The High Mountains of Portugal (35 page)

Encontrei nele, com meus próprios olhos,

um chimpanzé e um pequeno filhote de urso.

The words are unmistakable:
I found in him, with my own eyes, a chimpanzee and a small bear cub.
Beneath are a semi-legible signature and an official stamp that states the pathologist's name clearly: Dr. Eusebio Lozora.

“What's it say?” Ben asks.

“It says…” Peter's voice trails off as he opens the envelope again and rubs the black hairs between his fingers. He glances at the contents of the suitcase. What story is this suitcase trying to tell? What is his maternal great-uncle Rafael's pathology report—if that is what it is—doing in this house? He has made no inquiries about the family home. The discovery of his tenuous link to the village will generate noise and attention, which he doesn't care for. He does not feel like a returning native. More pertinently, like Odo, he is happy to live in the present moment, and the present moment has no past address. But now he wonders: Could this be the house? Could that be the explanation for its dereliction and its availability?

“Well?” his son prompts.

“Sorry. It seems to be some sort of pathology report. This doctor claims—how shall I put it?—that he found a chimpanzee and a bear cub in a man's body. It's what it says. Look, it's the same word:
um chimpanzé
.”

“What
?
”
Ben shoots Odo an incredulous glance.

“Clearly, there is a metaphor here, a Portuguese idiom, that I'm not understanding.”

“Clearly.”

“What's also strange is the name of the deceased. This is a puzzle for Dona Amélia perhaps. Here, let's bring the suitcase upstairs.”

“I'll do it. Don't strain yourself.”

They head for Dona Amélia's. Peter brings along the family photo album, which Odo is happy to carry. Dona Amélia is at home. She greets the two men with gracious calm, smiles at the ape.

“Minha casa—a casa de quem?” Peter asks her.

“Batista Reinaldo Santos Castro,” she answers. “Mas ele morreu há muito tempo. E a sua família”—she makes a sweeping motion with the back of her hand, accompanied by a quick blowing motion—“mudou-se para longe. As pessoas vão-se embora e nunca mais voltam.”

Batista Santos Castro—it is so, then. Unexpectedly, without any effort, the transient renter has found the house where he was born.

“What'd she say?” Ben whispers.

“She said that the man who lived in the house died a long time ago and his family—I didn't understand her exact words, but her gesture was pretty clear—his family left, went away, abandoned the village, something like that. People leave and they never come back.” He turns to Dona Amélia again. “E seu irmão?” he adds.
And his brother?

“O seu irmão?” Dona Amélia suddenly seems more interested. “O seu irmão Rafael Miguel era o pai do anjo na igreja. O papá! O papá!” she emphasizes.
His brother is the father of the angel in the church. The daddy! The daddy!

The angel in the church? Peter hasn't a notion what she's talking about, but at the moment he's interested only in the family connection. He takes the photo album from Odo and opens it, prepared to throw away his anonymity.

“Batista Santos Castro—sim?” he says, pointing at a man in the first photo in the album, the group shot.

Dona Amélia seems astounded that he should have a photo of Batista in his possession. “Sim!” she says, her eyes opening wide. She grabs the album and devours the photo with her eyes. “Rafael!” she exclaims, pointing at another man. She points again. “E sua esposa, Maria.” Then her breath is cut short. “É ele! A criança dourada! Outra foto dele!” she cries.
It's him! The Golden Child! Another photo of him!
She is pointing at a small child, a mottled speck of sepia peeking from behind his mother. Peter has never seen Dona Amélia so excited.

“Batista—meu…avô,” he confesses. He points to Ben, but he doesn't know the Portuguese word for “great-grandfather”.

“A criança dourada!” Dona Amélia practically shouts. She couldn't care less that Batista was his grandfather and his son's great-grandfather. She takes hold of his sleeve and drags him along. They head for the church.
The angel in the church,
she said. As they go, her excitement is contagious. Other villagers, mainly women, join them. They arrive at the church as a gaggle, in a flurry of rapid Portuguese. Odo seems pleased with the commotion, adds to it by hooting happily.

“What's happening?” Ben asks.

“I'm not sure,” replies Peter.

They enter and take a left down the aisle, away from the altar. Dona Amélia stops them at the shrine set up at the back of the church, on the north wall. In front of the shelf bookended by its vases of flowers stands a long three-tiered flower box filled with sand. The sand is studded with thin candles, some burning, most burned out. Any neatness in the arrangement is disturbed by the dozens and dozens of bits of paper that cover the shelf and the floor, some rolled up into scrolls, others neatly folded into squares. Peter never came close enough on his previous visits to see this scattered litter. A framed photo is fixed to the wall just above the middle of the shelf, a black-and-white head shot of a little boy. A handsome little boy. Staring straight out with a serious expression. His eyes are unusual, of such a pallor that, amidst the chiaroscuro of the photo, they match the white wall that is the background. The photo looks very old. A young child from a long time ago.

Dona Amélia opens the photo album. “É ele! É ele!” she repeats. She points to the child on the wall and to the child in the album. Peter looks and examines, tallying eyes with eyes, chin with chin, expression with expression. Yes, she's right; they are one and the same. “Sim,” he says, nodding, bemused. Mutters of amazement come from the crowd. The album is taken from his hands and is passed around, everyone seeking personal confirmation. Dona Amélia is aglow with rapture—while keeping a sharp eye on the photo album.

After a few minutes she takes firm hold of it again. “Pronto, já chega! Tenho que ir buscar o Padre Eloi.”
Okay, that's enough. I must get Father Eloi.
She rushes off.

Peter squeezes between people to get closer to the photo on the wall. The Golden Child. Again his memory is stirred. Some story his parents told. He searches his mind, but it is like the last leaves of autumn, blown away, dispersed. There is nothing he can seize, only the vague memory of a lost memory.

He suddenly wonders:
Where's Odo?
He sees his son on the edge of the group of villagers and the ape at the other end of the church. He extricates himself and he and his son make their way over to Odo. Odo is looking up and grunting. Peter follows with his eyes. Odo is staring at the wooden crucifix looming above and behind the altar. He appears to want to climb onto the altar, exactly the sort of scene Peter has feared would happen in the church. Mercifully, at that moment, Dona Amélia bustles back in with Father Eloi and hurries towards them. Her excitement distracts Odo.

The priest invites them to adjourn to the vestry. He places a thick folder on a round table and indicates that they should sit. Peter has had only cordial relations with the man, without ever feeling that the priest was trying to draw him into the flock. He takes a seat, as does Ben. Odo sets himself on a window ledge, watching them. He is silhouetted by daylight and Peter cannot read his expression.

Father Eloi opens the folder and spreads quantities of papers across the table—documents handwritten and typed, and a great number of letters. “Bragança, Lisboa, Roma,” the priest says, pointing to some of the letterheads. The explanations come patiently, as Peter's consultations of the dictionary are frequent. Dona Amélia at times gets emotional, with tears brimming in her eyes, then she smiles and laughs. The priest is more steady in his intensity. Ben stays as still and silent as a statue.

When they leave the church, they go straight to the café.

“Gosh, and I thought Portuguese village life would be dull,” Ben says, nursing his espresso. “What was that all about?”

Peter is unsettled. “Well, for starters, we've found the family home.”

“You're kidding? Where is it?”

“It happens to be the house I'm already living in.”

“Really?”

“They had to put me in an empty one, and the house has been empty since our family left. They never sold it.”

“Still, there are other empty houses. What an amazing coincidence.”

“But listen—Father Eloi and Dona Amélia also told me a story.”

“Something about a little boy a long time ago, I got that.”

“Yes, it happened in 1904. The boy was five years old and he was Grandpa Batista's nephew, your great-grandfather's nephew. He was away from the village with his father—my great-uncle Rafael—who was helping out on a friend's farm. And then the next moment the boy was miles away, by the side of a road, dead. The villagers say his injuries matched exactly the injuries of Christ on the Cross: broken wrists, broken ankles, a deep gash in his side, bruises and lacerations. The story spread that an angel had plucked him from the field to bring him up to God, but the angel dropped him by accident, which explains his injuries.”

“You say he was found by the side of a road?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds to me like he was run over.”

“As a matter of fact, two days later a car appeared in Tuizelo, the first ever in the whole region.”

“There you go.”

“Some villagers right away believed there was a link between the car and the boy's death. It quickly became such a story in the region that it was all documented. But there was no proof. And how did the boy, who was next to his father one moment, end up in front of a car miles away the next?”

“There must be some explanation.”

“Well, they took it as an act of God. Whether it was by God's direct hand or by means of this strange new transportation device, God was behind it. And there's more to the story. O que é dourado deve ser substituído pelo que é dourado.”

“What's that?”

“It's a local saying.
What is gilded should be replaced by what is gilded
. They say God was sorry about the angel dropping the boy and so He gave him special powers. Apparently any number of infertile women have prayed to the boy and shortly afterwards become pregnant. Dona Amélia swears it happened to her. It's a legend in these parts. More than that. There's a process afoot to have him declared
venerable
by Rome, and because of all the fertility stories attributed to him, they say he has a good chance.”

“Is that so? We have an uncle who's a saint and you live with an ape—that's quite the extended-family situation we've got going.”

“No, venerable, two notches down.”

“Sorry, I can't seem to tell my venerables from my saints.”

“Apparently, the little boy's death turned the whole village upside down. Poverty is a native plant here. Everyone grows it, everyone eats it. Then this child appeared and he was like living wealth. Everyone loved him. They call him the Golden Child. When he died, Father Eloi told me, they say days turned to grey and all colour drained from the village.”

“Well, sure. It would be incredibly upsetting, a little boy's death.”

“At the same time, they talk about him as if he's still alive. He
still
makes them happy. You saw Dona Amélia—and she never even met him.”

“And how is this boy related to us again, exactly?”

“He was my mother's cousin—and therefore my second cousin, or maybe my first cousin once removed, I'm not sure. At any rate, he's family. Rafael and his wife, Maria, had their son very late, which means my mother was older than her cousin. She'd have been a teenager when he was born—as was Dad. So my parents both knew him. That's what got Dona Amélia so excited. And I vaguely remember a story my parents told me when I was young, about the death of a child in the family. They would start it but never finish it—like a terrible war story. They always shut up at a particular point. I think they left the village before he was revived, so to speak. I suspect they never knew about that.”

“Or they didn't care to believe it.”

“Could be that. Like the boy's mother. It seems the boy's father and mother stood on different sides of the story, the father believing in the boy's powers, the mother not.”

“That's a sad story,” Ben says. “And what was the deal about the chimpanzee in the body?”

“I don't know. They didn't bring that up.”

Odo is sitting on a chair next to them, holding a coffee in his hands, looking out the window.

“Well, there's yours, sipping his cappuccino like a real European.”

When they return to the house, Peter goes from room to room, wondering if he feels differently about it. Will the walls now exude memories? Will he hear the pitter-patter of small bare feet on the floor? Will young parents appear, holding a small child in their arms, his future still shrouded in mystery?

No. This isn't home. Home is his story with Odo.

That evening, over a simple meal, he and Ben go through the photo album again together and try to make sense of Dr. Lozora's curious autopsy report on Rafael Miguel Santos Castro. Ben shakes his head in confusion.

The next afternoon they walk across the cobbled square to the little church. The day is as soft as a caress. They return to the candlelit shrine and the picture of the clear-eyed child. Ben mutters something about being related to “religious royalty”. They move to a pew near the front of the church to sit together.

Suddenly Ben looks startled. “Dad!” he says, pointing to the crucifix.

“What?”

“The cross there—it looks like a chimpanzee! I'm not kidding. Look at the face, the arms, the legs.”