Giacomo Sartori - I Am God

Daphne looks at him and weeps, he weeps and looks at the wall. Their weeping is rather similar actually, although her tears are larger and descend more quickly, a faucet dripping. His are smaller and spaced out widely, as if like him they are exhausted. She’s not thinking about leaving anymore, she’s not thinking about anything. She’s feeling very strange, there in the fading light, crucifix in hand, but she also feels this is necessary, it’s something like an initiation rite. Were her merciless mental clarity in charge here, she’d leap to her feet and run away, but some overpowering force has nailed her legs to that metal chair.

Now the door opens again and a young man in a white coat appears. The priest makes a tiny—but violent—gesture, outraged that they dare to keep on disturbing him. The doctor lowers his head and disappears. I learned a great deal from your mothe r, he mutters, picking up where he left off with some difficulty and fixing her once again in his gaze. His voice is even more feeble now, barely rising above the soughing of the river outside. The talks I had with her were a great gift to me, I have rarely met such profundity in matters of the spirit : he looks at her as if for confirmation. For a moment his ecumenical empathy is such that his hand edges toward hers; all his energy is concentrated in that tiny operation. But he lacks the strength to raise his forearm the necessary few millimeters, or even to slide it over the sheet. Daphne therefore reaches out and takes his hand, which is icy cold. She holds it in her own, warming it, the crucifix on her knees. For a long time. It’s almost dark, and the river has become a gleaming course of lead.

Now the door opens once more and this time the young doctor is accompanied by an elderly man who walks in with an authoritarian stride. He turns on the lamp on the night table. They don’t ask permission, they just take up positions on either side of the bed. There’s also a nun with them, different from the first, taller and more in tune with the times. The older doctor has a concertina of wrinkles on his neck; the priest is staring at him, seemingly getting ready to order them to leave. Instead he merely closes his eyes, you can see that the faint light is blinding him. He’s immobile, clearly too exhausted even to lift his eyelids. The young doctor checks the IV line, takes his pulse, adjusts the sheet.

The sister who’s plausibly a web-surfer is staring at Daphne as if she were a serial assassin. The accordion-necked doctor also studies her with something like bigoted rancor. It’s clear they’d like her to beat it right away (beat what, no one knows, but the expression is imperishable). She doesn’t know what to do; she’s feeling a bit woozy. Now she gets up, leaves the room and heads down the corridor, still holding the crucifix. A crucifix she hasn’t stolen; it was given to her by a dying bishop. Yes, bishop: that was how she’d heard him referred to. Descending the few steps at the entrance, she turns again toward the river, spellbinding for an instant in its violet hour. And at that very moment she understands that the not quite dead man is the same confessor who sexually abused her for a whole winter when she was nine, and then again the following year. Or better, she realizes that a warning bell inside her head had sounded smartly the very instant she first saw him, but something prevented her from hearing it. She starts to cry again. This time she’s riven by hacking sobs, like a woman with a bad cough.

A god shall not and must not speak. The languages of (wo)man seem to be purposely designed to formulate deception of all kinds, stoke up the pipe dreamers, lead people out on limbs and down garden paths. To stir up (wo)man’s highest accomplishment, in other words, his/her intrinsic raison d’être: evil. Other animals don’t get into trouble because they don’t speak and never have done, that’s the sole reason. [43] If they did speak, they’d immediately begin to screw around, get fired up, make war. Sparrows versus chaffinches, fleas versus lice, dark gray hippos versus pale gray hippos, and so on. Divine language is silence; words are superfluous to express harmony and love, or even anger of the just variety. It’s enough to look one another in the face, or merely stare straight ahead; everyone will know who’s in agreement or that there’s a certain problem.

Very soon I’m going to stop writing, go back to being God again, and that’ll be that. No thinking, no distractions, no more letting my gaze be captured by one particular thing. As I’ve always done. A god’s job is to show up , that is, be present, not so much agitate for one thing or another. It makes sense, really; a god that both is and is not would be a catastrophe, whether brazenly absent or merely part-time. Atheism and agnosticism would spread like wildfire, overtaking religions. These are the true cancers of the present day, and everything must be done to fight them. It must never be forgotten that once these false religions are installed, you need earthquakes, famine, terrible bloodshed, or hideous dictatorial regimes to drive them out. That’s the sort of shock therapy I’d frankly prefer to avoid.

I have no need of humans; actually, I need to avoid them. They’re merely an unlucky accident, a not very edifying sideshow. That irresponsible supposed son of mine created great confusion on that account, he let it be thought that humans are mighty important when in fact they don’t count for anything and could disappear from circulation in the wink of an eye. In some ways I’d prefer not even to hear them mentioned; they can do whatever they want, I couldn’t care less. I am God.

When she wakes up, Daphne needs some time to work out what bed she’s lying in. Then, her main processor slowly kicking into action, she realizes this is the room hosting the nineteenth-century laundry machine and the paleolithic honey extractor. And then she recalls why she’s here, and her external memory lights up, switched on by that cold shower of recollection. Leaving the seminary, she had waited for a train for who knows how long, mesmerized, staring at the river. In that hallucinatory frame of mind, she imagined the river to be her father. Back in the city, she had wandered around the center, lost to the world. In the end she found herself at the station and took the last coach for the town of the rich people’s villas. From there, driven by the force of inertia, she had walked to her stepfather’s place in the rain. And now she has no idea how she’s going to cope with this day that’s beginning. She feels like the corpse of some drowned creature, washed up on the beach by the waves.

Just to contemplate that man of the church she went to see yesterday is to relive a dreadful nightmare. She finds it very hard to accept that the afternoon was not just a figment of her imagination, that she really did meet him. She has to keep reprimanding her brain, forcing it to accept that truth. That it was that filthy bastard, who’s probably already croaked—in fact he expired just before dawn, I can confirm—who remote-controlled her childhood and adolescence the way a puppeteer pulls the strings of a marionette. He’s the one who put her in those boarding schools where she grew up with the nuns, he’s the one who paid for her. She hadn’t known it, but she was a puppet. She still is. A marionette come unstringed that cannot be repaired.

Now she thinks she hears voices. Her stepfather’s dull warble, in a very loud conversation with someone. She cocks an ear, and for a moment imagines she can make out Aphra’s limpid tones. I’m hearing things , she thinks; the only person here is that washed up neo-Buddhist who always knew who was pulling my strings and never said a word. He deceived her, and never even realized that monster was meddling with her. The silences and the voids are filling up, the different pieces fitting together neatly, as if her past were that of a normal person.