Yann Martel - The High Mountains of Portugal

“It’s about my husband.”

“Yes?” he encourages her.

She says nothing. He waits. He’ll let her come round. Hers will be an emotional lament disguised as a question. He will need to wrap in kind words the explanation for her husband’s death.

“I tried to write about it,” she finally says. “But it’s so vulgar on the page. And to speak about it is worse.”

“It’s all right,” he responds in a soothing voice, though he finds her choice of words odd. Vulgar? “It’s perfectly natural. And inevitable. It comes to all of us.”

“Does it? Not in Tuizelo. I’d say it’s quite rare there.”

Eusebio’s eyebrows knit. Does the woman live in a village of immortals where only a few are rudely visited by death? His wife often tells him that he spends so much time with the dead that he sometimes misses the social cues of the living. Did he not hear right? Did she not just ask him if he was the doctor who deals with bodies?

“Senhora Castro, death is universal. We must all go through it.”

“Death? Who’s talking about death? I’m talking about sex.”

Now that the dreaded word has been said, Maria Castro moves forward comfortably. “Love came into my life in the disguise I least expected. That of a man. I was as surprised as a flower that sees for the first time a bee coming towards it. It was my mother who suggested I marry Rafael. She consulted with my father and they decided it was a good match. It wasn’t an arranged marriage, then, not exactly, but I would have had to come up with a good, solid excuse not to want to marry Rafael. I couldn’t think of one. All we had to do was get along, and how difficult could that be? I had known him my whole life. He was one of the boys in the village. He’d always been there, like a rock in a field. I must have first set eyes on him when I was a toddler, and he, being older, perhaps gazed at me when I was a baby. He was a slim, pleasant-faced boy, quieter and more retiring than the others in the village. I don’t know if I had ever spent more than twenty minutes with him before it was suggested that we spend the rest of our lives together.

“We did have one moment, when I think back. It must have been a year or two earlier. I was running an errand and I came upon him on a path. He was fixing a gate. He asked me to hold something. I bent down and so brought my head close to his. Just then a gust of wind lifted a mass of my hair and threw it in his face. I felt it, the gentle lashing, and I pulled my head back, catching the last strands as they flowed off his face. He was smiling and looking straight at me.

“I remember too that he played the sweet flute, a little wooden thing. I liked the sound of it, its springtime bird-like tweeting.

“So the suggestion of marriage was made and I thought, Why not? I had to marry at some point. You don’t want to live your whole life alone. He would no doubt be useful to me and I would try my best to be useful to him. I looked at him in a new light and the idea of being married to him pleased me.

“His father had died when he was young, so it was his mother who was consulted. She thought the same thing and he presumably thought the same thing. Everyone thought, Why not? So we married under the banner of Why not? Everything happened swiftly. The ceremony was businesslike. The priest went through his pieties. No money was wasted on any celebration. We were moved into a shack of a house that Rafael’s uncle Valerio gave us until we found better.

“We were alone for the first time since the ceremony. The door had barely closed when Rafael turned to me and said, ‘Take your clothes off.’ I looked at him askance and said, ‘No, you take yours off.’ ‘All right,’ he replied, and he stripped down quickly and completely. It was impressive. I had never seen a naked man before. He came up to me and put his hand on my breast and squeezed. ‘Is this nice?’ he asked. I shrugged and said, ‘It’s all right.’ ‘How about this?’ he asked, squeezing again in a softer way, pinching the nipple. ‘It’s all right,’ I replied, but this time I didn’t shrug.

“Next, he was very forward. He came round behind me and pressed me to him. I could feel his cucumber against me. He ran his hand under my dress, all the way under, until it rested there . I didn’t fight him off. I guessed that this was what it meant to be married, that I had to put up with this.

“ ‘Is this nice?’ he asked.

“ ‘I’m not sure,’ I replied.

“ ‘And this?’ he asked as he prodded around some more.

“ ‘I’m not sure,’ I replied.

“ ‘And this?’

“ ‘Not…sure.’

“ ‘And this?’

“Suddenly I couldn’t answer. A feeling began to overcome me. He had touched a spot that shrivelled my tongue. Oh, it was so good. What was it?

“ ‘And this?’ he asked again.

“I nodded. He kept at it. I bent forward and he bent with me. I lost my balance and we stumbled around the room, overturning a chair, hitting a wall, shoving the table. Rafael held on to me firmly and brought us to the ground, onto the small carpet from his brother Batista. All the while he kept it up with his hand, and I stayed with the feeling. I had no idea what it was, but it rumbled through me like a train, and then there was an explosion of sorts, as if the train had suddenly come out of a tunnel into the light. I let it rumble through me. I was left breathless. I turned to Rafael. ‘I’ll take my clothes off now,’ I said.

“He was twenty-one, I was seventeen. Desire was a discovery. Where would I have found it earlier? My parents expressed desire like a desert. I was the one hardy plant they had produced. Otherwise, theirs was a sour and hardworking life. Did the Church teach me desire? The thought would be worth a laugh, if I had time to waste. The Church taught me to shame something I didn’t even know. As for those around me, young and old, perhaps there were innuendos, hints, slippages when I was growing up — but I missed their meaning.

“So there you have it: I had never desired. I had a body ready for it and a mind willing to learn, but it all lay asleep, unused, unsuspected. Then Rafael and I came together. Beneath plain clothing and shy manners we discovered our beautiful bodies, like gold hidden under the land. We were entirely ignorant in these matters. I didn’t know what a cucumber was or what it was for. I didn’t know what it could do for me or what I could do for it. And he was as ignorant about my nest. He stared at it, astonished. What a strange thing, his eyes said. Have you seen your thing? my eyes replied. Yes, yes, his eyes panted back, it’s all so very strange.

“Strangest of all, we knew what to do. It all fell into place. We touched, we asked, we did, all in one go. What pleased him pleased me, what pleased me pleased him. It works out like that in life sometimes, doesn’t it? A stamp takes pleasure in being licked and stuck to an envelope, and an envelope takes pleasure in the stick of that stamp. Each takes to the other without ever having suspected that the other existed. So Rafael and I were stamp and envelope.

“And to our astonishment, under the cover of marriage, our deportment was all good and proper. I had never imagined it could feel so good to be Portuguese.

“I used to hurry home along the crest of the hill from the neighbouring village, where I assisted the schoolteacher. There was no path to speak of, but it was the quickest route to get to our small house. I scrambled over large rocks, I plunged through hedges. There were stone walls, but they had gates. From the third-to-last gate, I often caught sight of him, down below in our second field, where the sheep grazed. It happened regularly that he noticed me too, just as I reached this particular gate. Every time I thought, What an extraordinary coincidence! I have just crossed this gate and he has seen me. He couldn’t hear me — too far — but sensing the deepening colour of the sky, aware of the time of day, he knew I would be coming along soon, and constantly he turned and looked up, creating the conditions for the coincidence. He would see me and redouble his efforts in the field, hustling and pushing the sheep into their pen, to the yapping delight of the dog, who saw his master taking over his job.