The High Mountains of Portugal Read online

  He is woken the next morning by the itching of his head and chest. He rises and methodically scratches himself. His fingernails have rims of blackness under them. It has been five days since he has washed. He must find an inn soon, with a good bed and a hot bath. Then he remembers the next village he must cross, the one he scorned. It is fear of Rosmaninhal that pushes him to enter third gear that day, the automobile's mechanical pinnacle. He has barely started off when he works the machine into second gear. With the grimmest lack of hesitation, he repeats the hand-and-foot manoeuvre, pushing the change-speed lever farther than he has ever pushed it before. The dial on the instrument board blinks in disbelief. The automobile becomes pure velocity. Third gear is the fire of the internal combustion engine coming into itself and becoming an external combustion engine, thundering through the countryside like a meteorite. Yet, oddly, third gear is quieter than second gear, as if even sound cannot keep up with the machine. The wind howls around the driving compartment. Such is the swiftness of the machine that the telegraph poles along the road shift and begin to appear as close together as teeth in a comb. As for the landscape beyond the poles, none of it is to be seen. It flits by like a panic-stricken school of fish. In the blurry land of High Velocity, Tomas is aware of only two things: the roaring and rattling frame of the automobile, and the road straight ahead, so hypnotic in its allure that it's like a fishing line upon whose hook he is caught. Though he is in the open country, his mental focus is such that he might as well be driving through a tunnel. In a daze, barely cognizant in the ambient din, he worries about lubrication. He imagines a small engine part going dry, heating up, bursting into flames, then the whole machine exploding in an iridescent conflagration of moto-naphtha-fuelled blues, oranges, and reds.

  Nothing bursts into flames. The automobile only clangs, bawls, and eats up the road with terrifying appetite. If there is evil resident in Rosmaninhal--indeed, if there is good resident in Rosmaninhal--he sees none of it. The village vanishes in a streak. He sees a figure--a man? a woman?--turn to look in his direction and fall over.

  It is some kilometres past Rosmaninhal that he comes upon the stagecoach. His uncle warned him about these, did he not? Tomas slows down and thinks of holding back until an alternate route suggests itself or the coach turns off. But he grows impatient on the solitary country road. There is no comparison between the thirty horses galloping in his machine and the four horses cantering ahead of the coach.

  He pushes down on the accelerator pedal. With a choke, a cough, and a shudder, the machine grips the road with greater determination. He feels his hands pulled forward while his head is pushed back. The distance between automobile and stagecoach begins to shrink. He sees a man's head appear from the top of the coach. The man waves at him. A moment later, the coach, which has been somewhat on the right side of the road, heaves to its centre. Is this the reason behind his uncle's warning about stagecoaches, their erratic weaving? He rather interprets the move as a courtesy, the stagecoach moving aside to let him go by, like a gentleman allowing a lady first passage through a doorway. The man's wave reinforces this interpretation in his mind. He urges the automobile on. He navigates into the space to the right of the stagecoach. Every part of the machine is shaking. The passengers in the stagecoach, which is wildly rocking to and fro and side to side, hold on to the edge of the windows and crane their necks to look at him, gawking with a number of expressions: curiosity, amazement, fear, disgust.

  The two drivers of the stagecoach come into view, his colleagues in a way, and he eases off the accelerator pedal. The stagecoach drivers and he will greet each other like sea captains whose ships are crossing paths. He has read a great many captains' logbooks in the course of his investigations. The way stagecoach and automobile are pitching and rolling has something maritime to it. He lifts a hand, ready to wave, a smile building upon his face.

  He looks up at the stagecoach drivers and is shocked at what he sees. If the passengers had a number of expressions on their faces, the drivers have only one: out-and-out loathing. The man who turned and waved at him earlier--or was he in fact shaking his fist?--is barking and growling at him like a dog and is making as if to leap from his seat down onto the roof of the machine. The man doing the driving looks even more incensed. His face is red with anger and his mouth is open in a continuous shout. He is brandishing a long whip, spurring his horses on. The whip rises and coils in the air like a serpent before coming down and flattening out with a sharp and piercing snap that goes off like a gun. Only then does Tomas realize that the steeds have been pushed to full thundering gallop. He can feel the ground beneath him shaking from their efforts. Despite the cushioning of the automobile's rubber wheels and the mediation of the suspension springs, the hard, marvellous work of the horses rattles his bones and awes his brain. In relative terms, he is slowly passing the stagecoach the way a man on a street might overtake an elderly walker, with such ease and comfort that he has the leisure to tip his hat and say a kind word. But from the point of view of someone standing by the side of the road, both he and the stagecoach are hurtling through space at a fantastic speed, as if the elderly walker and the man on the street were advancing on the roofs of two express trains racing on parallel tracks.

  The silence that enveloped him as a result of his intense concentration suddenly explodes into the hammering of the galloping horses' hooves, the screaming creaking of the swaying stagecoach, the shouting of the drivers, the shrill distress of the frightened passengers, the cracking of the whip, and the roar of the automobile. He presses the accelerator pedal as hard as he can. The automobile surges ahead, but slowly.

  A further noise, keen and metallic, stabs his ears. The driver has turned his whip off the horses and is now lashing the roof of the automobile. Tomas grimaces, as if the lashes were striking his own back. The driver's assistant has his arms raised. Above his head is a wooden chest with metal strappings. It looks heavy. The man hurls it at the automobile, and it hits the roof like a bomb, followed by scraping sounds as the chest and its contents slide off. The horses, less than a metre away from Tomas, are kicking up a storm of dirt and throwing off quantities of froth from their mouths. Their eyes bulge with terror. They veer closer. The driver is steering them into the automobile! Death is upon me, thinks Tomas.

  The horses give out just as the automobile reaches its full speed. The machine moves ahead decisively and he is able to steady it and bring it back to the centre of the road, clipping the right lead horse so closely that he sees in the side mirror that it has to rear up its head to avoid hitting the back of the cabin.

  The moment he is ahead, the exhausted horses falter to a halt. Behind him, the drivers continue to shout. In the side mirror he watches the passengers pour out of the stagecoach as they and the drivers direct their shouting and gesturing at each other.

  He feels shattered by the encounter and wants to stop, but fear of the stagecoach catching up drives him on. As his unhappy ship forges ahead, he focuses on the road again. His stomach is as turbulent as a stormy sea. He squirms with itchiness.

  He considers his situation. How many days has he been driving? He thinks and counts. One, two, three, four--four nights. Four nights and five days of his allotment of ten. Only ten days. And he is not even out of the province of Ribatejo, not a quarter of the way to his destination. How did he imagine that he could complete his mission in so few days? The notion is laughable. He was lured by the promise of his uncle's magic carpet. The chief curator of the Museum of Ancient Art will not tolerate him being late. If he misses even a single day of work, he will be fired, plain and simple. That is the work world he lives in, one where he is an insignificant, replaceable cog. His relations with the chief curator, the collections manager, and the other curators at the museum are no better than Father Ulisses' relations were with the Bishop and the island clergy. How happy is a work environment where colleagues never eat together but rather sit in sour isolation? Sometimes he feels he can match every misery that Father Ulisse
s experienced on Sao Tome with one he has experienced at the museum. The same tedium. The same solitary nature of the work, broken by tense encounters with others. The same physical discomfort, in his case the unending days spent in damp and musty basement storage rooms or hot and dusty attics. The same choking misery. The same floundering attempt to make sense of things.

  I find small shrines on the plantations, set up in remote locations. They are crudely made of wood or baked mud, with shells & rotting fruit lying about them. If they be destroyed--& it is not I who does so--they reappear somewhere else. I am pleased to come upon these shrines. The slaves, who in their native villages practice various crafts, do nothing here except the compulsory fieldwork. No metalwork, no woodwork, no basket weaving, no ornament-making, no tailoring, no body painting, no singing, nothing. On this green island of malefic riot, they are as productive as mules. Only in these shrines do I see a vestige of their former lives, a reach for pregnancy.

  Tomas is assailed by doubt. Is his own quest "a reach for pregnancy"? He imagines that Gaspar would be taken by Father Ulisses' gift, given his childish sensibility, but he doubts Dora would approve. That has always tormented him, that in the service of frank truth, he would do something that would upset her. But the treasure exists! He is only bringing to light what is already there. He pleads with Dora in his mind, begs for her forgiveness. It is an elevation of all creation, my love. No, no, there is no desecration. But he knows Dora would not believe him, that he would lose the argument. He still does not dare to halt the machine, so he weeps and drives at the same time.

  Outside the village of Atalaia, he finally stops. He climbs on a mudguard to assess the damage done to the roof of the machine. The sight is dispiriting. There is an enormous dent caused by the thrown chest. And the whip, expertly deployed, has done its own extensive damage. The bright burgundy paint of the roof is veined with cracks. Great chips of it are ready to come off. When he looks inside the cabin, he sees that the cedar panels of the ceiling have split and jut out, like broken bones.

  He walks into Atalaia, looking for moto-naphtha. He finds a small shop that sells a bit of everything. After he lists the various sobriquets of the fuel, the shop owner nods her head and produces a small bottle. He asks for more. The shop owner is surprised. But what! An automobile doesn't run on mere cupfuls of sustenance. An automobile is an insatiable fiend. He gets all she has: two bottles.

  Back at the automobile, as he is feeding the hungry beast the bottles of moto-naphtha he has gathered so far, he casually inspects an empty bottle's label. He starts. A lice and flea product! Guaranteed to kill all vermin and their eggs in a pitiless fashion, the label claims. Apply liberally. Do not ingest. KEEP AWAY FROM FLAMES.

  Could the shop owners and apothecaries not have asked him why he needed so many bottles of the foul liquid? What he bought as fuel for the machine, they sold as a parasite killer. They thought he was a tornado of vermin, with a civilization of lice, fleas, and whatnot dancing upon his head. No wonder they looked at him askance. He holds still. But of course. Of course. There is no other explanation. The shop owners and apothecaries are right. He is itchy all over, in a manner that is absolutely maddening, precisely because he is a tornado of vermin, with a civilization of lice, fleas, and whatnot dancing upon his head.

  He looks at his other hand. The bottle he is holding upside down has just gurgled itself empty. It was his last bottle. How many did he have? Fifteen or so. He's had bottles of the stuff practically since the beginning of his trip, clinking away in the cabin, besides a whole barrel of it. Now he has none of it, or none that he can get to. He grabs the tank's small round opening as if he could stretch it out. He can't. Between his suffering and its relief--a bathtub of it--there lies a narrow doorway that will not open.

  He wonders, Who touched me? Who touched my clothes? Who passed on the infestation? The point of contact must have been either in Povoa de Santa Iria or Ponte de Sor. In both places he rubbed shoulders--indeed, he rubbed against entire bodies--while rescuing the machine from the surrounding masses.

  He expends himself in a frenzy of scratching.

  The sky darkens. It begins to rain and he takes refuge in the automobile. The front window of the automobile becomes so streaked and marbled with drops of water that he has difficulty seeing through them to the road. As the rain grows to a steady downpour, he wonders: His uncle said nothing about the machine's ability to operate in the rain. He does not trust it to stay on the road. He will wait the rain out.

  Dusk and then darkness come on like a miasma. In his sleep, stagecoaches are galloping down on him from all directions. He is cold. His feet protrude over the edge of the driving compartment and the rain soaks them. Itchiness periodically rouses him.

  In the morning the rain is still coming down. He is too chilled to want to wash in it. He no more than wets a hand to wipe his face. His only comfort comes from remembering that Father Ulisses was plagued by rain on the island. There, it deluged with such insistence that minds became unhinged. By comparison, what is this mild European drizzle?

  On this deserted road, only the odd peasant appears, inevitably stopping for an extended conversation. Some arrive along the road, alone or pulling a donkey, while others come off the land itself, peasant lords working their tiny fiefdoms. None of them seems to mind the rain.

  From one peasant to the next, the reaction is the same. They inspect the vehicle's wheels, finding them dainty and small. They peer at the side mirrors, finding them ingenious. They gaze at the machine's controls, finding them intimidating. They stare at the machine's engine, finding it unfathomable. Each deems the whole a marvel.

  Only one, a shepherd, seems to have no interest in the contraption. "Can I sit with you for a while?" he asks. "I am cold and wet."

  Already his sheep are surrounding the vehicle, held hostage there by a small dog that races around and yips incessantly. The sheeps' bleating is constant and grating. Tomas nods to the man, who walks around to the other side of the vehicle and clambers in next to him in the driving compartment.

  Tomas wishes that he would speak, but the crusty man says not a word, only gazes ahead. Minutes go by. The silence is framed by the steady hiss of the rain, the bleating of the sheep, and the yipping of the dog.

  Finally it is Tomas who speaks. "Let me tell you why I'm travelling. It's been a difficult journey so far. I'm searching for a lost treasure. I've spent a year determining where it might be--and now I know. Or I nearly know. I'm close. When I find it, I'll take it to the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon, but it would be worthy of a great museum in Paris or London. The thing in question, it's--well, I can't tell you what it is, but it's an impressive object. People will stare at it, their mouths open. It will cause an uproar. With this object I'll give God His comeuppance for what He did to the ones I love."

  The old rube's sole response is to glance at him and nod. Otherwise, only the sheep seem to appreciate his momentous confession, with a blast of wavering baahs. The flock is no creamy billow of fluffy sheepdom. These creatures have bony faces, bulging eyes, ragged fleeces, and rear ends caked with excrement.

  "Tell me," he asks the shepherd, "what do you think of animals?"

  The shepherd once again glances at him, but this time he speaks. "What animals?"

  "Well, these, for example," Tomas replies. "What do you think of your sheep?"

  At length the man says, "They are my living."

  Tomas thinks for a moment. "Yes, your living. You make a profound point there. Without your sheep, you would have no livelihood, you would die. This dependency creates a sort of equality, doesn't it? Not individually, but collectively. As a group, you and your sheep are at opposite ends of a seesaw, and somewhere in between there is a fulcrum. You must maintain the balance. In that sense, we are no better than they."

  The man says not a word in response. At that moment Tomas is overcome by ravenous itchiness. It's all over his body now. "If you'll excuse me, I have business to attend to," he says to
the shepherd. He makes his way back along the footboard to the cabin. From the cabin, through the wide window, the back of the shepherd's head is plainly visible. Thrashing and twisting on the sofa, Tomas battles itchiness, digging hard with his fingernails at his insect tormentors. The gratification is intense. The shepherd never turns around.

  To block out the rain, Tomas covers the shattered door window with a blanket, securing the blanket to the frame by closing the door on it. The rain becomes a monotonous drumming on the roof. Amidst the scattered supplies he makes a space for himself on the leather sofa, covers himself with another blanket, and curls up tightly...

  He wakes with a start. He has no idea if he has slept five or fifty-five minutes. The rain is still falling. But the shepherd is gone. Peering through the machine's rain-streaked windows, he can see a hazy grey shape up ahead on the road--it is the flock of sheep. He opens the cabin door and stands on the footboard. The shepherd is in the middle of his flock, looking as if he is walking on a cloud. The dog is flitting about as it did earlier, but Tomas can no longer hear it. The flock moves down the road, then flows off to one side of it, taking a path into the countryside.

  Through the rain Tomas watches the flock get smaller and smaller. Just as it begins to disappear beyond a ridge, the shepherd, a black dot now, stops and turns. Is he checking for a lost sheep? Is he looking back at him? Tomas waves vigorously. He can't tell if the man has noticed his farewell. The black dot vanishes.

  He returns to the driving compartment. There is a small package on the passenger seat. Wrapped in cloth are a piece of bread, a chunk of white cheese, and a tiny sealed earthen jar of honey. A Christmas gift? When is Christmas, exactly? Four days away? He realizes he's losing track of the days. At any rate, what a kindness on the part of the shepherd. He is touched. He eats. It tastes so good! He can't remember ever having eaten such savoury bread, such flavourful cheese, such delicious honey.