Up until now, my infinite goodness has prevailed. But the time has come to extinguish them, men. Humans. As I did with dinosaurs, with mammoths, each time sweeping a goodly number of creatures off the planet. And I have no regrets. After a while you can get fed up with a species, like everything else. You want to see new faces, you need fresh air. Not to mention the fact that (wo)men are wiping out a stratospheric number of plants and animals at an ever-crazier rate. Extinguishing them will be a genuine ecological good deed. If you think about it, they are merely a single species among ten million in the animal kingdom (I disregard their unreliable estimates). The difference between 9,999,999 and 10 million changes little, I think you’ll agree. Very soon now, perhaps even as I write the final syllable of this fatal diary, I’ll pull the switch, and they’ll get what they deserve.
Yes, it will be some time before all the traces of their misdeeds disappear, but it’s important to begin. The rivers will begin to run where they desire to run, properly flooding the plains. Highways and cities will disappear under a tangle of vegetation. First moss and lichens will spread, then grasses, then mighty oaks. Trees will no longer fear being lopped off at the base, or even pruned; they’ll tower undisturbed again. In short, I trust in the vegetable world to repair things. At the most I might spread a little fertilizer—organic, of course; we’ve had enough chemistry. The skyscrapers will begin to lean like the Leaning Tower of Pisa (Pizza?), then they’ll all topple over like bowling pins. Farewell paved parking lots, high-tension lines, shopping centers, airports: the forests will rule everywhere. Above all, no more churches, those dangerous dens of hypocrisy. I can’t wait to be free of them again.
How peaceful it will be without (wo)men; I can already taste the deep serenity. No more airplanes deafening the atmosphere—and covering the sky with those unsightly trails—no more smelly industries and exhaust pipes, no more carloads of carbon dioxide. Fish will be free to tear around the sea without fear of ending up in a can, or as fish meal in a pigpen. Birds will fly where they wish, cows will stop producing that poor-quality milk and slowly relearn how to be less tame. Dogs will shed that intolerable servile air, cats will scratch and hiss again. Free competition among the species will be re-established, minus those tricks and cheap shots human beings have always imposed to their own advantage.
The only thing that could go wrong would be if a few cunning survivors were to remain hidden away in some cave or swamp. There they’d be, quiet as mice, gnawing on wild berries and lizards, awaiting better times, until they could carry out one of their demographic explosions, a skill they’re unequaled at, lying low the way a half-forgotten epidemic disease does, and then suddenly multiplying aggressively, like a bomb going off. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in less than no time they’d have reinvented fire, iron blades, gunpowder, and so forth down to cell phones. So I’ll be keeping an eye trained to be sure not even the tiniest pocket of resistance survives. If necessary, I’ll employ a powerful volcano, one of those emitting cinders of lava that darken the sky for several years, a Pompeii 2.0. I have no intention of repeating this foolish comedy.
Come to think of it, the best solution might be to give Andromeda a push, like you do a child on a swing, to speed her up. The apocalyptic collision is predicted in two billion years? How about if I make that two minutes? Bye-bye Milky Way, no more pointless constellation-gazing. One must never hesitate to think big. Or should I decide something subtler is in order, I could revive the appetite of Sagittarius A* so that stars gravitating nearby, such as the Sun, are drawn inside. I can see that hideous mouth of his sucking in the various stars, a celestial Polyphemus gobbling down Ulysses’ men. But this time there’ll be no Ulysses to outwit him, no more cunning, no more (human) words. I’ll think about it, and then I’ll decide. Or rather, I won’t think, the right choice will simply impose itself. I am God, as I said. And that’s it from me.
The novelist, poet, and dramatist Giacomo Sartori was born in 1958 in Trento in the Alpine northeast of Italy near the Austrian border. An agronomist, he is a soil specialist whose unusual day job (unusual for a writer) has shaped a distinctive concrete and poetic literary style. He has worked abroad with international development agencies in a number of countries, and has taught at the University of Trento. He was over 30 when he began writing, and has since published seven novels and four collections of stories as well as poetry and texts for the stage. He is an editor of the literary collective Nazione Indiana and contributes to the blog www.nazioneindiana.com.
Sartori took as his subject in his early novels Tritolo (TNT) and Sacrificio (Sacrifice) the stifling provincial atmosphere of the valleys of his native region and the twisted lives of its most vulnerable inhabitants. A recent novel Rogo (At the Stake), also set in the region, is written in the voices of three women from different historical periods who commit infanticide. The autofiction Anatomia della battaglia (The Anatomy of the Battle) about a young man’s effort to come to terms with and define his manhood against the model of his father, a committed Fascist, and the historical novel Cielo nero (Black Heavens), deal with fascism and its dark, persistent allure. Sartori’s shorter fiction includes the book of interrelated absurdist stories Autismi (Autisms, 2018) written in the voice of a person struggling to cope with the bizarre, baffling customs and expectations that all around him seem to share. The black humor and pessimism are reminiscent of Samuel Beckett. Several stories from Autismi have appeared in Frederika Randall’s English translation in Massachusetts Review, and an excerpt from L’Anatomia della battaglia, also translated by Randall, appeared in The Arkansas International no. 2. At present Sartori lives between Paris and Trento.
Translator Frederika Randall grew up in Pittsburgh and has lived in Italy for 30 years (also New York and London). She has worked as a cultural journalist for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Nation and the Italian weekly Internazionale among others. Her translations include Luigi Meneghello’s Deliver Us; Guido Morselli’s The Communist; the epic tale of the Risorgimento, Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of An Italian; as well as fiction by Davide Orecchio, Igiaba Scego, Ottavio Cappellani and Helena Janeczek. Further translations include historian Sergio Luzzatto’s The Body of Il Duce, his Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age, for which she and the author shared the Cundill Prize for Historical Literature in 2011, and Luzzatto’s Primo Levi’s Resistance (2016), shortlisted for the 2017 Italian Prose in Translation Award. Other awards include a 2009 PEN-Heim Translation Grant, and a 2013 Bogliasco Fellowship. She writes about literature and translation at frederikarandall.wordpress.com.