The Book of Eve

BOOK ONE

1

The Beginning

Before me, all was Chaos, a vast disarray, endlessness, the turmoil of darkness and light, the heavens and the abyss, above and below, lightness and weight, water and earth. There was no one to witness this. Everything was amorphous, unfinished, pending. Everything burned wildly.

This pandemonium was magnificent in its own way.

I know something about Chaos. I didn’t experience it firsthand, but Chaos is part of me. And I’m not alone in the Cosmos in that regard; Chaos is here today; its power animates the Universe.

Because of me, human pleasure and pain exist; and since I am the heir of Chaos, humans confuse pleasure and pain.

After Chaos, the Earth began to spin on its axis, creating gravity. But let’s leave things there, because that transformation, that craziness, that sudden coming together, would take up this whole story. Let’s spend our time on others:

Two sources of light pursued the Earth—the Sun and the Moon—a multitude of stars, comets, scattered asteroids, and other nameless heavenly bodies, some falling apart and spinning out of orbit without rhyme or reason. To be completely accurate, the Sun did not pursue the Earth, but in those times that’s how it appeared and that’s why it’s written so here.

This perception wasn’t foolish: our planet, enrobed in its atmosphere, was a thing of beauty to behold. But beauty and horror go hand in hand: the titans sprang forth from planet’s core, responding to the call of the Moon and the Sun. They rebelled against Earth’s internal pressure, just like geysers, spring waters, and volcanic eruptions.

The titans were misshapen, their very forms the image of Chaos. They were dim-witted shades, dumb, wandering shadows that moved slowly, relics of the early times with no reason for existence. Their deformity, and not their size, is how they got their name, because on Earth all living creatures were shaped harmoniously, except the short-lived titans.

The giants came next. I lived at the same time as them but can’t say much about them, because only infants can see giants clearly, and I was never a child. From the beginning I was an adult, or whatever you call the age I am, ageless.

Legend has it that the giants were born of the titans. This is completely unfounded, because all those who preceded Eve bore no offspring; the titans died out, leaving no descendants. I was and still am the first to ever conceive offspring, whereas the titans and giants sprouted like seeds or erupted like volcanos. Before me, all creation was part of a chain reaction; giving birth started with me. Before me, Chaos and Eternity. Everything that came into being was motherless.

Alas, the Mother: she is the personification of creation, irruption, the presence of the dark tunnel that delivers us to life, and worse: the keeper of the seed, the one who gives nourishment, the one who provides. A terrible figure. She ought to be mistrusted, not celebrated, because she consumes us—and if you don’t have your Mother’s approval it’s like being devoured twice over.

Over time, the giants had children with our own species. These were proud beings who disdained beauty; confident in their powers, they committed atrocities on par with those that some attributed to the giants.

And humans copulated with angels, too. The creatures produced by the union of women and angels settled in the first city, ruining Cain’s dream, the same one Noah would later have: creating a race free from wickedness by shortening the lives of its inhabitants, because if they lived too long some would become wicked, discovering the pleasures of vice. I’ll get to that story later.

The tides of Chaos—some of which were universal, others localized—were a formidable force, causing as much damage as war.

One of the last began near Earth, a little farther than the Moon. That was when Beelzebub, the greatest angel of all, fell from the heavens because of his arrogance, betraying his heavenly nature; it happened because of his attraction to the Earth, which made him anchor himself here as if he were one of us. Which was, of course, irreversible.

Though he himself was magnificent in his resplendence, Beelzebub could not restrain himself when faced with so much earthly beauty. He couldn’t stand it; hungry and greedy, he wanted to devour everything he saw.

Chewing giddily, Beelzebub stuffed himself silly, acting such the glutton that he collapsed, falling into one of the circles of the underworld.

The Moon howled with laughter.

The Moon’s long belly laugh shook the Earth and its surroundings. I wasn’t there, I learned this much later: it was recorded on stone and in water’s deference to the Moon.

The laughter of the Moon, magnificent in her defiance, gave Earth the constant of cold, lunar incandescence.

The Moon is, first and foremost, female (so they say), even in her fits of laughter. The same is true of Earth. And what is there that is not female? Tell me.

2

Presenting Eve, the Apple, Eden, and Eve’s Daughters, Who Ask About the Serpent

I, Eve, am the first of our kind.

Everything began with what they call the apple. The commonly accepted hypothesis about Adam and the clay and the breath is wrong—and I’m going to reveal its malicious origin. It is true that flesh, like the leaves on the trees, ribs, stones, and dirt, is made of stardust.

But asserting that the life-giving force worked with clay to create humans is false. Saying that man’s flesh preceded mine and that mine was wrought from a rib is nonsense.

Our roots are not in the ground, they can be traced to a fruit.

My name is Eve. I have no past. I was born of no one. I had no childhood. I’m the being that never dies. The first. The mother of you all.

"Despite Hell and its envy,"¹ I, "righter of wrongs, undoer of abuses,² will speak the truth here. Everything began with the bite I took of that fruit, the one they call the apple because their memories have been subjugated. It wasn’t an apple. That’s mere nonsense. The creation of the apple was a time-consuming human endeavor—and still is: every harvest, every tree requires care, kindness, imagination, luck—and the first one was cultivated by Cain, No knowledge is as precious as that which a child gives its mother. Sweet Cain, whom I nicknamed Seeds," my farmer son.

In Eden there was no such thing as care, kindness, imagination, or luck. In Eden, fruits, legumes, seeds, leaves, greens, and vegetables had no flavor or scent. Like everything else, fruit grew from stardust; it was luck that made it delicious.

From that moment luck became an inseparable companion of mine, of ours. It wasn’t the only thing that the apple gave us.

It’s also untrue that I did not bite the apple, as has been written elsewhere (she didn’t care if Adam took a bite / she did not taste it).³ I did bite the apple; why would I deny it, when I’m proud of it? It’s slanderous drivel to say that in doing so I committed the original sin.

The delicious fruit awakened my senses. I smelled a scent for the first time.

My sense of smell made me reach out, open my hand, take what hung from the branch and bring it to my mouth. My eyes played no part: the smell is what made me bring the fruit to my mouth. I felt its fresh, smooth skin with my lips, my tongue, and I sank my teeth into it.

(Stardust, stardust. I, too, am nothing more than stardust. But fertile dust, active, creating, generating, that’s the very nature of that primordial dust.)

—

The cool flesh of the fruit—solid but fleeting, a study in opposites, airy but dense, light but heavy—delighted me when I bit it, not only its flavor and its smell, its crunchy, moist texture gave me unknown pleasure.

What was Eden like? In brief, not like it is here.

It was a confined, restricted space. Nature was absent. Eden was an abstract plaything, a place where time did not exist, no night, no seasons, no rain, no wind, no drought, no cold, no distance; it was one dimensional. The Sun did not beat down, there was no ice. If there had been water in Eden, it would never have boiled. There was no steam in Eden either.

It defied earthly logic. It was a kind of orchard in which everything was artificial, because though there were flowers and fruits, they weren’t true flowers and fruits, they had no vitality, they didn’t seek the Sun’s light, they had no roots; there was no water, no air, no rocks, nothing that looked like earth on the ground.

Artists who have attempted to depict Eden have captured a little of what it was like, when, for example, they paint impractical and absurd things that defy all logic. Even if they don’t look exactly like Eden, they are similar, in a way; distorting what Eden was, they only graze the surface, because it really was like a painting, a representation, but not on canvas or paper. Color, yes, it did have color, but without gradations, and not the four primary colors but all colors at once, without different tones or shades or combinations.

Adam also tried to recreate Eden, that’s why he was so keen to domesticate animals. Because everything in Eden was orderly, as if planned out by a mind that was capable of thinking only on paper, in rigid shapes and plain colors.

In Eden I didn’t know I was me, and I had no idea that Adam was right beside me. It goes without saying that we never dreamed, because we never slept, there was no sleeping, no waking; so the premise that Thunder took one of his ribs while he was sleeping to create me is a lie, from beginning to end. And it was also a lie to say that Adam grew crops and kept livestock. No. Eden was Eden, untouched by human hands.

Another fallacy is that in Eden living creatures and other things were given names.

And the serpent, Eve?

Serpent? No, there was no serpent either! There was, however, the thing they call the ‘apple,’ and it was a fruit like the ones here on Earth.

Is it true that in Eden Thunder spoke with the angels, and that they spoke with the Serpent?

No, I don’t think so. Thunder didn’t speak. It didn’t communicate with language. It just rumbled things that weren’t translatable into words … We didn’t have words, we just nodded …

Were you in awe of Thunder?

We weren’t capable of feeling awe. We kept our eyes on the heavens only because we didn’t walk on all fours. Once in a while we cast our eyes down, just a reflex. We also couldn’t look sideways (Adam and I never exchanged glances in Eden, I never saw the spark in his eyes).

You mean you didn’t worship Thunder?

Of course not.

Who started referring to Thunder as a deity—God, Divine, Eternal, the All-Powerful, the Creator, things like that?

Adam did, out of the blue, but he did so after we had come to know the power of Earth.

—

Eden was no orchard. The apple was the only fruit there with scent and flavor.

It’s impossible to describe the creatures and the plants but let me try: They looked like they were made of lifeless matter, but that’s not specific enough. They were completely untouched by the passage of time because they were in Eden.

All the creatures in Eden were devoid of earthly light, unable to experience touch, smell, taste, and sound. You could say they were hollow, immaterial. I repeat: it wasn’t as though they were made of paper, cloth, or paint, because all three of those have some kind of smell or flavor.

Nor was Eden made of light, like the angels, or darkness, like the ones called demons who are the inverse of light. It was neither one nor the other: Eden was like illuminated night.

Eden was not attractive. It wasn’t desirable, desire didn’t exist there. Nor was it appealing; it neither attracted nor repelled. Nor was it plain. It was something else altogether, in a class of its own.

The one and only sweet-smelling, tasty apple hung from the branch of a tree, alone. Could it have been planted there—an intervention? If that were the case, who put it there? Was there a gardener in Eden? Even if that were the case, in Eden we didn’t have imagination, so there was no way an Edenite could have imagined such a foreign object.

There is no apple without imagination, and there was no being with imagination in Eden. Who made the apple, then? Who? Or what?

Who in Eden had altered the cheerless, constant presence of Thunder? (Thunder, whom some refer to as male, thanks to Adam and his acolytes.) Or could it be that Thunder created it, betraying itself?

The apple was the key that set us free. It made us understand ourselves, making us who we were. Who had done this?

Some suppose it was the handwork of one of the angels but there’s no evidence; as far as I know there were no angels in Eden, they stayed around the periphery.

There’s no doubt that neither the angels nor the delicious fruit came from Eden, although the latter was certainly there.

In the center, Eve? Was the apple at the heart of Eden?

That has nothing to do with it. Everything there was the center, or it didn’t have a center at all. It’s like saying that the surface of earth has a center. It doesn’t. There wasn’t one in Eden either.

I moved my hands toward the apple. I touched it. Its skin was a different temperature—unlike stone, unlike my body, unlike air; its texture felt completely foreign, a warning of the unknown—it wasn’t smooth like lambskin or sharp like my teeth, it was neither water nor rock. Neither light nor darkness. Nor chaos.

The apple’s skin awakened my own skin, giving me the courage to tell my hand, Take it!

In one swift motion I yanked the apple from the branch. I touched its skin to my lips. Once again it promised the unknown. I opened my mouth. My tongue touched it. I bit down. I chewed, it was sweet, and the tinkling bell sound the apple’s flesh made when my jaws crushed it echoed in my ears. I chewed with gusto, my jaws yearning to bite the apple again to hear that pealing, that sweet thunder, that crushing sound.

Immediately, or simultaneously, I felt an enormous wave of pleasure, or perhaps it was a lightning bolt that started inside me and moved outward, lightning that didn’t burn but was gentle—though that’s not quite right, because I didn’t tremble and it didn’t hurt, although it was intense, caustic, a lashing of sheer pleasure, piercing, expanding through me.

The apple’s flavor awakened my taste, my hearing, my smell, my sight: my consciousness. Everything changed with that bite. And I mean it when I say everything because when I’ve said that before it has been taken as an indication of my lack of restraint, not the accuracy of my word choice.

I continued chewing the pulp that was in my mouth. Each bite was another sound, another flavor, another burst of pleasure.

Without thinking I offered it to the one next to me, the one I was just becoming aware of because my skin was awakening. I offered it to him and for the first time I looked at him with desire.

Before he even touched the apple, Adam looked me in the eyes (for the first time) and understood that something had changed. It was a schism; suddenly we were burdened with a life we didn’t comprehend. That first look I gave him was a cascade. The way he looked at me … was denser, more stable, not fluid.

Adam took the apple, he felt it and he bit it, experiencing the same things I had—the pealing of its crunching flesh, its sweet flavor, the lashing, the lightning, the wound … I interlaced the fingers of his free hand in mine. I felt his skin with my skin for the first time. I saw Adam and, seeing him, I saw myself, too. I realized we were naked.

(The crushing sound of the apple’s flesh in my mouth, its crunchy pealing … it was something I had never heard before—because I had never heard anything at all. The delicate, crunchy fruit awakened my hearing … I heard everything inside my body, because the mouthful was inside me, awakening me … and awakening the music of the stars, the sounds of the universe …)

1. "A pesar del Infierno y de su envidia." Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Villancico III, in Obras Completas (Mexico City: Porrúa, 2012). All translations by Samantha Schnee unless otherwise specified.

2. "deshacedora de entuertos, destrozadora de injurias." Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Villancico VI, Obras Completas.

3. "contra el bocado se estuvo / de Adán, sin probar bocado" Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Concepción, primero nocturno, "Villancico I," Obras completas. Note that the quote is misused here, because the original villancico refers to the Virgin Mary, not Eve.

3

Nakedness, the Look, the