Giacomo Sartori - I Am God

Human beings are adept at finding ways to soothe their consciences, and especially the human beings of that down-at-the-heel boot known as Italy. Italian thieves believe they are the most honest of criminals, the assassins fancy themselves highly altruistic; everyone has a system to balance his or her personal accounts. We’ll see whether that same indulgence is applied in the court of Last Judgment.

I’m the first to admit I’m amazed, because at the beginning I didn’t notice these at all. However, you would be very much mistaken to think divine justice implies an unshakable, irrevocable verdict; to be just also means to evaluate elements previously overlooked, as happens in criminal justice when new evidence emerges.

The original camper (back in the days of Ms. Einstein’s mother, there had only been that) had been absorbed into an eclectic heap of discarded materials, like a small fish trapped in the stomach of a bigger one.

As usual I’m presenting what I know for a fact as merely hypothetical, the way writers do to avoid looking too sure of themselves. Not a very brilliant solution, but it’s what they teach in “creative writing.”

If there’s something that bothers me about men, I mean males, it’s their cowardice. They brag and boast, they convince others and themselves they’re brave as lions, they go out and blow their entire wages in one night, they show off, pontificate. And then at the first obstacle they revert to being an infant in a diaper: they whine, moan about their fate, beg for some compassionate wing to hide under. From the Get-Go they’ve all been that way, the only difference is that in the Upper Paleolithic there were no cell phones and social networks to multiply their foolishness.

It’s pointless to discuss crocodiles, they bite and have always bitten. I made them that way, and I take full responsibility. If I’d done it any other way, we’d have a madly overcrowded animal shelter instead of a food chain, and all of nature would be in chaos. The only proper choice was to have the larger animals eat the small. I couldn’t afford to get sentimental about it.

It’s a solution that works for everyone, for in fact even he doesn’t want an affair. Or rather he wouldn’t mind the pluses but he wants to avoid the minuses, the danger, first of all, that he’ll be found out by his German spouse, who heads a fierce volunteer association protecting battered wives.

Primitive man knew this: they used to make me touching likenesses and nice votive objects. They thought I was a fat lady with abundant thighs and Fellinian breasts and couldn’t be persuaded otherwise, although they worshiped me as best they could. When they got a bit closer to the mark, they began to turn out altars carved in the rock, temples, churches, cathedrals, statues in all kinds of materials, frescoes, paintings with sumptuous virgins and bearded saints, rosaries, ostensoria. It’s always a pleasure to receive nice presents.

They’re like those who think you can appreciate a beautiful woman from a series of X-rays and sonograms, never sampling the warm fine-grained, elastic skin, the sweet harmony of her curves, the minute but heartrending crevassing of her lips, and so on, all of it made more lovely by her delightful clothes and pleasing trinkets.

The problem for me isn’t that they make me nervous, nor that they represent the bad guys in a certain religion we’re all familiar with. I’ve no intention, with these reflections that nobody’s ever going to read, of grinding my own axe here; I was doubtful about these reptiles for many millions of years before those Bible stories came along.

There’s a range of possibilities, from 1) watching from the presidential box while a star that has run out of gas gets badly crushed by gravity, 2) standing under a shower of X-rays from a white dwarf; to 3) surfing space-time on the back of a gigantic gravitational wave.

It should be said that in the beginning, they weren’t bipeds: most everyone’s seen the vignette with the ape on all fours, then crouching, then gradually standing upright until finally he’s wearing a necktie. Oh well, I doubt that many theologians would feel comfortable with Adam in the ape phase.

I’d have to purify the air and the water, cap the hole in the ozone, remove millions of square miles of concrete construction, plant billions of trees, dispose of mountains of garbage and plastic junk, deactivate millions of landmines, bring up dozens of Soviet atomic submarines, resuscitate hundreds of thousands of animal and plant species that have gone extinct, completely restore the entire planet’s supply of natural resources: it would be a huge job even for an omnipotent god. But it won’t be me. I’ve done what I had to do and I don’t have the slightest intention of starting all over again just because a handful of lowlifes is having a ball destroying everything. It breaks, you pay, as the saying goes.

For a long time I mistakenly believed that atheists and agnostics were my worst enemies, but recently I’ve been forced to accept that animism, which I thought was dead and buried, is once again proliferating, if in a new, metropolitan guise.

The stomachache that suddenly intervened during the meal with the iguana turned out to be rather serious; he vomited all night, thrashing around in pain. In the morning he was even worse and they hospitalized him for a couple of days to do tests. Alas, the health of a human being is always hanging by a thread, the tiniest factor can put everything out of whack.

Despite their reputation as irreprehensible, Italian Catholics are capable of the most nefarious behavior, even toward friends and closest relatives. Afterward, though, they suffer strange abdominal upsets not unlike digestive problems, and try to make up for it with hypocritical smiles and witty remarks while they prepare to clear their criminal records by visiting the confessional booth.

With that incoherence so typical of human thought (an intrinsic cerebral opportunism ?) she’s not counting the fact that dairy cows, when their milk days are up, are also sliced and ground. And never mind about the male veal calves.

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.

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.

Before I began this diary, I’d never been aware of having highs and lows, or maybe I was simply always in the same gelid mood. Talking and thinking, one ends up getting confused.