Game of games

Every afternoon Father Nicanor would sit by the chestnut tree preaching in Latin, but Jose Arcadio Buendia insisted on rejecting rhetorical tricks and the transmutation of chocolate, and he demanded the daguerreotype of God as the only proof. Father Nicanor then brought him medals and pictures and even a reproduction of the Veronica, but Jose Arcadio Buendia rejected them as artistic objects without any scientific basis. He was so stubborn that Father Nicanor gave up his attempts at evangelization and continued visiting him out of humanitarian feelings. But then it was Jose Arcadio Buendia who took the lead and tried to break down the priest’s faith with rationalist tricks. On a certain occasion when Father Nicanor brought a checker set to the chestnut tree and invited him to a game, Jose Arcadio Buendia would not accept, because according to him he could never understand the sense of a contest in which the two adversaries have agreed upon the rules.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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