Yann Martel - The High Mountains of Portugal

The egg yolk wobbles. There is a pause in which the whole town holds its breath.

“I don’t know!” the plump man finally cries in a high-pitched voice, spilling the yolk. He pushes his way through the crowd and bolts. The sight of the ungainly, bandy-legged town notable racing down the street dumbfounds Tomás. He has lost his only ally.

A man speaks out. “It could have been left, it could have been right. Hard to tell.”

Murmurs of agreement rise up. The crowd seems cooler now, its indulgence turning to edginess. He has lifted his foot off the pedal and the engine has died. He gets out and turns the starting handle. He pleads with the crowd in front of the machine. “Listen to me, please! This machine will move, it will jump! For the sake of your children, for your own sake, please move away! I beg you! This is a most dangerous device. Step back!”

A man next to him addresses him quietly. “Oh, here comes Demetrio and his mother. She’s not one you want to cross.”

“Who’s Demetrio?” Tomás asks.

“He’s the village idiot. But so nicely dressed by his mother.”

Tomás looks up the street and sees the town notable returning. He’s weeping, his face covered in glistening tears. Holding his hand, pulling him along, is a very small woman dressed in black. She’s holding a club. Her eyes are fixed on Tomás. The way she’s straining at the end of her son’s arm, she looks like a tiny dog trying to hurry its leisurely owner along. Tomás returns to the driver’s seat and grapples with the machine’s controls.

He humours the machine into not pouncing forward. As he plies the pedals, it growls but only leans forward, like an enormous boulder that has lost the tiny pebble that holds it back but hasn’t yet gone crashing down the slope to destroy the village below. The crowd gasps and instantly creates a space all around. He presses a touch harder on the accelerator pedal. He prepares to twist the steerage wheel with mania in whatever direction his instincts will choose, hoping it will be the correct direction, when he is confounded to see that the steerage wheel is turning on its own, of its own will. And it proves to be turning the right way: The vehicle creeps forward and finishes clearing the turn onto the cross street. He would continue to stare in wonderment if he didn’t hear the clanging sound of a wooden club striking metal.

“YOU DARE TO MAKE FUN OF MY SON?” cries the mother of the broken egg. She has clocked one of the headlights with such force that it has cleanly broken off. He is horrified — his uncle’s jewel! “I’M GOING TO SUFFOCATE YOU UP A SHEEP’S ASS!”

The machine has conveniently brought its hood level with the aggrieved mother. Up goes the club, down goes the club. With a mighty crash, a valley appears on the hood. Tomás would push harder on the accelerator pedal, but there are still many people close-by. “Please, I implore you, hold your club!” he calls out.

Now the sidelight is within her easy reach. Another swing. In a glass-shattering explosion it flies off. The madwoman, whose son persists with his inconsolable blubbering, is winding up her club again.

“I’LL FEED YOU TO A DOG AND THEN EAT THAT DOG!” she shrieks.

Tomás pushes hard on the accelerator pedal. The woman narrowly misses the side mirror; her club instead shatters the window of the door to the cabin. In a roar, he and the injured automobile leap forth and escape Ponte de Sor.

A few kilometres onward, next to a growth of bushes, he brings the machine to a standstill. He gets out and gazes at the automobile’s amputations. He clears the glass shards from the cabin. His uncle will be livid at what has been done to the pride of his menagerie.

Just ahead is the village of Rosmaninhal. Is that not one of the villages he mocked for its obscurity? Rosmaninhal, you can do me no harm, he had boasted. Will the village now make him pay for his arrogance? He prepares for yet another night sleeping in the machine. This time he supplements his uncle’s coat with a blanket. He extracts the precious diary from the trunk and opens it at random.

The sun brings no solace, nor does sleep. Food no longer sates me, nor the company of men. Merely to breathe is to display an optimism I do not feel.

Tomás breathes deeply, finding optimism where Father Ulisses could not. Strange how this diary of misery brings him such joy. Poor Father Ulisses. He had such high hopes arriving on São Tomé. Before his energies were depleted by disease, solitary and without purpose, he spent much of his time wandering and watching. There seems to be no purpose to these rambles other than the working off of despair — better to be desperate and itinerant than desperate and sitting in an overheated hut. And what he saw, he wrote down.

Today a slave asked me — signified to me — if my leather shoes were made from the skin of an African. They are of the same colour. Was the man also eaten? Were his bones reduced to useful powder? Some of the Africans believe that we Europeans are cannibals. The notion is the result of their incredulity at the use they are put to: field labour. In their experience, the material part of one’s life, what we would call the earning of it, demands no great effort. Tending a vegetable garden in the tropics takes little time & occupies few hands. Hunting is more demanding, but is a group activity & source of some pleasure & the effort is not begrudged. Why then would the white man take so many of them if they didn’t have ulterior motives greater than gardening? I reassured the slave that my shoes were not made of his fellows’ skin. I cannot say I convinced him.

Tomás knows what the slaves and Father Ulisses cannot: the unending demands of the sugar cane fields of Brazil and, later, of the cotton fields of America. A man or a woman may not need to work so hard to live, but a cog in a system must turn ceaselessly.

No matter their provenance — what territory, what tribe — the slaves soon sink to the same saturnine behaviour. They become lethargic, passive, indifferent. The more the overseers exert themselves to change this behaviour, freely using the whip, the more it becomes ingrained. Of the many signs of hopelessness the slaves manifest, the one that strikes me the most is geophagy. They paw the ground like dogs, gather a round ball, open their mouths, chew it & swallow it. I cannot decide if eating of the Lord’s humus is unchristian.

Tomás turns his head and looks at the darkening fields around him. To be miserable upon the land — and then to eat it ? Later, Father Ulisses records trying it himself.

A darkness blooms in me, a choking algae of the soul. I chew slowly. It does not taste bad, only is unpleasant on the teeth. How much longer, Lord, how much longer? I feel unwell & see in the eyes of others that I am worse. Walking to town exhausts me. I go to the bay instead and stare out at the waters.

Whatever it was that afflicted Father Ulisses — and Europeans in Africa had their unhappy choice of ailments: malaria, dysentery, respiratory illnesses, heart troubles, anemia, hepatitis, leprosy, and syphilis, among others, in addition to malnutrition — it was slowly and painfully killing him.

Tomás falls asleep thinking of his son and of how, sometimes at night, after an evening at his uncle’s house, he would slip into Dora’s room in the servants’ quarters. She might be asleep already, after a long day of work. Then he would take sleeping Gaspar into his arms and hold him. Amazing how the two could sleep through any disturbance. He would hold his limp son and sing to him softly, nearly hoping he would wake so they could play.

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, Tomás 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.