Your highness was speaking of the docility of my parishioners. True, the are docile, even to an excess they are. They carry on jobs and pains with a passive acceptance almost stoical making them invulnerable. Non the less, under the crust, under the resignation with which they accept their destiny, under those eyes loaded with riddles, there hides a kind of sickened sensibility, a magic sentiment of life and a pit of rebelliousness capable of bursting any second with unprecedented violence.
They believe blindly on the effectiveness of lucky charms, on prophecies, hidden treasures, on miracles and supernatural apparitions and I sometimes wonder if it’s not our responsibility to push them into believing such. Not far from my point, last month, our missionary newspaper published the prophecy of sister Lucia about the darkness that on 1960 will befall inevitably over the earth. I don't give it much of a thought. That destruction threatening mankind since 1945 has unleashed on us a crowd of visionaries and mystics that live announcing universal catastrophes, and even if the prophecy of this ingenuous survivor of the Fatima's group had the moral backup of the Portuguese bishops and ours, I thought that the announcement would go unnoticed.
Two days latter, the prophecy's announcement made effect and thousands of parishioners invaded the church carrying bunches of honey smelling candles, matches and handfuls of ocote to be blessed. I made them open the baptismal room doors and with the help of my vicars I would stand hours droping tons of holy water over those fragile objects, giving them the supernatural powers that the faithful, over centurys have used to cast away pests, floods and tempest.
And while money was filling pots and trays, time was going backwards and the only thing left was that animal terror, the fear of the feudal times, and the magical conceptions of the Universe where phenomena can be modified and bended, and eternal laws substituted by the delusional prophecy of a poor sick woman. I saw the serious faces of the congregation, their humiliated faces to which another burden was being added, and I felt tempted to go on the pulpit and say:
-Sister Lucia is insane, insane are the Portuguese bishops and the printers of the missionary paper. Do not fear. The sun, our sun, is a star, not to small or too big, but a good, reasonable star that for ten billion years ago has kept a wonderful balance between it's gravitational force and the elastic forces of its gases.
-Every thing about the sun is portentous. Its size, its age, the secret of its energy would be beyond our human age, of our measures, of our conception of reality if not for the help of mathematical formulations. Only them could teach us of with their precise cyphered language of the estrange phenomena operating in the sun; of heat and density growing inwards reaching temperatures, pressures, and densities that in time make complex thermonuclear reactions. There, inside the star, atoms have lost their electrons and are no more than nuclei, heavy nuclei where fast protons collide exploding them, tearing a new energy, a photon, a gamma ray of short wavelength, and that photon in a journey through the layers of the sun goes colliding with other nuclei and growing in its wavelength and becoming a train of waves, on electromagnetic current that man, over the millenia has called light and heat in many tongues.
-Gamma ray and photon, my beloved brothers in Jesus Christ, do not fully explain the secret of solar energy. At the same time protons destroy nuclei, another conversion happens, that of hydrogen in helium, the omnipresent carbon cycle that allows the sun to feed itself and create on the active laboratory of its core, energy enough to assure another ten billion years without diminishing brightness, without decay, without damage to its prodigious vitality, because it's a lamp feed with precious fuel, a cosmic force excessive to Atlas's back or the shell of the Hindu turtle, a star that God has created with the purpose to stay lit, and lit it will remain thousands of centurys after your grandsons, and the grandsons of your grandsons have disappeared.
-This is my prophecy. Between this one and the one of sister Lucia there is only a difference in time. What she announced for 1960, I announce it on another date, near or distant, depending if we measure it on our terms or sidereal ones. So you can go home at peace and take your candles, matches and oils with you, just in case your old power plant brakes down as usual, and nocturnal darkness fall over Tajimaroa. Deo gratias.
Every phrase on the sermon fell on its place in my brain while I watched their serious and worried faces reflecting in the vast baptismal water pot. It was useless to tell them the truth. Their eyes saw the blinding flames of the mexican sun, and not its granulated skin, its dark spots, its “faculas” and its tempest. It was useless to tell them about the carbon cycle, of the gamma ray, of the old days of the sun transformed in a red giant, and of its final destiny, as a withe dwarf lost in the intense life of the galaxy.
*El Agua Envenenada
Fernando Benítez
Fondo de Cultura Económica
Vigésima segunda edición, 2003
ISBN 968-16-0635-3
