The High Mountains of Portugal (6 page)

Weeping is nothing new to him. He has wept many, many times since death dealt him a triple blow. A remembrance of Dora, Gaspar, or his father is often both the source and the focus of his grief, but there are times when he bursts into tears for no reason that he can discern, an occurrence as random as a sneeze. The situation now is clearly very different in nature. How can a noisy, uncontrollable machine and three coffins be compared in their effect? But strangely he feels upset in the same way, filled with that same acute sense of dread, aching loneliness, and helplessness. So he weeps and he pants, grief in competition with simmering panic. He pulls out the diary from his jacket pocket and presses it to his face. He smells its great age. He closes his eyes. He takes refuge in Africa, in the waters off its western equatorial coast, on the Portuguese island colony of São Tomé. His grief seeks the man who is leading him to the High Mountains of Portugal.

He tried to find information on Father Ulisses Manuel Rosario Pinto, but history seemed to have forgotten him nearly entirely. There was no trace of him but for two dates that gave his unfinished outlines: his birth on July 14, 1603, as attested by the São Tiago parish registry in Coimbra, and his ordination as a priest in that same city in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on May 1, 1629. No other detail of his life, down to the date of his death, could Tomás find. All that remained of Father Ulisses in the river of time, pushed far downstream, was this floating leaf of a diary.

He pulls the diary away from his face. His tears have marred its cover. This does not please him. He is professionally annoyed. He dabs at the cover with his shirt. How strange, this habit of weeping. Do animals weep? Surely they feel sadness—but do they express it with tears? He doubts it. He has never heard of a weeping cat or dog, or of a weeping wild animal. It seems to be a uniquely human trait. He doesn't see what purpose it serves. He weeps hard, even violently, and at the end of it, what? Desolate tiredness. A handkerchief soaked in tears and mucus. Red eyes for everyone to notice. And weeping is undignified. It lies beyond the tutorials of etiquette and remains a personal idiom, individual in its expression. The twist of face, quantity of tears, quality of sob, pitch of voice, volume of clamour, effect on the complexion, the play of hands, the posture taken: One discovers weeping—one's weeping personality—only upon weeping. It is a strange discovery, not only to others but to oneself.

Resolve surges in him. There is a church in the High Mountains of Portugal waiting for him. He must get to it. This metal box on wheels will help him do that, and so sitting behind its controls is where he should be.
Isso é minha casa.
This is home. He looks down at the pedals. He looks at the levers.

It is a good hour before he heads off. The problem does not lie in starting the automobile. That, after seeing Sabio do it so many times, is manageable. Arms straight, back straight, legs doing the work, he turns the starting handle. The warm engine seems disposed to starting again. The problem lies in getting the machine
moving
. Whatever permutation of pedals and levers he uses, the end result is always the same: a grinding squeal or an angry barking, often quite violent, with no movement forward. He takes breaks. He sits in the driving compartment. He stands next to the automobile. He goes for short walks. Sitting on the footboard, he eats bread, ham, cheese, dried figs, and he drinks wine. It is a joyless meal. The automobile is always on his mind. It stands there, looking incongruous on the side of the road. The horse and ox traffic going by notice it—and notice him—but so close to Lisbon, either coming or going, the drivers hurry their animals on, only shouting or waving a greeting. He does not have to explain himself.

At last it happens. After countless fruitless efforts, he presses on the accelerator pedal and the machine advances. He mightily wrenches the steerage wheel in the direction he hopes is the correct one. It is.

The vehicle is now in the centre of the road and moving ahead. To avoid the ditch on either side, he has to hold his ship to a single fixed course: the narrow, shrunken horizon dead ahead. Maintaining a straight line towards that bottomless dot is exhausting. The machine constantly wants to veer off course, and there are bumps and holes in the road.

There are people too, who stare harder the farther he gets from Lisbon. Worse, though, are the large drays and carts heavily laden with goods and produce for the city. They appear ahead of him, plugging the horizon. As they get closer, they seem to take up an increasing share of the road. They clip-clop slowly, confidently, stupidly, while he races towards them. He has to calculate his course exactly so that he drives next to them and not
into
them. His eyes tire from the strain and his hands hurt from gripping the steerage wheel.

Suddenly, he has had enough. He presses on a pedal. The automobile coughs to a harsh stop, throwing him against the steerage wheel. He steps down, exhausted but relieved. He blinks in astonishment. The application of the brake pedal has unpacked the landscape and it billows out around him, trees, hills, and vineyards to his left, textured fields and the Tagus to his right. He saw none of these while he was driving. There was only the devouring road ahead. What luck to live in a land that so unceasingly agrees to be agreeable. No wonder wine is made here. The road is now empty and he is alone. In the dying light of the day, wispy and opal, he is soothed by the quiet of an early evening in the country. He remembers lines from Father Ulisses' diary, which he recites under his breath:

I come not to shepherd the free, but the unfree. The first have their own church. My flock's church has no walls & a ceiling that reaches up to the Lord.

With his lungs and with his eyes, Tomás takes in the open church around him, the soft fecund appeal of Portugal. He doesn't know how far he has travelled, but surely more than he would have on foot. Enough for a first day. Tomorrow he will apply himself further.

Constructing a shelter from a rain tarp seems a great bother. He chooses instead to make a bedroom of the enclosed back cabin, as his uncle suggested, which leads him to inspect his uncle's contribution to the expedition. He finds: lightweight pots and pans; a small burner that works on white cubes of dried spirit; a bowl, a plate, a cup, utensils, all of metal; soup powder; rolls and loaves of bread; dried meats and fish; sausages; fresh vegetables; fresh and dried fruit; olives; cheese; milk powder; cocoa powder; coffee; honey; cookies and biscuits; a bottle of cooking oil; spices and condiments; a large jug of water; the motoring coat with its attending items, the gloves, the hat, the hideous goggles; six automobile tires; rope; an axe; a sharp knife; matches and candles; a compass; a blank notebook; lead pencils; a set of maps; a French-Portuguese dictionary; the Renault manual; wool blankets; the box of tools and other motoring necessities; the barrel of moto-naphtha; the canvas rain tarp, with lanyards and pegs; and more.

So many things! His uncle's excessive solicitude means that he has difficulty making space for himself in the cabin. When he has cleared the sofa, he tries lying down on it. It's not very long—to sleep on it, he would have to lie with his knees tucked in. He peers through the wide front window of the cabin into the driving compartment. The seat there is a tad firm, but flat and level, more like a bench, and because it's not boxed in at either end by a door he will be able to stretch his feet out.

He picks out bread, dried cod, olives, a wineskin, his uncle's coat, as well as the automobile manual and the dictionary, and transfers back to the driving compartment. He lies on his back on the seat, feet sticking out of the compartment. Doing as he was told by his uncle, he settles down to some motoring study, his hands holding the automobile manual, the dictionary lying on his chest.

It turns out that lubrication is a serious affair. With dawning horror, he realizes that the gears, the clutch, the clutch cup, the back axle, the front and back joints of the transmission shaft, the bearings of all the wheels, the joints of the front axle, the spindle axle bearings, the connecting axles, the joints of the driving rod, the magneto shaft, the hinges of the doors, and the list goes on—essentially everything that moves in the machine—needs obsessive lubrication. Many of these need a little squirt every morning before the engine is started, some need it every two to three days, others once a week, while with still others it's a question of mileage. He sees the automobile in a different light: It is a hundred little chicks chirping frantically, their necks extended and their beaks opened wide, their whole beings trembling with need as they scream for their drops of oil. How will he keep track of all these begging mouths? How much simpler were the instructions for Father Ulisses' gift! These turned out to be no more than a plea that good Portuguese craftsmen back home, blessed with access to the highest-quality paint, should do a proper job of repainting his masterwork. In the meantime he had to do with poor local substitutes.

As the night freshens, Tomás is thankful for his uncle's coat. The mink is warm and soft. He falls asleep imagining that the coat is Dora. She too was warm and soft, and gentle and graceful, and beautiful and caring. But the ministrations of Dora are overcome by worry—all those begging mouths!—and he sleeps poorly.

The next morning, after breakfast, he finds the oiling can and he follows the manual's directives line by line, illustration by illustration, paragraph after paragraph, page after page. He lubricates the entire automobile, which involves not only lifting the hood up on its hinges and sticking his head in the machine's entrails, but removing the floor of the driving compartment to access parts of its anatomy there, and even crawling on the ground and sliding
under
the machine. It is a tiresome, finicky, dirty business. Then he gives it water. After that, he has to confront a pressing problem. The machine, which his uncle claimed was at the acme of technological perfection, fails to provide one of the more basic feats of technology: plumbing. He has to use the leaves of a nearby shrub.

The starting up of the cold engine is long and painful. If only his limbs were stronger. Then there is the maddening conundrum of getting the machine to giddy-up once it is huffing and rattling. From the moment of waking to the moment when the machine fortuitously jerks forward, four hours pass. He grips the wheel and focuses on the road. He approaches Póvoa de Santa Iria, a small town near Lisbon, the closest settlement to the northeast of the capital on this road, a place that until then has lain dormant in the atlas of his mind. His heart beats like a drum as he enters the town.

Men appear with napkins hanging from their shirt fronts, a chicken leg or other repast in their hands, and stare. Barbers holding foaming brushes, followed by men with shaving foam lathered on their faces, run out, and stare. A group of old women make the sign of the cross, and stare. Men stop their talking, and stare. Women stop their shopping, and stare. An old man makes a military salute, and stares. Two women laugh in fright, and stare. A bench of old men chew with their toothless jaws, and stare. Children shriek, run to hide, and stare. A horse neighs and makes to buck, startling its driver, and stares. Sheep in a pen off the main street bleat in despair, and stare. Cattle low, and stare. A donkey brays, and stares. Dogs bark, and stare.

In the midst of this excruciating visual autopsy, Tomás fails to press hard enough on the accelerator pedal. The machine coughs once, twice, then dies. He jabs at the pedal. Nothing happens. He closes his eyes to contain his frustration. After a moment he opens them and looks around. In front of him, to the sides of him, behind him, a thousand eyeballs, human and animal, are staring at him. Not a sound is to be heard.

The eyeballs blink, and the silence crumbles. Imperceptibly, shyly, the people of Póvoa de Santa Iria ooze forward, pressing the automobile on all sides until they are ten, fifteen thick.

Some are wreathed in smiles and pepper him with questions.

“Who are you?”

“Why have you stopped?”

“How does it work?”

“What does it cost?”

“Are you rich?”

“Are you married?”

A few glare and grumble.

“Have you no pity for our ears?”

“Why do you throw so much dust in our faces?”

Children shout silly questions.

“What's its name?”

“What does it eat?”

“Is the horse in the cabin?”

“What does its caca look like?”

Many people come forward to stroke the machine. Most simply stare in benign silence. The man of the military salute salutes every time Tomás happens to look his way. In the background, the sheep, horses, donkeys, and dogs start up again with their respective noises.

After an hour of idle talk with the townspeople, it becomes clear to Tomás that they will not go away until he has left their town. He has somewhere to go; they don't.

He must, at this moment, overcome his natural reticence. In a morass of self-consciousness, digging deep into his inner reserves, he climbs out of the driving compartment, stands on the footboard, and asks the people to move away from the front of the machine. The people do not seem to hear or understand. He exhorts them—but they only creep forward again and again, in ever greater numbers. There develops such a crush of people around the automobile that he has to squeeze himself between bodies to get to the starting handle, and he has to push them back to make space to turn it. Some gawkers stand on the footboards. Others even make to clamber into the driving compartment, though a stony glare dissuades them. Children, grins plastered upon their faces, keep squeezing the horn's rubber bulb with demented glee.

Fatefully, after several trips to the starting handle and yet another bout of plying pedals and levers, the vehicle leaps forward, then promptly dies. Cries erupt all round as the people in front of the machine shriek and clutch their chests in fright. Women scream, children wail, men mutter. The military man stops saluting.