The High Mountains of Portugal

by Yann Martel

  "His foot, you say?"

  "Yes," she replies.

  "Do you care which one I start with?"

  She shakes her head. He is closest to Rafael Castro's right foot. He looks at it. In his medical student days he dissected a foot, he vaguely remembers, but as a practicing pathologist, beyond the occasional surface excision, he has never worked on one. How many bones is it again? Twenty-six, and thirty-three joints in each foot? All bound together and operated by an array of muscles and ligaments and nerves. A very efficient arrangement that can both support and transport.

  Where should he cut? Better the plantar surface than the dorsal, he thinks. Less bony. He takes hold of the ball of the foot and pushes. The foot flexes with little stiffness. He examines the sole. The callused skin will part, subcutaneous fat will show, some jellified blood might seep out--just a foot with a random cut in it. No indignity to the body, just an indignity to the attending pathologist.

  He presses the blade of the scalpel into the head of the medial metatarsals. He lets the blade go in deeply--it doesn't matter what it cuts--and he pushes down, towards the heel. The scalpel easily slices through the ball of the foot and into the arch, along the long plantar ligament. He brings the blade out as it digs into the fat pad of the heel.

  A thick substance pushes out of the cut. Blobs of it start to drop onto the autopsy table. It is whitish and lumpy, covered in a sheen of brightness, with a slight yellow runoff. It has a pungent smell.

  "I thought so," Maria Castro says.

  He stares in amazement. What in God's name is this? Though he has not uttered the question aloud, Maria Castro answers it.

  "It's vomit," she says.

  He examines the oozing mass closely. He sniffs it. The glutinous appearance, the bilious smell--yes, it is indeed vomit, fresh vomit. But how is that possible? It's a foot. He's seen necrosis and putrefaction in every form, but nothing like this, ever.

  "Where else would it go?" she says. "Gravity pulls." He seems in need of further explanation. "The child died, you see," she adds. She pauses for a moment. Then she converts all the silence in her into words. "Let me tell you how a funeral goes in Tuizelo. First, you must have the excuse for one. A life must be given up. If you want it to be a good funeral, it must be a precious life, not some distant uncle or the friend of a friend. Make it your own son. That's the way to start a funeral, with a thunderbolt that hammers you right in the chest and cleaves your insides into pieces. Deaf, dumb, witless, you can now attend to the details. A ready-made ceremony is handed to you, old and worn. You go along because you don't know better. There is a hearse--just someone's cart dressed up--a stiff, unreal ceremony in the church, then a burial in the cemetery on a grey day, everyone dressed in their Sunday best and looking uncomfortable for it, all of it unbearable. Then it's over.

  "People hang around for a while, but then they drift off. You're given an allotment of time, after which you're expected to return to the world, to your life of old. But why would anyone do that? After a funeral, a good funeral, everything loses its worth and there's no life of old to return to. You're left with nothing. You don't even have words, not right away. Right away, death is word-eating. Words for it come later, because how else can you think of him, since he's no longer with you?

  "At the funeral Rafael said only one thing. He cried out, 'The size of the coffin, the size of it!' It's true, it wasn't very big.

  "The day Rafael returned to Tuizelo, he didn't have to say anything to tell me. He couldn't, anyway. Distress had paralyzed his face and stunned his mouth. I knew right away. Nothing else would do that to him. I knew just looking at him that our precious one had died. Already people in the village had assembled in front of our house, milling around silently. He lay him on the dining table. I fainted. I wish I had fainted forever, that I had followed behind him swiftly and protectively, the way a mother should. Instead I awoke surrounded by smelly old widows. Rafael kept away. Close-by but away. He was eaten up with guilt. Our son had died on his watch. He was the shepherd that day. He had let his flock stray.

  "We loved our son like the sea loves an island, always surrounding him with our arms, always touching him and crashing upon his shore with our care and concern. When he was gone, the sea had only itself to contemplate. Our arms folded onto nothing until they met their frame. We wept all the time. If a job was left unfinished at the end of a day--the coop not repaired, a row of vegetables not weeded--we knew that one of us had sat down and wept. That's the nature of grief: It's a creature with many arms but few legs, and it staggers about, searching for support. Frayed chicken wire and a profusion of weeds became expressions of our loss. I can't look at chicken wire now without thinking of my lost son. There's something about the warp and weft of it, so thin yet strong, so porous yet solid, that reminds me of how we loved him. Later, because of our neglect, chickens died at the jaws of a fox that slipped into the coop, and the crop of vegetables was not so bountiful--but so it goes: A son dies and the earth becomes barren.

  "When he wasn't well or couldn't fall asleep, he crept into our bed between us. After he was gone, that space in our bed became unbridgeable. We met, Rafael and I, only below it, where in the night our toenails jabbed at each other like loose knives in a drawer, or above it, where we stared at each other without saying a word. Rafael never wanted to close that space, because to do so would be to acknowledge that our bear cub was never coming back. Some nights I saw his hand reach into the space and stroke its emptiness. Then the hand retreated, like the limb of a tortoise deep into its shell, and every morning Rafael woke with the weary, wrinkled eyes of a tortoise that has lived too long. His eyes blinked slowly, as did mine.

  "Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice--we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs.

  "Nothing fit right in our lives anymore. Drawers no longer closed cleanly, chairs and tables wobbled, plates became chipped, spoons appeared flecked with dried food, clothes started to stain and tear--and the outside world was just as ill-fitting.

  "His death made little difference to the outside world. Isn't that so with all children? When a child dies, there is no land to be handed down, hardly any possessions to be divided up, no job or role left unfilled, no debts that need paying off. A child is a small sun that shines in the shadow of its parents, and when that sun goes out there is darkness only for the parents.

  "What's the point of being a mother if you have no one to mother? It's like being a flower without a head. On the day our son died, I became a bald stem.

  "If there's one thing I held against Rafael for the longest time, it's that he delayed coming home by a day. He dithered. But a mother has a right to know right away when her child has died. For her to imagine that he is alive and well even for a minute when he is not is a crime against motherhood.

  "And then that thought that takes root in your mind: And now, how do I dare love anything?

  "When you forget about him ever so briefly--then comes the stab. Rafael would shout, 'My beautiful boy!' and he would collapse. Mostly, though, we went about with quiet, reserved insanity. It's what you do. Rafael started walking backwards. The first times I noticed him doing it, along the road or in the fields, I thought nothing of it. I thought he was doing it for a moment, to keep his eye on something. Then one morning he did it as we were going to church. No one said anything. They let him be. I asked him that night why this, why the walking backwards. He said that on that day he returned to Tuizelo he saw a man, a stranger, leaving the village. Rafael was sitting off the end of the cart, holding our little cub in his arms, wrapped in a sheet. The stranger was on foot and he was moving quickly, nearly running, and he was doing so backwards. He had the saddest face, Rafael said, a face of grief and anguish. He forgot about him until he found he wanted to do the same thing; it sat well with his emotions, he said. And so he s
tarted doing it when he left the house, going into the world. As often as not, he would turn around and start walking backwards.

  "I knew who the man was. He had stopped to visit the church. A strange city man, quite filthy and sick. Father Abrahan spoke with him, then he ran off. He left behind the device he'd come on--an automobile, the first one we'd ever seen. It must have been an arduous journey back, all the way to wherever he came from. His automobile stayed in the square for weeks, we didn't know what to do with it. Then one day a different man--a tall, thin one--walked into the village and drove it away without a word of explanation. People talked about the device and its driver, back and forth, back and forth. Was he just a visitor--or an angel of death? Whatever he was, I didn't care. I had turned to remembering. We never had much use for memory before. Why remember him when you have him right there in front of your eyes? Memory was just an occasional pleasure. Then it's all you're left with. You try your best to live in your memories of him. You try to turn memories into real things. You pull the strings of a puppet and you say, 'There, there, you see--he's alive!'

  "It was Rafael who started calling him our bear cub after he died. Rafael said he was hibernating. 'Eventually he'll stir and wake, he'll be ravenously hungry,' he would say with a smile, attaching a fact--our son's good appetite after a nap--to a fancy, that he was coming back. I played along: It was my comfort too.

  "He was such a joy. Everyone said that. Unplanned, unexpected--I thought I was long past my child-bearing years, such as they had been--and suddenly he came along. We used to look at him and ask ourselves, 'What child is this? Where did he come from?' We both have dark eyes and dark hair--doesn't everyone in Portugal? Yet his hair was as fair as a wheat field, and such eyes he had--bright blue. How did those eyes get into his head? Did a puff of the Atlantic blow into Tuizelo on the day he was conceived and add itself to his making? My theory is that the supplies in the pantry of our family tree were so rarely dipped into that when they finally were, only the best ingredients were used. He invented laughter. His joy-making was endless and his goodwill without limits. The whole village loved him. Everyone sought his attention and his affection, the adults and the other children. So much love was poured into those blue eyes. He took that love and gave it back, as happy and generous as a cloud.

  "Rafael had gone down to help a friend near Cova da Lua. A week's work, small money. He took him, our five-year-old boy. It would be an adventure for him. And he could help. Then it happened, while Rafael was sharpening the scythes on the whetstone. He paused and listened. It was too quiet. He called out. He searched around the farm. He searched in ever greater circles. Eventually he went along the road, calling out his name. That's where he found him. What about the other foot?"

  The question comes unexpectedly. Eusebio looks at the body's left foot. He nicks it at the heel. Again vomit comes out.

  "And higher up?" asks Maria Castro.

  He does not hesitate now. With the scalpel he cuts into the right leg next to the tibia, midway up; into the left knee, between the patella and the medial condyle of the femur; into the thighs, a cut into each quadriceps. Each cut is about five or six centimetres long, and each time vomit oozes out, although he notes that it comes out with less pressure from the cuts on the thighs. He cuts across the pelvic girdle, just above the pubic mound, a long cut. He pulls the skin back. A bulk of vomit shows. Atop it, on its edge, the scalpel touches something hard but loose. He probes. There is a glimmer. He dislodges it and turns it with the blade. A coin--a five-escudo silver coin. There are other coins next to it, some escudos, the others centavos, each lying flat atop the vomit. A peasant's meagre wealth.

  He pauses. He wonders whether he should leave the coins there or extract them.

  Maria Castro interrupts his thoughts. "The penis," she says.

  He takes hold of Rafael Castro's sizable penis. At a glance, the shaft and the glans appear perfectly normal. No signs of Peyronie's disease, no condylomata, no bowenoid papulosis. He decides to cut along a corpus cavernosum, one of the two spongy, elongated chambers that, when filled with blood, were the source of such pleasure for the couple. He slices the length of the penis, through the foreskin and into the glans. Again the scalpel strikes something hard where there should be nothing hard. He puts the blade down. With his thumbs on either side of the cut, and pushing on the opposite side of the penis with his fingers, he easily pushes out the hardness. It comes out in two pieces: wooden, smooth, round, and with holes.

  "Oh!" says Maria Castro. "His sweet flute."

  The two other pieces of the peasant flute lie in the second corpus cavernosum. Because he is a man of order and method, Eusebio assembles the instrument. He passes it to the old woman, who brings it to her lips. A three-note trill floats in the air.

  "He played it so nicely. It was like having a canary bird in the house," she says.

  She places it on the autopsy table, next to the body.

  With a word here, a shake of the head there, displaying a perfect knowledge of Rafael Castro's experiential anatomy, Maria Castro directs Eusebio's scalpel. It is the simplest autopsy he has ever performed, requiring only that single sharp instrument, even for the head. She avoids the thorax and abdomen until the very end, preferring the distal discoveries of the upper limbs and of the neck and head.

  The ring finger of the left hand is lightly packed with down feathers, as is the right hand's middle finger, while in the index fingers of both hands he finds blood, fresh, red blood--the only trace of blood he finds anywhere in the body. All the other digits contain mud. The palm of the right hand holds an oyster shell, the palm of the left, pages from a small wall calendar. The arms are crowded. From them he extracts a hammer, a pair of tongs, a long knife; an apple; a clump of mud; a sheaf of wheat; three eggs; a salted cod; a knife and fork. Rafael Castro's head proves roomier. Inside it he finds a square of red cloth; a small handmade wooden toy of a horse and cart with wheels that turn; a pocket mirror; more down feathers; a small wooden painted object, ochre in colour, that Maria Castro cannot identify; a candle; a long lock of dark hair; and three playing cards. In each eye he discovers a die, and a dried flower petal in place of the retina. The neck contains three chicken feet and what looks like kindling: dried leaves and twigs. The tongue holds ash except at its tip, where there is honey.

  Lastly comes the thorax and abdomen. The old wife nods, though with evident trepidation this time. Eusebio ends the autopsy with the cut with which he expected to start it, the Y-shaped incision from the shoulders to the sternum down over the abdomen. He sections the skin as lightly as he can, barely slicing through the subcutaneous fat. Since he made a cut along the pelvic girdle earlier, the thoracic and abdominal cavities open up plainly to view.

  He hears her gasp.

  Though he's no expert on the matter, he is quite certain that it is a chimpanzee, a kind of African primate. It takes him a little longer to identify the second, smaller creature, partly hidden as it is.

  Filling Rafael Castro's chest and abdomen, lying compactly in peaceful repose, are a chimpanzee and, wrapped in this chimpanzee's protective arms, a bear cub, small and brown.

  Maria Castro leans forward and presses her face to the bear cub. Is this then how her husband lived? Eusebio says nothing, only watches. He notices the chimpanzee's bright, clear face and thick, glossy coat. A young one, he concludes.

  She speaks quietly. "The heart has two choices: to shut down or to open up. I haven't told you my story entirely truthfully. I was the one who protested about the size of the coffin. I was the one who wailed, 'My beautiful boy!' and collapsed. I was the one who didn't want to close the space in our bed. Cut me some of the black creature's fur, will you? And please get the suitcase."

  He obeys. With the scalpel he cuts a tuft from the chimpanzee's coat, from its side. She rubs the hairs between her fingers and sniffs them and presses them to her lips. "Rafael always had more faith than I did," she says. "He often repeated something Father Abrahan said to him once, how
faith is ever young, how faith, unlike the rest of us, does not age."

  Eusebio retrieves the suitcase from his office. Maria Castro opens it, places it on the autopsy table, and begins to transfer to it the objects from Rafael Castro's body, one by one.

  Then she starts to undress.

  The shocking nudity of an aged woman. The flesh sapped by gravity, the skin ravaged by age, the proportions ruined by time--and yet glowing with long-lived life, like a parchment page covered in writing. He has seen a great number of such women, but dead, without personality, and rendered even more abstract by being opened up. Inner organs, unless touched by a pathology, are ageless.

  Maria Castro strips until she has not a piece of clothing on her. She takes off her wedding ring, she pulls off a band that holds her hair. All of it she puts in the suitcase, which she closes when she is done.

  Using the chair he brought in for her, she climbs onto the autopsy table. Leaning over Rafael Castro's body, nudging here and there, pushing and wiggling, making space where there seems to be none, filled as he is already with two creatures, Maria Castro carefully settles into her husband's body. All the while she repeats, "This is home, this is home, this is home." She places herself so that the chimpanzee's back is nestled against her front and her arms encircle both the chimpanzee and the bear cub, with her hands resting on the cub.

  "Please," she says.

  He knows what to do; he is much practiced in the matter. He picks up the needle. He pushes the twine through its eye. Then he begins to sew the body shut. It is quick work, as skin is soft, a simple crossing-over back-and-forth of the twine in a zigzag, though in this case he sews the stitches close together, creating a suture that is finer than usual. He works across Rafael Castro's pelvic girdle, then closes the skin over the abdomen and over the chest, up to each shoulder. He is careful with the tip of the needle not to prick Maria Castro or the two animals. He hears her only faintly as he finishes the torso: "Thank you, Senhor doctor."