The High Mountains of Portugal

by Yann Martel

  "It says in the Gospels: 'He did not speak to them except in parables.' "

  "That's right. The parable of the lost sheep, of the mustard seed, of the fig tree, of the yeast, of the sower, of the prodigal son, and so on. So many parables."

  Mutton with mustard sauce, with stewed figs and a glass of wine--so many edible parables, thinks Eusebio.

  "A parable is an allegory in the form of a simple story. It is a suitcase that we must open and unpack to see its contents. And the single key that unlocks these suitcases, that opens them wide, is allegory.

  "Finally, only one miracle stands true and literal, the pillar of our faith: his resurrection. Once that is clear, we can start making sense of all the stories told by Jesus and told about him. That is Christianity at heart: a single miracle surrounded and sustained by stories, like an island surrounded by the sea."

  Eusebio coughs a little. "You haven't been sharing these insights with Father Cecilio, have you?"

  Father Cecilio is their local priest--and the subject of much eye-rolling on Maria's part. In her presence the poor man always looks like the chicken in the coop that hasn't laid enough eggs.

  "What, and have us excommunicated? That dimwit is the very hammer of literalism that insults my faith. He's as dumb as an ox."

  "But he means well," Eusebio suggests soothingly.

  "As does an ox."

  "That's all very interesting, what you've been saying."

  "I'm not finished. I was searching, if you remember? There's a problem."

  "Yes, and you found a solution."

  "Oh, how my heart beats! I'll drink now, if you sanitize that glass."

  Maria bends down and produces from the bag a bottle of red wine, which she places on the desk. Eusebio cracks a wide smile. "Maria, bless you!" He hurries to open the bottle. While it breathes, he washes the glass thoroughly.

  "I don't have another glass," he says. "You drink from it and I'll drink from the bottle."

  "That's unseemly. We'll share the glass."

  "All right." He tips some of the elixir into the glass. It glows like a firefly. He licks his lips at the prospect of pouring it down his throat, but offers the glass to his wife. "You first, my angel."

  Maria takes a small, thoughtful sip. She closes her eyes as she considers its distilled effect on her. She purrs and opens her eyes. "It's a good one."

  She passes him the glass. He takes a larger sip, grunts with pleasure, empties the glass in one go. "Oh! Indeed. Just a little more." He half-fills the glass, perhaps a little more than half.

  Maria has another sip. "That'll be enough for me," she says. "Happy New Year."

  "Sorry?"

  "What's the point of looking at a clock if you don't notice the time? Look at the two hands. It's midnight. We're now in 1939."

  "You're right. Happy New Year to you, my angel. May this year be a good one."

  He finishes off the glass and sits down again. Now it is his turn to glow like a firefly, and his mind flits about inconsequentially as his wife starts up again.

  "Why would Jesus speak in parables? Why would he both tell stories and let himself be presented through stories? Why would Truth use the tools of fiction? Stories full of metaphors are by writers who play the language like a mandolin for our entertainment, novelists, poets, playwrights, and other crafters of inventions. Meanwhile, isn't it extraordinary that there are no significant historical accounts of Jesus of Nazareth? A minor government official from Lisbon comes to Braganca, a tight little man with nothing to say, and it's all over the papers, which end up in archives for the rest of time. Or you, your work, Eusebio. Someone does that ordinary thing of dying--and you write a report, you immortalize that ordinary mortal. Meanwhile, the Son of God comes to town, he travels around, he meets anyone and everyone, he impresses mightily, he is murdered--and no one writes about it? Of this great divine comet hitting the earth, the only impact is a swirl of oral tales?

  "There are hundreds of documents from pagan authors from the first century of our Christian era. Jesus is not mentioned in a single one. No contemporary Roman figure--no official, no general, no administrator, no historian, no philosopher, no poet, no scientist, no merchant, no writer of any sort--mentions him. Not the least reference to him is to be found on any public inscription or in any surviving private correspondence. He left behind no birth record, no trial report, no death certificate. A century after his death--one hundred years!--there are only two pagan references to Jesus, one from Pliny the Younger, a Roman senator and writer, the other from Tacitus, a Roman historian. A letter and a few pages--that's all from the zealous bureaucrats and the proud administrators of an empire whose next religion was founded on Jesus, whose capital would become the capital of his cult. The pagans didn't notice the man who would transform them from Romans into Christians. That seems as unlikely as the French not noticing the French Revolution.

  "If Jews of the day had more to say about Jesus, it's been lost. There is nothing from any of the Pharisees who conspired against him, nothing from the Sanhedrin, the religious council that condemned him. The historian Josephus makes two brief references to Jesus, but many decades after his crucifixion. The entire historical record on Jesus of Nazareth from non-Christian sources fits into a handful of pages, and it's all second hand. None of it tells us anything we don't already know from Christian sources.

  "No, no, no. The historical record is of no help. Our knowledge of the flesh-and-blood Jesus all comes down to four allegorists. Even more astonishing, these word minstrels never met Jesus. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, whoever they were, weren't eyewitnesses. Like the Romans and Jews, they wrote about Jesus years after his passage on earth. They were inspired scribes who recorded and arranged oral tales that had been circulating for decades. Jesus has come to us, then, through old stories that survived mostly by word of mouth. What a casual, risky way of making one's mark on history.

  "Stranger still, it's as if Jesus wanted it that way. Jews are obsessively literate. A Jew's every finger is a pen. God merely speaks to the rest of us, while Jews get handed inscribed stone tablets. Yet here was an important Jew who preferred the wind to the written word. Who chose the eddying of oral tales over the recorded facts. Why this approach? Why not impose himself like the great military Messiah Jews were hoping for? Why storytelling over history-making?"

  His wife has led him down one grand corridor after another. Now, Eusebio senses, they are about to enter the ballroom, with its vast dancing floor and glittering chandeliers and high windows.

  "I think it's because, once more, Jesus seeks to benefit us. A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves us, as any marriage would, and just as no marriage is exactly the same as another, so each of us interprets a story differently, feels for it differently. A story calls upon us as God calls upon us, as individuals--and we like that. Stories benefit the human mind. Jesus trod the earth with the calm assurance that he would stay with us and we would stay with him so long as he touched us through stories, so long as he left a fingerprint upon our startled imagination. And so he came not charging on a horse but quietly riding a story.

  "Imagine, Eusebio, that you've been invited to a feast and a splendid table has been presented to you, with the finest wines and the most delicious food. You eat and you drink till you are full. Would you then turn to your host and ask about the barn animals you've eaten? You might, and you might get some information about these animals--but what does it compare to the feast you've just had? We must abandon this reductionist quest for the historical Jesus. He won't be found, because that's not where--that's not how--he chose to make his mark. Jesus told stories and lived through stories. Our faith is faith in his story, and there is very little beyond that story-faith. The holy word is story, and story is the holy word."

  Maria breathes deeply. A smile lights up her face. "Well, stories are stil
l with us. And so I come to the solution, to Agatha Christie."

  She leans over and brings up from the bag at her feet handfuls of books with which Eusebio is familiar: The Man in the Brown Suit, The Mystery of the Blue Train, The Seven Dials Mystery, The Murder at the Vicarage, Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, Three Act Tragedy, Murder in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, The ABC Murders, Lord Edgware Dies, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Thirteen Problems, The Hound of Death, The Sittaford Mystery, Murder on the Orient Express, Dumb Witness, Peril at End House. They all end up on his desk, so many brightly jacketed hardcovers, except for a few that fall with a thud to the floor.

  "The thought first struck me as I was rereading Murder on the Orient Express. I noticed how the train comes from the East. There are thirteen passengers at the heart of the story, one of whom is a monster, a Judas. I noticed how these passengers come from all walks of life and all nationalities. I noticed how one of the investigators, a helper of Hercule Poirot, is a Dr. Constantine. Isn't the story of Jesus an Eastern story made popular by another Constantine? Did Jesus not have twelve disciples, with a Judas among them? Was Palestine not a mixed Orient Express of nationalities? The foreignness of Hercule Poirot is often remarked upon. Time and again he saves the day. The foreigner whose intervention is salvific--isn't that one way of seeing Jesus? These observations led me to examine the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie in a new light.

  "I began to notice things in a jumble. There is meaning in every small incident--Agatha Christie's stories are narratives of revelatory detail, hence the spare, direct language and the short, numerous paragraphs and chapters, as in the Gospels. Only the essential is recounted. Murder mysteries, like the Gospels, are distillations.

  "I noticed the near total absence of children in Agatha Christie--because murder is a decidedly adult entertainment--just as they are largely absent from the Gospels, which also address an adult sensibility.

  "I noticed how those who know the truth are always treated with suspicion and disdain. That was the case with Jesus, of course. But look at old Miss Marple. Always she knows, and everyone is surprised that she does. And the same with Hercule Poirot. How can that ridiculous little man know anything? But he does, he does. It is the triumph of the meek, in Agatha Christie as in the Gospels.

  "The gravest sin--the taking of a life--is always at the core of an Agatha Christie story--as it is at the core of the story of Jesus. In both narratives numerous characters are briefly introduced and for the same purpose: the parading of all the suspects, so that the reader can see who gives in to the temptation of evil in contrast to who does not. Fortitude is set next to weakness, both in the Gospels and in Agatha Christie. And in both, the light of understanding comes in the same way: We are given facts, neutral in themselves, then we are given an interpretation that imprints meaning upon these facts. So proceed the parables of Jesus--exposition, then explanation--and so proceeds the Passion of Jesus; his death and resurrection were explained, given meaning to, by Paul, after the fact. And so proceed the denouements of the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie: Hercule Poirot summarizes all the facts before he tells us what they mean.

  "Notice the vital role of the witness. Neither Jesus nor Hercule Poirot cared to pick up a pen. Both were content to live in the spoken word. The act of witness was therefore a necessity--how else would we know what they said and did? But it was also a consequence. Each man, in his own sphere, did such amazing things that people felt compelled to bear witness. Those who met Jesus spent the rest of their lives talking about him to family, friends, and strangers, until what they said reached the ears of Paul, and later of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And the same with Arthur Hastings, the Watson-like narrator of many of the Hercule Poirot stories, a narrator no less loyal than the narrators of the Gospels.

  "But every witness is to some degree unreliable. We see that clearly with Arthur Hastings, who is always a few steps behind Hercule Poirot until Poirot helps him catch up with lucid explanations. We realize then that it is not only Arthur Hastings who is obtuse. We too have missed clues, misunderstood import, failed to seize the meaning. We too need Hercule Poirot to help us catch up. And so with Jesus. He was surrounded by so many Arthur Hastingses who were perpetually missing clues, misunderstanding import, failing to seize the meaning. He too had to explain everything to his disciples so that they might catch up. And still the disciples got it wrong, still they couldn't agree on what Jesus said or did. Look at the Gospels: four of them, each a little different from the others, each inconsistent with the others, as always happens with the testimony of witnesses.

  "In an Agatha Christie mystery, the murderer is nearly always a figure closer than we expected. Remember The Man in the Brown Suit and The Seven Dials Mystery and Three Act Tragedy and The ABC Murders and especially The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, to name just a few. Our vision of evil far away is acute, but the closer the evil, the greater the moral myopia. The edges become blurred, the centre hard to see. Thus the reaction when it is revealed who did it: 'Et tu, Brute?' The disciples must have reacted in this way when Judas, good Judas Iscariot, our dear friend and travelling companion, proved to be a traitor. How blind we are to evil close-by, how willing to look away.

  "Speaking of blindness, there is this curious phenomenon. We read Agatha Christie in the grip of compulsion. We must keep on reading. We want to know who did it, and how, and why. Then we find out. We're amazed at the complexity of the crime's execution. Oh, the coolness of the murderer's mind, the steadiness of his or her hand. Our devouring curiosity satisfied, we put the book down--and instantly we forget who did it! Isn't that so? We don't forget the victim. Agatha Christie can title her novels The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Lord Edgware Dies without any fear of losing her readers' interest. The victim is a given, and he or she stays with us. But how quickly the murderer vanishes from our mind. We pick up an Agatha Christie murder mystery--she's written so many--and we wonder, Have I read this one? Let me see. She's the victim, yes, I remember that, but who did it? Oh, I can't remember. We must reread a hundred pages before we recall who it was that took a human life.

  "We apply the same amnesia to the Gospels. We remember the victim. Of course we do. But do we remember who killed him? If you went up to your average person on the street and said 'Quick--tell me--who murdered Jesus?' my guess is that the person would be at a loss for words. Who did murder Jesus of Nazareth? Who was responsible? Judas Iscariot? Bah! He was a tool, an accessory. He betrayed Jesus, he gave him up to people who sought him, but he did not kill him. Pontius Pilate, then, the Roman procurator who sentenced him to death? Hardly. He just went along. He found Jesus innocent of any wrongdoing, sought to have him released, preferred to have Barabbas crucified, and yielded only in the face of the angry crowd. Pilate chose to sacrifice an innocent man rather than have a riot on his hands. So he was a weak man, another accessory to murder, but he was not the actual murderer.

  "Who, then, did the deed? The Romans, more generally? Jesus was strung up by Roman soldiers following Roman orders according to Roman law in a Roman province. But who's ever heard of such a nebulous murderer? Are we to accept theologically that the Son of God was murdered by the nameless servants of a long-vanished empire to appease a squabbling local tribe? If that's the case, no wonder no one can remember who did it.

  "Ah! But of course: It was Jews who murdered Jesus! That's a familiar refrain, is it not? A group of manipulative Jewish elders, in collusion with the Roman authorities, conspired to get rid of a troublesome fellow Jew. (And we remembered to hate Jews but not Italians--how did that happen? The shame of it!) But if it was Jews who were responsible, which ones? What were their names? We have Caiaphas, the high priest. Any others? None who is named. And really, like Judas, like Pilate, Caiaphas was an accessory. Jews could not openly kill a Jew--remember the Ten Commandments? Caiaphas had to find others who would do it. So he and his fellow elders whipped up the crowd, and it's the crowd that decide
d matters against Jesus. With them lies the true, practical guilt. If the crowd had cried for Jesus' release and Barabbas's crucifixion, Pilate would have obliged, Caiaphas would have been stymied, and Judas would have had to return his blood money.

  "There we seem to have it, then: It was a crowd that was responsible for the murder of Jesus of Nazareth. To put it in exact terms, a crowd framed by mostly anonymous officials, manipulated by mostly anonymous elders, wished him dead, and then anonymous soldiers actually killed him. But it started with a crowd, and is there anything more anonymous than a crowd? Is a crowd not, by definition, anonymous? From this assessment, it's clear: These guilty Jews, these guilty Romans--they are straw men, red herrings, in the best tradition of Agatha Christie. No wonder the common brutish mind thinks it's the Jew next door who murdered Jesus--that's more concrete. But in theological actuality, it was Anonymous who killed Jesus of Nazareth. And who is Anonymous?"

  Maria stops. After some seconds of silence, Eusebio realizes with a start that his wife is waiting for him to answer the question.

  "Oh! I'm not sure. I've never--"

  "Anonymous is you, is me, is all of us. We murdered Jesus of Nazareth. We are the crowd. We are Anonymous. It is not the guilt of Jews that goes down through history, it is the guilt of all of us. But how quick we are to forget that. We don't like guilt, do we? We prefer to hide it, to forget it, to twist it and present it in a better light, to pass it on to others. And so, because of our aversion to guilt, we strain to remember who killed the victim in the Gospels, as we strain to remember who killed the victim in an Agatha Christie murder mystery.