Read Online Cain by José Saramago - Free Book Online

could enjoy it endlessly, freely, extravagantly, so
that you could enjoy it without rules or
prohibitions, I opened to
you the doors of my mind, which I had always kept bolted shut, and yet you refuse to do the one thing I ask of you and that would bring us total freedom, Freedom, yes, but remorse too, You're forgetting that I am lilith, I'm not the kind of woman to feel remorse, that's for the weak and feeble, And I am merely a man called cain who came from far away, a man who killed his own brother, who worked as a treader of mud, and who, having done nothing whatever to deserve it, has had the extraordinary good fortune to sleep in the bed of the most beautiful, passionate woman in the world, whom he loves, wants and desires with every pore of his body, So we won't kill noah, then, asked lilith, If you really want to, have a slave do it, No, I don't
despise noah so much that I would send a
slave to kill him, But I'm a
slave and you wanted me to kill him, That's different, a man who lies in my bed is not a slave, or perhaps he is, but only to me and my body, So why don't you kill him yourself,
asked cain, Because, despite everything, I don't think I would be capable, Men kill women every day, who knows, perhaps by killing him you would start a new trend, Let other women do that, I am lilith, wild, crazy lilith, but
that is as far as my errors and crimes
go, So we'll let him live then,
it will be punishment enough for him to know that we know he wanted to kill me, Put your arms around me, trample me beneath your feet, o treader of mud. Cain put his arms around her, but he entered her very gently, without violence, with an unexpected tenderness that brought her almost to the verge of tears. Two weeks later, lilith
announced that she was pregnant.
    Some might say
that social and domestic peace finally reigned
in the palace, enfolding everyone in the same fraternal embrace. This, however, was not the case, for after a few days had passed, cain came to the conclusion that with lilith expecting a child, his time there had ended. When the child came into the world, everyone would consider it to be noah's child, and although, at first, there would be no shortage of more than justified suspicions and murmurings, time, the great leveller, would soon smooth them away, and future historians would take care to eliminate from the
city's chronicle any reference to a
certain treader of mud called abel,
or cain, or whatever the devil his name was, a doubt which would, in itself, be deemed reason enough to condemn him to oblivion, to permanent quarantine, to the limbo of those events which, for the peace of mind of dynasties, it is best not to talk about. Our story may not be historical, but it shows how wrong or perhaps malicious those historians were, because cain did exist, he gave noah's wife a child,
and now he has a problem, how to tell
lilith that he wants to leave.
He hoped that the lord's curse, You will be a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth, would persuade her to accept his decision. In the end, though, it proved less problematic than he had thought, perhaps also because the child, that handful of hesitant cells, was already expressing a will and a desire, the first effect of which was to reduce its
parents' mad passion for each other to the
status of a vulgar sexual fling
to which, as we know, the official history will not devote a single line. Cain asked lilith for a donkey and she gave orders for him to be given the very best, the most docile and the sturdiest in the palace stables. At that point, news came that the treacherous slave and his partners in crime had been discovered and arrested. Fortunately for sensitive souls, who always look away from unpleasantnesses of any kind, there were no interrogations and no torture, perhaps because of lilith's pregnancy, for in the opinion of notable local
female authorities, this would augur ill
for the future of the gestating
child, not just the blood that would inevitably be