We all suffered to some degree from this misfortune. Each one of us secretly imagined foreigners, impartial witnesses, angels on no particular errand — unrelated company to whom we could show off what we took to be our qualities, or express what we knew to be our grievances.
The gift of pleasing lay rotting in my father’s heart. For want of guests his instinct for hospitality turned inward, and every night he welcomed new terrors into his dreams.
Unconfided vexation massed like gallstones in my mother’s gut.
I…
But leave me out of it. This hour is consecrated to my brother. And our self-sufficiency, our entirety unto ourselves, was crueller to him than to any of us. For what good is a genius for unattainability when there is nobody out there to try attaining you?
In the absence of a god who hankered after boyish company, or older men who would cradle youth only that they might see it spill from their embraces like golden sand, Abel’s beauty found the adoration it couldn’t do without — in my mother. She fed on it, drank from it, following it everywhere with her eyes, repairing every accidental bruising to it with slow suppliant idolatrous fingers. She sat him on her lap. She pressed his head between her breasts. She blew on his neck and shoulders, to cool him when he was hot, to warm him when he was cold — a climatic system all his own. She stroked his chest. She kissed his navel.
Nothing maternally untoward in that? Then let me tell you she was still bathing him when he was eighteen, and would have been drying him when he was twenty…
There had been no pacifying Eve. Her anger was fed from invisible sources, was nourished by a root system so complex that had Adam hacked at it for a thousand years he would have diminished her supply not a trickle.
From the moment he saw that the bitter waters had left his wife’s belly flat and thigh intact, but had begun to seep instead into her affections, my father threw himself into a frenzy of expiation. Elaborate apologies were not his way. You could say he was without grace. Without, too, any of that capacity for transferred anguish which later men, men not muddy in their origins, would employ as a means of righting wrong: ‘You think you are hurt by what I’ve done? Look at how it has affected me!’ He was unsubtle, in other words, and sought to make amends the only way he knew how — manually.
He hewed for her. He drew for her. He chopped and axed and chipped and carved and sliced and scythed and smoothed for her. He bevelled bowls for her. Whittled ladles. Cut down palms to shape her bowers, bound lianas to make her hammocks, bent bamboo and plaited rushes so that she should have simultaneous shade against the sun and shelter from the cold.
You rejoice in moderation here in Babel. I ask you to remember that for us the seasons were still unsorted. The Six-day Miracle notwithstanding, it was still possible to sweat and shiver at the same time, to feel the sun frizzle on our shoulders while our feet crunched snails iced up in their shells. The earth did not know what the air was thinking; the sea enjoyed no commerce with the shore — the thing we call amphibiousness came later, when co-operation between the elements could be counted on. In our time there was no relying on a single medium to co-operate even with itself.
As it happened, we never did wake to find the sky lower than the earth, or fire flowing like fog through river beds, but that might have had as much to do with Divine Luck as Divine Judgement.
Such uncertainty, anyway, meant that my father could not take any particulars of my mother’s comfort for granted. He could be fashioning her a punkah out of palmyra one minute and be expected to lash a raft together to save her from the freezing floods the next.
I say expected, but all consciousness of obligation was on his side. For her part my mother asked for nothing beyond simple produce — cereal, root vegetables, an orange that she could pick at with her nails, the occasional small bird — and showed no gratitude for the ingenious presents he showered on her. She didn’t want another bowl. She didn’t need another ladle. She ate standing up and with her back to him, and since she had no one to entertain, could find no use for a table that sat twenty.
But indifference wasn’t the beginning and the end of what she felt. There was a design problem between them, too. She detested the look of every article he made.
In retrospect I take no sides, except to say that what the objects of my father’s hands lacked in elegance they made up for generously in size.
She passed no comments about his carpentry to his face. A complaint could have been mistaken for an acknowledgement, and you cannot acknowledge where you are determined not to notice. She kept her head turned from him and all his works: when he called to her from the heights of a tree he was lopping, she looked down; when he hallooed from underground, where he was mining coloured stones for inlay work — he loved the test that marquetry set his banana fingers — she looked up; when he approached her with his mouth full of wooden nails and his flesh flayed by scalding resin, she looked away. If circumstances forced a conversation, she curtained her eyes and addressed an incorporeality — an idea of him, so to speak, as notional as a ghost and located in some even more theoretical dimension. But when he wasn’t in her vicinity, before her or behind her, above her or below her, waiting against all experience and likelihood for his reward, wondering whether he hadn’t this time stretched the parasol or gummed the trinket box that would melt all her resistance to him, once and for all — then, then she would let her opinion of his handicraft show.
Whatever was throwable she threw, whatever was breakable she broke. Sometimes she filled the air with flying lumber, made monstrous birds of his monstrous bowls, dispatching them with an aggression so pointed and individual that they might have been pieces of my father himself. But if the object of offence happened to be some edificial shebang he had taken it into his head to knock together — some summer-hut or wind-break or cold-cupboard or tree-house or canary-cage or bee-hive or rabbit-trap or vegetable-store or wood-shed or sheep-fold or pig-pen or lean-to — she went for it as though it were a mausoleum containing the relics of her enemy entire. She shook it until her shoulders ached, and punched it until her knuckles bled, and hammered at it with her forehead until the pain behind her eyes was greater than the ugliness before them.
We looked on, Abel and I, at a loss to understand the violence my father’s woodwork inspired in her. We did not know about the destructiveness of woman. That the circumstances of her creation had been such that she would never be happy until she had undone all making and seen the globe itself beaten back to its original flatness. We were in no position to try generalities. There was only one woman for us to go on. We could see she was upset and embittered, but we could not know that she was thereby expressing her fundamentally anarchic and vengeful nature — set upon an unswerving course to pay back Divinity for having conceived her only on another’s prompting, sequentially, function first.
This is the reason you never meet true religious faith in women, not even here in Babel, where you can pick and choose among discarded deities, but only a hysterical inversion of hate parading as devotion, a sort of mockery of reverence, as like as not accompanied by high temperatures and trembling of the flesh. Since all gods must of necessity be champions of order — even godlings of chaos insist on organised ritual — and since order was woman’s undoing, how can relations between them ever be anything but ironic? Think of the little domestic world of lord and servant you all know: was there ever a wife yet that did not discharge her offices sardonically?