Giacomo Sartori - I Am God

Translator FREDERIKA RANDALL grew up in Pittsburgh and has lived in Italy for 30 years (also New York and London). She has worked as a cultural journalist for The New York Times , the Wall Street Journal, the Nation and the Italian weekly Internazionale among others. Her translations include Luigi Meneghello’s Deliver Us; Guido Morselli’s The Communist; the epic tale of the Risorgimento, Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of An Italian; as well as fiction by Davide Orecchio, Igiaba Scego, Ottavio Cappellani and Helena Janeczek. Further translations include historian Sergio Luzzatto’s The Body of Il Duce , his Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age , for which she and the author shared the Cundill Prize for Historical Literature in 2011, and Luzzatto’s Primo Levi’s Resistance (2016), shortlisted for the 2017 Italian Prose in Translation Award. Other awards include a 2009 PEN-Heim Translation Grant, and a 2013 Bogliasco Fellowship. She writes about literature and translation at frederikarandall.wordpress.com.

RESTLESS BOOKS is an independent, nonprofit publisher devoted to championing essential voices from around the world, whose stories speak to us across linguistic and cultural borders. We seek extraordinary international literature that feeds our restlessness: our hunger for new perspectives, passion for other cultures and languages, and eagerness to explore beyond the confines of the familiar. Our books—fiction, narrative nonfiction, journalism, memoirs, travel writing, and young people’s literature—offer readers an expanded understanding of a changing world.

© 2016 by Giacomo Sartori

Published by arrangement with The Italian Literary Agency

Translation copyright © 2019 Frederika Randall

First published as Sono Dio by NN Editore, Milan

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without the prior written permission of the publisher.

First Restless Books paperback edition March 2019

A slightly different version of chapters 1 to 3 appeared in the Massachusetts Review , vol 58, no 4.

Paperback ISBN: 9781632062147

eISBN: 9781632061843

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948327

Cover design by Adam B. Bohannon

Cover illustration by Eugenia Loli

Typesetting, text design and eBook by Tetragon, London

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The comparison might have been more apt two thousand years ago, given that freight, including illicit freight, travels by truck and air nowadays. But that’s how it came to me and that’s how it stays.

Pardon my frankness, but if there is one discipline I’ve always considered nit-picking it is theology. Theologians reek of superiority, as if the gods (in their surreal deductions) were them .

We’re talking about millions of billions of ants every year, of billions of billions of billions of microbes every second, not some piddling number. What if every insect, every single earthworm, began to moan and groan when its time came, to issue solemn declarations and beg to be granted the big pardon?

The unfortunate bacteria have lived in peace for four billion years reproducing themselves millions of times a day, thus giving birth to billions of individuals. (If some bacterium wanted to organize a Christmas dinner with his closest relatives, even supposing he could track down the names and addresses, he would have to send out billions of billions of billions of invitations.) If there’s something that bugs me (just a figure of speech, obviously), it’s that instead of going to battle with crocodiles or piranhas, creatures that can defend themselves somewhat, that lily-livered species of humans go after bacteria. One more proof, should we need another, of their cowardice.

It is no secret that those who pontificate and preach are the same who trespass most in the shadowy backwaters of practice; if I had to tote up all the merriment taking place in sacristies and convents over the past thousand years it would take me a decade.

Merely in order to copulate, those big hairless apes lie to each other and themselves, dissimulate, cheat, squander fortunes, destroy friendships and marriages, bleed themselves dry, murder each other, all the while employing creativity and invention far beyond that applied to their technical progress. If I could begin again I’d endow them with a libido (a term that always reminds me of the name of a rock group) one hundred times more moderate than what they have, or limit its activity to a brief period each year, as I’ve done with many other species (and therefore, among other things, there would be a lot fewer of them).

During creation one is so intent that nothing surprises (it’s a sort of trance); nevertheless I invite you to imagine what it feels like to have a brontosaurus staring at you as if to work out whether he’s seen you somewhere before, and what the hell he must have been up to last night not to remember diddly squat.

At first I had no doubts at all: he was a charlatan, an impostor. But then I heard so much and such various commentary that even I began to feel unsure, I who better than anyone else ought to know whether or not he’s my son and how he was conceived. If there’s one thing the theologians have always been good at, it’s smoke and mirrors: according to some religions he existed, for others, no; for some his nature is more human than divine, for others more divine than human—in short, a tremendous muddle. So far as I’m concerned, if someone wants to believe, fine, if instead (s)he’s skeptical, that’s fine too; the important thing is that they believe in me. Relatives, even those who put themselves out for the cause, matter only up to a point. I hope I won’t disturb anyone in stating this frankly.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against homosexuals, but if I created men and women it was for some purpose, if you know what I mean.

Perhaps I should say zoom around , given the velocities infinitely greater than the speed of light (never mind quantum physics). If I prefer putter , it’s precisely to emphasize the completely relaxed and soothing nature of my activity. As always, I must explain myself in broad approximations.

Before I began to think , everything was okay with me. I would never have dreamed of finding even an infinitesimal reason to complain. But now, I see, my words reveal many dissatisfactions, many unattainable desires.

If there is one sphere in which humans reveal their lack of perfection, it’s the couple . I personally have never seen a pair of penguins shouting vile accusations at each other about mothers-in-law or nail scissors. Humans on the other hand are forever dissatisfied, they seem to go out of their way to find reasons to squabble. Or rather, after a brief pacific idyll comes a crescendo of misunderstanding and reciprocal intolerance until full-scale war breaks out. Not a pretty picture in a species so devoted to crooning love tunes, one that considers itself a thousand times superior to all others.