Yann Martel - The High Mountains of Portugal

Where should he cut? Better the plantar surface than the dorsal, he thinks. Less bony. He takes hold of the ball of the foot and pushes. The foot flexes with little stiffness. He examines the sole. The callused skin will part, subcutaneous fat will show, some jellified blood might seep out — just a foot with a random cut in it. No indignity to the body, just an indignity to the attending pathologist.

He presses the blade of the scalpel into the head of the medial metatarsals. He lets the blade go in deeply — it doesn’t matter what it cuts — and he pushes down, towards the heel. The scalpel easily slices through the ball of the foot and into the arch, along the long plantar ligament. He brings the blade out as it digs into the fat pad of the heel.

A thick substance pushes out of the cut. Blobs of it start to drop onto the autopsy table. It is whitish and lumpy, covered in a sheen of brightness, with a slight yellow runoff. It has a pungent smell.

“I thought so,” Maria Castro says.

He stares in amazement. What in God’s name is this? Though he has not uttered the question aloud, Maria Castro answers it.

“It’s vomit,” she says.

He examines the oozing mass closely. He sniffs it. The glutinous appearance, the bilious smell — yes, it is indeed vomit, fresh vomit. But how is that possible? It’s a foot. He’s seen necrosis and putrefaction in every form, but nothing like this, ever.

“Where else would it go?” she says. “Gravity pulls.” He seems in need of further explanation. “The child died, you see,” she adds. She pauses for a moment. Then she converts all the silence in her into words. “Let me tell you how a funeral goes in Tuizelo. First, you must have the excuse for one. A life must be given up. If you want it to be a good funeral, it must be a precious life, not some distant uncle or the friend of a friend. Make it your own son. That’s the way to start a funeral, with a thunderbolt that hammers you right in the chest and cleaves your insides into pieces. Deaf, dumb, witless, you can now attend to the details. A ready-made ceremony is handed to you, old and worn. You go along because you don’t know better. There is a hearse — just someone’s cart dressed up — a stiff, unreal ceremony in the church, then a burial in the cemetery on a grey day, everyone dressed in their Sunday best and looking uncomfortable for it, all of it unbearable. Then it’s over.

“People hang around for a while, but then they drift off. You’re given an allotment of time, after which you’re expected to return to the world, to your life of old. But why would anyone do that? After a funeral, a good funeral, everything loses its worth and there’s no life of old to return to. You’re left with nothing. You don’t even have words, not right away. Right away, death is word-eating. Words for it come later, because how else can you think of him, since he’s no longer with you?

“At the funeral Rafael said only one thing. He cried out, ‘The size of the coffin, the size of it!’ It’s true, it wasn’t very big.

“The day Rafael returned to Tuizelo, he didn’t have to say anything to tell me. He couldn’t, anyway. Distress had paralyzed his face and stunned his mouth. I knew right away. Nothing else would do that to him. I knew just looking at him that our precious one had died. Already people in the village had assembled in front of our house, milling around silently. He lay him on the dining table. I fainted. I wish I had fainted forever, that I had followed behind him swiftly and protectively, the way a mother should. Instead I awoke surrounded by smelly old widows. Rafael kept away. Close-by but away. He was eaten up with guilt. Our son had died on his watch. He was the shepherd that day. He had let his flock stray.

“We loved our son like the sea loves an island, always surrounding him with our arms, always touching him and crashing upon his shore with our care and concern. When he was gone, the sea had only itself to contemplate. Our arms folded onto nothing until they met their frame. We wept all the time. If a job was left unfinished at the end of a day — the coop not repaired, a row of vegetables not weeded — we knew that one of us had sat down and wept. That’s the nature of grief: It’s a creature with many arms but few legs, and it staggers about, searching for support. Frayed chicken wire and a profusion of weeds became expressions of our loss. I can’t look at chicken wire now without thinking of my lost son. There’s something about the warp and weft of it, so thin yet strong, so porous yet solid, that reminds me of how we loved him. Later, because of our neglect, chickens died at the jaws of a fox that slipped into the coop, and the crop of vegetables was not so bountiful — but so it goes: A son dies and the earth becomes barren.

“When he wasn’t well or couldn’t fall asleep, he crept into our bed between us. After he was gone, that space in our bed became unbridgeable. We met, Rafael and I, only below it, where in the night our toenails jabbed at each other like loose knives in a drawer, or above it, where we stared at each other without saying a word. Rafael never wanted to close that space, because to do so would be to acknowledge that our bear cub was never coming back. Some nights I saw his hand reach into the space and stroke its emptiness. Then the hand retreated, like the limb of a tortoise deep into its shell, and every morning Rafael woke with the weary, wrinkled eyes of a tortoise that has lived too long. His eyes blinked slowly, as did mine.

“Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice — we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs.

“Nothing fit right in our lives anymore. Drawers no longer closed cleanly, chairs and tables wobbled, plates became chipped, spoons appeared flecked with dried food, clothes started to stain and tear — and the outside world was just as ill-fitting.

“His death made little difference to the outside world. Isn’t that so with all children? When a child dies, there is no land to be handed down, hardly any possessions to be divided up, no job or role left unfilled, no debts that need paying off. A child is a small sun that shines in the shadow of its parents, and when that sun goes out there is darkness only for the parents.

“What’s the point of being a mother if you have no one to mother? It’s like being a flower without a head. On the day our son died, I became a bald stem.

“If there’s one thing I held against Rafael for the longest time, it’s that he delayed coming home by a day. He dithered. But a mother has a right to know right away when her child has died. For her to imagine that he is alive and well even for a minute when he is not is a crime against motherhood.

“And then that thought that takes root in your mind: And now, how do I dare love anything?

“When you forget about him ever so briefly — then comes the stab. Rafael would shout, ‘My beautiful boy!’ and he would collapse. Mostly, though, we went about with quiet, reserved insanity. It’s what you do. Rafael started walking backwards. The first times I noticed him doing it, along the road or in the fields, I thought nothing of it. I thought he was doing it for a moment, to keep his eye on something. Then one morning he did it as we were going to church. No one said anything. They let him be. I asked him that night why this, why the walking backwards. He said that on that day he returned to Tuizelo he saw a man, a stranger, leaving the village. Rafael was sitting off the end of the cart, holding our little cub in his arms, wrapped in a sheet. The stranger was on foot and he was moving quickly, nearly running, and he was doing so backwards. He had the saddest face, Rafael said, a face of grief and anguish. He forgot about him until he found he wanted to do the same thing; it sat well with his emotions, he said. And so he started doing it when he left the house, going into the world. As often as not, he would turn around and start walking backwards.