The High Mountains of Portugal (23 page)

“He played it so nicely. It was like having a canary bird in the house,” she says.

She places it on the autopsy table, next to the body.

With a word here, a shake of the head there, displaying a perfect knowledge of Rafael Castro's experiential anatomy, Maria Castro directs Eusebio's scalpel. It is the simplest autopsy he has ever performed, requiring only that single sharp instrument, even for the head. She avoids the thorax and abdomen until the very end, preferring the distal discoveries of the upper limbs and of the neck and head.

The ring finger of the left hand is lightly packed with down feathers, as is the right hand's middle finger, while in the index fingers of both hands he finds blood, fresh, red blood—the only trace of blood he finds anywhere in the body. All the other digits contain mud. The palm of the right hand holds an oyster shell, the palm of the left, pages from a small wall calendar. The arms are crowded. From them he extracts a hammer, a pair of tongs, a long knife; an apple; a clump of mud; a sheaf of wheat; three eggs; a salted cod; a knife and fork. Rafael Castro's head proves roomier. Inside it he finds a square of red cloth; a small handmade wooden toy of a horse and cart with wheels that turn; a pocket mirror; more down feathers; a small wooden painted object, ochre in colour, that Maria Castro cannot identify; a candle; a long lock of dark hair; and three playing cards. In each eye he discovers a die, and a dried flower petal in place of the retina. The neck contains three chicken feet and what looks like kindling: dried leaves and twigs. The tongue holds ash except at its tip, where there is honey.

Lastly comes the thorax and abdomen. The old wife nods, though with evident trepidation this time. Eusebio ends the autopsy with the cut with which he expected to start it, the Y-shaped incision from the shoulders to the sternum down over the abdomen. He sections the skin as lightly as he can, barely slicing through the subcutaneous fat. Since he made a cut along the pelvic girdle earlier, the thoracic and abdominal cavities open up plainly to view.

He hears her gasp.

Though he's no expert on the matter, he is quite certain that it is a chimpanzee, a kind of African primate. It takes him a little longer to identify the second, smaller creature, partly hidden as it is.

Filling Rafael Castro's chest and abdomen, lying compactly in peaceful repose, are a chimpanzee and, wrapped in this chimpanzee's protective arms, a bear cub, small and brown.

Maria Castro leans forward and presses her face to the bear cub. Is this then how her husband
lived
? Eusebio says nothing, only watches. He notices the chimpanzee's bright, clear face and thick, glossy coat. A young one, he concludes.

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.

In a state of shock, her eyes sheltered by the panel of straw weave, Senhora Melo witnessed the whole thing from her alcove. She did her best to record the report that came intermittently from the autopsy room. Periods of silence were followed by periods of weeping, then bursts of resolve, which was when Dr. Lozora spoke. But how do you record pain, how do you record wreckage? They recorded themselves in her, while she dutifully typed his words.

She knew many people thought of Maria Lozora as an eccentric woman. Lately, for example, she had taken to walking around town carrying a bag full of books. She could have a sharp tongue. Her silences were ominous. Father Cecilio was terrified of her. He submitted to her extemporaneous lectures on religion without a quibble, and didn't say a word when she started reading from her bag of books in plain sight of everyone during his sermons. But she was at heart a very kind woman, always willing to help at any time of day or night. She never seemed to sleep. How many times had she appeared during the night at her friends' houses when their children were sick, with a pot of soup and her good doctor husband at her side? Lives had been comforted, and in some cases even saved, by their intervention. They were an inseparable pair, those two. Quite odd. She didn't know any other couple who took such pleasure in each other's company.

And then that this should happen to her! She had gone out walking alone one evening, as was her wont. She was not home when Dr. Lozora returned from the hospital. Increasingly worried, he had reported her missing to the police later that night. He had no idea where she might be. She had a mind of her own, he said, and perhaps she had decided to visit someone without telling him. Yes, he had been working late that evening.

A few days later, a book was found on the shore under the bridge. It was a novel,
Peril at End House,
by the English writer Agatha Christie. There was a bloated book stamp. Dr. Lozora positively identified the book as belonging to him and his wife. The river and its rocky banks were searched. Other books by Agatha Christie were discovered downstream. Eventually Maria Lozora's body was found. It had unfortunately become wedged among the rocks in a spot that made it very hard to detect.

Who but Maria Lozora would be wandering about in such foul weather? And how had she fallen off the bridge?

It was entirely inexplicable—in fact, every possible explanation seemed more unbelievable than the next. Suicide? She was a happy, fulfilled woman with a network of family and friends who gave no sign of any mental or moral distress. And would a woman who was so comfortable with words not leave a suicide note? Furthermore, she was a thoughtful, devout Christian; such Christians do not take their lives. No one—not her husband or children, not her priest, not the police—found the explanation of suicide convincing. An accident, then? She plummeted to her death from a bridge that was safeguarded by thick solid stone balustrades whose height precluded anyone slipping or toppling over them. One might plausibly climb atop one, but why would any sensible soul do that except with the intent of jumping off? And since suicide was ruled out as a likely explanation for her death, so was the idea that she had willingly climbed the balustrade. If both suicide and accident were excluded, what was left? Murder. But this seemed the most improbable of all explanations. Who would want to murder Maria Lozora? She had no enemies. She was liked—even loved—by all who knew her. And this was Bragança, not Chicago. Murders were unknown in these parts. This was not a town where innocent women were randomly hoisted up in the air and thrown off bridges. The idea was preposterous. So it had to be either suicide or an accident. Round and round it went. The police pleaded for witnesses to step forward, but no one had seen anything. Forensic experts came all the way from Lisbon; they brought nothing to light. People adopted the explanation that seemed most plausible to them. Dr. Lozora espoused the theory of murder, while having no idea who would do that to his wife.