The High Mountains of Portugal

by Yann Martel

  But he has not seriously entertained the idea of returning to Canada since he and Odo moved to Tuizelo. The members of his own species now bring on a feeling of weariness in him. They are too noisy, too fractious, too arrogant, too unreliable. He much prefers the intense silence of Odo's presence, his pensive slowness in whatever he does, the profound simplicity of his means and aims. Even if that means that Peter's humanity is thrown back in his face every time he's with Odo, the thoughtless haste of his own actions, the convoluted mess of his own means and aims. And despite the fact that Odo, nearly every day, drags him out to meet fellow members of his species. Odo is insatiably sociable.

  "Oh, I don't know."

  "I have a friend who's single. She's attractive and really nice. Have you thought about that, about giving love and family another try?"

  He hasn't. His heart is expended in that way, of loving the single, particular individual. He loved Clara with every fibre of his being, but now he has nothing left. Or rather, he has learned to live with her absence, and he has no wish to fill that absence; that would be like losing her a second time. Instead he would prefer to be kind to everyone, a less personal but broader love. As for physical desire, his libido no longer tempts him. He thinks of his erections as being the last of his adolescent pimples; after years of prodding and squeezing, they have finally gone away, and he is unblemished by carnal desire. He can remember the how of sex but not the why.

  "Since Clara died, I just haven't been in that space," he says. "I can't--"

  "It's your ape, isn't it?"

  He doesn't say anything.

  "What do you do with it all day long?" she asks.

  "We go for walks. Sometimes we wrestle. Mostly we just hang out."

  "You wrestle with it? Like with a kid?"

  "Oh, Ben was never that strong, thank goodness. I come out of it banged and bruised."

  "But what's the point of it, Peter? Of the walking, the wrestling, and the hanging out?"

  "I don't know. It's"--what is it?--"interesting."

  "Interesting?"

  "Yes. Consuming, actually."

  "You're in love with it," his sister says. "You're in love with your ape and it's taken over your life." She is not criticizing, she is not attacking--but there is a slight edge to the observation.

  He considers what she's just said. In love with Odo, is he? If love it is, it's an exacting love, one that always demands that he pay attention, that he be alert. Does he mind? Not for one minute. So perhaps it is love. A curious love, if so. One that strips him of any privilege. He has language, he has cognition, he knows how to tie a shoelace--what of that? Mere tricks.

  And a love tinged with fear, still and always. Because Odo is so much stronger. Because Odo is alien. Because Odo is unknowable. It's a tiny, inexpungible parcel of fear, yet not incapacitating nor even a source of much worry. He never feels dread or anxiety with Odo, never anything so lingering. It rather goes like this: The ape appears without the least sound, seemingly out of nowhere, and among the emotions Peter feels--the surprise, the wonder, the pleasure, the joy--there is a pulse of fear. He can do nothing about it except wait for the pulse to go away. That is a lesson he has learned, to treat fear as a powerful but topical emotion. He is afraid only when he needs to be. And Odo, despite his capacity to overwhelm, has never given him real cause to be afraid.

  And if it is love, then that implies some sort of meeting. What strikes him isn't the blurring of the boundary between the animal and the human that this meeting implies. He long ago accepted that blurring. Nor is it the slight, limited movement up for Odo to his presumably superior status. That Odo learned to make porridge, that he enjoys going through a magazine, that he responds appropriately to something Peter says only confirms a well-known trope of the entertainment industry, that apes can ape--to our superficial amusement. No, what's come as a surprise is his movement down to Odo's so-called lower status. Because that's what has happened. While Odo has mastered the simple human trick of making porridge, Peter has learned the difficult animal skill of doing nothing. He's learned to unshackle himself from the race of time and contemplate time itself. As far as he can tell, that's what Odo spends most of his time doing: being in time, like one sits by a river, watching the water go by. It's a lesson hard learned, just to sit there and be. At first he yearned for distractions. He would absent himself in memories, replaying the same old movies in his head, fretting over regrets, yearning for lost happiness. But he's getting better at being in a state of illuminated, sitting-by-a-river repose. So that's the real surprise: not that Odo would seek to be like him but that he would seek to be like Odo.

  Teresa is right. Odo has taken over his life. She means the cleaning up and the looking after. But it's much more than that. He's been touched by the grace of the ape, and there's no going back to being a plain human being. That is love, then.

  "Teresa, I think we all look for moments when things make sense. Here, cut off, I find these moments all the time, every day."

  "With your ape?"

  "Yes. Sometimes I think Odo breathes time, in and out, in and out. I sit next to him and I watch him weave a blanket made of minutes and hours. And while we're on top of a boulder watching a sunset, he'll make a gesture with his hand, just something in the air, and I swear he's working an angle or smoothing a surface of a sculpture whose shape I can't see. But that doesn't bother me. I'm in the presence of a weaver of time and a maker of space. That's enough for me."

  At the other end of the phone line there's a long silence. "I don't know what to say, big brother," Teresa says at last. "You're a grown man who spends his days hanging out with an ape. Maybe it's counselling you need, not a girlfriend."

  With Ben it's not much easier. "When are you coming home?" he asks insistently.

  Could it be that his son, beyond the annoyance, is expressing a need to have him home? "This is home," he replies. "This is home. Why don't you come and see me?"

  "When I find the time."

  Peter never brings up Odo. When Ben found out about Odo, he threw an ice-cold tantrum. After that, it was as if his dad had turned out gay, and it was best not to ask questions lest unsavoury details be revealed.

  His granddaughter, Rachel, surprisingly, turns out to be the sweetest. They do well, antipodally. The distance allows her to pour her teenage secrets into his ear. To her, he is her gay grandfather, and in the same tone in which she gushes about boys she asks him breathlessly about Odo and their cohabitation. She wants to visit him to meet the short, hairy boyfriend, but she has school and camp, and Portugal is so far away from Vancouver, and, not really mentioned, there is her unwilling mother.

  Except for Odo, he is alone.

  He subscribes to book clubs and various magazines. He gets his sister to mail him boxes of used paperbacks--colourful, plot-driven stuff--and old magazines. Odo is as big a reader as he is. The arrival of a new National Geographic is greeted with loud hoots and the slapping of the ground with hands. Odo leafs through the magazine slowly, considering each image. Foldouts and maps are a particular source of interest.

  One of Odo's favourite books, discovered early on, is the family photo album. Peter humours Odo and goes through his childhood and early adult years with the ape, recounting to him the story of the Tovy family in Canada, their growing and ageing members, the new additions, their friends, the special occasions remembered by a snapshot. When Peter reaches a certain age, Odo recognizes him with a pant of surprise. He taps on the photo emphatically with a black finger and looks up at him. When Peter turns the pages, going back in time, and points at younger and younger guises of himself, slimmer, darker-haired, taut-skinned, captured in colour and then, earlier, in black-and-white, Odo peers with great intensity. One leap at a time they come to the oldest photo of Peter, taken in Lisbon, before his family's move to Canada, when he was a child of two. The portrait feels from another century to him. Odo stares at it with blinking incredulity.

  The few other photos in those opening page
s evoke people from his parents' earlier years in Portugal. The largest one, filling a whole page, is a group shot, the people in it stiffly standing in front of an exterior whitewashed wall. Most of these relatives Peter can't identify. His parents must have told him who they were, but he's forgotten. They are from so long ago and so far away that he finds it hard to imagine they were ever truly alive. Odo seems to share his same sense of disbelief, but with a greater desire to believe.

  A week later Odo opens the album again. Peter expects him to recognize the Lisbon photo, but the ape looks at it with a blank expression. Only by retracing the journey backwards in time, photo by photo, does he once again come to recognize Peter as a toddler. Which he forgets once more when they look at the album later. Odo is a being of the present moment, Peter realizes. Of the river of time, he worries about neither its spring nor its delta.

  It is a bittersweet activity for Peter, to revisit his life. It mires him in nostalgia. Some photos evoke stabs of memory that overwhelm him. One evening, at a shot of young Clara holding baby Ben, he begins to weep. Ben is tiny, red, wrinkled. Clara looks exhausted but ecstatic. The tiniest hand is holding on to her little finger. Odo looks at him, nonplused but concerned. The ape puts the album down and embraces him. After a moment Peter shakes himself. What is this weeping for? What purpose does it serve? None. It only gets in the way of clarity. He opens the album again and stares hard at the photo of Clara and Ben. He resists the easy appeal of sadness. Instead he focuses on the fact, huge and simple, of his love for them.

  He starts to keep a diary. In it he records his attempts at understanding Odo, the ape's habits and quirks, the general mystery of the creature. He also notes new Portuguese phrases he's learned. Then there are reflections about his life in the village, the life he's led, the sum of it all.

  He takes to sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, on one of the woolen blankets he buys. He reads on the floor, he writes, he grooms and is groomed, sometimes he naps, and sometimes he just sits there, doing nothing at all on the floor. Sitting down and getting up is tiresome, but he reminds himself that it's good exercise for a man his age. Nearly always Odo is right next to him, lightly pressed against him, minding his own ape business--or meddling with his.

  Odo rearranges the house. On the kitchen counter, the cutlery is lined up in the open, knives with knives, forks with forks, and so on. Cups and bowls are set on the counter, upside down and against the wall. The same with other objects in the house: They do not belong high up on shelves or hidden in drawers, but closer at hand, lined up against the foot of the wall, in the case of books and magazines, or set here or there on the floor.

  Peter puts things back where they belong--he is a neat man--but straightaway Odo sets things right, simian-style. Peter mulls over the situation. He returns his shoes to where he normally has them, next to the door, and the case for his reading glasses back into a drawer, then he moves a few magazines to a different location along the wall. Right behind him, Odo takes the shoes and places them on the same stone tile he placed them on earlier, and he returns the glasses case to its designated tile and the magazines to his chosen spot along the wall. Aha, thinks Peter. It's not a mess, then. It's an order of a different kind. Well, it makes the floor interesting. He lets go of his sense of neatness. It's all part of life at a crouch.

  He regularly has to return items to the rooms on the ground floor. Ostensibly a space for the keeping and caring of animals and the storage of implements needed for living off the land, it is now filled to the ceiling with the junk of the ages, the villagers being pathological hoarders from one generation to the next. Odo loves the animal pen. It is a treasure trove that endlessly exercises his curiosity.

  And beyond, there is the village, a place of a thousand points of interest for Odo. The cobblestones, for example. The flower boxes. The many stone walls, each easily climbable. The trees. The connecting roofs, of which Odo is particularly fond. Peter worries that the villagers will mind having an ape puttering atop their houses, but most don't even notice, and those who do, stare and smile. And Odo moves with nimble sure-footedness--he doesn't clatter about, displacing tiles. His favourite roof is that of the old church, from which he has a fine view. When he's up there, Peter sometimes goes inside the church. It's a humble place of worship, with bare walls, a plain altar, an awkward crucifix blackened by time, and, at the other end of the aisle, beyond the last pew, a shelf bookended by vases of flowers, the requisite shrine to some dusty saint of Christendom. He has no interest in organized religion. On his first visit, a two-minute once-over satisfied him. But the small church is a quiet spot, and it offers the same advantage as the cafe: a place to properly sit. He usually parks himself at a pew near a window from which he can see the downspout pipe Odo will take to descend from the roof. He's never come into the church with Odo, not wanting to risk it.

  Mostly, though, in the village, it is the people who interest Odo. They have lost their wariness. He is particularly well disposed towards women. Was the Peace Corps volunteer who brought him over from Africa a woman? Did a female lab technician make a positive impression on him in his early years? Or is it simple biology? Whatever the reason, he always reaches out to women. As a result, the village widows who at first shrank away from him, retreating into surliness, transform into the ones who are the most devoted to him. Odo responds amiably to all of them, making faces and sounds that comfort them and open them up further. It's a good fit, the short, stooped women dressed in black and the short, stooped animal with the black coat. From a distance, one might be forgiven for mistaking one for the other.

  Likely as not, the women--indeed, all the villagers--engage Odo in spirited conversation first. Then, when they turn to him, they speak in the simplest, most childish language, their voices raised, their expressions and gestures exaggerated, as if he were the village idiot. After all, he doesn't fala Portuguese.

  Dona Amelia becomes Odo's closest female disciple. Soon there is no longer any need for them to leave the house when she comes to clean. In fact, it is the opposite: Her weekly visit is a time when Odo happily stays in and Peter can go out and run errands. From the moment she arrives, the ape remains at her side as she moves about the house doing her light duties, which lengthen in time while costing him no more in escudos. He has the most immaculate, nearly barren house in Tuizelo, though peculiarly ordered, since Dona Amelia respects the ape's odd sense of tidiness. All the while she's working, she chatters away to Odo in mellifluous Portuguese.

  She tells Peter that Odo is "um verdadeiro presente para a aldeia"--a true gift to the village.

  He makes his own observations about the village. The richest villager is Senhor Alvaro; as a shopkeeper, he has the most disposable income. Then come the villagers who own and cultivate land. Next come the shepherds, who own their flocks. Last come the workers, who own nothing except perhaps their own houses and who work for those who have work to give them. They are the poorest in the village and have the most freedom. Peopling every level of this hierarchy are family members young and old, all of whom work to some degree, according to their capacity. The priest, an amiable man named Father Eloi, stands apart, since he owns nothing but has business with everyone. He moves across all levels. Overall, the villagers of Tuizelo are monetarily poor, though this is not immediately apparent. In many ways they are autarkic, growing their own food, both animal and vegetable, and making and mending their own clothes and furniture. Barter--of goods and services--is still a common practice.

  He observes an odd local tradition he has seen nowhere else. He first notices it at a funeral, as the procession makes its way through the village to the church: A number of the mourners are walking in reverse. It appears to be an expression of grief. Along the street, across the square, up the stairs, backwards they move, their grave faces tilted down as they dwell on their sorrow. Regularly they turn their heads to look over their shoulders to direct themselves, but others also assist them by reaching out with a hand. He is intrigued b
y the custom and inquires about it. Neither Dona Amelia nor anyone else seems to know where it comes from or why exactly it is done.

  The ape's preferred spot in the village is the cafe. The villagers become used to seeing them sitting at an outdoor table, enjoying cafes com muito leite.

  One wet day he and Odo are standing in front of the cafe. They have just come back from a long walk. They're both cold. The outdoor tables and chairs are puddled with rain. He hesitates. Senhor Alvaro is at the counter. He sees them and raises his hand and gestures that they should come in.

  They settle in a corner of the room. The establishment is typical of its sort. There is a counter with the saucers piled up, each with its small spoon and package of sugar, ready to receive a cup of coffee. Behind the counter, the shelves are lined with bottles of wine and liqueur. In front of the counter are the round tables with their complement of metal chairs. Lording over the room is a television, which is always on but thankfully with the volume turned quite low.

  To Peter's surprise, Odo is not engrossed by the television. He watches the small men chasing after the tiny white ball or, preferably, the couples looking at each other with great intensity--the ape prefers soaps to sports--but only for a short time. Of greater interest is the warm room and the real live people in it. The television is dethroned while the patrons look at Odo and Odo looks at them. Meanwhile, Peter and Senhor Alvaro catch each other's eyes. They smile. Peter lifts two fingers to place their usual order. Senhor Alvaro nods. After that, they become habitues at the cafe, even down to where they sit.

  He and Odo often go on long hikes. Odo never again asks to be carried, as he did once in Oklahoma. Now the ape's energy is unflagging. But he still regularly takes refuge in trees, perching himself high up on a branch. Peter can only wait patiently below. For being so quiet in the forest--except when they find clearings of spongy moss, perfect for merry tussles--they see badgers, otters, weasels, hedgehogs, genets, wild boar, hares and rabbits, partridges, owls, crows, ibis, jays, swallows, doves and pigeons, other birds, once a shy lynx, and another time a rare Iberian wolf. Each time Peter thinks that Odo will go after them, a crashing chase through the undergrowth, but instead he stands stock-still and stares. Despite the evident wealth of the forest, they both prefer to explore the open plateau.