise, for we would die if we touched it, Serpents can’t speak, at most they hiss, said the lord, The serpent in my dream spoke, And may one know what else the serpent said, asked the lord, trying to give the words a mocking tone that ill accorded with the celestial dignity of his robes, The serpent said that we wouldn’t die, Oh, I see, the lord’s irony was becoming more and more marked, it would seem that this serpent thinks he knows more than I do, That is what I dreamed, my lord, that you didn’t want us to eat of that fruit because we would open our eyes and know good and evil just as you know them, lord, And what did you do, you fallen, frivolous woman, when you woke from this delightful dream, I went straight to the tree, ate the fruit and brought some back for adam, who also ate, It got stuck just here, said adam, touching his throat, Right, said the lord, if that’s the way you want it, that’s the way it shall be, from now on you can bid farewell to the good life, you, eve, will not only suffer all the discomforts of pregnancy, morning sickness included, you will give birth in pain, and yet you will still feel desire for your husband, and he shall rule over you, Poor me, said eve, what a bad beginning, and what a sad fate will be mine, You should have thought of that before, and as for you, adam, the ground is cursed because of you, and in sorrow will you eat of it all of your days, it will bring forth only thorns and thistles, and you will have to eat the herbs of the fields, only by the sweat of your brow will you manage to grow enough to eat, until you return to the ground out of which you came, wretched adam, for dust you are and to dust you will return. That said, the lord plucked out of the air a couple of animal skins to cover the nakedness of adam and eve, who exchanged knowing winks, for they had known they were naked from the very first day and had made the most of it too. Then the lord said, In knowing good and evil, man has become like a god, and if you were to eat of the fruit of the tree of life you would gain eternal life, whatever next, two gods in one universe, that is why I am expelling you and your wife from the garden of eden, at whose gate I will place an angel armed with a flaming sword, who will let no one enter, now go, leave, I never want to see you again. Bearing on their backs the stinking animal hides, staggering along on unsteady legs, adam and eve resembled two orangutans who had stood upright for the first time. Outside of the garden of eden, the earth was arid and inhospitable, the lord was not exaggerating when he threatened adam with thorns and thistles. As he had so rightly said, the good life was over.

2

THEIR FIRST HOME was a low, narrow cave, well, it was more of a cavity than a cave, which they discovered in a rocky outcrop to the north of the garden of eden when they were searching desperately for some shelter. There, at last, they could take refuge from the brutal, burning sun that bore no resemblance to the invariably benign temperatures to which they were accustomed and that had remained constant day and night and at any season of the year. They abandoned the heavy skins that were suffocating them with their heat and stench and returned to their initial nakedness, although to protect the more delicate parts of the body, those that are only partially shielded by the thighs, they resorted to using thinner skins with shorter hair and invented what would later come to be called a skirt, identical in form for women and for men. They went hungry for the first few days, with not even a crust of bread to chew on. The garden of eden was full of fruit, indeed, that was all there was to eat, and even those animals, who should, given their nature as carnivores, feed on red meat, even they, by divine command, had to submit to the same melancholy, unsatisfactory diet. What we don’t know is where those skins came from that the lord had summoned up with a snap of his fingers, like a magician. They clearly came from animals, and large ones too, but who had killed and skinned them and where, no one knows. By chance, there was some water nearby, but it was only a somewhat muddy stream and was nothing like the wide river that had its source in the garden of eden and then divided into four, with one branch irrigating the region reputed to have an abundance of gold and with the other flowing through the land of cush. And strange though this may seem to today’s readers, the remaining two branches were immediately baptized with the names tigris and euphrates. Faced by the humble little stream laboriously threading its way through the thorns and thistles of the desert, it seems likely that the river had merely been an optical illusion created by the lord himself to make life in the earthly paradise more pleasant. Anything is possible. Yes, anything is possible, even eve’s extraordinary idea of going to ask the angel for permission to enter the garden of eden and pick some fruit to keep them alive for a few more days. Adam was as skeptical as any man is regarding the success of any enterprise born of a woman’s brain and so he told her to go alone and to prepare to be disappointed, That angel over there, guarding the gate with his flaming sword, is not just any angel, with no weight or authority, he’s one of the cherubim, so do you really expect him to disobey the lord’s orders, he asked very sensibly, That I don’t know nor will I until I try, And if you fail, If I fail, I will have lost only the steps I took from there to here and the words I said to him, she replied, Yes, but we’ll be in deep trouble if the angel goes and denounces us to the lord, What, more trouble than we’re in already, with no way of earning our living, with no food, no roof over our heads and no clothes worthy of the name, how much more trouble could we be in, the lord has already punished us by expelling us from the garden of eden, and I can’t imagine anything worse than that, We have no way of knowing what the lord can or cannot do, In that case, we should demand that he explain himself, and the first thing he should tell us is why he did what he did and to what purpose, You’re mad, Better mad than fainthearted, Don’t you be disrespectful to me, shouted adam angrily, besides, I’m not fainthearted and I’m not afraid, Well, neither am I, so that makes us even, and there’s nothing more to be said, Fine, but don’t you forget that I’m the one who gives the orders around here, So the lord said, agreed eve with the look of someone who has uttered not a word. When the sun had lost some of its strength, she set off wearing her skirt and with one of the lighter skins draped over her shoulders. She looked, you might say, very proper, although she could do nothing about her bare breasts, which bobbed about as she walked. She couldn’t help it, nor did she even give it a thought, after all, there was no one around to be attracted by them, and, at the time, breasts served only for suckling and little more. She was surprised at herself, at how freely and fearlessly she had replied to her husband, without having to choose her words, merely saying what, in her view, the case merited. It was as if there were another woman inside her, quite independent of the lord and of the husband he had given her, a woman, in short, who had decided to make full use of the tongue and the language that the lord had, in a manner of speaking, stuck down her throat. She crossed the stream, enjoying the coolness of the water that seemed to spread through her veins and simultaneously experiencing something that might have been happiness, well, something, at least, that bore a close resemblance to that word. Then she felt a pang of hunger, this was hardly the moment for such positive thoughts. She waded out of the stream and picked a few sour berries which, although they weren’t exactly nourishing, did for a while, a very short while, assuage the need to eat. The garden of eden is very close now, you can clearly see the tops of the tallest trees. Eve is walking more slowly than before and not because she’s feeling tired. If adam were here, he would laugh at her, Where’s all your bravery now, you’re really scared. Yes, she was scared, scared of failing, scared that she wouldn’t find the right words to persuade the guard, in fact, she felt so discouraged that she found herself muttering, It would be much easier if I were a man. There is the angel, and in his right hand, the flaming sword shines with a malevolent light. Eve tried to cover her breasts and then went over to him. What do you want, asked the angel, I’m hungry, said the woman, There’s nothing here for you to eat, But I’m hungry, she insisted, You and your husband were driven out of the garden of eden by the lord and there is no appeal against that sentence, go away, Would you kill me if I tried to go in, asked eve, That’s why I was placed here on guard, You didn’t answer my question, Those are my orders, To kill me, Yes, And would you obey that order. The angel did not respond. He merely moved his arm, and the flaming sword in his hand hissed like a serpent. That was his reply. Eve took a step nearer. Stop, said the angel, You’ll have to kill me, then, because I won’t stop, and she took another step, you’ll be left guarding an orchard of rotten fruit that no one will want to eat, god’s orchard, the lord’s orchard, she added. What do you want, asked the angel again, apparently unaware that repeating the question would be interpreted as a sign of weakness, As I said, I’m hungry, Well, I assumed you’d both be far away by now, Where would we go, asked eve, we’re in the middle of a strange desert with not a single path or road, where we haven’t seen another living soul all the time we’ve been here, we sleep in a hole, we eat grass, just as the lord promised, and we have diarrhea, What’s diarrhea, asked the angel, Another word for it is the runs, the vocabulary the lord taught us has a word for everything, having diarrhea or the runs, if you prefer that term, means that you can’t retain the shit you have inside you, What does that mean, Ah, that’s the advantage of being an angel, said eve, and smiled. The angel liked that smile. In heaven, people smiled a lot too, but always seraphically and with the slightly embarrassed look of someone apologizing for being so contented, if you could call it contentment. Eve had won the dialectic battle, now she just had to win the battle for food. The angel said, All right, I’ll bring you some fruit, but don’t tell anyone, My lips are sealed, although my husband will have to know, Come back here with him tomorrow, we need to talk. Eve removed the skin from around her shoulders and said, Use this to carry the fruit in. She was naked from the waist up. The sword hissed more loudly as if it had received a sudden influx of energy, the same energy that led the angel to take a step forward, the same that made him raise his left hand and touch the woman’s breast. Nothing else happened, nothing else could happen, angels, as long as they are angels, are forbidden any carnal commerce, only fallen angels were free to get together with whoever they wanted or whoever wanted them. Eve smiled and placed her hand on the angel’s hand and pressed it gently to her breast. Her body was grimy, her nails were as black as if she had been using them to dig the earth, her hair was like a tangled nest of eels, but she was a woman, the only one. The angel had gone into the garden, where he took his time picking the most nutritious and luscious of fruits, before returning laden down with a goodly burden. Here you are, he said, and eve asked, What’s your name, and he replied, My name is azael, Thank you for the fruit, azael, Well, I could hardly let the creatures whom the lord created starve, The lord will be grateful to you, but it’s best you don’t tell him about this. The angel either appeared not to hear or really didn’t hear, occupied as he was in helping eve put the bulging load on her back, meanwhile saying, Come back tomorrow with adam, there are a few things you need to know, We’ll be here, she said.

The following day, adam went with his wife to the garden of eden. At her suggestion, they had washed themselves as best they could in the stream, although their best was very little, almost nothing really, because without the aid of soap, water can give only an illusion of cleanliness. They sat down on the ground and discovered that the angel azael wasn’t one to beat about the bush, You are not the only human beings on earth, he began, Not the only ones, exclaimed adam, astonished, Please, don’t make me repeat myself, Who created those other beings, where are they, They’re everywhere, Did the lord create them as he created us, asked eve, That I can’t say, and if you ask the same question again, our conversation will end right here, and we will each go our separate ways, I to my job of guarding the garden of eden and you to your cave and your hunger, In that case, we’ll be dead in no time, said adam, no one has ever taught me how to do anything, I can’t dig or work the land because I have no hoe and no plough, and if I had, I would have to learn how to use them and there’s no one in this desert to teach me, we would be better off as the dust we came from, with no will and no desire, You speak like a book, said the angel, and adam felt pleased to have spoken like a book, he who had never studied. Then eve asked, If other human beings already exist, why did the lord make us, As you know, the ways of the lord are mysterious, but, as far as I can make out, you were an experiment, Us, an experiment, exclaimed adam, an experiment to prove what, Since I do not know for certain, I cannot tell you, but the lord must have his reasons for keeping silent on the matter, We aren’t a matter, we are two people who don’t know how we’re going to survive, said eve, Wait, I haven’t yet finished, said the angel, Speak then, and please give us some scrap of good news, however insignificant, Not far from here is a road occasionally frequented by caravans of traders traveling back and forth to the markets, and my idea is that you should light a fire that produces a lot of smoke, enough to be seen from a distance, We haven’t anything to light it with, said eve, You don’t, but I do, What, This burning sword, which will finally be of some use, I just need to apply the tip to some dry thistles and some straw and you’ll have a bonfire that can be seen n...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• Translator’s Acknowledgments
• Sample chapter from BLINDNESS
• Buy the Book
• About the Author