Yann Martel - The High Mountains of Portugal

Tomás presses on. He is not bedevilled by slaves, only ghosts. And his ship must only make three jumps over a river. The crossing of the bridges is a rumbling affair. He fears that he will drive the machine off them. When he has escaped the third bridge and reached the eastern shore of the river, he is too rattled to drive on. He decides that since he is motoring, perhaps he should properly learn how to motor. He stops and retrieves what he needs from the cabin. Sitting behind the steerage wheel, manual and dictionary at hand, he applies himself to learning the proper operation of the change-speed lever, the clutch pedal, and the accelerator pedal. The manual is illuminating, but the knowledge he gains from it is purely theoretical. Its application is the rub. He finds moving smoothly from neutral gear — as his uncle called it, though he finds nothing neutral about it — to first gear insuperably difficult. Over the course of the rest of the day, in jarring fits and starts, he advances perhaps five hundred metres, the machine roaring and coughing and shuddering and stopping the whole way. He curses until nightfall sends him to bed.

In the dimming light, as fingers of cold reach for him, he seeks calm in Father Ulisses’ diary.

If the Empire be a man, then the hand that is holding up a solid gold bullion is Angola, while the other that is jingling pennies in the pocket — that is São Tomé.

So the priest quotes an aggrieved trader. Tomás has studied the history that Father Ulisses is fated to live: The priest set foot on São Tomé between sugar and chocolate, between the island’s time as a leading exporter of sugar, in the late sixteenth century, and of the chocolate bean now, in the early twentieth century. He would live the rest of his short life at the start of a three-century-long trough of poverty, stagnation, despair, and decadence, a time when São Tomé was an island of half-abandoned plantations and feuding elites who made the better part of their meagre living off the living, that is, from the slave trade. The island supplied slave ships with provisions — water, wood, yams, maize flour, fruit — and exploited some slaves for its own needs — the ongoing marginal production of sugar, cotton, rice, ginger, and palm oil — but the white islanders mainly acted as slave brokers. They could not dream of rivalling Angola’s vast and endless domestic supply, but the Bight of Benin was at their doorstep across the Gulf of Guinea and that coast was rich with slaves. The island was both an ideal way station for a ship about to cross the Atlantic, the hellish voyage that came to be called the Middle Passage — such an intestinal expression, Tomás thought — and an excellent back door into Portuguese Brazil and its ravenous hunger for slave labour. And so the slaves came, in their thousands. “This pocket jingles with dazed African souls,” Father Ulisses comments.

That he travelled to São Tomé on a slave ship was not incidental. He had applied to be a slave priest, a priest assigned to the salvation of the souls of slaves. “I want to serve the humblest of the humble, those whose souls Man has forgot but God hasn’t.” He explains his urgent new mission on São Tomé:

A century & a half ago some Hebraic children, in ages from 2 to 8 yrs, were brought to the island. From these noxious seeds a wretched plant grew that spread its poison to all the soil, polluting the unwary. My mission is twice then — once more to bring the African soul to God & further to tear away from that soul the foul grappling roots of the Jew. I spend my days at the port, a sentinel of the Lord, waiting for slave ships to bring in their bounty. When one arrives, I board it and christen the Africans & read the Bible to them. You are all God’s children, I repeat to them tirelessly. I also draw the odd sketch.

That is his duty, which he fulfils with unquestioning diligence: to welcome strangers to a faith they do not follow in a language they do not understand. At this stage in his diary, Father Ulisses appears to be a churchman typical of his time, steeped in the Lord, steeped in ignorance and contempt. That will change, Tomás knows.

He falls asleep in an unsettled frame of mind. He cannot find comfort in the automobile, neither in driving it nor in sleeping in it.

In the morning he would like to wash, but neither soap nor towel is to be found in the cabin. After the usual motoring difficulties he sets off. The road through a dull, flat landscape of tilled fields leads him to Porto Alto, which is a larger town than he expected. His skill in getting the automobile going has improved, but whatever composure this new ability gives him is seriously undermined by the surge of people who appear on all sides. People wave, people shout, people come close. A young man runs alongside the automobile. “Hello!” he shouts.

“Hello!” Tomás shouts back.

“What an incredible machine!”

“Thank you!”

“Won’t you stop?”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“I still have far to go!” Tomás shouts.

The young man moves off. Another young man appears right away in his stead, eager to pursue his own hollered dialogue with Tomás. As he gives up, he is replaced by another. All the way through Porto Alto, Tomás is kept in constant, shouting conversation with eager strangers jogging next to the machine. When at last he reaches the far edge of the town, he would like to cry out in victory at having so adroitly controlled the machine, but his voice is too hoarse.

In the open country he eyes the change-speed lever. He has covered ground in the last three days, the machine has undeniable stamina — but so do snails. The manual is clear on the point, and his uncle proved it in practice in Lisbon: Real motoring results are to be achieved only in a higher gear. He rehearses in his mind. Finally it comes down to doing it or not. Pedals, buttons, levers — these are released or pressed, pushed or pulled, each according to its need. He performs all these actions without taking his eyes off the road — or letting air out of his lungs. The clutch pedal tingles, it seems, as if to signal to him that it has done its job and would be happy if he took his foot off its back, which he does. At the same moment, the accelerator pedal seems to fall forward ever so slightly, as if it, on the contrary, were hungry for the pressure of his foot. He pushes down harder.

The monster pounces forward in second gear. The road is disappearing under its wheels with such thunder that he feels it’s no longer the machine that is moving forward on the landscape but the landscape that is being pulled from underneath it, like that hazardous trick in which a tablecloth is yanked off a fully set table. The landscape vanishes with the same menacing understanding that the trick will work only if done at lightning speed. Whereas earlier he was afraid of going too fast, now he’s afraid of going too slowly, because if second gear malfunctions it won’t be just he who meets his end smashing into a telegraph pole, but the entire porcelain landscape that will crash with him. In this madness, he is a teacup rattling on a saucer, his eyes glinting like bone china glaze.

As he careers through space, motionless while in headlong motion, furiously staring ahead, he yearns for still, thoughtful landscapes, a calm vineyard like he saw yesterday, or a shoreline like Father Ulisses frequents, where each small wave lands upon his feet in prayerful collapse like a pilgrim who has reached his destination. But the priest is jarred in his own way, is he not? As Tomás is shaking now in this infernal machine, so must Father Ulisses’ hand shake at times as he commits his harrowed thoughts to the pages of his diary.

The priest quickly becomes disenchanted with São Tomé. He gets along no better with the natural world there than he did in Angola. There is the same strangle of vegetation, fed by the same incessant showers and coddled by the same unremitting heat. He is afflicted by the wet season, with its torrents of rain interspersed with gaps of stifling moist heat, and he is afflicted by the dry season, with its burning heat and ground-level clouds of dripping mist. He complains bitterly of this hothouse weather “that makes a green leaf sing & a man die.” And then there are the supplementary, incidental miseries: the stench of a sugar mill, bad food, infestations of ants, ticks as large as cherry pips, a cut to his left thumb that becomes infected.