The Last Temptation of Christ Read Free Page A

such an hour. You leave instructions for the ledger to be put in your coffin so that you will be able to open it in front of God, present your bill and collect the immortal millions. ... And you, liar, teller of tall tales: you trample all the Lord’s commandments underfoot, you murder, steal, commit adultery, and afterward break into tears, beat your breast, take down your guitar and turn the sin into a song. Shrewd devil, you know very well that God pardons singers no matter what they do, because he can simply die for a song. ... And you, Thomas, sharp ox goad in our rumps. ... And me, me: crazy irresponsible fool, I got a swelled head and left my wife and children in order to search for the Messiah! All of us together—devils, angels, imps, dwarfs—we’re all needed in our great cause! ... After him, lads!”
    He laughed, spit into his palms and moved his big feet.
    “After him, lads!” he shouted again, and he started at a run down the slope leading to Nazareth.
     
    Mountains and men became smoke and disappeared. The sleeper’s eyes filled with dreamless murk. Now, at last, he heard nothing in his endless sleep but huge heavy feet stamping on the mountain and descending.
    His heart pounded wildly. He heard a piercing cry deep within his bowels: They’re coming! They’re coming! Jumping up with a start (so it seemed to him in his sleep), he blockaded the door with his workbench and piled all his tools on top—his saws, jack and block planes, adzes, hammers, screwdrivers—and also a massive cross which he was working on at the time. Then he sheathed himself again in his wood shavings and chips, to wait.
    There was a strange, disquieting calm-thick, suffocating. He heard nothing, not even the villagers’ breathing, much less God’s. Everything, even the vigilant devil, had sunk into a dark, fathomless, dried-up well. Was this sleep? Or death, immortality, God? The young man became terrified, saw the danger, tried with all his might to reach his drowning mind to save himself—and woke up.
    He was soaked in sweat. He remembered nothing from the dream. Only this: someone was hunting him. Who? ... One? Many? ... Men? Devils? He could not recall. He cocked his ear and listened. The village’s respiration could be heard now in the quiet of the night: the breathing of many breasts, many souls. A dog barked mournfully; from time to time a tree rustled in the wind. A mother at the edge of the village lulled her child to sleep, slowly, movingly. ... The night filled with murmurs and sighs which he knew and loved. The earth was speaking, God was speaking, and the young man grew calm. For a moment he had feared he remained all alone in the world.
    He heard his old father’s gasps from the room where his parents slept, which was next to his own. The unfortunate man could not sleep. He was contorting his mouth and laboriously opening and closing his lips in an effort to speak. For years he had been tormenting himself in this way, struggling to emit a human sound, but he sat paralyzed on his bed, unable to control his tongue. He toiled, sweated, driveled at the mouth, and now and then after a terrible contest he managed to put together one word by voicing each syllable separately, desperately—one word, one only, always the same: A-do-na-i, Adonai. Nothing else, only Adonai. ... And when he finished this entire word he would remain tranquil for an hour or two until the struggle again gripped him and he began once more to open and close his mouth.
    “It’s my fault ... my fault ...” murmured the young man, his eyes filling with tears.
    In the silence of the night the son heard his father’s anguish and he too, overcome with anguish, began involuntarily to sweat and open and close his lips. Shutting his eyes, he listened to what his father did so that he could do the same. Together with the old man, he sighed, uttered desperate, inarticulate cries—and while doing this, slept once more.
    But as soon as sleep came over