Giacomo Sartori - I Am God

That afternoon, the bespectacled beanpole, skipping her sacrilegious big game hunt, goes straight home. This time she cooks rice with okra, following a recipe she invents as she goes. She also makes an algae salad with capers and pickles that smell of oyster shells and the Atlantic. When she’s finished she goes to the storeroom with the bayonet window that looks out on the alley of Nigerian prostitutes, takes the door off its hinges and mounts it on two sawhorses ordinarily used to hold up complex stratigraphs of clothing. Over this she throws a colorfully striped tablecloth made from a parachute, the gift of a Swiss athlete with whom she’d had three or four two–zeros.

These preparations of hers irritate me but I can’t stop watching, I observe her every move, weigh her every sigh. You could call it a maniacal interest if it made any sense in the case of a god to speak of interest, let alone maniacal. You could call it a fixation , which suits me even less. If not an obsession . What’s certain is that nothing like this has happened to me in many billions of years; that’s what floors me. I’ve never felt less divine.

When her two guests arrive, the lanky microbiologist reaches into a woven plastic bag under the computer station with its tangle of screens and towers and pulls out a handful of crucifixes, stacking them head to foot in a neat pyre in the tiny fireplace. She sets them alight with the help of some pages from an old microelectronics review. Even before the little pyre catches fire she warms her hands over it as if it were winter, and after a moment of hesitation so do her guests, a wee female and her good-looking male companion. It’s June already, but it’s still raining and summer is a long way off. For a while all three watch the flames dancing among the crucifixes without saying anything.

If she thinks she’s going to shock me, she’s quite mistaken. I’ve seen far worse: human beings burned at the stake and drawn and quartered, gruesome rapes, steaming torrents of blood, genocides. I find the fanatical geneticist a bit sad, actually—that beaky long face of hers like a highly alert bird. Her and her militant atheist accomplices. Let them rip all the crucifixes off the walls and burn them, these are certainly not the things that count. True, a father doesn’t enjoy seeing images of his son (especially an only son, and deceased young) set on fire, but there’s no point in making a tragedy out of it. There are hundreds of millions of crucifixes around; a dozen more, a dozen less, mean nothing. Anyway, I never much liked the pose in which the poor kid was immortalized: too bombastic, too melodramatic, too human.

Even supposing that madman really is my son. Truth is, I knew nothing about it until he burst onto the scene and began proclaiming to the four winds of Palestine that he was the Son of God . There have always been droves of nutcases ranting on about such things, sometimes from the top of a date palm tree. Celebrity has a price, as some pontificator said. The difference was that this one could convert a corpse, and so rather than toss him in the dungeons, they got down on their knees, copied down everything he said and didn’t say, bombarded him with questions, followed him everywhere. Unbelievable. Because he really was my son, or because he was better at leading them down the garden path? I confess it’s not a dilemma that keeps me awake at night. [8] 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.

When the crosses are burning nicely, the lanky unbeliever adds another, larger crucifix to the fire. Only when the pyre really gets crackling does she lay on a big blue angel. Atheists think they can do away with me by despising religious froufrou. They don’t realize that the more they go at it, the more they sink into the quicksand of their own faith in reverse, fall back on surrogates destined to leave them in the lurch (look what became of communism!). I’m always somewhat astonished (insofar as a god can be astonished) to think how seriously they underestimate me. Doesn’t it even occur to them that I’m here watching, that I could swallow them in one bite? Maybe I should be annoyed, but instead I find them kind of sweet. Like children when you see them make some lewd gesture they don’t understand.

The tall one and the wee one had met each other a few days earlier in a crowd of nutcases kissing and necking in the middle of the road, individuals of the same sex I mean. [9] 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. Now they’re babbling away beside the burning angels and crucifixes. The tall one says that it’s the church’s fault that the country still doesn’t have a law protecting homosexual couples; the church stands in the way of all progress in civil rights and scientific research. The wee one replies that nothing’s likely to happen soon: it certainly won’t be that smiley new pope who’ll upend that lethal fascist crime syndicate that’s been persecuting genuine spirituality from the beginning. The boyfriend is studying a collection of votive phalluses atop a bamboo chest, his brow furrowed: that is, the way men listen to women talking to one another.

Obviously, it bothers me somewhat that these two girls (as well as their partner in crime pretending an interest in priapic statuettes) take it for granted I don’t exist. I mean, who wouldn’t be peeved: you’re there, you hear every word, you see what’s behind every single breath and syllable, and they act like you don’t exist and never have. It’s not merely bad manners, it’s a question of a total lack of recognition, considering that it is I who made the firmament and all creation (as they say). However, if they think they can get at me by disparaging the church, they’ve got the wrong man (so to speak). I’ve never granted the slightest indulgence to the institution, nor to that kid they call my son (and who probably isn’t). If there’s an institution that has always caused me trouble, it’s the church.

After gazing at the crucifician immolation for some time, the three of them sit down at the table: she on the side of the fish-counter-become-kitchen-counter with the hunk sitting across from her, and the wee one next to the glass blocks that face out on the post-proletarian shop-yard. She tells them that she’s worked for a number of years in a genetic research unit but also has a fallback job in bovine insemination. So, you’ve got a thing for microbes ? says the hunk, in a tone that would like to sound horrified but in fact just sounds phony. Oh yes , says she, her face all tender. Our future is in their hands ! she declares, like some nun in the throes of mystical abandon. To hear her raving like that sets my teeth on edge (you might say), but it would be the end of me if I had to correct every piece of balderdash humans say. I’d have to step in tens of billions of times a day.