Yann Martel - The High Mountains of Portugal

Except for Odo, he is alone.

He subscribes to book clubs and various magazines. He gets his sister to mail him boxes of used paperbacks — colourful, plot-driven stuff — and old magazines. Odo is as big a reader as he is. The arrival of a new National Geographic is greeted with loud hoots and the slapping of the ground with hands. Odo leafs through the magazine slowly, considering each image. Foldouts and maps are a particular source of interest.

One of Odo’s favourite books, discovered early on, is the family photo album. Peter humours Odo and goes through his childhood and early adult years with the ape, recounting to him the story of the Tovy family in Canada, their growing and ageing members, the new additions, their friends, the special occasions remembered by a snapshot. When Peter reaches a certain age, Odo recognizes him with a pant of surprise. He taps on the photo emphatically with a black finger and looks up at him. When Peter turns the pages, going back in time, and points at younger and younger guises of himself, slimmer, darker-haired, taut-skinned, captured in colour and then, earlier, in black-and-white, Odo peers with great intensity. One leap at a time they come to the oldest photo of Peter, taken in Lisbon, before his family’s move to Canada, when he was a child of two. The portrait feels from another century to him. Odo stares at it with blinking incredulity.

The few other photos in those opening pages evoke people from his parents’ earlier years in Portugal. The largest one, filling a whole page, is a group shot, the people in it stiffly standing in front of an exterior whitewashed wall. Most of these relatives Peter can’t identify. His parents must have told him who they were, but he’s forgotten. They are from so long ago and so far away that he finds it hard to imagine they were ever truly alive. Odo seems to share his same sense of disbelief, but with a greater desire to believe.

A week later Odo opens the album again. Peter expects him to recognize the Lisbon photo, but the ape looks at it with a blank expression. Only by retracing the journey backwards in time, photo by photo, does he once again come to recognize Peter as a toddler. Which he forgets once more when they look at the album later. Odo is a being of the present moment, Peter realizes. Of the river of time, he worries about neither its spring nor its delta.

It is a bittersweet activity for Peter, to revisit his life. It mires him in nostalgia. Some photos evoke stabs of memory that overwhelm him. One evening, at a shot of young Clara holding baby Ben, he begins to weep. Ben is tiny, red, wrinkled. Clara looks exhausted but ecstatic. The tiniest hand is holding on to her little finger. Odo looks at him, nonplused but concerned. The ape puts the album down and embraces him. After a moment Peter shakes himself. What is this weeping for? What purpose does it serve? None. It only gets in the way of clarity. He opens the album again and stares hard at the photo of Clara and Ben. He resists the easy appeal of sadness. Instead he focuses on the fact, huge and simple, of his love for them.

He starts to keep a diary. In it he records his attempts at understanding Odo, the ape’s habits and quirks, the general mystery of the creature. He also notes new Portuguese phrases he’s learned. Then there are reflections about his life in the village, the life he’s led, the sum of it all.

He takes to sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, on one of the woolen blankets he buys. He reads on the floor, he writes, he grooms and is groomed, sometimes he naps, and sometimes he just sits there, doing nothing at all on the floor. Sitting down and getting up is tiresome, but he reminds himself that it’s good exercise for a man his age. Nearly always Odo is right next to him, lightly pressed against him, minding his own ape business — or meddling with his.

Odo rearranges the house. On the kitchen counter, the cutlery is lined up in the open, knives with knives, forks with forks, and so on. Cups and bowls are set on the counter, upside down and against the wall. The same with other objects in the house: They do not belong high up on shelves or hidden in drawers, but closer at hand, lined up against the foot of the wall, in the case of books and magazines, or set here or there on the floor.

Peter puts things back where they belong — he is a neat man — but straightaway Odo sets things right, simian-style. Peter mulls over the situation. He returns his shoes to where he normally has them, next to the door, and the case for his reading glasses back into a drawer, then he moves a few magazines to a different location along the wall. Right behind him, Odo takes the shoes and places them on the same stone tile he placed them on earlier, and he returns the glasses case to its designated tile and the magazines to his chosen spot along the wall. Aha, thinks Peter. It’s not a mess, then. It’s an order of a different kind. Well, it makes the floor interesting. He lets go of his sense of neatness. It’s all part of life at a crouch.

He regularly has to return items to the rooms on the ground floor. Ostensibly a space for the keeping and caring of animals and the storage of implements needed for living off the land, it is now filled to the ceiling with the junk of the ages, the villagers being pathological hoarders from one generation to the next. Odo loves the animal pen. It is a treasure trove that endlessly exercises his curiosity.

And beyond, there is the village, a place of a thousand points of interest for Odo. The cobblestones, for example. The flower boxes. The many stone walls, each easily climbable. The trees. The connecting roofs, of which Odo is particularly fond. Peter worries that the villagers will mind having an ape puttering atop their houses, but most don’t even notice, and those who do, stare and smile. And Odo moves with nimble sure-footedness — he doesn’t clatter about, displacing tiles. His favourite roof is that of the old church, from which he has a fine view. When he’s up there, Peter sometimes goes inside the church. It’s a humble place of worship, with bare walls, a plain altar, an awkward crucifix blackened by time, and, at the other end of the aisle, beyond the last pew, a shelf bookended by vases of flowers, the requisite shrine to some dusty saint of Christendom. He has no interest in organized religion. On his first visit, a two-minute once-over satisfied him. But the small church is a quiet spot, and it offers the same advantage as the café: a place to properly sit. He usually parks himself at a pew near a window from which he can see the downspout pipe Odo will take to descend from the roof. He’s never come into the church with Odo, not wanting to risk it.

Mostly, though, in the village, it is the people who interest Odo. They have lost their wariness. He is particularly well disposed towards women. Was the Peace Corps volunteer who brought him over from Africa a woman? Did a female lab technician make a positive impression on him in his early years? Or is it simple biology? Whatever the reason, he always reaches out to women. As a result, the village widows who at first shrank away from him, retreating into surliness, transform into the ones who are the most devoted to him. Odo responds amiably to all of them, making faces and sounds that comfort them and open them up further. It’s a good fit, the short, stooped women dressed in black and the short, stooped animal with the black coat. From a distance, one might be forgiven for mistaking one for the other.

Likely as not, the women — indeed, all the villagers — engage Odo in spirited conversation first. Then, when they turn to him, they speak in the simplest, most childish language, their voices raised, their expressions and gestures exaggerated, as if he were the village idiot. After all, he doesn’t fala Portuguese.