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

evolving from that seemingly irrelevant incident, came a gigantic spiral of ephemeral and transparent men and women who multiplied and spread across magnificent landscapes, their faces alight with a myriad of expressions, their skins reflecting shades from the gleam of wet tree trunks to the pale petals of the rhododendron. Around them swirled shapes and forms, unnamed objects among which they moved with aplomb and without haste, inquisitive and curious, as they unveiled a multiplicity of visions that in turn split into bottomless depths, strata of incomprehensible symbols whose meaning they debated in an onslaught of confused sounds and harmonies whose echoes nevertheless resonated inside Eve, as if by not knowing them she knew them. In the accelerating spin of these succeeding cycles, she saw them, hidden and confused, burn andtwist, light and extinguish terrible conflagrations from which they emerged again and again. Their faces were tirelessly renewed, repeated in the incessant motion of that animated and cacophonous multitude spilling across never-seen lands, unknown places, gesticulating, displaying emotions that rippled or floated on the water that reflected them, emotions in which she perceived the same thirst for knowledge that consumed her, as well as profound currents and perplexities she would have liked to be able to name. To peer into that energetic and unrelenting tumult, to glimpse the unknown spaces, to hear the murmur of her blood respond to a vulnerable and shared destiny, inspired in her a tenderness and a desire deeper than anything she had known until then. Curiously, the last image that emerged before the water stilled was so placid and clear that she wondered whether it was she herself realizing she was still in the Garden, or whether the mystery at the end of it all was the possibility of going back to the beginning.
    History, Eve said to herself. She had seen it. That was what would begin if she ate of the fruit. Elokim wanted her to decide whether or not it existed. He did not want to be responsible for it. He wanted her to be the one to bear that onus.

CHAPTER 3
    E VE RAN TO LOOK FOR ADAM. SHE DID NOT FIND him in the meadow, where he liked to teach the dog to obey and to intuit his thoughts. She did not find him in the lush jungle, or back on the bank of the river. Weary, she stopped and sat down on the grass. She looked around with nostalgia, as if she were seeing a memory. She saw greenness, water, and blue mountains.
    What was the difference between the images she had seen in the water and others that often were revealed to her as she strolled through isolated areas of the Garden, alone, without Adam’s presence at her side to stand between her and her imagination? Adam said that the fabulous creatures that appeared to her where the golden light barely filtered through the dense vegetation were visions: women of water playing with butterflies with tiny human faces and long manes, birds discussing the world with animals that had human torsos, enormous leaves on which hieroglyphics appeared and disappeared, gigantic creatures that fed on the dense clouds they tore from the sky, thelizard that spat fire as it followed a body so long that, even though its own, it attacked as if it belonged to another.
    Unlike those iridescent, evanescent visions, the ones she saw in the river were strong, clear, their reality more forceful than that of the Garden itself. She had been allowed to see them, she thought, not merely to share in the all-enveloping gaze that came from within Elokim, but to experience the abundance of life that filled him in such profusion that it overflowed and was transformed, perhaps mocking his will, into creation bursting from a wish before he had time to repent. However much this life might defy him, he must be fascinated to witness the destiny of beings that, perhaps moved by what the Serpent called freedom, contrived to go against and live outside his creative will. This could