Yann Martel - The High Mountains of Portugal

To block out the rain, Tomás covers the shattered door window with a blanket, securing the blanket to the frame by closing the door on it. The rain becomes a monotonous drumming on the roof. Amidst the scattered supplies he makes a space for himself on the leather sofa, covers himself with another blanket, and curls up tightly…

He wakes with a start. He has no idea if he has slept five or fifty-five minutes. The rain is still falling. But the shepherd is gone. Peering through the machine’s rain-streaked windows, he can see a hazy grey shape up ahead on the road — it is the flock of sheep. He opens the cabin door and stands on the footboard. The shepherd is in the middle of his flock, looking as if he is walking on a cloud. The dog is flitting about as it did earlier, but Tomás can no longer hear it. The flock moves down the road, then flows off to one side of it, taking a path into the countryside.

Through the rain Tomás watches the flock get smaller and smaller. Just as it begins to disappear beyond a ridge, the shepherd, a black dot now, stops and turns. Is he checking for a lost sheep? Is he looking back at him? Tomás waves vigorously. He can’t tell if the man has noticed his farewell. The black dot vanishes.

He returns to the driving compartment. There is a small package on the passenger seat. Wrapped in cloth are a piece of bread, a chunk of white cheese, and a tiny sealed earthen jar of honey. A Christmas gift? When is Christmas, exactly? Four days away? He realizes he’s losing track of the days. At any rate, what a kindness on the part of the shepherd. He is touched. He eats. It tastes so good! He can’t remember ever having eaten such savoury bread, such flavourful cheese, such delicious honey.

The rain stops and the sky clears. While waiting for the wintry sunshine to dry the road, he lubricates the machine with drops of oil. Then, impatiently, he sets off. When he reaches the edge of the small town of Arez, he enters it on foot. He is pleased to find a proper apothecary.

“I’ll buy your whole stock. I have horses that are badly infested with lice,” he informs the man behind the counter once he has produced the usual small bottle of moto-naphtha.

“You might want to try Hipolito, the blacksmith,” the apothecary says.

“Why would he have any of the stuff?”

“Horses are his concern, including horses badly infested with lice, I would think. And what about your feet?”

“My feet?”

“Yes. What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing’s wrong with my feet. Why would anything be wrong with them?”

“I saw the way you were walking.”

“My feet are perfectly healthy.”

Walking backwards through the village on his perfectly healthy feet, Tomás finds Hipolito’s smithy down a lane. He is astonished to discover that the blacksmith has an enormous barrel of moto-naphtha. Tomás is dizzy with joy. The supply will not only glut the automobile with fuel but will also soothe his ravaged body.

“My good man, I’ll buy lots of it. I have twelve horses that are badly infested with lice.”

“Oh, you don’t want to use this stuff on horses. That would be doing them a great disservice. It’s very harsh on the skin. You need a powder that you’ll mix with water.”

“Why then do you have so much moto-naphtha? What’s it for?”

“For automobiles. They’re a new device.”

“Perfect! I have one of those too, and as it happens it desperately needs to be fed.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” says the jovial rustic.

“My horses were on my mind. The poor beasts.”

Hipolito the blacksmith is moved by the drama of Tomás’s twelve afflicted horses and goes into tender, lengthy details about how the lice powder should be mixed with warm water, applied topically, allowed to dry, then carefully brushed and combed out, starting at the top of the head and working one’s way back and down across the horse’s body. It’s a task that takes much time, but a horse deserves nothing less than the best treatment.

“Bring your horses and I’ll help you do it,” Hipolito adds in a burst of fellow equine love.

“I’m not from these parts. I only have my automobile here.”

“Then you’ve come a long way searching for the wrong remedy for your horses. I have the powder right here. Twelve horses, you say? Six cans should do you, eight to be safe. And you’ll need this comb-and-brush kit. The highest quality.”

“Thank you. You can’t imagine how relieved I am. Tell me, how long have you been selling moto-naphtha?”

“Oh, about six months.”

“How’s business?”

“You’re my first customer! I’ve never seen an automobile in my life. But it’s the carriage of the future, I’m told. And I’m a smart businessman, I am. I understand commerce. It’s important to be up to date. No one wants to buy what’s old. You want to be the first to spread the word and show off the product. That’s how you corner the market.”

“How did you get this enormous barrel all the way up here?”

“By stagecoach.”

At the word Tomás’s heart skips a beat.

“But you know,” Hipolito adds, “I didn’t tell them it was for automobiles. I told them it was to treat horses with lice. They’re funny about automobiles, those stagecoach drivers.”

“Are they? Any stagecoaches coming soon?”

“Oh, in the next hour or so.”

Not only does Tomás run back to the automobile, he runs forward to it.

When he roars up to the smithy in his uncle’s Renault with the alarm of a bank robber, Hipolito is surprised, stunned, aghast, and delighted at the throbbing, clanging invention Tomás has brought to his shop.

“So this is it? What a big, noisy thing! Quite ugly in a beautiful sort of way, I’d say. Reminds me of my wife,” yells Hipolito.

Tomás turns the machine off. “I completely agree. I mean about the automobile. To be honest with you, I find it ugly in an ugly sort of way.”

“Hmmm, you may be right,” the blacksmith muses, perhaps pondering how the automobile will wreck his commerce and way of life. His forehead wrinkles. “Oh well, business is business. Where does the moto-naphtha go? Show me.”

Tomás points eagerly. “Here, here, here, and here.”

He has Hipolito fill the fuel tank, the barrel, and all the glass bottles of vermin lotion. He eyes the bottles hungrily. He sorely wants to empty one all over his body.

“Come again!” cries Hipolito after Tomás has paid for the fuel, the eight cans of lice powder for horses, and the comb-and-brush kit of the highest quality. “Remember, from back to front, starting at the top of the head and working your way back and down. Poor creatures!”

“Thank you, thank you!” shouts Tomás as he speeds away.

After Arez, he turns off the road onto a well-marked track. He trusts that his map, with its faint markings for secondary roads, will lead him back to the road beyond the larger town of Nisa, which he is hoping to circumvent by this deviation. From that track he turns onto another, then another. The quality of the tracks goes from bad to worse. There are rocks everywhere. He navigates the terrain as best he can. The land, meanwhile, rises and falls like heaving swells so that he can never see very far around him. Is this how Father Ulisses felt sailing to the island, closed in while in the wide open?

In the midst of his oceanic meanderings, the track simply vanishes. The directed smoothness of a pathway is replaced by a rockiness that is uniform and undefined, as if the track were a river that opened onto a delta, casting him adrift. He navigates on, but eventually he hears the voice of prudence and it urgently suggests he reverse his course.

He turns the machine around, but facing one way looks no different from facing another. He becomes confused. Surrounding him in all directions is the same countryside, rocky, dry, silent, with silver-green olive trees as far as the eye can see and bulbous white clouds boiling up high in the sky. He’s lost, a castaway. And night is coming.