I don’t know whether I could have been of any help or comfort to him, even if I’d had the courage to go near. Ours was not a touching family. We didn’t give embraces easily — my brother’s bath-time was hardly evidence of ease — and we didn’t receive them comfortably. We could be rough and ready with one another, we could cuff and clip and buffet, provided that every blow was glancing and there was no lingering in looks or clinches. Had my hand rested on my father’s skin for any longer than it takes a lizard to lick up a fly, I believe it would have burst into flames. To this day I carry no knowledge of what his flesh felt like — which is in accordance, I suspect, with how the Lord wanted it — and only guess that it was clammy: oily and rubbery but cold, like octopus.
I can’t imagine on what basis he’d be able to offer any more detailed a description of mine.
Modesty — I mean modesty in the sense of bashfulness not inexpectancy: pure bodily unwillingness and shame — had been his trouble from the start. Often, when Abel had fallen asleep coiled like a kitten in my mother’s lap, and hot nights and bitterness had salted and loosened her tongue, I learnt things about my father I would never have heard from his own lips. Such as, that at the very moment of his creation, when the clay was still wet and the outline of the pattern still indistinct, he had sought the means to cover himself; that his functions were a horror to him, impossible to perform in the sight of an earthworm let alone an All Seeing Creator; that, solitary and unpaired upon the planet, without the sensibilities of another of his kind to consider, he nevertheless put a smothering hand to his mouth every time he belched or hiccoughed, and suffered agonies rather than audibly, in the hearing of no one, No One, break wind; that he had been fashioned with more ingenuity than forethought, to propagate his species out of his single self (small wonder he invented a Lilith) — by fission rather than by fire, like an amoeba rather than a phoenix — but had demanded a wife for companionship and pleasure because he could not approach, could not contemplate, could not without abhorrence envisage, the alternative.
I take it that by the alternative, I asked, you mean celibacy?
She laughed. From low, low in her chest one of those ashen, acrid, mother’s laughs that make a God-hater and father-killer out of every son. I mean, she said, his pigs.
His pigs? Wasn’t that…? Isn’t that…?
I wanted to be sure I had this right. We had all heard with our own ears — and frequently enough to be in no doubt that He expected to be obeyed — the Vowelless One pronounce against confusion: the familial confusion which is wrought when a man uncovers the nakedness of his father’s wife, or lies with mankind as he lies with a woman; and the still greater confusion of the fields — confusion worse confounded — the defilement of man and, oh God, beast! ‘Surely the man shall be put to death,’ He had warned. How could I forget that? I had discussed the self-same topic with my father on the eve of his taking up ventriloquism. And how could I forget what came next? ‘And ye shall slay the beast!’ It seemed so tough on the poor beast, who might just have been ruminating in a field, jaws going, without a lubricious thought in its head.
Could it be, then, that against the very crime from which He so vehemently and particularly swore us, He had originally made no adequate provision? Had left it entirely to the fancy of my father whether he had the stomach for it or not?
My mother laughed again. Low, low. The Eve-laugh, derisive of everything. Almost everything. Her fingers tracing the circles of my brother’s hair. It only became a sin, she said, never mind an unpardonable crime, on the day that I, the afterthought and antidote, was given existence. Until then, until me, there were few distinctions made between one kind of brute behaviour and another. The Lord God, blessed be He, did not concern Himself greatly where your father put his body. But He did concern Himself — as I recall He concerned Himself every minute of every hour — where I put mine.
On the grounds that you might breed monsters?
On the grounds that I might approach monsters.
Rising like a river mist, my mother’s bitterness wreathed around us in the night air, creating an illusion of safe intimacy, encouraging a sort of camaraderie in extremity, the swooning desperation of drunkenness.
So the Law originates, I began, in the Lord’s fear…
Precisely, she said… of a woman’s incontinence.
And morality resides…
Precisely, she said… in the pizzle of a pig.
We should have taken it as a sign, an anti-covenant, that we were not at that instant smitten with madness, blindness and astonishment of heart. He was not listening — that was the one certain conclusion we could draw from the stars not immediately going out in the heavens. He was not at home, else our lives should have hung in doubt before us. He was off, absent, otherwise engaged. I don’t know, now, why it took us so long to work out He was moonlighting, had found Himself another set of nostrils to blow into — but that was the obvious explanation. We had cousins out there and He wasn’t telling us their names.
So I consider I did well, getting His voice to come walking in my garden in the cool of the day, given what other calls there were on His time. But I had to sweat for it. In an element I abhorred.
Of the success or failure I enjoyed, cultivating what nature had never intended to be seen, controlling what nature had always intended should be free, I cannot, in this company, summon the effrontery to speak. The gardens and gardeners of Babel are justly famous. It is no surprise to me, now that I have seen them for myself, that men travel vast distances for the privilege of admiring the smoothness of your lawns and inhaling the perfumes of your rockeries. There can be few sights better calculated to soothe the temper of inhabitants of a blistered land and make them aspire to a green and watery hereafter, than the husbandmen of Babel up early on the seventh day, cutting back their grass, falling upon enthusiastic growth — chickweed, thistle, twitch — and otherwise waging war on that garish propagation which is the combined wish of a hot sun and well-dug wells.
Back! Back!
That so confirmed an enmity to growth should be a prerequisite in all those who call themselves growers would be a puzzle to me were it not for my own experience of husbandry. I have this in common with you, gentlemen and gentlewomen cultivators of Babeclass="underline" we are each of us convinced that we can improve at every turn on what is natural. Beyond that, I would not dare to press the similarity. Your aim is a quiet beauty, an expression of vegetal serenity that will serve as an example in the moral sphere. And the success of your faith may be judged by the number of your citizens who actually resemble gardens. I, on the other hand, lopped and pruned lustily, as I have already hinted, for purposes that were preeminently political. I did not require that the soil should, merely to soothe the jagged nerves of growers or to harmonise with secular hymn-singing, be more temperate in its yield; rather I wished to educate it in the science of self-dislike. Perverseness, if you prefer. I saw no reason why it shouldn’t feel as odd about itself as I did. I mean as odd as I did about myself. But I suppose I also mean as odd as I did about it.
It was thus that I discovered something disgusting about nature. You cannot be too cruel to it. Short, that is, of wiping it out altogether, there is nothing you can do to it that it doesn’t in some way find provocative, stimulating, a challenge to its ingenuity. An incision is as encouraging as a caress. An amputation a positive incitement. Set fire to it and you can see its gratitude putting forth tender shoots of green appreciation, naked as wounds, almost before the smoke has cleared.