Cain (15 page)

Unfortunately,
it turned out far worse than could ever
have
been expected. Armed with the carte blanche given to
him by the lord, satan attacked simultaneously on all fronts.
One day, while job's sons and daughters, seven sons and
three daughters, were eating and drinking wine in the eldest
brother's house, a messenger came to job's house, our very
own cain, who, as we know, had been employed to tend the
she-asses, and he said to job, The oxen were ploughing and
the asses feeding beside them, when the sabeans fell upon
them and took them away and put all the servants to the
sword, and only I escaped alone to tell you. Cain was still
speaking when another messenger arrived, The fire of god
is fallen from heaven and has burned up the sheep and the
slaves and only I escaped alone to tell you. While he was
still speaking, there came another, The chaldeans, he said,
divided into three groups and fell upon the camels and
carried
them off, having first put the
servants to the sword, and only
I
escaped alone to tell you. While he was still speaking, there
came another, who said, Your sons and your daughters were
eating and drinking wine in the eldest brother's house, when
suddenly the came a great wind from the wilderness and
smote the four corners of the house and it fell in upon them
and killed them, and only I escaped alone to tell you. Then
job stood up and rent his cloak and shaved his head, and
fell down upon the ground and said, Naked came I out of
my mother's womb and naked shall I return to the womb
of the earth, the lord gave and the lord has taken away,
blessed be the name of the lord. The disasters befalling this
unfortunate family will not stop here, but before proceeding,
allow us a few remarks. The first is to express our bewilderment
at the fact that satan was able to do as he pleased
with the sabeans and the chaldeans in order to serve his
particular interests, the second is to express our even
greater
bewilderment on learning that satan
had been authorised
to
make use of a natural phenomenon, in this case a great
wind, and worse still, and this really is inexplicable, to
use
god's own fire to burn the sheep
and the slaves tending
them.
So, either satan is far more powerful than we thought,
or what we are seeing here is a grave case of tacit
complicity,
assuming it was tacit, between good
and evil. Mourning
had
fallen like a tombstone on the land of uz, because all
those who died had been born in the city, which was now
condemned, who knows for how long, to a general poverty
in which job would not be the least of the poor. A few days
after these unhappy events, there was another gathering of
the celestial beings, and satan was again amongst them. The
lord asked him, Where have you been, and satan answered,
I have been going to and fro on the earth and walking up
and down in it, Did you notice my servant job, asked the
lord, there is none like him on the earth, he is a perfect
and upright man, who fears god and eschews evil, and who
still holds fast to his integrity, even though you moved me
to destroy him for no reason, and satan answered, I did so
with your agreement, whether or not job deserved it was
none of my business, neither was the idea of tormenting
him, and he went on, A man is capable of giving all that
he has to save his life, even his own skin, but put forth
your
hand now and make him suffer
illness in his own bones
and
body and you will see that he will curse you to your
face. The lord said, He is in your hands, but on condition
that you spare his life, That is all I require, answered
satan
and he left the gathering to go and
find job and, before you
could
say knife, he had covered him with boils from the
soles of his feet to the crown of his head. It was terrible
to
see the poor man sitting in the
dust of the road while he
scraped
the pus from his legs with a potsherd, like the lowest
of the low. Job's wife, who had not said a word until now,
not even to mourn the death of her ten children, felt that
it was time to speak up and she asked her husband, Do you
still cling to your integrity, if I were you, if I were in
your
place, I would curse god even if,
by doing so, I risked
bringing
about my own death, to which job responded, You
speak like a foolish woman, if we receive good from god,
why should we not also receive evil, that was his question,
but his wife answered angrily, Evil is satan's business, it
would never have occurred to me that god would appear
to us now in the guise of satan's rival, God cannot have put
me in this state, only satan, Yes, but with the lord's agreement,
she said, adding, According to the ancients, the devil's
wiles would never prevail over the will of god, but I'm not
sure now that things are that simple, it seems likely that
satan is just another instrument of the lord, the one who
does the dirty work to which god prefers not to put his
name. Then job, at the height of his suffering, and perhaps,
although without admitting as much, encouraged by his
wife, broke the dyke of the fear of god sealing his lips and
cried, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night
in which it was said, There is a man-child conceived, let
that
day be darkness, let not god regard
it from above, neither
let
the light shine upon it, let darkness and the shadow of
death stain it, let a cloud dwell upon it, let the blackness
of the day terrify it, let it not be joined to the other days
of
the year, let it not be counted
among the months, let that
night
be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein, let the
stars of the twilight be dark, let it look for light, but
have
none, neither let it see the
dawning of the day, because it
shut
not up the doors of my mother's womb nor hid sorrow
from me, thus job bemoaned his fate, pages and pages
of imprecations and lamentations, while three friends of
his, eliphaz the temanite, bildad the shuhite and zophar the
naamathite lectured him on the need for resignation and
on the duty of all believers to bow their head to the will
of god whatever that will might be. Cain had managed to
find employment, the fairly lowly task of looking after the
donkeys of a small landowner, to whom he had to repeat
over and over, to him and his relatives, the story of the
attack by the sabeans and their theft of the she-asses. He
reckoned that the angels must still be around, collecting
information about job's misfortunes in order to carry the
news back to the lord, who would be impatient to hear
them, but, to his surprise, they were the ones who sought
him out, to congratulate him on having escaped the cruelty
of the sabean nomads, A miracle, they said. Cain, of course,
thanked them, but that prerogative did not make him forget
his grievances with god, which were growing steadily, The
lord must be very happy, he said to the angels, he won his
bet against satan, and despite all job's sufferings, he has
still
not denied god, We knew he
wouldn't, And god knew too,
I
imagine, Oh yes, the lord most of all, Which means that
he made the wager because he knew he would win, In a
way, yes, So nothing has changed, then, the lord knows no
more about job than he did before, True, In that case, can
you explain to me why job should have been transformed
into a leper, covered in suppurating wounds, having lost all
his children and all his wealth, The lord will find some way
of compensating him, Will he resuscitate his ten children,
raise the walls of his house and bring back the animals that
were killed, asked cain, That we don't know, And what will
the lord do to satan, who would seem to have abused the
authority given to him, Probably nothing, Nothing, asked
cain, scandalised, slaves may not count in the statistics,
but
a lot of other people died too, and
you're telling me that
the
lord will probably do nothing, It's not our fault, that's
how it's always been in heaven, The fact that satan should
be present at a gathering of celestial beings is, in itself,
incomprehensible to any mere mortal. The conversation
ended there, the angels left, and cain began to think that
he really should find a more dignified path in life, I'm not
going to stay here for ever, looking after donkeys, he
thought.
This praiseworthy notion was
deserving of consideration,
but,
unfortunately, his options were nil, apart from going
back to the land of nod and taking his place at the palace
and in lilith's bed. He would grow fat there and give her
two or three more children, but now another idea occurred
to him, that of going to see how his parents were, to find
out if they were still alive and if they were all right. He
would wear a disguise so as to go unrecognised, but no one
would deprive him of that joy. Joy, he asked himself, for
cain
there can never be any joy, cain is
the man who killed his
brother,
cain is the man born to witness the unspeakable,
cain is the man who hates god.

However, he
needed a donkey to take him there. At first,
he even considered forgetting about donkeys altogether and
travelling on foot, but if it took a long time before he was
sent to another present, he would have no option but to
wander those deserts, guiding himself by the stars at night
and, by day, waiting for them to come out. Besides, he would
have no one to talk to. Contrary to what most people think,
the donkey is a great conversationalist, one need think only
of its many ways of braying and snorting and the sheer
variety of its ear movements, however, not everyone who
rides a donkey knows that language, which is why seemingly
inexplicable situations arise, like when the creature
stops in the middle of the road, motionless, and refuses to
budge even if beaten. People say then that the donkey is as
stubborn as a mule, when, in fact, it's simply a communication
problem, as happens so often between human beings.
The idea of travelling on foot did not, therefore, last long
in cain's mind. He needed a donkey, even if he had to steal
one, but we, who are gradually getting to know him better,
also know that he will not do this. Cain may be a murderer,
but he's an essentially honest man, and even the dissolute
days he spent in concubinal bliss with lilith, however reprehensible
in bourgeois eyes, were not enough to alter his
innate moral sense, one has only to think of the way he
bravely stands up to god, although, truth be told, the lord
has not as yet noticed, unless one recalls the discussion
they
had over abel's still-warm body. In
this toing and froing of
thoughts,
cain had the providential idea of buying one of
the donkeys in his care, by taking only half his salary and
leaving the other half in the hands of the landowner as
payment on account. It would take a long time to pay off
this debt, but cain was in no hurry, no one in the world
was expecting him, not even lilith, however nervously and
impatiently her body might toss and turn in bed. The owner
of the donkeys, who was a decent man, drew up the accounts
in his own fashion and to cain's benefit, not that cain
noticed,
mathematics never having been his
strong point. It did not
take
many weeks before cain found himself, at last, in possession of his own
donkey. He could leave when he wished.
On
the eve of his departure, he decided to go and see how
his previous employer was doing, to see if the sores left by
the boils had now healed, but was horrified to find him still
sitting on the ground at the door of his house, scraping at
the wounds on his leg with a potsherd, just as he had been
on the day when the curse fell upon him, for god's surrender
of him into satan's hands had proved to be the very worst
of curses. Much coin, much care, people say, and job's story
demonstrates that to the full. Discreet as any fugitive has
to
be, cain did not approach job to
wish him some improvement in his health, after all, employer and employee had
never
met, that's the problem with social
divisions, with each of
us
stuck in our own place, preferably the place we were born,
how then will we ever make friendships with people from
different worlds. Mounted on the donkey that now belongs
to him by right, cain returned to his place of work to
prepare
what he needed for the journey. In
comparison with the
donkey
he had left behind in lilith's stables at the palace, the
magnificent beast that had prompted the envy of the farrier
at jericho, this new mount is more of a retired rocinante
than an animal to be led proudly out on parades. However,
even the least demanding of independent minds will
acknowledge that the beast has good strong legs, albeit
somewhat skinny and inelegant. All in all, cain is not ill
served, thought the donkey's former owner, who came to
the door to say goodbye when cain, early the following
morning, finally set off.