experience watching them work. It's hardly surprising, therefore, that the work advanced with previously unimaginable speed, so fast that there was scarcely time to appreciate the changes. During this period, the lord appeared only once. He asked noah how things were progressing and enquired as to whether cain was helping the family, oh, indeed he was, he had already slept with two of the daughters-in-law and was preparing to sleep with the third. The lord also asked if he was managing to gather together the animals who would be travelling with them in the ark, and noah told him that most had been found and that, as soon as the ark was finished, they would find those that were still missing. This was only a very small part of the truth. There were some animals, the most common ones, kept in a paddock at the far end of the valley, but they were a tiny fraction of those envisaged by the plan set out by the lord, namely, every living thing of all flesh, from the pot-bellied hippopotamus to the most insignificant of fleas, not forgetting the even smaller creatures, all the way down to microorganisms, who are also flesh. In the same ample, generous interpretation of the word flesh, there are also those creatures widely spoken of in certain exclusive, esoteric circles, but whom no one can claim to have seen. We are referring, for example, to the unicorn, the phoenix, the hippogryph, the centaur, the minotaur, the basilisk, the chimera, and that whole prodigious, composite class of animals with only one justification for their existence, that of having been created by god in a moment of extravagance, as was the common- or-garden donkey, with whom these lands are teeming. Imagine the pride, the prestige, the respect noah would gain in the eyes of the lord if he could persuade just one of those animals to enter the ark, preferably the unicorn, always supposing he could find one. The problem with the unicorn is that there are no females, and so it cannot reproduce via the normal routes of fecundation and gestation, although, on second thoughts, perhaps that isn't necessary, after all, biological continuity isn't everything, it's enough that the human mind can create and recreate whatever creature it obscurely believes in. For the remaining tasks, gathering together the animals and the necessary food supplies, for example, noah is hoping to be able to rely on the efficient help of the worker angels, who, all honour to them, continue to work with praiseworthy enthusiasm. Among themselves, the angels were happy to acknowledge that life in heaven was the most boring thing ever invented, with the chorus of angels constantly proclaiming to the four winds the lord's greatness, generosity and even his beauty. It's high time that these and other angels began to experience the simple joys of ordinary people, it shouldn't always be necessary, in order to generate a little excitement, to rain down fire on sodom or to sound their trumpets and bring down the walls of jericho. In this case, at least from the point of view of the worker angels, happiness on earth was far superior to that in heaven, but the lord, of course, being a jealous god, must never know this, because if he did, such seditious thoughts would merit the severest of reprisals with no regard for the perpetrators' angelic status. Thanks to the harmonious atmosphere that reigned among the people working on the ark, cain, when the time came, was able to get his donkey on board, as a stowaway, thus saving him from the general drowning. It was also thanks to this cordial relationship that he became privy to the angels' doubts and perplexities. Cain asked two of the angels, with whom he had established what, in human terms, would be described as bonds of camaraderie and friendship, if they really thought that, once this humanity had been destroyed, the race that followed would not fall into the same errors, the same temptations, the same follies and crimes, and they answered, We are mere angels, we know little about this incomprehensible charade that you call human nature, but to be perfectly frank, we don't see how the second experiment will be any more satisfactory than the first, which ended in the long string of miseries we see before us now, in short, in our honest opinion as angels, and considering all the evidence, we don't believe that human beings deserve life, Do you really believe that man doesn't deserve to live, asked cain, shocked, That isn't what we said, what we said, and we repeat, is that given the behaviour of human beings through the ages, they do not deserve life, with its many dark sides, in all its beauty, grandeur and magnificence, replied one of the angels, So saying one thing is not the same as saying the other, added the second angel, It may not be the same, but it almost is, But the difference lies in that almost, and that difference is enormous, As far as I know, we men never ask ourselves whether or not we deserve life, said cain, If you had, perhaps you wouldn't be about to vanish from the face of the earth, Well, there's no point crying about it now, said cain, giving voice to the sombre pessimism acquired during his successive journeys into the horrors of past and future, if the children who were burned to death in sodom hadn't been born, they wouldn't have had to scream the screams I heard while fire and brimstone fell from the heavens on to their innocent heads, That was their parents' fault, said one of the angels, There was no reason why the children should suffer because of that, Your mistake is to assume that guilt is understood in the same way by god and by men, said one of the angels, In the case of sodom, the guilt lies with a god who was in such a ridiculous hurry that he didn't want to waste time selecting for punishment only those who, in his eyes, were the evil-doers, besides, where did the strange idea come from, that god, simply because he is god, has the right to govern the private lives of his believers, setting up rules, prohibitions, interdictions and other such nonsense, asked cain, We don't know, said one of the angels, We're told almost nothing about such things, we're only called in to do the heavy work, added the other in a tone of complaint, when the time comes to lift the boat and carry it to the sea, you can be quite sure that there will be no seraphim, cherubim, thrones or archangels around, That doesn't surprise me, cain started to say, but the words were left hanging in the air, suspended, while a kind of wind beat in his ears and he suddenly found himself inside a tent. A naked man was lying on the ground, and that man was noah who was plunged in the deepest of drunken sleeps. Another man was having carnal relations with him, and that man was ham, his youngest son, who was, in turn, the father of canaan. Ham saw his father naked, which was an elliptical, rather discreet way of describing the embarrassing or reprehensible thing that was actually happening. Worse still was the fact that the guilty son then went and told shem and japheth, who were standing outside the tent, but they compassionately took a blanket and, walking backwards, so that they would not see their father's nakedness, covered him over. When noah wakes up and realises the shame ham has brought on him, he will let fall upon his son the curse that will harm all the people of canaan, Cursed be canaan, he will be the servant of servants to his brothers, and blessed be shem by the lord god and let canaan be his servant, may god enlarge japheth and he shall dwell in the tents of shem and let canaan be his servant. Cain, however, will no longer be there, the same gust of wind brought him back to the door of the ark just as noah and his son ham were approaching with the latest news, We leave tomorrow, they said, the animals are all in the ark, the foodstuffs are safely stowed, we can weigh anchor.
Chapter 13
God was not there for the launch. He was busy examining the planet's hydraulic system, checking the state of the valves, tightening the odd loose screw that was dripping where it shouldn't, testing the various local distribution networks, keeping an eye on the manometers, as well as dealing with tens of myriads of other tasks, large and small, each of them more important than the last, and which only he, as creator, engineer and administrator of the universal mechanisms, was in a position to carry out and to which only he could give the sacred ok. Parties were for other people, he had work to do. At such times, he felt less like a god and more like the foreman of the worker angels, who, at that precise moment, were waiting in their immaculately white overalls, one hundred and fifty on the starboard of the ark and one hundred and fifty on the port side, for the order to lift the enormous vessel, but we could not say that an order rang out, because no voice would be heard, for this operation is all in the mind, in one mind, as if only one man with a single brain and a single will were thinking it. One moment the ark was on the ground, the next it had been lifted chest-high by the worker angels, as if they were performing an exercise with weights and dumb-bells. Noah and his family leaned excitedly out of the window the better to appreciate the spectacle, at the risk, thought cain, of one of them falling out. One last push and the ark was suddenly raised into the upper air. It was then that noah shouted, The unicorn, the unicorn. And indeed, galloping alongside the ark was that creature without equal in zoology, with its spiral horn, its dazzling white coat, like an angel, that mythical horse whose existence so many had doubted, and there it was, almost within their grasp, all they had to do was lower the ark, open the door and lure it in with a lump of sugar, which is the favourite treat of all equines, and can be their perdition. Suddenly, the unicorn disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. Noah's cries of, Go down, go down, were all in vain. Manoeuvring the ark earthwards again would have been very complicated logistically, and what was the point if the unicorn had vanished and would now be wandering who knows where. Meanwhile, at a far greater speed than that of the hindenburg airship, the ark was cutting through the air, heading for the sea, where, when the water was deemed deep enough, it finally landed, creating a huge wave as it did so, a real tsunami, that raced up the beaches, destroying the boats and huts of
