The High Mountains of Portugal

Part Two: Homeward

Eusebio Lozora says the Lord’s Prayer three times slowly. After that he launches forth with unrehearsed praise and supplication. His thoughts wander but return, his sentences stop midway but eventually resume. He praises God, then he praises his wife to God. He asks God to bless her and their children. He asks for God’s continued support and protection. Then, since he is a physician, a pathologist at that, rooted in the body, but also a believer, rooted in the promise of the Lord, he repeats, perhaps two dozen times, the words “The Body of Christ,” after which he gets up off his knees and returns to his desk.

He considers himself a careful practitioner. He examines the paragraph he has been working on the way a farmer might look back at a freshly sowed furrow, checking to see that he has done a good job because he knows the furrow will yield a crop — in his case, a crop of understanding. Does the writing hold up to his high standards? Is it true, clear, concise, final?

He is catching up on his work. It is the last day of December of the year 1938, its final hours, in fact. A bleak Christmas has been dutifully celebrated, but otherwise he is in no mood for holiday festivities. His desk is covered with papers, some in clear view, others carefully, meaningfully eclipsed to varying degrees depending on their importance, and still others that are ready to be filed away.

His office is quiet, as is the hallway outside it. Bragança has a population of not thirty thousand people, but its Hospital São Francisco, in which he is head pathologist, is the largest in Alto Douro. Other parts of the hospital will be lit up and swollen with bustle and noise — the emergency wing, where people come in screaming and crying, the wards, where the patients ring bells and hold the nurses up in endless conversations — but the pathology wing, in the basement of the hospital, beneath all these lively floors, is typically hushed, like all pathology wings. He wishes it to stay that way.

With the adding of three words and the crossing out of one, he completes the paragraph. He reads it over one last time. It is his private opinion that pathologists are the only physicians who know how to write. All the other devotees of Hippocrates hold up as their triumph the restored patient, and the words they might write — a diagnosis, a prescription, instructions for a treatment — are of fleeting interest to them. These physicians of restoration, as soon as they see a patient standing on his or her feet, move on to a new case. And it is true that every day patients depart the hospital with quite a bounce to their step. Just an accident, or a little bout of this or that illness, they say to themselves. But Eusebio places greater store in those who were seriously sick. He notes in these patients leaving the hospital the tottering gait and the dishevelled hair, the desperately humbled look and the holy terror in their eyes. They know, with inescapable clarity, what is coming to them one day. There are many ways in which life’s little candle can be snuffed out. A cold wind pursues us all. And when a stub of a candle is brought in, the wick blackened, the sides streaked with dripped wax, the attending physician — at the Hospital São Francisco, in Bragança, Portugal, at least — is either he or his colleague, Dr. José Otavio.

Every dead body is a book with a story to tell, each organ a chapter, the chapters united by a common narrative. It is Eusebio’s professional duty to read these stories, turning every page with a scalpel, and at the end of each to write a book report. What he writes in a report must reflect exactly what he has read in the body. It makes for a hard-headed kind of poetry. Curiosity draws him on, like all readers. What happened to this body? How? Why? He searches for that crafty, enforced absence that overtakes us all. What is death? There is the corpse — but that is the result, not the thing itself. When he finds a grossly enlarged lymph node or tissue that is abnormally rugose, he knows that he’s hot on death’s trail. How curious, though: Death often comes disguised as life, a mass of exuberant, anomalous cells — or, like a murderer, it leaves a clue, a smoking gun, the sclerotic caking of an artery, before fleeing the scene. Always he comes upon death’s handiwork just as death itself has turned the corner, its hem disappearing with a quiet swish.

He leans back in his chair to stretch. The chair creaks, like old bones. He notices a file on his workbench, along the wall, where his microscope stands. What is it doing there? And what is that on the floor beneath the bench — another file? And the glass on his desk — it’s so dried out, it’s collecting dust. He strongly believes in the importance of proper hydration. Life is moist. He should clean the glass and fill it with fresh, cool water. He shakes his head. Enough of these scattered thoughts. He has much that needs preserving, not only in solutions and slides but in words. In each case he must bring together the patient’s clinical history, the findings from the autopsy, and the histological results into a smooth and coherent whole. He must apply himself. Focus, man, focus. Find the words. Besides, there are other reports that need finishing. There is the one he has been putting off. It has to be done tonight. A body that was crushed and left for several days half-exposed to the air, half-submerged in a river, inviting both rot and bloating.

A loud rap at the door startles him. He looks at his watch. It is half past ten at night.

“Come in,” he calls out, exasperation escaping from his voice like steam from a kettle.

No one enters. But he senses a brooding presence on the other side of the solid wood door.

“I said come in,” he calls out again.

Still no rattling of the doorknob. Pathology is not a medical art that is much subject to emergency. The sick, or rather their biopsied samples, can nearly always wait till the next morning, and the dead are even more patient, so it’s unlikely to be a clerk with an urgent case. And pathologists’ offices are not located so that the general public might find them easily. Who then, at such an hour, on New Year’s Eve at that, would wend their way through the basement of the hospital to look for him?

He gets up, upsetting both himself and a number of papers. He walks around his desk, takes hold of the doorknob, and opens the door.

A woman in her fifties, with lovely features and large brown eyes, stands before him. In one hand she is holding a bag. He is surprised to see her. She eyes him. In a warm, deep voice, she starts up: “Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but find no rest. I am poured out like water. My heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd. Oh my darling, come quickly to my help!”

While a small part of Eusebio sighs, a larger part smiles. The woman at the door is his wife. She comes to his office to see him on occasion, though not usually at such a late hour. Her name is Maria Luisa Motaal Lozora, and he is familiar with the words of her lament. They are taken mostly from Psalm 22, her favourite psalm. She in fact has no cause for conventional suffering. She is in good mental and physical health, she lives in a nice house, she has no desire to leave him or the town where they live, she has good friends, she is never truly bored, they have three grown children who are happy and healthy — in short, she has all the elements that make for a good life. Only his wife, his dear wife, is an amateur theologian, a priest manqué, and she takes the parameters of life, her mortal coildom, her Jobdom, very seriously.

She is fond of quoting from Psalm 22, especially its first line: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” His thought in response is that, nonetheless, there is “My God, my God” at the start of the plaint. It helps that there’s someone listening, if not doing.

He has much listening to do, he does, with his wife, and not much doing. Her mouth might be dried up like a potsherd, but she never quotes the line that follows in Psalm 22—“and my tongue sticks to my jaws”—because that would be an untruth. Her tongue is never stuck to her jaws. Maria ardently believes in the spoken word. To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken. And so she talks. She talks all the time. She talks to herself when she is alone at home and she talks to herself when she is alone in the street, and she has been talking to him incessantly since the day they met, thirty-eight years ago. His wife is an endlessly unfurling conversation, with never a true stop, only a pause. But she produces no drivel and has no patience for drivel. Sometimes she chafes at the inane talk she has to endure with her friends. She serves them coffee and cake, she listens to their prattle, and later she grouses, “Guinea pigs, I am surrounded by guinea pigs.”

He surmises that his wife read about guinea pigs and something about them aroused her resentment: their smallness, their utter harmlessness and defencelessness, their fearfulness, their contentedness simply to chew on a grain or two and expect no more from life. As a pathologist he quite likes the guinea pig. It is indeed small in every way, especially when set against the stark and random cruelty of life. Every corpse he opens up whispers to him, “I am a guinea pig. Will you warm me to your breast?” Drivel, his wife would call that. She has no patience for death.

When they were young, Maria tolerated for a while the amorous cooing of which he was so fond. Despite the surface brutality of his profession, he is soft of heart. When he met her the first time — it was in the cafeteria of the university — she was the most alluring creature he’d ever seen, a serious girl with a beauty that lit him up. At the sight of her, song filled his ears and the world glowed with colour. His heart thumped with gratitude. But quickly she rolled her eyes and told him to stop twittering. It became clear to him that his mission was to listen to her and respond appropriately and not to annoy her with oral frivolity. She was the rich earth and the sun and the rain; he was merely the farmer who got the crop going. He was an essential but bit player. Which was fine with him. He loved her then and he loves her now. She is everything to him. She is still the rich earth and the sun and the rain and he is still happy to be the farmer who gets the crop going.

Only tonight he had hoped to get some work done. Clearly that is not to be the case. The Conversation is upon him.

“Hello, my angel,” he says. “What a joyous surprise to see you! What’s in the bag? You can’t have been shopping. No shop would be open at this hour.” He leans forward and kisses his wife.

Maria ignores the question. “Death is a difficult door,” she says quietly. She steps into his office. “Eusebio, what’s happened?” she exclaims. “Your office is an unholy mess. This is indecent. Where are your visitors supposed to sit?”

He surveys his office. He sees embarrassing disorder everywhere. Pathologists at work don’t normally receive visitors who need to sit or who care for order. They usually lie flat and without complaint on a table across the hallway. He takes his workbench chair and places it in front of his desk. “I wasn’t expecting you tonight, my angel. Here, sit here,” he says.

“Thank you.” She sits down and places the bag she brought with her on the floor.

He gathers up papers from his desk, which he stuffs in the nearest folder, which he stacks on other folders, which he then drops to the floor. He pushes the pile under his desk with a foot, out of sight. He crunches up stray bits of paper, sweeps up shameful accumulations of dust with the edge of his hand, using his other hand as a dustpan, which he empties into the wastepaper basket beside his desk. There, that’s better. He sits down and looks across his desk at the woman sitting there. A man and his wife.

“I have found the solution at last, and I must tell you about it,” she says.

The solution? Was there a problem?

“Why don’t you do that, then,” he replies.

She nods. “I first tried through laughter, because you like to laugh,” she says without a trace of mirth. “You saw me, the books I was reading.”

He thinks. Yes, that would explain the selection of books she ordered from her favourite Coimbra bookseller these last several months. Some plays of Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Molière, Georges Feydeau, some weightier tomes of Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire. All of these she read wearing the grimmest expression. He himself is not such an accomplished reader. He was not sure why she was reading these books, but, as always, he let her be.

“Humour and religion do not mix well,” she goes on. “Humour may point out the many mistakes of religion — any number of vilely immoral priests, or monsters who shed blood in the name of Jesus — but humour sheds no light on true religion. It is just humour unto itself. Worse, humour misunderstands religion, since there is little place for levity in religion — and let us not make the mistake of thinking that levity is the same thing as joy. Religion abounds in joy. Religion is joy. To laugh at religion with levity, then, is to miss the point, which is fine if one is in the mood to laugh, but not if one is in the mood to understand. Do you follow me?”

“Though it’s late, I think I do,” he replies.

“Next I tried children’s books, Eusebio. Did Jesus not say that we must receive the Kingdom of God like a little child? So I reread the books we used to read to Renato, Luisa, and Antón.”

Images of their three children when they were small appear in his mind. Those little ones lived with their mother’s volubility like children live in a rainy climate: They just ran out to play in the puddles, shrieking and laughing, heedless of the downpour. She never took umbrage at these joyous interruptions. With difficulty, he returns his attention to his wife.

“These books brought back many happy memories — and some sadness that our children are all grown up — but they brought no religious illumination. I continued my search. Then the solution appeared right in front of me, with your favourite writer.”

“Really? How interesting. When I saw your nose in those Agatha Christies, I thought you were taking a break from your arduous studies.”

He and she are devoted to Agatha Christie. They have read all her books, starting with the very first, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Thanks to the good works of the Círculo Português de Mistério, they receive her every new murder mystery the moment it is translated, and translation is prompt because Portuguese readers are eager. Husband and wife know better than to bother the other when one of them is absorbed in the latest arrival. Once they’ve both finished it, they go over the case together, discussing the clues they should have caught, and the avenues to the solution they ran down only to find they were dead ends. Agatha Christie’s star detective is Hercule Poirot, a vain, odd-looking little Belgian man. But Poirot, inside his egg-shaped head, has the quickest, most observant mind. His “grey cells”—as he calls his brain — work with order and method, and these cells perceive what no one else does.

“Death on the Nile was such a marvel of ingenuity! Her next book must be due soon,” he says.

“It must.”

“And what solution did you find in Agatha Christie?”

“Let me first explain the path I have taken,” she replies. “This path twists and turns, so you must listen carefully. Let us start with the miracles of Jesus.”

The miracles of Jesus. One of her favourite topics. He glances at the clock next to his microscope. The night is going to be long.

“Is something the matter with your microscope?” his wife asks.

“Not at all.”

“Peering through it won’t help you understand the miracles of Jesus.”

“That is true.”

“And staring at the clock won’t save you from your future.”

“True again. Are you thirsty? Can I offer you water before we start?”

“Water from that glass?” She peers critically at the filthy glass on his desk.

“I propose to clean it.”

“That would be a good idea. I’m fine for the moment, though. But how appropriate that you should mention water — we shall come back to water. Now, pay attention. The miracles of Jesus — so many of them, are there not? And yet, if we look closely, we can see that they fall into two categories. Into one category fall those miracles that benefit the human body. There are many of these. Jesus makes the blind see, the deaf hear, the dumb speak, the lame walk. He cures fevers, treats epilepsy, exorcizes psychological maladies. He rids lepers of their disease. A woman suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years touches his cloak and her bleeding stops. And of course he raises the dead — Jairus’s daughter and the widow of Nain’s only son, both freshly dead, but also Lazarus, who has been dead for four days and whose body stinks of death. We might call these the medical miracles of Jesus, and they represent the overwhelming majority of his miraculous work.”

Eusebio remembers the autopsy he performed earlier today, speaking of bodies that stink of death. The mushy, puffy body of a floater is an abhorrence to the eyes and to the nose, even when these are trained.

“But there are other miracles that benefit the human body besides the medical miracles,” his wife continues. “Jesus makes the nets of fishermen bulge with catch. He multiplies fish and loaves of bread to feed thousands. At Cana he turns water into wine. In alleviating hunger and quenching thirst, Jesus again benefits the human body. So too when he stills a storm that is swamping the boat his disciples are travelling in and rescues them from drowning. And the same when he gets Peter to pay the temple tax with the coin from the fish’s mouth; in doing that, he saves Peter from the beating he would have endured had he been arrested.”

Maria has benefitted his body, Eusebio muses, as he has hers. To love and then to have a fun time of it — is there any greater joy? They were like birds in springtime. Their carnal relations settled over the years, but the satisfaction has remained — the comfort of a sturdy, warm nest. Renewed love for Maria flames within him. When they met, she never told him that her name was Legion, that teeming within her were all the prophets and apostles of the Bible, besides a good number of the Church Fathers. When she was giving birth to their children — with each one the ordeal began with something like a plate breaking inside her, she said — even then, as he sat in the waiting room listening to her panting and groaning and shrieking, she discoursed on religion. The doctor and the nurses came out with thoughtful expressions. He had to remind them to tell him about the new baby. Even as she suffered and they worked, she caused them to think. How did he end up with a wife who was both beautiful and profound? Did he deserve such luck? He smiles and winks at his wife.

“Eusebio, stop it. Time is short,” she whispers. “Now, why does Jesus benefit the human body? Of course he does his miracle work to impress those around him — and they are impressed. They’re amazed. But to show that he is the Messiah, why does Jesus cure infirmities and feed hungry stomachs? After all, he could also soar like a bird, as the devil asked him to do, or, as he himself mentioned, he could go about casting mountains into seas. These too would be miracles worthy of a Messiah. Why body miracles?”

Eusebio remains hushed. He’s tired. Worse, he’s hungry. He remembers the bag at his wife’s feet. Perhaps he should wash the glass in the small sink in his office and, when returning to his desk, try to glimpse inside the bag. She usually brings him something to eat when she visits.

His wife answers her question. “Jesus performs these miracles because they bring relief where we want it most. We all suffer in our bodies and die. It is our fate — as you well know, my dear, spending your days cutting up human carrion. In curing and feeding us, Jesus meets us at our weakest. He eases us of our heavy burden of mortality. And that impresses us more deeply than any other display of mighty power, be it flying in the air or throwing mountains into seas.

“Now to the second category of the miracles of Jesus, the category of the miracle of interpretation. This category contains only a single miracle. Do you know what that miracle is?”

“Tell me,” Eusebio says softly.

“It is when Jesus walks on the water. There is no other miracle like it. Jesus tells his disciples to get into the boat and travel on ahead. They set out, while Jesus goes onto the mountain to pray. The day ends. The disciples strain at their oars against a strong wind — but there is no storm; their bodies are not in any danger. After a long night of toil, as the new day is starting, they see Jesus coming towards their boat, walking on the sea. They are terrified. Jesus reassures them: ‘It is I; do not be afraid.’ Matthew, in his version of the story, has Peter ask the Lord if he can join him. ‘Come,’ says Jesus. Peter gets out of the boat and walks on the water towards Jesus, but then the wind frightens him and he begins to sink. Jesus reaches out with his hand and brings Peter back to the boat. The adverse wind ceases.

“Why would Jesus walk on water? Did he do it to save a drowning soul, to benefit a human body? No — Peter got into trouble in the water after Jesus began walking on it. Was there some other impetus? Jesus started his miraculous walk very early in the morning from remote shores, alone, and at sea he was seen by no one but his disciples, who were out of sight of land. In other words, there was no social necessity to the miracle. Walking on water did no one any particular good, raised no specific hopes. It was neither asked for, nor expected, nor even needed. Why such an anomalous miracle in documents as spare and winnowed as the Gospels? And this unique miracle can’t be hidden away. It appears in two of the synoptic Gospels — Matthew and Mark—and in John, one of the very few crossover miracles. What does it mean, Eusebio, what does it mean? In a moment of clarity, I saw.”

He perks up. It always goes like this. She talks and talks and talks, and then suddenly he is hooked, like a fish in a biblical story. What did she see?

“I saw that the miracle of Jesus walking on the water means little when taken at face value. However, when it is taken as saying one thing but implying another — in other words, as allegory—then the miracle opens up. Swimming is a modern invention — people at the time of Jesus could not swim. If they fell into deep water, they sank and they drowned — that is the literal truth. But if we think of water as the experience of life, it is also the religious truth. Men and women are weak, and in their weakness they sink. Jesus does not sink. A man drowning in water naturally looks up. What does he see? While he is being engulfed by choking darkness, he sees above him the clear light and pure air of salvation. He sees Jesus, who stands above those struggling in weakness, offering them redemption. This explains Peter’s hapless performance on the water: He is only human, and therefore he begins to sink. Read so, as an allegory about our weakness and Jesus’ purity and the salvation that he offers, the miracle takes on a whole new meaning.

“Now, I asked myself, why would this miracle demand an allegorical reading but not the others? Would the miracles that benefit the human body gain from a similar reading? I had never thought of that. Poor stupid woman that I am, I had always taken the body miracles of Jesus as factual truth. In my mind Jesus really did cure leprosy, blindness, and other ailments and infirmities, and he really did feed the thousands. But is the Lord to be reduced to an itinerant doctor and a peddler of buns? I don’t think so. The miracles that benefit the human body must also mean something greater.”

“What?” Eusebio asks pliantly.

“Well, what else could they be but symbols of the Everlasting Kingdom? Each miraculous cure of Jesus is a glimpse of the ultimate place that is ours, if we have faith. Have faith, and you will be cured of your mortality, you will be fed forever. Do you understand the import of what I am saying?” Eusebio ventures a nod. Maria’s voice is warm, buttery, comforting. If only he could eat it. He peeks at the clock. “The miracle of Jesus walking on the water is a guide to how we must read Scripture as a whole. The Gospels are lesser, their message weakened, if we read them as though they are reports by four journalists. But if we understand them as written in a language of metaphors and symbols, then they open up with moral depth and truth. That is the language used by Jesus himself, is it not? How did he teach the people?”

“It says in the Gospels: ‘He did not speak to them except in parables.’ ”

“That’s right. The parable of the lost sheep, of the mustard seed, of the fig tree, of the yeast, of the sower, of the prodigal son, and so on. So many parables.”

Mutton with mustard sauce, with stewed figs and a glass of wine — so many edible parables, thinks Eusebio.

“A parable is an allegory in the form of a simple story. It is a suitcase that we must open and unpack to see its contents. And the single key that unlocks these suitcases, that opens them wide, is allegory.

“Finally, only one miracle stands true and literal, the pillar of our faith: his resurrection. Once that is clear, we can start making sense of all the stories told by Jesus and told about him. That is Christianity at heart: a single miracle surrounded and sustained by stories, like an island surrounded by the sea.”

Eusebio coughs a little. “You haven’t been sharing these insights with Father Cecilio, have you?”

Father Cecilio is their local priest — and the subject of much eye-rolling on Maria’s part. In her presence the poor man always looks like the chicken in the coop that hasn’t laid enough eggs.

“What, and have us excommunicated? That dimwit is the very hammer of literalism that insults my faith. He’s as dumb as an ox.”

“But he means well,” Eusebio suggests soothingly.

“As does an ox.”

“That’s all very interesting, what you’ve been saying.”

“I’m not finished. I was searching, if you remember? There’s a problem.”

“Yes, and you found a solution.”

“Oh, how my heart beats! I’ll drink now, if you sanitize that glass.”

Maria bends down and produces from the bag a bottle of red wine, which she places on the desk. Eusebio cracks a wide smile. “Maria, bless you!” He hurries to open the bottle. While it breathes, he washes the glass thoroughly.

“I don’t have another glass,” he says. “You drink from it and I’ll drink from the bottle.”

“That’s unseemly. We’ll share the glass.”

“All right.” He tips some of the elixir into the glass. It glows like a firefly. He licks his lips at the prospect of pouring it down his throat, but offers the glass to his wife. “You first, my angel.”

Maria takes a small, thoughtful sip. She closes her eyes as she considers its distilled effect on her. She purrs and opens her eyes. “It’s a good one.”

She passes him the glass. He takes a larger sip, grunts with pleasure, empties the glass in one go. “Oh! Indeed. Just a little more.” He half-fills the glass, perhaps a little more than half.

Maria has another sip. “That’ll be enough for me,” she says. “Happy New Year.”

“Sorry?”

“What’s the point of looking at a clock if you don’t notice the time? Look at the two hands. It’s midnight. We’re now in 1939.”

“You’re right. Happy New Year to you, my angel. May this year be a good one.”

He finishes off the glass and sits down again. Now it is his turn to glow like a firefly, and his mind flits about inconsequentially as his wife starts up again.

“Why would Jesus speak in parables? Why would he both tell stories and let himself be presented through stories? Why would Truth use the tools of fiction? Stories full of metaphors are by writers who play the language like a mandolin for our entertainment, novelists, poets, playwrights, and other crafters of inventions. Meanwhile, isn’t it extraordinary that there are no significant historical accounts of Jesus of Nazareth? A minor government official from Lisbon comes to Bragança, a tight little man with nothing to say, and it’s all over the papers, which end up in archives for the rest of time. Or you, your work, Eusebio. Someone does that ordinary thing of dying — and you write a report, you immortalize that ordinary mortal. Meanwhile, the Son of God comes to town, he travels around, he meets anyone and everyone, he impresses mightily, he is murdered—and no one writes about it? Of this great divine comet hitting the earth, the only impact is a swirl of oral tales?

“There are hundreds of documents from pagan authors from the first century of our Christian era. Jesus is not mentioned in a single one. No contemporary Roman figure — no official, no general, no administrator, no historian, no philosopher, no poet, no scientist, no merchant, no writer of any sort — mentions him. Not the least reference to him is to be found on any public inscription or in any surviving private correspondence. He left behind no birth record, no trial report, no death certificate. A century after his death — one hundred years! — there are only two pagan references to Jesus, one from Pliny the Younger, a Roman senator and writer, the other from Tacitus, a Roman historian. A letter and a few pages — that’s all from the zealous bureaucrats and the proud administrators of an empire whose next religion was founded on Jesus, whose capital would become the capital of his cult. The pagans didn’t notice the man who would transform them from Romans into Christians. That seems as unlikely as the French not noticing the French Revolution.

“If Jews of the day had more to say about Jesus, it’s been lost. There is nothing from any of the Pharisees who conspired against him, nothing from the Sanhedrin, the religious council that condemned him. The historian Josephus makes two brief references to Jesus, but many decades after his crucifixion. The entire historical record on Jesus of Nazareth from non-Christian sources fits into a handful of pages, and it’s all second hand. None of it tells us anything we don’t already know from Christian sources.

“No, no, no. The historical record is of no help. Our knowledge of the flesh-and-blood Jesus all comes down to four allegorists. Even more astonishing, these word minstrels never met Jesus. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, whoever they were, weren’t eyewitnesses. Like the Romans and Jews, they wrote about Jesus years after his passage on earth. They were inspired scribes who recorded and arranged oral tales that had been circulating for decades. Jesus has come to us, then, through old stories that survived mostly by word of mouth. What a casual, risky way of making one’s mark on history.

“Stranger still, it’s as if Jesus wanted it that way. Jews are obsessively literate. A Jew’s every finger is a pen. God merely speaks to the rest of us, while Jews get handed inscribed stone tablets. Yet here was an important Jew who preferred the wind to the written word. Who chose the eddying of oral tales over the recorded facts. Why this approach? Why not impose himself like the great military Messiah Jews were hoping for? Why storytelling over history-making?”

His wife has led him down one grand corridor after another. Now, Eusebio senses, they are about to enter the ballroom, with its vast dancing floor and glittering chandeliers and high windows.

“I think it’s because, once more, Jesus seeks to benefit us. A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves us, as any marriage would, and just as no marriage is exactly the same as another, so each of us interprets a story differently, feels for it differently. A story calls upon us as God calls upon us, as individuals—and we like that. Stories benefit the human mind. Jesus trod the earth with the calm assurance that he would stay with us and we would stay with him so long as he touched us through stories, so long as he left a fingerprint upon our startled imagination. And so he came not charging on a horse but quietly riding a story.

“Imagine, Eusebio, that you’ve been invited to a feast and a splendid table has been presented to you, with the finest wines and the most delicious food. You eat and you drink till you are full. Would you then turn to your host and ask about the barn animals you’ve eaten? You might, and you might get some information about these animals — but what does it compare to the feast you’ve just had? We must abandon this reductionist quest for the historical Jesus. He won’t be found, because that’s not where — that’s not how—he chose to make his mark. Jesus told stories and lived through stories. Our faith is faith in his story, and there is very little beyond that story-faith. The holy word is story, and story is the holy word.”

Maria breathes deeply. A smile lights up her face. “Well, stories are still with us. And so I come to the solution, to Agatha Christie.”

She leans over and brings up from the bag at her feet handfuls of books with which Eusebio is familiar: The Man in the Brown Suit, The Mystery of the Blue Train, The Seven Dials Mystery, The Murder at the Vicarage, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? Three Act Tragedy, Murder in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, The ABC Murders, Lord Edgware Dies, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Thirteen Problems, The Hound of Death, The Sittaford Mystery, Murder on the Orient Express, Dumb Witness, Peril at End House. They all end up on his desk, so many brightly jacketed hardcovers, except for a few that fall with a thud to the floor.

“The thought first struck me as I was rereading Murder on the Orient Express. I noticed how the train comes from the East. There are thirteen passengers at the heart of the story, one of whom is a monster, a Judas. I noticed how these passengers come from all walks of life and all nationalities. I noticed how one of the investigators, a helper of Hercule Poirot, is a Dr. Constantine. Isn’t the story of Jesus an Eastern story made popular by another Constantine? Did Jesus not have twelve disciples, with a Judas among them? Was Palestine not a mixed Orient Express of nationalities? The foreignness of Hercule Poirot is often remarked upon. Time and again he saves the day. The foreigner whose intervention is salvific — isn’t that one way of seeing Jesus? These observations led me to examine the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie in a new light.

“I began to notice things in a jumble. There is meaning in every small incident — Agatha Christie’s stories are narratives of revelatory detail, hence the spare, direct language and the short, numerous paragraphs and chapters, as in the Gospels. Only the essential is recounted. Murder mysteries, like the Gospels, are distillations.

“I noticed the near total absence of children in Agatha Christie — because murder is a decidedly adult entertainment — just as they are largely absent from the Gospels, which also address an adult sensibility.

“I noticed how those who know the truth are always treated with suspicion and disdain. That was the case with Jesus, of course. But look at old Miss Marple. Always she knows, and everyone is surprised that she does. And the same with Hercule Poirot. How can that ridiculous little man know anything? But he does, he does. It is the triumph of the meek, in Agatha Christie as in the Gospels.

“The gravest sin — the taking of a life — is always at the core of an Agatha Christie story — as it is at the core of the story of Jesus. In both narratives numerous characters are briefly introduced and for the same purpose: the parading of all the suspects, so that the reader can see who gives in to the temptation of evil in contrast to who does not. Fortitude is set next to weakness, both in the Gospels and in Agatha Christie. And in both, the light of understanding comes in the same way: We are given facts, neutral in themselves, then we are given an interpretation that imprints meaning upon these facts. So proceed the parables of Jesus — exposition, then explanation — and so proceeds the Passion of Jesus; his death and resurrection were explained, given meaning to, by Paul, after the fact. And so proceed the denouements of the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie: Hercule Poirot summarizes all the facts before he tells us what they mean.

“Notice the vital role of the witness. Neither Jesus nor Hercule Poirot cared to pick up a pen. Both were content to live in the spoken word. The act of witness was therefore a necessity — how else would we know what they said and did? But it was also a consequence. Each man, in his own sphere, did such amazing things that people felt compelled to bear witness. Those who met Jesus spent the rest of their lives talking about him to family, friends, and strangers, until what they said reached the ears of Paul, and later of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And the same with Arthur Hastings, the Watson-like narrator of many of the Hercule Poirot stories, a narrator no less loyal than the narrators of the Gospels.

“But every witness is to some degree unreliable. We see that clearly with Arthur Hastings, who is always a few steps behind Hercule Poirot until Poirot helps him catch up with lucid explanations. We realize then that it is not only Arthur Hastings who is obtuse. We too have missed clues, misunderstood import, failed to seize the meaning. We too need Hercule Poirot to help us catch up. And so with Jesus. He was surrounded by so many Arthur Hastingses who were perpetually missing clues, misunderstanding import, failing to seize the meaning. He too had to explain everything to his disciples so that they might catch up. And still the disciples got it wrong, still they couldn’t agree on what Jesus said or did. Look at the Gospels: four of them, each a little different from the others, each inconsistent with the others, as always happens with the testimony of witnesses.

“In an Agatha Christie mystery, the murderer is nearly always a figure closer than we expected. Remember The Man in the Brown Suit and The Seven Dials Mystery and Three Act Tragedy and The ABC Murders and especially The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, to name just a few. Our vision of evil far away is acute, but the closer the evil, the greater the moral myopia. The edges become blurred, the centre hard to see. Thus the reaction when it is revealed who did it: ‘Et tu, Brute?’ The disciples must have reacted in this way when Judas, good Judas Iscariot, our dear friend and travelling companion, proved to be a traitor. How blind we are to evil close-by, how willing to look away.

“Speaking of blindness, there is this curious phenomenon. We read Agatha Christie in the grip of compulsion. We must keep on reading. We want to know who did it, and how, and why. Then we find out. We’re amazed at the complexity of the crime’s execution. Oh, the coolness of the murderer’s mind, the steadiness of his or her hand. Our devouring curiosity satisfied, we put the book down — and instantly we forget who did it! Isn’t that so? We don’t forget the victim. Agatha Christie can title her novels The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Lord Edgware Dies without any fear of losing her readers’ interest. The victim is a given, and he or she stays with us. But how quickly the murderer vanishes from our mind. We pick up an Agatha Christie murder mystery — she’s written so many — and we wonder, Have I read this one? Let me see. She’s the victim, yes, I remember that, but who did it? Oh, I can’t remember. We must reread a hundred pages before we recall who it was that took a human life.

“We apply the same amnesia to the Gospels. We remember the victim. Of course we do. But do we remember who killed him? If you went up to your average person on the street and said ‘Quick — tell me—who murdered Jesus?’ my guess is that the person would be at a loss for words. Who did murder Jesus of Nazareth? Who was responsible? Judas Iscariot? Bah! He was a tool, an accessory. He betrayed Jesus, he gave him up to people who sought him, but he did not kill him. Pontius Pilate, then, the Roman procurator who sentenced him to death? Hardly. He just went along. He found Jesus innocent of any wrongdoing, sought to have him released, preferred to have Barabbas crucified, and yielded only in the face of the angry crowd. Pilate chose to sacrifice an innocent man rather than have a riot on his hands. So he was a weak man, another accessory to murder, but he was not the actual murderer.

“Who, then, did the deed? The Romans, more generally? Jesus was strung up by Roman soldiers following Roman orders according to Roman law in a Roman province. But who’s ever heard of such a nebulous murderer? Are we to accept theologically that the Son of God was murdered by the nameless servants of a long-vanished empire to appease a squabbling local tribe? If that’s the case, no wonder no one can remember who did it.

“Ah! But of course: It was Jews who murdered Jesus! That’s a familiar refrain, is it not? A group of manipulative Jewish elders, in collusion with the Roman authorities, conspired to get rid of a troublesome fellow Jew. (And we remembered to hate Jews but not Italians — how did that happen? The shame of it!) But if it was Jews who were responsible, which ones? What were their names? We have Caiaphas, the high priest. Any others? None who is named. And really, like Judas, like Pilate, Caiaphas was an accessory. Jews could not openly kill a Jew — remember the Ten Commandments? Caiaphas had to find others who would do it. So he and his fellow elders whipped up the crowd, and it’s the crowd that decided matters against Jesus. With them lies the true, practical guilt. If the crowd had cried for Jesus’ release and Barabbas’s crucifixion, Pilate would have obliged, Caiaphas would have been stymied, and Judas would have had to return his blood money.

“There we seem to have it, then: It was a crowd that was responsible for the murder of Jesus of Nazareth. To put it in exact terms, a crowd framed by mostly anonymous officials, manipulated by mostly anonymous elders, wished him dead, and then anonymous soldiers actually killed him. But it started with a crowd, and is there anything more anonymous than a crowd? Is a crowd not, by definition, anonymous? From this assessment, it’s clear: These guilty Jews, these guilty Romans — they are straw men, red herrings, in the best tradition of Agatha Christie. No wonder the common brutish mind thinks it’s the Jew next door who murdered Jesus — that’s more concrete. But in theological actuality, it was Anonymous who killed Jesus of Nazareth. And who is Anonymous?”

Maria stops. After some seconds of silence, Eusebio realizes with a start that his wife is waiting for him to answer the question.

“Oh! I’m not sure. I’ve never—”

“Anonymous is you, is me, is all of us. We murdered Jesus of Nazareth. We are the crowd. We are Anonymous. It is not the guilt of Jews that goes down through history, it is the guilt of all of us. But how quick we are to forget that. We don’t like guilt, do we? We prefer to hide it, to forget it, to twist it and present it in a better light, to pass it on to others. And so, because of our aversion to guilt, we strain to remember who killed the victim in the Gospels, as we strain to remember who killed the victim in an Agatha Christie murder mystery.

“And at the end of it, is that not the plainest way to describe the life of Jesus, as a Murder Mystery? A life was taken, the victim completely innocent. Who did it? Who had the motive and the opportunity? What happened to the body? What did it all mean? An exceptional detective was needed to solve the crime, and he came along, some years after the murder, the Hercule Poirot of the first century: Paul of Tarsus. Christianity starts with Paul. The earliest Christian documents are his letters. With them we have the story of Jesus, years before the life of Jesus of the Gospels. Paul vowed to get to the bottom of the Jesus affair. Using his grey cells, he sleuthed about, listening to testimony, poring over the record of events, gathering clues, studying every detail. He had a big break in the case in the form of a vision on the road to Damascus. And at the end of his investigation he drew the only conclusion possible. Then he preached and he wrote, and Jesus went from being a failed Messiah to the resurrected Son of God who takes on our burden of sins. Paul closed the case on Jesus of Nazareth. And just as the resolution of the crime in an Agatha Christie brings on a sort of glee, and the reader is struck by her amazing ingenuity, so the resurrection of Jesus and its meaning induces a powerful glee in the Christian — more: a lasting joy — and the Christian thanks God for His amazing ingenuity, as well as His boundless compassion. Because the resurrection of Jesus to wash away our sins is the only possible solution to the problem as understood by Paul, the problem of a loving God unexpectedly put to death who then resurrects. Hercule Poirot would heartily approve of the logic of Paul’s solution.

“The world of the Gospels is stark. There is much suffering in it, suffering of the body, suffering of the soul. It is a world of moral extremes in which the good are purely good and the evil insistently evil. Agatha Christie’s world is equally stark. Who among us lives a life so beset by murders as Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple? And behind these murders, so much conniving evil! Our world is not like that, is it? Most of us know neither so much good nor so much evil. We sail a tempered middle. And yet murders happen, sometimes on a large scale, do they not? The Great War ended not so long ago. Next door the Spaniards are killing each other with abandon. And now there are insistent rumours of another war across our continent. The symbolic crime of our century is the murder, Eusebio. Anonymous is still very much with us. That tempered middle we sail is an illusion. Our world is stark too, but we hide in a shelter built of luck and closed eyes. What will you do when your luck runs out, when your eyes are ripped open?

“The sad fact is that there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, as the unjust taking of a loved being. And even the luckiest of us will encounter at least one murder in our lives: our own. It is our fate. We all live a murder mystery of which we are the victim.

“The only modern genre that plays on the same high moral register as the Gospels is the lowly regarded murder mystery. If we set the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie atop the Gospels and shine a light through, we see correspondence and congruence, agreement and equivalence. We find matching patterns and narrative similarities. They are maps of the same city, parables of the same existence. They glow with the same moral transparency. And so the explanation for why Agatha Christie is the most popular author in the history of the world. Her appeal is as wide and her dissemination as great as the Bible’s, because she is a modern apostle, a female one — about time, after two thousand years of men blathering on. And this new apostle answers the same questions Jesus answered: What are we to do with death? Because murder mysteries are always resolved in the end, the mystery neatly dispelled. We must do the same with death in our lives: resolve it, give it meaning, put it into context, however hard that might be.

“And yet Agatha Christie and the Gospels are different in a key way. We no longer live in an age of prophecy and miracle. We no longer have Jesus among us the way the people of the Gospels did. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are narratives of presence. Agatha Christie’s are gospels of absence. They are modern gospels for a modern people, a people more suspicious, less willing to believe. And so Jesus is present only in fragments, in traces, cloaked and masked, obscured and hidden. But look — he’s right there in her last name. Mainly, though, he hovers, he whispers.”

A smile creeps across Maria Lozora’s face as she watches for his reaction. He smiles back but stays silent. If he is honest, it is jarring to hear Jesus Christ and Agatha Christie, the apostle Paul and Hercule Poirot so closely matched. The Pope in Rome will not be pleased to hear that he has a serious rival in the form of a forty-eight-year-old woman from Torquay, England, the author of many highly engaging entertainments.

Maria speaks again, her gentle voice coming like an embrace. “That’s the great, enduring challenge of our modern times, is it not, to marry faith and reason? So hard — so unreasonable—to root our lives upon a distant wisp of holiness. Faith is grand but impractical: How does one live an eternal idea in a daily way? It’s so much easier to be reasonable. Reason is practical, its rewards are immediate, its workings are clear. But alas, reason is blind. Reason, on its own, leads us nowhere, especially in the face of adversity. How do we balance the two, how do we live with both faith and reason? In your case, Eusebio, I thought the solution would be stories that put reason on brilliant display while also keeping you close to Jesus of Nazareth. That way you can hold on to your faith, should it ever waver. And so I give to you: Agatha Christie.”

She is radiant. Her two-word gift, wrapped in spools of speech, is now in his lap. From decades of experience he knows that his turn to intervene has come. But he is unexpectedly tongue-tied. What? The miracles of Jesus, Jesus benefitting the human body, Jesus walking on water, Jesus the allegorist saved by other allegorists, Jesus the victim in a murder mystery, Jesus a whispering background character in Agatha Christie — all that winding argumentation so that he might read his favourite writer with greater religious comfort? He stumbles his way to words. “Thank you, Maria. I’ve never thought of Agatha Christie in this way. It’s a—”

“I love you,” his wife interrupts him, “and I’ve done this for you. All you ever read is Agatha Christie. Next time you’re at home sick with sadness pick up one of her books and imagine you’re in a boat. Standing on the water alongside the boat is Jesus of Nazareth. He begins to read the Agatha Christie to you. The warm breath of God, who loves you, comes off the page and touches your face. How can you not smile, then?”

“Why, M-M-Maria—” he cries. What is this stammer that is suddenly afflicting him? He looks at her and is reminded of that for which he is grateful, the rich earth and the sun and the rain and the crops. “My angel, it’s so kind of you! I’m truly thankful.”

He stands and moves around the desk towards her. She also gets to her feet. He takes her in his arms. They kiss. She is cold. He holds her tighter to warm her with his body. He speaks into her shoulder. “It’s a wonderful gift. I’m so lucky to have—”

She pulls back and pats his cheek. “You’re welcome, my dear husband, you’re welcome. You’re a good man.” She sighs. “I should be getting home. Can you help me put the books back in the bag, please?”

“Of course!” He bends down to pick up the volumes that fell to the floor. Together they fill the bag with all the Agatha Christies and walk the few steps to the door of his office. He opens the door.

“You left the milk out,” she says on the threshold. “For three days. It’s gone bad. It stinks. I didn’t notice, since I never drink the stuff. If you’re going to work all night, get some fresh milk on your way home. And buy bread. Make sure you don’t get lentil bread. It gives you gas. And lastly I’ve brought you a little gift. Don’t look now. I’m leaving.”

But still he wants to hold her back, to thank her for the gift of her, his dear wife of thirty-eight years, still he wants to say things to her.

“Shall we pray?” he asks, typically a good way to stop his wife in her tracks.

“I’m too tired. But you pray. And you have work to do. What are you working on?”

He looks at his desk. His work? He’d forgotten all about his work. “I have a number of reports to write up. One case is particularly unpleasant, a woman who was pushed off a bridge. A wicked murder.”

He sighs. Only the autopsies of babies and children are worse — all those toy organs. Otherwise, there is no greater abomination than the decomposed human body. Two or three days after death, the putrefying body manifests a greenish patch on the abdomen, which spreads to the chest and to the upper thighs. This green tinge is the result of a gas produced by bacteria in the intestinal system. During life, these bacteria help digest food, but in death they help digest the body. Nature is full of such friends. This gas contains sulphur and it smells foul. Some of it escapes from the rectum — the decaying body is often smelled before it is seen. But there is shortly much to be seen. When the gas has finished discolouring the skin, it proceeds to bloat the body. The eyes — their eyelids puffed — bulge out. The tongue protrudes from the mouth. The vagina turns inside out and is pushed out, as are the intestines from the anus. The colour of the skin continues to change. After a mere week, a pale white body, if given over to thoroughgoing, wet gangrene decomposition, will go from pale green to purple to a dark green marbled with streaks of black along the veins. Seeping blisters grow and burst, leaving puddles of rot on the skin. Cadaver juices seep out of the nose, the mouth, and other body orifices. Two of the chemicals found in these fluids are called putrescine and cadaverine, nicely capturing their aroma. By the second week of death, the body is taut with swelling, especially the abdomen, scrotum, breasts, and tongue. The slimmest person becomes gross with corpulence. The distended skin rips and starts to come off in sheets. Within another week, hair, nails, and teeth lose their grip. Most internal organs have ruptured and begun to liquefy, including the brain, which in its last solid phase is a dark green gelatin. All these organs become a stinking, gloppy river that flows off the bones.

Outdoors, other organisms besides bacteria play a role in uglifying the body. Any number of birds will peck at dead flesh, gashing the way in for hosts of smaller invaders, among them flies, principally flesh flies and blowflies, with their generous and abundant contribution of maggots, but also beetles, ants, spiders, mites, millipedes, centipedes, wasps, and others. Each mars the body in its own way. And there are still more disfigurers: shrews, voles, mice, rats, foxes, cats, dogs, wolves, lynxes. These eat the face, pull away chunks of flesh, remove entire limbs. All this is done to a body that was, until very recently, living, whole, and standing, walking, smiling, and laughing.

“How terrible,” Maria says.

“Yes. I’m going to avoid that bridge from now on.”

His wife nods. “Faith is the answer to death. Good-bye.”

She tilts her face up and they kiss one last time. To have her lovely face so close to his! To feel her body against his! She pulls away. A little smile and a glance of farewell, and she leaves his office and starts moving down the hallway. He follows her out.

“Good-bye, my angel. Thank you for all your gifts. I love you.”

She disappears around a bend. He gazes down the deserted hallway, then returns to his office and closes the door.

His office now feels empty and too quiet. Perhaps he should pray again, although he is not, as it happens, one who has seen many victories won through prayer, devoted though he is to Jesus of Nazareth. Nor is he of the age when throwing oneself upon one’s knees comes easily. Genuflection proceeds with groaning and the slow working of parts, a precarious balancing act accompanied by moments of sudden giving way. And at the end of it, knees are painfully pressed against a marble floor that is hard and cold (though perfect for mopping up blood and cadaver juices). He begins to work his way down, using the desk for help. Then he remembers: Maria mentioned a gift. He looks at his desk. She must have placed her gift on it while he was bent down, gathering the Agatha Christies off the floor. Sure enough, some papers betray a bump that was not there earlier. He straightens himself and reaches over. A book. He takes it in his hands and turns it over.

Appointment with Death, by Agatha Christie. He searches his memory. The title does not seem familiar, nor does the cover. But there are so many titles, so many covers. He checks the copyright page: 1938, this very year — or this year until a few minutes ago. His heart leaps. It’s a new Agatha Christie! A successor to Death on the Nile. It must have arrived that day from the Círculo Português de Mistério. Bless them. Bless his wife, who graced him with the further gift of letting him read it first.

The reports will wait. He settles in his chair. Or rather, as his wife suggested, he settles in a boat. A voice comes to his ears:

“You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?”

The question floated out into the still night air, seemed to hang there a moment and then drift away down into the darkness towards the Dead Sea.

Hercule Poirot paused a minute with his hand on the window catch. Frowning, he shut it decisively, thereby excluding any injurious night air! Hercule Poirot had been brought up to believe that all outside air was best left outside, and that night air was especially dangerous to the health.

As he pulled the curtains neatly over the window and walked to his bed, he smiled tolerantly to himself.

“You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?”

Curious words for one Hercule Poirot, detective, to overhear on his first night in Jerusalem.

“Decidedly, wherever I go, there is something to remind me of crime!” he murmured to himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My name is Maria Dores Passos Castro.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How can I help you?” he asks.

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

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

“It’s about my husband.”

“Yes?” he encourages her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ ‘Is this nice?’ he asked.

“ ‘I’m not sure,’ I replied.

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

“ ‘I’m not sure,’ I replied.

“ ‘And this?’

“ ‘Not…sure.’

“ ‘And this?’

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

“ ‘And this?’ he asked again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My mother looked at me. ‘I mean the act, the act,’ she whispered, though we were alone.

“Did my mother think I was referring to naps? That we went to bed early every night and that sometimes we napped during the day too? That sometimes in the morning we woke up and right away had a nap? That sometimes we had two naps in a row? Did she think we were as lazy and dozy as cats?

“ ‘Yes, yes, Mother,’ I replied, ‘we do the act all the time. Perhaps if I see him in the next half hour, we’ll do it then.’

“My mother’s eyes expressed surprise, consternation, horror. Every night? On Sundays? This was last century, mind you. Much has changed since. Everything is so modern these days. I could see in my mother’s mind the pages of a Bible being speedily flipped. The preserving of fruit was done with. I could go now.

“ ‘He is my husband,’ I told her, pushing the door open with a bump of my hip.

“She never brought up the subject again. At least now she hoped to be blessed with a dozen grandchildren. She would show them around the village like fine jewellery. And my answer was good for gossip. That was my mother, a prude who lived through gossip, like every prude. After that, the men in the village looked at me with lingering smiles — the older they were, the greater the twinkle in their eyes — while the women, the young ones and the old hens, were a muddled mix of envy, disdain, and curiosity. And from then onward my mother announced her arrival at our house a hundred metres away with a great fanfare of noise.

“On the count of grandchildren, her hopes were dashed. I proved to be as unreproductive as she was. Considering how often stamp was brought to envelope, it’s surprising that there weren’t more letters. But only one letter came, a delightful one, late, late, late, a darling boy who tore out of me not with a cry but with a burst of laughter. By the time I presented our little bear cub to my mother, her mind was gone. I could have been handing her a clucking chicken, the vacant smile would have been the same.”

A vague smile comes to the old woman’s lips, though not a vacant one.

“Now that I’m old, sleep has become a mystery to me. I can remember sleep, I just can’t remember how to do it. Why has sleep betrayed me? Rafael and I used to give to it so generously when we were young. Despite our poverty, we had a comfortable bed, we had curtains, we obeyed the call of the night. Our sleep was as deep as a well. Every morning we awoke and wondered at this refreshing event that so knocked us out. Now my nights are plagued by worries and sadness. I lie down tired, and nothing happens. I just lie there with my thoughts coiling around me like a snake.”

Eusebio speaks quietly. “Ageing is not easy, Senhora Castro. It’s a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology. It starts well. It’s a most desirable disease. One wouldn’t want to do without it. It’s like the yeast that corrupts the juice of grapes. One loves, one loves, one persists in loving — the incubation period can be very long — and then, with death, comes the heartbreak. Love must always meet its unwanted end.”

But where’s the body? That is the pressing question that he leaves unstated. And whose body? Perhaps it is not her husband’s. She’s wearing black, but so does every woman over forty in rural Portugal who has lost some relative somewhere. The apparel of mourning is a permanent dress for rural women. Perhaps she has come to inquire about someone younger. If that’s the case, any one of the files at his feet under the desk might contain the information she wants. It could also be that hers is a case that Dr. Otavio, his colleague, dealt with. José has been gone now for close to three weeks, off on his month-long holiday to England to visit his daughter. Hence all of the extra work right now. But José signed off on all his cases, so if Maria Castro is inquiring about one of those, he will be able to find it in the filing cabinets next door.

At any rate, there needs to be a body, because he’s a pathologist. Those who have sleep problems go elsewhere, to a family doctor who will prescribe a sleep potion, or to a priest who will absolve their sins. Those who are unhappy about getting old, who suffer from heartbreak, they too go elsewhere, to a priest again, or to a friend, or to a taverna, or even to a brothel. But not to a pathologist.

“I’m glad to hear about your joys and sad to hear about your troubles,” he continues. “But why exactly have you come to see me? Are you here to inquire about a particular case?”

“I want to know how he lived.”

How he lived? She means how he died. A slip-up due to age.

“Who?”

“Rafael, of course.”

“What’s his full name?”

“Rafael Miguel Santos Castro, from the village of Tuizelo.”

“Your husband, then. Just a moment, please.”

He bends over and pulls the files out from under his desk. Where is the master list? He finds the sheet of paper. He looks it over carefully. There is no Rafael Miguel Santos Castro among the cases pending.

“I don’t see that name on my list. Your husband must have been dealt with by my colleague, Dr. Otavio. I must get his file. It will just take me a moment. “

“What file?” asks Maria.

“Your husband’s, of course. Every patient has a file.”

“But you haven’t even seen him yet.”

“Oh. You didn’t tell me that. In that case, you’ll have to come back in a few days, after he’s come through.”

“But he’s here.”

“Where?”

He can’t be in the cold room. Eusebio is well aware of the bodies currently stored there. Does she mean that her husband is here in a spiritual sense? He wonders about her state of mind from a medical point of view. A bit of delusional dementia?

Maria Castro looks at him with an expression of clear good sense and replies in a matter-of-fact tone, “Right here.”

She leans over and undoes the clasps of the suitcase. The lid falls open and the sole content of the suitcase slips out like a baby being born: the dead and shoeless body of Rafael Castro.

Eusebio peers at the body. Bodies come to their deaths in many ways, but they always come to him in the hospital in the same way: on a gurney and properly prepared, with an accompanying clinical report. They don’t tumble out of suitcases in their Sunday best. But peasants have their own customs, he knows. They live with death in ways that urban people left behind long ago. Sometimes in rural Portugal they bury their dead in old tree trunks, for example. In his long professional life he has examined a few such bodies for the purpose of determining that they died of natural causes and were buried, not murdered and disposed of. (In every instance it was a proper burial.) He has also worked on the bodies of peasants who had pins stuck under their fingernails. No cruelty, this; just a primitive method to ensure that someone was actually dead. And here was another practical peasant way of dealing with death: doing one’s own ambulance work. That must have been a lot of work for the old woman, hauling the suitcase down from the High Mountains of Portugal.

“How long has he been dead?” he asks.

“Three days,” Maria replies.

That seems about right. The winter cold of the road has done a good job of preserving the body.

“How did he die?” he asks. “I mean, was he sick?”

“Not that he told me. He was having a cup of coffee in the kitchen. I went out. When I came back, he was on the floor and I couldn’t wake him.”

“I see.” Acute myocardial infarction, cerebral aneurysm, something like that, he thinks. “And what do you want me to do with him, Senhora Castro?”

“Open him up, tell me how he lived.”

That mistake again. Perhaps an aversion to the actual word. Although, come to think of it, her way of putting it is not inaccurate. In showing how a person died, an autopsy often indicates how that person lived. Still, it’s odd. Perhaps a regional locution, born of superstition.

“You want me to perform an autopsy on your husband?”

“Yes. Isn’t that what you do?”

“It is. But you don’t order up an autopsy the way you order a meal in a restaurant.”

“What’s the problem?”

“There are procedures to follow.”

“He’s dead. What else is necessary?”

She has a point. Proper protocol or not, the body will be the same. Send her away with her suitcase, and Maria and Rafael Castro will be back the next day. In the meantime, an inn in Bragança will be displeased to find that one of its guests was a dead body. And overnight, in the warmth of a room, that body may reach the spillover point of decomposition, which will merely inconvenience him but will scandalize the innkeepers. If the couple even go to an inn. Since when have peasants had money to spend on paying accommodation? More likely she will spend the night at the train station, sitting on a bench, or, worse, outdoors in a park, sitting on her suitcase. Old Rafael Castro will not mind the cold, nor, for that matter, will his faithful wife — these ancient peasants are as rugged as the Iberian rhinoceros of yore. It’s he, Eusebio, who will mind. A piece of paper is not worth such bodily ache, not after so much heartache. And better this fresh body than the body he will otherwise have to reckon with, the woman who was thrown off the bridge.

Maria Castro looks at him, waiting for his reply. Her patience weighs on him.

He is practical in his own way. How did she put it? She got married “under the banner of Why not?” Well, why not? This will be one to tell José about.

“All right, I’ll perform an autopsy on your husband. You’ll have to wait here.”

“Why?”

“Autopsies are not a public spectacle.”

Not true, of course. They have been a public spectacle throughout the history of medicine. But not for the general public. More for the specialized public. How else would doctors learn their trade?

“I’m not a spectator. I was his wife for sixty years. I will be there with him.”

There is a forceful finality to her last sentence, the words of a woman who has so few wants left that the ones she still has are filled to the brim with her will.

It is unseemly to argue late at night, even more so with a grieving widow. Again his practicality suggests a solution. He will stand her next to a chair. At the first cut, the one that opens the chest, she will feel faint. He will assist her to the chair, and then, when she’s recovered, bring her to his office, where he will leave her while he finishes his work.

“Very well. Have it your way, Senhora Castro. But I warn you, an autopsy, to the uninitiated, is not a pretty sight.”

“I’ve slaughtered my share of pigs and chickens. A body is a body.”

Except for the swirl of emotions, Eusebio observes to himself. We don’t love our pigs and chickens. We don’t mourn our pigs and chickens. We don’t even remember our pigs and chickens. But let her see for herself. That is the very meaning of the word “autopsy”, from the Greek, to see with one’s own eyes. She will not last. Even the toughest old peasant, placed so close to death, will want to retreat back to life. Only she must not fall and hurt herself.

“Perhaps you could help me with the body,” he says.

A few minutes later, Rafael Miguel Santos Castro is lying on his back on one of the two operating tables of the pathology department. Without any fuss, Maria Castro helps him remove all her husband’s clothes. She pats down his hair. She rights his penis, setting it straight over the scrotum. Then she surveys his body as she might her vegetable garden, pleased to see that everything is in good order.

Eusebio is unnerved. This is how he looked at a body when he was a medical student, interested, curious, game. Death was an impersonal sport. This here is her husband. He regrets his decision to allow Maria Castro to assist at the autopsy of her husband. What was he thinking? It’s the fatigue. He will not face any problems with the hospital or the medical college. There are no rules about who can assist at an autopsy. He is captain of his ship. Only this is no sight for a loved one, the raw nakedness of the man, in a setting that is necessarily cold and sterile — and that’s before he has even touched the peasant’s body with his science. How will the man’s wife react then?

He dons his apron and ties the knot. He could offer one to Maria Castro but thinks better of it. An apron will encourage her to get close.

He looks at his tray of tools. They are simple but effective: a few sharp scalpels and knives, some forceps and clamps, a pair of blunt-nosed curved scissors, a chisel, a wooden mallet, a good saw, a scale to weigh organs, a ruler clearly marked in centimetres and millimetres to measure them, a long, flat knife to slice them, sundry sponges, and needle and twine, to sew the body up afterwards. And the pail for slop, at the foot of the table. Of course his main tool is his microscope, with which he examines the slides of the biopsied and excisional specimens and the samples of body fluids. That is a key part of his work, the histological work. Under the pathologist’s microscope, life and death fight in an illuminated circle in a sort of cellular bullfight. The pathologist’s job is to find the bull among the matador cells.

He should have taken the body away and returned a few minutes later with some slides, claiming they were specimens from her husband’s body. She wouldn’t know better. Flying over these colourful landscapes using José’s two-headed microscope, he would have spouted medical hocus-pocus. Ah yes, it’s absolutely clear to me, Senhora Castro. You see the pattern here and here. It’s the classic architecture. No doubt about it. Your husband died of liver cancer. Or, since she avoided the word, he would have said that her husband lived of liver cancer. Then she would have gone away, sad but satisfied, able to move on — and spared the butchery of her husband.

But it’s too late for that. There she stands, next to the table, without the least interest in the chair he has brought in for her.

Perhaps he could get her to sit in Senhora Melo’s alcove. What would he and José do without the indefatigable Senhora Melo? Her office, which is not much wider than the table on which rests her typewriter, abuts the wall shared by the two autopsy rooms. On either side of it, at the level of her head, is an opening fitted with a panel of straw weave that gives onto each room. The multiple tiny holes of the weave allow her to hear with her ears but not see with her eyes. If it were otherwise, if she saw the dripping organs and the disembowelled bodies, she would shriek and faint, and she is there to record, not to react. She types with extraordinary speed and accuracy, and her Latin spelling is excellent. Senhora Melo’s assistance allows him and José to observe and speak as they are doing, without having to stop to write. They have so many autopsies to do. As it is, while one doctor works and dictates, the other finishes up with a body, takes a break, then prepares for the next case. Alternating like this, the two doctors efficiently perform autopsy after autopsy.

Sometimes, after he has made his confession to Father Cecilio, it occurs to him that Senhora Melo might be a better confessor. To her, many more harsh truths have been revealed than to Father Cecilio.

He normally wears rubber gloves when he performs an autopsy — a fairly recent and welcome advance in technology. He treats his gloves with great care, washing them with soap and water every day and keeping them moist with mercury biniodide spirit. But he hesitates to pull them out now. Maria Castro might think that by wearing them he is expressing disdain for her husband’s body. Better in this case to go back to the old bare-hands technique.

But first he will replace the strip of flypaper. Flies are a persistent problem in Portugal’s climate. They thrive as peddlers of contagion. He makes it his regular business to replace the yellow coils that hang in the autopsy rooms.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he says to Maria Castro. “Hygiene, order, routine — all very important.” He takes the chair intended for her and places it under the used strip, climbs onto it, removes the strip studded with the fat bodies of dead flies, and replaces it with a new, bright, gluey strip.

Maria Castro watches him silently.

From the chair he gazes down at the autopsy table. They never look very big on the table, the bodies. It’s built to accommodate the largest frames, there’s that. And they’re naked. But it’s something else. That parcel of the being called the soul — weighing twenty-one grams, according to the experiments of the American doctor Duncan MacDougall — takes up a surprising amount of space, like a loud voice. In its absence, the body seems to shrink. That is, before the bloat of decomposition.

Of which Rafael Castro seems to be free, likely the result of the cold, but also of the jumbling of his body while travelling in a suitcase. Eusebio is used to being greeted by the Mortis sisters when he comes to work. The oldest, Algor, chills the patient to the ambient temperature; Livor, the middle sister, neatly applies her favourite colour scheme — yellowish grey to the top half of the patient and purple red to the bottom half, where the blood has settled — and Rigor, the youngest, so stiffens the body that bones can be broken if limbs are forced. They are cheery ones, these sisters, eternal spinsters who ravish innumerable bodies.

Rafael Castro’s ears are deep purple; there is only that touch of Livor Mortis. And his mouth is open. The agonal moment is the last knock of the body at the door of the eternal before that door swings open. The body convulses, the breath rattles in the chest, the mouth opens, and it’s over. Perhaps the mouth opens to release the twenty-one grams. Or perhaps it’s nothing more than a relaxing of the mandibular muscles. Whatever the case, the mouth is usually closed, because bodies always come to him washed and prepared, the jaw tied shut with a strip of cotton fabric, the knot resting on top of the head, the hands bound together in front of the body, and the rectum and, if the case be, the vagina packed with cotton batting. Cutting these ligatures and removing these stops are the first steps in opening the book of the body.

The teeth seem in good condition, a departure from the stock peasant with the healthy bones but the decayed teeth.

No identifying tag is attached to the big toe. Eusebio has to take it on faith that the dead man is indeed Rafael Miguel Santos Castro, from the village of Tuizelo. But he has no reason to doubt that Maria Castro is telling the truth.

Nor is there a clinical report. That report is like the jacket copy of a book, announcing what is to come. But just as jacket copy can stray from the actual content of a book, so can a clinical report. With no knowledge of the case at all, he will nonetheless find out what racked Rafael Castro, what pushed his body to give up.

He steps off the chair. He looks at the shelf of bottles along the wall near the table. He picks out the bottle of carbolic oil. Since he’s not going to use his rubber gloves, he smears his hands with the oil to protect them. Then he finds the bar of Marseille soap and scratches it so that slivers of soap stick under his fingernails. This precaution, along with vigorous hand washing and the application of scented oils, means that he can reach for his wife in the evenings without her recoiling and beating him away.

He will start with words. Words will be the anaesthetic that will prepare Maria Castro for what he is about to do.

“Senhora Castro, let me explain a little what is going to happen. I will now perform an autopsy on your husband. The purpose of it will be to discover the physiological abnormality — that is, the disease or the injury — that led to his death. In some instances, when the clinical report is very clear, this object is determined fairly easily, as a result of examining a single organ, say the heart or the liver. The healthy body is a balancing act of a thousand parts, and the serious imbalance of a single part can, on its own, throw a life off its tightrope. But in other cases, where we have no clinical information, as is the case here, the dead body is, well, a murder mystery. Needless to say, I’m using this as a figure of speech. I don’t mean a real murder. I mean the body becomes a house inhabited by a cast of characters, each of whom denies having anything to do with the death, but in a few rooms we will find clues. The pathologist is the detective who pays close attention and uses his grey cells to apply order and logic until the mask of one of the organs can be torn off and its true nature, its black guilt, proved beyond a doubt.”

He smiles to himself. Maria, his Maria, would be pleased with his murder-mystery analogy. Maria Castro just stares at him steadily. He moves on.

“Where do we begin? With the surface. Before any incision is made, the body undergoes a surface examination. Does the body appear to have been nourished appropriately? Is it thin or emaciated or, on the contrary, obese? Is the chest barrel-shaped, indicative of bronchitis and emphysema, or is there a pigeon breast, a sign of rickets in early life? Is there unusual pallor to the skin or the opposite, any deepening of the colour or any sign of jaundice? Skin eruptions, scars and lesions, fresh wounds — all these must be noted, their extent, their severity.

“The orifices of the body — the mouth, the nose, the ears, the anus — must be checked for discharges or abnormalities, as must the external genitalia. Lastly, the teeth.

“In your husband’s case, everything seems in order. I look here and here. Here. Here. He looks like a normal, externally healthy man of his age who died of an internal cause. I notice, here, an old scar.”

“He slipped on a rock,” Maria Castro says.

“It’s a source of no concern. I am only noting it. This external part of the examination is usually cursory, since it adds little to my findings. Disease most often develops from the inside to the outside. So the liver fails before the skin turns yellow, for example. There are notable exceptions, of course: skin cancers, lesions and the like, and accidents. And death by crime often starts on the outside, but that is not an issue here. In this case, the skin has little to tell us.

“Now we must, well, we must enter the body, we must examine it on the inside. It is safe to say there’s no reason to start an autopsy with an extremity, say, the patient’s feet. In pathology, the equivalent of the king and the queen in chess are the thorax and the head. Each is vital to the game, so to speak, and one can start an autopsy with either one. The pathologist’s standard opening gambit is the thorax.”

Eusebio mentally curses himself. Why is he talking about chess? Enough of this prattle!

“I will start by cutting a Y-shaped incision in your husband’s chest, using this scalpel, starting at the shoulders and meeting over the sternum, then heading down over the abdomen to the pubic mound. You will notice that subcutaneous fat is very yellow, and muscles look very much like raw beef, very red. That is normal. Already I’m looking for indicators. The appearance of the muscles, for example, which could signal a wasting disease or a toxic one, such as typhoid fever.

“Next the sternum and the anterior part of the ribs are removed. I will use these curved scissors to cut through the ribs”—his wife uses an identical pair in their garden and swears by them—“making sure not to damage underlying organs. Now the innards are exposed, lying in a colourful mass. I will look to see how they sit with each other. Organs are siblings that work in the same family business. Is there any obvious abnormality that has thrown the family into disarray? Any swelling? Any unusual colouration? Normally, the surface of the viscera should be shiny and smooth.

“After this overview, I need to look at the organs individually. Since we don’t know what brought on your husband’s death, I am inclined to take out his thoracic contents altogether to examine them in continuity, before separating them and studying each component on its own.

“I will ask of each organ roughly the same questions. What is its general form? Is it shrunken or, on the contrary, swollen? The surface of the organ — is there any exudate, that is, any matter that has flowed out? Does the exudate crumble easily, or is it stringy and difficult to remove? Are there any areas that are pearly white, indicating chronic inflammation? Are there cicatrices — scars — or rugosity, wrinkles if you want, a sign of fibrosis? And so on. Next will come the internal examinations. I will incise each organ — I will use this knife — with the idea of assessing its inner condition. The heart is the locus of many pathological possibilities, and I will examine it with extra care.”

He pauses. The woman says nothing. Perhaps she is overwhelmed. It is time to abridge and sum up.

“The abdominal viscera will be next, the small and large intestines, the stomach, the duodenum, the pancreas, the spleen, the kidneys — I will be thorough in my approach.” He sweeps a hand over the torso. “The king is done. Now we can move on to the queen, that is, the head. Examining your husband’s brain and stem will involve removing the scalp by means of an incision and sawing through the skull — but never mind that. Details, details. Lastly, I may examine peripheral nerves, bones, joints, vessels, et cetera, if I feel there is a need. Throughout, I will be excising samples — small bits of organs — which I’ll fix in formalin, embed in paraffin, then slice, stain, and examine under the microscope. This lab work comes later.

“At this stage the essential work on your husband’s body is over, Senhora Castro. I will return his organs to his body and fill any hollowness with newspaper. I will replace the sternum and sew the skin shut, the same with the top of his skull. There, the job is done. Once dressed, your husband will look as if nothing has happened to him and no one outside this room will know better — but science will. We will know with certainty how and why your husband died — or, as you put it, how he lived. Do you have any questions?”

The old woman sighs and shakes her head. Did she roll her eyes?

All right, then. Reluctantly, he picks up the scalpel. “This is the scalpel,” he says.

The sharp blade hovers over Rafael Castro’s chest. Eusebio’s mind is racing. There’s no way around it. He will have to open the thorax. But he will zero in quickly on an organ — the heart. Oh, this explains it. We clearly have our answer right here. We need proceed no further.

“Well, here we go…”

“Start with the foot,” Maria Castro says.

He looks up. What did she say? Did she say pé or fé—foot or faith? And what does that mean, Start with the faith? Does she want him to say a prayer before he starts? He’s happy to oblige, not that he’s ever done that in the autopsy room. The Body of Christ is elsewhere. Here is more simply the body of a man.

“I’m sorry. What did you say?” he asks.

Maria repeats herself. “Start with the foot.”

This time she points. He looks at Rafael Castro’s yellowed feet. They are as far away from the acute myocardial infarction he wants to diagnose as is physiologically possible.

“But Senhora Castro, as I just explained to you, in fact using that very example, it makes no sense to start an autopsy with a patient’s foot. Feet are peripheral organs, both literally and pathologically. And as concerns your husband’s feet, I see no sign of fractures or any other injury — no, nothing at all — nor any sign of a skin tumour or other disease, or any condition at all, bunions, ingrown toenails, anything. There’s some slight peripheral oedema — swelling, that is — but that is normal for someone who has been dead three days. There is also a trace of livor mortis around the heel. Once again, that is normal.”

Maria Castro says it a third time. “Start with the foot.”

He is silent. What a disaster of a night. He should have stayed at home. Not only will he get no work done, but now he has an insane peasant woman in his autopsy room. This is precisely why he went into pathology, to avoid situations like this. He can deal with the clogging and liquefaction of bodies, but not the clogging and liquefaction of emotions. What is he to do? Say no and tell her to go slice her husband’s feet on her kitchen table if she’s so keen on it? That would mean stuffing the old man in the suitcase again, naked this time. And would the old battleaxe go quietly? He doubts it.

He gives up. She will have it her way. He feels like a hawker at a market, selling his wares. Autopsy, autopsy, who wants an autopsy? Don’t hesitate, step right up! Today’s special: Pay for one eyeball, get the other free. You, senhor, how about a testicle, just one testicle for starters? Come on, get your autopsy! Why not start with the feet? If she wants her husband’s autopsy to start there, then let it start there. Whatever the customer wants. He sighs and moves to the distal extremity of the body, scalpel in hand. Maria Castro joins him.

“His foot, you say?”

“Yes,” she replies.

“Do you care which one I start with?”

She shakes her head. He is closest to Rafael Castro’s right foot. He looks at it. In his medical student days he dissected a foot, he vaguely remembers, but as a practicing pathologist, beyond the occasional surface excision, he has never worked on one. How many bones is it again? Twenty-six, and thirty-three joints in each foot? All bound together and operated by an array of muscles and ligaments and nerves. A very efficient arrangement that can both support and transport.

Where should he cut? Better the plantar surface than the dorsal, he thinks. Less bony. He takes hold of the ball of the foot and pushes. The foot flexes with little stiffness. He examines the sole. The callused skin will part, subcutaneous fat will show, some jellified blood might seep out — just a foot with a random cut in it. No indignity to the body, just an indignity to the attending pathologist.

He presses the blade of the scalpel into the head of the medial metatarsals. He lets the blade go in deeply — it doesn’t matter what it cuts — and he pushes down, towards the heel. The scalpel easily slices through the ball of the foot and into the arch, along the long plantar ligament. He brings the blade out as it digs into the fat pad of the heel.

A thick substance pushes out of the cut. Blobs of it start to drop onto the autopsy table. It is whitish and lumpy, covered in a sheen of brightness, with a slight yellow runoff. It has a pungent smell.

“I thought so,” Maria Castro says.

He stares in amazement. What in God’s name is this? Though he has not uttered the question aloud, Maria Castro answers it.

“It’s vomit,” she says.

He examines the oozing mass closely. He sniffs it. The glutinous appearance, the bilious smell — yes, it is indeed vomit, fresh vomit. But how is that possible? It’s a foot. He’s seen necrosis and putrefaction in every form, but nothing like this, ever.

“Where else would it go?” she says. “Gravity pulls.” He seems in need of further explanation. “The child died, you see,” she adds. She pauses for a moment. Then she converts all the silence in her into words. “Let me tell you how a funeral goes in Tuizelo. First, you must have the excuse for one. A life must be given up. If you want it to be a good funeral, it must be a precious life, not some distant uncle or the friend of a friend. Make it your own son. That’s the way to start a funeral, with a thunderbolt that hammers you right in the chest and cleaves your insides into pieces. Deaf, dumb, witless, you can now attend to the details. A ready-made ceremony is handed to you, old and worn. You go along because you don’t know better. There is a hearse — just someone’s cart dressed up — a stiff, unreal ceremony in the church, then a burial in the cemetery on a grey day, everyone dressed in their Sunday best and looking uncomfortable for it, all of it unbearable. Then it’s over.

“People hang around for a while, but then they drift off. You’re given an allotment of time, after which you’re expected to return to the world, to your life of old. But why would anyone do that? After a funeral, a good funeral, everything loses its worth and there’s no life of old to return to. You’re left with nothing. You don’t even have words, not right away. Right away, death is word-eating. Words for it come later, because how else can you think of him, since he’s no longer with you?

“At the funeral Rafael said only one thing. He cried out, ‘The size of the coffin, the size of it!’ It’s true, it wasn’t very big.

“The day Rafael returned to Tuizelo, he didn’t have to say anything to tell me. He couldn’t, anyway. Distress had paralyzed his face and stunned his mouth. I knew right away. Nothing else would do that to him. I knew just looking at him that our precious one had died. Already people in the village had assembled in front of our house, milling around silently. He lay him on the dining table. I fainted. I wish I had fainted forever, that I had followed behind him swiftly and protectively, the way a mother should. Instead I awoke surrounded by smelly old widows. Rafael kept away. Close-by but away. He was eaten up with guilt. Our son had died on his watch. He was the shepherd that day. He had let his flock stray.

“We loved our son like the sea loves an island, always surrounding him with our arms, always touching him and crashing upon his shore with our care and concern. When he was gone, the sea had only itself to contemplate. Our arms folded onto nothing until they met their frame. We wept all the time. If a job was left unfinished at the end of a day — the coop not repaired, a row of vegetables not weeded — we knew that one of us had sat down and wept. That’s the nature of grief: It’s a creature with many arms but few legs, and it staggers about, searching for support. Frayed chicken wire and a profusion of weeds became expressions of our loss. I can’t look at chicken wire now without thinking of my lost son. There’s something about the warp and weft of it, so thin yet strong, so porous yet solid, that reminds me of how we loved him. Later, because of our neglect, chickens died at the jaws of a fox that slipped into the coop, and the crop of vegetables was not so bountiful — but so it goes: A son dies and the earth becomes barren.

“When he wasn’t well or couldn’t fall asleep, he crept into our bed between us. After he was gone, that space in our bed became unbridgeable. We met, Rafael and I, only below it, where in the night our toenails jabbed at each other like loose knives in a drawer, or above it, where we stared at each other without saying a word. Rafael never wanted to close that space, because to do so would be to acknowledge that our bear cub was never coming back. Some nights I saw his hand reach into the space and stroke its emptiness. Then the hand retreated, like the limb of a tortoise deep into its shell, and every morning Rafael woke with the weary, wrinkled eyes of a tortoise that has lived too long. His eyes blinked slowly, as did mine.

“Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice — we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs.

“Nothing fit right in our lives anymore. Drawers no longer closed cleanly, chairs and tables wobbled, plates became chipped, spoons appeared flecked with dried food, clothes started to stain and tear — and the outside world was just as ill-fitting.

“His death made little difference to the outside world. Isn’t that so with all children? When a child dies, there is no land to be handed down, hardly any possessions to be divided up, no job or role left unfilled, no debts that need paying off. A child is a small sun that shines in the shadow of its parents, and when that sun goes out there is darkness only for the parents.

“What’s the point of being a mother if you have no one to mother? It’s like being a flower without a head. On the day our son died, I became a bald stem.

“If there’s one thing I held against Rafael for the longest time, it’s that he delayed coming home by a day. He dithered. But a mother has a right to know right away when her child has died. For her to imagine that he is alive and well even for a minute when he is not is a crime against motherhood.

“And then that thought that takes root in your mind: And now, how do I dare love anything?

“When you forget about him ever so briefly — then comes the stab. Rafael would shout, ‘My beautiful boy!’ and he would collapse. Mostly, though, we went about with quiet, reserved insanity. It’s what you do. Rafael started walking backwards. The first times I noticed him doing it, along the road or in the fields, I thought nothing of it. I thought he was doing it for a moment, to keep his eye on something. Then one morning he did it as we were going to church. No one said anything. They let him be. I asked him that night why this, why the walking backwards. He said that on that day he returned to Tuizelo he saw a man, a stranger, leaving the village. Rafael was sitting off the end of the cart, holding our little cub in his arms, wrapped in a sheet. The stranger was on foot and he was moving quickly, nearly running, and he was doing so backwards. He had the saddest face, Rafael said, a face of grief and anguish. He forgot about him until he found he wanted to do the same thing; it sat well with his emotions, he said. And so he started doing it when he left the house, going into the world. As often as not, he would turn around and start walking backwards.

“I knew who the man was. He had stopped to visit the church. A strange city man, quite filthy and sick. Father Abrahan spoke with him, then he ran off. He left behind the device he’d come on — an automobile, the first one we’d ever seen. It must have been an arduous journey back, all the way to wherever he came from. His automobile stayed in the square for weeks, we didn’t know what to do with it. Then one day a different man — a tall, thin one — walked into the village and drove it away without a word of explanation. People talked about the device and its driver, back and forth, back and forth. Was he just a visitor — or an angel of death? Whatever he was, I didn’t care. I had turned to remembering. We never had much use for memory before. Why remember him when you have him right there in front of your eyes? Memory was just an occasional pleasure. Then it’s all you’re left with. You try your best to live in your memories of him. You try to turn memories into real things. You pull the strings of a puppet and you say, ‘There, there, you see—he’s alive!’

“It was Rafael who started calling him our bear cub after he died. Rafael said he was hibernating. ‘Eventually he’ll stir and wake, he’ll be ravenously hungry,’ he would say with a smile, attaching a fact — our son’s good appetite after a nap — to a fancy, that he was coming back. I played along: It was my comfort too.

“He was such a joy. Everyone said that. Unplanned, unexpected — I thought I was long past my child-bearing years, such as they had been — and suddenly he came along. We used to look at him and ask ourselves, ‘What child is this? Where did he come from?’ We both have dark eyes and dark hair — doesn’t everyone in Portugal? Yet his hair was as fair as a wheat field, and such eyes he had — bright blue. How did those eyes get into his head? Did a puff of the Atlantic blow into Tuizelo on the day he was conceived and add itself to his making? My theory is that the supplies in the pantry of our family tree were so rarely dipped into that when they finally were, only the best ingredients were used. He invented laughter. His joy-making was endless and his goodwill without limits. The whole village loved him. Everyone sought his attention and his affection, the adults and the other children. So much love was poured into those blue eyes. He took that love and gave it back, as happy and generous as a cloud.

“Rafael had gone down to help a friend near Cova da Lua. A week’s work, small money. He took him, our five-year-old boy. It would be an adventure for him. And he could help. Then it happened, while Rafael was sharpening the scythes on the whetstone. He paused and listened. It was too quiet. He called out. He searched around the farm. He searched in ever greater circles. Eventually he went along the road, calling out his name. That’s where he found him. What about the other foot?”

The question comes unexpectedly. Eusebio looks at the body’s left foot. He nicks it at the heel. Again vomit comes out.

“And higher up?” asks Maria Castro.

He does not hesitate now. With the scalpel he cuts into the right leg next to the tibia, midway up; into the left knee, between the patella and the medial condyle of the femur; into the thighs, a cut into each quadriceps. Each cut is about five or six centimetres long, and each time vomit oozes out, although he notes that it comes out with less pressure from the cuts on the thighs. He cuts across the pelvic girdle, just above the pubic mound, a long cut. He pulls the skin back. A bulk of vomit shows. Atop it, on its edge, the scalpel touches something hard but loose. He probes. There is a glimmer. He dislodges it and turns it with the blade. A coin — a five-escudo silver coin. There are other coins next to it, some escudos, the others centavos, each lying flat atop the vomit. A peasant’s meagre wealth.

He pauses. He wonders whether he should leave the coins there or extract them.

Maria Castro interrupts his thoughts. “The penis,” she says.

He takes hold of Rafael Castro’s sizable penis. At a glance, the shaft and the glans appear perfectly normal. No signs of Peyronie’s disease, no condylomata, no bowenoid papulosis. He decides to cut along a corpus cavernosum, one of the two spongy, elongated chambers that, when filled with blood, were the source of such pleasure for the couple. He slices the length of the penis, through the foreskin and into the glans. Again the scalpel strikes something hard where there should be nothing hard. He puts the blade down. With his thumbs on either side of the cut, and pushing on the opposite side of the penis with his fingers, he easily pushes out the hardness. It comes out in two pieces: wooden, smooth, round, and with holes.

“Oh!” says Maria Castro. “His sweet flute.”

The two other pieces of the peasant flute lie in the second corpus cavernosum. Because he is a man of order and method, Eusebio assembles the instrument. He passes it to the old woman, who brings it to her lips. A three-note trill floats in the air.

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

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

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

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

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

He hears her gasp.

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

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

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

She speaks quietly. “The heart has two choices: to shut down or to open up. I haven’t told you my story entirely truthfully. I was the one who protested about the size of the coffin. I was the one who wailed, ‘My beautiful boy!’ and collapsed. I was the one who didn’t want to close the space in our bed. Cut me some of the black creature’s fur, will you? And please get the suitcase.”

He obeys. With the scalpel he cuts a tuft from the chimpanzee’s coat, from its side. She rubs the hairs between her fingers and sniffs them and presses them to her lips. “Rafael always had more faith than I did,” she says. “He often repeated something Father Abrahan said to him once, how faith is ever young, how faith, unlike the rest of us, does not age.”

Eusebio retrieves the suitcase from his office. Maria Castro opens it, places it on the autopsy table, and begins to transfer to it the objects from Rafael Castro’s body, one by one.

Then she starts to undress.

The shocking nudity of an aged woman. The flesh sapped by gravity, the skin ravaged by age, the proportions ruined by time — and yet glowing with long-lived life, like a parchment page covered in writing. He has seen a great number of such women, but dead, without personality, and rendered even more abstract by being opened up. Inner organs, unless touched by a pathology, are ageless.

Maria Castro strips until she has not a piece of clothing on her. She takes off her wedding ring, she pulls off a band that holds her hair. All of it she puts in the suitcase, which she closes when she is done.

Using the chair he brought in for her, she climbs onto the autopsy table. Leaning over Rafael Castro’s body, nudging here and there, pushing and wiggling, making space where there seems to be none, filled as he is already with two creatures, Maria Castro carefully settles into her husband’s body. All the while she repeats, “This is home, this is home, this is home.” She places herself so that the chimpanzee’s back is nestled against her front and her arms encircle both the chimpanzee and the bear cub, with her hands resting on the cub.

“Please,” she says.

He knows what to do; he is much practiced in the matter. He picks up the needle. He pushes the twine through its eye. Then he begins to sew the body shut. It is quick work, as skin is soft, a simple crossing-over back-and-forth of the twine in a zigzag, though in this case he sews the stitches close together, creating a suture that is finer than usual. He works across Rafael Castro’s pelvic girdle, then closes the skin over the abdomen and over the chest, up to each shoulder. He is careful with the tip of the needle not to prick Maria Castro or the two animals. He hears her only faintly as he finishes the torso: “Thank you, Senhor doctor.”

Never has he worked on a body that ended up having so many incisions. Professional ethic compels him to close every single one: across the head, along the arms, in the neck, on the legs and hands, through the penis and the tongue. The fingers are painstaking labour. The eyes are unsatisfying in the final result — he spends much time contriving to shut the eyelids over his botched job. He finishes with the soles of the feet.

Finally only a body remains on the autopsy table, and a suitcase on the floor, loosely packed with random objects.

He looks on dumbly for a long while. When he turns away, he notices something on a side table: the tuft of chimpanzee hairs. Maria Castro forgot them — or did she leave them behind deliberately? He takes hold of them and does what she did: He sniffs them and touches them to his lips.

He is utterly spent. He goes back to his office, the chimpanzee hairs in one hand, the suitcase in the other. He sets the suitcase on his desk and settles heavily into his chair. He opens the suitcase and stares at its contents. He opens a drawer, finds an envelope, places the chimpanzee hairs in it, and drops the envelope into the suitcase. He notices on the floor the Agatha Christie novel. He picks it up.

Senhora Melo arrives early, as is her habit. She is surprised to find Dr. Lozora collapsed on his desk. Her heart flutters. Is he dead? A dead pathologist — the notion strikes her as professionally unbecoming. She steps in. He is only sleeping. She can hear his breathing and see the gentle rising and falling of his shoulders. And his colour is good. He has drooled on his desk. She will not share with anyone this embarrassing detail, the shiny river from his mouth, the small puddle. Nor will she mention the empty bottle of red wine. She lifts it and quietly places it on the floor behind the desk, out of sight. There is a large scuffed suitcase on the desk. Is it the doctor’s? Is he going somewhere? Would he have such a shabby suitcase?

He is sleeping on top of a file. It is mostly concealed by a hand, but she can still read the first line:

Rafael Miguel Santos Castro, 83 anos, da aldeia de Tuizelo,

as Altas Montanhas de Portugal

Odd — she doesn’t recall the name or the locality. She is the guardian of names, the one who links with certitude each person with his or her fatality. And it’s written in the doctor’s hand, transiently, rather than set for eternity with her typewriter. Could it be an emergency case that arrived after she left last night? That would be highly unusual. In passing she notes the patient’s age. Eighty-three is a sound age to live to. That reassures her. In spite of the tragedies of life, the world can still be a good place.

She notices that the clasps of the suitcase are undone. Though she knows she shouldn’t, she quietly opens it, to see if it belongs to the doctor. Such a strange assortment of things — a flute, a knife and a fork, a candle, a plain black dress, a book, a square of red cloth, an envelope, among other bits and pieces — would not likely be Dr. Lozora’s. She closes the suitcase.

She leaves the office quietly, not wanting to embarrass the doctor by being there when he wakes up. She walks to her tiny work alcove. She likes to be properly set up before the day’s work starts. The typewriter ribbon needs to be checked, the carbon paper restocked, her water carafe filled. The door to the autopsy room is open, which it shouldn’t be. She glances in. She catches her breath. There is a body on the table! A shudder goes through her. What is it doing there? How long has it been out of the cold room? This is most improper. Normally there is a good hour of dictation of final reports before the autopsies start. Normally the bodies come and go shrouded, invisible to everyone except the doctors.

She enters the room. It will be like a living body, she tells herself, only dead.

It isn’t at all like a living body. The corpse is that of a man, an old man. Yellow and sagging. Bony. His hairy pubic mound and large penis exposed with unspeakable obscenity. But far worse are the crude seams all over his body, ragged sutures of red, grey, and yellow that make him look like a cloth doll. His hands look like the underside of a starfish. Even his penis is marred by ghastly stitching. Senhora Melo gulps, thinks she might faint, steadies herself. She forces herself to look at the man’s face. But there is nothing to be read upon his face, only age. She is aghast at how a dead body is such a — she searches for the word — such a relic. When she leaves the autopsy room on tiptoes, as if the relic might be disturbed by her presence, she wonders: Where’s the gurney? How did he get here?

She closes the door of the autopsy room and takes a few deep breaths. Clearly the doctor needs help. He has not been well lately. Sometimes he arrives late for work, sometimes he doesn’t show up at all, sometimes he works all night. Poor man. The death of his wife has been very hard on him. He waved away the concerns of the other doctors, of the director of the hospital himself. He would do it, he said, he would do it. But what a thing to do! Dr. Otavio, his colleague, was away on holiday, but even if he had been here he would have refused to work on her on account of having known her. That’s standard procedure. In the normal course of things, her body should have gone to the hospital in Vila Real. But Dr. Lozora couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else doing it. And she was decomposing; it needed to be done right away. And so he performed the autopsy of his own wife.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It distressed Senhora Melo that Maria Lozora’s death would not have the neat resolution of the murder mysteries of which Maria and the doctor were so fond.

Senhora Melo hears a gasp. Dr. Lozora is awake. She hears him begin to weep. He doesn’t know that she’s arrived, that he isn’t alone. The volume increases. Great cracking sobs. The poor man, the poor man. What is she to do? If he realizes that she’s there, he will be mortified. She doesn’t want that. Perhaps she should make a noise to alert him to her presence. He continues to weep. She stands very still and quiet. Then Senhora Melo becomes annoyed with herself. Can it be any more plain that the man needs help? Didn’t she just think that a moment ago?

She turns and heads for Dr. Lozora’s office.