He is going to throw up. He clamps his mouth shut. Child, stop! He stands and steadies himself. He makes his way backwards down the aisle and, as he is about to turn for the door, lets his eyes sweep through the church one last time. His eyes rest on the crucifix again. A point of stillness makes itself felt within him, a point that becalms not only the troubles of his body but also the rash workings of his brain.
To place one foot in front of the other feels unnatural, but he does not want to take his eyes off the crucifix. He walks forward. The crucifix is not Renaissance. It’s more recent than that. In fact, he is certain of its date: 1635. It is indeed Baroque, then — what might be called African Baroque. Unmistakably, what he is staring at is Father Ulisses’ crucifix. There it is, all the way from São Tomé. Oh, what a marvel! The match between what Father Ulisses wrote in his diary and fashioned with his hands is perfect. The arms, the shoulders, the hanging body, the curled legs, and, above all, the face! Now that he is properly taking in what his eyes are seeing, the crucifix indeed shines and shrieks, barks and roars. Truly this is the Son of God giving a loud cry and breathing his last breath as the curtain of the temple is torn in two from top to bottom.
“Excuse me,” he cries out to Senhora Castro.
She takes a few steps.
He points with his arm and finger. He points to the heart of the church and asks her, “What is that?”
The woman looks bemused. “It is Our Lord Jesus Christ.”
“Yes, but how is he represented?”
“Suffering on the Cross.”
“But what form has he taken?”
“The form of a man. God so loved us that He gave us His Son,” she replies simply.
“No!” shouts Tomás, smiling though every muscle in his midsection is twisting. “What you have here is a chimpanzee! An ape. It’s clear in his sketch — the facial hair, the nose, the mouth. He’s feathered away the hair, but the features are unmistakable, once you know. And those long arms and short legs, they’re not stylized, they’re simian! Chimpanzees have limbs exactly like that, long in the upper body and short in the lower. Do you understand? You’ve been praying to a crucified chimpanzee all these years. Your Son of Man is not a god—he’s just an ape on a cross!”
It is done. This Christ on the Cross, once it is displayed and widely known, will mock all the others. He whispers his private business: There. You took my son, now I take yours.
He wants his laughter to be light, but his victory is blighted by an onrushing emotion: a plummeting feeling of sadness. He fights it. Here is the truth about Jesus of Nazareth, the biological reality. All science points to the materiality of our condition. As an aside, the crucifix is breathtakingly beautiful, and to him will go the glory of discovering it and bringing it to the museum. Still, the feeling of sadness quickly deepens. He stares at Father Ulisses’ crucified ape. Not a god — only an animal.
As he flees the church, a hand pressed to his mouth, a Gospel verse unexpectedly rings in his head. Jesus has just been arrested after the betrayal of Judas, the disciples have deserted him and fled, and then, from Mark: A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.
Is he not now similarly naked?
Senhora Castro watches him go, struck by his strange backwards gait; he looks as if a wind were sucking him out of the church. She does not follow him. Instead she approaches the altar and peers up at the crucifix. What was the man saying? An ape? The Jesus she sees has long arms because he’s welcoming, and a long face because he’s doleful. She has never seen anything odd about the crucifix. The artist did his best. Besides, she pays more attention to Father Abrahan. And she prays with her eyes closed. It’s just a crucifix. And if he’s an ape, so be it — he’s an ape. He’s still the Son of God.
She decides she should check on the stranger.
Tomás is leaning against the automobile, retching violently. From his rectum to his throat he is a single constricting muscle at the mercy of the child who is wringing him like a wet rag. From the corner of his eye, he sees a priest appear in the square, holding a fishing rod in one hand and a line of three fish in the other.
Father Abrahan beholds Maria Passos Castro, who has a puzzled look on her face; he beholds one of those new, fashionable carriages he’s heard about (but this one in very poor condition); and he beholds a bedraggled stranger next to it, dry-heaving with mighty roars.
Tomás climbs into the driving compartment. He wants to go. In a daze he looks at the steerage wheel. The machine needs to move to the right to avoid the wall next to it. What does that mean in terms of the rotation of the wheel in his hands? Grief surges through him ahead of his capacity to answer the question. The steerage wheel has finally and truly defeated him. He begins to weep. He weeps because he feels horribly sick. He weeps because he is soul-racked and bone-weary tired of driving the machine. He weeps because his ordeal is only half over; he still has to drive all the way back to Lisbon. He weeps because he is unwashed and unshaved. He weeps because he has spent days on end in foreign lands and nights on end sleeping in an automobile, cold and cramped. He weeps because he has lost his job, and what will he do next, how will he earn his living? He weeps because he has discovered a crucifix he no longer cares to have discovered. He weeps because he misses his father. He weeps because he misses his son and his lover. He weeps because he has killed a child. He weeps because, because, because.
He weeps like a child, catching his breath and hiccupping, his face drenched with tears. We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more — there is no greater relationship. Long before Darwin, a priest lucid in his madness encountered four chimpanzees on a forlorn island in Africa and hit upon a great truth: We are risen apes, not fallen angels. Tomás is strangled by loneliness.
“Father, I need you!” he cries out.
Father Abrahan throws his fishing gear to the ground and runs to help the piteous stranger.
Part Two: Homeward
Eusebio Lozora says the Lord’s Prayer three times slowly. After that he launches forth with unrehearsed praise and supplication. His thoughts wander but return, his sentences stop midway but eventually resume. He praises God, then he praises his wife to God. He asks God to bless her and their children. He asks for God’s continued support and protection. Then, since he is a physician, a pathologist at that, rooted in the body, but also a believer, rooted in the promise of the Lord, he repeats, perhaps two dozen times, the words “The Body of Christ,” after which he gets up off his knees and returns to his desk.
He considers himself a careful practitioner. He examines the paragraph he has been working on the way a farmer might look back at a freshly sowed furrow, checking to see that he has done a good job because he knows the furrow will yield a crop — in his case, a crop of understanding. Does the writing hold up to his high standards? Is it true, clear, concise, final?
He is catching up on his work. It is the last day of December of the year 1938, its final hours, in fact. A bleak Christmas has been dutifully celebrated, but otherwise he is in no mood for holiday festivities. His desk is covered with papers, some in clear view, others carefully, meaningfully eclipsed to varying degrees depending on their importance, and still others that are ready to be filed away.