Cain (11 page)

In an instant,
the same cain who had just left sodom, travelling along proper roads, was
suddenly transported to the
sinai
desert where, to his great surprise, he found himself
in the midst of a multitude of thousands all encamped at
the foot of a mountain. He had no idea who they were, nor
where they had come from, nor where they were going. If
he were to ask any of the people next to him, he would
immediately betray the fact that he was a stranger, and that
might bring him all kinds of embarrassments and problems.
Keeping prudently on the back foot, therefore, he decided
to call himself neither cain nor abel this time, just in case
the devil should decide to stir things up and introduce
someone who had heard tell of that tale of two brothers
and who might then start asking awkward questions. It
would be best to keep eyes and ears open and to draw his
own conclusions. One thing was certain, the name of moses
was on everyone's lips, some uttered it in a tone of ancient
veneration, but most did so with a rather more contemporary
note of impatience. They were the ones who kept asking,
Where is moses, he went up to the mountain to speak to the
lord forty days and forty nights ago, and we have received
neither word nor
command from him since, the lord has
obviously
abandoned his people and wants nothing more
to do with us. The road to self-deception is narrow to begin
with, but there's always someone ready to broaden it out,
for as the proverb says, self-deception is like eating or
scratching, it's all a matter of beginning. Along with those
waiting for moses' return from mount sinai was a brother
of his called aaron, who had been appointed high priest
during the time of the israelites' captivity in egypt. The
more
impatient among them addressed
themselves to him, saying,
Since
we do not know what has happened to moses, why
don't you make us some gods to guide us, and aaron, who
was, it would seem, neither a model of steadfastness nor
very brave, instead of refusing point-blank, said, If that's
what you want, take the gold earrings from your wives and
sons and daughters and bring them here. They did as he
asked, and he then melted the gold, poured it into a mould,
cast it and made of it a golden calf. Apparently pleased with
his work and oblivious to the serious confusion he was about
to create around that future object of worship, namely, was
it the lord himself or a calf replacing him, he announced,
Tomorrow we will hold a feast in honour of the lord. Cain
heard all this and, piecing together odd words, scraps of
dialogue, snatches of opinion, he began to form an idea, not
just about what was happening at that moment, but about
what had gone on before. He was greatly helped in this by
conversations overheard in a tent used as a dormitory for
soldiers, those without families of their own. Unable to
think
of anything better, Cain had told
them that his name was
noah,
and he was made welcome and invited to join in
their conversations, for jews have always been a talkative
people. The following morning, a rumour spread that moses
was finally coming down from mount sinai and that joshua,
his aide and the israelites' military commander, had gone
to meet him. When joshua heard the shouts of the people,
he said to moses, There is a noise of war in the camp, What
you hear, said moses, are not the happy songs of victory or
the sad songs of defeat, it is merely the sound of people
singing. Little did he know what awaited him. When he
entered the camp, the first thing he saw was the golden calf
and the people dancing round it. He seized the calf, smashed
it into pieces and ground it to powder, then, turning to
aaron, he asked, What did this people do to you that you
allowed them to commit so great a sin, and aaron, who,
for all his faults, knew the world in which he lived,
replied,
Do not be angry with me, for you
know that these people
are
set on mischief, it was their idea, they wanted other
gods because they no longer believed that you would return,
and they would probably have killed me if I had refused
to do as they asked. Then moses stood at the gate of the
camp and cried, Whoever is on the lord's side let him come
to me. All the tribe of levi gathered around him, and moses
proclaimed, Thus says the lord god of israel, take up your
swords, return to the camp and go from door to door
killing your brother, your friend, your neighbour. And in
this way nearly three thousand men died. And the blood
ran between the tents like a flood that had sprung up from
the earth, as if the earth itself were bleeding, everywhere
lay bodies cleaved in two, with throats slit or guts hanging
out, and so loud were the screams of the women and children
that they must have reached the top of mount sinai
where the lord would be rejoicing in his revenge. Cain could
barely believe what he was seeing. Burning sodom and
gomorrah to the ground had evidently not been enough for
the lord, for here, at the foot of mount sinai, was clear,
irrefutable proof of his wickedness, three thousand men
killed simply because he was angered by the creation of a
supposed rival in the form of a golden calf. I killed one
brother and the lord punished me, who, I would like to
know, is going to punish the lord for all these deaths,
thought
cain, lucifer was quite right when
he rebelled against god,
and
those who say he did so out of envy are wrong, he
simply recognised god's evil nature. Some of the gold dust
blown by the wind stained cain's hands. He washed them
in a puddle as if ritually shaking from his feet the dust of
a place where he had been ill received, then he climbed on
to his donkey and left. A dark cloud hung over mount sinai,
where the lord sat.

For reasons it
is not in our power to explain, mere
repeaters
as we are of ancient stories, constantly wavering
between the most ingenuous credulity and the most resolute
scepticism, cain found himself plunged into what we can,
without exaggeration, call a tempest, a calendric cyclone, a
temporal hurricane. During the few days following the
episode of the golden calf and its brief existence, his ever-
changing presents followed one upon another with incredible
rapidity, emerging from the void and hurling themselves
back into the void in the form of random, disparate images,
with no continuity or connection between them, at times
showing what appeared to be the battles of a never-ending
war whose first cause no one could remember, at others
revealing a kind of grotesque and invariably violent farce, a
sort of on-going grand guignol, harsh, discordant and obsessive.
One of these images, the most enigmatic and fleeting
of all, set before his eyes a vast expanse of water where one
could see nothing as far as the horizon, not even an island
or a sailing boat with its fishermen and their nets. Water,
water everywhere, nothing but water covering the earth.
Obviously, cain could not have been an eye-witness to all
of these stories, and some, whether true or not, came to him
via the well-known route of hearing a story from someone
who had heard it from someone else who had, in turn, told
someone else. One example was the scandalous case of lot
and his daughters. When sodom and gomorrah were
destroyed, lot was afraid to go on living in the nearby town
of zoar and decided to seek shelter in a cave in the mountains.
One day, his eldest daughter said to his younger
daughter, Our father is old, one day he will die, and there
is no man on the earth to marry us, come, let us make our
father drink wine and we will lie with him so that he may
give us descendants. And so it was, and lot did not notice
when she lay down nor when she left his bed, and the same
thing happened with his younger daughter on the following
night, for he was so old and drunk that, again, he did not
notice when she lay down nor when she left his bed. The
two sisters duly became pregnant, but when this story was
told to cain, that great expert on erections and
ejaculations,
as
lilith, his first and so far only lover, would happily confirm,
he said, Any man who was so drunk that he didn't even
know what was going on wouldn't even be able to get it up,
and if he couldn't get it up, then no penetration could take
place and no engendering either. We should not be surprised
by the fact that in the ancient societies he had created, the
lord should accept incest as an everyday occurrence not
deserving of punishment, for nature then lacked any moral
code and was concerned only with the propagation of the
species, whether driven by natural urges, mere lust or, as
people will say later on, simply doing what comes naturally.
The lord himself had said, Go forth and multiply, and he
put no limits or restrictions on that injunction, nor on who
one should or shouldn't go with. It's possible, although this
is only a working hypothesis, that the lord's liberality in
the
matter of making babies had to do
with the need to replace
the
considerable losses suffered, in the way of dead and
wounded, by his and other people's armies, as we have
already seen and will doubtless continue to see. We need
only recall what happened within sight of mount sinai and
the column of smoke that was the lord, the erotic zeal with
which, that same night, once the survivors had dried their
tears, they hurriedly did their best to engender new combatants
who would one day wield the ownerless swords and
slit the throats of the children of those who had just
vanquished them. Look at what happened to the midianites.
In the great lottery of war, it chanced that they defeated
the israelites, who, in the past, it must be said, despite
all
the propaganda to the contrary,
often faced defeat. This
rankled
with the lord, like a stone in his shoe, and he said
to moses, You should take vengeance for the israelites on
the midianites and then, prepare yourself, for afterwards you
will be gathered unto your people. Swallowing the unpleasant
news about his own imminent demise, moses ordered each
of the twelve tribes of israel to provide one thousand men
for the war and thus raised an army of twelve thousand
soldiers, who destroyed the midianites, not one of whom
escaped with his life. Among the dead were the kings of
midian, namely evi, rekem, zur, hur and reba, for kings then
used to have strange names, rather than being called joao
or afonso or manuel, sancho or pedro. As for the women
and children, the israelites took them captive, as well as
seizing their cattle, sheep, and all their other goods and
chattels. They presented this booty to moses and to the priest
eleazar and to the congregation of the children of israel,
who were encamped on the plains of moab, by the river
jordan, near jericho, toponymic details which we give here
merely to show that we have invented nothing. On learning
the outcome of the battle, moses was angry and he demanded
of the soldiers entering the encampment, Why did you not
also kill the women who caused the israelites to trespass
against the lord and worship instead the god baal, thus
causing a plague among the people of the lord, I order you,
therefore, to go back and kill every male child and every
woman who has lain with a man, and as for the female children
and those women who have not yet lain with a man,
you may keep them for yourselves. None of this surprised
cain. What was new to him was the sharing out of the spoils,
which we set down here as an indispensable record of the
customs of the day, with apologies to the reader for an
excess
of detail for which we are not
responsible. This is what the
lord
said to moses, You and the priest eleazar and the chief
fathers of the congregation take the sum of the spoils that
were taken, both of men and of beasts, and divide them into
two parts, half for the soldiers who fought in the battle and
the other half for the congregation. From the soldiers' half
you will take as a tribute to the lord one soul of every five
hundred, both of people and of beasts, oxen, asses or sheep.
Of the children of israel's half you will take one portion of
every fifty, both of people and of beasts, oxen, asses or
sheep,
and give them to the levites, who
guard the tabernacle of
the
lord. Moses did as the lord commanded. And the booty
that the israelite soldiers took was six hundred and seventy-
five thousand sheep, seventy-two thousand oxen, sixty-one
thousand asses and thirty-two thousand women who had
not lain with men. And the half corresponding to the soldiers
who had gone into battle was, therefore, three hundred and
thirty-seven thousand five hundred sheep, of which the lord's
tribute was six hundred and seventy-five, thirty-six thousand
oxen, of which the lord's tribute was seventy-two, thirty
thousand five hundred asses, of which the lord's tribute was
sixty-one, and sixteen thousand people, of which the lord's
tribute was thirty-two. The other half, which moses gave to
the israelites, consisted also of three hundred and thirty-
seven thousand five hundred sheep, thirty-six thousand oxen,
thirty thousand five hundred asses and sixteen thousand
women who had not lain with men. Of that half, moses
took one portion of every fifty, both of people and of
beasts,
and just as the lord commanded, he
gave them to the levites,
who
guard the tabernacle of the lord. But this was not all.
In gratitude to the lord for having saved their lives, for
none
of them had died in the battle, the
soldiers, through the
intermediary
of their commanding officers, offered up to
the lord the gold they had found during the sack of the
town. Those bracelets, bangles, rings, earrings and necklaces
weighed in at some three hundred and seventy pounds. As
has been amply demonstrated, as well as being naturally
gifted with the brain of a book-keeper and being very quick
at mental arithmetic too, the lord is also what one can only
describe as very rich. Still astonished by the abundance of
cattle, slave-women and gold, the fruits of the battle
against
the midianites, cain thought, War
is obviously very good
business
indeed, perhaps the best of all, to judge by the ease
with which, in an instant, one can acquire thousands and
thousands of oxen, sheep, asses and women, this lord will
one day be known as the god of war, I can see no other use
for him, thought cain, and he was right. It is quite possible
that the pact that some say exists between god and men
contains only two articles, namely, you scratch my back and
I'll scratch yours. One thing is sure, things have changed a
lot. Once, the lord would appear to us in person, in the
flesh
so to speak, and even took a
certain satisfaction in showing
himself
to the world, just ask adam and eve, who benefitted
from his presence, or ask cain, although that was in less
fortunate circumstances, we refer, of course, to the murder
of abel, when there was little cause for contentment. Now,
though, the lord conceals himself in columns of smoke, as
if he preferred not to be seen. As mere observers of events,
we are of the view that he feels ashamed of some of his less
palatable actions, for example, those innocent children in
sodom devoured by his divine fire.