Yann Martel - The High Mountains of Portugal

She speaks quietly. “The heart has two choices: to shut down or to open up. I haven’t told you my story entirely truthfully. I was the one who protested about the size of the coffin. I was the one who wailed, ‘My beautiful boy!’ and collapsed. I was the one who didn’t want to close the space in our bed. Cut me some of the black creature’s fur, will you? And please get the suitcase.”

He obeys. With the scalpel he cuts a tuft from the chimpanzee’s coat, from its side. She rubs the hairs between her fingers and sniffs them and presses them to her lips. “Rafael always had more faith than I did,” she says. “He often repeated something Father Abrahan said to him once, how faith is ever young, how faith, unlike the rest of us, does not age.”

Eusebio retrieves the suitcase from his office. Maria Castro opens it, places it on the autopsy table, and begins to transfer to it the objects from Rafael Castro’s body, one by one.

Then she starts to undress.

The shocking nudity of an aged woman. The flesh sapped by gravity, the skin ravaged by age, the proportions ruined by time — and yet glowing with long-lived life, like a parchment page covered in writing. He has seen a great number of such women, but dead, without personality, and rendered even more abstract by being opened up. Inner organs, unless touched by a pathology, are ageless.

Maria Castro strips until she has not a piece of clothing on her. She takes off her wedding ring, she pulls off a band that holds her hair. All of it she puts in the suitcase, which she closes when she is done.

Using the chair he brought in for her, she climbs onto the autopsy table. Leaning over Rafael Castro’s body, nudging here and there, pushing and wiggling, making space where there seems to be none, filled as he is already with two creatures, Maria Castro carefully settles into her husband’s body. All the while she repeats, “This is home, this is home, this is home.” She places herself so that the chimpanzee’s back is nestled against her front and her arms encircle both the chimpanzee and the bear cub, with her hands resting on the cub.

“Please,” she says.

He knows what to do; he is much practiced in the matter. He picks up the needle. He pushes the twine through its eye. Then he begins to sew the body shut. It is quick work, as skin is soft, a simple crossing-over back-and-forth of the twine in a zigzag, though in this case he sews the stitches close together, creating a suture that is finer than usual. He works across Rafael Castro’s pelvic girdle, then closes the skin over the abdomen and over the chest, up to each shoulder. He is careful with the tip of the needle not to prick Maria Castro or the two animals. He hears her only faintly as he finishes the torso: “Thank you, Senhor doctor.”

Never has he worked on a body that ended up having so many incisions. Professional ethic compels him to close every single one: across the head, along the arms, in the neck, on the legs and hands, through the penis and the tongue. The fingers are painstaking labour. The eyes are unsatisfying in the final result — he spends much time contriving to shut the eyelids over his botched job. He finishes with the soles of the feet.

Finally only a body remains on the autopsy table, and a suitcase on the floor, loosely packed with random objects.

He looks on dumbly for a long while. When he turns away, he notices something on a side table: the tuft of chimpanzee hairs. Maria Castro forgot them — or did she leave them behind deliberately? He takes hold of them and does what she did: He sniffs them and touches them to his lips.

He is utterly spent. He goes back to his office, the chimpanzee hairs in one hand, the suitcase in the other. He sets the suitcase on his desk and settles heavily into his chair. He opens the suitcase and stares at its contents. He opens a drawer, finds an envelope, places the chimpanzee hairs in it, and drops the envelope into the suitcase. He notices on the floor the Agatha Christie novel. He picks it up.

Senhora Melo arrives early, as is her habit. She is surprised to find Dr. Lozora collapsed on his desk. Her heart flutters. Is he dead? A dead pathologist — the notion strikes her as professionally unbecoming. She steps in. He is only sleeping. She can hear his breathing and see the gentle rising and falling of his shoulders. And his colour is good. He has drooled on his desk. She will not share with anyone this embarrassing detail, the shiny river from his mouth, the small puddle. Nor will she mention the empty bottle of red wine. She lifts it and quietly places it on the floor behind the desk, out of sight. There is a large scuffed suitcase on the desk. Is it the doctor’s? Is he going somewhere? Would he have such a shabby suitcase?

He is sleeping on top of a file. It is mostly concealed by a hand, but she can still read the first line:

Rafael Miguel Santos Castro, 83 anos, da aldeia de Tuizelo,

as Altas Montanhas de Portugal

Odd — she doesn’t recall the name or the locality. She is the guardian of names, the one who links with certitude each person with his or her fatality. And it’s written in the doctor’s hand, transiently, rather than set for eternity with her typewriter. Could it be an emergency case that arrived after she left last night? That would be highly unusual. In passing she notes the patient’s age. Eighty-three is a sound age to live to. That reassures her. In spite of the tragedies of life, the world can still be a good place.

She notices that the clasps of the suitcase are undone. Though she knows she shouldn’t, she quietly opens it, to see if it belongs to the doctor. Such a strange assortment of things — a flute, a knife and a fork, a candle, a plain black dress, a book, a square of red cloth, an envelope, among other bits and pieces — would not likely be Dr. Lozora’s. She closes the suitcase.

She leaves the office quietly, not wanting to embarrass the doctor by being there when he wakes up. She walks to her tiny work alcove. She likes to be properly set up before the day’s work starts. The typewriter ribbon needs to be checked, the carbon paper restocked, her water carafe filled. The door to the autopsy room is open, which it shouldn’t be. She glances in. She catches her breath. There is a body on the table! A shudder goes through her. What is it doing there? How long has it been out of the cold room? This is most improper. Normally there is a good hour of dictation of final reports before the autopsies start. Normally the bodies come and go shrouded, invisible to everyone except the doctors.

She enters the room. It will be like a living body, she tells herself, only dead.

It isn’t at all like a living body. The corpse is that of a man, an old man. Yellow and sagging. Bony. His hairy pubic mound and large penis exposed with unspeakable obscenity. But far worse are the crude seams all over his body, ragged sutures of red, grey, and yellow that make him look like a cloth doll. His hands look like the underside of a starfish. Even his penis is marred by ghastly stitching. Senhora Melo gulps, thinks she might faint, steadies herself. She forces herself to look at the man’s face. But there is nothing to be read upon his face, only age. She is aghast at how a dead body is such a — she searches for the word — such a relic . When she leaves the autopsy room on tiptoes, as if the relic might be disturbed by her presence, she wonders: Where’s the gurney? How did he get here?

She closes the door of the autopsy room and takes a few deep breaths. Clearly the doctor needs help. He has not been well lately. Sometimes he arrives late for work, sometimes he doesn’t show up at all, sometimes he works all night. Poor man. The death of his wife has been very hard on him. He waved away the concerns of the other doctors, of the director of the hospital himself. He would do it, he said, he would do it. But what a thing to do! Dr. Otavio, his colleague, was away on holiday, but even if he had been here he would have refused to work on her on account of having known her. That’s standard procedure. In the normal course of things, her body should have gone to the hospital in Vila Real. But Dr. Lozora couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else doing it. And she was decomposing; it needed to be done right away. And so he performed the autopsy of his own wife.