Zama by Benedetto Antonio Di

Author:Benedetto, Antonio Di [Benedetto, Antonio Di]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Novel, Modern Classics
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-06-13T03:00:00+00:00

1794

I WAS laboriously making my way back to the idea of a divine creator. A spirit grounded upon nothing, able to establish laws of equilibrium, gravity, and motion. But its universe was a rotation of spheres, large or small, opaque or luminous, within a precise space, seemingly delimited by the range of a gaze, where all sound was inconceivable.

Then, to meet my needs, the divine creator took on human form but could not truly be a man because he was a god, alien and remote. An old man with white hair and beard, sitting on a rock in fatigued contemplation of the mute universe.

His hair had been white forever. He was born old and could not die. His solitude was appalling. Malevolent.

A god cannot create gods so he thought to create man so that man could create them.

Then he created life. But before creating mankind, he made snakes, flies, and the germs that cause plague. He gave fire to the volcanoes and churned the seas. He needed to eradicate his torment and a rage engendered in his heart by solitude.

Later he carried out a labor of love: mankind. And surrounded him with a wealth of goods.

But the god failed. For mankind created a multitude of gods who did not look kindly upon the first one. These gods divided the universe among themselves, and some imposed their own rule. The god’s greatest failure was this: He could see man, but man could not see him, could not gaze back into his eyes, which were suffused with paternal affection.

The god was left alone and irascible. He allowed the fruits of goodness to multiply, on their own or through mankind’s labors, but did not eliminate the evils. Instead he delighted in stirring them up here or there, as a way of manifesting his presence. Other upstart gods assisted him in this.

•

I wished to be a father. To be a father once more, with a son there, where I was: a son who would gaze back up at me with affection when I turned my eyes and my desolation toward him.

Emilia, the woman who attended to my needs, an impecunious Spanish widow who did not surpass me in age but did in character, resisted this idea and insulted me whenever I spoke of it.

To preserve appearances, I kept my room at the inn, though I slept at her rancho and with her, of course.

One lunar night we lay unsleeping long past midnight and had no taste for each other. Emilia waxed garrulous. My thoughts were occupied with Peruvian gold, racehorses, and my private theogony. She was drawing up an inventory of the family members she had lost; in truth, not a single one was left, I believe. Her own calculations must have reached the same result, for she burst forth in tears and said I was her last and only refuge and that she loved me more than her dead husband, along with other plaintive and touching confidences of that kind. She kissed me a good deal on the mouth and that night was the first we tallied up until she was a mother.

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