When her two guests arrive, the lanky microbiologist reaches into a woven plastic bag under the computer station with its tangle of screens and towers and pulls out a handful of crucifixes, stacking them head to foot in a neat pyre in the tiny fireplace. She sets them alight with the help of some pages from an old microelectronics review. Even before the little pyre catches fire she warms her hands over it as if it were winter, and after a moment of hesitation so do her guests, a wee female and her good-looking male companion. It’s June already, but it’s still raining and summer is a long way off. For a while all three watch the flames dancing among the crucifixes without saying anything.
If she thinks she’s going to shock me, she’s quite mistaken. I’ve seen far worse: human beings burned at the stake and drawn and quartered, gruesome rapes, steaming torrents of blood, genocides. I find the fanatical geneticist a bit sad, actually—that beaky long face of hers like a highly alert bird. Her and her militant atheist accomplices. Let them rip all the crucifixes off the walls and burn them, these are certainly not the things that count. True, a father doesn’t enjoy seeing images of his son (especially an only son, and deceased young) set on fire, but there’s no point in making a tragedy out of it. There are hundreds of millions of crucifixes around; a dozen more, a dozen less, mean nothing. Anyway, I never much liked the pose in which the poor kid was immortalized: too bombastic, too melodramatic, too human.
Even supposing that madman really is my son. Truth is, I knew nothing about it until he burst onto the scene and began proclaiming to the four winds of Palestine that he was the Son of God. There have always been droves of nutcases ranting on about such things, sometimes from the top of a date palm tree. Celebrity has a price, as some pontificator said. The difference was that this one could convert a corpse, and so rather than toss him in the dungeons, they got down on their knees, copied down everything he said and didn’t say, bombarded him with questions, followed him everywhere. Unbelievable. Because he really was my son, or because he was better at leading them down the garden path? I confess it’s not a dilemma that keeps me awake at night.[8]
When the crosses are burning nicely, the lanky unbeliever adds another, larger crucifix to the fire. Only when the pyre really gets crackling does she lay on a big blue angel. Atheists think they can do away with me by despising religious froufrou. They don’t realize that the more they go at it, the more they sink into the quicksand of their own faith in reverse, fall back on surrogates destined to leave them in the lurch (look what became of communism!). I’m always somewhat astonished (insofar as a god can be astonished) to think how seriously they underestimate me. Doesn’t it even occur to them that I’m here watching, that I could swallow them in one bite? Maybe I should be annoyed, but instead I find them kind of sweet. Like children when you see them make some lewd gesture they don’t understand.
The tall one and the wee one had met each other a few days earlier in a crowd of nutcases kissing and necking in the middle of the road, individuals of the same sex I mean.[9] Now they’re babbling away beside the burning angels and crucifixes. The tall one says that it’s the church’s fault that the country still doesn’t have a law protecting homosexual couples; the church stands in the way of all progress in civil rights and scientific research. The wee one replies that nothing’s likely to happen soon: it certainly won’t be that smiley new pope who’ll upend that lethal fascist crime syndicate that’s been persecuting genuine spirituality from the beginning. The boyfriend is studying a collection of votive phalluses atop a bamboo chest, his brow furrowed: that is, the way men listen to women talking to one another.
Obviously, it bothers me somewhat that these two girls (as well as their partner in crime pretending an interest in priapic statuettes) take it for granted I don’t exist. I mean, who wouldn’t be peeved: you’re there, you hear every word, you see what’s behind every single breath and syllable, and they act like you don’t exist and never have. It’s not merely bad manners, it’s a question of a total lack of recognition, considering that it is I who made the firmament and all creation (as they say). However, if they think they can get at me by disparaging the church, they’ve got the wrong man (so to speak). I’ve never granted the slightest indulgence to the institution, nor to that kid they call my son (and who probably isn’t). If there’s an institution that has always caused me trouble, it’s the church.
After gazing at the crucifician immolation for some time, the three of them sit down at the table: she on the side of the fish-counter-become-kitchen-counter with the hunk sitting across from her, and the wee one next to the glass blocks that face out on the post-proletarian shop-yard. She tells them that she’s worked for a number of years in a genetic research unit but also has a fallback job in bovine insemination. So, you’ve got a thing for microbes? says the hunk, in a tone that would like to sound horrified but in fact just sounds phony. Oh yes, says she, her face all tender. Our future is in their hands! she declares, like some nun in the throes of mystical abandon. To hear her raving like that sets my teeth on edge (you might say), but it would be the end of me if I had to correct every piece of balderdash humans say. I’d have to step in tens of billions of times a day.
I’M HAVING A BLAST
What I like best, when I have some time for myself (you know what I mean) is to dillydally (what a verb: I dillydally, you dillydally, they had a brief dillydalliance) around the galaxies and intergalactic spaces. I know of no spectacle more intense and thrilling than galaxies and clusters of galaxies. If I could, if I never had to toil, I would do nothing else. Keep in mind, however, that the distinction between labor and free time is meaningless for a god, because inevitably mine is not really labor, and even less so is my free time really free. Simplifying as much as possible, or we’ll never get to the bottom of this, let us say that whenever I can I like to putter around.[10]
Let me be clear: when I move through the universe I do not strut about like the owner of a great corporation in the hallways of his headquarters, and even less like a scowling Tolstoyan latifundista on horseback. The term that comes closest, although it’s still profoundly inadequate, is tourist. Like a tourist, I have no precise objective, like a tourist my frame of mind is receptive and benevolent, I’m unstressed, I like to compare, digress. Of course I know that tourism is widely considered anything but a spiritual activity, but in my view, if all tourists acted like tourists in their everyday lives too, the so-called world would be a lot better off.
There are dozens of billions of galaxies, and even the paltriest of them has tens of millions of stars of all colors, stars with halos in various styles, pretentious plumes, nebulae in the most garish colors, even planets and satellites. Some stars are as quiet as little angels despite the deadly nuclear reactions inside them; most however seem to be possessed by the devil, hawking up foaming lava that swells into giant bubbles, or just the opposite, collapsing and shriveling until they nearly disappear, a billion times denser than lead. But the interstellar spaces, too, with their fresh and invigorating atmosphere measuring two hundred sixty degrees below zero (to use a scale everyone can understand) and their glimmers of all but impalpable dust, are by no means wastelands without any appeal, and they vary greatly. In short, it’s almost impossible to get bored.
8
At first I had no doubts at alclass="underline" he was a charlatan, an impostor. But then I heard so much and such various commentary that even I began to feel unsure, I who better than anyone else ought to know whether or not he’s my son and how he was conceived. If there’s one thing the theologians have always been good at, it’s smoke and mirrors: according to some religions he existed, for others, no; for some his nature is more human than divine, for others more divine than human—in short, a tremendous muddle. So far as I’m concerned, if someone wants to believe, fine, if instead (s)he’s skeptical, that’s fine too; the important thing is that they believe in me. Relatives, even those who put themselves out for the cause, matter only up to a point. I hope I won’t disturb anyone in stating this frankly.
9
Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against homosexuals, but if I created men and women it was for some purpose, if you know what I mean.
10
Perhaps I should say