The High Mountains of Portugal

Part One: Homeless

Tomás decides to walk.

From his modest flat on Rua São Miguel in the ill-famed Alfama district to his uncle’s stately estate in leafy Lapa, it is a good walk across much of Lisbon. It will likely take him an hour. But the morning has broken bright and mild, and the walk will soothe him. And yesterday Sabio, one of his uncle’s servants, came to fetch his suitcase and the wooden trunk that holds the documents he needs for his mission to the High Mountains of Portugal, so he has only himself to convey.

He feels the breast pocket of his jacket. Father Ulisses’ diary is there, wrapped in a soft cloth. Foolish of him to bring it along like this, so casually. It would be a catastrophe if it were lost. If he had any sense he would have left it in the trunk. But he needs extra moral support this morning, as he does every time he visits his uncle.

Even in his excitement he remembers to forgo his regular cane and take the one his uncle gave him. The handle of this cane is made of elephant ivory and the shaft of African mahogany, but it is unusual mainly because of the round pocket mirror that juts out of its side just beneath the handle. This mirror is slightly convex, so the image it reflects is quite wide. Even so, it is entirely useless, a failed idea, because a walking cane in use is by its nature in constant motion, and the image the mirror reflects is therefore too shaky and fleeting to be helpful in any way. But this fancy cane is a custom-made gift from his uncle, and every time he pays a call Tomás brings it.

He heads off down Rua São Miguel onto Largo São Miguel and then Rua de São João da Praça before turning onto Arco de Jesus — the easy perambulation of a pedestrian walking through a city he has known his whole life, a city of beauty and bustle, of commerce and culture, of challenges and rewards. On Arco de Jesus he is ambushed by a memory of Dora, smiling and reaching out to touch him. For that, the cane is useful, because memories of her always throw him off balance.

“I got me a rich one,” she said to him once, as they lay in bed in his flat.

“I’m afraid not,” he replied. “It’s my uncle who’s rich. I’m the poor son of his poor brother. Papa has been as unsuccessful in business as my uncle Martim has been successful, in exact inverse proportion.”

He had never said that to anyone, commented so flatly and truthfully about his father’s checkered career, the business plans that collapsed one after the other, leaving him further beholden to the brother who rescued him each time. But to Dora he could reveal such things.

“Oh, you say that, but rich people always have troves of money hidden away.”

He laughed. “Do they? I’ve never thought of my uncle as a man who was secretive about his wealth. And if that’s so, if I’m rich, why won’t you marry me?”

People stare at him as he walks. Some make a comment, a few in jest but most with helpful intent. “Be careful, you might trip!” calls a concerned woman. He is used to this public attention; beyond a smiling nod to those who mean well, he ignores it.

One step at a time he makes his way to Lapa, his stride free and easy, each foot lifted high, then dropped with aplomb. It is a graceful gait.

He steps on an orange peel but does not slip.

He does not notice a sleeping dog, but his heel lands just short of its tail.

He misses a step as he is going down some curving stairs, but he is holding on to the railing and he regains his footing easily.

And other such minor mishaps.

Dora’s smile dropped at the mention of marriage. She was like that; she went from the lighthearted to the deeply serious in an instant.

“No, your family would banish you. Family is everything. You cannot turn your back on yours.”

“You are my family,” he replied, looking straight at her.

She shook her head. “No, I am not.”

His eyes, for the most part relieved of the burden of directing him, relax in his skull like two passengers sitting on deck chairs at the rear of a ship. Rather than surveying the ground all the time, they glance about dreamily. They notice the shapes of clouds and of trees. They dart after birds. They watch a horse snuffle as it pulls a cart. They come to rest on previously unnoticed architectural details in buildings. They observe the bustle of traffic on Rua Cais de Santarém. All in all, it should be a delightful morning stroll on this pleasant late-December day of the year 1904.

Dora, beautiful Dora. She worked as a servant in his uncle’s household. Tomás noticed her right away the first time he visited his uncle after she was hired. He could hardly take his eyes off her or get her out of his mind. He made efforts to be especially courteous to her and to engage her in brief conversations over one minor matter after another. It allowed him to keep looking at her fine nose, her bright dark eyes, her small white teeth, the way she moved. Suddenly he became a frequent visitor. He could remember precisely the moment Dora realized that he was addressing her not as a servant but as a woman. Her eyes flitted up to his, their gazes locked for a moment, and then she turned away — but not before a quick complicit smile curled up a corner of her mouth.

Something great was released within him then, and the barrier of class, of status, of utter improbability and unacceptability vanished. Next visit, when he gave her his coat, their hands touched and both lingered on that touch. Matters proceeded swiftly from there. He had, until then, had experience of sexual intimacy only with a few prostitutes, occasions that had been terribly exciting and then terribly depressing. He had fled each time, ashamed of himself and vowing never to do it again. With Dora, it was terribly exciting and then terribly exciting. She played with the thick hairs of his chest as she rested her head on him. He had no desire to flee anywhere.

“Marry me, marry me, marry me,” he pleaded. “We will be each other’s wealth.”

“No, we will only be poor and isolated. You don’t know what that’s like. I do, and I don’t want you to go through it.”

Into that amorous standstill was born their little Gaspar. If it were not for his strenuous pleading, she would have been dismissed from his uncle’s household when it was discovered that she was with child. His father had been his sole supporter, telling him to live his love for Dora, in precise opposition to his uncle’s silent opprobrium. Dora was relegated to invisible duties deep within the kitchen. Gaspar lived equally invisibly in the Lobo household, invisibly loved by his father, who invisibly loved his mother.

Tomás visited as often as he decently could. Dora and Gaspar came to see him in the Alfama on her days off. They would go to a park, sit on a bench, watch Gaspar play. On those days they were like any normal couple. He was in love and happy.

As he passes a tram stop, a tram rumbles up on its rails, a transportation newness hardly three years old, shiny yellow and electric. Commuters rush forward to get on it, commuters hurry to get off it. He avoids them all — except one, into whom he crashes. After a quick interaction in which mutual apologies are proffered and accepted, he moves on.

The sidewalk has several raised cobblestones but he glides over them easily.

His foot strikes the leg of a café chair. It is bumped, nothing more.

Death took Dora and Gaspar one unyielding step at a time, the doctor summoned by his uncle expending his skills to no avail. First a sore throat and fatigue, followed by fever, chills, aches, painful swallowing, difficulty breathing, convulsions, a wild-eyed, strangled losing of the mind — until they gave out, their bodies as grey, twisted, and still as the sheets they’d thrashed in. He was there with each of them. Gaspar was five years old, Dora was twenty-four.

He did not witness his father’s death a few days later. He was in the music room of the Lobo house, sitting silently with one of his cousins, numb with grief, when his uncle entered, grim-faced. “Tomás,” he said, “I have terrible news. Silvestro…your father, has died. I have lost my only brother.” The words were only sounds but Tomás felt crushed physically, as if a great rock had fallen on him, and he keened like a wounded animal. His warm bear of a father! The man who had raised him, who had countenanced his dreams!

In the course of one week — Gaspar died on Monday, Dora on Thursday, his father on Sunday — his heart became undone like a bursting cocoon. Emerging from it came no butterfly but a grey moth that settled on the wall of his soul and stirred no farther.

There were two funerals, a paltry one for a servant girl from the provinces and her bastard son, and a rich one for a rich man’s poor brother, whose lack of material success was discreetly not mentioned.

He does not see an approaching carriage as he steps off a curb, but the driver’s cry alerts him and he scampers out of the way of the horse.

He brushes against a man standing with his back to him. He raises his hand and says, “My apologies.” The man shrugs amiably and watches him go.

One step at a time, every few steps turning his head to glance over his shoulder at what lies onward, Tomás makes his way to Lapa walking backwards.

“Why? Why are you doing this? Why don’t you walk like a normal person? Enough of this nonsense!” his uncle has cried on more than one occasion. In response Tomás has come up with good arguments in defence of his way of walking. Does it not make more sense to face the elements — the wind, the rain, the sun, the onslaught of insects, the glumness of strangers, the uncertainty of the future — with the shield that is the back of one’s head, the back of one’s jacket, the seat of one’s pants? These are our protection, our armour. They are made to withstand the vagaries of fate. Meanwhile, when one is walking backwards, one’s more delicate parts — the face, the chest, the attractive details of one’s clothing — are sheltered from the cruel world ahead and displayed only when and to whom one wants with a simple voluntary turn that shatters one’s anonymity. Not to mention arguments of a more athletic nature. What more natural way to walk downhill, he contends, than backwards? The forefeet touch down with nimble delicacy, and the calf muscles can calibrate their tensing and releasing with precision. Movement downwards is therefore elastic and without strain. And should one trip, what safer way to do so than backwards, the cushioned buttocks blunting one’s fall? Better that than to break one’s wrists in a forward tumble. And he’s not excessively stubborn about it. He does make exceptions, when climbing the many long, winding stairs of the Alfama, for example, or when he has to run.

All of these justifications his uncle has waved aside impatiently. Martim Augusto Mendes Lobo is an impatient successful man. Yet he knows why Tomás walks backwards, despite his testy interrogations and his nephew’s dissembling explanations. One day Tomás overheard him talking to a visiting friend. It was the very dropping of his uncle’s voice that made him prick up his ears.

“…the most ridiculous scene,” his uncle was saying, sotto voce. “Imagine this: Ahead of him — that is, behind him — there is a streetlight. I call over my secretary, Benito, and we watch in silent fascination, our minds preoccupied with the same question: Will my nephew walk into the streetlight? At that moment, another pedestrian appears on the street, at the other end. This man sees Tomás walking towards him backwards. We can tell from his cocked head that my nephew’s curious way of advancing has caught his attention. I know from experience that there will be an encounter of sorts — a comment made, a jest thrown out, at the very least a bewildered stare as he passes by. Sure enough, a few steps before Tomás reaches the streetlight, the other man quickens his pace and stops him with a tap on the shoulder. Tomás turns. Benito and I cannot hear what the two say to each other, but we can watch the pantomime. The stranger points to the streetlight. Tomás smiles, nods, and brings a hand to his chest to express his gratitude. The stranger smiles back. They shake hands. With a wave to each other they depart, each going his way, the stranger down the street, and Tomás — swivelling round, moving backwards once more — up the street. He circles the streetlight without the least trouble.

“Ah, but wait! It’s not over. After a few steps the other pedestrian turns his head to glance back at Tomás, and clearly he is surprised to see that he is still walking backwards. Concern can be read on his face—Careful, you’ll have an accident if you don’t watch out! — but also a measure of embarrassment because Tomás is looking his way and has seen him turn to stare, and we all know it’s rude to stare. The man quickly turns his head to face forward again, but it’s too late: He collides with the next streetlight. He hits it like a clapper hits a bell. Both Benito and I wince instinctively in sympathy. Tottering, he grimaces as he brings his hands to his face and chest. Tomás runs to help him — he runs forward. You’d think it would look normal, his forward gait, but it doesn’t. There is no bounce to his step. He advances with great, long strides, his torso moving smoothly in a straight line, as if on a conveyor belt.

“Another exchange takes place between the two men, Tomás expressing great concern, the other man waving it aside while keeping a hand pressed to his face. Tomás retrieves the man’s hat, which has fallen to the ground. With another handshake and a more muted wave, the poor man staggers off. Tomás — and Benito and I — watch him go. Only once the man has turned the corner of the street does Tomás, in his usual rearward manner, resume his course. But the incident has flustered him, evidently, because he now smartly bangs into the streetlight he so artfully avoided a minute earlier. Rubbing the back of his head, he turns to glare at it.

“But still, Fausto, he persists. No matter how often he bangs his head, no matter how many times he falls over, he goes on walking backwards.” Tomás heard his uncle laugh and the friend Fausto join in. Then his uncle continued more somberly. “It started the day his little boy, Gaspar, died of diphtheria. The boy was born out of wedlock to a servant here. She died of the sickness too. Then, as fate would have it, my brother, Silvestro, dropped dead a few days later, midday, mid-speech. Already Tomás’s mother had died when he was young. Now his father. To be so assailed by tragedy! Some people never laugh again. Others take to drink. My nephew, in his case, chose to walk backwards. It’s been a year. How long will this bizarre grieving last?”

What his uncle does not understand is that in walking backwards, his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting. Because when everything cherished by you in life has been taken away, what else is there to do but object?

He takes a roundabout route. He turns off Rua Nova de São Francisco and starts walking up Rua do Sacramento. He is nearly there. As he swivels his head to see over his shoulder — he remembers there’s a streetlight ahead — he looks up at the rear of his uncle’s grand residence, with its elaborate cornices and intricate mouldings and soaring windows. He feels eyes upon him and notices a figure at a window on the corner of the second floor. Given that is where his uncle’s office is located, it is likely his uncle Martim, so he turns his head back and strives to walk confidently, carefully skirting the streetlight. He follows the wall surrounding his uncle’s property until he comes up to the gate. He spins round to reach for the bell, but his hand pauses in midair. He pulls it back. Though he knows his uncle has seen him and is waiting for him, he tarries. Then he takes the old leather diary from the breast pocket of his jacket, slips it out of its cotton cloth, puts his back against the wall, and slides down to a sitting position on the sidewalk. He gazes at the book’s cover.

Being the Life in Words

and the Instructions for the Gift

of Father Ulisses Manuel Rosario Pinto

humble Servant of God

He is well acquainted with Father Ulisses’ diary. Whole sections he knows by heart. He opens it at random and reads.

As slave ships approach the island to deliver their cargo, they have much accounting & housecleaning to do. Within sight of the port, they throw body after body overboard, both port & starboard, some of them limp & pliant, others feebly gesticulating. These are the dead & the seriously sick, the first discarded because they are no longer of any value, the second for fear that whatever illness is afflicting them might spread & affect the value of the others. It happens that the wind carries to my ears the cries of the living slaves as they protest their expulsion from the ship, as it also carries the splash their bodies make upon hitting the water. They disappear into the crowded Limbo that is the bottom of the Bay of Ana Chaves.

His uncle’s house is also a Limbo of unfinished, interrupted lives. He closes his eyes. Loneliness comes up to him like a sniffing dog. It circles him insistently. He waves it away, but it refuses to leave him alone.

He came upon Father Ulisses’ diary mere weeks after his life was irretrievably blighted. The discovery was a happenstance related to his work at the National Museum of Ancient Art, where he works as assistant curator. The Cardinal-Patriarch of Lisbon, José Sebastião de Almeida Neto, had just made a donation to the museum of ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical objects accumulated over the centuries from across the Portuguese empire. With Cardinal Neto’s permission, Tomás was sent by the museum to do research in the Episcopal archives on Rua Serpa Pinto to establish the exact provenance of these beautiful artifacts, the story whereby an altar, chalice, crucifix or psalter, a painting or a book, had come into the hands of the Lisbon diocese.

What he found were not exemplary archives. Succeeding secretaries of the various archbishops of Lisbon clearly did not dwell overmuch on the earthly matter of organizing thousands of papers and documents. It was on one of the open shelves devoted to the patriarchate of Cardinal José Francisco de Mendoça Valdereis, Patriarch of Lisbon between 1788 and 1808, in a stuff-all section given the breezy title Miudezas—Odds and Ends — that he spotted the hand-stitched volume with the brown leather cover, the handwritten title legible despite the splotchy discolourations.

What life was this, what gift? he had wondered. What were the instructions? Who was this Father Ulisses? When he pried open the volume, the spine made the sound of small bones breaking. Handwriting burst out with startling freshness, the black ink standing in high contrast to the ivory paper. The italic, quill-penned script was from another age. The pages were faintly rimmed with sunny yellow, indicating that they had seen very little light since the day they were written upon. He doubted that Cardinal Valdereis had ever read the volume; in fact, given that there was no archival note attached to the cover or anywhere inside — no catalogue number, no date, no comment — and no reference to the book in the index, he had the distinct impression that no one had ever read it.

He studied the first page, noticing an entry with a date and a place name above it: September 17, 1631, Luanda. He turned the pages with care. Other dates appeared. The last year recorded, though without a day or month, was 1635. A diary, then. Here, there, he noted geographic references: “the mountains of Bailundu…the mountains of Pungo Ndongo…the old Benguela route,” locales that all appeared to be in Portuguese Angola. On June 2, 1633, there was a new place name: São Tomé, the small island colony in the Gulf of Guinea, “that fleck of dandruff off the head of Africa, long days north along the damp coast of this pestilential continent.” His eyes came upon a sentence written a few weeks later: Isso é minha casa. “This is home.” But it wasn’t written just once. The words covered the page. A whole page of the same short sentence, closely written, the repeated lines wavering up and down slightly: “This is home. This is home. This is home.” Then they stopped, replaced by prose that was more normally discursive, only to appear again some pages later, covering half a page: “This is home. This is home. This is home.” Then once more, further on, for a page and a quarter: “This is home. This is home. This is home.”

What did it mean? Why the manic repetition? He eventually found a possible answer on a page where the reiteration was the same as in every other instance, covering nearly two pages this time, with one difference, a spillage at the end, a clue that the phrase on the page was an ellipsis that the author completed in his mind every time: “This is home. This is home. This is home where the Lord has put me until He takes me to His Breast.” Father Ulisses evidently had been racked by acute homesickness.

On one page Tomás found a curious sketch, a drawing of a face. The features were hastily outlined except for the mournful eyes, which were meticulously drawn. He studied those eyes for many minutes. He plunged into their sadness. Memories of his recently lost son swirled in his mind. When he left the archives that day, he hid the diary among innocuous papers in his briefcase. He was honest to himself about his purpose. This was no informal loan — it was plain theft. The Episcopal archives of Lisbon, having neglected Father Ulisses’ diary for over two hundred and fifty years, would not miss it now, and he wanted the leisure to examine it properly.

He began reading and transcribing the diary as soon as he found the time. He proceeded slowly. The penmanship went from the easily readable to skeins of calligraphy that required him to work out that this scribble represented that syllable, while that squiggle represented this syllable. What was striking was how the writing was poised in the early sections, then grew markedly worse. The final pages were barely decipherable. A number of words he could not make out, no matter how hard he tried.

What Father Ulisses wrote when he was in Angola was no more than a dutiful account and of modest interest. He was merely another minion of the Bishop of Luanda, who “sat in the shade on the pier upon his marble throne” while he worked himself to a listless stupor, running around baptizing batches of slaves. But on São Tomé a desperate force took hold of him. He began to work on an object, the gift of the title. Its making consumed his mind and took all his energy. He mentioned seeking the “most perfect wood” and “adequate tools” and recalled training in his uncle’s shop when he was young. He describes oiling his gift several times to help in its preservation, “my glistening hands artisans of devoted love.” Towards the end of the diary, Tomás found these odd words, extolling the imposing character of his creation:

It shines, it shrieks, it barks, it roars. Truly the Son of God giving a loud cry & breathing his last as the curtain of the temple is torn from top to bottom. It is finished.

What did Father Ulisses train in, and what did his uncle’s shop produce? What did he oil with his hands? What was shining and shrieking, barking and roaring? Tomás could not find a clear answer in Father Ulisses’ diary, only hints. When did the Son of God give a loud cry and breathe his last? On the Cross. Could the object in question be a crucifix, then, Tomás wondered. It was certainly a sculpture of some sort. But there was more to it than that. It was, by Father Ulisses’ account, a most peculiar work. The moth in Tomás’s soul stirred. He remembered Dora’s last hours. Once she was bedridden, she held on to a crucifix with both hands, and no matter how much she tossed and turned, no matter how much she cried out, she didn’t let go of it. It was a cheap brass effigy that glinted dully, smallish in size, the type that might hang on a wall. She died clasping it to her chest in her small, bare room, with only Tomás present, in a chair by her bed. When the final moment came, signaled to him by the dramatic stoppage of her loud, rasping breathing (whereas their son had departed so quietly, like the petals of a flower falling off), he felt like a sheet of ice being rushed along a river.

In the hours that followed, as the long night ended and the new day stretched on, as he waited for the undertaker, who kept failing to show up, he fled and returned to Dora’s room repeatedly, pushed away by horror, drawn back by compulsion. “How will I survive without you?” he pleaded to her at one point. His attention fell on the crucifix. Until then he had floated along religiously, observant on the outside, indifferent on the inside. Now he realized that this matter of faith was either radically to be taken seriously or radically not to be taken seriously. He stared at the crucifix, balancing between utter belief and utter disbelief. Before he had cast his lot one way or the other, he thought to keep the crucifix as a memento. But Dora, or rather Dora’s body, would not let go. Her hands and arms clutched the object with unyielding might, even as he practically lifted her body off the bed trying to wrench it from her. (Gaspar, by comparison, had been so soft in death, like a large stuffed doll.) In a sobbing rage, he gave up. At that moment, a resolution — more a threat — came to his mind. He glared at the crucifix and hissed, “You! You! I will deal with you, just you wait!”

The undertaker arrived at last and took Dora and her cursed crucifix away.

If the object that Father Ulisses had created was what Tomás inferred it was from the priest’s wild scribblings, then it was a striking and unusual artifact, something quite extraordinary. It would do nothing less than turn Christianity upside down. It would make good his threat. But did it survive? That was the question that gripped Tomás from the moment he finished reading the diary in his flat after he had smuggled it out of the Episcopal archives. After all, the object might have been burned or hacked to pieces. But in a pre-industrial age, when goods were crafted one by one and distributed slowly, they shone with a value that has faded with the rise of modern industry. Even clothing was not thrown away. Christ’s scanty clothing was shared by Roman soldiers who believed he was nothing more than a lowly Jewish rabble-rouser. If ordinary clothes were passed on, then surely a large sculpted object would be preserved, all the more so if it was religious in nature.

How to determine its fate? There were two options: Either the object had stayed on São Tomé, or it had left São Tomé. Since the island was poor and given over to commerce, he guessed that it had made its way off the island. He hoped it had gone to Portugal, to the mother country, but it could also have gone to one of the many trading posts and cities along the coast of Africa. In both cases, it would have travelled by ship.

After the death of his loved ones, Tomás spent months seeking evidence of Father Ulisses’ creation. In the National Archives of Torre do Tombo, he searched and studied the logbooks of Portuguese ships that travelled the western coast of Africa in the few years after Father Ulisses’ death. He worked on the assumption that the carving had left São Tomé on a Portuguese ship. If it had departed on a foreign ship, then God only knew where it had ended up.

Finally, he came upon the logbook of one Captain Rodolfo Pereira Pacheco, whose galleon had departed São Tomé on December 14, 1637, carrying, among other goods, “a rendition of Our Lord on the Cross, strange & marvellous.” His pulse had quickened. This was the first and only reference to a religious object of any kind that he had seen in relation to the debased colony.

Written next to each item in the logbook was its point of disembarkation. A great number of goods were unloaded at one stop or another along the Slave and Gold coasts, sold or replaced by other goods for which they were traded. He read the word next to the cross in Captain Pacheco’s logbook: Lisboa. It had reached the homeland! He whooped in a way unseemly for a study room in the National Archives.

He turned Torre do Tombo upside down trying to find where Father Ulisses’ crucifix had gone once it reached Lisbon. He eventually found his answer not in the National Archives but back in the Episcopal archives, where he had started. The irony was more galling than that. The answer lay in the form of two letters on the very shelf of Cardinal Valdereis’s archives where he had found the diary, right next to where it had rested before he filched it. If only a string had attached diary to letters, he would have been spared much work.

The first letter was from the Bishop of Bragança, António Luís Cabral e Câmara, dated April 9, 1804, asking if the good Cardinal Valdereis might have some gift for a parish in the High Mountains of Portugal whose church had lately suffered a fire that destroyed its chancel. It was “a fine old church,” he said, though he did not name the church or give its location. In his reply, a copy of which was attached to Bishop Câmara’s letter, Cardinal Valdereis stated: “It is my pleasure to send on to you an object of piety that has been with the Lisbon diocese for some time, a singular portrayal of our Lord on the Cross, from the African colonies.” Next to a diary that came from the African colonies, could the reference be to any other portrayal of the Lord but Father Ulisses’? Amazing that despite having it right in front of his eyes, Cardinal Valdereis could not see the thing for what it was. But the cleric did not know — and so he could not see.

An exchange of letters with the diocese of Bragança revealed that there was no trace of an African object per se going through their office during Bishop Câmara’s years. Tomás was vexed. A creation that was strange and marvellous at its point of origin had become singular in Lisbon and then, at the hands of provincials, mundane. That, or its nature had been deliberately ignored. Tomás had to take another tack. The crucifix was meant to go to a church that had suffered a fire. Records showed that between 1793, when Câmara was consecrated bishop of Bragança, and 1804, when he wrote to Cardinal Valdereis, there had been fires of varying severity in a number of churches in the High Mountains of Portugal. Such are the dangers of illuminating churches with candles and torches and burning incense during high holidays. Câmara said the crucifix was destined for “a fine old church.” What church would earn that favourable description from the bishop? Tomás surmised one that was Gothic or perhaps Romanesque. Which meant a church built in the fifteenth century or earlier. The secretary of the diocese of Bragança did not prove to be a keen ecclesiastical historian. Prodding on Tomás’s part yielded the guess that five of the churches blighted by fires might be worthy recipients of Bishop Câmara’s praise, namely the widely scattered churches of São Julião de Palácios, Santalha, Mofreita, Guadramil, and Espinhosela.

Tomás wrote to the priest of each church. Their replies were inconclusive. Each priest heaped praise upon his church, extolling its age and beauty. By the sounds of it, there were copies of Saint Peter’s Basilica strewn across the High Mountains of Portugal. But none of the priests had much to say that was illuminating on the crucifix at the heart of his church. Each claimed that it was a stirring work of faith, but none knew when his church had acquired it or where it had come from. Finally Tomás decided that there was nothing to do but go and determine for himself if he was right about the true character of Father Ulisses’ crucifix. It was a minor annoyance that it had ended up in the High Mountains of Portugal, that remote and isolated region to the very northeast of his country. Soon enough he would have the object before his eyes.

He is startled by a voice.

“Hello, Senhor Tomás. You are coming to see us, are you not?”

It is the old groundskeeper, Afonso. He has opened the gate and is looking down at Tomás. How did he open it so quietly?

“Yes, I am, Afonso.”

“Are you not well?”

“I’m fine.”

He works his way to his feet, slipping the book back into his pocket as he does so. The groundskeeper pulls the cord of the bell. As the bell jangles, so do Tomás’s nerves. He must go in, it is so. It is not just this home, where Dora and Gaspar died, but every home that now has this effect on him. Love is a house with many rooms, this room to feed the love, this one to entertain it, this one to clean it, this one to dress it, this one to allow it to rest, and each of these rooms can also just as well be the room for laughing or the room for listening or the room for telling one’s secrets or the room for sulking or the room for apologizing or the room for intimate togetherness, and, of course, there are the rooms for the new members of the household. Love is a house in which plumbing brings bubbly new emotions every morning, and sewers flush out disputes, and bright windows open up to admit the fresh air of renewed goodwill. Love is a house with an unshakable foundation and an indestructible roof. He had a house like that once, until it was demolished. Now he no longer has a home anywhere — his flat in the Alfama is as bare as a monk’s cell — and to set foot in one is to be reminded of how homeless he is. He knows that is what drew him to Father Ulisses in the first place: their mutual homesickness. Tomás recalls the priest’s words on the death of the governor of São Tomé’s wife. She was the only European woman on the island. The next such woman lived in Lagos, some eight hundred kilometres across the waters. Father Ulisses had not actually met the governor’s wife. He had seen her on only a few occasions.

The death of a white man causes a greater breach on this pestilent island than it does in Lisbon. When it is a woman, then! Her demise is a weight that is most difficult to bear. I fear the sight of a woman of my own kind will never again comfort me. Never again beauty, gentility, grace. I do not know how much longer I can go on.

Tomás and Afonso cross the cobbled courtyard, the groundskeeper a deferential step ahead of him. Since he is advancing backwards in his usual fashion, they walk in lockstep back to back. At the foot of the steps to the main entrance, Afonso moves aside and bows. As it’s a matter of climbing only a few steps, Tomás climbs them backwards. Before he has even reached the door, it opens behind him and he enters the house backwards. Glancing over his shoulder, he sees Damiãno, his uncle’s long-time butler who has known him since he was a child, waiting for him, his hands open, a smile upon his face. Tomás pivots to face him.

“Hello, Damiãno.”

“Menino Tomás, what a pleasure to see you. You are well?”

“I am, thank you. How is my aunt Gabriela?”

“Splendid. She shines upon us like the sun.”

Speaking of the sun, it shines through the high windows upon the bounty of objects in the entrance hall. His uncle has made his vast fortune trading in African goods, principally ivory and timber. Two enormous elephant tusks adorn one wall. Between them hangs a rich, glossy portrait of King Carlos I. His Majesty himself stood before this likeness when he honoured his uncle with his presence in the house. Other walls are decorated with zebra and lion hides, with mounted animal heads above them: lion and zebra, but also eland, hippopotamus, wildebeest, giraffe. Hides also provide the upholstery for the chairs and the couch. African handiworks are displayed in niches and on shelves: necklaces, rustic wooden busts, gris-gris, knives and spears, colourful fabrics, drums, and so on. Various paintings — landscapes, portraits of Portuguese landowners and attending natives, but also a large map of Africa, with the Portuguese possessions highlighted — set the scene and evoke some of the characters. And on the right, artfully set amidst tall grass, the stalking stuffed lion.

The hall is a curatorial mess, a cultural mishmash, every artifact ripped out of the context that gave sense to it. But it lit up Dora’s eyes. She marvelled at this colonial cornucopia. It made her proud of the Portuguese empire. She touched every object she could reach, except the lion.

“I’m glad to hear my aunt is well. Is my uncle in his office?” Tomás asks.

“He’s waiting for you in the courtyard. If you would be so kind as to follow me.”

Tomás does an about-face and follows Damiãno across the entrance hall and down a carpeted hallway lined with paintings and display cases. They turn in to another hallway. Ahead of Tomás, Damiãno opens two French windows and moves aside. Tomás steps out onto a semi-circular landing. He hears his uncle’s loud, exuberant voice: “Tomás, behold the Iberian rhinoceros!”

Tomás looks over his right shoulder. Tackling the three steps down into the large courtyard, he hurries to him and spins round next to him. They shake hands.

“Uncle Martim, how good to see you. You are well?”

“How could I not be? I have the great pleasure of seeing my one and only nephew.”

Tomás is about to inquire about his aunt again but his uncle waves these social niceties aside. “Enough, enough. Well, what do you think of my Iberian rhinoceros?” he asks, pointing. “It is the pride of my menagerie!”

The beast in question stands in the middle of the courtyard, not far from the lean and tall Sabio, its keeper. Tomás gazes at it. Though the light is soft and milky, wrapping it in a flattering gauze, it is in his eyes a farcical monstrosity. “It is…magnificent,” he replies.

Despite its ungraceful appearance, he has always lamented the fate of the animal that once roamed the rural corners of his country. Was the Iberian rhinoceros’s last bastion not, in fact, the High Mountains of Portugal? Curious, the hold the animal has had on the Portuguese imagination. Human advancement spelled its end. It was, in a sense, run over by modernity. It was hunted and hounded to extinction and vanished, as ridiculous as an old idea — only to be mourned and missed the moment it was gone. Now it is fodder for fado, a stock character in that peculiar form of Portuguese melancholy, saudade. Indeed, thinking of the long-gone creature, Tomás is overcome with saudade. He is, as the expression goes, tão docemente triste quanto um rinoceronte, as sweetly sad as a rhinoceros.

His uncle is pleased with his answer. Tomás observes him with a degree of apprehension. Upon a solid frame of bones his father’s brother has padded his body with wealth, a layer of portliness he carries with jocular pride. He lives in Lapa, in the lap of luxury. He spends staggering sums of money on every new bauble. Some years ago his fancy was caught by the bicycle, a two-wheeled transportation device propelled by the rider’s own legs. On the hilly, cobbled streets of Lisbon, a bicycle is not merely impractical but dangerous. It can be used safely only on the pathways of parks, a Sunday amusement in which the rider goes round and round in circles, annoying walkers and frightening their children and dogs. His uncle has a whole stable of French Peugeot bicycles. Then he went on to procure motorized bicycles that went even faster than pedal bicycles, besides making much noise. And here is a representative of the latest of his expensive curios, recently acquired. “But Uncle,” he adds carefully, “I see only an automobile.”

“Only, you say?” responds his uncle. “Well, this technical wonder is the eternal spirit of our nation brought to life again.” He places a foot on the automobile’s footboard, a narrow platform that runs along its edge between the front and back wheels. “I hesitated. Which should I lend you? My Darracq, my De Dion-Bouton, my Unic, my Peugeot, my Daimler, perhaps even my American Oldsmobile? The choice was difficult. Finally, because you are my dear nephew, in memory of my sorely missed brother, I settled on the champion of the lot. This is a brand new four-cylinder Renault, a masterpiece of engineering. Look at it! It is a creation that not only shines with the might of logic but sings with the allure of poetry. Let us be rid of the animal that so befouls our city! The automobile never needs to sleep — can the horse beat that? You can’t compare their power output, either. This Renault is assessed to have a fourteen-horsepower engine, but that is a strict, conservative estimate. More likely it produces twenty horsepower of drive. And a mechanical horsepower is more powerful than an animal horsepower, so imagine a stagecoach with thirty horses tethered to it. Can you see that, the thirty horses lined up in rows of two, stamping and chafing at the bit? Well, you don’t have to imagine it: It’s right here before your eyes. Those thirty horses have been compressed into a metal box fitted between these front wheels. The performance! The economy! Never has old fire been put to such brilliant new use. And where in the automobile is the offal that so offends with the horse? There is none, only a puff of smoke that vanishes in the air. An automobile is as harmless as a cigarette. Mark my words, Tomás: This century will be remembered as the century of the puff of smoke!”

His uncle beams, filled to the brim with pride and joy in his Gallic gewgaw. Tomás remains tight-lipped. He does not share his uncle’s infatuation with automobiles. A few of these newfangled devices have lately found their way onto the streets of Lisbon. Amidst the bustling animal traffic of the city, all in all not so noisy, these automobiles now roar by like huge, buzzing insects, a nuisance offensive to the ears, painful to the eyes, and malodorous to the nose. He sees no beauty in them. His uncle’s burgundy-coloured copy is no exception. It lacks in any elegance or symmetry. Its cabin appears to him absurdly oversized compared to the puny stable at the aft into which are stuffed the thirty horses. The metal of the thing, and there is much of it, glares shiny and hard — inhumanly, he would say.

He would happily be carted by a conventional beast of burden to the High Mountains of Portugal, but he is making the trip over the Christmas season, cumulating holiday time that is his due with the few days he begged, practically on his knees, from the chief curator at the museum. That gives him only ten days to accomplish his mission. The distance is too great, his time too limited. An animal won’t do. And so he has to avail himself of his uncle’s kindly offered but unsightly invention.

With a clattering of doors, Damiãno enters the courtyard bearing a tray with coffee and fig pastries. A stand for the tray is produced, as are two chairs. Tomás and his uncle sit down. Hot milk is poured, sugar is measured out. The moment is set for small talk, but instead he asks directly, “So how does it work, Uncle?”

He asks because he does not want to contemplate what is just beyond the automobile, fringing the wall of his uncle’s estate, next to the path that leads to the servants’ quarters: the row of orange trees. For it is there that his son used to wait for him, hiding behind a not-so-thick tree trunk. Gaspar would flee, shrieking, as soon as his father’s eyes caught him. Tomás would run after the little clown, pretending that his aunt and uncle, or their many spies, did not see him go down the path, just as the servants pretended not to see him entering their quarters. Yes, better to talk about automobiles than to look at those orange trees.

“Ah, well you should ask! Let me show you the marvel within,” replies his uncle, leaping up out of his seat. Tomás follows him to the front of the automobile as he unhooks the small, rounded metal hood and tips it forward on its hinges. Revealed are tangles of pipes and bulbous protuberances of shiny metal.

“Admire!” his uncle commands. “An in-line four-cylinder engine with a 3,054 cc capacity. A beauty and a feat. Notice the order of progress: engine, radiator, friction clutch, sliding-pinion gearbox, drive to the rear axle. Under this alignment, the future will take place. But first let me explain to you the wonder of the internal combustion engine.”

He points with a finger that aims to make visible the magic that takes place within the opaque walls of the engine. “Here moto-naphtha vapour is sprayed by the carburetor into the explosion chambers. The magnet activates the sparking plugs; the vapour is thereby ignited and explodes. The pistons, here, are pushed down, which…”

Tomás understands nothing. He stares dumbly. At the end of the triumphant explanations, his uncle reaches in to pick up a thick booklet lying on the seat of the driving compartment. He places it in his nephew’s hand. “This is the automobile manual. It will make clear what you might not have understood.”

Tomás peers at the manual. “It’s in French, Uncle.”

“Yes. Renault Frères is a French company.”

“But—”

“I’ve included a French-Portuguese dictionary in your kit. You must take utmost care to lubricate the automobile properly.”

“Lubricate it?” His uncle might as well be speaking French.

Lobo ignores his quizzical expression. “Aren’t the mudguards handsome? Guess what they’re made of?” he says, slapping one. “Elephant ears! I had them custom-made as a souvenir from Angola. The same with the outside walls of the cabin: only the finest-grain elephant hide.”

“What’s this?” asks Tomás.

“The horn. To warn, to alert, to remind, to coax, to complain.” His uncle squeezes the large rubber bulb affixed to the edge of the automobile, left of the steerage wheel. A tuba-like honk, with a little vibrato, erupts out of the trumpet attached to the bulb. It is loud and attention-getting. Tomás has a vision of a rider on a horse carrying a goose under his arm like a bagpipe, squeezing the bird whenever danger is nigh, and cannot repress a cough of laughter.

“Can I try it?”

He squeezes the bulb several times. Each honk makes him laugh. He stops when he sees that his uncle is less amused and endeavours to pay attention to the renewed motoring mumbo-jumbo. These are more venerations than clarifications. If his relative’s smelly metallic toy could show feelings, it would surely turn pink with embarrassment.

They come to the steerage wheel, which is perfectly round and the size of a large dinner plate. Reaching into the driving compartment again, Lobo places a hand on it. “To turn the vehicle to the left, you turn the wheel to the left. To turn the vehicle to the right, you turn the wheel to the right. To drive straight, you hold the wheel straight. Perfectly logical.”

Tomás peers closely. “But how can a stationary wheel be said to turn to the left or to the right?” he asks.

His uncle searches his face. “I’m not sure I understand what there is not to understand. Do you see the top of the wheel, next to my hand? You see it, yes? Well, imagine that there’s a spot there, a little white spot. Now, if I turn the wheel this way”—and here he pulls on the wheel—“do you see how that little white spot moves to the left? Yes? Well then, the automobile will turn to the left. And do you see that if I turn the wheel that way”—and here he pushes the wheel—“do you see how the little white spot moves to the right? In that case, the automobile will turn to the right. Is the point obvious to you now?”

Tomás’s expression darkens. “But look”—he points with a finger—“at the bottom of the steerage wheel! If there were a little white spot there, it would be moving in the opposite direction. You might be turning the wheel to the right, as you say, at the top, but at the bottom you’re turning it to the left. And what about the sides of the wheel? As you’re turning it both right and left, you’re also turning one side up and the other side down. So either way, in whichever direction you spin the wheel, you’re simultaneously turning it to the right, to the left, up, and down. Your claim to be turning the wheel in one particular direction sounds to me like one of those paradoxes devised by the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea.”

Lobo stares in consternation at the steerage wheel, the top of it, the bottom of it, the sides of it. He takes a long, deep breath. “Be that as it may, Tomás, you must drive this automobile the way it was designed. Keep your eyes on the top of the steerage wheel. Ignore all the other sides. Shall we move on? There are other details we must cover, the operation of the clutch and of the change-speed lever, for example…” He accompanies his talk with hand and foot gestures, but neither words nor mummery spark any comprehension in Tomás. For example, what is “torque”? Did the Iberian Peninsula not get enough torque with Grand Inquisitor Torquemada? And what sane person could make sense of “double declutch”?

“I have supplied you with a few items that you’ll find useful.”

His uncle pulls open the door of the cabin, which is located in its back half. Tomás leans forward to peer in. There is relative gloom within. He notes the features of the cabin. It has the elements of a domestic space, with a black sofa of the finest leather and walls and a ceiling of polished cedar strips. The front window and the side windows look like the windows of an elegant home, boasting clear, good-quality panes and gleaming metal sashes. And the back window above the sofa, so neatly framed, could well be a painting hanging on a wall. But the scale of it! The ceiling is so low. The sofa will accommodate no more than two people comfortably. Each side window is of a size that will allow only a single person to look out of it. As for the back window, if it were a painting, it would be a miniature. And to get into this confined space, one must bend down to get through the door. What happened to the opulent openness of the horse-drawn carriage? He pulls back and gazes at one of the automobile’s side mirrors. It might plausibly belong in a washroom. And didn’t his uncle mention something about a fire in the engine? He feels an inward sinking. This tiny habitation on wheels, with bit parts of the living room, the washroom, and the fireplace, is a pathetic admission that human life is no more than this: an attempt to feel at home while racing towards oblivion.

He has also noticed the multitude of objects in the cabin. There is his suitcase, with his few personal necessities. More important, there is his trunk of papers, which contains all sorts of essential items: his correspondence with the secretary of the Bishop of Bragança and with a number of parish priests across the High Mountains of Portugal; the transcription of Father Ulisses’ diary; archival newspaper clippings on the occurrences of fires in village churches in that same region; excerpts from the logbook of a Portuguese ship returning to Lisbon in the mid-seventeenth century; as well as various monographs on the architectural history of northern Portugal. And usually, when he is not carrying it in his pocket — a folly, he reminds himself — the trunk would hold and protect Father Ulisses’ invaluable diary. But suitcase and trunk are crowded alongside barrels, boxes, tin containers, and bags. The cabin is a cave of goods that would glut the Forty Thieves.

“Ali Baba, Uncle Martim! So many things? I’m not crossing Africa. I’m only going to the High Mountains of Portugal, some few days away.”

“You’re going farther than you think,” his uncle replies. “You’ll be venturing into lands that have never seen an automobile. You’ll need the capacity to be autonomous. Which is why I’ve included a good canvas rain tarp and some blankets, although you might be better off sleeping in the cabin. That box there contains all the motoring tools you’ll need. Next to it is the oiling can. This five-gallon metal barrel is full of water, for the radiator, and this one of moto-naphtha, the automobile’s elixir of life. Resupply yourself as often as you can, because at some point you’ll have to rely on your own stock. Along the way, look out for apothecaries, bicycle shops, blacksmiths, ironmongers. They’ll have moto-naphtha, though they may give it another name: petroleum spirit, mineral spirit, something like that. Smell it before you buy it. I’ve also provided you with victuals. An automobile is best operated by a well-fed driver. Now, see if these fit.”

From a bag on the floor of the cabin, his uncle pulls out a pair of pale leather gloves. Tomás tries them on, baffled. The fit is snug. The leather is pleasingly elastic and creaks when he makes a fist.

“Thank you,” he says uncertainly.

“Take good care of them. They’re from France too.”

Next his uncle hands him goggles that are big and hideous. Tomás has hardly put them on when his uncle brings out a beige coat lined with fur that reaches well below his knees.

“Waxed cotton and mink. The finest quality,” he says.

Tomás puts it on. The coat is heavy and bulky. Finally, Lobo slaps a hat on him that has straps that tie under the chin. Gloved, goggled, coated, and hatted, he feels like a giant mushroom. “Uncle, what is this costume for?”

“For motoring, of course. For the wind and the dust. For the rain and the cold. It is December. Have you not noticed the driving compartment?”

He looks. His uncle has a point. The back part of the automobile consists of the enclosed cubicle for the passengers. The driving compartment in front of it, however, is open to the elements but for the roof and a front window. There are no doors or windows on either side. Wind, dust, and rain will easily come in. He grouses internally. If his uncle hadn’t cluttered the cabin with so much gear, making it impossible for him to sit within, he could take shelter there while Sabio drove the machine.

His uncle presses on. “I’ve included maps as good as they exist. When they’re of no help, rely on the compass. You’re heading north-northeast. The roads of Portugal are of the poorest quality, but the vehicle has a fine suspension system — leaf springs. They will handle any ruts. If the roads get to you, drink plenty of wine. There are two wineskins in the cabin. Avoid roadside inns and stagecoaches. They are not your friends. It’s understandable. A degree of hostility is to be expected from those whose livelihood the automobile directly threatens. Right, as for the rest of the supplies, you’ll figure out what’s what. We should get going. Sabio, are you ready?”

“Yes, senhor,” replies Sabio with military promptness.

“Let me get my jacket. I’ll drive you to the edges of Lisbon, Tomás.”

His uncle returns to the house. Tomás doffs the ludicrous motoring costume and returns it to the cabin. His uncle bounces back into the courtyard, a jacket on his back, gloves upon his hands, his cheeks flushed with excitement, exuding a nearly terrifying joviality.

“By the way, Tomás,” he bellows, “I forgot to ask: Why on earth do you so badly want to go to the High Mountains of Portugal?”

“I’m looking for something,” Tomás replies.

“What?”

Tomás hesitates. “It’s in a church,” he finally says, “only I’m not sure which one, in which village.”

His uncle stands next to him and studies him. Tomás wonders whether he should say more. Whenever his uncle comes to the Museum of Ancient Art, he gazes at the exhibits with glazed eyes.

“Have you heard of Charles Darwin, Uncle?” Tomás asks.

“Yes, I’ve heard of Darwin,” Lobo replies. “What, is he buried in a church in the High Mountains of Portugal?” He laughs. “You want to bring his body back and give it pride of place in the Museum of Ancient Art?”

“No. Through my work I came upon a diary written on São Tomé, in the Gulf of Guinea. The island has been a Portuguese colony since the late fifteenth century.”

“A miserable one. I stopped there once on my way to Angola. I thought I might invest in some cocoa plantations there.”

“It was an important place during the slave trade.”

“Well, now it’s a producer of bad chocolate. Beautiful plantations, though.”

“No doubt. By a process of deduction involving three disparate elements — the diary I’ve just mentioned, the logbook of a ship returning to Lisbon, and a fire in a village church in the High Mountains of Portugal — I have discovered an unsuspected treasure and located it, approximately. I’m on the brink of a great find.”

“Are you? And what is this treasure, exactly?” his uncle asks, his eyes steady on Tomás.

Tomás is sorely tempted. All these months he has told no one, especially not his colleagues, about his discovery, nor even about his research. He did it all on his own time, privately. But a secret yearns to be divulged. And in mere days the object will be found. So why not his uncle?

“It is…a religious statuary, a crucifix, I believe,” he replies.

“Just what this Catholic country needs.”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s a very odd crucifix. A wondrous crucifix.”

“Is it? And what does it have to do with Darwin?”

“You’ll see,” Tomás replies, flushing with zeal. “This Christ on the Cross has something important to say. Of that, I am certain.”

His uncle waits for more, but more does not come. “Well, I hope it makes your fortune. Off we go,” he says. He climbs into the driver’s seat. “Let me show you how to start the engine.” He claps his hands and roars, “Sabio!”

Sabio steps forward, his gaze fixed on the automobile, his hands at the ready.

“Before starting the engine, the moto-naphtha tap has to be turned to open — good man, Sabio — the throttle handle, here under the steerage wheel, has to be placed at half-admission — so — and the change-speed lever set at the neutral point, like this. Next you flick the magneto switch — here on the dashboard — to ON. Then you open the lid of the hood — there’s no need to open the whole hood, you see that small lid there at the front? — and you press down once or twice on the float of the carburetor to flood it. See how Sabio does it? You close the lid, and all that’s left after that is turning the starting handle. Then you sit in the driver’s seat, take the hand brake off, get into first gear, and away you go. It’s child’s play. Sabio, are you ready?”

Sabio faces the engine squarely and sets his legs apart, feet solidly planted on the ground. He bends down and grips the starting handle, a thin rod protruding from the front of the automobile. His arms straight, his back straight, he suddenly snaps the handle upward with great force, pulling himself upright, then, upon the handle completing a half-turn, he shoves down on it, using the full weight of his body, before working the upswing as he did the first time. He performs this circular action with enormous energy, with the result that not only does the whole automobile shake but the handle spins round two, maybe three times. Tomás is about to comment on Sabio’s prowess but for the result attending this spinning of the handle: The automobile roars to life. It starts with a sputtering rumble from deep within its bowels, followed by a succession of piercing explosions. As it begins to judder and shudder, his uncle yells, “Come on, hop aboard. Let me show you what this remarkable invention can do!”

Tomás unwillingly but speedily clambers up to sit next to his uncle on the padded seat that stretches across the driving compartment. His uncle does a manoeuvre with his hands and feet, pulling this and pressing that. Tomás sees Sabio straddling a motorcycle that is standing next to a wall, then kick-starting it. He will be a good man to have along.

Then, with a jerk, the machine moves.

Quickly it gathers speed and swerves out of the courtyard, throwing itself over the threshold of the opened gates of the Lobo estate onto Rua do Pau de Bandeira, where it does a sharp right turn. Tomás slides across the smooth leather of the seat and slams into his uncle.

He cannot believe the bone-jarring, mind-unhinging quaking he is experiencing, directly related to the noise-making, because such trembling can come only from such noise. The machine will surely shake itself to pieces. He realizes he has misunderstood the point of the suspension springs his uncle mentioned. Clearly their purpose is not to protect the automobile from ruts, but ruts from the automobile.

Even more upsetting is the extremely fast and independent forward motion of the device. He sticks his head out the side and casts a look backwards, thinking — hoping — that he will see the Lobo household, every family member and employee, pushing the machine and laughing at the joke they are pulling on him. (Would that Dora were among those pushers!) But there are no pushers. It seems unreal to him that no animal should be pulling or pushing the device. It’s an effect without a cause, and therefore disturbingly unnatural.

Oh, the alpine summits of Lapa! The automobile — coughing, sputtering, rattling, clattering, jouncing, bouncing, chuffing, puffing, whining, roaring — dashes down to the end of Rua do Pau de Bandeira, the cobblestones underfoot making their presence known with a ceaseless, explosive rat-a-tat, then violently lurches leftwards and falls off the street as if from a cliff, such is the steepness of Rua do Prior. Tomás’s guts feel as if they are being squeezed into a funnel. The automobile reaches the bottom of the street with a flattening that sends him crashing to the floor of the driving compartment. The machine has barely stabilized itself — and he regained his seat, if not his composure — before it springs up the last upward part of Rua do Prior onto Rua da Santa Trindade, which in turn descends steeply. The automobile gaily starts to dance over the metallic jaws of Santa Trindade’s tram tracks, sending him sliding to and fro across the seat, alternately smashing into his uncle, who does not seem to notice, or practically falling out of the automobile at the other end of the seat. From balconies that fleet by, he sees people scowling down at them.

His uncle takes the right turn at Rua de São João da Mata with ferocious conviction. Down the street they race. Tomás is blinded by the sun; his uncle seems unaffected. The automobile pounces across Rua de Santos-o-Velho and bolts down the curve of Calçada Ribeiro Santos. Upon reaching the Largo de Santos, he looks wistfully — and briefly — at the walkers indulging in the slow activities of its pleasant park. His uncle drives around it until, with a savage left turn, he flings the automobile onto the wide Avenida Vinte e Quatro de Julho. Lapa’s lapping waters, the breathtaking Tagus, open up to the right in a burst of light, but Tomás does not have time to appreciate the sight as they hurtle through the urban density of Lisbon in a blur of wind and noise. They spin so fast around the busy roundabout of Praça do Duque da Terceira that the vehicle is projected, slingshot-like, down Rua do Arsenal. The hurly-burly of the Praça do Comércio is no impediment, merely an amusing challenge. Indistinctly Tomás sees the statue of the Marquis of Pombal standing in the middle of the square. Oh! If only the Marquis knew what horrors his streets were being subjected to, he might not have rebuilt them. On they go, onward and forward, in a roar of rush, in a smear of colour. Throughout, traffic of every kind — horses, carts, carriages, drays, trams, hordes of people and dogs — bumble around them blindly. Tomás expects a collision at any moment with an animal or a human, but his uncle saves them at the last second from every certain-death encounter with a sudden swerve or a harsh stoppage. A number of times Tomás feels the urge to scream, but his face is too stiff with fright. Instead, he presses his feet against the floorboards with all his might. If he thought his uncle would accept being treated like a life buoy, he would gladly hold on to him.

All along, his uncle — when he is not hurling insults at strangers — is lit up with joy, his red face radiating excitement, his mouth creased up in a smile, his eyes shining, and he laughs with insane abandon, or shouts a one-way conversation of acclamations and exclamations: “Amazing!..Glorious!..Fantastic!..Didn’t I tell you?…Now, that’s how you take a left turn!..Extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary!..Look, look: We must be hitting fifty kilometres an hour!”

Meanwhile, the Tagus flows, placid, unhurried, unperturbed, a gentle behemoth next to the outrageous flea that leaps along its bank.

Next to a field, upon a fledgling rural road without any cobblestone finery, his uncle at last stops the automobile. Behind them, at some distance, Lisbon’s skyline stands, like the emerging teeth of a small child.

“See how far we’ve come — and so fast!” His uncle’s voice booms in the refreshing silence. He is beaming like a boy on his birthday.

Tomás looks at him for a few seconds, incapable of speech, then practically falls to the ground getting out of the driving compartment. He staggers to a nearby tree and supports himself against it. He bends forward and a heaving gush of vomit spews from his mouth.

His uncle shows understanding. “Motion sickness,” he diagnoses breezily as he removes his driving gloves. “It’s a curious thing. Some passengers are subject to it, but never the driver. Must be something to do with controlling the vehicle, perhaps being able to anticipate the coming bumps and turns. That, or the mental effort of driving distracts the stomach from any malaise it might feel. You’ll be fine once you’re behind the wheel.”

It takes a moment for Tomás to register the words. He cannot imagine holding the reins of this metallic stallion. “Sabio is coming with me, isn’t he?” he asks breathlessly as he wipes the sides of his mouth with his handkerchief.

“I’m not lending you Sabio. Who will look after my other vehicles? Besides, he’s made sure the Renault is in tip-top running order. You won’t need him.”

“But Sabio will drive the thing, Uncle.”

“Drive it? Why would you want that? Why would anyone want to delegate to a servant the thrill of driving such an astonishing invention? Sabio is here to work, not to play.”

Just then the servant in question appears, expertly directing the sputtering motorcycle off the road to stop it behind the automobile. Tomás turns to his uncle again. It’s his blistering ill fortune to have a relative with the wealth to own several automobiles and the eccentricity to want to drive them himself.

“Sabio drives you around, dear Uncle.”

“Only on formal occasions. It’s mostly Gabriela he carts about. Silly mouse doesn’t dare try it herself. You’re young and smart. You’ll do fine. Won’t he, Sabio?”

Sabio, who is standing quietly next to them, nods in agreement, but the way his eyes linger on Tomás makes Tomás feel that he does not fully share his employer’s sunny trust. Anxiety roils his stomach.

“Uncle Martim, please, I have no experience in—”

“Look here! You start in neutral, with the throttle at half. To get going, you put yourself in first gear, then release the clutch slowly as you press on the accelerator pedal. As you gather speed, you move up to second gear, then third. It’s easy. Just start on flat ground. You’ll get the knack in no time.”

His uncle steps back and fondly contemplates the automobile. Tomás hopes that during this pause, kindness and solicitude will soften his uncle’s heart. Instead, he delivers a last blast of peroration.

“Tomás, I hope you are aware that what you have before your eyes is a highly trained orchestra, and it plays the most lovely symphony. The pitch of the piece is pleasingly variable, the timbre dark but brilliant, the melody simple yet soaring, and the tempo lies between vivace and presto, although it does a fine adagio. When I am the conductor of this orchestra, what I hear is a glorious music: the music of the future. Now you are stepping up to the podium and I am passing you the baton. You must rise to the occasion.” He pats the driver’s seat in the automobile. “You sit here,” he says.

Tomás’s lungs are suddenly gasping for air. His uncle gestures to Sabio to start the engine. Once again the roar of the internal combustion engine fills the exterior countryside. He has no choice. He has waited too long, understood too late. He will have to get behind the steerage wheel of the monster.

He climbs aboard. His uncle again points, explains, nods, smiles.

“You’ll be all right,” he concludes. “Things will work out. I’ll see you when you return, Tomás. Good luck. Sabio, stay and help him out.”

With the finality of a door slamming, his uncle turns and disappears behind the automobile. Tomás cranes his head out the side to find him. “Uncle Martim!” he shouts. The motorcycle starts with a detonation, followed by a grinding sound as it moves off. His last view of his uncle is the sight of his ample girth overhanging both sides of the slender machine and his disappearance down the road in a thunder of mechanical flatulence.

Tomás turns his eyes to Sabio. It occurs to him that his uncle has departed on the motorcycle and that he is to leave with the automobile. How then will Sabio return from the outer northeast edge of Lisbon to his employer’s house in western Lapa?

Sabio speaks quietly. “Driving the automobile is possible, senhor. It only needs a little practice.”

“Of which I have none!” Tomás cries. “Neither practice nor knowledge, neither interest nor aptitude. Save my life and show me again how to use this blasted thing.”

Sabio goes over the daunting details of piloting the manufactured animal. He instructs with untiring patience, spending much time over the proper order in which to press or release the pedals and pull or push the levers. He reminds Tomás about the left and right turning of the steerage wheel. He teaches him the use of the throttle handle, which is needed not only to start the engine but to stop it. And he speaks on matters Uncle Martim said nothing about: the difference between pressing hard or lightly on the accelerator pedal; the usage of the brake pedal; the important hand brake, which he is to pull whenever the automobile is at rest; the use of the side mirrors. Sabio shows him how to turn the starting handle. When Tomás tries it, he feels something heavy turning inside the automobile, like a boar on a spit being rotated in a vat of thick sauce. On his third turn of the spit, the boar explodes.

He stalls the engine again and again. Each time Sabio gamely returns to the front of the machine, where he gets it to roar to life again. Then he proposes to put the machine into first gear. Tomás slides over to the passenger side of the driving compartment. Sabio does the necessary manoeuvres; the gears sigh consent and the machine inches forward. Sabio points to where he should put his hands and where he should press his foot. Tomás moves into place. Sabio works his way out of the driver’s seat onto the footboard, nods gravely at him, and steps off the automobile.

Tomás feels cast off, thrown away, abandoned.

The road ahead is straight and the machine grunts along noisily in first gear. The steerage wheel is a hard, unfriendly thing. It shakes in his hands. He tugs it one way. Is it left? Is it right? He can’t tell. He’s barely able to make it move. How did his uncle do it so easily? And keeping the accelerator pedal pressed down is exceedingly tiresome; his foot is starting to cramp. At the first bend, a slight curve to the right, as the automobile starts to cross over the road and head towards a ditch, alarm pushes him to action and he lifts his foot and stamps on one pedal after another at random. The machine coughs and jolts to a halt. The clanging pandemonium mercifully stops.

Tomás looks about. His uncle is gone, Sabio is gone, there is no one else in sight — and his beloved Lisbon is gone too, scraped away like the leftovers of a meal off a plate. Into a silence that is more vacuum than repose, his little son vaults into his mind. Gaspar often ventured out to play in the courtyard of his uncle’s house before being shooed away by one servant or another, like a stray cat. He also prowled about the garage, filled as it was with rows of bicycles and motorcycles and automobiles. His uncle would have found a kindred spirit in his son when it came to motoring. Gaspar stared at the automobiles like a hungry mouth eats. Then he died, and the courtyard now contains a silent parcel of emptiness. Other parts of his uncle’s house similarly afflict Tomás with the absence of Dora or of his father, this door, that chair, this window. What are we without the ones we love? Would he ever get over the loss? When he looks in his eyes in the mirror when he shaves, he sees empty rooms. And the way he goes about his days, he is a ghost who haunts his own life.

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.

Tomás shouts apologies, strikes the steerage wheel, reprimands the automobile in the strongest terms. He jumps out to help the affronted people. He kicks the vehicle’s tires. He slaps its elephant-ear mudguards. He insults its ugly hood. He fiercely turns the starting handle, putting the machine in its place. All to no positive effect. The goodwill of the people of Póvoa de Santa Iria has evaporated in the wintry Portuguese sun.

He hurries back to the driving compartment. Miraculously, the automobile whines, shakes itself, and tiptoes ahead. The people of Póvoa de Santa Iria part fearfully before him and the road opens up. He urges the machine on.

He determinedly roars through the next town, Alverca do Ribatejo, keeping his foot firmly on the accelerator pedal. He ignores all the people and their stares. It is the same with the town of Alhandra. Past Alhandra he sees a sign saying Porto Alto, pointing to the right, off the main road, to the Tagus. Three bridges span two small islands. He peers across to the flat, desolate countryside beyond the river’s eastern shore and brings the automobile to a halt.

He turns the engine off and fetches the maps of Portugal from the cabin. There are a number of these, neatly folded and labelled, a national map and regional ones of Estremadura, Ribatejo, Alto Alentejo, Beira Baixa, Beira Alta, Douro Litoral, and Alto Douro. There are even maps of the neighbouring Spanish provinces of Cáceres, Salamanca, and Zamora. It seems his uncle has prepared him for every conceivable route to the High Mountains of Portugal, including the wayward and lost.

He examines the national map. Exactly as he thought. To the west and north of the Tagus, along or near Portugal’s littoral, the land is crowded with towns and cities. By comparison, the backcountry beyond the river, to the east of the Tagus and in the lands bordering Spain, reassures him with the sparseness of its settlements. Only Castelo Branco, Covilhã, and Guarda glare with urban danger. Perhaps he can find ways to avoid them. Otherwise, what motorist would be afraid of settlements such as Rosmaninhal, Meimoa, or Zava? He has never heard of these obscure villages.

He starts the automobile and plies different pedals and pushes the change-speed lever into first gear. Fortune favours him. He turns to the right and works his way down the road to the bridges. On the cusp of the first bridge, he hesitates. It is a wooden bridge. He remembers about the thirty horses. But surely the engine does not weigh thirty horses? He is mindful of Father Ulisses’ experience on water, sailing from Angola to his new mission on São Tomé:

Travelling over water is a form of hell, all the more so in a cramped & fetid slave ship holding five hundred & fifty-two slaves & their thirty-six European keepers. We are plagued by periods of dead calm, then rough seas. The slaves moan & cry at all hours of the day & night. The hot stench of their quarters seeps through the whole ship.

Tomás presses on. He is not bedevilled by slaves, only ghosts. And his ship must only make three jumps over a river. The crossing of the bridges is a rumbling affair. He fears that he will drive the machine off them. When he has escaped the third bridge and reached the eastern shore of the river, he is too rattled to drive on. He decides that since he is motoring, perhaps he should properly learn how to motor. He stops and retrieves what he needs from the cabin. Sitting behind the steerage wheel, manual and dictionary at hand, he applies himself to learning the proper operation of the change-speed lever, the clutch pedal, and the accelerator pedal. The manual is illuminating, but the knowledge he gains from it is purely theoretical. Its application is the rub. He finds moving smoothly from neutral gear — as his uncle called it, though he finds nothing neutral about it — to first gear insuperably difficult. Over the course of the rest of the day, in jarring fits and starts, he advances perhaps five hundred metres, the machine roaring and coughing and shuddering and stopping the whole way. He curses until nightfall sends him to bed.

In the dimming light, as fingers of cold reach for him, he seeks calm in Father Ulisses’ diary.

If the Empire be a man, then the hand that is holding up a solid gold bullion is Angola, while the other that is jingling pennies in the pocket — that is São Tomé.

So the priest quotes an aggrieved trader. Tomás has studied the history that Father Ulisses is fated to live: The priest set foot on São Tomé between sugar and chocolate, between the island’s time as a leading exporter of sugar, in the late sixteenth century, and of the chocolate bean now, in the early twentieth century. He would live the rest of his short life at the start of a three-century-long trough of poverty, stagnation, despair, and decadence, a time when São Tomé was an island of half-abandoned plantations and feuding elites who made the better part of their meagre living off the living, that is, from the slave trade. The island supplied slave ships with provisions — water, wood, yams, maize flour, fruit — and exploited some slaves for its own needs — the ongoing marginal production of sugar, cotton, rice, ginger, and palm oil — but the white islanders mainly acted as slave brokers. They could not dream of rivalling Angola’s vast and endless domestic supply, but the Bight of Benin was at their doorstep across the Gulf of Guinea and that coast was rich with slaves. The island was both an ideal way station for a ship about to cross the Atlantic, the hellish voyage that came to be called the Middle Passage — such an intestinal expression, Tomás thought — and an excellent back door into Portuguese Brazil and its ravenous hunger for slave labour. And so the slaves came, in their thousands. “This pocket jingles with dazed African souls,” Father Ulisses comments.

That he travelled to São Tomé on a slave ship was not incidental. He had applied to be a slave priest, a priest assigned to the salvation of the souls of slaves. “I want to serve the humblest of the humble, those whose souls Man has forgot but God hasn’t.” He explains his urgent new mission on São Tomé:

A century & a half ago some Hebraic children, in ages from 2 to 8 yrs, were brought to the island. From these noxious seeds a wretched plant grew that spread its poison to all the soil, polluting the unwary. My mission is twice then — once more to bring the African soul to God & further to tear away from that soul the foul grappling roots of the Jew. I spend my days at the port, a sentinel of the Lord, waiting for slave ships to bring in their bounty. When one arrives, I board it and christen the Africans & read the Bible to them. You are all God’s children, I repeat to them tirelessly. I also draw the odd sketch.

That is his duty, which he fulfils with unquestioning diligence: to welcome strangers to a faith they do not follow in a language they do not understand. At this stage in his diary, Father Ulisses appears to be a churchman typical of his time, steeped in the Lord, steeped in ignorance and contempt. That will change, Tomás knows.

He falls asleep in an unsettled frame of mind. He cannot find comfort in the automobile, neither in driving it nor in sleeping in it.

In the morning he would like to wash, but neither soap nor towel is to be found in the cabin. After the usual motoring difficulties he sets off. The road through a dull, flat landscape of tilled fields leads him to Porto Alto, which is a larger town than he expected. His skill in getting the automobile going has improved, but whatever composure this new ability gives him is seriously undermined by the surge of people who appear on all sides. People wave, people shout, people come close. A young man runs alongside the automobile. “Hello!” he shouts.

“Hello!” Tomás shouts back.

“What an incredible machine!”

“Thank you!”

“Won’t you stop?”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“I still have far to go!” Tomás shouts.

The young man moves off. Another young man appears right away in his stead, eager to pursue his own hollered dialogue with Tomás. As he gives up, he is replaced by another. All the way through Porto Alto, Tomás is kept in constant, shouting conversation with eager strangers jogging next to the machine. When at last he reaches the far edge of the town, he would like to cry out in victory at having so adroitly controlled the machine, but his voice is too hoarse.

In the open country he eyes the change-speed lever. He has covered ground in the last three days, the machine has undeniable stamina — but so do snails. The manual is clear on the point, and his uncle proved it in practice in Lisbon: Real motoring results are to be achieved only in a higher gear. He rehearses in his mind. Finally it comes down to doing it or not. Pedals, buttons, levers — these are released or pressed, pushed or pulled, each according to its need. He performs all these actions without taking his eyes off the road — or letting air out of his lungs. The clutch pedal tingles, it seems, as if to signal to him that it has done its job and would be happy if he took his foot off its back, which he does. At the same moment, the accelerator pedal seems to fall forward ever so slightly, as if it, on the contrary, were hungry for the pressure of his foot. He pushes down harder.

The monster pounces forward in second gear. The road is disappearing under its wheels with such thunder that he feels it’s no longer the machine that is moving forward on the landscape but the landscape that is being pulled from underneath it, like that hazardous trick in which a tablecloth is yanked off a fully set table. The landscape vanishes with the same menacing understanding that the trick will work only if done at lightning speed. Whereas earlier he was afraid of going too fast, now he’s afraid of going too slowly, because if second gear malfunctions it won’t be just he who meets his end smashing into a telegraph pole, but the entire porcelain landscape that will crash with him. In this madness, he is a teacup rattling on a saucer, his eyes glinting like bone china glaze.

As he careers through space, motionless while in headlong motion, furiously staring ahead, he yearns for still, thoughtful landscapes, a calm vineyard like he saw yesterday, or a shoreline like Father Ulisses frequents, where each small wave lands upon his feet in prayerful collapse like a pilgrim who has reached his destination. But the priest is jarred in his own way, is he not? As Tomás is shaking now in this infernal machine, so must Father Ulisses’ hand shake at times as he commits his harrowed thoughts to the pages of his diary.

The priest quickly becomes disenchanted with São Tomé. He gets along no better with the natural world there than he did in Angola. There is the same strangle of vegetation, fed by the same incessant showers and coddled by the same unremitting heat. He is afflicted by the wet season, with its torrents of rain interspersed with gaps of stifling moist heat, and he is afflicted by the dry season, with its burning heat and ground-level clouds of dripping mist. He complains bitterly of this hothouse weather “that makes a green leaf sing & a man die.” And then there are the supplementary, incidental miseries: the stench of a sugar mill, bad food, infestations of ants, ticks as large as cherry pips, a cut to his left thumb that becomes infected.

He speaks of a “mulatto silence,” a miscegenation between the heat and humidity of the island and the unhappy people on it. This mulatto silence creeps into all the senses. The slaves are sullen, have to be pushed to do anything, which they do in silence. As for the Europeans who live out their lives on São Tomé, their words, usually curt and annoyed, are spoken, perhaps are heard, less likely are obeyed promptly, then are muffled by the silence. Work for the slaves on the plantations carries on from sunrise to sunset, with no singing or even conversation, with a one-hour break at noon to eat, rest, and become further aware of the silence. The working day ends with a speechless meal, solitude, and restless sleep. The nights are louder than the days on São Tomé, because of the lively insects. Then the sun rises and it all starts over, in silence.

Nourishing this silence are two emotions: despair and rage. Or, as Father Ulisses puts it, “the black pit & the red fire.” (How well Tomás knows that pair!) His relations with the island clergy become fraught with tension. He never gives the precise nature of his grievances. Whatever the cause, the result is clear: He becomes increasingly cut off from everyone. As his diary progresses, there are fewer and fewer mentions of interactions with fellow Europeans. Who else is there? The barriers of social status, language, and culture preclude any amicable dealings between a white man, even a priest, and slaves. Slaves come and go, communicating with Europeans mostly with their wide-open eyes. As for the locals, freed slaves and mulattos, what they have to gain from Europeans is precarious. To trade with them, to work for them, to leave their sight — that is the best policy. Father Ulisses laments:

The shacks of natives disappear overnight & rings of emptiness form around isolated white men & I am that. I am an isolated white man in Africa.

Tomás stops the machine and decides, after poking his face up at the sky, that the afternoon has turned cool and cloudy, unsuited to further motoring. Better to settle down for the day under the mink coat.

The next day the road continues nearly villagelessly until Couço, where there is a bridge across the River Sorraia. Under the narrow bridge, alarmed egrets and herons, until then peaceably standing in the water, flutter away. He is pleased to see orange trees, the only splash of colour in an otherwise grey day. He wishes the sun would come out. It’s the sun that makes a landscape, drawing out its colour, defining its contours, giving it its spirit.

On the outskirts of a town named Ponte de Sor, he halts the automobile. He sets out on foot for the town. It’s good to walk. He kicks his feet back vigorously. He’s practically skipping backwards. But what is this itch that is bothering him? He scratches his scalp, his face, and his chest. It is his body crying to be washed. His armpits are starting to smell, as are his nether regions.

He enters the town. People stare at him, at his manner of walking. He finds an apothecary to buy moto-naphtha, following his uncle’s advice of resupplying himself as often as he can. He asks the man at the counter if he has the product. He has to use a few names before the implacably serious man nods and produces from a shelf a small glass bottle, barely half a litre.

“Do you have any more?” Tomás asks.

The apothecary turns and brings down another two bottles.

“I’ll have still more, please.”

“I don’t have any more. That’s my whole stock.”

Tomás is disheartened. At this rate, he will have to ransack every apothecary between Ponte de Sor and the High Mountains of Portugal.

“I’ll take these three bottles, then,” he says.

The apothecary brings them to the till. The transaction is routine, but something in the man’s manner is odd. He wraps the bottles in a sheet of newspaper, then, when two people enter the shop, he hastily slides the package over to him. Tomás notices that the man is staring at him fixedly. Self-consciousness overcomes him. He scratches the side of his head. “Is something wrong?” he asks.

“No, nothing,” replies the apothecary.

Tomás is bewildered but says nothing. He leaves the shop and takes a walk around the town, memorizing the route he will take with the automobile.

When he returns to Ponte de Sor an hour later, it all goes wrong. He gets horribly lost. And the more he drives around the town, the more he attracts the attention of the population. Crowds assail him at every turn. At one sharp corner, as his hands frenetically wrestle with the steerage wheel, he stalls once again.

The multitude of the curious and the offended descends upon him.

He starts the automobile well enough, despite the crowd. He even feels that he can get it into first gear. Then he looks at the steerage wheel and has no idea in which direction he is supposed to turn it. In trying to satisfy the fiendish angle of the street he was attempting to get onto, he turned the wheel several times before stalling. He tries to determine the matter logically — this way? that way? — but he cannot come to any conclusion. He notices a plump man in his fifties standing on the sidewalk level with the automobile’s headlights. He’s better dressed than the others. Tomás leans out and calls to him above the din of the engine. “Excuse me, sir! I need your help, if you would be so kind. I’m having a mechanical problem. Something complicated I won’t bore you with. But tell me, is the wheel there, the one right in front of you, is it turning?”

The man backs away and looks down at the wheel. Tomás grabs the steerage wheel and turns it. With the automobile completely at rest, it takes real effort.

“Well,” Tomás puffs loudly, “is it turning?”

The man looks puzzled. “Turning? No. If it were turning, your carriage would be moving.”

“I mean, is it turning the other way?”

The man looks to the rear of the automobile. “The other way? No, no, it’s not moving that way, either. It’s not moving at all.”

Many in the crowd nod in agreement.

“I’m sorry, I’m not making myself clear. I’m not asking if the wheel turned on itself in a round way, like a cartwheel. Rather, did it”—he searches for the right words—“did it turn on the spot on its tiptoes, like a ballerina, so to speak?”

The man stares at the wheel doubtfully. He looks to his neighbours left and right, but they don’t venture any opinion, either.

Tomás turns the steerage wheel again with brutal force. “Is there any movement at all from the wheel, any at all?” he shouts.

The man shouts in return, with many in the crowd joining in. “Yes! Yes! I see it. There is movement!”

A voice cries, “Your problem is solved!”

The crowd bursts into cheers and applause. Tomás wishes they would go away. His helper, the plump man, says it again, pleased with himself. “There was movement, more than the last time.”

Tomás signals to him with his hand to come closer. The man sidles over only a little.

“That’s good, that’s good,” says Tomás. “I’m most grateful for your help.”

The man ventures no reaction beyond a single callisthenic blink and the vaguest nodding. If a broken egg were resting atop his bald head, the yolk might wobble a little.

“But tell me,” Tomás pursues, leaning forward and speaking emphatically, “which way did the wheel turn?”

“Which way?” the man repeats.

“Yes. Did the wheel turn to the left or did it turn to the right?”

The man lowers his eyes and swallows visibly. A heavy silence spreads through the crowd as it waits for his response.

“Left or right?” Tomás asks again, leaning closer still, attempting to establish a manner of complicity with the man.

The egg yolk wobbles. There is a pause in which the whole town holds its breath.

“I don’t know!” the plump man finally cries in a high-pitched voice, spilling the yolk. He pushes his way through the crowd and bolts. The sight of the ungainly, bandy-legged town notable racing down the street dumbfounds Tomás. He has lost his only ally.

A man speaks out. “It could have been left, it could have been right. Hard to tell.”

Murmurs of agreement rise up. The crowd seems cooler now, its indulgence turning to edginess. He has lifted his foot off the pedal and the engine has died. He gets out and turns the starting handle. He pleads with the crowd in front of the machine. “Listen to me, please! This machine will move, it will jump! For the sake of your children, for your own sake, please move away! I beg you! This is a most dangerous device. Step back!”

A man next to him addresses him quietly. “Oh, here comes Demetrio and his mother. She’s not one you want to cross.”

“Who’s Demetrio?” Tomás asks.

“He’s the village idiot. But so nicely dressed by his mother.”

Tomás looks up the street and sees the town notable returning. He’s weeping, his face covered in glistening tears. Holding his hand, pulling him along, is a very small woman dressed in black. She’s holding a club. Her eyes are fixed on Tomás. The way she’s straining at the end of her son’s arm, she looks like a tiny dog trying to hurry its leisurely owner along. Tomás returns to the driver’s seat and grapples with the machine’s controls.

He humours the machine into not pouncing forward. As he plies the pedals, it growls but only leans forward, like an enormous boulder that has lost the tiny pebble that holds it back but hasn’t yet gone crashing down the slope to destroy the village below. The crowd gasps and instantly creates a space all around. He presses a touch harder on the accelerator pedal. He prepares to twist the steerage wheel with mania in whatever direction his instincts will choose, hoping it will be the correct direction, when he is confounded to see that the steerage wheel is turning on its own, of its own will. And it proves to be turning the right way: The vehicle creeps forward and finishes clearing the turn onto the cross street. He would continue to stare in wonderment if he didn’t hear the clanging sound of a wooden club striking metal.

“YOU DARE TO MAKE FUN OF MY SON?” cries the mother of the broken egg. She has clocked one of the headlights with such force that it has cleanly broken off. He is horrified — his uncle’s jewel! “I’M GOING TO SUFFOCATE YOU UP A SHEEP’S ASS!”

The machine has conveniently brought its hood level with the aggrieved mother. Up goes the club, down goes the club. With a mighty crash, a valley appears on the hood. Tomás would push harder on the accelerator pedal, but there are still many people close-by. “Please, I implore you, hold your club!” he calls out.

Now the sidelight is within her easy reach. Another swing. In a glass-shattering explosion it flies off. The madwoman, whose son persists with his inconsolable blubbering, is winding up her club again.

“I’LL FEED YOU TO A DOG AND THEN EAT THAT DOG!” she shrieks.

Tomás pushes hard on the accelerator pedal. The woman narrowly misses the side mirror; her club instead shatters the window of the door to the cabin. In a roar, he and the injured automobile leap forth and escape Ponte de Sor.

A few kilometres onward, next to a growth of bushes, he brings the machine to a standstill. He gets out and gazes at the automobile’s amputations. He clears the glass shards from the cabin. His uncle will be livid at what has been done to the pride of his menagerie.

Just ahead is the village of Rosmaninhal. Is that not one of the villages he mocked for its obscurity? Rosmaninhal, you can do me no harm, he had boasted. Will the village now make him pay for his arrogance? He prepares for yet another night sleeping in the machine. This time he supplements his uncle’s coat with a blanket. He extracts the precious diary from the trunk and opens it at random.

The sun brings no solace, nor does sleep. Food no longer sates me, nor the company of men. Merely to breathe is to display an optimism I do not feel.

Tomás breathes deeply, finding optimism where Father Ulisses could not. Strange how this diary of misery brings him such joy. Poor Father Ulisses. He had such high hopes arriving on São Tomé. Before his energies were depleted by disease, solitary and without purpose, he spent much of his time wandering and watching. There seems to be no purpose to these rambles other than the working off of despair — better to be desperate and itinerant than desperate and sitting in an overheated hut. And what he saw, he wrote down.

Today a slave asked me — signified to me — if my leather shoes were made from the skin of an African. They are of the same colour. Was the man also eaten? Were his bones reduced to useful powder? Some of the Africans believe that we Europeans are cannibals. The notion is the result of their incredulity at the use they are put to: field labour. In their experience, the material part of one’s life, what we would call the earning of it, demands no great effort. Tending a vegetable garden in the tropics takes little time & occupies few hands. Hunting is more demanding, but is a group activity & source of some pleasure & the effort is not begrudged. Why then would the white man take so many of them if they didn’t have ulterior motives greater than gardening? I reassured the slave that my shoes were not made of his fellows’ skin. I cannot say I convinced him.

Tomás knows what the slaves and Father Ulisses cannot: the unending demands of the sugar cane fields of Brazil and, later, of the cotton fields of America. A man or a woman may not need to work so hard to live, but a cog in a system must turn ceaselessly.

No matter their provenance — what territory, what tribe — the slaves soon sink to the same saturnine behaviour. They become lethargic, passive, indifferent. The more the overseers exert themselves to change this behaviour, freely using the whip, the more it becomes ingrained. Of the many signs of hopelessness the slaves manifest, the one that strikes me the most is geophagy. They paw the ground like dogs, gather a round ball, open their mouths, chew it & swallow it. I cannot decide if eating of the Lord’s humus is unchristian.

Tomás turns his head and looks at the darkening fields around him. To be miserable upon the land — and then to eat it? Later, Father Ulisses records trying it himself.

A darkness blooms in me, a choking algae of the soul. I chew slowly. It does not taste bad, only is unpleasant on the teeth. How much longer, Lord, how much longer? I feel unwell & see in the eyes of others that I am worse. Walking to town exhausts me. I go to the bay instead and stare out at the waters.

Whatever it was that afflicted Father Ulisses — and Europeans in Africa had their unhappy choice of ailments: malaria, dysentery, respiratory illnesses, heart troubles, anemia, hepatitis, leprosy, and syphilis, among others, in addition to malnutrition — it was slowly and painfully killing him.

Tomás falls asleep thinking of his son and of how, sometimes at night, after an evening at his uncle’s house, he would slip into Dora’s room in the servants’ quarters. She might be asleep already, after a long day of work. Then he would take sleeping Gaspar into his arms and hold him. Amazing how the two could sleep through any disturbance. He would hold his limp son and sing to him softly, nearly hoping he would wake so they could play.

He is woken the next morning by the itching of his head and chest. He rises and methodically scratches himself. His fingernails have rims of blackness under them. It has been five days since he has washed. He must find an inn soon, with a good bed and a hot bath. Then he remembers the next village he must cross, the one he scorned. It is fear of Rosmaninhal that pushes him to enter third gear that day, the automobile’s mechanical pinnacle. He has barely started off when he works the machine into second gear. With the grimmest lack of hesitation, he repeats the hand-and-foot manoeuvre, pushing the change-speed lever farther than he has ever pushed it before. The dial on the instrument board blinks in disbelief. The automobile becomes pure velocity. Third gear is the fire of the internal combustion engine coming into itself and becoming an external combustion engine, thundering through the countryside like a meteorite. Yet, oddly, third gear is quieter than second gear, as if even sound cannot keep up with the machine. The wind howls around the driving compartment. Such is the swiftness of the machine that the telegraph poles along the road shift and begin to appear as close together as teeth in a comb. As for the landscape beyond the poles, none of it is to be seen. It flits by like a panic-stricken school of fish. In the blurry land of High Velocity, Tomás is aware of only two things: the roaring and rattling frame of the automobile, and the road straight ahead, so hypnotic in its allure that it’s like a fishing line upon whose hook he is caught. Though he is in the open country, his mental focus is such that he might as well be driving through a tunnel. In a daze, barely cognizant in the ambient din, he worries about lubrication. He imagines a small engine part going dry, heating up, bursting into flames, then the whole machine exploding in an iridescent conflagration of moto-naphtha-fuelled blues, oranges, and reds.

Nothing bursts into flames. The automobile only clangs, bawls, and eats up the road with terrifying appetite. If there is evil resident in Rosmaninhal — indeed, if there is good resident in Rosmaninhal — he sees none of it. The village vanishes in a streak. He sees a figure — a man? a woman? — turn to look in his direction and fall over.

It is some kilometres past Rosmaninhal that he comes upon the stagecoach. His uncle warned him about these, did he not? Tomás slows down and thinks of holding back until an alternate route suggests itself or the coach turns off. But he grows impatient on the solitary country road. There is no comparison between the thirty horses galloping in his machine and the four horses cantering ahead of the coach.

He pushes down on the accelerator pedal. With a choke, a cough, and a shudder, the machine grips the road with greater determination. He feels his hands pulled forward while his head is pushed back. The distance between automobile and stagecoach begins to shrink. He sees a man’s head appear from the top of the coach. The man waves at him. A moment later, the coach, which has been somewhat on the right side of the road, heaves to its centre. Is this the reason behind his uncle’s warning about stagecoaches, their erratic weaving? He rather interprets the move as a courtesy, the stagecoach moving aside to let him go by, like a gentleman allowing a lady first passage through a doorway. The man’s wave reinforces this interpretation in his mind. He urges the automobile on. He navigates into the space to the right of the stagecoach. Every part of the machine is shaking. The passengers in the stagecoach, which is wildly rocking to and fro and side to side, hold on to the edge of the windows and crane their necks to look at him, gawking with a number of expressions: curiosity, amazement, fear, disgust.

The two drivers of the stagecoach come into view, his colleagues in a way, and he eases off the accelerator pedal. The stagecoach drivers and he will greet each other like sea captains whose ships are crossing paths. He has read a great many captains’ logbooks in the course of his investigations. The way stagecoach and automobile are pitching and rolling has something maritime to it. He lifts a hand, ready to wave, a smile building upon his face.

He looks up at the stagecoach drivers and is shocked at what he sees. If the passengers had a number of expressions on their faces, the drivers have only one: out-and-out loathing. The man who turned and waved at him earlier — or was he in fact shaking his fist? — is barking and growling at him like a dog and is making as if to leap from his seat down onto the roof of the machine. The man doing the driving looks even more incensed. His face is red with anger and his mouth is open in a continuous shout. He is brandishing a long whip, spurring his horses on. The whip rises and coils in the air like a serpent before coming down and flattening out with a sharp and piercing snap that goes off like a gun. Only then does Tomás realize that the steeds have been pushed to full thundering gallop. He can feel the ground beneath him shaking from their efforts. Despite the cushioning of the automobile’s rubber wheels and the mediation of the suspension springs, the hard, marvellous work of the horses rattles his bones and awes his brain. In relative terms, he is slowly passing the stagecoach the way a man on a street might overtake an elderly walker, with such ease and comfort that he has the leisure to tip his hat and say a kind word. But from the point of view of someone standing by the side of the road, both he and the stagecoach are hurtling through space at a fantastic speed, as if the elderly walker and the man on the street were advancing on the roofs of two express trains racing on parallel tracks.

The silence that enveloped him as a result of his intense concentration suddenly explodes into the hammering of the galloping horses’ hooves, the screaming creaking of the swaying stagecoach, the shouting of the drivers, the shrill distress of the frightened passengers, the cracking of the whip, and the roar of the automobile. He presses the accelerator pedal as hard as he can. The automobile surges ahead, but slowly.

A further noise, keen and metallic, stabs his ears. The driver has turned his whip off the horses and is now lashing the roof of the automobile. Tomás grimaces, as if the lashes were striking his own back. The driver’s assistant has his arms raised. Above his head is a wooden chest with metal strappings. It looks heavy. The man hurls it at the automobile, and it hits the roof like a bomb, followed by scraping sounds as the chest and its contents slide off. The horses, less than a metre away from Tomás, are kicking up a storm of dirt and throwing off quantities of froth from their mouths. Their eyes bulge with terror. They veer closer. The driver is steering them into the automobile! Death is upon me, thinks Tomás.

The horses give out just as the automobile reaches its full speed. The machine moves ahead decisively and he is able to steady it and bring it back to the centre of the road, clipping the right lead horse so closely that he sees in the side mirror that it has to rear up its head to avoid hitting the back of the cabin.

The moment he is ahead, the exhausted horses falter to a halt. Behind him, the drivers continue to shout. In the side mirror he watches the passengers pour out of the stagecoach as they and the drivers direct their shouting and gesturing at each other.

He feels shattered by the encounter and wants to stop, but fear of the stagecoach catching up drives him on. As his unhappy ship forges ahead, he focuses on the road again. His stomach is as turbulent as a stormy sea. He squirms with itchiness.

He considers his situation. How many days has he been driving? He thinks and counts. One, two, three, four — four nights. Four nights and five days of his allotment of ten. Only ten days. And he is not even out of the province of Ribatejo, not a quarter of the way to his destination. How did he imagine that he could complete his mission in so few days? The notion is laughable. He was lured by the promise of his uncle’s magic carpet. The chief curator of the Museum of Ancient Art will not tolerate him being late. If he misses even a single day of work, he will be fired, plain and simple. That is the work world he lives in, one where he is an insignificant, replaceable cog. His relations with the chief curator, the collections manager, and the other curators at the museum are no better than Father Ulisses’ relations were with the Bishop and the island clergy. How happy is a work environment where colleagues never eat together but rather sit in sour isolation? Sometimes he feels he can match every misery that Father Ulisses experienced on São Tomé with one he has experienced at the museum. The same tedium. The same solitary nature of the work, broken by tense encounters with others. The same physical discomfort, in his case the unending days spent in damp and musty basement storage rooms or hot and dusty attics. The same choking misery. The same floundering attempt to make sense of things.

I find small shrines on the plantations, set up in remote locations. They are crudely made of wood or baked mud, with shells & rotting fruit lying about them. If they be destroyed—& it is not I who does so — they reappear somewhere else. I am pleased to come upon these shrines. The slaves, who in their native villages practice various crafts, do nothing here except the compulsory fieldwork. No metalwork, no woodwork, no basket weaving, no ornament-making, no tailoring, no body painting, no singing, nothing. On this green island of malefic riot, they are as productive as mules. Only in these shrines do I see a vestige of their former lives, a reach for pregnancy.

Tomás is assailed by doubt. Is his own quest “a reach for pregnancy”? He imagines that Gaspar would be taken by Father Ulisses’ gift, given his childish sensibility, but he doubts Dora would approve. That has always tormented him, that in the service of frank truth, he would do something that would upset her. But the treasure exists! He is only bringing to light what is already there. He pleads with Dora in his mind, begs for her forgiveness. It is an elevation of all creation, my love. No, no, there is no desecration. But he knows Dora would not believe him, that he would lose the argument. He still does not dare to halt the machine, so he weeps and drives at the same time.

Outside the village of Atalaia, he finally stops. He climbs on a mudguard to assess the damage done to the roof of the machine. The sight is dispiriting. There is an enormous dent caused by the thrown chest. And the whip, expertly deployed, has done its own extensive damage. The bright burgundy paint of the roof is veined with cracks. Great chips of it are ready to come off. When he looks inside the cabin, he sees that the cedar panels of the ceiling have split and jut out, like broken bones.

He walks into Atalaia, looking for moto-naphtha. He finds a small shop that sells a bit of everything. After he lists the various sobriquets of the fuel, the shop owner nods her head and produces a small bottle. He asks for more. The shop owner is surprised. But what! An automobile doesn’t run on mere cupfuls of sustenance. An automobile is an insatiable fiend. He gets all she has: two bottles.

Back at the automobile, as he is feeding the hungry beast the bottles of moto-naphtha he has gathered so far, he casually inspects an empty bottle’s label. He starts. A lice and flea product! Guaranteed to kill all vermin and their eggs in a pitiless fashion, the label claims. Apply liberally. Do not ingest. KEEP AWAY FROM FLAMES.

Could the shop owners and apothecaries not have asked him why he needed so many bottles of the foul liquid? What he bought as fuel for the machine, they sold as a parasite killer. They thought he was a tornado of vermin, with a civilization of lice, fleas, and whatnot dancing upon his head. No wonder they looked at him askance. He holds still. But of course. Of course. There is no other explanation. The shop owners and apothecaries are right. He is itchy all over, in a manner that is absolutely maddening, precisely because he is a tornado of vermin, with a civilization of lice, fleas, and whatnot dancing upon his head.

He looks at his other hand. The bottle he is holding upside down has just gurgled itself empty. It was his last bottle. How many did he have? Fifteen or so. He’s had bottles of the stuff practically since the beginning of his trip, clinking away in the cabin, besides a whole barrel of it. Now he has none of it, or none that he can get to. He grabs the tank’s small round opening as if he could stretch it out. He can’t. Between his suffering and its relief — a bathtub of it — there lies a narrow doorway that will not open.

He wonders, Who touched me? Who touched my clothes? Who passed on the infestation? The point of contact must have been either in Póvoa de Santa Iria or Ponte de Sor. In both places he rubbed shoulders — indeed, he rubbed against entire bodies — while rescuing the machine from the surrounding masses.

He expends himself in a frenzy of scratching.

The sky darkens. It begins to rain and he takes refuge in the automobile. The front window of the automobile becomes so streaked and marbled with drops of water that he has difficulty seeing through them to the road. As the rain grows to a steady downpour, he wonders: His uncle said nothing about the machine’s ability to operate in the rain. He does not trust it to stay on the road. He will wait the rain out.

Dusk and then darkness come on like a miasma. In his sleep, stagecoaches are galloping down on him from all directions. He is cold. His feet protrude over the edge of the driving compartment and the rain soaks them. Itchiness periodically rouses him.

In the morning the rain is still coming down. He is too chilled to want to wash in it. He no more than wets a hand to wipe his face. His only comfort comes from remembering that Father Ulisses was plagued by rain on the island. There, it deluged with such insistence that minds became unhinged. By comparison, what is this mild European drizzle?

On this deserted road, only the odd peasant appears, inevitably stopping for an extended conversation. Some arrive along the road, alone or pulling a donkey, while others come off the land itself, peasant lords working their tiny fiefdoms. None of them seems to mind the rain.

From one peasant to the next, the reaction is the same. They inspect the vehicle’s wheels, finding them dainty and small. They peer at the side mirrors, finding them ingenious. They gaze at the machine’s controls, finding them intimidating. They stare at the machine’s engine, finding it unfathomable. Each deems the whole a marvel.

Only one, a shepherd, seems to have no interest in the contraption. “Can I sit with you for a while?” he asks. “I am cold and wet.”

Already his sheep are surrounding the vehicle, held hostage there by a small dog that races around and yips incessantly. The sheeps’ bleating is constant and grating. Tomás nods to the man, who walks around to the other side of the vehicle and clambers in next to him in the driving compartment.

Tomás wishes that he would speak, but the crusty man says not a word, only gazes ahead. Minutes go by. The silence is framed by the steady hiss of the rain, the bleating of the sheep, and the yipping of the dog.

Finally it is Tomás who speaks. “Let me tell you why I’m travelling. It’s been a difficult journey so far. I’m searching for a lost treasure. I’ve spent a year determining where it might be — and now I know. Or I nearly know. I’m close. When I find it, I’ll take it to the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon, but it would be worthy of a great museum in Paris or London. The thing in question, it’s — well, I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s an impressive object. People will stare at it, their mouths open. It will cause an uproar. With this object I’ll give God His comeuppance for what He did to the ones I love.”

The old rube’s sole response is to glance at him and nod. Otherwise, only the sheep seem to appreciate his momentous confession, with a blast of wavering baahs. The flock is no creamy billow of fluffy sheepdom. These creatures have bony faces, bulging eyes, ragged fleeces, and rear ends caked with excrement.

“Tell me,” he asks the shepherd, “what do you think of animals?”

The shepherd once again glances at him, but this time he speaks. “What animals?”

“Well, these, for example,” Tomás replies. “What do you think of your sheep?”

At length the man says, “They are my living.”

Tomás thinks for a moment. “Yes, your living. You make a profound point there. Without your sheep, you would have no livelihood, you would die. This dependency creates a sort of equality, doesn’t it? Not individually, but collectively. As a group, you and your sheep are at opposite ends of a seesaw, and somewhere in between there is a fulcrum. You must maintain the balance. In that sense, we are no better than they.”

The man says not a word in response. At that moment Tomás is overcome by ravenous itchiness. It’s all over his body now. “If you’ll excuse me, I have business to attend to,” he says to the shepherd. He makes his way back along the footboard to the cabin. From the cabin, through the wide window, the back of the shepherd’s head is plainly visible. Thrashing and twisting on the sofa, Tomás battles itchiness, digging hard with his fingernails at his insect tormentors. The gratification is intense. The shepherd never turns around.

To block out the rain, Tomás covers the shattered door window with a blanket, securing the blanket to the frame by closing the door on it. The rain becomes a monotonous drumming on the roof. Amidst the scattered supplies he makes a space for himself on the leather sofa, covers himself with another blanket, and curls up tightly…

He wakes with a start. He has no idea if he has slept five or fifty-five minutes. The rain is still falling. But the shepherd is gone. Peering through the machine’s rain-streaked windows, he can see a hazy grey shape up ahead on the road — it is the flock of sheep. He opens the cabin door and stands on the footboard. The shepherd is in the middle of his flock, looking as if he is walking on a cloud. The dog is flitting about as it did earlier, but Tomás can no longer hear it. The flock moves down the road, then flows off to one side of it, taking a path into the countryside.

Through the rain Tomás watches the flock get smaller and smaller. Just as it begins to disappear beyond a ridge, the shepherd, a black dot now, stops and turns. Is he checking for a lost sheep? Is he looking back at him? Tomás waves vigorously. He can’t tell if the man has noticed his farewell. The black dot vanishes.

He returns to the driving compartment. There is a small package on the passenger seat. Wrapped in cloth are a piece of bread, a chunk of white cheese, and a tiny sealed earthen jar of honey. A Christmas gift? When is Christmas, exactly? Four days away? He realizes he’s losing track of the days. At any rate, what a kindness on the part of the shepherd. He is touched. He eats. It tastes so good! He can’t remember ever having eaten such savoury bread, such flavourful cheese, such delicious honey.

The rain stops and the sky clears. While waiting for the wintry sunshine to dry the road, he lubricates the machine with drops of oil. Then, impatiently, he sets off. When he reaches the edge of the small town of Arez, he enters it on foot. He is pleased to find a proper apothecary.

“I’ll buy your whole stock. I have horses that are badly infested with lice,” he informs the man behind the counter once he has produced the usual small bottle of moto-naphtha.

“You might want to try Hipolito, the blacksmith,” the apothecary says.

“Why would he have any of the stuff?”

“Horses are his concern, including horses badly infested with lice, I would think. And what about your feet?”

“My feet?”

“Yes. What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing’s wrong with my feet. Why would anything be wrong with them?”

“I saw the way you were walking.”

“My feet are perfectly healthy.”

Walking backwards through the village on his perfectly healthy feet, Tomás finds Hipolito’s smithy down a lane. He is astonished to discover that the blacksmith has an enormous barrel of moto-naphtha. Tomás is dizzy with joy. The supply will not only glut the automobile with fuel but will also soothe his ravaged body.

“My good man, I’ll buy lots of it. I have twelve horses that are badly infested with lice.”

“Oh, you don’t want to use this stuff on horses. That would be doing them a great disservice. It’s very harsh on the skin. You need a powder that you’ll mix with water.”

“Why then do you have so much moto-naphtha? What’s it for?”

“For automobiles. They’re a new device.”

“Perfect! I have one of those too, and as it happens it desperately needs to be fed.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” says the jovial rustic.

“My horses were on my mind. The poor beasts.”

Hipolito the blacksmith is moved by the drama of Tomás’s twelve afflicted horses and goes into tender, lengthy details about how the lice powder should be mixed with warm water, applied topically, allowed to dry, then carefully brushed and combed out, starting at the top of the head and working one’s way back and down across the horse’s body. It’s a task that takes much time, but a horse deserves nothing less than the best treatment.

“Bring your horses and I’ll help you do it,” Hipolito adds in a burst of fellow equine love.

“I’m not from these parts. I only have my automobile here.”

“Then you’ve come a long way searching for the wrong remedy for your horses. I have the powder right here. Twelve horses, you say? Six cans should do you, eight to be safe. And you’ll need this comb-and-brush kit. The highest quality.”

“Thank you. You can’t imagine how relieved I am. Tell me, how long have you been selling moto-naphtha?”

“Oh, about six months.”

“How’s business?”

“You’re my first customer! I’ve never seen an automobile in my life. But it’s the carriage of the future, I’m told. And I’m a smart businessman, I am. I understand commerce. It’s important to be up to date. No one wants to buy what’s old. You want to be the first to spread the word and show off the product. That’s how you corner the market.”

“How did you get this enormous barrel all the way up here?”

“By stagecoach.”

At the word Tomás’s heart skips a beat.

“But you know,” Hipolito adds, “I didn’t tell them it was for automobiles. I told them it was to treat horses with lice. They’re funny about automobiles, those stagecoach drivers.”

“Are they? Any stagecoaches coming soon?”

“Oh, in the next hour or so.”

Not only does Tomás run back to the automobile, he runs forward to it.

When he roars up to the smithy in his uncle’s Renault with the alarm of a bank robber, Hipolito is surprised, stunned, aghast, and delighted at the throbbing, clanging invention Tomás has brought to his shop.

“So this is it? What a big, noisy thing! Quite ugly in a beautiful sort of way, I’d say. Reminds me of my wife,” yells Hipolito.

Tomás turns the machine off. “I completely agree. I mean about the automobile. To be honest with you, I find it ugly in an ugly sort of way.”

“Hmmm, you may be right,” the blacksmith muses, perhaps pondering how the automobile will wreck his commerce and way of life. His forehead wrinkles. “Oh well, business is business. Where does the moto-naphtha go? Show me.”

Tomás points eagerly. “Here, here, here, and here.”

He has Hipolito fill the fuel tank, the barrel, and all the glass bottles of vermin lotion. He eyes the bottles hungrily. He sorely wants to empty one all over his body.

“Come again!” cries Hipolito after Tomás has paid for the fuel, the eight cans of lice powder for horses, and the comb-and-brush kit of the highest quality. “Remember, from back to front, starting at the top of the head and working your way back and down. Poor creatures!”

“Thank you, thank you!” shouts Tomás as he speeds away.

After Arez, he turns off the road onto a well-marked track. He trusts that his map, with its faint markings for secondary roads, will lead him back to the road beyond the larger town of Nisa, which he is hoping to circumvent by this deviation. From that track he turns onto another, then another. The quality of the tracks goes from bad to worse. There are rocks everywhere. He navigates the terrain as best he can. The land, meanwhile, rises and falls like heaving swells so that he can never see very far around him. Is this how Father Ulisses felt sailing to the island, closed in while in the wide open?

In the midst of his oceanic meanderings, the track simply vanishes. The directed smoothness of a pathway is replaced by a rockiness that is uniform and undefined, as if the track were a river that opened onto a delta, casting him adrift. He navigates on, but eventually he hears the voice of prudence and it urgently suggests he reverse his course.

He turns the machine around, but facing one way looks no different from facing another. He becomes confused. Surrounding him in all directions is the same countryside, rocky, dry, silent, with silver-green olive trees as far as the eye can see and bulbous white clouds boiling up high in the sky. He’s lost, a castaway. And night is coming.

Finally it is not this predicament, of being lost, that leads him to drop anchor for the night. It is another, more personal one: Great armies of tiny vermin are rampaging over his body, and he cannot stand it any longer.

He reaches a rise in the land and halts the vehicle, tapping its front against a tree. The air, fragrant with the fertile labour of trees, is extraordinarily soft. There is not a sound around him, not from insects, not from birds, not from the wind. All that registers upon his ears are the few sounds he himself makes. In the absence of sound, he notices more with his eyes, in particular the delicate winter flowers that here and there brave the stony ground. Pink, light blue, red, white — he doesn’t know what kind of flowers they are, only that they are beautiful. He breathes in deeply. He can well imagine that this land was once the last outpost of the storied Iberian rhinoceros, roaming free and wild.

In every direction he walks, he finds no trace of human presence. He wanted to wait until he reached a private spot to take care of his problem, and now he has found it. The moment has come. He returns to the automobile. No human being — no being of any kind — could stand such itchiness. But before slaying his enemies with his magic potions, he gives in one last time to the gratifying indulgence of scratching an itch.

He raises his ten fingers in the air. His blackened fingernails gleam. With a warlike cry, he throws himself into the fray. He rakes his fingernails over his head — the top, the sides, the nape — and over his bearded cheeks and neck. It is quick, hard, spirited work. Why do we make animal sounds in moments of pain or pleasure? He does not know, but he makes animal sounds and he makes animal faces. He goes AAAAHHHHH! and he goes OOOOHHHHH! He throws off his jacket, unbuttons and removes his shirt, tears off his undershirt. He attacks the enemies on his torso and in his armpits. His crotch is a cataclysm of itchiness. He unbuckles his belt and pulls his trousers and his underpants down to his ankles. He scratches his hairy sexual patch vigorously, his fingers like claws. Has he ever felt such relief? He pauses to bask in it. Then he starts over again. He moves down to his legs. There is blood under his fingernails. No matter. But the vandals have regrouped in the crack of his ass. Because there too he is hairy. He is hairy all over. It has always been a source of acute embarrassment to him, the forests of thick black hair that sprout from his pale white skin all over his body. That Dora liked to run her fingers through his chest hair always comforted him, because otherwise he finds his hairiness repulsive. He is an ape. Hence the care with which he has his hair cut, with which he shaves. He is normally a clean and neat man, and modest and reserved. But right now he is unhinged with itchiness. His ankles are constrained by his trousers. He kicks his shoes off, pulls his socks off, tears one pant leg off, then the other. That’s better — now he can lift his legs. He attacks the crack of his ass with both hands. On he battles: His hands fly about and he hops from one foot to the other, he makes animal sounds and he makes animal faces, he goes AAAAHHHHH! and he goes OOOHHHHH!

It’s as he’s working his pubic patch, his hands vibrating like the wings of a hummingbird, his face displaying a particularly simian grin of satisfaction, that he sees the peasant. Just a short way off. Looking at him. Looking at the man hopping about naked, scratching himself madly, making animal sounds next to the strange horseless cart. Tomás freezes on the spot. How long has the man been watching him?

What is there to do at such a moment? What can he do to salvage his dignity, his very humanity? He removes the animal expression from his face. He stands upright. As solemnly as he can — with quick dips to gather his clothes — he walks to the automobile and disappears inside the cabin. Profound mortification brings on complete immobility.

When the sun has set and the sky is inky black, the darkness and the isolation begin to weigh on him. And full-out, unqualified, comprehensive humiliation is not a remedy against vermin. He is still covered in rioting insect life. He can practically hear them. He cautiously opens the automobile door. He peers out. He looks about. There is no one. The peasant has gone. Tomás lights a candle stub. He has nowhere to place the candle where it will not risk damaging the plush interior, so he unplugs one of the bottles of moto-naphtha and corks it with the lit candle. The effect is attractive. The cabin looks cosy, truly a very small living room.

Still fully naked, he steps out. He takes out the tin of horse lice powder and two bottles of moto-naphtha lotion. He will do better than what Hipolito suggested. He will mix the lice powder with moto-naphtha rather than with water, doubling the lethalness of the concoction. Besides, he has no water left. The water from the barrel in the cabin went into either him or the automobile. He has only a skin of wine left. He mixes moto-naphtha and horse lice powder in a pot until the paste is neither too runny nor too thick. It smells awful. He starts to apply it to his body, working it in with his fingers. He winces. His skin is tender from all the scratching. The paste burns. But he endures it because of the death blow it is striking against the vermin. Apply liberally, says the label on the bottle. He does, he does. After caking his head and face, he applies the mixture to his armpits and over his chest and stomach, on his legs and feet. He covers his pubic mound in a thick layer. Where the paste falls off his body, he applies double the quantity. For his rear, he places a great dollop on the footboard and sits in it. There. His head upright, his arms tight against his body, his hands spread out over his torso, he sits very still. Any movement, even breathing, not only loosens the paste but increases the burning.

This burning is infernal. He tries to get used to it, but he can’t. It’s as if the paste has consumed his skin and now is working through his flesh. He is being roasted alive. But so are the vermin. They and their eggs are dying by the thousands. He needs to endure the agony only a little longer, until they are all dead. After that, he will be well on the road to recovery. He continues to wait, slowly sizzling.

Then it happens: a shattering BOOM! He is projected from the footboard, as much by surprise and fright as by the force of the explosion. He turns and stares, the vermin and the pain all forgotten. The automobile is on fire! Where before there was only a single wavering flame atop the bottle of moto-naphtha, now there are great patches of fire all over the inside of the cabin. And upon feeling a prickling at the back of his head, he realizes that the fire has leapt from the cabin onto his head. In a moment it spreads to his beard, his chest, his entire body. POUF! goes his pubic mound, now an orange forest of flames. He screams. Luckily for him, the lice powder is not flammable. But there are stabs of pain coming from his head, from his chest, from his penis — wherever the moto-naphtha-fuelled fire has worked its way through lice powder and hair and reached bare skin. He hops about, slapping his hands all over his body, stamping the fires out. When he is done, he stands, smoke rising off him in a column.

The automobile is still burning. He runs to it. On the way he picks up off the ground the wet blanket that he used the previous day to cover the broken cabin window and keep the rain out. He dives into the cabin. Throwing the blanket around and flinging horse lice powder about, he manages to extinguish the fires.

He pulls the trunk out from the cabin and opens it. Father Ulisses’ diary, for being inside it, is undamaged. He nearly cries with relief. But the cabin — the state of it! The leather of the sofa — charred and crispy. The side panels — scorched. The ceiling — black with soot. All the windows except the one in front of the driving compartment — blown out, shards of glass everywhere. The food, the motoring supplies, his clothes — all singed and burned. Everything covered in ashes and carbonized horse lice powder. And the reek!

He finishes the last of the red wine, clears the driving compartment seat of broken glass, then lies down naked on the blanket on the seat, covering himself with the mink coat. Pain racks his body, his uncle yells at him in his dreams. He is chilled by the night while yet burning from his sores.

In the morning light, he dresses gingerly. However carefully he puts his clothes on, they rake at his tender skin. He sweeps and cleans the cabin as best he can. He opens the trunk again to check the diary. He does not want to lose his connection to Father Ulisses. He has come to see in the priest a man perfected by his suffering. A man to be imitated. Because to suffer and do nothing is to be nothing, while to suffer and do something is to become someone. And that is what he is doing: He is doing something. He must strike onward to the High Mountains of Portugal and fulfil his quest.

But he is confronted with an unexpected problem: the tree right in front of the automobile. There’s not enough space to drive around it. He has not encountered this situation until now. Always there has been space in front of the vehicle to make use of the steerage wheel and move forward. He exclaims and blames and curses. Finally he tries to think of a solution, and there is only one, clearly: to cut down the tree. There’s an axe among the store of essential items in the cabin. He has just seen it, covered in soot. His ever considerate and farsighted uncle no doubt included it for this precise purpose. The grand march of progress apparently includes the unfortunate necessity of chopping down every obstacle in its way. But the tree is so large, the trunk so thick, his body so sore!

He dithers. Finally the sight of his trunk of papers in the breezy cabin focuses his scattered energies. He picks up the axe.

He stands, facing the side of the tree opposite where the automobile is held prisoner. He raises the axe and swings. He chops and chops and chops. The bark flies off well enough, but the pale flesh of the tree is rubbery and resistant. The axe, sharp though it is, bounces back, producing only the smallest indentation each time. Hitting the same spot repeatedly demands a skill that mostly eludes him. And every swing grinds tender flesh against harsh clothing.

Quickly he is bathing in perspiration. He rests, eats, goes at it again. The morning is spent in this fashion. Then the early afternoon slips by.

By late afternoon, he has hacked a large hollow into the side of the trunk. The hollow goes beyond the midway point, but the tree doesn’t seem to feel any inclination to fall. His palms are shredded red and bleeding. The pain in his hands barely masks the pain he feels in his whole body. He is so exhausted he can barely stand.

He can chop no longer. The hindrance has to go away — now. He decides to use the weight of his body to make the tree topple. Placing one foot on the edge of the mudguard and another on the edge of the hood, he reaches for the first branch. It’s torture to grip the bark with his hands, but he manages to hook a leg around another branch and heave himself up. After all his struggles with the axe, the comparative ease with which he climbs the tree cheers him.

He moves out along a bough. He holds on to two separate branches. Of course, when the tree falls, he will fall with it. But the height isn’t great, and he will brace himself.

He begins to swing his body back and forth, ignoring the excruciating pain that is radiating from his palms. The head of the tree dances and dances. He expects to hear at any moment a sharp crack and feel himself drop through the air the short distance to the ground.

Instead, the tree gives up with quiet, rubbery elasticity. It tips over slowly. Tomás turns his head and sees the ground coming up. The landing is soft. But his feet slip off their bough, and where they come to rest on the ground is the precise spot where the tree chooses to press down with its heaviest limb. He yelps with pain.

He wrenches his feet free. He moves his toes. No bones are broken. He turns and looks at the automobile. He sees in an instant from the ground what he didn’t during his long hours of toil standing up: The stump is too high. The automobile, its bottom, will never be able to reach over it. He should have chopped much lower. But even if he had, the tree is still attached to the stump. It has fallen over without breaking off. The point at which tree and stump cling to each other is twisted and will be even more resistant to the axe. And even if he did manage to chop through the rest of the trunk, and supposing the stump were shorter, would he be able to pull the tree away? It seems scarcely imaginable. It’s no bush.

His efforts have been futile. The tree mocks him. Still entangled in the branches, he slumps. He begins to sob awkwardly. He closes his eyes and abandons himself to grief.

He hears the voice just before a hand touches his shoulder.

“My friend, you are hurt.”

He looks up, startled. A peasant has materialized out of the air. Such a bright white shirt he is wearing. Tomás chokes on his last sob and wipes his face with the back of his hand.

“You’ve been thrown so far!” says the man.

“Yes,” replies Tomás.

The man is looking at the automobile and the tree. Tomás understood him to mean how far he was projected from the tree (which, in fact, he hasn’t been at all; he’s in the tree, like a bird in its nest). But the peasant meant from the automobile. He must think that Tomás crashed into the tree and was projected from the vehicle into its branches.

“My hands and feet hurt. And I’m so thirsty!” Tomás says.

The peasant wraps one of his arms around his waist. Though short, he’s a powerful man and he lifts Tomás off the ground. He half-carries him to the automobile, setting him down on the footboard. Tomás massages his ankles.

“Anything broken?” the man asks.

“No. Just bruised.”

“Have some water.”

The man produces a gourd. Tomás drinks from it greedily.

“Thank you. For the water and for your help. I’m most grateful. My name is Tomás.”

“My name is Simão.”

Simão gazes at the fallen tree and the automobile’s broken windows, burned-out cabin, and many dents and scratches. “What a terrible accident! Such a powerful machine!” he exclaims.

Tomás hopes Simão doesn’t notice the axe on the ground.

“Pity about the tree,” Simão adds.

“Is it yours?”

“No. This is Casimiro’s grove.”

For the first time Tomás looks at the tree not as an obstacle in his way but as a being in its own right. “How old was it?”

“By the looks of it, two to three hundred years old. A good one, producing plenty of olives.”

Tomás is aghast. “I’m so sorry. Casimiro will be very angry.”

“No, he’ll understand. Accidents happen to all of us.”

“Tell me, is Casimiro somewhat older, with a round face and greying hair?”

“Yes, that would describe Casimiro.”

As it would the peasant from last night, the one who watched Tomás’s vermin dance. Tomás suspects that Casimiro will see the events in his olive grove in a different, less forgiving light.

“Do you think the machine will still work?” asks Simão.

“I’m sure it will,” replies Tomás. “It’s a solid thing. But I need to move it backwards. That’s my problem.”

“Put it in neutral and we’ll push it.”

That word again. Tomás is not sure why the machine’s neutrality will allow it to move backwards, but Simão seems to know what he’s talking about.

“It’s already in neutral. Only the hand brake needs to be released,” Tomás says.

He puts his shoes back on and climbs into the driving compartment. With a sore hand, he releases the hand brake. Nothing happens. He doubts Simão’s quick fix will yield anything more fruitful than his own tree-chopping solution.

“Come,” says Simão.

Tomás joins him at the front of the automobile. This notion of pushing the automobile is preposterous. Still, to be polite to the man who has so obligingly helped him and is now ready beside him to push, he places a shoulder against the automobile.

“One — two — three!” cries Simão, and he pushes, and Tomás too, though not very hard.

To his amazement, the automobile moves. He’s so amazed, in fact, that he forgets to move with it and he falls flat on his face. In a matter of seconds, the vehicle stands three lengths from the tree.

Simão is beaming. “What an astonishing machine!”

“Yes, it is,” says Tomás, incredulous.

As he picks himself up off the ground, he discreetly takes hold of the axe. Placing it close to his leg, he returns it to the cabin. Simão is still gazing at the automobile with unbounded admiration.

Tomás would like nothing better than to stay where he is for the night, but the prospect of Casimiro arriving on the scene, and having to explain the attack on his quarter-millennium olive tree, strongly advises against the option. Besides, he’s lost. If he stays the night, he will still be lost in the morning.

“Simão, I was wondering if you might help me find my way out of here. I seem to have got lost.”

“Where do you want to go? To Nisa?”

“No, I’ve just come from there. I’m heading for Vila Velha de Ródão.”

“Vila Velha? You have got very lost. But it’s no problem. I know the way.”

“That’s wonderful. Might you help me start the automobile?”

With the condition his hands are in, the idea of having to turn the starting handle makes Tomás feel faint. He supposes Simão will take pleasure in it. He’s right. The peasant’s face breaks into a wide grin.

“Yes, of course. What do you want me to do?”

Tomás shows him the starting handle and the direction in which to turn it. As the machine explodes to life, Simão might as well be struck by lightning — the effect is the same. Tomás waves at him to get into the driving compartment and Simão scampers aboard. Tomás puts the vehicle into first gear, and as it moves forward he glances at his passenger. His face confirms what Tomás already suspected from watching his uncle: The machine turns grown men into little boys. Simão’s weathered features are transformed by delight. If he shrieked and giggled, Tomás would not be surprised.

“Which way should I go?” he asks.

Simão points. Every few minutes Simão corrects his course and soon the trace of a track appears. Then a proper track, smoother and verged. The driving becomes easier and faster. Simão’s delight continues undiminished.

After a good half hour of driving, they reach a true, blessed road. Tomás stops the automobile.

“I never thought I’d be so happy to see a road. So which way is Vila Velha de Ródão?” he asks.

Simão indicates to the right.

“Thank you very much, Simão. You’ve been of invaluable help. I must reward you.” Tomás reaches into the pocket of his charred jacket.

Simão shakes his head. With a struggle, as if his tongue has been lost deep inside his body, he speaks. “My reward is having been in this amazing carriage. It is I who thank you.”

“It’s nothing. I’m sorry I’ve taken you so far out of your way.”

“It’s not so far on foot.”

Simão reluctantly vacates the passenger seat, and Tomás prods the machine onward. “Thank you, thank you again,” he shouts.

Simão waves until he disappears from view in the side mirror.

Shortly thereafter, with a dragging to one side and a fluf-fluf-fluf-fluf sound, Tomás realizes that something is wrong. He presses on one pedal, then another.

It takes a few walkabouts around the vehicle before he sees that the front right tire is — he searches for the word—flat. The roundness of the wheel is no longer so round. There were some pages in the manual about this eventuality. He skipped them when it became apparent that the wheels, in their roundness, at least, did not require lubrication. He retrieves the manual and finds the appropriate section. He blanches. This is serious engineering work. He can see that even before he has translated the details from the French.

Understanding the nature and operation of the jack; assembling it; finding where it must be placed under the automobile; jacking the automobile up; unbolting and removing the wheel; replacing it with the spare wheel from the footboard; tightly bolting the fresh wheel into place; returning everything to its proper place — an experienced motorist might do it in half an hour. It takes him, with his raw hands, two hours.

At last, his hands sullied and throbbing, his body sweaty and aching, the task is done. He should be pleased that he can proceed again, but all he feels is mortal exhaustion. He retreats to the driving compartment and stares out in front of him. His head is prickly, as is the unwanted beard that is growing on his face. “Enough! Enough!” he whispers. What does suffering do to a man? Does it open him up? Does he understand any more as a result of his suffering? In the case of Father Ulisses, for the longest time it seems the answer to these questions was no. Tomás remembers a telling incident:

Today I saw a fight on a plantation. Two slaves clashed. Others stood about, with stupefied expressions. A female slave, the object of contention, looked on, impassive, indifferent. Whoever won, she would lose. Continually shouting in their native gibberish, the two fought, at first with words & gestures, then their fists, then their tools. The matter proceeded swiftly, from injured prides to injured bodies, from bruising & bleeding to frenzied hacking, till the end was reached: a dead slave with a torso cleft with deep cuts & a half-severed head. Whereupon the other slaves, the female included, turned & got back to their work lest the overseer arrive on the scene. The victor slave, his visage apathetic, threw some soil on the body, then returned to cutting cane. None of the slaves will come forward to acknowledge or explain, to accuse or defend. Just silence & the hoeing of sugar cane. The dead man’s decay will be rapid, started by insects & predatory birds & beasts & accelerated by the sun & rain. Soon nothing but a lump will be left of him. Only if the overseer directly steps onto this lump will its gashed blackness reveal white bones & decaying red flesh. Then the overseer will know the whereabouts of the slave who went missing.

Of this appalling scene, Father Ulisses has only one significant comment to make:

Such were the Lord’s wounds, like that dead slave’s injuries. His hands, his feet, his forehead where the crown of thorns pierced his skin & especially the wound on his side from the soldier’s spear — carmine red, very, very bright, a pull on the eyes.

Such was the suffering of Christ: “carmine red” and a “pull on the eyes”. But the suffering of the two men who fought to death before his very eyes? They are not worth a word. No more than the spectator slaves would Father Ulisses come forward to acknowledge or explain, to accuse or to defend. He seems to have been deaf and dumb to the suffering of the slaves. Or, to be more accurate, he seems to have seen nothing peculiar about it: They suffer, but so do I — so what of it?

The land begins to change as Tomás drives on. The Portugal that he knows is a land solemn in its beauty. A land that prizes the sound of work, both human and animal. A land devoted to duty. Now an element of wilderness begins to intrude. Great outcrops of round rocks. Dark green vegetation that is dry and scrubby. Wandering flocks of goats and sheep. He sees the High Mountains of Portugal foreshadowed in these extrusions of rocks, like the roots of a tree that break above ground, heralding the tree itself.

He is fretful. He is approaching Castelo Branco, which is a proper city, the largest on his deliberately rural route. An idea strikes him: He will drive through the city in the middle of the night. Thus will he avoid people, because it is people who are the problem. Streets, avenues, boulevards — these he can handle, if people aren’t staring and shouting and congregating. If he crosses Castelo Branco at, say, two in the morning in full-throttle third gear, he will likely meet only the odd nightshift worker or drunkard.

When Castelo Branco is near, he leaves the automobile behind and makes his way into the city on foot, backwards as always. He hitches a ride with a man driving a cart, which is fortunate, as the distance to the city turns out to be considerable. The man asks if he saw the strange carriage down the road. He says that he did, without mentioning that he is its driver. The man speaks of the machine in terms of wonder and worry. It’s the quantity of metal that surprises him, he says. It reminds him of a safe.

In Castelo Branco Tomás determines the route he should take. He is pleased to discover that the road continuing to the north of the country mostly avoids the city, circling it on its northwest side. Only the junction with the road is tricky.

He tells three apothecaries his horses-afflicted-with-lice story, which gets him ten bottles of moto-naphtha and, as an unfortunate corollary, three tins of horse lice powder. He carries these in two bags, evenly balanced. He decides to check in to a hotel for the day to wash himself and rest, but the two hotels he finds refuse to admit him, as does the restaurant he seeks to eat in. The proprietors look him up and down, study his singed face and burned hair — one pinches his nose — and they all point to the door. He is too tired to protest. He buys food from a grocer and eats on a bench in a park. He drinks water from a fountain, gulping it avidly, splashing it over his face and head, scrubbing at the soot plastered to his scalp. He wishes he’d remembered to bring the two wineskins, which he could have filled with water. Then he walks in reverse back to the automobile, watching Castelo Branco recede into the distance.

He waits in the cabin for night to fall, idly leafing through the diary to pass the time.

The provenance of the slaves on São Tomé was at first a matter of concern and interest to Father Ulisses — he named the newcomers’ origins in his diary: “from the Mbundu tribe” or “the Chokwe tribe.” But he was hazier on the origins of slaves who came from outside the Portuguese sphere of influence in Africa, and São Tomé, being usefully located, saw slave ships of every nationality — Dutch, English, French, Spanish — and soon he grew weary as a result of the slaves’ too-great numbers. They received his weakening blessing in a state of increasing anonymity. “Does it matter,” he wrote, “wherefrom a soul comes? The exiles of Eden are varied. A soul is a soul, to be blessed & brought to the love of God.”

But one day there was a change. Father Ulisses wrote with uncharacteristic excitement:

I am at the port when a Dutch slaver is unloading its stock. Four captives catch my eye. I see them from afar as they shuffle down the gangplank in shackles & chains. What poor souls are these? They walk with a listless gait, their backs bent, their will broken. I know how they feel. My exhaustion & theirs is the same. The fever is upon me again. Jesus reached out to all, Romans, Samaritans, Syrophoenicians, and others. So must I. I want to get closer but am too weak, the sun too bright. A sailor from the ship is passing by. I beckon to him. I point & ask & he tells me that the captives come from deep within the Congo River basin & were captured in a raid, not traded by a tribe. Three females & a child. My Dutch is poor & I don’t fully understand the sailor. I believe he uses the word “minstrel”. They are to be entertainers of some sort. He gives no sense of impropriety to the term. What? I say to him. Straight from the jungles of the Congo to amusing the white man after his dinner in the New World? He laughs.

I have learned that the four are now jailed on García’s plantation. The mother of the child attacked an overseer & was severely beaten for the offence. They were unwilling to put on clothes & it seemed they provided poor entertainment. Their fate will be decided shortly.

Though I am so feeble I cannot stay long on my feet, I went to García’s today & slipped in to see his captives in their dark, hot cell. The rebellious female has died of her injuries. Her body was still there, her child at her side, listless, nearly unconscious. Fruit lay rotting on the ground. Are the two females that remain starving themselves to death? I spoke to them, knowing they would not understand me. They did not respond or even seem to hear me. I blessed them.

I have gone again. The stench! The child is most certainly dead. At first I had no greater success with the two survivors than yesterday. I read to them from the Gospel of Mark. I chose Mark because it is the most humble Gospel, revealing a messiah at his most human, racked by doubt & anxiety while still shining with loving kindness. I read until fatigue, the heat & the stench nearly overcame me. Thereafter I sat in silence. I was about to leave when one of the captives, the youngest, an adolescent female, stirred. She crawled & settled against the wall on the other side of the bars from me. I whispered to her, “Filha, o Senhor ama-te. De onde vens tu? Conta-me sobre o Jardim do Éden. Conta-me a tua história. O que fizemos de errado?” She did not react in any way. A time passed. Then she turned her head & looked me in the eyes. She looked only briefly before moving away. She guessed that she had nothing to gain from my nearness or interest. I said not a word. My tongue was stilled of any priestly cant. I am transformed. I saw. I have seen. I see. That short gaze made me see a wretchedness that until then had never echoed in my heart. I entered that cell thinking I was a Christian man. I walked out knowing I was a Roman soldier. We are no better than animals.

When I returned this day, they were dead, their bodies taken away and burned. They are free now, as they should have been all along.

The next entry in Father Ulisses’ diary is fierce and accusatory, outlining the final rift between him and the island’s civil and religious authorities. He made a scene at the cathedral, interrupting the Mass with his shouts and protests. The consequence was swift.

I was summoned by the Bishop today. I told him that I had met the unequal & in meeting them found them equal. We are no better than they, I told him. In fact, we are worse. He yelled at me that as there are hierarchies of angels in heaven and of the damned in hell, so there are hierarchies here on earth. The boundaries are not to be blurred. I was sent off, struck by his harshest thunderbolt, excommunication. In his eyes I am no longer a man of the cloth. But I yet feel the Lord’s hand holding me up.

Tomás is amazed, as he is every time he reads this passage. To exclude French and English pirates, or Dutch sailors, little more than mercenaries, from the communion of God is one thing — but an ordained Portuguese priest? That seems an extreme measure, even by the standards of São Tomé. But a place that made its living off slavery would think poorly of a fevered emancipator.

It is then that Father Ulisses mentioned the gift for the first time. Tomás always reads the sentence with trepidation.

I know my mission now. I will make this gift to God before death takes me. I thank God that I drew a sketch while I was at García’s, visiting her in her hellish confinement. Her eyes have opened mine. I will bear witness to the wreckage we have wrought. How great is our fall from the Garden!

Tomás turns the page and stares for the thousandth time at the sketch in question. It is this sketch, with its haunting eyes, that set him on his search.

Night has settled on the land and the time has come to drive through Castelo Branco. He lights the remaining sidelight and adjusts its broad wick. The flame that dances up sheds a circle of warm light. The brilliantly white flame of the surviving headlight hisses like an angry snake. Its illumination is focused forward by a crystal-glass encasement. If only the light cast by the headlight weren’t so lopsided. His Cyclops looks rather sorry.

He reviews the route he will take. He has a series of markers in his head. At each point where a decision needs to be made, he has taken note of a detail — a house, a shop, a building, a tree. Because there will be no throngs of people at this time of night, he will have more leisure to guide himself correctly.

Whatever illusion he has that he’s riding a firefly of sorts — and when he moves away from the vehicle’s lit side, its radiance gives that image some credibility — is shattered when he starts up the machine. Its juddering roar rather brings to mind a dragon, although one with puny flames shooting from its mouth.

Not only puny: wholly ineffective. The lights, bright to his eyes close up, are mere pinpricks in the impenetrable night. All the headlight does, and poorly at that, is bring out the rough features of the road immediately under the automobile’s nose. What lies beyond — every rut, every turn — comes as a frightening, ever-changing surprise.

His only recourse — wholly illogical, he knows, but he can’t help himself and does it over and over — is to squeeze the horn, as if the night were a black cow obstructing the road that will jump out of the way with a few honks.

He does not move beyond first gear as he gropes his way towards Castelo Branco.

In Portugal the sunshine is often pearly, lambent, tickling, neighbourly. So too, in its own way, is the dark. There are dense, rich, and nourishing pockets of gloom to be found in the shadows of houses, in the courtyards of modest restaurants, on the hidden sides of large trees. During the night, these pockets spread, taking to the air like birds. The night, in Portugal, is a friend. These are the days and nights that he has mostly known. Only in his distant childhood was the night ever a breeder of terrors. Then he quaked and cried out. His father came to his rescue each time, stumbling half-asleep to his bed, where he would take him in his arms. He would fall asleep against his father’s big, warm chest.

Castelo Branco does not have the streetlights that light up Lisbon’s nights. Every marker on his route, so clear during the day, is now shrouded. Streets rear up like the tentacles of a giant squid. He never finds the road that skirts the city on its northwest. Instead, Castelo Branco is a breeder of terrors. He tries to hold a course in one direction until he reaches the city’s edge, any edge, but every street he takes ends in a T-junction, either way plunging him back into the depths of the city. Worse are the people. Like the houses and buildings that surround him, they appear abruptly out of the darkness, their faces suddenly fixed by the white light of the one-eyed machine. Some shout in fright, spreading their fright to him, and stand frozen, while others turn and run. It’s true that in the silence of the night the automobile is very loud, and he continues to honk the horn incessantly — but only to alert. At first there is hardly anyone about, but as he moves through the city like a blind creature scuttling at the bottom of the ocean, more and more people throw their shutters open, more and more people fling themselves into the streets, dishevelled but sharp-eyed. He moves into second gear and outpaces them. A short while later, on another circuit through the city, he encounters more groups. He sees them, they see him. They run towards him, he turns down another street. He moves into third gear.

If he cannot escape, then he must hide. After a series of turns, halfway down a deserted avenue, he abruptly stops the machine. He hurries to blow out the flames of the sidelight and headlight. Darkness and silence engulf him. He listens. Will the night hordes find him? He ventures out. He peers around corners and stares down streets. Nothing but benign darkness. It seems he has lost them.

He spends the rest of the night walking through Castelo Branco, establishing the route he will take at first light.

During his nocturnal exploration of the city, he comes upon a plain square, with its allotment of trees, benches, and a single statue veiled in darkness in its centre. He sees movement and he jumps, then realizes what it is. There has been a market that day in the square. The vendors’ stalls still stand, and beneath the tables, strewn about, lies the bad produce that the vendors threw away, fruit, vegetables, perhaps even meat. Moving amidst this detritus are dogs. Under the great dome of the night, in the submarine quiet of a city returned to sleep after a brief disturbance, he gazes at these street dogs that are taking in what others have rejected. They go about their business with hopeful pokes and snuffles, occasionally finding and gratefully eating. A few of them look up and stare at him before returning to their rooting. They accept him, as he accepts them.

When he returns to the automobile, he feels the gratitude of a sea creature retreating into its sheltering shell. He lies down for a short nap in the cabin. Alas, the walking and the sleepless night have taxed him greatly. He oversleeps. At the honk of the machine’s horn, pressed by some impertinent bystander, he wakes with a jerk to the sight of faces pressed through the window openings of the cabin, goggling eyes on him, noses sniffing the air. He has to push against the door of the cabin to move the people on the other side enough that he can squeeze out. He stands on the footboard and breathes in the fresh air of the new day. It is good to have escaped the night, but surrounding him now, sloshing and slapping against the automobile like the ocean’s bright blue water, is seemingly the entire population of Castelo Branco, clamouring at him like breaking waves. His escape — involving the usual shouted exhortations, the usual blinkered lack of understanding, the usual surprise when the automobile nudges forward, and the usual race ahead of the mob — drains him utterly. He drives until his nodding head hits the steerage wheel.

He wakes midafternoon and makes a groggy calculation. For each day established by a memory of it — the first day, the bridges, Ponte de Sor, the stagecoach, and so on — he raises a finger. Quickly the fingers of one hand stand erect. Then the fingers of the other, but for one. Nine, if his calculation is correct. Today is his ninth day on the road. His meagre ration of days is nearly expended. In two days, early in the morning, the chief curator at the museum will be expecting his return. He puts his head in his hands. Castelo Branco is not even halfway to his ultimate destination. Should he abandon his mission? But even if he does, he will not be back in Lisbon in time. To return now will be to fail twice, at his job and in his mission. To press on towards the High Mountains of Portugal will be to fail only at his job. And if his mission is crowned with success, he might perhaps get his job back. He will carry on, then, he will persevere. That is the only sensible course. But night is coming. He will persevere tomorrow.

With the changing land comes a changing climate. Winter in the Portuguese hinterland is cold and damp, and its bite is made worse by the metal cage that is the automobile’s cabin and the drafts that blow through its broken windows. Tomás steps out. Beyond the faint gleam of the road, there is only blackness. He wonders: Animals know boredom, but do they know loneliness? He doesn’t think so. Not this kind of loneliness, of the body and the soul. He belongs to a lonely species. He returns to the sofa and wraps himself in the mink coat and three blankets. Perhaps he sleeps at odd moments, but if he does, he dreams that he is in the cabin of an automobile on a cold night, waiting, and so, awake or sleeping, he remains in the same state of misery. Through the hours, a question preoccupies him: When is Christmas? Did he miss it?

In the morning he is glad to get the machine going. The land continues to dry up, the cultivated weave plucked away, the sustaining frame of rock further exposed. The new landscape jumps out at him, luminous, the assertion of geology plain and direct.

He begins to lose his way regularly. Until now, thanks to the maps, to the forbearance of roads, to luck, he has never got lost for very long. This changes after Castelo Branco. After Castelo Branco, the days blur into a fog of time. He drives into a village in despair, finds a local, and asks him, “Please, I’ve been looking for Rapoula do Côa for three days. Where is it? In what direction does it lie?” The old villager looks in consternation at the smelly, distressed man in the smelly, distressing machine (whom he saw the previous day and the day before, roaring through the village) and responds shyly, “This is Rapoula do Côa.” Lost elsewhere Tomás begs to know where Almeida is, and the native smiles and cries out, “¿Almeida? No está aquí, hombre. Almeida está del otro lado de la frontera.” Tomás stares at the man’s mouth, aghast to hear the susurration of Portuguese replaced by the growl of Spanish. He races back to Portugal, fearful that the border he did not even notice will now rear up like an impassable mountain range.

The compass is of no help. Always, no matter the road, it points away from the road into the wilderness, its needle trembling as he trembles.

How one gets lost can vary, but the state of being lost, the feeling of it, is always the same: paralysis, anger, lethargy, despair. A pack of wolf children somewhere past Macedo de Cavalerios pelt the machine with stones, gouging the elephant hide, denting the metal hood, and, worst of all, shattering the window of the driving compartment, so that he must now drive through howls of cold wind wearing the motoring coat, goggles, and hat, but not the fine gloves, which burned to a crisp in the cabin fire. He has another flat tire, and this time he must actually repair the tire, since the tire on the footboard is already punctured.

One afternoon he at last reaches his destination. Invisibly — but the map telling him so — he enters the High Mountains of Portugal. He can see it in the gentle lift in the land and in the increasing drop off the side of the road. He is jubilant. Soon, soon, he will find the church he’s been seeking and his uncommon insight will be brilliantly demonstrated. His mission is nearly accomplished. What he has been saying with his backwards walking for a year, his outrage, his despair, he will now say with an unconventional crucifix. A broad smile illuminates his face.

The road soon settles into a steady flatness. He looks to his left and right, perplexed. He discovers that he is driving through an act of national vanity. Every country yearns to flaunt that glittering jewel called a mountain range, and so this barren wasteland, too low to be alpine but too high to be usefully fertile, has been bedecked with a grand title. But there are no mountains in the High Mountains of Portugal. There is nothing beyond mere hills, nothing trás os montes. It is an extensive, undulating, mostly treeless steppe, cool, dry, and bleached by a clear, dispassionate sunshine. Where he expected snow and rock, he finds a low, rampant golden-yellow grass that stretches as far as the eye can see, occasionally interrupted by patches of forest. And the only summits he sees are strange, pockmarked boulders, enormous in size, the detritus of some geologic bustle. Streams here and there flow with unexpected liveliness. The steppe is, as its homophone implies, a temporary place from which one proceeds elsewhere. Historically, generations of hardscrabble locals have hurried away from its poor soil, emigrating to more clement parts of the world, and he finds that he too wishes to hurry through it. The villages he encounters concentrate the loneliness he feels in the wide-open spaces between them. Every man and woman he encounters — he doesn’t see any children — smells of time and radiates solitude. These people live in plain, square, solid stone houses with shale roofs, the habitable spaces built above the animal pens, so that the two groups live in joint dependency, the humans receiving warmth and sustenance, the animals food and safety. The land is not amenable to extensive economic use. There is nothing but small, hardy fields of rye, large vegetable gardens, chestnut trees, beehives, chickens in profusion, pens of pigs, and roaming flocks of goats and sheep.

The nights are of a coldness he didn’t know existed in Portugal. He sleeps bundled up in blankets, wearing every item of clothing he can fit on. He cuts the canvas rain tarp into pieces and uses them to seal, more or less, the broken windows. This makes the cabin very dark. He burns candles inside it to heat it. One morning he awakes to a landscape of snow. It is midafternoon before it has melted enough for him to dare to drive on. Now that there is no front window, the driving is so cold that he must slow down.

There are moments in the days when he recognizes a formal beauty to the landscape. It often has less to do with geography and more to do with the weather and the play of light. He does not get as lost as he did farther south, because there are fewer villages and fewer roads. But the roads are rutty obscenities laid down by an enterprising government long ago and forgotten by every government since. In fact, the whole region has the feel of living in administrative amnesia. And yet churches were built in the High Mountains of Portugal, as they were everywhere else in the country. Geography clamours for history. He studies the map and locates the five villages of São Julião de Palácios, Santalha, Mofreita, Guadramil, and Espinhosela. If his research delivers on its promise — and it must, it must — in one of these villages, washed up by the vagaries of history, he will find Father Ulisses’ anguished creation.

He first heads for the village of São Julião de Palácios. The wooden crucifix in its church is ordinary and unremarkable. The same with the centrepiece of the church of Guadramil.

It is on the way to Espinhosela that it happens.

He awakes to a sharp dawn. The air is bright, odourless, dry, with none of the luxuriance of Portugal’s coastal air. When he walks on the gravel at the side of the road, it crunches with parched crispness. A bird’s cry startles him. He looks up. At that precise instant a falcon collides from above with a dove. There is a wobble in the air, a flutter of loosened feathers, then a smooth banking as the falcon resumes its controlled flight with the dove crushed in its talons. It flaps its wings and gains altitude. Tomás watches it vanish in the distance.

An hour or so later, the road he is driving along is open and flat, as is the land on either side. Just then, above the snout of the automobile’s hood, the child appears — more precisely, its hand. The sight is so odd, so unexpected, that he cannot believe what he has seen. Was it a branch? No, it was most certainly a small hand. If a child were holding on to the front of the automobile and stood up, that’s where its hand would appear. And if a child were holding on to the front of the automobile and slipped off, it would then fall under the moving machine. What is the sound of a body being run over by an automobile? Clearly it is what he has just heard: a sound soft, swift, and thumping.

His mind moves in that alternately slow and abrupt way of a mind that is jarred. He must check on the child. Perhaps it is hurt. Or at the very least frightened. If there even was a child. He sticks his head out of the driving compartment and looks back.

He sees behind him, receding, a lump, small and still.

He halts the machine and steps out. He removes his hat and goggles. He is breathless. The lump is far off. He walks backwards towards it. Every time he turns his head, it is closer and his chest feels tighter. He walks faster. His heart is jumping in his chest. He turns around and runs forward towards the lump.

It is indeed a child. A boy. Perhaps five or six years old. Dressed in overlarge clothes. A peasant boy with a large head, surprisingly blond hair, and a lovely, harmonious face marred only by streaks of dirt. And what Portuguese eyes are these—blue? Some atavism, some trace of the foreign. Their fixed gaze appalls him.

“Boy, are you all right? Boy?”

The last word he says louder, as if death were a hearing problem. The boy’s eyes do not blink. His pale face remains frozen in a grave expression. Tomás kneels and touches the boy’s chest. He feels only stillness. A small river of blood appears from under the body and flows along the ground in the usual way of rivers.

Tomás shudders. He lifts his head. A breeze is blowing. In whatever direction he looks, there is majestic normalcy: wild growth here, tilled fields over there, the road, the sky, the sun. Everything is in its place, and time is moving with its usual discretion. Then, in an instant, without any warning, a little boy tripped everything up. Surely the fields will notice; they will rise, dust themselves, and come closer to take a concerned look. The road will curl up like a snake and make sad pronouncements. The sun will darken with desolation. Gravity itself will be upset and objects will float in existential hesitation. But no. The fields remain still, the road continues to lie hard and fixed, and the morning sun does not stop shining with unblinking coolness.

Tomás thinks back to the last place he stopped. It was just a few kilometres earlier. He had a short nap, his forehead resting against the steerage wheel, the engine left running. Could the child have climbed onto the front of the automobile during that break, while his head was down, unnoticed by him?

Children will play.

This could well be something Gaspar would have done, climbed onto a warm, throbbing machine to see what it was like.

“I’m sorry, little one,” he whispers.

He gets back to his feet. What is there to do but leave?

He walks away in his usual fashion, and so the child remains in his sight. He churns with horror. Then a hand seizes that horror and stuffs it in a box and closes the lid. If he leaves quickly enough, it will not have happened. For the moment this accident is in himself only, a private mark, a notch carved nowhere but upon his sensibility. Outside him, nothing cares. Look for yourself: The wind blows, time flows. Besides, it was an accident. It just happened, with no intent or knowledge on his part.

He turns and runs. Upon arriving at the front of the automobile to pull on the starting handle, he sees that the small lid of the hood is open. This lid is at the very front of the hood, out of sight of the driver in the driving compartment, and is designed to allow access to the engine without the hood having to be lifted. Did the child see it as a door into a little round dollhouse? Why must children be so curious? He notes how the boy would have held on, where his feet might have rested, what his hands must have gripped. The edge of the chassis, the base of the starting handle, the ends of the suspension springs, the thin rods that hold the headlights into place, the rim of the open lid — so many options for a little monkey. Comfortable enough a perch, perhaps even exhilarating when the warm noisy machine jerked into motion — but then fear and fatigue would have set in. So much speed and shaking, the ground disappearing beneath like a watery torrent.

He closes the lid and turns the starting handle. He hastens back to the driving compartment, puts the machine into first gear. He pauses. He considers what lies behind him and what lies ahead. With a shudder, the machine starts to move. He presses harder on the pedal. The automobile gains speed. He puts it into second gear, then third. He looks in the side mirror. The image is shaky, but he can still make out the lump. He turns his eyes to the road ahead.

He does not drive very far. The road snakes and ascends into a forest of pine trees. He stops, he turns the engine off, he sits. Then he lifts his gaze to look out the paneless window. Through the trees he sees the road he was on earlier. He is already far from that road, but nothing catches the eye like movement. He sees a tiny figure, just a speck. The figure is running. He recognizes that it’s a man from the sparks of light that flash through the running legs. The man runs and then he stops. He falls forward. There is no movement for a long time. Then the man gets up, lifts the bundle off the road, and walks back the way he came.

Tomás’s inner being plummets. To be the victim of a theft, and now to have committed a theft. In both cases, a child stolen. In both cases, his goodwill and grieving heart of no consequence. In both cases, mere chance. There is suffering and there is luck, and once again his luck has run out. He suddenly feels swallowed, as if he were a struggling insect floating on water and a great mouth gulped him in.

After a long time he looks away. He gets the automobile into gear and pushes on.

The church of Espinhosela yields no treasure; nor does the church of Mofreita. There is only the church of Santalha left. If Father Ulisses’ crucifix is not there, what will he do next?

On the road to Santalha he begins to feel ill. The pain comes in waves, and at each wave it seems to him that he can feel the exact outline of his stomach. Within that outline he is gripped by cramps. Relief comes — only for another cramp to hit him. Nausea surges through him next. Its onset is violent. Saliva floods his mouth, and the taste of it, its very presence, increases the nausea. He halts the vehicle and hastily exits it, trembling and covered in a cold sweat. He falls to his knees. Vomit erupts out of his mouth, a white torrent that splatters the grass. It reeks of putrid cheese. He is left panting. The urge returns with unstoppable force and he retches again. At the end of it, bile is burning his throat.

He lurches back to the automobile. He examines himself in a side mirror. He is scruffy and wild-eyed. His hair is sticky and matted. His clothes are unrecognizably dirty. He looks like a skewer of roasted meat. He spends a grim, sleepless night haunted by a pair of blue eyes, by a sad solemn little face, his stomach clenching and unclenching. It dawns on him: He is sick because of the child. The child is pushing from within him.

That morning he enters a village named Tuizelo. The day is sunny but the village square is deserted. He gets down from the automobile and drinks from the fountain at the centre of the square. He should clean himself, but he cannot muster the will or the concern. Instead he goes searching for somewhere to buy a little food. In these small villages in the High Mountains of Portugal, where the inhabitants survive largely on a mix of self-sufficiency and barter, he has discovered that sometimes a private house acts as an informal shop — but even this is not to be found in Tuizelo, only large vegetable gardens and wandering animals. The village is in fact full of animals: cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, sheep, goats, cows, donkeys, songbirds. As he is returning to the automobile, another stomach cramp besets him. As he pauses to steady himself, he catches sight of the village church. It is a squat building, plain and simple, though not unattractive for it. Its pale stone glows appealingly in the sunlight. He is of the opinion that architectural modesty best suits the religious sentiment. Only song needs to soar in a church; anything fancier is human arrogance disguised as faith. A church such as Tuizelo’s, with no high pointed arches, no ribbed vaulting, no flying buttresses, more accurately reflects the true humble nature of the seeker who enters its walls. The church is not on his list — but visiting it might distract him from his aching stomach and guilty sorrow.

The two doors he tries are locked. As he steps away he catches sight of a woman. She is standing looking at him from a little way off.

“Father Abrahan has gone fishing for the day. I have the key, if you would like,” she says.

He hesitates. There is more driving to be done. With great uncertainty ahead. But she is offering. And it doesn’t escape his notice: The woman is beautiful. A peasant beauty. It lifts his spirits while dashing them at the same time. Once he had a beautiful woman in his life.

“That would be kind of you, senhora.”

She tells him her name is Maria Dores Passos Castro and that he should wait. She disappears around a corner. While he waits for her return, he sits on the step of the church. It is a relief to be approached by a lone woman. He is grateful that no mob has descended on him in this lost village.

Senhora Castro returns. She produces an enormous iron key. “The custodian of the church is my husband, Rafael Miguel Santos Castro, but he is away for the week.” With much clanging and grinding, she unlocks and opens the door to the church. She moves aside to let him in.

“Thank you,” he says.

The interior is dim, because the windows are narrow and because he has just walked in from bright sunlight. He walks to the centre of the nave, to the single aisle between the rows of pews. He is preoccupied with his stomach. If only the child would stop pushing! He is afraid he will vomit inside the church. He hopes Senhora Castro will not follow him too closely. She doesn’t; she stands back and leaves him in peace.

His eyes grow accustomed to the muted light. Stone pilasters connected by arched mouldings frame the white stucco walls around him. The capitals atop the pilasters are plain. Other than a commonplace pictorial Stations of the Cross, the walls are bare, and the windows have no stained glass. He makes his way in reverse along the nave. It is all sober and simple. He takes the church for what it aims to be: a shelter, a refuge, a harbour. He is so weary.

He notices the church’s narrow windows, the thick walls, and the barrel-vaulted ceiling. The Romanesque style arrived late and died late in Portugal. This appears to be a typical small Romanesque church, unmarked by time and unmodified by later hands. A forgotten seven-centuries-old church.

“How old is the church?” he calls.

“Thirteenth century,” the woman replies.

He is pleased to learn that he has identified it correctly. He backs up the aisle slowly, dropping his feet with care. The transepts appear, containing no surprises. He turns around to face the altar, lowering himself into a pew in the second row. He takes long, deep breaths. He glances at the altar and at the crucifix above it. The crucifix is not the standard-issue maudlin symbol he has found almost everywhere. It seems to be early Renaissance. Christ’s long face, elongated arms, and foreshortened legs speak of an awkward attempt by the artist to correct the distortions caused by viewing an elevated figure from below. The extended arms and reduced legs make the body look normal to the viewer looking up at it. The work is no Mantegna or Michelangelo, but it’s expressive, the face of Christ especially so, nearly Baroque in its emotional eloquence. It’s a worthy attempt to express the humanity of Christ and juggle with perspective, circa the early fifteenth century.

He is going to throw up. He clamps his mouth shut. Child, stop! He stands and steadies himself. He makes his way backwards down the aisle and, as he is about to turn for the door, lets his eyes sweep through the church one last time. His eyes rest on the crucifix again. A point of stillness makes itself felt within him, a point that becalms not only the troubles of his body but also the rash workings of his brain.

To place one foot in front of the other feels unnatural, but he does not want to take his eyes off the crucifix. He walks forward. The crucifix is not Renaissance. It’s more recent than that. In fact, he is certain of its date: 1635. It is indeed Baroque, then — what might be called African Baroque. Unmistakably, what he is staring at is Father Ulisses’ crucifix. There it is, all the way from São Tomé. Oh, what a marvel! The match between what Father Ulisses wrote in his diary and fashioned with his hands is perfect. The arms, the shoulders, the hanging body, the curled legs, and, above all, the face! Now that he is properly taking in what his eyes are seeing, the crucifix indeed shines and shrieks, barks and roars. Truly this is the Son of God giving a loud cry and breathing his last breath as the curtain of the temple is torn in two from top to bottom.

“Excuse me,” he cries out to Senhora Castro.

She takes a few steps.

He points with his arm and finger. He points to the heart of the church and asks her, “What is that?”

The woman looks bemused. “It is Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“Yes, but how is he represented?”

“Suffering on the Cross.”

“But what form has he taken?”

“The form of a man. God so loved us that He gave us His Son,” she replies simply.

“No!” shouts Tomás, smiling though every muscle in his midsection is twisting. “What you have here is a chimpanzee! An ape. It’s clear in his sketch — the facial hair, the nose, the mouth. He’s feathered away the hair, but the features are unmistakable, once you know. And those long arms and short legs, they’re not stylized, they’re simian! Chimpanzees have limbs exactly like that, long in the upper body and short in the lower. Do you understand? You’ve been praying to a crucified chimpanzee all these years. Your Son of Man is not a god—he’s just an ape on a cross!”

It is done. This Christ on the Cross, once it is displayed and widely known, will mock all the others. He whispers his private business: There. You took my son, now I take yours.

He wants his laughter to be light, but his victory is blighted by an onrushing emotion: a plummeting feeling of sadness. He fights it. Here is the truth about Jesus of Nazareth, the biological reality. All science points to the materiality of our condition. As an aside, the crucifix is breathtakingly beautiful, and to him will go the glory of discovering it and bringing it to the museum. Still, the feeling of sadness quickly deepens. He stares at Father Ulisses’ crucified ape. Not a god — only an animal.

As he flees the church, a hand pressed to his mouth, a Gospel verse unexpectedly rings in his head. Jesus has just been arrested after the betrayal of Judas, the disciples have deserted him and fled, and then, from Mark: A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.

Is he not now similarly naked?

Senhora Castro watches him go, struck by his strange backwards gait; he looks as if a wind were sucking him out of the church. She does not follow him. Instead she approaches the altar and peers up at the crucifix. What was the man saying? An ape? The Jesus she sees has long arms because he’s welcoming, and a long face because he’s doleful. She has never seen anything odd about the crucifix. The artist did his best. Besides, she pays more attention to Father Abrahan. And she prays with her eyes closed. It’s just a crucifix. And if he’s an ape, so be it — he’s an ape. He’s still the Son of God.

She decides she should check on the stranger.

Tomás is leaning against the automobile, retching violently. From his rectum to his throat he is a single constricting muscle at the mercy of the child who is wringing him like a wet rag. From the corner of his eye, he sees a priest appear in the square, holding a fishing rod in one hand and a line of three fish in the other.

Father Abrahan beholds Maria Passos Castro, who has a puzzled look on her face; he beholds one of those new, fashionable carriages he’s heard about (but this one in very poor condition); and he beholds a bedraggled stranger next to it, dry-heaving with mighty roars.

Tomás climbs into the driving compartment. He wants to go. In a daze he looks at the steerage wheel. The machine needs to move to the right to avoid the wall next to it. What does that mean in terms of the rotation of the wheel in his hands? Grief surges through him ahead of his capacity to answer the question. The steerage wheel has finally and truly defeated him. He begins to weep. He weeps because he feels horribly sick. He weeps because he is soul-racked and bone-weary tired of driving the machine. He weeps because his ordeal is only half over; he still has to drive all the way back to Lisbon. He weeps because he is unwashed and unshaved. He weeps because he has spent days on end in foreign lands and nights on end sleeping in an automobile, cold and cramped. He weeps because he has lost his job, and what will he do next, how will he earn his living? He weeps because he has discovered a crucifix he no longer cares to have discovered. He weeps because he misses his father. He weeps because he misses his son and his lover. He weeps because he has killed a child. He weeps because, because, because.

He weeps like a child, catching his breath and hiccupping, his face drenched with tears. We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more — there is no greater relationship. Long before Darwin, a priest lucid in his madness encountered four chimpanzees on a forlorn island in Africa and hit upon a great truth: We are risen apes, not fallen angels. Tomás is strangled by loneliness.

“Father, I need you!” he cries out.

Father Abrahan throws his fishing gear to the ground and runs to help the piteous stranger.