Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand by Gioconda Belli

"If we hadn't eaten the fruit," she said, looking Adam in the eye, "I would never have tasted a fig, or an oyster. I wouldn't have seen the Phoenix rise form its ashes. I wouldn't have known night. I wouldn't have learned that I feel alone when you leave me, and I wouldn't have felt how my body--so cold, even in the heart of the fire--filled with warmth when I heard you calling me. I would have gone on seeing you naked without being disturbed. I would never have known how much I like it when like a fish you slip inside me to invent the ocean."

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Well, maybe you've heard that part of the story. On the sixth day he made man, and then he made woman--although maybe that's pretty well-worn territory, too. But what that story doesn't tell you is that Adam and Eve had not only sons, but daughters, written out of the Creation story in favor of their twin brothers Cain and Abel. Gioconda Belli's Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand is a retelling of the Adam and Eve story with a feminist slant, a version of Genesis in which the woman is responsible for the Fall, but for the regeneration, too, of mankind.

Belli's God, called Elokim, is distant and mercurial, rarely speaking to his creations directly. Instead, he leaves it up to the Serpent to interpret his will for him. The Serpent, who describes herself as a kind of Eve to Elokim's Adam--his long-suffering companion--describes a God that barely understands his own motivations in making humankind, a God who suffers from a great loneliness but also piques of stubborn jealousy. From speaking to the Serpent, and through her own visions, Eve comes to understand that it is Elokim's will that, after the fall, humankind makes its way back to the state of grace from which it was expelled. In her role as mother, Eve shares with Elokim a capacity for creation, a capacity which evokes awe and jealousy from Adam, and which brings forth the lineage of humankind Belli calls history. What Eve comes to understand through her difficult post-Eden life is that the very gifts for which she forsook Eden by eating the apple will be the gifts that lead her, and by extension us, back to grace: knowledge and freedom. For Milton, the Fall was the origin of all the bad things in the world, but for Belli, the Fall ushers it its own resolution and points toward a possible world in which human beings have knowledge and freedom as well as peace and prosperity.

In the meantime, Belli's Adam and Eve must make their way together in a world for which neither has any guidance. Adam, used to animals eating from the palm of his hand, is nearly mauled to death by a bear. Pregnant Eve, having no idea what awaits her, imagines monsters bursting from her exploded body. When night falls for the first time, neither knows whether the sun will return. When winter comes, there is no guarantee that spring arrive again. Together they face the world's first ethical quandaries--Adam is driven to kill and cook meat to ensure his partner's survival; Eve finds it wrong.

The greatest change Belli makes to the story of Genesis is probably the introduction of the two daughters. Cain and Abel are both twins: Cain to the beautiful Luluwa, Abel to the homely Aklia. Elokim commands Adam and Eve to mate Cain with Aklia and Abel to Luluwa, which evokes Cain's anger. The first murder, then, is not about a sacrifice--or not only--but about Cain's jealousy and possessiveness toward a woman he considers his property. Toxic masculinity is baked into the very beginning of the human world. (There is an essentialism to Belli's ideas about gender that seems a little outre today.) Luluwa follows Cain to Nod and is written out of history, but Aklia's fate is stranger: she is drawn to the apes of the forest and follows them, becoming the first ancestor in human evolution. It's a clever way of uniting myth and modern knowledge, but it's also a representation of Belli's circular model of creation: Eve turns out to be the last human, not the first, the end stage toward which all of Aklia's descendants move.

With the addition of Nicaragua, my "countries read" list is now up to 72!