Yann Martel - The High Mountains of Portugal

Nothing bursts into flames. The automobile only clangs, bawls, and eats up the road with terrifying appetite. If there is evil resident in Rosmaninhal — indeed, if there is good resident in Rosmaninhal — he sees none of it. The village vanishes in a streak. He sees a figure — a man? a woman? — turn to look in his direction and fall over.

It is some kilometres past Rosmaninhal that he comes upon the stagecoach. His uncle warned him about these, did he not? Tomás slows down and thinks of holding back until an alternate route suggests itself or the coach turns off. But he grows impatient on the solitary country road. There is no comparison between the thirty horses galloping in his machine and the four horses cantering ahead of the coach.

He pushes down on the accelerator pedal. With a choke, a cough, and a shudder, the machine grips the road with greater determination. He feels his hands pulled forward while his head is pushed back. The distance between automobile and stagecoach begins to shrink. He sees a man’s head appear from the top of the coach. The man waves at him. A moment later, the coach, which has been somewhat on the right side of the road, heaves to its centre. Is this the reason behind his uncle’s warning about stagecoaches, their erratic weaving? He rather interprets the move as a courtesy, the stagecoach moving aside to let him go by, like a gentleman allowing a lady first passage through a doorway. The man’s wave reinforces this interpretation in his mind. He urges the automobile on. He navigates into the space to the right of the stagecoach. Every part of the machine is shaking. The passengers in the stagecoach, which is wildly rocking to and fro and side to side, hold on to the edge of the windows and crane their necks to look at him, gawking with a number of expressions: curiosity, amazement, fear, disgust.

The two drivers of the stagecoach come into view, his colleagues in a way, and he eases off the accelerator pedal. The stagecoach drivers and he will greet each other like sea captains whose ships are crossing paths. He has read a great many captains’ logbooks in the course of his investigations. The way stagecoach and automobile are pitching and rolling has something maritime to it. He lifts a hand, ready to wave, a smile building upon his face.

He looks up at the stagecoach drivers and is shocked at what he sees. If the passengers had a number of expressions on their faces, the drivers have only one: out-and-out loathing. The man who turned and waved at him earlier — or was he in fact shaking his fist? — is barking and growling at him like a dog and is making as if to leap from his seat down onto the roof of the machine. The man doing the driving looks even more incensed. His face is red with anger and his mouth is open in a continuous shout. He is brandishing a long whip, spurring his horses on. The whip rises and coils in the air like a serpent before coming down and flattening out with a sharp and piercing snap that goes off like a gun. Only then does Tomás realize that the steeds have been pushed to full thundering gallop. He can feel the ground beneath him shaking from their efforts. Despite the cushioning of the automobile’s rubber wheels and the mediation of the suspension springs, the hard, marvellous work of the horses rattles his bones and awes his brain. In relative terms, he is slowly passing the stagecoach the way a man on a street might overtake an elderly walker, with such ease and comfort that he has the leisure to tip his hat and say a kind word. But from the point of view of someone standing by the side of the road, both he and the stagecoach are hurtling through space at a fantastic speed, as if the elderly walker and the man on the street were advancing on the roofs of two express trains racing on parallel tracks.

The silence that enveloped him as a result of his intense concentration suddenly explodes into the hammering of the galloping horses’ hooves, the screaming creaking of the swaying stagecoach, the shouting of the drivers, the shrill distress of the frightened passengers, the cracking of the whip, and the roar of the automobile. He presses the accelerator pedal as hard as he can. The automobile surges ahead, but slowly.

A further noise, keen and metallic, stabs his ears. The driver has turned his whip off the horses and is now lashing the roof of the automobile. Tomás grimaces, as if the lashes were striking his own back. The driver’s assistant has his arms raised. Above his head is a wooden chest with metal strappings. It looks heavy. The man hurls it at the automobile, and it hits the roof like a bomb, followed by scraping sounds as the chest and its contents slide off. The horses, less than a metre away from Tomás, are kicking up a storm of dirt and throwing off quantities of froth from their mouths. Their eyes bulge with terror. They veer closer. The driver is steering them into the automobile! Death is upon me, thinks Tomás.

The horses give out just as the automobile reaches its full speed. The machine moves ahead decisively and he is able to steady it and bring it back to the centre of the road, clipping the right lead horse so closely that he sees in the side mirror that it has to rear up its head to avoid hitting the back of the cabin.

The moment he is ahead, the exhausted horses falter to a halt. Behind him, the drivers continue to shout. In the side mirror he watches the passengers pour out of the stagecoach as they and the drivers direct their shouting and gesturing at each other.

He feels shattered by the encounter and wants to stop, but fear of the stagecoach catching up drives him on. As his unhappy ship forges ahead, he focuses on the road again. His stomach is as turbulent as a stormy sea. He squirms with itchiness.

He considers his situation. How many days has he been driving? He thinks and counts. One, two, three, four — four nights. Four nights and five days of his allotment of ten. Only ten days. And he is not even out of the province of Ribatejo, not a quarter of the way to his destination. How did he imagine that he could complete his mission in so few days? The notion is laughable. He was lured by the promise of his uncle’s magic carpet. The chief curator of the Museum of Ancient Art will not tolerate him being late. If he misses even a single day of work, he will be fired, plain and simple. That is the work world he lives in, one where he is an insignificant, replaceable cog. His relations with the chief curator, the collections manager, and the other curators at the museum are no better than Father Ulisses’ relations were with the Bishop and the island clergy. How happy is a work environment where colleagues never eat together but rather sit in sour isolation? Sometimes he feels he can match every misery that Father Ulisses experienced on São Tomé with one he has experienced at the museum. The same tedium. The same solitary nature of the work, broken by tense encounters with others. The same physical discomfort, in his case the unending days spent in damp and musty basement storage rooms or hot and dusty attics. The same choking misery. The same floundering attempt to make sense of things.

I find small shrines on the plantations, set up in remote locations. They are crudely made of wood or baked mud, with shells & rotting fruit lying about them. If they be destroyed—& it is not I who does so — they reappear somewhere else. I am pleased to come upon these shrines. The slaves, who in their native villages practice various crafts, do nothing here except the compulsory fieldwork. No metalwork, no woodwork, no basket weaving, no ornament-making, no tailoring, no body painting, no singing, nothing. On this green island of malefic riot, they are as productive as mules. Only in these shrines do I see a vestige of their former lives, a reach for pregnancy.