The High Mountains of Portugal

by Yann Martel

  He closes the lid and turns the starting handle. He hastens back to the driving compartment, puts the machine into first gear. He pauses. He considers what lies behind him and what lies ahead. With a shudder, the machine starts to move. He presses harder on the pedal. The automobile gains speed. He puts it into second gear, then third. He looks in the side mirror. The image is shaky, but he can still make out the lump. He turns his eyes to the road ahead.

  He does not drive very far. The road snakes and ascends into a forest of pine trees. He stops, he turns the engine off, he sits. Then he lifts his gaze to look out the paneless window. Through the trees he sees the road he was on earlier. He is already far from that road, but nothing catches the eye like movement. He sees a tiny figure, just a speck. The figure is running. He recognizes that it's a man from the sparks of light that flash through the running legs. The man runs and then he stops. He falls forward. There is no movement for a long time. Then the man gets up, lifts the bundle off the road, and walks back the way he came.

  Tomas's inner being plummets. To be the victim of a theft, and now to have committed a theft. In both cases, a child stolen. In both cases, his goodwill and grieving heart of no consequence. In both cases, mere chance. There is suffering and there is luck, and once again his luck has run out. He suddenly feels swallowed, as if he were a struggling insect floating on water and a great mouth gulped him in.

  After a long time he looks away. He gets the automobile into gear and pushes on.

  The church of Espinhosela yields no treasure; nor does the church of Mofreita. There is only the church of Santalha left. If Father Ulisses' crucifix is not there, what will he do next?

  On the road to Santalha he begins to feel ill. The pain comes in waves, and at each wave it seems to him that he can feel the exact outline of his stomach. Within that outline he is gripped by cramps. Relief comes--only for another cramp to hit him. Nausea surges through him next. Its onset is violent. Saliva floods his mouth, and the taste of it, its very presence, increases the nausea. He halts the vehicle and hastily exits it, trembling and covered in a cold sweat. He falls to his knees. Vomit erupts out of his mouth, a white torrent that splatters the grass. It reeks of putrid cheese. He is left panting. The urge returns with unstoppable force and he retches again. At the end of it, bile is burning his throat.

  He lurches back to the automobile. He examines himself in a side mirror. He is scruffy and wild-eyed. His hair is sticky and matted. His clothes are unrecognizably dirty. He looks like a skewer of roasted meat. He spends a grim, sleepless night haunted by a pair of blue eyes, by a sad solemn little face, his stomach clenching and unclenching. It dawns on him: He is sick because of the child. The child is pushing from within him.

  That morning he enters a village named Tuizelo. The day is sunny but the village square is deserted. He gets down from the automobile and drinks from the fountain at the centre of the square. He should clean himself, but he cannot muster the will or the concern. Instead he goes searching for somewhere to buy a little food. In these small villages in the High Mountains of Portugal, where the inhabitants survive largely on a mix of self-sufficiency and barter, he has discovered that sometimes a private house acts as an informal shop--but even this is not to be found in Tuizelo, only large vegetable gardens and wandering animals. The village is in fact full of animals: cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, sheep, goats, cows, donkeys, songbirds. As he is returning to the automobile, another stomach cramp besets him. As he pauses to steady himself, he catches sight of the village church. It is a squat building, plain and simple, though not unattractive for it. Its pale stone glows appealingly in the sunlight. He is of the opinion that architectural modesty best suits the religious sentiment. Only song needs to soar in a church; anything fancier is human arrogance disguised as faith. A church such as Tuizelo's, with no high pointed arches, no ribbed vaulting, no flying buttresses, more accurately reflects the true humble nature of the seeker who enters its walls. The church is not on his list--but visiting it might distract him from his aching stomach and guilty sorrow.

  The two doors he tries are locked. As he steps away he catches sight of a woman. She is standing looking at him from a little way off.

  "Father Abrahan has gone fishing for the day. I have the key, if you would like," she says.

  He hesitates. There is more driving to be done. With great uncertainty ahead. But she is offering. And it doesn't escape his notice: The woman is beautiful. A peasant beauty. It lifts his spirits while dashing them at the same time. Once he had a beautiful woman in his life.

  "That would be kind of you, senhora."

  She tells him her name is Maria Dores Passos Castro and that he should wait. She disappears around a corner. While he waits for her return, he sits on the step of the church. It is a relief to be approached by a lone woman. He is grateful that no mob has descended on him in this lost village.

  Senhora Castro returns. She produces an enormous iron key. "The custodian of the church is my husband, Rafael Miguel Santos Castro, but he is away for the week." With much clanging and grinding, she unlocks and opens the door to the church. She moves aside to let him in.

  "Thank you," he says.

  The interior is dim, because the windows are narrow and because he has just walked in from bright sunlight. He walks to the centre of the nave, to the single aisle between the rows of pews. He is preoccupied with his stomach. If only the child would stop pushing! He is afraid he will vomit inside the church. He hopes Senhora Castro will not follow him too closely. She doesn't; she stands back and leaves him in peace.

  His eyes grow accustomed to the muted light. Stone pilasters connected by arched mouldings frame the white stucco walls around him. The capitals atop the pilasters are plain. Other than a commonplace pictorial Stations of the Cross, the walls are bare, and the windows have no stained glass. He makes his way in reverse along the nave. It is all sober and simple. He takes the church for what it aims to be: a shelter, a refuge, a harbour. He is so weary.

  He notices the church's narrow windows, the thick walls, and the barrel-vaulted ceiling. The Romanesque style arrived late and died late in Portugal. This appears to be a typical small Romanesque church, unmarked by time and unmodified by later hands. A forgotten seven-centuries-old church.

  "How old is the church?" he calls.

  "Thirteenth century," the woman replies.

  He is pleased to learn that he has identified it correctly. He backs up the aisle slowly, dropping his feet with care. The transepts appear, containing no surprises. He turns around to face the altar, lowering himself into a pew in the second row. He takes long, deep breaths. He glances at the altar and at the crucifix above it. The crucifix is not the standard-issue maudlin symbol he has found almost everywhere. It seems to be early Renaissance. Christ's long face, elongated arms, and foreshortened legs speak of an awkward attempt by the artist to correct the distortions caused by viewing an elevated figure from below. The extended arms and reduced legs make the body look normal to the viewer looking up at it. The work is no Mantegna or Michelangelo, but it's expressive, the face of Christ especially so, nearly Baroque in its emotional eloquence. It's a worthy attempt to express the humanity of Christ and juggle with perspective, circa the early fifteenth century.

  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 Sao Tome. 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 Tomas, 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.

  Tomas 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.

  Tomas 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. Tomas 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.

  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.

  His office is quiet, as is the hallway outside it. Braganca has a population of not thirty thousand people, but its Hospital Sao Francisco, in which he is head pathologist, is the largest in Alto Douro. Other parts of the hospital will be lit up and swollen with bustle and noise--the emergency wing, where people come in screaming and crying, the wards, where the patients ring bells and hold the nurses up in endless conversations--but the pathology wing, in the basement of the hospital, beneath all these lively floors, is typically hushed, like all pathology wings. He wishes it to stay that way.

  With the adding of three words and the crossing out of one, he completes the paragraph. He reads it over one last time. It is his private opinion that pathologists are the only physicians who know how to write. All the other devotees of Hippocrates hold up as their triumph the restored patient, and the words they might write--a diagnosis, a prescription, instructions for a treatment--are of fleeting interest to them. These physicians of restoration, as soon as they see a patient standing on his or her feet, move on to a new case. And it is true that every day patients depart the hospital with quite a bounce to their step. Just an accident, or a little bout of this or that illness, they say to themselves. But Eusebio places greater store in those who were seriously sick. He notes in these patients leaving the hospital the tottering gait and the dishevelled hair, the desperately humbled look and the holy terror in their eyes. They know, with inescapable clarity, what is coming to them one day. There are many ways in which life
's little candle can be snuffed out. A cold wind pursues us all. And when a stub of a candle is brought in, the wick blackened, the sides streaked with dripped wax, the attending physician--at the Hospital Sao Francisco, in Braganca, Portugal, at least--is either he or his colleague, Dr. Jose Otavio.

  Every dead body is a book with a story to tell, each organ a chapter, the chapters united by a common narrative. It is Eusebio's professional duty to read these stories, turning every page with a scalpel, and at the end of each to write a book report. What he writes in a report must reflect exactly what he has read in the body. It makes for a hard-headed kind of poetry. Curiosity draws him on, like all readers. What happened to this body? How? Why? He searches for that crafty, enforced absence that overtakes us all. What is death? There is the corpse--but that is the result, not the thing itself. When he finds a grossly enlarged lymph node or tissue that is abnormally rugose, he knows that he's hot on death's trail. How curious, though: Death often comes disguised as life, a mass of exuberant, anomalous cells--or, like a murderer, it leaves a clue, a smoking gun, the sclerotic caking of an artery, before fleeing the scene. Always he comes upon death's handiwork just as death itself has turned the corner, its hem disappearing with a quiet swish.

  He leans back in his chair to stretch. The chair creaks, like old bones. He notices a file on his workbench, along the wall, where his microscope stands. What is it doing there? And what is that on the floor beneath the bench--another file? And the glass on his desk--it's so dried out, it's collecting dust. He strongly believes in the importance of proper hydration. Life is moist. He should clean the glass and fill it with fresh, cool water. He shakes his head. Enough of these scattered thoughts. He has much that needs preserving, not only in solutions and slides but in words. In each case he must bring together the patient's clinical history, the findings from the autopsy, and the histological results into a smooth and coherent whole. He must apply himself. Focus, man, focus. Find the words. Besides, there are other reports that need finishing. There is the one he has been putting off. It has to be done tonight. A body that was crushed and left for several days half-exposed to the air, half-submerged in a river, inviting both rot and bloating.