If I were capable of second thoughts (a priori out of the question), the one thing I’d regret would be having created them. Without men, evil would not exist, nor the whole shebang of infamy and atrocities that go with it, and the cosmos would be utterly perfect. No infanticides, no blood feuds, wars, massacres of the innocents, holocausts. If I could do it again (another meaningless expression) I’d recreate the giraffes, the fleas, the walruses, the dinosaurs (poor things, came to a bad end), the salamanders, and I might even throw in some novel items, as always happens when you remake something from scratch and new ideas come to you, but one thing I wouldn’t do is put man back in circulation. I’d leave Noah on the dock. Ban the Man, as the nuclear disarmament people would say.
Having completed what she was meant to do and also what according to the protocol she wasn’t meant to do, the brainy biker now heads straight home to the former fishmonger’s shop she’s minimally converted into a dwelling, and once inside the door strides straight to the toilet and sits down to pee with her blind cat on her knees. She then empties a tin of rice and tuna into the cat’s dish. For herself, she snaps open (dull thwack) a can of sweet corn, adds some olive oil, half a finely sliced onion, some salted capers, some white raisins, and seated on the floor in front of the television, digs in with a spoon, from time to time biting off some cheese (fontina) from the piece she holds in the other hand. Before retiring to sleep in the large green-tiled fish tank, she watches a ghastly TV show about a beautiful young woman who was supposed to marry an airplane pilot but instead dallies with his ex, a female lifeguard. First she masturbates by kneading the cushion between her legs and then using her fingers (in short, a real eyeful).
I AM PERFECT
I am God and I am wrapped in silence. A silence consonant with my divine office. A silence that is also a deafening roar, a cacophony of clanging and hissing sometimes unfolding into a heavenly symphony, sometimes just one noise drowning out the other. A silence that is blinding light, a blaze of too many colors, but also perpetual darkness. I’m putting this badly, though, for as you can imagine it is not easy to describe my existence (let’s call it that) in clumsy human language. The language resists, it refuses to admit my transcendence. Languages were made for (wo)man.
I am God, and I am perfect (and thus there is nothing more untrue than the expression nobody’s perfect). My perfection is uncontestable, it is axiomatic. You might think that in the long run my utter absence of defects, even tiny ones, would grow tedious, especially when there is no great stampede to admire it (and in fact there is no one at all in the vicinity), but that isn’t the case, because perfection entails having a perfect character (none of that rage and cruelty you find in the Bible) as well as an imperfectible—already free of impurity—patience. Perfection is also achieved by perfecting perfection.
Although this is the first time I’ve expressed myself, I do not stammer on words I’ve never used before, I don’t stumble over complex constructions; the words well up (to employ a hydraulic metaphor) like water from a spring. I merely feel ever so slightly giddy from time to time, as when one is just beginning to fall ill. I am immense, and my immensity must pass through the lexicon’s narrow neck and the obligatory pathways of syntax (resembling the twists and turns of a digestive system). It’s a sensation (as much as that term can mean anything referring to a god) like that experienced by speleologists as they slither forward into the rocky grip of a cave.
Sometimes I ask myself, why did I create them, human beings? Let me emphasize that it didn’t happen as the Bible asserts (one of the most unreliable and delusional storybooks ever written). I started creating (I no longer remember why), and all of a sudden I was peering at microbes so minute even a divine eye could scarcely make them out, huge, lumbering ruminants, tiny plants, fungi and algae, serpents, cacti, shellfish, gnats. It’s not true that fish appeared and the next day, animals (the next day?); I created and created, and before I knew it there was a huge potpourri of animal and vegetable species. It’s all very well being omniscient, but there are some things that just blow you away.[7]
Certainly, as soon as I laid eyes on them I knew what each of these species was called, and how they were made, et cetera et cetera (obviously), but still, I would be lying if I said that in one precise instant I decided to create a creature called x that looked like such and such, and then another called y that looked like so and so, and so on. No, I was taking the inspiration as it came, winging it, as they say. Picasso, too, was amazed to see what came splashing forth from his brush, so you can just imagine just how volcanic my creation was, considering that I am omnipotent. This was the situation (I won’t say chaotic, but confusing, yes) in which, without me having decided anything specific, man came forth. Anyone who imagines a long and meticulous drafting as an architect might do, a craftsman’s patient perfecting and polishing, could not be more mistaken. What is more, that bunkum about in His own image is thoroughly exaggerated, although there is some slight family resemblance; I noticed it myself immediately.
THE SUPPER OF THE CRUCIFICIAN IMMOLATION
Humans abound, although in comparison with bacteria (for example) they can almost be considered a species on the way to extinction. They teem in all four corners of that little planet that designates itself Earth, so that many regions seen from on high look like colonies of Enterococcus, a condition exacerbated by the pestilential fumes and lights that pollute the night. You might suppose that I watch all the geographic regions equally (divisions in nation-states make little sense to me). But no, I mostly keep an eye on what’s happening in that tatty little Italian boot that (rightly and properly) gobbled up the Papal State in the nineteenth century. Focusing in particular on a large city in the north not very far from a mountain chain famous for its rupestrian beauties. And more in particular, on that strapping blond mademoiselle (blond when not tinted purple), half skinny (on top) and half hefty (below) and intolerably sure of herself. I myself struggle to understand why.
That afternoon, the bespectacled beanpole, skipping her sacrilegious big game hunt, goes straight home. This time she cooks rice with okra, following a recipe she invents as she goes. She also makes an algae salad with capers and pickles that smell of oyster shells and the Atlantic. When she’s finished she goes to the storeroom with the bayonet window that looks out on the alley of Nigerian prostitutes, takes the door off its hinges and mounts it on two sawhorses ordinarily used to hold up complex stratigraphs of clothing. Over this she throws a colorfully striped tablecloth made from a parachute, the gift of a Swiss athlete with whom she’d had three or four two–zeros.
These preparations of hers irritate me but I can’t stop watching, I observe her every move, weigh her every sigh. You could call it a maniacal interest if it made any sense in the case of a god to speak of interest, let alone maniacal. You could call it a fixation, which suits me even less. If not an obsession. What’s certain is that nothing like this has happened to me in many billions of years; that’s what floors me. I’ve never felt less divine.
7
During creation one is so intent that nothing surprises (it’s a sort of trance); nevertheless I invite you to imagine what it feels like to have a brontosaurus staring at you as if to work out whether he’s seen you somewhere before, and what the hell he must have been up to last night not to remember diddly squat.