Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve

A
ND HE WAS
.

Suddenly. From not being to being conscious that he was. He opened his eyes.

He touched himself and knew he was a man, without knowing how he knew. He saw the garden and he felt someone watching him. He looked in every direction hoping to see another like himself.

As he was looking, air spilled into his throat and its coolness stirred his senses. He could smell. He took a deep breath. In his head he felt the confused whirling of images seeking a name. Words, sounds, surged up inside him, clean and clear, and settled on everything around him. He named, and saw what he named recognize itself. The breeze moved the branches of the trees. A bird sang. Long leaves opened their finely drawn hands. Where was he? he asked. Why didn't the one who was watching allow himself to be seen? Who was this Other?

He walked, unhurried, until he had completed the circle
of the place where he had come to be. The greens, the forms and colors of the vegetation, filled the landscape and flowed into his gaze, and he felt a happiness in his chest. He named the stones, the streams, the rivers, the mountains, the cliffs, the caves, the volcanoes. He observed small things so as not to overlook them: the bee, moss, clover. At times, so much beauty left him dazed, unable to move: the butterfly, the lion, the giraffe. The steady beat of his heart accompanied him, independent of his wishing or knowing, a steady rhythm whose purpose was not his to divine. On his hands he experienced the warm breath of the horse, the coolness of water, the harshness of sand, the slippery scales of the fish, the soft fur of the cat. From time to time he looked up suddenly, hoping to surprise the Other, whose presence was softer than the wind though similar to it. The intensity of his gaze, however, was unequivocal. He sensed it on his skin, just as he perceived the unchanging, ever-present light that enveloped the Garden and illuminated the sky with its resplendent breath.

After he had done everything he thought he should do, the man sat on a stone to be happy and to contemplate it all. Two animals, a cat and a dog, came and lay at his feet. He tried to teach them to speak, but to no avail; they just looked longingly into his eyes.

Happiness seemed long-lasting and a bit monotonous to him. He could not touch it. He could not find a use for his hands. The birds flew past him swiftly, and very high. So did the clouds. All around him animals were grazing and drinking. He ate the white petals that fell from the sky. He needed nothing, and nothing seemed to need him. He was lonely.

He touched his nose to the ground and breathed in the
scent of grass. He closed his eyes and saw concentric circles of light beneath his eyelids. Lying on his side, he felt the moist earth inhale and exhale, imitating the sound of his respiration. A soft, silken drowsiness came over him. He surrendered to the sensation. Later he would remember his body opening, the split that divided his being to release the intimate creature that until then had dwelled within him. He could scarcely move. His body in its incarnation as chrysalis acted on its own; he could do nothing but wait in his state of semiconsciousness for whatever was to happen. If anything was clear, it was the extent of his ignorance; his mind filled with visions and voices for which he had no explanation. He stopped questioning himself and abandoned himself to the heavy sensation of his first sleep.

He awoke and remembered being unconscious. He found it entertaining to examine the faculties of memory, amusing himself by forgetting and remembering, until he saw the woman at his side. He lay very still, observing her bewilderment, the gradual effect of air in her lungs, of light in her eyes, the fluid way she moved to recognize herself. He imagined what she was going through, the slow awakening from nothingness to being.

He extended his hand and she held out hers, opened. Their palms touched. They measured their hands, arms, legs. They examined their similarities and their differences. He took her to walk through the Garden. He felt useful, responsible. He showed her the jaguar, the centipede, the raccoon, the turtle. They played; they watched the clouds roll by and change their shapes, they listened to the unvarying tune of the trees; they tried out words for describing what could not be named. He
knew himself to be Adam, and he knew her as Eve. She wanted to know everything.

“What are we doing here?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

“Who can explain to us where we came from?”

“The Other.”

“Where is this Other?”

“I don't know where he is. I know only that he is all around.”

She decided to look for him. She, too, had felt that she was being observed. They would have to climb to high places. She thought the look must come from there. Might it not be a bird? Perhaps, he said, admiring her astuteness. Walking among fragrant bushes and trees with generous foliage, without hurrying, they reached the highest volcano. They climbed it and from the top saw the green circle of the Garden, surrounded on all sides by thick whitish fog.

“What is that farther up?” she asked.

“Clouds,” he answered.

“And behind the clouds?”

“I don't know.”

“Maybe that's where the one who's observing us lives. Have you tried to go outside the Garden?”

“No. I know we are not supposed to go any farther than where it's green.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know.”

“The way you knew the names?”

“Yes.”

It did not take long for Eve to reach the conclusion that
the gaze of whatever was watching them did not belong to a bird. The enormous phoenix, with its red and blue feathers, had whirled above them, but like the rest of the creatures, had merely glanced toward them.

“Maybe it's that tree,” she ventured, pointing toward the center of the Garden. “Look, Adam, look at it. Its canopy brushes the clouds as if it were playing with them. Maybe the one that sees us lives beneath its shade, or maybe what we feel is the gaze of the trees. There are so many, and they are everywhere. It may be that they are like us, except that they don't talk or move.”

“The one observing us moves,” said Adam. “I have heard his footsteps in the foliage.”

They made their way down the volcano, wondering what to do to find the Other.

Eve began to call him. Adam was astounded that such a deep moan could issue from her, a lament of the air in her unwinged body. She had gone to stand at the bank of the river, with her arms opened wide. Her dark hair fell down her back. Her distant and perfect profile, her face with the closed eyes and open mouth from which that invocation issued, moved Adam. He asked himself whether they were wasting their time imagining an Other like them hidden deep in the luxuriant vegetation, where it was impossible to distinguish one tree from another. But both Adam and the woman had sensed not only his gaze but also his voice, whispering to them in the language that, more and more fluently, they used to communicate. And they even thought they had seen his watching shadow reflected in the eyes of the dog and the cat. Adam wondered if maybe they would see him when their eyes were more mature,
less new. They still had difficulty distinguishing what existed only in their minds from what they observed around them. Eve especially was prone to confusing the one with the other. She claimed she had seen more than one animal with a human head and chest, lizards that flew, women of water.

From beyond the confines of the Garden they often heard the sound of cataclysms. They saw distant darkness and intermittent eruptions, streams of comets blazing across the firmament. Yet above them the sky remained unchanged, glowing with a golden clarity whose tones increased or diminished in no predictable order. When the earth quivered beneath their feet, Eve would tiptoe toward Adam, playing at not losing her balance. He would watch her, entranced, the toes of her feet stretching and contracting, reminding him of fishes.

Adam did not remember the tree in the center of the Garden. He thought it was strange that he hadn't noted it before, since he believed he had explored the place from end to end.

“The one watching us does not want to be seen. He is protecting himself, but we must find him, Adam. We must know why he is observing us, what it is he expects us to do.”

Adam decided they would follow the course of one of the rivers. They walked into the humid jungle. Their nostrils were filled with the heavy, penetrating odors of the fertile soil where all sorts of ferns and mushrooms and orchids grew. The graceful, complex nests of golden orioles swung from the high branches from which lichens and mosses spilled like lace above their heads. They saw sleeping sloths hanging by their tails. Groups of raucous monkeys peered at them as they pirouetted through the treetops. Tapirs, wild pigs, and rabbits crossed their path,
brushing against their legs in a friendly manner. Though the warm heart of encompassing green welcomed them, throbbing with life, they walked in silence, soaking up the atmosphere filled with the sounds and aromas of the hidden heart of their Paradise.

The jungle was so dense that they walked in circles and lost their way again and again, but they persisted. At last they came out in the center of the Garden. They discovered that this was the origin of all the paths that radiated from here and later forked, and of the two rivers that flowed to the east and the west. They found an enormous tree; beneath its trunk earth and water were joined together. As it stretched upward, its branches disappeared into the clouds, and they extended farther to all sides than their eyes could see. Adam felt an impulse to bow before its magnificence. Eve went straight to the tree. Instinctively Adam tried to stop her, but she turned and looked at him with an air of pity.

“It can't move,” she told him. “It doesn't speak.”

“It hasn't moved. It hasn't spoken,” he said. “But we don't know what it's capable of doing.”

“It's a tree.”

“Not just any tree. It is the Tree of Life.”

“How do you know?”

“The moment I saw it, I knew.”

“It is very beautiful.”

“Imposing. And I would say that you should not get so close.”

Although the tree seemed to paralyze him, she could barely contain her desire to touch its broad and robust, its soft and gleaming, trunk. Beauty flooded her eyes everywhere, and
the man had proudly showed her a myriad of colors and birds and majestic beasts, but to her nothing seemed more beautiful than the tree. Its leaves filled her imagination. They were lustrous, their backs painted a luminous green that contrasted with the underside, which was purple with thick, bright, salient veins. Arrayed on the many branches, extending in every direction, the leaves swallowed the light and then exhaled it, distributing radiance all about them. The skin of the round, white fruit shone, caught in the scintillating phosphorescence that radiated from the tree toward every part of the Garden. As Eve approached, the fruit-scented breath of the great tree tingled like unfamiliar excitement in her mouth, a current of life that was transmitted throughout the surroundings. Like Adam, she was overcome with reverence, and she had second thoughts about her initial impulse to touch the bark and eat the fruit. She was very close, and the crinkled skin was within reach of her hand, when her eyes lighted on a twin image. It was as if she were seeing a reflection in a pond: another, identical, tree rising before her, strange and complicit. Everything that was light about the first tree was crepuscular in the second: purple on the back of the leaves, green on the reverse, the fig fruit dark. It was wrapped in dense air and a dull, opaque light.

Adam, who had kept hidden, observing her, moved closer when she circled the great round trunk and disappeared behind it.

Even when he heard her, he still could not see her. He wondered whom she could be talking with. Until then, they had not come across any other creature that could put into words the sensations of the body. The cat, the dog, and the
rest of the animals communicated in elementary melodies. If hearing her intrigued him, seeing the tree reproduced in an identical image with inverted colors left him stunned. Carefully, not making a sound, he followed the murmur of her words. He saw her seated on an enormous root that sank into the earth as if it were one of the extremities of what he imagined might be the reflection of how the Tree of Life thought of itself. Perhaps instead of talking, he told himself, the tree sees what it imagines. He was about to step out into the open, around the broad trunk, when he heard a voice. He thought that the Other had finally allowed himself to be seen; but then he was assailed by doubt. This voice did not sound like the disembodied one whose murmurs he knew, the one that light as the air had the quality of resonating inside his chest. This was like liquid slipping along the earth and dragging stones as it went. He heard its laughter. It laughed like the woman. It said:

“So! You noticed that we were observing you. How perceptive of you! And you have devoted yourselves to looking for us? Excellent! I suspected that would happen, but I am happy to know it was so. We could not resist the desire to watch you. It has been very entertaining.”

“You are not alone, then? Do you have a companion too?”

“Companion? Me? Mmmm I never thought of it in that way.”

“But there is someone else, besides you?”

“Elokim. He is the one who created you.”

“The man says I came out of him.”

“You were hidden inside him. Elokim placed you on one of his ribs. Not inside his head, so that you would not know
pride, and not in his heart, so that you would never feel the desire to possess.”

Those were its words. Adam kept listening.

“What is there beyond this Garden; why are we here?”

“Why do you want to know? You have everything you need.”

“Why would I
not
want to know? What does it matter if I know?”

“Only Elokim knows the reason for everything that exists. If you should eat of the fruit of this tree, then you would know as well. You would be like him. You would understand the reason for all things. That is why I am here, at the foot of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, to warn you not to partake of these fruits, because if you do you will loose your innocence and die.” The creature smiled maliciously.