Yann Martel - The High Mountains of Portugal

He gets up, upsetting both himself and a number of papers. He walks around his desk, takes hold of the doorknob, and opens the door.

A woman in her fifties, with lovely features and large brown eyes, stands before him. In one hand she is holding a bag. He is surprised to see her. She eyes him. In a warm, deep voice, she starts up: “Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but find no rest. I am poured out like water. My heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd. Oh my darling, come quickly to my help!”

While a small part of Eusebio sighs, a larger part smiles. The woman at the door is his wife. She comes to his office to see him on occasion, though not usually at such a late hour. Her name is Maria Luisa Motaal Lozora, and he is familiar with the words of her lament. They are taken mostly from Psalm 22, her favourite psalm. She in fact has no cause for conventional suffering. She is in good mental and physical health, she lives in a nice house, she has no desire to leave him or the town where they live, she has good friends, she is never truly bored, they have three grown children who are happy and healthy — in short, she has all the elements that make for a good life. Only his wife, his dear wife, is an amateur theologian, a priest manqué, and she takes the parameters of life, her mortal coildom, her Jobdom, very seriously.

She is fond of quoting from Psalm 22, especially its first line: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” His thought in response is that, nonetheless, there is “My God, my God” at the start of the plaint. It helps that there’s someone listening, if not doing.

He has much listening to do, he does, with his wife, and not much doing. Her mouth might be dried up like a potsherd, but she never quotes the line that follows in Psalm 22—“and my tongue sticks to my jaws”—because that would be an untruth. Her tongue is never stuck to her jaws. Maria ardently believes in the spoken word. To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken. And so she talks. She talks all the time. She talks to herself when she is alone at home and she talks to herself when she is alone in the street, and she has been talking to him incessantly since the day they met, thirty-eight years ago. His wife is an endlessly unfurling conversation, with never a true stop, only a pause. But she produces no drivel and has no patience for drivel. Sometimes she chafes at the inane talk she has to endure with her friends. She serves them coffee and cake, she listens to their prattle, and later she grouses, “Guinea pigs, I am surrounded by guinea pigs.”

He surmises that his wife read about guinea pigs and something about them aroused her resentment: their smallness, their utter harmlessness and defencelessness, their fearfulness, their contentedness simply to chew on a grain or two and expect no more from life. As a pathologist he quite likes the guinea pig. It is indeed small in every way, especially when set against the stark and random cruelty of life. Every corpse he opens up whispers to him, “I am a guinea pig. Will you warm me to your breast?” Drivel, his wife would call that. She has no patience for death.

When they were young, Maria tolerated for a while the amorous cooing of which he was so fond. Despite the surface brutality of his profession, he is soft of heart. When he met her the first time — it was in the cafeteria of the university — she was the most alluring creature he’d ever seen, a serious girl with a beauty that lit him up. At the sight of her, song filled his ears and the world glowed with colour. His heart thumped with gratitude. But quickly she rolled her eyes and told him to stop twittering. It became clear to him that his mission was to listen to her and respond appropriately and not to annoy her with oral frivolity. She was the rich earth and the sun and the rain; he was merely the farmer who got the crop going. He was an essential but bit player. Which was fine with him. He loved her then and he loves her now. She is everything to him. She is still the rich earth and the sun and the rain and he is still happy to be the farmer who gets the crop going.

Only tonight he had hoped to get some work done. Clearly that is not to be the case. The Conversation is upon him.

“Hello, my angel,” he says. “What a joyous surprise to see you! What’s in the bag? You can’t have been shopping. No shop would be open at this hour.” He leans forward and kisses his wife.

Maria ignores the question. “Death is a difficult door,” she says quietly. She steps into his office. “Eusebio, what’s happened?” she exclaims. “Your office is an unholy mess. This is indecent. Where are your visitors supposed to sit?”

He surveys his office. He sees embarrassing disorder everywhere. Pathologists at work don’t normally receive visitors who need to sit or who care for order. They usually lie flat and without complaint on a table across the hallway. He takes his workbench chair and places it in front of his desk. “I wasn’t expecting you tonight, my angel. Here, sit here,” he says.

“Thank you.” She sits down and places the bag she brought with her on the floor.

He gathers up papers from his desk, which he stuffs in the nearest folder, which he stacks on other folders, which he then drops to the floor. He pushes the pile under his desk with a foot, out of sight. He crunches up stray bits of paper, sweeps up shameful accumulations of dust with the edge of his hand, using his other hand as a dustpan, which he empties into the wastepaper basket beside his desk. There, that’s better. He sits down and looks across his desk at the woman sitting there. A man and his wife.

“I have found the solution at last, and I must tell you about it,” she says.

The solution? Was there a problem?

“Why don’t you do that, then,” he replies.

She nods. “I first tried through laughter, because you like to laugh,” she says without a trace of mirth. “You saw me, the books I was reading.”

He thinks. Yes, that would explain the selection of books she ordered from her favourite Coimbra bookseller these last several months. Some plays of Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Molière, Georges Feydeau, some weightier tomes of Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire. All of these she read wearing the grimmest expression. He himself is not such an accomplished reader. He was not sure why she was reading these books, but, as always, he let her be.

“Humour and religion do not mix well,” she goes on. “Humour may point out the many mistakes of religion — any number of vilely immoral priests, or monsters who shed blood in the name of Jesus — but humour sheds no light on true religion. It is just humour unto itself. Worse, humour misunderstands religion, since there is little place for levity in religion — and let us not make the mistake of thinking that levity is the same thing as joy. Religion abounds in joy. Religion is joy. To laugh at religion with levity, then, is to miss the point, which is fine if one is in the mood to laugh, but not if one is in the mood to understand. Do you follow me?”

“Though it’s late, I think I do,” he replies.

“Next I tried children’s books, Eusebio. Did Jesus not say that we must receive the Kingdom of God like a little child? So I reread the books we used to read to Renato, Luisa, and Antón.”

Images of their three children when they were small appear in his mind. Those little ones lived with their mother’s volubility like children live in a rainy climate: They just ran out to play in the puddles, shrieking and laughing, heedless of the downpour. She never took umbrage at these joyous interruptions. With difficulty, he returns his attention to his wife.