The High Mountains of Portugal (12 page)

Understanding the nature and operation of the jack; assembling it; finding where it must be placed under the automobile; jacking the automobile up; unbolting and removing the wheel; replacing it with the spare wheel from the footboard; tightly bolting the fresh wheel into place; returning everything to its proper place—an experienced motorist might do it in half an hour. It takes him, with his raw hands, two hours.

At last, his hands sullied and throbbing, his body sweaty and aching, the task is done. He should be pleased that he can proceed again, but all he feels is mortal exhaustion. He retreats to the driving compartment and stares out in front of him. His head is prickly, as is the unwanted beard that is growing on his face. “Enough! Enough!” he whispers. What does suffering do to a man? Does it open him up? Does he understand any more as a result of his suffering? In the case of Father Ulisses, for the longest time it seems the answer to these questions was no. Tomás remembers a telling incident:

Today I saw a fight on a plantation. Two slaves clashed. Others stood about, with stupefied expressions. A female slave, the object of contention, looked on, impassive, indifferent. Whoever won, she would lose. Continually shouting in their native gibberish, the two fought, at first with words & gestures, then their fists, then their tools. The matter proceeded swiftly, from injured prides to injured bodies, from bruising & bleeding to frenzied hacking, till the end was reached: a dead slave with a torso cleft with deep cuts & a half-severed head. Whereupon the other slaves, the female included, turned & got back to their work lest the overseer arrive on the scene. The victor slave, his visage apathetic, threw some soil on the body, then returned to cutting cane. None of the slaves will come forward to acknowledge or explain, to accuse or defend. Just silence & the hoeing of sugar cane. The dead man's decay will be rapid, started by insects & predatory birds & beasts & accelerated by the sun & rain. Soon nothing but a lump will be left of him. Only if the overseer directly steps onto this lump will its gashed blackness reveal white bones & decaying red flesh. Then the overseer will know the whereabouts of the slave who went missing.

Of this appalling scene, Father Ulisses has only one significant comment to make:

Such were the Lord's wounds, like that dead slave's injuries. His hands, his feet, his forehead where the crown of thorns pierced his skin & especially the wound on his side from the soldier's spear—carmine red, very, very bright, a pull on the eyes.

Such was the suffering of Christ: “carmine red” and a “pull on the eyes”
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But the suffering of the two men who fought to death before his very eyes? They are not worth a word. No more than the spectator slaves would Father Ulisses come forward to acknowledge or explain, to accuse or to defend. He seems to have been deaf and dumb to the suffering of the slaves. Or, to be more accurate, he seems to have seen nothing peculiar about it:
They suffer, but so do I—so what of it?

The land begins to change as Tomás drives on. The Portugal that he knows is a land solemn in its beauty. A land that prizes the sound of work, both human and animal. A land devoted to duty. Now an element of wilderness begins to intrude. Great outcrops of round rocks. Dark green vegetation that is dry and scrubby. Wandering flocks of goats and sheep. He sees the High Mountains of Portugal foreshadowed in these extrusions of rocks, like the roots of a tree that break above ground, heralding the tree itself.

He is fretful. He is approaching Castelo Branco, which is a proper city, the largest on his deliberately rural route. An idea strikes him: He will drive through the city in the middle of the night. Thus will he avoid people, because it is people who are the problem. Streets, avenues, boulevards—these he can handle, if people aren't staring and shouting and congregating. If he crosses Castelo Branco at, say, two in the morning in full-throttle third gear, he will likely meet only the odd nightshift worker or drunkard.

When Castelo Branco is near, he leaves the automobile behind and makes his way into the city on foot, backwards as always. He hitches a ride with a man driving a cart, which is fortunate, as the distance to the city turns out to be considerable. The man asks if he saw the strange carriage down the road. He says that he did, without mentioning that he is its driver. The man speaks of the machine in terms of wonder and worry. It's the quantity of metal that surprises him, he says. It reminds him of a safe.

In Castelo Branco Tomás determines the route he should take. He is pleased to discover that the road continuing to the north of the country mostly avoids the city, circling it on its northwest side. Only the junction with the road is tricky.

He tells three apothecaries his horses-afflicted-with-lice story, which gets him ten bottles of moto-naphtha and, as an unfortunate corollary, three tins of horse lice powder. He carries these in two bags, evenly balanced. He decides to check in to a hotel for the day to wash himself and rest, but the two hotels he finds refuse to admit him, as does the restaurant he seeks to eat in. The proprietors look him up and down, study his singed face and burned hair—one pinches his nose—and they all point to the door. He is too tired to protest. He buys food from a grocer and eats on a bench in a park. He drinks water from a fountain, gulping it avidly, splashing it over his face and head, scrubbing at the soot plastered to his scalp. He wishes he'd remembered to bring the two wineskins, which he could have filled with water. Then he walks in reverse back to the automobile, watching Castelo Branco recede into the distance.

He waits in the cabin for night to fall, idly leafing through the diary to pass the time.

The provenance of the slaves on São Tomé was at first a matter of concern and interest to Father Ulisses—he named the newcomers' origins in his diary: “from the Mbundu tribe” or “the Chokwe tribe.” But he was hazier on the origins of slaves who came from outside the Portuguese sphere of influence in Africa, and São Tomé, being usefully located, saw slave ships of every nationality—Dutch, English, French, Spanish—and soon he grew weary as a result of the slaves' too-great numbers. They received his weakening blessing in a state of increasing anonymity. “Does it matter,” he wrote, “wherefrom a soul comes? The exiles of Eden are varied. A soul is a soul, to be blessed & brought to the love of God.”

But one day there was a change. Father Ulisses wrote with uncharacteristic excitement:

I am at the port when a Dutch slaver is unloading its stock. Four captives catch my eye. I see them from afar as they shuffle down the gangplank in shackles & chains. What poor souls are these? They walk with a listless gait, their backs bent, their will broken. I know how they feel. My exhaustion & theirs is the same. The fever is upon me again. Jesus reached out to all, Romans, Samaritans, Syrophoenicians, and others. So must I. I want to get closer but am too weak, the sun too bright. A sailor from the ship is passing by. I beckon to him. I point & ask & he tells me that the captives come from deep within the Congo River basin & were captured in a raid, not traded by a tribe. Three females & a child. My Dutch is poor & I don't fully understand the sailor. I believe he uses the word “minstrel”. They are to be entertainers of some sort. He gives no sense of impropriety to the term. What? I say to him. Straight from the jungles of the Congo to amusing the white man after his dinner in the New World? He laughs.

I have learned that the four are now jailed on García's plantation. The mother of the child attacked an overseer & was severely beaten for the offence. They were unwilling to put on clothes & it seemed they provided poor entertainment. Their fate will be decided shortly.

Though I am so feeble I cannot stay long on my feet, I went to García's today & slipped in to see his captives in their dark, hot cell. The rebellious female has died of her injuries. Her body was still there, her child at her side, listless, nearly unconscious. Fruit lay rotting on the ground. Are the two females that remain starving themselves to death? I spoke to them, knowing they would not understand me. They did not respond or even seem to hear me. I blessed them.

I have gone again. The stench! The child is most certainly dead. At first I had no greater success with the two survivors than yesterday. I read to them from the Gospel of Mark. I chose Mark because it is the most humble Gospel, revealing a messiah at his most human, racked by doubt & anxiety while still shining with loving kindness. I read until fatigue, the heat & the stench nearly overcame me. Thereafter I sat in silence. I was about to leave when one of the captives, the youngest, an adolescent female, stirred. She crawled & settled against the wall on the other side of the bars from me. I whispered to her,
“Filha, o Senhor ama-te. De onde vens tu? Conta-me sobre o Jardim do Éden. Conta-me a tua história. O que fizemos de errado?”
She did not react in any way. A time passed. Then she turned her head & looked me in the eyes. She looked only briefly before moving away. She guessed that she had nothing to gain from my nearness or interest. I said not a word. My tongue was stilled of any priestly cant. I am transformed. I saw. I have seen. I see. That short gaze made me see a wretchedness that until then had never echoed in my heart. I entered that cell thinking I was a Christian man. I walked out knowing I was a Roman soldier. We are no better than animals.

When I returned this day, they were dead, their bodies taken away and burned. They are free now, as they should have been all along.

The next entry in Father Ulisses' diary is fierce and accusatory, outlining the final rift between him and the island's civil and religious authorities. He made a scene at the cathedral, interrupting the Mass with his shouts and protests. The consequence was swift.

I was summoned by the Bishop today. I told him that I had met the unequal & in meeting them found them equal. We are no better than they, I told him. In fact, we are worse. He yelled at me that as there are hierarchies of angels in heaven and of the damned in hell, so there are hierarchies here on earth. The boundaries are not to be blurred. I was sent off, struck by his harshest thunderbolt, excommunication. In his eyes I am no longer a man of the cloth. But I yet feel the Lord's hand holding me up.

Tomás is amazed, as he is every time he reads this passage. To exclude French and English pirates, or Dutch sailors, little more than mercenaries, from the communion of God is one thing—but an ordained Portuguese priest? That seems an extreme measure, even by the standards of São Tomé. But a place that made its living off slavery would think poorly of a fevered emancipator.

It is then that Father Ulisses mentioned the gift for the first time. Tomás always reads the sentence with trepidation.

I know my mission now. I will make this gift to God before death takes me. I thank God that I drew a sketch while I was at García's, visiting her in her hellish confinement. Her eyes have opened mine. I will bear witness to the wreckage we have wrought. How great is our fall from the Garden!

Tomás turns the page and stares for the thousandth time at the sketch in question. It is this sketch, with its haunting eyes, that set him on his search.

Night has settled on the land and the time has come to drive through Castelo Branco. He lights the remaining sidelight and adjusts its broad wick. The flame that dances up sheds a circle of warm light. The brilliantly white flame of the surviving headlight hisses like an angry snake. Its illumination is focused forward by a crystal-glass encasement. If only the light cast by the headlight weren't so lopsided. His Cyclops looks rather sorry.

He reviews the route he will take. He has a series of markers in his head. At each point where a decision needs to be made, he has taken note of a detail—a house, a shop, a building, a tree. Because there will be no throngs of people at this time of night, he will have more leisure to guide himself correctly.

Whatever illusion he has that he's riding a firefly of sorts—and when he moves away from the vehicle's lit side, its radiance gives that image some credibility—is shattered when he starts up the machine. Its juddering roar rather brings to mind a dragon, although one with puny flames shooting from its mouth.

Not only puny: wholly ineffective. The lights, bright to his eyes close up, are mere pinpricks in the impenetrable night. All the headlight does, and poorly at that, is bring out the rough features of the road immediately under the automobile's nose. What lies beyond—every rut, every turn—comes as a frightening, ever-changing surprise.

His only recourse—wholly illogical, he knows, but he can't help himself and does it over and over—is to squeeze the horn, as if the night were a black cow obstructing the road that will jump out of the way with a few honks.

He does not move beyond first gear as he gropes his way towards Castelo Branco.

In Portugal the sunshine is often pearly, lambent, tickling, neighbourly. So too, in its own way, is the dark. There are dense, rich, and nourishing pockets of gloom to be found in the shadows of houses, in the courtyards of modest restaurants, on the hidden sides of large trees. During the night, these pockets spread, taking to the air like birds. The night, in Portugal, is a friend. These are the days and nights that he has mostly known. Only in his distant childhood was the night ever a breeder of terrors. Then he quaked and cried out. His father came to his rescue each time, stumbling half-asleep to his bed, where he would take him in his arms. He would fall asleep against his father's big, warm chest.

Castelo Branco does not have the streetlights that light up Lisbon's nights. Every marker on his route, so clear during the day, is now shrouded. Streets rear up like the tentacles of a giant squid. He never finds the road that skirts the city on its northwest. Instead, Castelo Branco is a breeder of terrors. He tries to hold a course in one direction until he reaches the city's edge, any edge, but every street he takes ends in a T-junction, either way plunging him back into the depths of the city. Worse are the people. Like the houses and buildings that surround him, they appear abruptly out of the darkness, their faces suddenly fixed by the white light of the one-eyed machine. Some shout in fright, spreading their fright to him, and stand frozen, while others turn and run. It's true that in the silence of the night the automobile is very loud, and he continues to honk the horn incessantly—but only to alert. At first there is hardly anyone about, but as he moves through the city like a blind creature scuttling at the bottom of the ocean, more and more people throw their shutters open, more and more people fling themselves into the streets, dishevelled but sharp-eyed. He moves into second gear and outpaces them. A short while later, on another circuit through the city, he encounters more groups. He sees them, they see him. They run towards him, he turns down another street. He moves into third gear.