Yann Martel - The High Mountains of Portugal

“I completely agree. It’s outrageous.”

“It’s become somewhat of an issue. The party leadership is none too happy.”

“I formally resign from the Senate of Canada.”

“It’s the right thing to do — unless you want to come back, of course.”

“I don’t. And I’ll return my salary since the time I left Ottawa. I haven’t even touched it. Been living off my savings. And now I’ll have my pension.”

“Even better. Can I get all that in writing?”

Two days later there’s a new message at the café: Teresa.

“You’ve resigned. I read it in the papers. Why don’t you want to come back to Canada?” she asks him. “I miss you. Come back.” The tone of her voice is warm, sisterly. He misses her too, their regular phone calls that were not so long-distance, their dinners together when he lived in Toronto.

But he has not seriously entertained the idea of returning to Canada since he and Odo moved to Tuizelo. The members of his own species now bring on a feeling of weariness in him. They are too noisy, too fractious, too arrogant, too unreliable. He much prefers the intense silence of Odo’s presence, his pensive slowness in whatever he does, the profound simplicity of his means and aims. Even if that means that Peter’s humanity is thrown back in his face every time he’s with Odo, the thoughtless haste of his own actions, the convoluted mess of his own means and aims. And despite the fact that Odo, nearly every day, drags him out to meet fellow members of his species. Odo is insatiably sociable.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“I have a friend who’s single. She’s attractive and really nice. Have you thought about that, about giving love and family another try?”

He hasn’t. His heart is expended in that way, of loving the single, particular individual. He loved Clara with every fibre of his being, but now he has nothing left. Or rather, he has learned to live with her absence, and he has no wish to fill that absence; that would be like losing her a second time. Instead he would prefer to be kind to everyone, a less personal but broader love. As for physical desire, his libido no longer tempts him. He thinks of his erections as being the last of his adolescent pimples; after years of prodding and squeezing, they have finally gone away, and he is unblemished by carnal desire. He can remember the how of sex but not the why.

“Since Clara died, I just haven’t been in that space,” he says. “I can’t—”

“It’s your ape, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t say anything.

“What do you do with it all day long?” she asks.

“We go for walks. Sometimes we wrestle. Mostly we just hang out.”

“You wrestle with it? Like with a kid?”

“Oh, Ben was never that strong, thank goodness. I come out of it banged and bruised.”

“But what’s the point of it, Peter? Of the walking, the wrestling, and the hanging out?”

“I don’t know. It’s”—what is it? — “interesting.”

“Interesting?”

“Yes. Consuming, actually.”

“You’re in love with it,” his sister says. “You’re in love with your ape and it’s taken over your life.” She is not criticizing, she is not attacking — but there is a slight edge to the observation.

He considers what she’s just said. In love with Odo, is he? If love it is, it’s an exacting love, one that always demands that he pay attention, that he be alert. Does he mind? Not for one minute. So perhaps it is love. A curious love, if so. One that strips him of any privilege. He has language, he has cognition, he knows how to tie a shoelace — what of that? Mere tricks.

And a love tinged with fear, still and always. Because Odo is so much stronger. Because Odo is alien. Because Odo is unknowable. It’s a tiny, inexpungible parcel of fear, yet not incapacitating nor even a source of much worry. He never feels dread or anxiety with Odo, never anything so lingering . It rather goes like this: The ape appears without the least sound, seemingly out of nowhere, and among the emotions Peter feels — the surprise, the wonder, the pleasure, the joy — there is a pulse of fear. He can do nothing about it except wait for the pulse to go away. That is a lesson he has learned, to treat fear as a powerful but topical emotion. He is afraid only when he needs to be. And Odo, despite his capacity to overwhelm, has never given him real cause to be afraid.

And if it is love, then that implies some sort of meeting . What strikes him isn’t the blurring of the boundary between the animal and the human that this meeting implies. He long ago accepted that blurring. Nor is it the slight, limited movement up for Odo to his presumably superior status. That Odo learned to make porridge, that he enjoys going through a magazine, that he responds appropriately to something Peter says only confirms a well-known trope of the entertainment industry, that apes can ape — to our superficial amusement. No, what’s come as a surprise is his movement down to Odo’s so-called lower status. Because that’s what has happened. While Odo has mastered the simple human trick of making porridge, Peter has learned the difficult animal skill of doing nothing. He’s learned to unshackle himself from the race of time and contemplate time itself. As far as he can tell, that’s what Odo spends most of his time doing: being in time, like one sits by a river, watching the water go by. It’s a lesson hard learned, just to sit there and be . At first he yearned for distractions. He would absent himself in memories, replaying the same old movies in his head, fretting over regrets, yearning for lost happiness. But he’s getting better at being in a state of illuminated, sitting-by-a-river repose. So that’s the real surprise: not that Odo would seek to be like him but that he would seek to be like Odo.

Teresa is right. Odo has taken over his life. She means the cleaning up and the looking after. But it’s much more than that. He’s been touched by the grace of the ape, and there’s no going back to being a plain human being. That is love, then.

“Teresa, I think we all look for moments when things make sense. Here, cut off, I find these moments all the time, every day.”

“With your ape?”

“Yes. Sometimes I think Odo breathes time, in and out, in and out. I sit next to him and I watch him weave a blanket made of minutes and hours. And while we’re on top of a boulder watching a sunset, he’ll make a gesture with his hand, just something in the air, and I swear he’s working an angle or smoothing a surface of a sculpture whose shape I can’t see. But that doesn’t bother me. I’m in the presence of a weaver of time and a maker of space. That’s enough for me.”

At the other end of the phone line there’s a long silence. “I don’t know what to say, big brother,” Teresa says at last. “You’re a grown man who spends his days hanging out with an ape. Maybe it’s counselling you need, not a girlfriend.”

With Ben it’s not much easier. “When are you coming home?” he asks insistently.

Could it be that his son, beyond the annoyance, is expressing a need to have him home? “This is home,” he replies. “This is home. Why don’t you come and see me?”

“When I find the time.”

Peter never brings up Odo. When Ben found out about Odo, he threw an ice-cold tantrum. After that, it was as if his dad had turned out gay, and it was best not to ask questions lest unsavoury details be revealed.

His granddaughter, Rachel, surprisingly, turns out to be the sweetest. They do well, antipodally. The distance allows her to pour her teenage secrets into his ear. To her, he is her gay grandfather, and in the same tone in which she gushes about boys she asks him breathlessly about Odo and their cohabitation. She wants to visit him to meet the short, hairy boyfriend, but she has school and camp, and Portugal is so far away from Vancouver, and, not really mentioned, there is her unwilling mother.