Giacomo Sartori - I Am God

On the way home she stops at her usual garage. Since the last time the bike was repaired it’s been running fine, but all the same she puts it up on the kickstand in the square and goes inside. The owner tells her that the mechanic who worked on it has gone to race an Enduro. So she sits down to wait on her doubly erect twin-cylinder and looks at the other bikes parked around hers, imagining how she would improve them. She’s never studied mechanical engineering but she knows enough to mentally scan a bike body or engine quickly, identifying structural defects and little flaws. When the mechanic with the boxer’s flat nose shows up she smiles at him and says she’s reconsidered, and would like to do that checkup he was proposing. They discuss the terms for a few minutes, then she’s off. She stops in a church she often visits—and here I must ask that we cast a veil over what she’s up to—and then to the supermarket.

Back home in the old fishmonger’s, she begins cleaning house. It’s that type of ruthless cleaning that precedes some very important occasion, some special party. She polishes the two big windows facing the inside court where the old entrance to the fishmonger’s was, she shines up the inclined surface where the fish were laid out, now her kitchen counter, removes the three-quarter mattress from the old trout basin, vacuums, disposes of the dust balls from the coils of computer cords, washes the sky-blue tiled floor. You can see it’s not a burden, that she’s actually happy to clean up. She folds the balled-up clothes lying around, dusts the knickknacks atop the “furniture,” changes the cat box, for which the cat, though blind, seems to be grateful. Now she’s working on the atmosphere: incense, candles, plates of biscotti and candied ginger like votive offerings.

You’d think she was arranging a sacred ceremony, while it’s nothing but a banal copulation. Sex for sex’s sake, without even the appearance of moral pretext (never mind the institution of the family and the ceremony that seals it). When I think of this I feel a hard-to-define discomfort, a pang I don’t think I’ve ever felt before, almost misery. This is depraved materialism at its worst, unfolding in a context where the individual and his/her corporal nature are fetishistically sacralized under the specious sombrero of sexual freedom . But am I not partly responsible, when I allow them to copulate in that wild way the randy one favors? Doesn’t that mean I’ve given her a sort of license?

It would be child’s play for me to blow young Randy’s plans to smithereens. I mean, what does it take to knock down a bicycle ridden by a guy with one arm in a sling and mysterious stomach pains, just as an old van whose brakes are shot comes along—or better, might as well do things properly—a tractor trailer? The cyclists are asking for it, in a way, trying to glide through the anarchy of Italian traffic. It often happens without me raising a finger. A hard blow to the temple, I’m thinking; no blood or other distressing fluids. Just a cranium smashed in at the parietal lobe. Fate can be so cruel , people would whisper. At least he didn’t suffer, poor guy. All those agnostic remarks that by now no longer even touch me.

I’m ready to intervene. I already have the bike in my crosshairs, and needless to say, it’s red. I’m merely waiting while the rider, [30] Perhaps someone will think I’m the mastermind (so to speak) behind his fractured elbow on the night of the toads. That is utterly untrue. Here is what actually happened. When I saw that he was about to step on a very slippery spot (a toad flattened by a car tire) I slightly corrected the spin of his fall to prevent him from putting his hand down in the same slimy mess. Now it’s true that he smashed his elbow instead of dirtying his hand, but my intentions were nothing but the best, as befits a merciful god. who’s now bent over the seat, gets on and begins to pedal. I’m rubbing my hands with glee (forgive me if I turn up the hype, a story shouldn’t be boring) the way every killer does. I sense the slight tension in me that marks the approach of the fatal hour. I’m already feeling slightly better because this nightmare (so it seems to me at times) will soon be over. I’ll be back to my old self; I’ll cease to think about these matters once and for all. I’ll take up my old duties.

But then, as Daphne meticulously bathes her long asymmetrical body, I reflect that the situation that’s been created (by whom? I need a break here) is utterly ridiculous. Whatever it may say in the Bible, where there’s entirely too much emphasis on those rare occasions when I lost my head, I believe in being fair and impartial. And it’s obvious that I would completely disqualify (not to say something much saltier) myself if I were to behave like some grandee pursuing only his own interests. In time the word would spread, and with it, complaints and protests. In the long run no one would believe in me, and atheism would triumph.

I therefore surrender to my own infinite wisdom, and put down the (metaphorical) high-power precision rifle. The red bicycle will not be run over, at least not on account of any special intervention of mine. If a tractor trailer involved in an ordinary accident were to crush it, that would be another kettle of fish. Meanwhile the old fishmonger’s will once again be transformed into a temple of sex and host the nth profane sexual congress. I can do nothing about it. [31] I want to be sure this point is crystal clear: although I ultimately pull the strings of all that takes place in the cosmos and on tiny planet Earth, there are many details that I leave to so-called chance to arrange as it sees fit and proper. Amen. Take it up with the Last Judgment.

For a change of scene I went out once again (metaphor!) for a stroll among the galaxies. I didn’t want to know another thing about the big girl in heat and what she was up to or not. I am God, not a peeping Tom, or some kamikaze friar raring to detox the little planet from its poisonous techno-consumer drug habit, its allergy to transcendence in any shape or form, and its obsession with sexual gratification. She can copulate with whomever she wants, that godless creature with her far-apart bird eyes. Let her be tortured in bondage gear or sodomized by a rhinoceros, it’s all the same to me. I’m going to calm down now , I thought, but in fact I was getting even more upset.

However, once I’d put a couple billion light years between me and the Earth (and its inescapable familiarity with evil) I began to feel better. The way a person befuddled by stress abandons the chaos of a metropolis and slips into a peaceable forest (I’m trying to draw a parallel here that can speak to everyone) I was able to rest my eyes and ears and empty my brain of every last thought. It did me good, as getting down from a train benefits the passenger—and wormholes through space-time are not so different from a railroad train—it did me good to idle through that awesome gallery of gargantuan abstract paintings, or perhaps I should say surrealist. Full of innumerable chromatic nuances, but as always violet and emerald green, watery ocher tints shading into pearl gray: my favorite colors as far back as the Creation. Among colors I include infrareds, which bring a pleasant warmth to the skin (those that have skin), and X rays, so energizing, like intravenous caffeine, a soft drug. And then there are radio waves and their odd, enigmatic cacophony, like contemporary electronic music played at the bottom of a cave heard by an ear plastered to an aperture at the mouth. When I refer to colors, it’s merely a figure of speech.

Dillydallying without any precise destination, I came upon a blue star. Blue, like Daphne’s eyes, I found myself thinking. It was magnificent, a precious stone set in the cosmos. Splendid in a way that was also heart-wrenching, that made one apprehensive, perhaps because blue stars are such ephemeral things: four or five million years and they’re gone. Contemplating them, it’s impossible not to think of this tragic fact. As I’m sure you’re aware, a god’s not compatible with a cell phone, or I would have snapped a photo.