The High Mountains of Portugal (15 page)

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. Tomás 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.

E
usebio 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. Bragança has a population of not thirty thousand people, but its Hospital São 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 São Francisco, in Bragança, Portugal, at least—is either he or his colleague, Dr. José 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.

A loud rap at the door startles him. He looks at his watch. It is half past ten at night.

“Come in,” he calls out, exasperation escaping from his voice like steam from a kettle.

No one enters. But he senses a brooding presence on the other side of the solid wood door.

“I said come in,” he calls out again.

Still no rattling of the doorknob. Pathology is not a medical art that is much subject to emergency. The sick, or rather their biopsied samples, can nearly always wait till the next morning, and the dead are even more patient, so it's unlikely to be a clerk with an urgent case. And pathologists' offices are not located so that the general public might find them easily. Who then, at such an hour, on New Year's Eve at that, would wend their way through the basement of the hospital to look for him?

He gets up, upsetting both himself and a number of papers. He walks around his desk, takes hold of the doorknob, and opens the door.

A woman in her fifties, with lovely features and large brown eyes, stands before him. In one hand she is holding a bag. He is surprised to see her. She eyes him. In a warm, deep voice, she starts up: “Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but find no rest. I am poured out like water. My heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd. Oh my darling, come quickly to my help!”

While a small part of Eusebio sighs, a larger part smiles. The woman at the door is his wife. She comes to his office to see him on occasion, though not usually at such a late hour. Her name is Maria Luisa Motaal Lozora, and he is familiar with the words of her lament. They are taken mostly from Psalm 22, her favourite psalm. She in fact has no cause for conventional suffering. She is in good mental and physical health, she lives in a nice house, she has no desire to leave him or the town where they live, she has good friends, she is never truly bored, they have three grown children who are happy and healthy—in short, she has all the elements that make for a good life. Only his wife, his dear wife, is an amateur theologian, a priest
manqué,
and she takes the parameters of life, her mortal coildom, her Jobdom, very seriously.

She is fond of quoting from Psalm 22, especially its first line: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” His thought in response is that, nonetheless, there is “My God, my God” at the start of the plaint. It helps that there's someone listening, if not doing.

He has much listening to do, he does, with his wife, and not much doing. Her mouth might be dried up like a potsherd, but she never quotes the line that follows in Psalm 22—“and my tongue sticks to my jaws”—because that would be an untruth. Her tongue is never stuck to her jaws. Maria ardently believes in the spoken word. To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken. And so she talks. She talks all the time. She talks to herself when she is alone at home and she talks to herself when she is alone in the street, and she has been talking to him incessantly since the day they met, thirty-eight years ago. His wife is an endlessly unfurling conversation, with never a true stop, only a pause. But she produces no drivel and has no patience for drivel. Sometimes she chafes at the inane talk she has to endure with her friends. She serves them coffee and cake, she listens to their prattle, and later she grouses, “Guinea pigs, I am surrounded by guinea pigs.”

He surmises that his wife read about guinea pigs and something about them aroused her resentment: their smallness, their utter harmlessness and defencelessness, their fearfulness, their contentedness simply to chew on a grain or two and expect no more from life. As a pathologist he quite likes the guinea pig. It is indeed small in every way, especially when set against the stark and random cruelty of life. Every corpse he opens up whispers to him, “I am a guinea pig. Will you warm me to your breast?” Drivel, his wife would call that. She has no patience for death.

When they were young, Maria tolerated for a while the amorous cooing of which he was so fond. Despite the surface brutality of his profession, he is soft of heart. When he met her the first time—it was in the cafeteria of the university—she was the most alluring creature he'd ever seen, a serious girl with a beauty that lit him up. At the sight of her, song filled his ears and the world glowed with colour. His heart thumped with gratitude. But quickly she rolled her eyes and told him to stop twittering. It became clear to him that his mission was to listen to her and respond appropriately and not to annoy her with oral frivolity. She was the rich earth and the sun and the rain; he was merely the farmer who got the crop going. He was an essential but bit player. Which was fine with him. He loved her then and he loves her now. She is everything to him. She is still the rich earth and the sun and the rain and he is still happy to be the farmer who gets the crop going.

Only tonight he had hoped to get some work done. Clearly that is not to be the case. The Conversation is upon him.

“Hello, my angel,” he says. “What a joyous surprise to see you! What's in the bag? You can't have been shopping. No shop would be open at this hour.” He leans forward and kisses his wife.

Maria ignores the question. “Death is a difficult door,” she says quietly. She steps into his office. “Eusebio, what's happened?” she exclaims. “Your office is an unholy mess. This is indecent. Where are your visitors supposed to sit?”

He surveys his office. He sees embarrassing disorder everywhere. Pathologists at work don't normally receive visitors who need to sit or who care for order. They usually lie flat and without complaint on a table across the hallway. He takes his workbench chair and places it in front of his desk. “I wasn't expecting you tonight, my angel. Here, sit here,” he says.

“Thank you.” She sits down and places the bag she brought with her on the floor.

He gathers up papers from his desk, which he stuffs in the nearest folder, which he stacks on other folders, which he then drops to the floor. He pushes the pile under his desk with a foot, out of sight. He crunches up stray bits of paper, sweeps up shameful accumulations of dust with the edge of his hand, using his other hand as a dustpan, which he empties into the wastepaper basket beside his desk. There, that's better. He sits down and looks across his desk at the woman sitting there. A man and his wife.

“I have found the solution at last, and I must tell you about it,” she says.

The solution? Was there a problem?

“Why don't you do that, then,” he replies.

She nods. “I first tried through laughter, because you like to laugh,” she says without a trace of mirth. “You saw me, the books I was reading.”

He thinks. Yes, that would explain the selection of books she ordered from her favourite Coimbra bookseller these last several months. Some plays of Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Molière, Georges Feydeau, some weightier tomes of Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire. All of these she read wearing the grimmest expression. He himself is not such an accomplished reader. He was not sure why she was reading these books, but, as always, he let her be.

“Humour and religion do not mix well,” she goes on. “Humour may point out the many mistakes of religion—any number of vilely immoral priests, or monsters who shed blood in the name of Jesus—but humour sheds no light on true religion. It is just humour unto itself. Worse, humour misunderstands religion, since there is little place for levity in religion—and let us not make the mistake of thinking that levity is the same thing as joy. Religion abounds in joy. Religion
is
joy. To laugh at religion with levity, then, is to miss the point, which is fine if one is in the mood to laugh, but not if one is in the mood to understand. Do you follow me?”

“Though it's late, I think I do,” he replies.

“Next I tried children's books, Eusebio. Did Jesus not say that we must receive the Kingdom of God like a little child? So I reread the books we used to read to Renato, Luisa, and Antón.”

Images of their three children when they were small appear in his mind. Those little ones lived with their mother's volubility like children live in a rainy climate: They just ran out to play in the puddles, shrieking and laughing, heedless of the downpour. She never took umbrage at these joyous interruptions. With difficulty, he returns his attention to his wife.

“These books brought back many happy memories—and some sadness that our children are all grown up—but they brought no religious illumination. I continued my search. Then the solution appeared right in front of me, with your favourite writer.”

“Really? How interesting. When I saw your nose in those Agatha Christies, I thought you were taking a
break
from your arduous studies.”