the rapids and swift currents of the river and to hike through kilometres of forest and dead zones as he made the rounds of his extended parish.
Like so many priests in the wilderness, Father Stephanos Caetano was a Jesuit, educated in the venerable Colégio Santo Inácio in Rio de Janeiro. His work in São Gabriel da Cachoeira had not given him much opportunity for debating theological niceties, but he tried to do his best by the Child. See them now, sitting in the shaded veranda of his bungalow, talking, sipping iced lemonade made by Father Caetano’s wife, a plump homely woman who worked in the hospital’s administration, while out in the hot bright little walled garden bees and hummingbirds attend flowering bushes sparingly watered from the dwindling river.
‘He pretends to be interested in my experiments,’ the Child told Roberto, the next day. ‘But even though I explained everything three different ways, he doesn’t really understand it.’
‘Well, I don’t really understand it either.’
‘Only because you can’t be bothered to.’
Roberto shrugged. A lanky teenager dressed in a one-piece white tracksuit and running shoes, just returned from his daily run. His wiry hair was matted with sweat; his dark skin shone. He’d always run everywhere as a kid, driven by impatience and an excess of energy that the boundaries and routines of the small town couldn’t contain, and he still ran now, at least ten kilometres a day. Besides an interest in science, he and the Child shared an ambition to escape the town and make their mark on the wider world. Roberto was already on his way. He’d aced the vestibular for the Institute of Physics at the Federal University of São Paulo, won a scholarship. In a few weeks, at the end of summer, he’d be gone, on a trajectory that the Child longed to follow.
He said, ‘Is it so bad, if all you’re doing is boring him with biology?’
‘He keeps bringing God into it.’
‘Priests have a habit of doing that.’
‘I told him about spandrels,’ she said. ‘The old idea that certain properties of organisms are accidental byproducts of function and form, just as the highly decorated spandrels between adjacent arches in cathedrals are accidents of geometry. I told him that our appreciation of beauty in all its forms, our arts, might also be spandrels.’
‘You were trying to stir him up.’
‘I was bored. I wondered if it was possible that religion was a spandrel. He said that all forms of art were ways of praising creation. And therefore, of praising the Creator. So how could I be sure, he said, that they were truly accidental?’
‘He isn’t stupid,’ Roberto said.
‘I have to see him again,’ the Child said. ‘Over and over. Until I’m turned into a good little Christian.’
‘That will take some time.’
‘And meanwhile you’ll be in São Paulo, free as a bird.’
‘Ask him about his telescope,’ Roberto said.
‘He has a telescope?’
‘A good one. Twenty-centimetre reflector. Ask him to show you the stars and planets. You’ll learn something useful, and it’ll keep him off the topic of G-O-D.’
See the Child and the priest, then, sitting on the parched lawn of the bungalow in the hot summer night, leaning over a slate that displayed the telescope’s images, directing it this way and that. Gazing at double stars and nebulae, at the Magellanic Clouds and Andromeda, watching for shooting stars, studying the Moon’s rugged face.
That summer Jupiter was as close to Earth as it ever got: the brightest star in the sky, rising like a lamp in the east. The telescope easily resolved the Galilean moons and Father Caetano told the Child the story of their discovery by the father of astronomy, Galileo Galilei: how that venerable scientist had realised that their shifting patterns meant they were not distant stars that by chance inhabited the same patch of sky as the planet, but were moons orbiting it. That if moons orbited Jupiter, Earth was not,
Like so many priests in the wilderness, Father Stephanos Caetano was a Jesuit, educated in the venerable Colégio Santo Inácio in Rio de Janeiro. His work in São Gabriel da Cachoeira had not given him much opportunity for debating theological niceties, but he tried to do his best by the Child. See them now, sitting in the shaded veranda of his bungalow, talking, sipping iced lemonade made by Father Caetano’s wife, a plump homely woman who worked in the hospital’s administration, while out in the hot bright little walled garden bees and hummingbirds attend flowering bushes sparingly watered from the dwindling river.
‘He pretends to be interested in my experiments,’ the Child told Roberto, the next day. ‘But even though I explained everything three different ways, he doesn’t really understand it.’
‘Well, I don’t really understand it either.’
‘Only because you can’t be bothered to.’
Roberto shrugged. A lanky teenager dressed in a one-piece white tracksuit and running shoes, just returned from his daily run. His wiry hair was matted with sweat; his dark skin shone. He’d always run everywhere as a kid, driven by impatience and an excess of energy that the boundaries and routines of the small town couldn’t contain, and he still ran now, at least ten kilometres a day. Besides an interest in science, he and the Child shared an ambition to escape the town and make their mark on the wider world. Roberto was already on his way. He’d aced the vestibular for the Institute of Physics at the Federal University of São Paulo, won a scholarship. In a few weeks, at the end of summer, he’d be gone, on a trajectory that the Child longed to follow.
He said, ‘Is it so bad, if all you’re doing is boring him with biology?’
‘He keeps bringing God into it.’
‘Priests have a habit of doing that.’
‘I told him about spandrels,’ she said. ‘The old idea that certain properties of organisms are accidental byproducts of function and form, just as the highly decorated spandrels between adjacent arches in cathedrals are accidents of geometry. I told him that our appreciation of beauty in all its forms, our arts, might also be spandrels.’
‘You were trying to stir him up.’
‘I was bored. I wondered if it was possible that religion was a spandrel. He said that all forms of art were ways of praising creation. And therefore, of praising the Creator. So how could I be sure, he said, that they were truly accidental?’
‘He isn’t stupid,’ Roberto said.
‘I have to see him again,’ the Child said. ‘Over and over. Until I’m turned into a good little Christian.’
‘That will take some time.’
‘And meanwhile you’ll be in São Paulo, free as a bird.’
‘Ask him about his telescope,’ Roberto said.
‘He has a telescope?’
‘A good one. Twenty-centimetre reflector. Ask him to show you the stars and planets. You’ll learn something useful, and it’ll keep him off the topic of G-O-D.’
See the Child and the priest, then, sitting on the parched lawn of the bungalow in the hot summer night, leaning over a slate that displayed the telescope’s images, directing it this way and that. Gazing at double stars and nebulae, at the Magellanic Clouds and Andromeda, watching for shooting stars, studying the Moon’s rugged face.
That summer Jupiter was as close to Earth as it ever got: the brightest star in the sky, rising like a lamp in the east. The telescope easily resolved the Galilean moons and Father Caetano told the Child the story of their discovery by the father of astronomy, Galileo Galilei: how that venerable scientist had realised that their shifting patterns meant they were not distant stars that by chance inhabited the same patch of sky as the planet, but were moons orbiting it. That if moons orbited Jupiter, Earth was not,
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