In the morning my father came for me. I knew that he too had gone without sleep because not once in the night had I heard the accustomed anguish of his suffocation in the mud of nightmare. He did not exactly look tired — although his eyes were bruised, ringed purple, bearing the rotation marks of his own knuckles — more… I suppose the only word is sacred, washed with wonders. Marvel-fatigued.
He untied me — untethered me — with the exaggerated delicacy he usually reserved for magic. I was eggshell and his hands were swansdown. I was the dried pea and his fingers — watch, everybody! — the cones you had to find me under. To say that he untied me belittles his tenderness and dexterity. He spirited me from that tree.
When he saw the marks around my throat where I had struggled, relishing failure, against my captivity, his cheeks turned the same colour the evening sky had been. Joy and pain identical in sound; now rejoicing and remorse identical in pigmentation. We are unsubtly made. We lack the strings to pluck the tunes we hear. I would have liked my father unambiguously contrite that morning, I would have welcomed a symphony of sorrow from him, but the emotion that rattled the phlegm in his chest could have been any one of the four or five with which he’d made himself familiar. After the delicacy he could as easily have thrust my head under water again.
Come, he said. Perhaps I only imagine that he said, my son.
Since I couldn’t have out and out contrition, I would have settled for a long sentence. For some sign from him that he at least understood there were long emotions in our vicinity — his and mine — worth trying to make long sentences about. But he was undoubtedly in elemental spirits, his thoughts under the sway of first and last things, and I accepted that I would have to be satisfied with that.
My mother was waiting for me, squatting in shadow, smiling.
Cain, she called. Perhaps I only imagine that she called, my son.
In the few days I had not been allowed to see her (fear of commotion, fear of contamination, fear of pollution: fear, fear, fear), I had disconnected her voice from her body. I had carried the sound of her in my head, could conjure her calling Cain any time I wanted — I still can conjure it, something between a lullaby and a reprimand, a caress and a call to arms — but the actual voice was now not as thrilling to me as the disembodied one; or rather, for it was still the same voice and still enveloped me in its remembered warmth, it let me down by virtue of its location, it failed me in proportion as I could see it, it wasn’t the intimate and dignified and grand a thing that I’d been carrying in my imagination now that it was back where it originated, in her mouth.
In the few days I had been forbidden her I had forgotten what she looked like. She was heavier than I remembered, rounder shouldered, greasier, more lugubriously jowled. I had forgotten that her arms were decorated with bleached bones and phosphorescent feathers to please my father, and that she wore anklets of braided vine, although her ankles were often swollen, perhaps to please God. I had forgotten how plump and creased her wrists were, and that she dyed the nails of her fingers and her toes, and that the sight of a painted nail which was also broken, at the end of a finger or a toe which wasn’t clean, either roused or upset me unaccountably. I concentrated on her extremities because now that it was before me I did not after all want to see what she held to the heart of herself.
Look, she said.
I had forgotten the way her mouth worked. How it always appeared to contain too much moisture or too little, and how she was always mopping up or watering it with her tongue.
Look, she said. Your brother.
I must have advanced, or made some sudden movement, because I recall her shrinking from me and holding out a creased and grimy palm and saying, not too close. Not yet. Just look. Isn’t he lovely? Isn’t he beautiful? Your brother.
At the time I wondered why she was so anxious for my corroboration. Why did I have to say he was lovely? What did it matter whether or not I found him beautiful? Did she lack confidence in her own judgement? Couldn’t he be finally and indisputably lovely in her eyes until I agreed he was? Only later did I understand that it wasn’t confirmation she was after from me at all, but remission. Concede his loveliness to me, was what she was really saying, so that I may be forgiven forgetting yours. I must away on another expedition of the affections: wave me off, with your blessing.
Well? she said. What do you think?
What did I think? I thought she ought not to have had him at her breasts. Whatever needs the positioning answered to in him, or her, or in my father, or in God, I thought it was graphically discourteous to me. Would not the ground have done? Was there not space beside her or between her painted toes? Was there no dying tree for him to be tethered to? Could not my father have dangled him from the fold that gathered plentifully at his blood-red neck? Had she truly wished me to scrutinize him dispassionately, estimate his loveliness and beauty impartially, attach myself to him early as an admirer, were there not a hundred other less indiscreet tableaux of the family she might have struck?
Impelled by an unerring instinct for divisiveness, our Creator created in us the right of choice, and in the exercise of hers my mother chose to force a breast on Abel with her right hand while with her left she simultaneously beckoned me and held me back, saying, look, look, look, look, look, your brother.
I looked. Through crumpled, half-closed, old man’s eyes he looked back. If you are given to fancy you could say we exchanged a salutation, brother to brother, across whatever distance he had still to travel before he could become as young as I was. Then, his curiosity expended, he returned, all mouth, to what all mothers must ensure all mouths desire.
I will kill him, I thought. I will surely have to kill him when the time comes. Or else I must accept what I cannot, that I alone shall have no bearing on his future.
And because my bowels yearned — I could not have said towards whom — and because such a dispersion of sensation, such promiscuity of emotion, was unknown to me and unnamed, I named it love.
* * *
He sits, Cain the wanderer and reciter, the man of crowds and cities, and wipes his face deliberately on the rich, billowing sleeve of his ornate gown. The robe with which God originally clothed his father, to conceal his father’s nakedness, to spare his father’s shame, is said to be in circulation, the subject of wrangling and controversy among connoisseurs and antiquaries. But this is not it. Cain’s costume is costly in the more worldly sense.
He is jewelled, scented and elaborately sandalled. He is known to be particular about where he sets his foot, fearing not just snakes and scorpions but worms, water, soil — the very feel of bare, unreconstituted earth itself. It is said that his medium is marble and his element is artifice and that the exclusion of all stains of nature from his person is his first concern. To this end he carries with him at all times a large square of spotless cambric with which he removes perspiration and emotion from the corners of his eyes and mouth. The billowing sleeve is a purely theatrical device.
He accepts the approbation of his audience without smiling. There are no lines upon his face to suggest where a smile might form. His mouth has a set and waxen look, not sternness suppressing merriment, but an apparent atrophy of the smiling muscles, a stamp of incapacity, an ingrained physical reluctance as incontrovertible as a birthmark.