“What if it just slipped out of him, like sometimes pee does?”
“You think you’re being funny, but that’s exactly what other sharp minds have thought. The world slipped out of God like piss slips out of us. The world is the result of his incontinence, like a man with an enlarged prostate.”
“What’s a prostate?”
“It doesn’t matter, pretend I gave a different example. What matters is that the world slipped out of Him, that God just wasn’t able to hold it in, and that all this is the result of the Evil he carries inside him-that’s the only way to excuse God. We’re in shit up to our eyes, but he’s no better off himself. Then, however, all the pretty things they tell you at the Oratorio start falling like overripe fruit, things about God as the Good, as the perfect being who created the heavens and the earth. He created the heavens and the earth precisely because he was profoundly imperfect. That’s why he made the stars like batteries that can’t be recharged.”
“But hang on, maybe God did create a world where those of us in it are destined to die, but say he did it as a test, to make us earn paradise, and therefore eternal happiness.”
“Or burn in hell.”
“The ones who yield to the devil’s temptations.”
“You talk like theologians, who are all in bad faith. Like you, they say that Evil exists, but that God has given us the greatest gift in the world, which is our free will. We are free to do what God tells us to do or what the devil tempts us to do, and if we end up in hell it’s just because we haven’t been created as slaves but as free men, and it just so happens we’ve used our freedom badly, which is our own doing.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly? But who told you that freedom is a gift? In other words, be careful not to confuse things. Our comrades in the mountains are fighting for freedom, but it’s freedom from other men who wanted to turn them into so many little machines. Freedom is a beautiful thing between one man and another; you don’t have the right to make me do and think what you want me to. And besides, our comrades were free to decide whether to go up into the mountains or to hide out somewhere.
But the freedom that God granted me, what kind of freedom is that? The freedom to go to paradise or to hell, with no middle ground. You’re born and you’re forced to play a hand of briscola, and if you lose you suffer for all eternity.
And what if I didn’t want to play this game? Fat Head, who among all his evil deeds actually did a few good things too, banned gambling houses, because those are places where people are tempted and end up ruining their lives. And don’t tell me people are free to go there or not.
Better not to lead them into temptation. But here God has created us free and incredibly weak, exposed to temptation. You call that a gift? It’s as if I were to throw you down that escarpment and tell you, Don’t worry, you’re free to grab onto some shrub and haul yourself back up, or you can let yourself roll down until you’ve been reduced to the kind of minced meat they eat in Alba.
You might ask: But why did you throw me down when I was doing just fine up there? And I would answer: To see how strong you were. A fine lark. You didn’t want to prove how strong you were, you were just happy not to fall.”
“Now you’re confusing me. What is it you believe, then?”
“It’s simple, it just never occurred to anyone before: God is evil. Why do priests say God is good? Because he created us. But that’s precisely why he’s evil. God doesn’t have evil the way we have a headache. God is Evil. Maybe, seeing as he’s eternal, he wasn’t evil billions of years ago. Maybe he became that way, like kids who get bored in the summer and start tearing the wings off flies, to pass the time. Notice how if you think that God is evil, the whole question of Evil becomes crystal clear.”
“They’re all bad, then, even Jesus?”
“Ah, no! Jesus is the only evidence that at least us men are capable of being good. To tell the truth, I’m not sure Jesus was God’s son, because it doesn’t make sense to me that a good guy like that could be born from such an evil father. I’m not even sure that Jesus really existed. Maybe we invented him ourselves, and that in itself would be a miracle, that our minds could come up with such a beautiful idea.
Or maybe he did exist, was the best of men, and said he was the son of God with the best of intentions, to convince us that God was good. But if you read the Gospels closely, you’ll realize that in the end even Jesus realized that God was bad: he gets scared in the olive grove and asks, Let this cup pass from me, and zilch, God doesn’t listen; on the cross he shouts Father why hast thou forsaken me, and zilch, God turns his back. But Jesus showed us what a man can do to offset God’s wickedness.
If God is evil, then we at least have to try to be good, forgive each other, refrain from doing each other harm, heal the sick, and turn the other cheek. We’ve got to help each other, seeing as God doesn’t help us. Do you see how great Jesus’ idea was? Imagine how much it must have irritated God. Forget the devil, Jesus was the only true enemy of God, and he’s the only friend us poor wretches have.”
“You must be some kind of heretic, like the ones they burned…” “I’m the only one who understands the truth, but unless I want to get burned I can’t go around speaking it, so you’re the only one I’ve told. Swear you won’t tell anyone.”
“I swear,” I said, tracing a cross over my lips with my finger.
I noticed that Gragnola always wore a long, thin leather sack that hung from his neck, beneath his shirt.
“What’s that, Gragnola?”
“A lancet.”
“Were you studying to be a doctor?”
“I was studying philosophy. I was given the lancet in Greece by a doctor in my regiment, before he died. ‘I don’t need this anymore,’ he told me. ‘That grenade has opened my belly. What I need now is one of those kits, like women have, with a needle and thread. But this hole is past stitching up. Keep this lancet to remember me by’ And I’ve worn it ever since.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a coward. With the things I do and the things I know, if the SS or the Black Brigades catch me, they’ll torture me. If they torture me, I’ll talk, because evil scares me. And I’ll be sending my comrades to their deaths. This way, if they catch me, I’ll cut my throat with the lancet. It doesn’t hurt, only takes a second, sffft. I’ll be screwing them all: the Fascists because they won’t learn a thing, the priests because I’ll be a suicide and that’s a sin, and God because I’ll be dying when I choose and not when he chooses. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
Gragnola’s speeches left me sad. Not because I was sure they were evil, but because I feared they were good. I was tempted to discuss them with my grandfather, but I did not know how he would react. He and Gragnola might not have understood each other, though they were both anti-Fascists. Grandfather had resolved his problems with Merlo, and with Il Duce, in an amusing way. He had saved the four boys in the chapel, pulling one over on the Black Brigades, and that was it. He was not a churchgoer, but that did not mean he was atheist-if he were, why would he have set up the Nativity scene?
If he believed in God, it was a jolly God, who would have had a good laugh seeing Merlo trying to vomit his guts out-Grandfather had saved God the trouble of sending Merlo to Hell, since after all that oil he would surely have been sent merely to purgatory, where he could relieve himself in peace. Gragnola, on the other hand, lived in a world made wretched by an evil God, and the only times I saw him
