Cain Read Free

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
baptised 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 sceptical
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