The High Mountains of Portugal (19 page)

Eusebio pauses. An Agatha Christie that starts in
Jerusalem
? The last one took place on the Nile, there was one set in Mesopotamia—circling around Palestine—but now Jerusalem itself. After all that Maria was saying, the coincidence amazes him. She will take it as confirmation of her theory.

A rap at the door startles him. The book in his hands flies up like a bird. “Maria!” he cries. She has come back! He hurries to the door. He must tell her.

“Maria!” he calls again as he pulls the door open.

A woman stands before him. But it's not his wife. It is a different woman. This woman is older. A black-dressed widow. A stranger. She eyes him. There is a large beat-up suitcase at her feet. Surely the woman hasn't been travelling at this late hour? He notes something else. Hidden by wrinkles, blurred by time, hindered by black peasant dress, but shining through nonetheless: The woman is a great beauty. A luminous face, a striking figure, a graceful carriage. She must have been something to behold when she was young.

“How did you know I was coming?” the woman asks, startled.

“I'm sorry, I thought you were someone else.”

“My name is Maria Dores Passos Castro.”

Maria that she is, who is she? She's not his Maria, his wife, she's a different Maria. What does she want? What is she doing here?

“How can I be of assistance, Senhora Castro?” he asks stiffly.

Maria Castro answers with a question. “Are you the doctor who deals with bodies?”

That's one way of putting it. “Yes, I'm head of the department of pathology. My name is Dr. Eusebio Lozora.”

“In that case, I need to talk to you, Senhor doctor, if you have a few minutes to spare.”

He leans out to look down the hallway, searching for his wife. She isn't there. She and this woman must have crossed paths. He sighs inwardly. Another woman who wants to talk to him. Is she also concerned with his salvation? How many more biblical prophets lie waiting for him in the night? All he wants to do is get a little work done, get caught up. And since when do pathologists have consultations with the public, in the middle of the night at that? He's starving too. He should have brought something to eat if he was going to work all night.

He will turn this woman away. For whatever ails her, she should see a family doctor, she should go to the emergency room. His hand is set to close the door when he remembers: No men attended Jesus when he was buried. Only women came to his tomb, only women.

Perhaps one of the cases on his desk has to do with her? A relative, a loved one. It's highly unusual for him to deal with family members. He prides himself on his ability to determine what may cause grief, but grief itself, dealing with it, is neither his medical specialty nor a talent he happens to have. That is why he went into pathology. Pathology is medicine reduced to its pure science, without the draining contact with patients. But before training to track down death, he studied life, and here is a living woman who wants to consult with him. This, he remembers, is what the original calling of the medical arts is about: the alleviating of suffering.

In as gentle a voice as his weary frame can muster, he says, “Please come in, Senhora Castro.”

The old woman picks up her suitcase and enters his office. “Much obliged, Senhor doctor.”

“Here, sit here,” he says, indicating the chair his wife has just vacated. His office is still a mess, his workbench still covered in papers—and what's that file on the floor in the corner? But it will have to do for now. He sits down in his chair, across the desk from his new visitor. A doctor and his patient. Except for the bottle of red wine standing on the desk and the Agatha Christie murder mystery lying on the floor.

“How can I help you?” he asks.

She hesitates, then makes up her mind. “I've come down from the village of Tuizelo, in the High Mountains of Portugal.”

Ah yes. The few people who live in the High Mountains of Portugal trickle down to Bragança because there's not a hospital in the whole thankless plateau or, indeed, a commercial centre of any size.

“It's about my husband.”

“Yes?” he encourages her.

She says nothing. He waits. He'll let her come round. Hers will be an emotional lament disguised as a question. He will need to wrap in kind words the explanation for her husband's death.

“I tried to write about it,” she finally says. “But it's so vulgar on the page. And to speak about it is worse.”

“It's all right,” he responds in a soothing voice, though he finds her choice of words odd.
Vulgar?
“It's perfectly natural. And inevitable. It comes to all of us.”

“Does it? Not in Tuizelo. I'd say it's quite rare there.”

Eusebio's eyebrows knit. Does the woman live in a village of immortals where only a few are rudely visited by death? His wife often tells him that he spends so much time with the dead that he sometimes misses the social cues of the living. Did he not hear right? Did she not just ask him if he was the doctor who deals with bodies?

“Senhora Castro, death is universal. We must all go through it.”

“Death? Who's talking about death? I'm talking about sex.”

Now that the dreaded word has been said, Maria Castro moves forward comfortably. “Love came into my life in the disguise I least expected. That of a man. I was as surprised as a flower that sees for the first time a bee coming towards it. It was my mother who suggested I marry Rafael. She consulted with my father and they decided it was a good match. It wasn't an arranged marriage, then, not exactly, but I would have had to come up with a good, solid excuse not to want to marry Rafael. I couldn't think of one. All we had to do was get along, and how difficult could that be? I had known him my whole life. He was one of the boys in the village. He'd always been there, like a rock in a field. I must have first set eyes on him when I was a toddler, and he, being older, perhaps gazed at me when I was a baby. He was a slim, pleasant-faced boy, quieter and more retiring than the others in the village. I don't know if I had ever spent more than twenty minutes with him before it was suggested that we spend the rest of our lives together.

“We did have one moment, when I think back. It must have been a year or two earlier. I was running an errand and I came upon him on a path. He was fixing a gate. He asked me to hold something. I bent down and so brought my head close to his. Just then a gust of wind lifted a mass of my hair and threw it in his face. I felt it, the gentle lashing, and I pulled my head back, catching the last strands as they flowed off his face. He was smiling and looking straight at me.

“I remember too that he played the sweet flute, a little wooden thing. I liked the sound of it, its springtime bird-like tweeting.

“So the suggestion of marriage was made and I thought,
Why not?
I had to marry at some point. You don't want to live your whole life alone. He would no doubt be useful to me and I would try my best to be useful to him. I looked at him in a new light and the idea of being married to him pleased me.

“His father had died when he was young, so it was his mother who was consulted. She thought the same thing and he presumably thought the same thing. Everyone thought,
Why not?
So we married under the banner of
Why not?
Everything happened swiftly. The ceremony was businesslike. The priest went through his pieties. No money was wasted on any celebration. We were moved into a shack of a house that Rafael's uncle Valerio gave us until we found better.

“We were alone for the first time since the ceremony. The door had barely closed when Rafael turned to me and said, ‘Take your clothes off.' I looked at him askance and said, ‘No, you take yours off.' ‘All right,' he replied, and he stripped down quickly and completely. It was impressive. I had never seen a naked man before. He came up to me and put his hand on my breast and squeezed. ‘Is this nice?' he asked. I shrugged and said, ‘It's all right.' ‘How about this?' he asked, squeezing again in a softer way, pinching the nipple. ‘It's all right,' I replied, but this time I didn't shrug.

“Next, he was very forward. He came round behind me and pressed me to him. I could feel his cucumber against me. He ran his hand under my dress, all the way under, until it rested
there
. I didn't fight him off. I guessed that this was what it meant to be married, that I had to put up with this.

“ ‘Is this nice?' he asked.

“ ‘I'm not sure,' I replied.

“ ‘And this?' he asked as he prodded around some more.

“ ‘I'm not sure,' I replied.

“ ‘And this?'

“ ‘Not…sure.'

“ ‘And this?'

“Suddenly I couldn't answer. A feeling began to overcome me. He had touched a spot that shrivelled my tongue. Oh, it was so good. What was it?

“ ‘And this?' he asked again.

“I nodded. He kept at it. I bent forward and he bent with me. I lost my balance and we stumbled around the room, overturning a chair, hitting a wall, shoving the table. Rafael held on to me firmly and brought us to the ground, onto the small carpet from his brother Batista. All the while he kept it up with his hand, and I stayed with the feeling. I had no idea what it was, but it rumbled through me like a train, and then there was an explosion of sorts, as if the train had suddenly come out of a tunnel into the light. I let it rumble through me. I was left breathless. I turned to Rafael. ‘I'll take my clothes off now,' I said.

“He was twenty-one, I was seventeen. Desire was a discovery. Where would I have found it earlier? My parents expressed desire like a desert. I was the one hardy plant they had produced. Otherwise, theirs was a sour and hardworking life. Did the Church teach me desire? The thought would be worth a laugh, if I had time to waste. The Church taught me to shame something I didn't even know. As for those around me, young and old, perhaps there were innuendos, hints, slippages when I was growing up—but I missed their meaning.

“So there you have it: I had never desired. I had a body ready for it and a mind willing to learn, but it all lay asleep, unused, unsuspected. Then Rafael and I came together. Beneath plain clothing and shy manners we discovered our beautiful bodies, like gold hidden under the land. We were entirely ignorant in these matters. I didn't know what a cucumber was or what it was for. I didn't know what it could do for me or what I could do for it. And he was as ignorant about my nest. He stared at it, astonished.
What a strange thing,
his eyes said.
Have you seen your thing?
my eyes replied.
Yes, yes,
his eyes panted back,
it's all so very strange.

“Strangest of all, we knew what to do. It all fell into place. We touched, we asked, we did, all in one go. What pleased him pleased me, what pleased me pleased him. It works out like that in life sometimes, doesn't it? A stamp takes pleasure in being licked and stuck to an envelope, and an envelope takes pleasure in the stick of that stamp. Each takes to the other without ever having suspected that the other existed. So Rafael and I were stamp and envelope.

“And to our astonishment, under the cover of marriage, our deportment was all good and proper. I had never imagined it could feel so good to be Portuguese.

“I used to hurry home along the crest of the hill from the neighbouring village, where I assisted the schoolteacher. There was no path to speak of, but it was the quickest route to get to our small house. I scrambled over large rocks, I plunged through hedges. There were stone walls, but they had gates. From the third-to-last gate, I often caught sight of him, down below in our second field, where the sheep grazed. It happened regularly that he noticed me too, just as I reached this particular gate. Every time I thought,
What an extraordinary coincidence! I have just crossed this gate and he has seen me.
He couldn't hear me—too far—but sensing the deepening colour of the sky, aware of the time of day, he knew I would be coming along soon, and constantly he turned and looked up, creating the conditions for the coincidence. He would see me and redouble his efforts in the field, hustling and pushing the sheep into their pen, to the yapping delight of the dog, who saw his master taking over his job.

“Often, before he had even properly finished the task, he started to run, as did I. He was ahead of me, but he had much to do. He charged into the yard and screamed after the chickens. As I got closer, I could hear their frantic clucking. They were hurled into the coop. Then there were the pigs, who needed their slop for the night. And more. The endless tasks of a farm. From the top of the hill, I raced down to the back of the house. I would laugh and shout, ‘I'll get there first!' The front door would be the closest for him, the back door for me. When I was metres away, he would give up—to hell with the farm—and make a break for it. The doors would be torn open, sometimes his first, sometimes mine. Either way, they were slammed shut, shaking our hovel to its foundations, and we would be face to face, breathless, giddy, drunk with happiness. And why this rush? Why this unseemly race across the countryside? Why this neglect of farm duties? Because we were so eager to be naked with each other. We tore our clothes off as if they were on fire.

“One day my mother and I were working on preserves, a few months after my marriage. She asked me if Rafael and I had been ‘intimate' yet. That was her language. She wasn't touched by her husband, my father, for eighteen months after they got married. I don't know what they did for those eighteen months. Lie in bed, back to back, waiting to fall asleep in dead silence, their eyes wide open? My mother's concern was grandchildren. Her lineage was not a richly reproductive lot. She herself was an only child, and fifty-four years of marriage resulted in a single daughter. She was worried that I would be afflicted with the family's barrenness. I told my mother that Rafael and I were intimate every night, and sometimes during the day too, if we happened both to be at home, on a Sunday, for example. Sometimes in the morning also, before we had to rush off to work. Sometimes we were intimate two times in a row.