The High Mountains of Portugal

by Yann Martel

  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.

  If he cannot escape, then he must hide. After a series of turns, halfway down a deserted avenue, he abruptly stops the machine. He hurries to blow out the flames of the sidelight and headlight. Darkness and silence engulf him. He listens. Will the night hordes find him? He ventures out. He peers around corners and stares down streets. Nothing but benign darkness. It seems he has lost them.

  He spends the rest of the night walking through Castelo Branco, establishing the route he will take at first light.

  During his nocturnal exploration of the city, he comes upon a plain square, with its allotment of trees, benches, and a single statue veiled in darkness in its centre. He sees movement and he jumps, then realizes what it is. There has been a market that day in the square. The vendors' stalls still stand, and beneath the tables, strewn about, lies the bad produce that the vendors threw away, fruit, vegetables, perhaps even meat. Moving amidst this detritus are dogs. Under the great dome of the night, in the submarine quiet of a city returned to sleep after a brief disturbance, he gazes at these street dogs that are taking in what others have rejected. They go about their business with hopeful pokes and snuffles, occasionally finding and gratefully eating. A few of them look up and stare at him before returning to their rooting. They accept him, as he accepts them.

  When he returns to the automobile, he feels the gratitude of a sea creature retreating into its sheltering shell. He lies down for a short nap in the cabin. Alas, the walking and the sleepless night have taxed him greatly. He oversleeps. At the honk of the machine's horn, pressed by some impertinent bystander, he wakes with a jerk to the sight of faces pressed through the window openings of the cabin, goggling eyes on him, noses sniffing the air. He has to push against the door of the cabin to move the people on the other side enough that he can squeeze out. He stands on the footboard and breathes in the fresh air of the new day. It is good to have escaped the night, but surrounding him now, sloshing and slapping against the automobile like the ocean's bright blue water, is seemingly the entire population of Castelo Branco, clamouring at him like breaking waves. His escape--involving the usual shouted exhortations, the usual blinkered lack of understanding, the usual surprise when the automobile nudges forward, and the usual race ahead of the mob--drains him utterly. He drives until his nodding head hits the steerage wheel.

  He wakes midafternoon and makes a groggy calculation. For each day established by a memory of it--the first day, the bridges, Ponte de Sor, the stagecoach, and so on--he raises a finger. Quickly the fingers of one hand stand erect. Then the fingers of the other, but for one. Nine, if his calculation is correct. Today is his ninth day on the road. His meagre ration of days is nearly expended. In two days, early in the morning, the chief curator at the museum will be expecting his return. He puts his head in his hands. Castelo Branco is not even halfway to his ultimate destination. Should he abandon his mission? But even if he does, he will not be back in Lisbon in time. To return now will be to fail twice, at his job and in his mission. To press on towards the High Mountains of Portugal will be to fail only at his job. And if his mission is crowned with success, he might perhaps get his job back. He will carry on, then, he will persevere. That is the only sensible course. But night is coming. He will persevere tomorrow.

  With the changing land comes a changing climate. Winter in the Portuguese hinterland is cold and damp, and its bite is made worse by the metal cage that is the automobile's cabin and the drafts that blow through its broken windows. Tomas steps out. Beyond the faint gleam of the road, there is only blackness. He wonders: Animals know boredom, but do they know loneliness? He doesn't think so. Not this kind of loneliness, of the body and the soul. He belongs to a lonely species. He returns to the sofa and wraps himself in the mink coat and three blankets. Perhaps he sleeps at odd moments, but if he does, he dreams that he is in the cabin of an automobile on a cold night, waiting, and so, awake or sleeping, he remains in the same state of misery. Through the hours, a question preoccupies him: When is Christmas? Did he miss it?

  In the morning he is glad to get the machine going. The land continues to dry up, the cultivated weave plucked away, the sustaining frame of rock further exposed. The new landscape jumps out at him, luminous, the assertion of geology plain and direct.

  He begins to lose his way regularly. Until now, thanks to the maps, to the forbearance of roads, to luck, he has never got lost for very long. This changes after Castelo Branco. After Castelo
Branco, the days blur into a fog of time. He drives into a village in despair, finds a local, and asks him, "Please, I've been looking for Rapoula do Coa for three days. Where is it? In what direction does it lie?" The old villager looks in consternation at the smelly, distressed man in the smelly, distressing machine (whom he saw the previous day and the day before, roaring through the village) and responds shyly, "This is Rapoula do Coa." Lost elsewhere Tomas begs to know where Almeida is, and the native smiles and cries out, "?Almeida? No esta aqui, hombre. Almeida esta del otro lado de la frontera." Tomas stares at the man's mouth, aghast to hear the susurration of Portuguese replaced by the growl of Spanish. He races back to Portugal, fearful that the border he did not even notice will now rear up like an impassable mountain range.

  The compass is of no help. Always, no matter the road, it points away from the road into the wilderness, its needle trembling as he trembles.

  How one gets lost can vary, but the state of being lost, the feeling of it, is always the same: paralysis, anger, lethargy, despair. A pack of wolf children somewhere past Macedo de Cavalerios pelt the machine with stones, gouging the elephant hide, denting the metal hood, and, worst of all, shattering the window of the driving compartment, so that he must now drive through howls of cold wind wearing the motoring coat, goggles, and hat, but not the fine gloves, which burned to a crisp in the cabin fire. He has another flat tire, and this time he must actually repair the tire, since the tire on the footboard is already punctured.

  One afternoon he at last reaches his destination. Invisibly--but the map telling him so--he enters the High Mountains of Portugal. He can see it in the gentle lift in the land and in the increasing drop off the side of the road. He is jubilant. Soon, soon, he will find the church he's been seeking and his uncommon insight will be brilliantly demonstrated. His mission is nearly accomplished. What he has been saying with his backwards walking for a year, his outrage, his despair, he will now say with an unconventional crucifix. A broad smile illuminates his face.

  The road soon settles into a steady flatness. He looks to his left and right, perplexed. He discovers that he is driving through an act of national vanity. Every country yearns to flaunt that glittering jewel called a mountain range, and so this barren wasteland, too low to be alpine but too high to be usefully fertile, has been bedecked with a grand title. But there are no mountains in the High Mountains of Portugal. There is nothing beyond mere hills, nothing tras os montes. It is an extensive, undulating, mostly treeless steppe, cool, dry, and bleached by a clear, dispassionate sunshine. Where he expected snow and rock, he finds a low, rampant golden-yellow grass that stretches as far as the eye can see, occasionally interrupted by patches of forest. And the only summits he sees are strange, pockmarked boulders, enormous in size, the detritus of some geologic bustle. Streams here and there flow with unexpected liveliness. The steppe is, as its homophone implies, a temporary place from which one proceeds elsewhere. Historically, generations of hardscrabble locals have hurried away from its poor soil, emigrating to more clement parts of the world, and he finds that he too wishes to hurry through it. The villages he encounters concentrate the loneliness he feels in the wide-open spaces between them. Every man and woman he encounters--he doesn't see any children--smells of time and radiates solitude. These people live in plain, square, solid stone houses with shale roofs, the habitable spaces built above the animal pens, so that the two groups live in joint dependency, the humans receiving warmth and sustenance, the animals food and safety. The land is not amenable to extensive economic use. There is nothing but small, hardy fields of rye, large vegetable gardens, chestnut trees, beehives, chickens in profusion, pens of pigs, and roaming flocks of goats and sheep.

  The nights are of a coldness he didn't know existed in Portugal. He sleeps bundled up in blankets, wearing every item of clothing he can fit on. He cuts the canvas rain tarp into pieces and uses them to seal, more or less, the broken windows. This makes the cabin very dark. He burns candles inside it to heat it. One morning he awakes to a landscape of snow. It is midafternoon before it has melted enough for him to dare to drive on. Now that there is no front window, the driving is so cold that he must slow down.

  There are moments in the days when he recognizes a formal beauty to the landscape. It often has less to do with geography and more to do with the weather and the play of light. He does not get as lost as he did farther south, because there are fewer villages and fewer roads. But the roads are rutty obscenities laid down by an enterprising government long ago and forgotten by every government since. In fact, the whole region has the feel of living in administrative amnesia. And yet churches were built in the High Mountains of Portugal, as they were everywhere else in the country. Geography clamours for history. He studies the map and locates the five villages of Sao Juliao de Palacios, Santalha, Mofreita, Guadramil, and Espinhosela. If his research delivers on its promise--and it must, it must--in one of these villages, washed up by the vagaries of history, he will find Father Ulisses' anguished creation.

  He first heads for the village of Sao Juliao de Palacios. The wooden crucifix in its church is ordinary and unremarkable. The same with the centrepiece of the church of Guadramil.

  It is on the way to Espinhosela that it happens.

  He awakes to a sharp dawn. The air is bright, odourless, dry, with none of the luxuriance of Portugal's coastal air. When he walks on the gravel at the side of the road, it crunches with parched crispness. A bird's cry startles him. He looks up. At that precise instant a falcon collides from above with a dove. There is a wobble in the air, a flutter of loosened feathers, then a smooth banking as the falcon resumes its controlled flight with the dove crushed in its talons. It flaps its wings and gains altitude. Tomas watches it vanish in the distance.

  An hour or so later, the road he is driving along is open and flat, as is the land on either side. Just then, above the snout of the automobile's hood, the child appears--more precisely, its hand. The sight is so odd, so unexpected, that he cannot believe what he has seen. Was it a branch? No, it was most certainly a small hand. If a child were holding on to the front of the automobile and stood up, that's where its hand would appear. And if a child were holding on to the front of the automobile and slipped off, it would then fall under the moving machine. What is the sound of a body being run over by an automobile? Clearly it is what he has just heard: a sound soft, swift, and thumping.

  His mind moves in that alternately slow and abrupt way of a mind that is jarred. He must check on the child. Perhaps it is hurt. Or at the very least frightened. If there even was a child. He sticks his head out of the driving compartment and looks back.

  He sees behind him, receding, a lump, small and still.

  He halts the machine and steps out. He removes his hat and goggles. He is breathless. The lump is far off. He walks backwards towards it. Every time he turns his head, it is closer and his chest feels tighter. He walks faster. His heart is jumping in his chest. He turns around and runs forward towards the lump.

  It is indeed a child. A boy. Perhaps five or six years old. Dressed in overlarge clothes. A peasant boy with a large head, surprisingly blond hair, and a lovely, harmonious face marred only by streaks of dirt. And what Portuguese eyes are these--blue? Some atavism, some trace of the foreign. Their fixed gaze appalls him.

  "Boy, are you all right? Boy?"

  The last word he says louder, as if death were a hearing problem. The boy's eyes do not blink. His pale face remains frozen in a grave expression. Tomas kneels and touches the boy's chest. He feels only stillness. A small river of blood appears from under the body and flows along the ground in the usual way of rivers.

  Tomas shudders. He lifts his head. A breeze is blowing. In whatever direction he looks, there is majestic normalcy: wild growth here, tilled fields over there, the road, the sky, the sun. Everything is in its place, and time is moving with its usual discretion. Then, in an instant, without any warning, a little boy tripped everything up. Surely the fields will notic
e; they will rise, dust themselves, and come closer to take a concerned look. The road will curl up like a snake and make sad pronouncements. The sun will darken with desolation. Gravity itself will be upset and objects will float in existential hesitation. But no. The fields remain still, the road continues to lie hard and fixed, and the morning sun does not stop shining with unblinking coolness.

  Tomas thinks back to the last place he stopped. It was just a few kilometres earlier. He had a short nap, his forehead resting against the steerage wheel, the engine left running. Could the child have climbed onto the front of the automobile during that break, while his head was down, unnoticed by him?

  Children will play.

  This could well be something Gaspar would have done, climbed onto a warm, throbbing machine to see what it was like.

  "I'm sorry, little one," he whispers.

  He gets back to his feet. What is there to do but leave?

  He walks away in his usual fashion, and so the child remains in his sight. He churns with horror. Then a hand seizes that horror and stuffs it in a box and closes the lid. If he leaves quickly enough, it will not have happened. For the moment this accident is in himself only, a private mark, a notch carved nowhere but upon his sensibility. Outside him, nothing cares. Look for yourself: The wind blows, time flows. Besides, it was an accident. It just happened, with no intent or knowledge on his part.

  He turns and runs. Upon arriving at the front of the automobile to pull on the starting handle, he sees that the small lid of the hood is open. This lid is at the very front of the hood, out of sight of the driver in the driving compartment, and is designed to allow access to the engine without the hood having to be lifted. Did the child see it as a door into a little round dollhouse? Why must children be so curious? He notes how the boy would have held on, where his feet might have rested, what his hands must have gripped. The edge of the chassis, the base of the starting handle, the ends of the suspension springs, the thin rods that hold the headlights into place, the rim of the open lid--so many options for a little monkey. Comfortable enough a perch, perhaps even exhilarating when the warm noisy machine jerked into motion--but then fear and fatigue would have set in. So much speed and shaking, the ground disappearing beneath like a watery torrent.