Cain Read Online Free

and
whereas the lord, at least as regards this experiment, cared
nothing about the future of his two creations, azael, the
angelic guard charged with keeping them out of the garden of
eden, welcomed them in christian fashion, gave them food
and, above all, equipped them for life with a few precious
practical ideas, a true road to salvation for the body and,
therefore, the soul. The couple could not thank him enough, eve
even shed a few tears when she embraced azael, a display of
affection that greatly displeased her husband, and later
on, he couldn't help but ask the question that was
bursting to be asked, Did you give him something in exchange, What
and to whom, asked eve, knowing full well what her
husband meant, Who do you think, to him, azael, said adam,
carefully omitting the first part of the question, He's an
angel, one of the cherubim, replied eve, and felt it
unnecessary to say anything more. Some say that this was the day on
which the battle of the sexes really began. The first
caravan of traders did not appear for three weeks. Rather than them
all trudging up to the cave where adam and eve were
living, they sent an advance guard of three men who had the
authority to negotiate any work contracts, they, however,
took pity on the luckless pair and made room for them on the
donkeys they were riding. The leader of the caravan would
decide what to do with them. Despite this uncertainty,
adam, like someone closing a door as he says goodbye, put
out the fire. When the last wisp of smoke had disappeared
into the atmosphere, the angel said, Ah, they've gone,
safe journey.

Chapter 3
     
    Life
treated them fairly well. They were accepted into the caravan
despite their evident lack of labouring skills and were not required
to give too many explanations about who they were and where they came from.
They had got lost, they said, and that, after all, was the
truth of the matter. Apart from the fact that they were the children
of the lord, the work of his own divine hands, something which
no one there could possibly
know, there were no obvious physio-gnomic differences between them and their
providential hosts, you would even think they belonged to the
same race, black hair, olive skin, dark eyes, striking
eyebrows. When cain is born, all the neighbours will be surprised by
the pale rosy complexion with which he comes into the
world, as if he were the son of an angel, or an archangel, or
even, perish the thought, the son of one of the cherubim. They
never lacked for a dish of lentils, and it was not long
before adam and eve began to earn a wage, nothing much, a
purely symbolic amount really, but it nevertheless represented a
start in life. Not only adam, but eve as well, who had not been
born to be a duchess, were gradually being initiated into
the mysteries of manual labour, into operations as simple
as making a slip knot in a rope or as complex as handling a needle without
pricking your
fingers too often. When the caravan arrived at the settlement from which it
had set out some weeks before, adam and eve were given a tent and
some mats to sleep on and it was thanks to that and to
other periods of stability in their lives that adam could, at
last, learn to dig and delve, to sow seed in a furrow, and even
to perfect the sublime art of pruning, which no lord and no
god had thought to invent. He began to work with the tools
that others lent him, then slowly acquired his own and,
after only a few years, was considered by his neighbours to
be a good farmer. The days spent in the garden of eden and
in the cave in the desert, the days of thorns and thistles
and muddy streams, faded from his memory until sometimes
they seemed like gratuitous inventions that had never actually been
experienced or
even dreamed, but, rather, intuited as if they came from a life, a
self, a destiny that might have been. Eve, it is true, kept a
special place in her memory for azael, the angel who had disobeyed the lord's
instructions in order to save his