Yann Martel - The High Mountains of Portugal

Father Abrahan beholds Maria Passos Castro, who has a puzzled look on her face; he beholds one of those new, fashionable carriages he’s heard about (but this one in very poor condition); and he beholds a bedraggled stranger next to it, dry-heaving with mighty roars.

Tomás climbs into the driving compartment. He wants to go. In a daze he looks at the steerage wheel. The machine needs to move to the right to avoid the wall next to it. What does that mean in terms of the rotation of the wheel in his hands? Grief surges through him ahead of his capacity to answer the question. The steerage wheel has finally and truly defeated him. He begins to weep. He weeps because he feels horribly sick. He weeps because he is soul-racked and bone-weary tired of driving the machine. He weeps because his ordeal is only half over; he still has to drive all the way back to Lisbon. He weeps because he is unwashed and unshaved. He weeps because he has spent days on end in foreign lands and nights on end sleeping in an automobile, cold and cramped. He weeps because he has lost his job, and what will he do next, how will he earn his living? He weeps because he has discovered a crucifix he no longer cares to have discovered. He weeps because he misses his father. He weeps because he misses his son and his lover. He weeps because he has killed a child. He weeps because, because, because.

He weeps like a child, catching his breath and hiccupping, his face drenched with tears. We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more — there is no greater relationship. Long before Darwin, a priest lucid in his madness encountered four chimpanzees on a forlorn island in Africa and hit upon a great truth: We are risen apes, not fallen angels. Tomás is strangled by loneliness.

“Father, I need you!” he cries out.

Father Abrahan throws his fishing gear to the ground and runs to help the piteous stranger.

Eusebio Lozora says the Lord’s Prayer three times slowly. After that he launches forth with unrehearsed praise and supplication. His thoughts wander but return, his sentences stop midway but eventually resume. He praises God, then he praises his wife to God. He asks God to bless her and their children. He asks for God’s continued support and protection. Then, since he is a physician, a pathologist at that, rooted in the body, but also a believer, rooted in the promise of the Lord, he repeats, perhaps two dozen times, the words “The Body of Christ,” after which he gets up off his knees and returns to his desk.

He considers himself a careful practitioner. He examines the paragraph he has been working on the way a farmer might look back at a freshly sowed furrow, checking to see that he has done a good job because he knows the furrow will yield a crop — in his case, a crop of understanding. Does the writing hold up to his high standards? Is it true, clear, concise, final?

He is catching up on his work. It is the last day of December of the year 1938, its final hours, in fact. A bleak Christmas has been dutifully celebrated, but otherwise he is in no mood for holiday festivities. His desk is covered with papers, some in clear view, others carefully, meaningfully eclipsed to varying degrees depending on their importance, and still others that are ready to be filed away.

His office is quiet, as is the hallway outside it. Bragança has a population of not thirty thousand people, but its Hospital São Francisco, in which he is head pathologist, is the largest in Alto Douro. Other parts of the hospital will be lit up and swollen with bustle and noise — the emergency wing, where people come in screaming and crying, the wards, where the patients ring bells and hold the nurses up in endless conversations — but the pathology wing, in the basement of the hospital, beneath all these lively floors, is typically hushed, like all pathology wings. He wishes it to stay that way.

With the adding of three words and the crossing out of one, he completes the paragraph. He reads it over one last time. It is his private opinion that pathologists are the only physicians who know how to write. All the other devotees of Hippocrates hold up as their triumph the restored patient, and the words they might write — a diagnosis, a prescription, instructions for a treatment — are of fleeting interest to them. These physicians of restoration, as soon as they see a patient standing on his or her feet, move on to a new case. And it is true that every day patients depart the hospital with quite a bounce to their step. Just an accident, or a little bout of this or that illness, they say to themselves. But Eusebio places greater store in those who were seriously sick. He notes in these patients leaving the hospital the tottering gait and the dishevelled hair, the desperately humbled look and the holy terror in their eyes. They know, with inescapable clarity, what is coming to them one day. There are many ways in which life’s little candle can be snuffed out. A cold wind pursues us all. And when a stub of a candle is brought in, the wick blackened, the sides streaked with dripped wax, the attending physician — at the Hospital São Francisco, in Bragança, Portugal, at least — is either he or his colleague, Dr. José Otavio.

Every dead body is a book with a story to tell, each organ a chapter, the chapters united by a common narrative. It is Eusebio’s professional duty to read these stories, turning every page with a scalpel, and at the end of each to write a book report. What he writes in a report must reflect exactly what he has read in the body. It makes for a hard-headed kind of poetry. Curiosity draws him on, like all readers. What happened to this body? How? Why? He searches for that crafty, enforced absence that overtakes us all. What is death? There is the corpse — but that is the result, not the thing itself. When he finds a grossly enlarged lymph node or tissue that is abnormally rugose, he knows that he’s hot on death’s trail. How curious, though: Death often comes disguised as life, a mass of exuberant, anomalous cells — or, like a murderer, it leaves a clue, a smoking gun, the sclerotic caking of an artery, before fleeing the scene. Always he comes upon death’s handiwork just as death itself has turned the corner, its hem disappearing with a quiet swish.

He leans back in his chair to stretch. The chair creaks, like old bones. He notices a file on his workbench, along the wall, where his microscope stands. What is it doing there? And what is that on the floor beneath the bench — another file? And the glass on his desk — it’s so dried out, it’s collecting dust. He strongly believes in the importance of proper hydration. Life is moist. He should clean the glass and fill it with fresh, cool water. He shakes his head. Enough of these scattered thoughts. He has much that needs preserving, not only in solutions and slides but in words. In each case he must bring together the patient’s clinical history, the findings from the autopsy, and the histological results into a smooth and coherent whole. He must apply himself. Focus, man, focus. Find the words. Besides, there are other reports that need finishing. There is the one he has been putting off. It has to be done tonight. A body that was crushed and left for several days half-exposed to the air, half-submerged in a river, inviting both rot and bloating.

A loud rap at the door startles him. He looks at his watch. It is half past ten at night.

“Come in,” he calls out, exasperation escaping from his voice like steam from a kettle.

No one enters. But he senses a brooding presence on the other side of the solid wood door.

“I said come in,” he calls out again.

Still no rattling of the doorknob. Pathology is not a medical art that is much subject to emergency. The sick, or rather their biopsied samples, can nearly always wait till the next morning, and the dead are even more patient, so it’s unlikely to be a clerk with an urgent case. And pathologists’ offices are not located so that the general public might find them easily. Who then, at such an hour, on New Year’s Eve at that, would wend their way through the basement of the hospital to look for him?