Read Online Cain by José Saramago - Free Book Online Page A

spilled, but also the terrible screams of the torture
victims. These authorities, mainly midwives
of long experience, believed
that a baby in its mother's womb can hear everything going on outside. The
result was a sober death by hanging
before the entire populace of the city, as a warning, Be careful, this is the very least that could happen to you. The execution was watched from a palace balcony by noah, lilith and cain, the latter because he had been the target of the failed attack. It was noted that, contrary to protocol, noah did not stand in the middle of that small group, lilith did, thus keeping husband and lover apart, as if she were saying that, although she did not love her official spouse, she would remain joined to him, because that is what public opinion seemed to want and what the interests of the dynasty appeared to need, and that although she was being forced by cruel destiny, by the lord's curse, You will be a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth, to allow cain to leave, she would remain bound to him by the body's sublime memory, by the inextinguishable recollection of the dazzling hours she had spent with him, something a woman never forgets, not like men, to whom such things are like water off a duck's back. The corpses of the malefactors will remain hanging where they are until all that remains of them are bones, for their flesh is accursed, and the earth, if they were buried
in it, would erupt and vomit them up,
over and over. That night,
lilith and cain slept together for the last time. She wept, he clung to her and wept too, but their tears did not last long, they were soon overcome by erotic passion, in whose grip they once more lost all control and fell into delirium, absolute and utter, as if the world were nothing more than that, two lovers interminably devouring each other, so much so that lilith said at last, Kill me. Yes,
perhaps that would be the logical end to this
story of the love between cain
and lilith, but he didn't kill her. He placed a long, lingering kiss on her lips, looked at her for the last time
and then went and spent the rest of the
night in the bed reserved for
him in the antechamber.

Chapter
6
     
    Despite the grey
gloom of pre-dawn, you could see that the birds,
not the charming winged creatures that will soon be singing their songs to the sun, but the brutish birds of
prey, those carnivores who travel from
scaffold to scaffold, had begun
their work of public cleansing on the exposed parts of the hanged men, their faces, eyes, hands, feet, the half
of a leg left uncovered by a tunic.
Two owls, startled by the sound
of the ass's hooves, flew up from the dead slave's shoulders with a silken murmur perceptible only to experienced
ears. They swooped very low down a narrow alleyway next to the palace and disappeared. Cain dug his heels into the donkey's sides and crossed the square, wondering if he would again meet the old man with the two sheep, and, for the first time, he asked himself who that impertinent person might be, Perhaps it was the lord, he murmured, he'd be quite capable of such a thing, given his liking for turning up when and where he's least expected. He preferred not to think about lilith. When he woke in his lonely guard's bed after a broken, constantly interrupted night's sleep, he had felt a sudden impulse to go into the bedroom for one last word of farewell, one last kiss, and who knows what else. There was
still time. Everyone was asleep in the palace, only lilith was sure to be awake, no one would notice his brief incursion, or perhaps only the two slave-women who had half-opened the gates of paradise to him when he first arrived, and they would simply say with a smile, How well we understood you, abel. Once he turns the next corner, the palace will disappear from view. The old man with the sheep wasn't there, the lord, if it was him, was clearly giving
cain carte blanche, but no road map or
passport or recommendations for hotels and restaurants, it was how