The High Mountains of Portugal

Part Three: Home

When Peter Tovy is appointed to the Senate in the summer of 1981 from the House of Commons to make way in his safe Toronto riding for a star candidate, there is no longer any need for him to spend much time in his constituency. He and his wife, Clara, buy a larger, nicer apartment in Ottawa, with a lovely view of the river. They prefer the quieter pace of the capital, and they’re happy to be near their son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter, who live in the city.

Then one morning he enters the bedroom and finds Clara sitting on their bed, holding her left side with both hands, crying.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

Clara only shakes her head. Fear grips him. They go to the hospital. Clara is sick, seriously so.

At the same time that his wife is fighting for her life, their son’s marriage falls apart. He paints the rosiest picture possible of the breakdown for his wife. “It’s best for all of them,” he says. “They never got along. Away from each other they’ll blossom. It’s what people do these days.”

She smiles in agreement. Her horizons are shrinking. But it isn’t best, or even good. It’s terrible. He watches conjugal partners become bitter enemies, he sees a child become war loot. His son, Ben, spends inordinate amounts of time, money, and energy fighting with his former wife, Dina, who fights back just as hard, to the delight of their lawyers and to his stupefaction. He tries to talk to Dina and play the mediator, but however civil her tone and open her heart at the start of each conversation, inevitably she loses her cool and boils up in anger. Being the father of, he can only be an abettor and a co-conspirator. “You’re just like your son,” she spat out once. Except, he pointed out, that he has lived in loving harmony with his wife for over four decades. She hung up on him. His granddaughter, Rachel, a cheerful sprite when she was a small child, turns sour on both her parents and walls herself in a teenage tower of caustic resentment. On a few occasions he takes her out for a walk and a restaurant meal to cheer her up — and to cheer himself up, he hopes — but he can never get past her sullenness. Then she moves to Vancouver with her mother, who has “won” her in the custody battle. He drives them to the airport. When they walk through security, already bickering, he does not see an adult woman and her growing daughter but two black scorpions, their venomous stingers raised, goading each other on.

As for Ben, who remains in Ottawa, he is hopeless. As far as Peter can tell, his son is incredibly brightly stupid. A medical researcher, Ben at one point studied why people accidentally bite their tongue. This painful breakdown in the tongue’s ability to work around teeth, like a sheet worker operating heavy machinery, has surprisingly complex roots. Now Peter sees his son as a tongue blindly throwing itself under gnashing teeth, coming out bloody, but throwing itself under again the very next day, over and over, without an ounce of self-understanding or any realization of the costs or consequences. Instead Ben is always chafing with exasperation. Conversations between them end in stony silence, with the son rolling his eyes and the father at a loss for words.

Amidst a swirl of medical terms, after the waxing and waning of hope over every treatment, after the twisting, groaning, and sobbing, after the incontinence and the vanishing of all flesh, his beautiful Clara lies in a hospital bed, wearing a horrible green hospital gown, her eyes glazed and half-shut, her mouth open. She convulses, a rattle comes from her chest, and she dies.

He becomes a spectre on Parliament Hill.

One day he’s speaking in the Senate. A fellow senator has turned and is looking up at him with a scrutiny that is more intense than simple interest should warrant. Why are you looking at me like that? he thinks. What’s the matter with you? If he leans forward and blows into his colleague’s face, his breath will have the effect of a blowtorch and the skin of his face will peel off. It’ll be a grinning skull that will be looking up at him. That will deal with your stupid expression.

His reverie is interrupted by the Speaker of the Senate, who says, “Will the honourable member continue on the topic at hand, or…?”

The trailing off of the Speaker’s voice is significant. Peter looks down at his papers and realizes that he has no idea what he’s been talking about — no idea, and no interest in going on even if he did remember. He has nothing to say. He looks at the Speaker, shakes his head, and sits down. His colleague, after another second of staring, turns away.

The Whip comes round to his desk. They are friends. “How’s it going, Peter?” he asks.

Peter shrugs.

“Maybe you should take a break. Bust loose for a while. You’ve been through a lot.”

He sighs. Yes, he needs to get out. He can’t take it anymore. The speeches, the endless posturing, the cynical scheming, the swollen egos, the arrogant aides, the merciless media, the stifling minutiae, the scientific bureaucracy, the microscopic betterment of humanity — all are hallmarks of democracy, he recognizes. Democracy is such a crazy, wonderful thing. But he’s had enough.

“I’ll see if I can’t find something for you,” the Whip says. He pats him on the shoulder. “Hang in there. You’ll make it.”

A few days later the Whip comes back to him with a proposal. A trip.

“To Oklahoma?” Peter responds.

“Hey, great things come from remote places. Who’d ever heard of Nazareth before Jesus showed up?”

“Or of Saskatchewan before Tommy Douglas.”

The Whip smiles. He’s from Saskatchewan. “And it’s what came up. Someone bailed out at the last minute. The State Legislature down there has invited Canadian Members of Parliament to visit. You know, the knitting and maintaining of relations, that sort of thing. You won’t have much to do.”

Peter isn’t even sure where Oklahoma is, exactly. A marginal state of the American empire, somewhere in the middle of it.

“Just a change of air, Peter. A little four-day holiday. Why not?”

He agrees. Sure, why not. Two weeks later he flies to Oklahoma with three Members of Parliament.

Oklahoma City is warm and pleasant in May, and their hosts display gracious hospitality. The Canadian delegation meets the governor of the state, state legislators, and businesspeople. They are shown around the State Capitol, they visit a factory. Each day ends with a dinner. The hotel where they are lodged is grand. Throughout the visit, Peter talks about Canada and hears about Oklahoma in a relaxed fog. The change of scenery, the change of air, even — soft and moist — is soothing, as the Whip predicted.

On the eve of their last full day, a day that has been left open for the recreation of the Canadian guests, he notices a tourist brochure about the Oklahoma City Zoo. He has a fondness for zoos, not because he’s particularly interested in animals, but because Clara was. She was on the Board of Management of the Toronto Zoo at one time. He expresses the wish to visit the Oklahoma City Zoo. The legislative assistant who is their go-to person at the State Capitol looks into it and comes back to him with profuse apologies.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “Usually the zoo is open every day, but it’s closed at the moment because of major renovations. I could check to see if they’d let you in anyway, if you’re interested.”

“No, no, I don’t want to be a bother.”

“There is a chimpanzee sanctuary south of town, in Norman, at the university,” she suggests.

“A chimpanzee sanctuary?”

“Yes, it’s an institute for the study of — of monkeys, I guess. It’s not normally open to the public, but I’m sure we can make that happen.”

She does make it happen. The word “senator” works wonders on American ears.

The next morning a car is waiting for him in front of the hotel. No one else in his delegation is interested in joining him, so he goes alone. The car drives him to the Institute for Primate Research, as the place is called, an outpost of the University of Oklahoma in the middle of empty, brushy countryside ten or so kilometres east of Norman. The sky is blue, the land is green.

At the institute, at the end of a winding gravel driveway, he sees a large, vaguely menacing-looking man with a beard and a big belly. Next to him stands a lanky younger man with long hair and bulging eyes; clearly, from his body language, he is a subordinate.

“Senator Tovy?” says the larger man as he steps out of the car.

“Yes.”

They shake hands. “I’m Dr. Bill Lemnon, director of the Institute for Primate Research.” Lemnon looks beyond him into the car, whose door is still open. “You don’t have much of a delegation.”

“No, it’s just me.” Peter closes the door of the car.

“What state are you from again?”

“The province of Ontario, in Canada.”

“That so?” His answer seems to give the director reason to pause. “Well, come with me and I’ll explain to you briefly what we do here.”

Lemnon turns and walks away without waiting for him to fall into step. The unintroduced subordinate scampers along behind.

They walk around a bungalow and a few sheds until they come to a sizable pond shaded by giant cottonwood trees. The pond has two islands, one with a cluster of trees. In the branches of one of these, he sees a number of tall, skinny monkeys swinging about with extraordinary grace and agility. The other island is larger, its tall grasses, bushes, and few scattered trees dominated by an imposing log structure. High poles support four platforms at different heights, connected by a web of ropes and cargo-net hammocks. A truck tire hangs from a chain. Next to the structure is a round hut made of cinder blocks.

The director turns and faces Peter. He seems bored with what he is about to say even before he has started.

“Here at the IPR, we are at the forefront of studying primate behaviour and communication. What can we learn from chimpanzees? More than the man on the street might think. Chimpanzees are our closest evolutionary relatives. We share a common primate ancestor. We and chimpanzees parted company only about six million years ago. As Robert Ardrey put it: We are risen apes, not fallen angels. We both have large brains, an extraordinary capacity for communication, an ability to use tools, and a complex social structure. Take communication. Some of our chimpanzees here can sign up to a hundred and fifty words, which they can string together to form sentences. That is language. And they can make tools to forage for ants and termites or to break open nuts. They can hunt cooperatively, taking on different roles to catch their prey. They have, in short, the rudiments of culture. So when we study chimpanzees, we are studying an ancestral reflection of ourselves. In their facial expressions…”

It is interesting enough, if delivered somewhat automatically, without any warmth. Lemnon looks annoyed. Peter listens with a distracted ear. He suspects the assistant at the legislature oversold him. She probably didn’t mention that the visiting senator wasn’t from the U.S. Some of the chimpanzees appear on the larger island. At that moment he hears a voice calling.

“Dr. Lemnon! Dr. Terrace is on the phone.” He turns to see a young woman standing next to one of the buildings.

Lemnon is jolted to life. “I have to take that call. If you’ll excuse me,” he grunts as he walks off, without waiting for a response from his guest.

Peter breathes a sigh of relief at seeing the man go. He turns to the chimpanzees once more. There are five of them. They move slowly on all fours, their heads low, the bulk of their weight in their upper bodies, held up by their thick, strong arms, while their shorter legs follow along like the back wheels of a tricycle. In the sunlight, they are surprisingly black — roving patches of night. They amble a little distance and sit down. One of them climbs onto the lowest platform of the log structure.

Nothing much, but there’s something satisfying about watching them. Each animal is like a piece of a puzzle, and wherever it settles, it belongs, clicking into place perfectly.

The subordinate is still with him.

“We weren’t introduced. I’m Peter,” Peter says, extending his hand.

“I’m Bob. Pleased to meet you, sir.”

“Same here.”

They shake hands. Bob has a prominent Adam’s apple. It keeps bobbing up and down, which makes his name easy to remember.

“How many monkeys do you have here?” Peter asks.

Bob follows his eyes to the main island. “Those are apes, sir. Chimpanzees are apes.”

“Oh.” Peter points to the other island, where he saw the creatures swinging through the trees. “And those over there are monkeys?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, they’re also apes. They’re gibbons. They’re members of the ‘lesser’ apes, as they’re called. The rule of thumb is, monkeys have tails and apes don’t, and generally monkeys live in trees and apes live on the ground.”

As Bob finishes speaking, the chimpanzee sitting on the low platform climbs and swings with acrobatic ease to the top platform. At the same time, the other apes, the lesser gibbons, reappear in the tree on their island, dancing through the air from branch to branch.

“Of course, nature serves up lots of exceptions to keep us on our toes,” Bob adds.

“So, how many chimpanzees do you have here?” Peter asks.

“Thirty-four right now. We breed them to sell or loan to other researchers, so the number varies. And we have five being reared by families around Norman.”

“Reared by human families?”

“Yeah. Norman must be the cross-fostering capital of the world.” Bobbing Bob laughs, until he notices Peter’s nonplused expression. “Cross-fostering is where baby chimps are raised by human families as if they were human.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“Oh, lots. They’re taught sign language. It’s amazing: We communicate with them and see how their minds work. And there’s lots of other behavioural research going on, here and elsewhere, on the social relations of chimpanzees, their forms of communication, how they structure their groups, patterns of dominance and submission, maternal and sexual behaviour, how they adapt to change, and so on. Professors and PhD students from the university come here every day. It’s as Dr. Lemnon said: They’re different from us, but weirdly similar too.”

“And all the chimpanzees live on that island?” Peter asks.

“No. We bring them out here in small groups for experiments and sign-language lessons, and for a little rest and relaxation, as is the case with the group you see now.”

“Don’t they try to run away?”

“They can’t swim. They’d sink like stones. And even if they did get away, they wouldn’t wander far. This is home for them.”

“Aren’t they dangerous?”

“They can be. They’re strong and they have a mouthful of knives. They need proper handling. But they’re mostly incredibly sweet, especially if you’re promising them candy.”

“Where are the other ones?”

Bob points. “In the main compound, there.”

Peter turns and starts walking towards the building, assuming it’s the next stop on the tour.

Bob comes up behind him. “Oh! I’m not sure that’s part of — of the visit, sir.”

Peter stops. “But I’d like to see the other chimpanzees closer up.”

“Well — um — we should maybe talk to — he didn’t say—”

“He’s busy.” Peter starts off again. He likes the idea of irking the almighty Dr. Lemnon.

Bob hops along, making noises of hesitation. “All right, I guess,” he finally decides, when he sees that Peter isn’t going to change his mind. “We’ll make it quick. This way.”

They turn a corner and come to a door. They enter a small room with a desk and lockers. There is another metal door. Bob pulls out a key. He unlocks the door and opens it. They go through.

If the island in the pond gave the appearance of a sunlit idyll, here, inside this windowless building, there is the reality of a dark and dank underworld. The smell hits Peter first, an animal reek of piss and misery, the tang of it made fierce by the heat. They are at the entrance of a rounded, tunnel-like corridor of metal bars that shreds the space around them, as if the bars were a grater. On either side of this corridor hang two rows of cubic metal cages. Each cage measures about five feet on either side and hangs in the air from a chain, like a birdcage. The front rows are set off from the back rows so that every cage is easily visible from the corridor, one closer up, the next a little farther in. The cages are built with round steel bars and are perfectly see-through, offering not the least privacy. Underneath each is a large plastic tray littered with the refuse of its inmate: rotting food, excrement, pools of urine. Some cages are empty, but many are not, and those that are not contain one thing and one thing only: a large black chimpanzee.

An ear-splitting explosion of shrieking and screaming greets them. Raw fear grips Peter. His breathing is cut short and he stands rooted to the spot.

“Quite the effect, huh?” shouts Bob. “It’s because you’re new and ‘invading’ their territory.” With his fingers Bob signals the ironic quotation marks around the word “invading”.

Peter stares. Some of the chimpanzees have bounded up and are shaking their cages with fury. Restrained by horizontal chains, the cages swing only so much. It’s the way the apes are suspended in the air, cut off from each other, from the very earth, that freaks him out. They have nothing to hide behind, hold on to, or play with, not a toy or blanket or the least bit of straw. They just hang there in their barren cages, the very image of incarceration. Hasn’t he seen movies like that, where a new inmate walks into a penitentiary and all the inmates start to jeer and catcall? He swallows hard and breathes deeply, trying to master his fear.

Bob moves forward, occasionally hollering some comment or other, unconcerned by the mad ruckus. Peter follows him closely, walking in the exact middle of the corridor, well clear of the bars. Though he can see that the animals are securely confined — in cages and then behind bars — he’s still afraid.

Every three or four cages there is a heavy-gauge chain-link fence that runs from the corridor bars to the wall and ceiling of the building, separating one set of cages from the next. Yet another layer to the confinement. Each of these fences has a door through it, at the back, next to the wall.

Peter points to a fence. “Aren’t the cages enough?” he yells.

Bob shouts back, “It allows us to release some of the chimpanzees so they can be together in larger but separate spaces.”

Indeed, in the relative darkness of the compound, Peter notices on one side of the corridor four chimpanzees lolling about the floor, near the back wall. At the sight of him, they get up and start acting out. One makes to rush the bars. But at least they look more natural like that — on the ground, in a group, lively and dynamic. Bob gestures that Peter should squat down. “They like it when we’re at their height,” he says in Peter’s ear.

They both crouch. Bob puts his hand through the bars and waves to the chimpanzee that seemed the most aggressive, the one that made to attack them. After a moment of hesitation, the animal runs up to the bars, touches Bob’s hand, then scampers back to rejoin the others at the back wall. Bob smiles.

Peter starts to calm down. They’re just doing their thing, he tells himself. He and Bob stand up and resume moving down the corridor. Peter is able to observe the chimpanzees more steadily. They display various levels of aggression or agitation; they shake, they growl, they shriek, they grimace, they make forceful body movements. All are in an uproar.

Except one. The last prisoner at the end of the corridor sits quietly in its cage, lost in its own thoughts and seemingly oblivious to its surroundings. When Peter reaches its cage, he stops, struck by the creature’s singular behaviour.

The ape is sitting with its back to its venting primate neighbours, presenting its profile to Peter. A straight arm casually lies atop a bent knee. Peter notices the coat of sleek black hair that covers the animal’s body. It’s so thick it looks like a costume. From it emerges hands and feet that are hairless and clearly very nimble. Of the head, he observes the receding, nearly absent forehead; the big saucer-like ears; the massive, overhanging brows; the perfunctory nose; and the smooth, bulging, pleasingly rounded mouth, with the hairless upper lip and the slightly bearded lower one. Because of their great size, these lips are highly expressive. Peter gazes at them. At the moment, with this particular specimen, they are in slight motion — fluttering, parting, closing, puckering — as if the ape were in conversation with itself.

The creature turns its head and looks him in the eyes.

“It’s looking at me,” Peter says.

“Yep, they do that,” responds Bob.

“I mean, right into my eyes.”

“Yep, yep. Usually a sign of dominance, but this one’s a very chilled-out dude.”

Still looking at Peter, the ape purses its lips, funnel-like. From them, making its way through the raucous noise of the compound to Peter’s ears, comes a panted hoo-hoo sound.

“What does that mean?” he asks.

“It’s a greeting. He’s saying hello.”

The ape does it again, this time mouthing it without actually making the sound, relying on Peter’s intent gaze rather than his assaulted ears.

Peter can’t take his eyes off the ape. What an attractive face, the expression so vivacious, the scrutiny so intense. The large head is as densely covered with black hair as the body, but the face, in its essential parts, the upside-down triangle of the eyes and nose and the circle of the mouth, is bare, showing off smooth dark skin. Aside from some faint vertical wrinkles on the upper lip, the only wrinkles on the ape’s face are around the eyes, concentric ones beneath each orbit, and a few wavy lines over the flattened bridge of the nose and between the prominent brows. The effect of these circles within circles is to draw attention to their dual centres. What colour are those eyes? Peter can’t tell exactly in the artificial light of the compound, but they seem to be a bright rusty brown, nearly red, but of the earth. The eyes are closely set, the gaze steady. That gaze bores into him and holds him in place.

The ape turns its body to face Peter fully. Its stare is charged, but its posture is relaxed. It seems to be enjoying swallowing him with its eyes.

“I want to get closer,” Peter says. He is amazed that he has said this. Where has his fear gone? Just a minute ago he was quaking with terror.

“Oh, you can’t do that, sir,” says Bob with evident alarm.

At the end of the corridor is a heavy wire door. There were two like it midway down the corridor, on either side. Peter looks around; there are no chimpanzees on the floor beyond the door. He steps towards it and puts his hand on the handle. It turns fully.

Bob’s eyes open wide. “Ah, man, who forgot to lock that door? You really shouldn’t go in!” he pleads. “You’ll — you’ll have to talk to Dr. Lemnon, sir.”

“Bring him on,” Peter says as he swings the door open and goes through.

Bob follows him in. “Don’t touch him. They can be very aggressive. He might bite your hand off.”

Peter stands in front of the cage. He and the ape lock gazes again. Once more he feels a magnetic pull. What do you want?

The ape squeezes its hand through the criss-cross bars and reaches out. The hand opens in front of Peter, narrow palm up. Peter stares at it, at the black leathery skin, at the long fingers. There is no question, no hesitation. He lifts his own hand.

“Oh boy, oh boy!” Bob whimpers.

The two hands wrap around each other. A short but strong opposable thumb reaches over and pins his hand down. The gesture comes with no grasping or pulling; there is no menace to it. The ape is simply squeezing his hand into its own. It’s a surprisingly warm hand. Peter takes hold of it with both of his, one hand cupping it in a handshake, the other holding on to its hairy back. It has the appearance of a politician’s glad hand, but fixed and intense. The ape’s grasp tightens. It could crush his hand, he realizes, but it doesn’t and he feels no fear. It continues to stare into his eyes. Peter doesn’t know why, but his throat tightens and he feels close to tears. Is it that no one since Clara has looked at him like that, fully and frankly, the eyes like open doors?

“Where is this one from?” he asks without averting his eyes. “Does he have a name?”

Peter notices the switch in his pronouns, from it to he. It comes naturally. This creature is no object.

“His name’s Odo,” Bob answers, rocking nervously from side to side. “He’s a rolling stone. He was brought over by someone who was volunteering in Africa for the Peace Corps. Then he was with NASA, for testing in the space program. Then he went to Yerkes, then LEMSIP, before—”

A burst of shrieking comes from the other end of the corridor. The chimpanzees, who have mostly settled down, start up again. It’s even more deafening than when he and Bob entered. Dr. Lemnon has returned. “BOB, YOU BETTER HAVE A DAMN GOOD EXPLANATION FOR THIS!” he bellows.

Peter and Odo let go of each other’s hands. The consent is mutual. The ape turns and resumes his former position, his side to Peter, his gaze somewhat lifted.

Bob looks as if he’d rather climb into one of the hanging cages than return to the corridor. Peter goes out first. The full menace of Dr. Bill Lemnon becomes plain as he strides down the corridor, his angry features alternately illuminated and obscured by the spaced-out light bulbs, the din of the animals amplifying as he gets closer.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE?” he yells at Peter.

Any pretence at cordiality is gone. Lemnon is an ape asserting his dominance.

“I’ll buy that one off you,” Peter says calmly. He points to Odo.

“Will you, now?” replies Lemnon. “Should we throw in four elephants and a hippo? Maybe two lions and a herd of zebras? This isn’t a pet store! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”

“I’ll pay you fifteen thousand dollars.” Oh, the terrible appeal of round numbers. Fifteen thousand dollars — that’s considerably more than his car cost.

Lemnon stares in disbelief, as does Bob, who has crept back into the corridor. “Well, well, you must be a senator after all, if you’re throwing that kind of money around. Which one?”

“That one there.”

Lemnon looks. “Huh. Can’t get more omega than that bozo. He lives in la-la land.” He thinks. “Fifteen thousand dollars, you say?”

Peter nods.

Lemnon laughs. “I guess we are a pet store. Bob, you’ve got a great eye for customers. Mr. Tovy — I’m sorry, Senator Tovy — you can have your pet chimpanzee if you want. Only thing is, we don’t have a money-back policy. You buy him, you get tired of him, you want to give him back to us — we’ll take him, but it’ll still cost you fifteen grand. You hear me?”

“It’s a deal,” says Peter. He extends his hand. Lemnon shakes it, looking like he’s enjoying the greatest joke in the world.

Peter glances at Odo. As he begins to move off, he sees from the corner of his eyes that the ape is turning his head. Peter looks again. Odo is staring at him once more. A quiet thrill goes through him. He’s been aware of me all along. To himself as much as to the ape, he whispers, “I’m coming back, I promise.”

They walk down the corridor. A last observation forces itself upon him as he looks left and right, something he didn’t notice on his way in: He’s struck by the chimpanzees’ great diversity. He assumed that one chimpanzee would pretty much look and be like the next. It is not so, not at all. Each ape has its own body shape and bearing, its own coat of hair with its own colour and pattern, its own face with its own tone, complexion, and expressions. Each, he sees, is something he hadn’t expected: an individual with a unique personality.

Bob sidles up to Peter at the door of the compound, looking worried and discombobulated. “We sell them,” he whispers, “but not for that—”

Lemnon waves him away. “Git, git!”

They return to the car. Peter comes to a quick agreement with Lemnon. He will be back in a week or two, as soon as he can; he needs time to make the necessary arrangements. He promises to mail a cheque for a thousand dollars as a deposit. Lemnon agrees to get all the papers ready.

As the car drives away, Peter turns and looks out the rear window. Lemnon still wears his triumphant smirk. Then he turns to Bob and his expression changes. Bob is evidently about to be fully dressed down. Peter feels bad for him.

“Had a good visit?” the driver asks.

Peter sits back in a daze. “It was interesting.”

He can’t believe what he has just done. What will he do with a chimpanzee in Ottawa? He lives in an apartment, five floors off the ground. Will the other residents accept having a large, unwieldy ape in their building? Is it even legal to own a chimpanzee in Canada? How will the ape take to Canadian winters?

He shakes his head. Clara has been dead for just over six months. Did he not read somewhere that people who are grieving a major loss should wait at least a year before making important changes in their lives? Has grief caused him to throw away all good sense?

He’s a fool.

Back at the hotel he tells no one, neither the Oklahomans nor his fellow Canadians, about what he has done. Nor does he tell anyone in Ottawa upon his return the following morning. He spends that first day at home alternating between denial and disbelief, and completely forgetting about it. The next day he hits upon an excellent idea: He will buy the chimpanzee after all, and donate it to a zoo. He’s quite certain the Toronto Zoo doesn’t have chimpanzees, but another zoo — Calgary? — will surely take the animal. It will be a stupidly expensive gift, but he’ll make it in Clara’s name. That will make it worth every penny. There, the matter is settled.

He wakes up early on the third morning. He stares at the ceiling from his pillow. Odo looked right into him with his reddish-brown eyes, and Peter said to him, I’m coming back, I promise. That wasn’t a promise to drop him off at a zoo; it was a promise to take care of him.

He has to go through with it. Dammit all, he doesn’t know why, but he wants to go through with it.

Once the first, central decision is made, all the ones that follow are easy. He mails the deposit cheque for Odo to Lemnon.

It’s obvious that they can’t stay in Ottawa. In Oklahoma, science was the excuse to keep the ape in a cage. In Canada, it would be the weather. They need a warmer climate.

It’s good to think in terms of “they” again. Is it pathetic? Instead of throwing himself at another woman right away, on the rebound, as the expression goes, as if he were a ball in a pinball machine, is he doing worse by throwing himself at a pet? It doesn’t feel that way. Whatever term might be given to their relationship, Odo is no pet.

Peter never thought he would move again. He and Clara had never talked about it, but they didn’t mind the cold weather, and the idea was that they would stay in Ottawa into their old age.

Where will they go?

Florida. A lot of Canadians retire there, precisely for the purpose of fleeing Canada’s winters. But the place means nothing to him. He doesn’t want to live between a strip mall, a golf course, and a sweltering beach.

Portugal. The word illuminates his mind. He’s of Portuguese origin. His family emigrated to Canada when he was two years old. He and Clara visited Lisbon once. He loved the tiled houses, the luxuriant gardens, the hills, the streets of rundown European charm. The city felt like a late-summer evening, a mix of soft light, nostalgia, and slight boredom. Only Lisbon, like Ottawa, is no place for an ape. They need a quiet spot, with lots of space and few people.

He recalls that his parents came from a rural area — the High Mountains of Portugal. A return to his roots? He might even have distant relatives there.

The destination fixes itself in his mind. His next step is to deal with his attachments to Canada. He considers what these attachments are. At one time they were everything: his wife, his son, his granddaughter, his sister in Toronto, the members of his extended family, his friends, his career — in a word, his life. Now, other than his son, he is surrounded by material relics: an apartment with stuff in it, a car, a pied-à-terre in Toronto, an office in the West Block on Parliament Hill.

His heart beats with excitement at the idea of getting rid of it all. The apartment is now unbearable to him, imprinted as it is in every room with Clara’s suffering. His car is just a car — the same with his studio apartment in Toronto. And his job as a senator is a sinecure.

Distance might improve his relations with Ben. He isn’t going to spend the rest of his life waiting around Ottawa for his son to find more time for him. His younger sister, Teresa, has her own life in Toronto. They talk on the phone regularly, so no reason why that should stop. As for Rachel, his granddaughter, for all he now sees of her or hears from her, he might as well live on Mars. She might be tempted to visit him one day, lured by the appeal of Europe. That’s a valid hope.

He takes a deep breath. It all has to go.

With alarming glee, he sets about throwing off the chains that hold him down, as he now thinks of them. Already, when he and Clara moved from Toronto to Ottawa, they rid themselves of many personal possessions. Now, in a frenzied week, the rest goes. Their apartment in Ottawa—“Such a good location!” the agent beams — finds a buyer quickly, as does his place in Toronto. Books are carted away to a used bookstore, furniture and appliances sold off, clothes given to charity, personal papers donated to the National Archives, and knick-knacks and baubles simply thrown away. He pays off all his bills, closes his utility and phone accounts, and cancels his newspaper subscription. He gets his visa for Portugal. He wires a Portuguese bank and makes arrangements for opening an account. Ben helps dutifully, all the while grousing about why on earth Peter would pick up from his ordered life and leave.

Peter walks away from it all carrying nothing but a suitcase of clothes, a family photo album, some camping gear, a guidebook to Portugal, and an English-Portuguese dictionary.

He books their flight. It appears that it would be easier if he and the ape fly directly from the United States to Portugal. Fewer borders to cross with an exotic animal. The airline tells him that, provided he has a cage and the animal is calm, they will carry it. He consults with a veterinarian on how to sedate a chimpanzee.

Through connections, he finds a buyer for his car where he wants one, in New York City. “I’ll deliver it myself,” he tells the man from Brooklyn on the phone.

He doesn’t say that he will be taking a slight detour via Oklahoma on his way down.

He cancels all his future appointments — with Senate committees, with family and friends, with his doctor (his heart isn’t so good, but he packs a supply of medication and a renewal for his prescription), with everyone. He writes letters to those to whom he doesn’t speak in person or on the phone.

“You suggested I bust loose,” he tells the Whip.

“You sure took my words to heart. Why Portugal?”

“Warm weather. My parents came from there.”

The Whip looks at him steadily. “Peter, have you met another woman?”

“No, I haven’t. Not even close.”

“All right, if you say so.”

“How could I have met a woman in Portugal while living in Ottawa?” he asks. But the more he denies a romantic connection, the less the Whip seems to believe him.

He doesn’t tell anyone about Odo, neither his family nor his friends. The ape remains a luminous secret in his heart.

He happens to have a dental appointment coming up. He spends his last night in Canada sleeping in a motel, and the next morning he has his teeth cleaned. He says good-bye to his dentist and he drives away.

It’s a long drive through Ontario, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri to Oklahoma. He doesn’t want to tire himself too much, so he does it over five days. Along the way — from a corner store in Lansing, Michigan, from a diner in Lebanon, Missouri — he calls the Institute for Primate Research to make sure they are aware of his imminent arrival. He speaks to the young woman who told Lemnon about the phone call, the one that distracted him and allowed Peter to visit the chimpanzee compound. She assures him that all is ready.

After a last night in Tulsa, Peter makes his way to the IPR, arriving mid-morning. He parks the car and wanders over to the pond. On the main island, two people are having what looks like a sign-language lesson with a chimpanzee. A group of three apes lazes about in the centre, on the ground. Sitting among them is Bob, attending to a chimpanzee, inspecting its shoulder. Peter calls out and waves. Bob waves back, gets up, and heads for a rowboat that’s resting on the shore. The ape he’s with follows him. It leaps with ease into the rowboat and perches on a bench. Bob pushes off and rows over.

Halfway across the pond, when the boat turns, the chimpanzee, whose view was blocked by Bob, sees him. It hoots loudly and pounds the bench with a fist. Peter blinks. Is that…? — yes, it is. Odo is larger than he remembered. The size of a big dog, only wider.

Before the boat has reached the shore, Odo leaps out, bounces once off the ground, and sails through the air towards Peter. He has no time to react. The ape slams against his chest, wrapping his arms around him. Peter falls over, landing inelegantly on his backside and sprawling flat on his back. He feels large wet lips and the smooth hardness of teeth against the side of his face. He’s being attacked!

Bob’s laughter comes through to him. “My, my, he’s certainly taken to you. Gentle, Odo, gentle. You all right?”

Peter can’t answer the question. He’s shaking from head to toe. But he feels no pain. Odo has not bitten him. The ape has instead moved off and settled right next to him, pressed against his shoulder. He starts playing with Peter’s hair.

Bob kneels next to him. “You all right?” he asks again.

“Y-y-yes, I think so,” Peter answers. He slowly sits up. He stares with wide eyes and breathless incredulity. The strange black face, the thick, hairy body, the whole, warm animal literally breathing down his neck — with no bars between them, no protection for him, no safety. He doesn’t dare push the ape away. He just sits there, alert and paralyzed, his gaze hovering. “What’s he doing?” he finally asks. The ape is still plucking at his head.

“He’s grooming you,” Bob replies. “That’s a big part of chimpanzee social life. I groom you, you groom me. It’s how they get along. And it gets rid of ticks and fleas. Keeps them clean.”

“What should I do?”

“Nothing. Or you can groom him back, if you want.”

A knee is right there. He brings a trembling hand to it and strokes a few hairs.

“Here, I’ll show you how,” says Bob.

Bob sits on the ground and much more assertively starts grooming Odo’s back. With the edge of one hand, he pushes through the chimpanzee’s coat against the natural lie of the hairs, exposing their roots and bare skin. After doing this two or three times, he finds a good patch and sets to work with the other hand, scratching and picking out skin flakes, bits of dirt, and other detritus. All in all, a fussy, involving activity. Bob seems to forget about Peter.

Peter begins to regain his composure. It’s not disagreeable, what the creature is doing to his head. He can feel soft fingers against his skull.

He looks into Odo’s face. In immediate response the ape shifts his gaze to look at him. Their faces are maybe eight inches apart, eyes fully staring into eyes. Odo hoots lightly, the panted breath bouncing off his face, then folds out his lower lip, revealing a row of large teeth. Peter tenses.

“He’s smiling at you,” says Bob.

It’s only then that the young man, who is so good at reading the ape’s emotions, understands Peter’s. He puts a hand on his shoulder.

“He won’t harm you, sir. He likes you. And if he didn’t like you, he’d just leave you alone.”

“I’m sorry I got you into trouble last time.”

“Don’t worry about that. It was worth it. This place is bad. Wherever you’re going with Odo will be better than here.”

“Is Lemnon around?”

“No. He’ll be back after lunch.”

A stroke of good luck. Over the next few hours, Bob gives Peter a mini-course on Odo. He teaches him the basics about chimpanzee sounds and facial expressions. Peter learns about hoots and grunts, about barks and screams, about the pouting, puckering, and smacking of lips, about the many roles played by panting. Odo can be as loud as Krakatoa or as quiet as sunlight. He has no command of American Sign Language but does understand some English. And as is the case with humans, tone, gesture, and body language do much to convey meaning. The ape’s hands also speak, as does his posture and the lie of his hair, and Peter must listen to what they have to say. A kiss and a hug are just that, a kiss and a hug, to be enjoyed and appreciated and perhaps returned, at least the hug. The best face is one where Odo’s mouth is slightly open, his demeanour relaxed; this may be followed by one of the delights of chimpanzee language, the laughter, a bright-eyed, nearly silent panting, the mirth fully expressed without the grating HA HA HA of human laughter.

“It’s a complete language,” says Bob of chimpanzee communication.

“I’m not very good with foreign languages,” Peter muses aloud.

“Don’t worry. You’ll understand him. He’ll make sure of that.”

He’s potty-trained, Bob tells Peter, only the potty has to be within sight. Chimpanzees don’t tolerate continence for very long. Bob supplies four potties to distribute around Odo’s territory.

The cage that is to be Odo’s means of transportation and his nighttime nest doesn’t fit in the car. They take it apart and put it in the trunk. Odo will travel in the front seat.

At one point Peter goes to the restroom. He sits down on the toilet lid and puts his head into his hands. Was early fatherhood like this? He doesn’t remember feeling so overwhelmed. Bringing baby Ben home was a giddy experience. He and Clara didn’t know what they were doing — do any young parents know? But it was all right. They raised Ben with love and attention. And they weren’t afraid of him. He badly wishes Clara were with him now. What am I doing here? he says to himself. This is crazy.

Bob and he go for a walk with Odo, much to the ape’s delight. Odo forages for berries, climbs trees, asks (with a grunt and his arms raised, like a child) to be carried by Peter, who obliges, lurching and stumbling about until he’s ready to drop. The way Odo holds on to him with his arms and legs, he feels he has a hundred-pound octopus on his back.

“I can give you his collar and his twenty-foot leash if you want, but they’re pointless,” Bob says. “If he’s in a tree, he’ll just pull you up like you’re a yo-yo. And if you happen to be on a horse, he’ll pull your horse up too. Chimpanzees are unbelievably strong.”

“So how do I restrain him?”

Bob thinks for a few seconds before answering. “I don’t mean to get personal, sir, but are you married?”

“I was,” Peter replies soberly.

“And how did you restrain your wife?”

Restrain Clara? “I didn’t.”

“Right. You got along. And when you didn’t, you argued and you coped. It’s the same here. There’s very little you can do to control him. You’ll just have to cope. Odo likes figs. Placate him with figs.”

During this exchange, Odo has been poking around a bush. He comes out and sits right next to Peter, on his foot. Brazenly, he feels, Peter reaches down and pats Odo’s head.

“You gotta get physical,” Bob says. He squats in front of the chimpanzee. “Odo, tickle-fest, tickle-fest?” he says, his eyes open wide. He begins to tickle the ape’s sides. Soon the two are wildly rolling about the ground, Bob laughing and Odo hooting and shrieking with delight.

“Join in, join in!” Bob shouts. The next moment Peter and Odo are thrashing about. The ape does indeed possess Herculean strength. There are times when he lifts Peter clear off the ground with arms and legs before crashing him back down.

When their roughhousing is over, Peter staggers to his feet. He’s dishevelled, one of his shoes has come off, his shirt has lost two buttons, the front pocket is torn, and he’s covered in grass, twigs, and soil stains. It was an embarrassingly juvenile episode, unbecoming of a man of sixty-two years — and utterly thrilling. He can feel his fear of the ape draining away.

Bob looks at him. “You’ll do fine,” he says.

Peter smiles and nods. He declines the collar and leash.

When Lemnon appears, there is only the commercial transaction that needs to be completed. Peter hands over the bank draft, which Lemnon inspects carefully. In return, he gives Peter various papers. One form states that he, Peter Tovy, is the legal owner of the male chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, Odo. It is notarized by a lawyer in Oklahoma City. Another form is from a wildlife veterinarian; it gives the ape a clean bill of health and guarantees that Odo is up to date on all vaccinations. Yet another is an export permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They all look properly official, with signatures and embossed stamps. “All right, I guess that’s it,” Peter says. Lemnon and he don’t shake hands, and Peter walks away without saying another word.

Bob places a folded towel on the front passenger seat. He bends down and hugs Odo. Then he stands and motions to him to get into the car. Odo does so without hesitation, making himself comfortable in the seat.

Bob takes hold of the ape’s hand and holds it to his face. “Good-bye, Odo,” he says, his voice strained by sadness.

Peter gets in the driver’s seat and starts the engine. “Should we put his seatbelt on?” he asks.

“Why not,” Bob replies. He reaches over and works it across Odo’s waist. He snaps the buckle in. The shoulder strap is too high, running across Odo’s face. Bob puts it behind his head. Odo does not mind the arrangement.

Peter feels panic simmering within him. I can’t do this. I should just call the whole thing off. He lowers his window and waves at Bob. “Good-bye, Bob. Thanks again. You’ve been a tremendous help.”

The drive from Oklahoma City takes longer than the drive to it. He goes at a moderate speed so as not to alarm Odo. And whereas from Ottawa to Oklahoma City he jumped from human colony to human colony — Toronto, Detroit, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Tulsa — on the way to New York City he avoids as many urban centres as he can, once again to spare the ape.

He would like to sleep in a proper bed and enjoy a shower, but he is quite certain that no motel owner will rent a room to a half-simian couple. On the first night, he turns off the road and stops the car next to an abandoned farmhouse. He assembles the cage, but he isn’t sure where to place it. On the roof of the car? Sticking out of the trunk? A little ways off, in the ape’s “own” territory? Finally he puts the cage, its door ajar, next to the car and leaves the front passenger window rolled open. He gives Odo a blanket, then he lies down on the back seat. When night falls, the ape comes in and out, making considerable noise, leaping into the back seat a few times, practically landing on Peter, until he settles in the foot well of the back seat, next to him. Odo doesn’t snore, but his breathing is powerful. Peter does not sleep well, not only because he is overtly disturbed by the ape but because of nagging worries. This is a large, powerful animal, unrestrained and uncontrollable. What have I got myself into?

Other nights they sleep on the edge of a field, at the end of a dead-end road, wherever it’s quiet and isolated.

One evening he has a closer look at the papers Lemnon gave him. Included among them is a report that gives an overview of Odo’s life. He was “wild-caught as a baby” in Africa. No mention is made of the Peace Corps volunteer, only that Odo next spent time with NASA, at a place called Holloman Aerospace Medical Center, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Then he went to the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, in Atlanta, Georgia, then to the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates, LEMSIP for short, in Tuxedo, New York, before being sent to Lemnon’s Institute for Primate Research. What an odyssey. No wonder Bob said Odo was a rolling stone.

Peter lingers on certain words: “medical”…“biology”…“laboratory”…“research”—and especially “experimental medicine and surgery.” Experimental? Odo was shunted from one medical Auschwitz to another, and this after being taken from his mother as a baby. Peter wonders what happened to Odo’s mother. Earlier in the day, while grooming the ape, he noticed a tattoo on his chest. Only in that area can the dark skin be made out beneath the thick coat, and there, in the upper-right-hand corner, he found two wrinkled digits — the number 65—inscribed on unacceptable paper.

He turns to Odo. “What have they done to you?”

He moves over and grooms him.

One afternoon in lush Kentucky, after filling up, he drives to the far end of the recreation area behind the gas station so they can eat. Odo gets out of the car and climbs a tree. At first Peter is relieved; the ape is out of the way. But then he can’t get him to come down. He’s afraid that Odo will reach over into another tree and then another and be gone. But the ape stays put. He only gazes at the forest on whose edge he is hovering. He seems drunk with joy at being in such a leafy haven. A chimpanzee afloat in a sea of green.

Peter waits. Time goes by. He has nothing to read and he doesn’t feel like listening to the radio. He has a nap in the back seat. He reflects on Clara, on his disenchanted son, on the life he is leaving behind. He walks to the gas station to get food and water. He sits in the car and contemplates the layout of the gas station, its main building that was once brightly coloured but is now faded, the expanse of asphalt, the coming and going of cars and trucks and people, the recreation area, the edge of the forest, the tree in which Odo has ensconced himself, and then he sits there and just watches Odo.

No one notices the chimpanzee in the tree except children. While grown-ups busy themselves with trips to the restrooms and with fuelling up their cars and their families, children look around. They grin. Some point and try to alert their parents. A random, blind gaze is all they get. The children wave at Odo as they drive off.

Five hours later, as the day is coming to an end, Peter is still looking up at the chimpanzee. Odo isn’t ignoring him. In fact, when he’s not distracted by activity in the gas station, Odo looks down at him with the same relaxed interest that Peter shows looking up at him.

When dusk comes, the air cools a little and still the ape does not come down. Peter opens the trunk of the car and pulls out his sleeping bag and Odo’s blanket. The ape hoots. Peter gets close to the tree and lifts the blanket in the air. The creature reaches down to grab it. He climbs back into the tree and wraps himself up cosily.

Peter leaves fruit, slices of bread spread with peanut butter, and a jug of water at the foot of the tree. When it gets dark, he lies down for the night in the car. He is exhausted. He is worried that Odo will flee during the night or, worse, attack someone. But he falls asleep with a last, pleasing realization: It is likely the first time since his African childhood that Odo has slept under the stars.

In the early morning, the fruit and bread slices are gone and the jug is half empty. When Peter emerges from the car, Odo comes down from the tree. He raises his arms towards him. Peter sits on the ground and they embrace and groom each other. Peter gives Odo a breakfast of chocolate milk and egg salad sandwiches.

At two other gas stations along the way, the same tree-dwelling scenario is repeated. Peter twice has to call the airline to change their reservations, at a cost each time.

During the day, as they drive across America, he finds himself at regular intervals turning his head to glance at his passenger, astounded again and again that he’s in a car with a chimpanzee. And he senses that Odo, who is otherwise much taken by the landscape going by, does the same thing, turns his head at regular intervals to glance at him, astounded again and again that he’s in a car with a human being. And so, in a constant and mutual state of wonder and amazement (and a little fear), they make their way to New York City.

Peter grows nervous as they approach the metropolis. He worries that Lemnon has played a trick on him, that at Kennedy Airport he will be stopped and Odo taken away.

The ape stares at the city, his jaw slack, his eyes unblinking. On a side road on the way to Kennedy, Peter stops the car. Now comes the hard part. He must inject into the ape a powerful animal sedative called Sernalyn, prescribed by the veterinarian. Will Odo attack him in retaliation?

“Look!” he says, pointing away. Odo looks. Peter jabs him in the arm with the syringe. Odo hardly seems to notice the prick and in a few minutes falls unconscious. At the airport, because of the nature of his cargo, Peter is allowed to go to a special bay to unload the ape. He assembles the cage and with considerable effort heaves Odo’s limp body onto a blanket on the floor of it. He lingers, his fingers hooked around the metal bars. What if Odo doesn’t wake up? Where will that leave him?

The cage is put on a dolly and wheeled into the labyrinth of JFK. Peter is accompanied by a security guard. When the customs official has gone through all the papers and verified his flight ticket, Odo is taken away. Peter is told that, if the captain gives his permission, he will be able to go in the hold during the flight to check on him.

He races away. He goes to a car wash, cleans the car inside and out, drives to Brooklyn. The prospective buyer proves to be a difficult man who magnifies every fault in the car and dismisses every quality. But Peter didn’t practice politics for nearly twenty years for nothing. He listens to the man without saying a word, then restates the agreed-upon price. When the man makes to argue further, Peter says, “That’s fine. I’ll sell it to the other buyer.” He gets into the car and starts it.

The man comes up to the window. “What other buyer?” he asks.

“Just after I agreed to sell it to you, another buyer called. I said no, because I made a commitment to you. But it’s better for me if you don’t want it. I’ll get more money that way.” He gets the car into gear and starts reversing out of the driveway.

The man waves. “Wait, wait! I’ll take it,” he yells. He quickly pays up.

Peter flags down a taxi and returns to Kennedy. He pesters the airline with his worries about Odo. They assure him that, no, they won’t forget to load the ape onto the plane, and that, yes, he will be loaded in the top hold, which is pressurized and heated, and that, no, there have been no reports of him stirring, and that, yes, he gives all signs of still being alive, and that, no, Peter can’t see him just yet, and that, yes, as soon as the plane is at cruising altitude they will inquire about Peter going to see him.

An hour into the flight, the captain gives his permission and Peter goes to the back of the plane. Through a narrow door, he enters the top hold. The light is turned on. He spots the cage right away, tethered to the wall of the plane with straps. It’s set apart from the first-class luggage. He hurries to it. He is relieved to see Odo’s chest rising and falling evenly. He puts his hand through the bars and feels the warm body. He would go inside the cage to groom him, but the airline has added its own padlock to the door.

Except for the odd trip to the restroom or for a meal, Peter stays next to the cage the whole flight. The flight attendants don’t seem to mind him being there. The veterinarian told him that a chimpanzee can’t overdose on Sernalyn. Twice during the flight he gives Odo an extra jab. He hates doing it, but he doesn’t want the ape to wake up in such a noisy, strange place. He might panic.

Enough of this, Peter thinks. He promises that he will never subject Odo to such egregious strains again. The ape deserves better.

A flight attendant enters the hold half an hour before the plane is due to land. He must return to his seat, she tells him. He does as he is told and promptly falls asleep.

When the plane bumps to a landing early in the morning at Lisbon’s Portela Airport, he groggily looks out the window, and it is he who feels panic racing through him. His heart jumps about his chest. His breathing is laboured. This is all a mistake. I’ll just turn around. But what about Odo? Lisbon surely has a zoo. He could abandon the ape in his cage at the entrance, an animal foundling.

An hour after all the other passengers have picked up their luggage and moved on, he is still waiting in the arrivals area. He spends most of that hour in a cubicle of a restroom near the luggage carousel, weeping quietly. If only Clara were with him! She would steady him. But if she were around, he wouldn’t be in this ridiculous predicament.

Eventually a man in a uniform finds him. “O senhor é o homem com o macaco?” he asks.

Peter stares at him dumbly.

“Macaco?” the man says, making to scratch his armpits while going oo, oo, oo, oo.

“Yes, yes!” Peter nods.

As they walk through secured doors, the man chats amiably in Portuguese to him. Peter nods, though he doesn’t understand a word. He remembers from long-ago conversations between his parents that this is what Portuguese sounds like, a slurred mournful whisper.

In the middle of a hangar, the cage is resting on a luggage cart. Some airport workers are standing around it. Again Peter’s heart jumps in his chest, but this time with gladness. The men are chatting about the macaco with evident interest. Odo is still unconscious. The men ask questions, to which Peter can only shake his head apologetically.

“Ele não fala português,” says the man who brought him in.

Sign language takes over.

“O que o senhor vai fazer com ele?” says another man, his hands waving in front of him, palms up.

“I’m going to the High Mountains of Portugal,” Peter replies. He cuts a rectangle in the air with a finger, says, “Portugal,” and points to the top right of the rectangle.

“Ah, as Altas Montanhas de Portugal. Lá em cima com os rinocerontes,” responds the man.

The others laugh. Peter nods, though he doesn’t know what has amused them. Rinocerontes?

Eventually their work duties call. His passport is examined and stamped; Odo’s papers are signed, stamped, and separated, one set for Peter, one set for them. There. A man leans against the luggage cart. The foreigner and his macaco are good to go.

Peter blanches. In the frenzy of the last two weeks, there is one detail he has forgotten to address: how he and Odo will get from Lisbon to the High Mountains of Portugal. They need a car, but he has made no arrangements for buying one.

He puts his palms face out. Stop. “I need to buy a car.” He shakes his fists up and down, mimicking hands on a steering wheel.

“Um carro?”

“Yes. Where can I buy one, where?” He rubs thumb and forefinger together.

“O senhor quer comprar um carro?”

Comprar—that sounds right.

“Yes, yes, comprar um carro, where?”

The man calls over another and they discuss. They write on a piece of paper, which they hand to Peter. Citroën, it says, with an address. He knows citron is French for lemon. He hopes this isn’t an omen.

“Near, near?” he asks, cupping his fingers towards him.

“Sim, é muito perto. Táxi.”

He points to himself, then away and back. “I’m going and then I’m coming back.”

“Sim, sim.” The men nod.

He hurries away. He has brought with him substantial Canadian and American cash, in addition to traveller’s cheques. And he has his credit card, for extra surety. He changes all his money into escudos and hops into a taxi.

The Citroën dealership is not very far from the airport. The cars are strange, roly-poly things. One has lovely lines, but it’s expensive and too big for his needs. Finally, he decides on a very basic model, a dorky grey contraption that looks like it was made from tuna cans. It has no frills at all, no radio, no air conditioning, no armrests, no automatic transmission. It doesn’t even have roll-down windows. The windows are cut in two horizontally and the lower half hinges up to rest against the top half, like a flap, held up by a clip. Nor is there a hardtop roof, or a glass rear window, only a piece of sturdy fabric that can be detached and rolled back, flexible transparent plastic window included. He opens and closes a door. The car feels rickety and rudimentary, but the salesman expresses great enthusiasm for it, praising it to the sky with his hands. Peter wonders at the name, which isn’t a name at all, only an alphanumeric code: 2CV. He would prefer an American car. But he needs a car right away, before Odo wakes up.

He interrupts the salesman with a nod — he will take it. The man breaks into smiles and directs him to his office. Peter’s international driver’s licence is inspected, papers are filled out, money is taken, calls are made to his credit card company.

An hour later he drives up to the airport, a temporary licence plate taped to the inside of the car’s rear window. The transmission on the car is clunky, with the gear stick poking straight out of the dashboard, the engine is noisy, and the ride is bouncy. He parks the car and makes his way back to the hangar.

Odo is still sleeping. Peter and the airport employee wheel the cage out to the car. They transfer the ape to the back seat. Right then, a problem arises. The cage, even folded up, doesn’t fit in the tiny trunk of the 2CV. There’s no question of strapping it onto the soft roof. It has to be left behind. Peter is not bothered. The thing is a nuisance, and besides, Odo hasn’t used it at all. The airport man is amenable to taking it.

Peter checks one last time that he hasn’t forgotten anything. He has his passport and papers, he’s pulled out the map of Portugal, his luggage is jammed into the trunk, the ape is in the back seat — he’s ready to set off. Only he’s exhausted and thirsty and hungry. He steadies himself.

“How far to the Altas Montanhas de Portugal?” he asks.

“Para as Altas Montanhas de Portugal? Cerca de dez horas,” the man answers.

Peter uses his fingers to make sure he has understood. Ten fingers. Ten hours. The man nods. Peter sighs.

He consults the map. As he did in the United States, he decides to avoid large cities. That means turning away from the coast and driving through the interior. Past a town called Alhandra, there is a bridge across the Tagus. After that, the map promises settlements that are so small they receive the minimal cartographic designation, a tiny black circle with a blank centre.

A couple of hours later, after only a quick stop at a café in a place called Porto Alto to eat and drink and buy supplies, he can keep his eyes open no longer. They come upon Ponte de Sor. It’s a pleasantly bustling town. He eyes a hotel longingly; he would happily stop there. Instead he drives on. Back in the countryside, he turns off onto a quiet side road and parks next to an olive grove. The car looks like a grey bubble about to be blown across the landscape. He leaves food next to Odo. He thinks to lay his sleeping bag across the front seats, but the seats are too far apart. Nor do they recline to any extent. He looks at the ground next to the car. Too rocky. Finally he gets in the back and works Odo’s heavy body onto the floor of the car. He lies across the back seat in a fetal position and promptly falls into a deep sleep.

When Peter awakes late that afternoon, Odo is sitting right next to his head, practically on it. He’s looking around. No doubt he’s wondering what new trick the humans have pulled on him. Where is he now? Where have the big buildings gone? Peter can feel the warmth of Odo’s body against his head. He’s still tired, but anxiety revives him. Will Odo be angry and aggressive? If he is, there’s no way Peter can escape him. He lifts himself slowly.

Odo embraces him with both arms. Peter embraces the ape back. They remain interlocked for several seconds. He gives Odo some water to drink and feeds him apples, bread, cheese, ham, all of which disappear in quick, full mouthfuls.

Peter notices a group of men a ways off, walking in their direction along the road. They’re carrying shovels and hoes on their shoulders. He moves to the driver’s seat. Odo hops into the passenger seat next to him. He starts the car. Odo hoots at the rumble of the engine but otherwise stays put. He turns the car around and returns to the road.

Like most emigrants, his parents departed the High Mountains of Portugal in a state of want, and they were determined that their children would have different, better lives in Canada. As if stanching a wound, they turned their backs on their origins. In Toronto, they deliberately avoided fellow Portuguese immigrants. They forced themselves to learn English well and passed on neither their native language nor their native culture to their son and daughter. Instead, they encouraged them to move in wider circles and were delighted when each married a non-Portuguese.

Only in their last years, once their identity engineering had succeeded, did his parents relent a little and did he and his sister, Teresa, on occasion get a glimpse into their long-ago former lives. It came in the form of brief stories, supported by family photos. A few names were floated and a hazy geography was sketched, centred on one place name: Tuizelo. That was where his parents came from, and that is where he and Odo will settle.

But he knows nothing of the country. He is Canadian through and through. As they drive in the fading light of day, he notes how pretty the landscape is, how busy the rurality. Everywhere there are flocks and herds, beehives and grapevines, ploughed fields and tended groves. He sees people carrying firewood on their backs and donkeys carrying loaded baskets on theirs.

The night stops them and sends them to sleep. He moves to the cramped back seat. At a late hour, he is vaguely aware of Odo exiting the car through the door, but he is too knocked out by sleep to check on him.

In the morning he finds the ape sleeping on top of the car, on its fabric roof. Peter does not rouse him. Instead he reads the guidebook. He learns from it that the peculiar tree he keeps seeing — stocky, thick-limbed, the trunk dark brown except where the precious bark has been neatly removed — is the cork tree. The parts of the trees that have been stripped glow a rich reddish brown. He vows from then on to drink only from wine bottles that have been cork-stoppered.

Visigoths, Francs, Romans, Moors — all were here. Some did no more than kick over furniture before moving on. Others stayed long enough to build a bridge or a castle. Then, in a sidebar, he discovers that “faunal anomaly of northern Portugal”: the Iberian rhinoceros. Was that what the man at the airport meant? This biological relic, descended from the woolly rhinoceros of earlier glacial ages, existed in Portugal in shrinking pockets right up into the modern era, with the confirmed death of the last known specimen taking place in 1641. Hardy and fierce-looking but mostly benign — a herbivore, after all, slow to anger and quick to forgive — it fell out of step with the times, unable to adapt to the shrinking space given it, and so it vanished, though with occasional claims of sightings to this day. In 1515 King Manuel I of Portugal offered an Iberian rhinoceros as a gift to Pope Leo X. The guidebook has a reproduction of the Dürer woodcut of that rhinoceros, “incorrectly single-horned.” He peers at the image. The animal looks grand, ancient, unlikely, appealing.

Odo awakes as Peter is preparing breakfast on the camping stove. When Odo sits up, and even more so when he stands on the roof of the car, taking in his surroundings, Peter is again struck by his situation. If he were in this foreign land alone, it would be unbearable; he would die of loneliness. But because of his strange companion, loneliness is pushed away. For that he is deeply grateful. Even so, he can’t ignore the other feeling troubling him at the moment, which seems to liquefy his innards: fear. He can’t explain the sudden onset of the emotion. He’s never been subject to panic attacks, but perhaps this is what they feel like. Fear melts through him, opening his every pore, causing his breaths to shorten and quicken. Then Odo climbs down from the car, ambles over on all fours to sit and stare at the camping stove, amiably disposed, and the fear goes away.

After breakfast, they hit the road again. They cross villages with stone houses, cobbled streets, sleeping dogs, and observant donkeys. Places of stillness, with few men and the women dressed in black, all of them older. He senses that the future comes like the night in these settlements, quietly and without surprise, each generation much like the previous one and the next, only shrinking in numbers.

In the early afternoon they reach — according to the map — the High Mountains of Portugal. The air is cooler. He is puzzled. Where are the mountains? He wasn’t expecting soaring, winter-clad Alps, but he didn’t expect an undulating barren savannah either, its forests hidden away in valleys, without any peaks anywhere. He and Odo cross plains of enormous grey boulders, each sitting on its own in the grassland. Some of these rocks reach past what would be the second floor of a house. Perhaps to a man standing next to one, there is something mountain-like about them, but it’s a stretch. Odo is as intrigued by the boulders as he is.

Tuizelo appears at the end of a winding road, on the edge of a forest, tucked in a valley. The narrow, sloping, cobbled streets wend their way to a small square with a humble, gurgling fountain at its centre. On one side of the square is a church, on the other, a café, which also appears to be a small grocery store and bakery. These two institutions, each plying its own wares, are set amidst modest stone houses with wooden balconies. Only the many vegetable gardens are large, as large as fields, and neat. Here, there, everywhere, chickens, goats, sheep, lazing dogs.

Right away he is taken by the tranquility and isolation of the village. And his parents came from here. In fact, he was born here. He can hardly believe it. The distance between this place and the house in the heart of Toronto, in Cabbagetown, where he grew up, seems immeasurable. He has no memories of Tuizelo. His parents left when he was a toddler. Nonetheless, he will give the place a try.

“We’ve arrived,” he announces. Odo looks around with a blank expression.

They eat sandwiches and drink water. Peter notices a small group of people in a vegetable garden. He reaches for the dictionary. He practices a phrase a few times.

“Don’t move. Stay in the car,” he says to Odo. The ape sits so low in the car seat that he’s barely visible from the outside.

Peter gets out of the car and waves to the group. They wave back. A man shouts a greeting. Peter goes through the small gate and joins them. Each villager steps forward to shake his hand, a smile on his or her face. “Olá,” he says each time. When the ceremony is over, he self-consciously recites his phrase. “Eu quero uma casa, por favor,” he says slowly. I would like a house, please.

“Uma casa? Por uma noite?” says one.

“Não,” he replies as he flips through the dictionary, “uma casa por…viver.” No, a house to live in.

“Aqui, em Tuizelo?” says another, his wrinkled features expanding in surprise.

“Sim,” Peter replies, “uma casa aqui em Tuizelo por viver.” Yes, a house here in Tuizelo to live in. Clearly, immigration is unknown in these parts.

“Meu Deus! O que é aquela coisa?” a woman gasps. He guesses that the horror in her tone has nothing to do with his request to live in the village. She is looking beyond him. He turns. Sure enough, Odo has climbed onto the roof of the car and is observing them.

The group makes various startled, fearful noises. One man grips his hoe and lifts it in the air somewhat.

“No, no, he’s friendly,” Peter says, his palms raised to appease them. He rifles through the dictionary. “Ele é…amigável! Amigável!”

He repeats the word a few times, trying to heed the tonic accent and get the pronunciation right. He retreats to the car. The group stays frozen. Already Odo has attracted further attention. Two men are staring from the café, as is a woman from her doorstep, and another from a balcony.

Peter had hoped to ease Odo into village life, but the notion is foolish. There are no degrees to amazement.

“Amigável, amigável!” he repeats to all.

He beckons to Odo, who clambers down from the car and knuckle-walks to the vegetable garden with him. The ape chooses not to go through the gate but to leap onto the stone wall. Peter stands next to him, stroking one of his legs.

“Um macaco,” he says to the group, to help with what they are seeing. “Um macaco amigável.” A friendly ape.

The people stare while he and Odo wait. The woman who first noticed Odo is the first to relax a little. “E ele mora com o senhor?” she asks. Her tone is open, touched by wonder.

“Sim,” he replies, though he doesn’t know what “mora” means.

One villager decides that he’s had enough. He turns to move away. His neighbour reaches for him, but in doing so he stumbles. The result is that he pulls hard on the first man’s sleeve as he seeks to regain his balance. The other man in turn loses his balance momentarily, cries out, flings his arm back to throw off the other man’s hand, and walks off in a huff. Odo instantly feels the tension and lifts himself onto his legs, following the departing man with his eyes. Standing on the wall as he is, he now towers over the group in the garden. Peter senses their apprehension. “It’s all right,” he whispers to the ape, tugging on one of Odo’s hands, “it’s all right.” He’s anxious. Might this be enough to make the ape run amok?

Odo doesn’t run amok. He sits back down, producing a few inquisitive hoo, hoo, hoos in a rising pitch. Some faces in the group smile at hearing the sound, perhaps reassured by the confirmation of a stereotype — apes really do go hoo, hoo, hoo.

“De onde é que ele vem? O que é que faz?” asks the same woman.

“Sim, sim,” Peter replies, again not knowing to what. “Eu quero uma casa em Tuizelo por viver com macaco amigável.”

By now, other villagers have turned up. They gather at a respectful distance. Odo is as curious about the villagers as they are about him. He pivots on the wall, looking, engaging, commenting with quiet hoos and aarrrhhhs.

“Uma casa…?” Peter repeats as he strokes the ape.

The group in the garden at last begins to address his request. They talk to each other and he can hear the word “casa” being repeated along with what sounds like names. The conversation widens when one woman turns and calls out to another woman who is standing near his car. This villager responds and soon another conversation begins there. Occasional verbal volleys are tossed between the villagers around the car and the ones in the vegetable garden. The reason why they don’t come together is plain: Between the two groups is the gate, and guarding the gate like a sentinel is an ape.

Peter thinks that he should perhaps refine his request. A house on the edge of the village would be best. He looks in the dictionary.

“Uma casa…nas bordas de Tuizelo…nas proximidades,” he calls out, somewhat addressing his request to the woman who first spoke about Odo, but intending it for everyone to hear.

The discussion starts again, until the woman, who has willingly taken on her role as his main interlocutor, announces the result of it. “Temos uma casa que provavelmente vai servir para si e o seu macaco.”

He understands nothing except “uma casa” and “seu macaco”. A house and your ape. He nods.

The woman smiles and looks pointedly at the gate. He promptly goes through it and nudges Odo off the stone wall. Odo drops to the ground next to him. They walk a few steps towards the car. The group in the garden advances towards the gate, while the group around the car melts away. He turns to the woman and indicates in various directions. She points to the right, up towards the top of the village. He moves in that direction. Mercifully, Odo stays at his side. The woman trails along at a safe distance. Villagers ahead of them disperse, as do the chickens and dogs. Except for the chickens, all the villagers, human and animal, join in following the newcomers. He regularly turns to make sure they are going the right way. The woman, leading the villagers some fifteen paces behind, nods to confirm that he is, or redirects him with her hand. And so, leading the group while in fact following it, he and Odo walk through the village. Odo strolls along nicely on all fours next to him, despite being powerfully interested in the chickens and dogs.

They emerge from the village. The cobbled street becomes a dirt road. After a turn, they cross a shallow stream. The trees grow more sparse, the plateau starts to show. Shortly, the woman calls out and points. They have reached the house.

It is no different from many of the others in the village. It is a small two-storey stone structure, L-shaped, with a gated stone wall completing the other two sides of the L to create a house with an enclosed courtyard. The woman invites him into this courtyard, while staying outside the gate with her companions. She indicates that the second floor is reached by the external stone staircase. Then she points at Odo and to a door on the ground floor. Peter opens it; it has no lock, only a latch. He is not happy with what he sees. Besides being filled with quantities of stuff, the room is filthy, everything covered in dust. Then he sees a ring attached to a wall and notices that the door he just opened is divided in two horizontally, and he understands. This floor is a pen, a stable, an enclosure for livestock. He has seen any number of such houses on their drive but only now grasps their design. The animals — the sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, donkeys — live below their owners, who thus have them close-by and safe, and who profit in winter from the warmth their livestock generate. It also explains the outside staircase. He closes the door.

“Macaco,” the woman says in a helpful tone from the other side of the low stone wall.

“Não,” he replies, shaking his head. He points up the stairs.

The people nod. The foreigner’s macaco wants to live upstairs, does it? It has a taste for luxury?

He and Odo climb the stone stairs. The landing, of wood with a roof, is large enough to qualify as a balcony. He opens the door. It doesn’t have a lock, either. Burglary doesn’t seem to be a problem in Tuizelo.

He is better pleased with this top floor. It is rustic, but it will do. It has a stone floor (easy to clean) and little furniture (less to break). The walls are very thick and covered in uneven whitewash, showing areas of rise and fall, but clean; they look like a plausible map of the High Mountains of Portugal. The layout of the flat is simple. The door opens onto a main room that has a wooden table with four chairs, some shelves built into the wall, and a cast-iron woodstove. To one side of this room, the top of the L, separated by a wall that goes only halfway across, is the kitchen, which is fitted with a large sink, a propane gas stove, a counter, and more shelves. At the other end of the living room, through a doorway without a door, he finds two rooms in a row, the bottom of the L. The first room contains a wardrobe whose door holds a large mirror speckled with age. The end room has a bed with a mattress long past its prime, a small bedside table, a chest of drawers, and a primitive bathroom with a sink and a dusty, dry toilet. There is no shower or bathtub.

He returns to the living room, scanning the bottoms of the walls. He examines the ceiling of each room. There are no electrical outlets or light fixtures anywhere. In the kitchen he confirms what he thought he did not see; indeed, there is no refrigerator. The place has no electricity. And no phone jack, either. He sighs. He turns the kitchen faucet on. No gush of water disturbs the silence. Two of the windows are broken. Everything is covered in dust and grime. A wave of fatigue washes over him. From the Senate of Canada, surrounded by all the amenities of the modern world in a capital city, to this cave-age dwelling on the fringes of nowhere. From the comfort of family and friends to a place where he is a stranger and does not speak the language.

He is saved from his impending emotional meltdown by Odo. The ape is evidently delighted with their new digs. He gives out excited hoots and bobs his head as he races from one end of the apartment to the other. It is, Peter realizes, the first habitation Odo has seen outside the cages he has lived in his whole adult life. So much bigger and airier than anything he has known. And better than the cars he has been dwelling in this last week. Perhaps Odo thought he had traded living in a hanging cage for living in a cage on wheels. By captive ape standards, this house is the Ritz.

With good light, come to think of it: There are windows in every wall. The sun will be their light bulb. And there’s charm — and economy — in the idea of lighting the place in the evenings with candles and lanterns. And if there is plumbing, there must once have been running water, which can no doubt be restored.

Peter approaches one of the windows facing the courtyard. He opens it. The villagers are waiting patiently on the other side of the courtyard wall. He waves and smiles at them. What is “good” in Portuguese? He consults his dictionary. “A casa é boa — muito boa!” he cries.

The villagers smile and clap their hands.

Odo joins him at the window. In a state of high excitement, he says the same thing Peter has just said, only in his own language, which, to his ears and those of the people down below, comes as a terrific shriek. The villagers cower.

“Macaco…macaco”—he searches for the word—“macaco…é feliz!”

The villagers break into applause once more. Which increases Odo’s happiness. He shrieks again with primate glee — and throws himself out the window. Peter bends forward in alarm, his hands outstretched. He looks down. He cannot see the ape. The villagers are going ooh and ahh in surprise and slight alarm. They are looking up.

He runs down the outside steps and joins them. Odo has grabbed the edge of the schist-tile roof and, pushing himself off the stones of the wall, has climbed on top of the house. He is now perched on its peak, looking about with unbounded delight at the humans below, at the village, at the trees nearby, at the wide world around him.

The moment is good to conclude matters with the villagers. Peter introduces himself to their leader. Her name is Amélia Duarte; he should call her Dona Amélia, she tells him. He makes her understand that he would be happy to live in the house. (Whose house? he wonders. What happened to those who lived in it?) In butchered Portuguese he inquires about the windows and the plumbing and about the place being cleaned. To all these, Dona Amélia nods vigorously. All will be taken care of, she makes clear. She turns her hand over and over. Amanhã, amanhã. And how much? The same: Tomorrow, tomorrow.

To one and all he says, “Obrigado, obrigado, obrigado.” Odo’s shrieks echo the same gratitude. Eventually, after he has shaken hands with each and every one, the villagers move off, their eyes fixed on the roof of the house.

Odo is sitting in what Peter already recognizes is a posture of relaxation: feet apart, forearms resting on the knees, hands dangling between the legs, alert head peering about. After the villagers have gone, and with the ape showing continuing pleasure at being where he is, Peter walks down to retrieve the car. “I’ll be back,” he shouts to Odo.

Back at the house, he unpacks their few belongings. Then he makes an early supper using the camping gear, which requires him to find a bucket and walk down to the village fountain to get water.

A little later he calls out to the ape again. When Odo fails to appear, he moves to the window. Just then, the ape’s head pops into view, upside down. Odo is clinging to the outside wall of the house.

“Supper’s ready,” Peter says, showing Odo the pot in which he has boiled eggs and potatoes.

They eat in thoughtful silence. Then Odo leaps out the window again.

Leery of the old mattress, Peter sets his camping mat and sleeping bag on the table in the living room.

And then he has nothing to do. After three weeks — or is it a lifetime? — of ceaseless activity, he has nothing to do. A very long sentence, anchored in solid nouns, with countless subordinate clauses, scores of adjectives and adverbs, and bold conjunctions that launched the sentence in a new direction — besides unexpected interludes — has finally, with a surprisingly quiet full stop, come to an end. For an hour or so, sitting outside on the landing at the top of the stairs, nursing a coffee, tired, a little relieved, a little worried, he contemplates that full stop. What will the next sentence bring?

He settles in his sleeping bag on the table. Odo stays on the roof till it’s dark, then returns through the window, his shape cut out by the moonlight. He grunts with pleasure at discovering that he has the mattress in the bedroom all to himself. Soon the house is quiet. Peter falls asleep imagining that Clara is lying next to him. “I wish you were here,” he whispers to her. “I think you’d like this house. We’d set it up really nicely, with lots of plants and flowers. I love you. Good night.”

In the morning, a delegation stands before the house, the tomorrow crew, led by Dona Amélia. Armed with buckets, mops, and rags, with hammers and wrenches, with determination, they have come to fix the place up. As they set to work, Peter tries to help, but they shake their heads and shoo him away. Besides, he has his ape to take care of. They are nervous about having him around.

He and Odo go for a walk. Every eye, human and animal, turns to them and stares. The gaze is not hostile, not at all; in every case it comes with a greeting. Peter again marvels at the vegetable gardens. Turnips, potatoes, zucchini, gourds, tomatoes, onions, cabbages, cauliflowers, kale, beets, lettuce, leeks, sweet peppers, green beans, carrots, small fields of rye and corn — this is cottage-industry gardening on a serious scale. In one garden, the ape pulls out a head of lettuce and eats it. Peter claps his hands and calls Odo to him. The ape is hungry. So is he.

They stand before the village café. Its patio is deserted. He does not want to risk entering the café—but surely it would be all right to be served outside? He consults the dictionary, then lingers beside a table. The man behind the counter comes out, eyes wide and alert, but with an amiable mien.

“Como posso servi-lo?” he asks.

“Dois sanduíches de queijo, por favor, e um café com leite,” Peter pronounces.

“Claro que sim, imediatamente,” the man replies. Though he moves warily, he wipes down the table nearest them, which Peter takes as an invitation to sit down.

“Muito obrigado,” he says.

“Ao seu serviço,” replies the man as he returns inside the café.

Peter sits down. He expects Odo to stay seated on the ground beside him, but the ape’s eyes are fixed on his metal chair. Odo climbs onto the one next to him. From there, he peers at the ground, rocks the chair, slaps its arms, generally explores the uses and capabilities of the peculiar device. Peter glances into the café. The patrons within are looking at them. And outside, people are starting to gather in a wide circle. “Steady, steady,” he mutters to Odo.

He moves closer to Odo and makes a few grooming gestures. But the ape seems in no way distressed or under strain. On the contrary, as attested by his bright expression and lively curiosity, he’s in good spirits. It’s the people around who seem in need of social grooming, so to speak.

“Olá, bom dia,” Peter calls out.

Greetings come back.

“De onde o senhor é?” asks a man.

“I’m from Canada,” he replies.

Murmurs of approval. Lots of Portuguese immigrants in Canada. It’s a good country.

“E o que está a fazer com um macaco?” asks a woman.

What is he doing with an ape? It’s a question for which he doesn’t have an answer, neither in English nor in Portuguese.

“Eu vive com ele,” he replies simply. I live with him. That’s as much as he can say.

Their order arrives. With the alertness of a bullfighter, the man places the coffee and the two plates on the side of the table farthest from Odo.

The ape loudly grunts and reaches across to take hold of both cheese sandwiches, which he devours in an instant, to the amusement of the villagers. Peter smiles along. He looks at the server.

“Outro dois sanduíches, por favor,” he asks. He remembers that the café is also a grocery store. “E, para o macaco, dez…” He makes a long shape with his hands, which he then peels.

“Dez bananas?” the man asks.

Ah, it’s the same word. “Sim, dez bananas, por favor.”

“Como desejar.”

If the villagers were amused by Odo eating both sandwiches, they are even more mirthful at his reaction to the bananas. Peter thought he was buying a supply that would last a few days. Not so. The chimpanzee, upon seeing the bananas, grunts ecstatically and proceeds to eat every single one, peels flying off, and would have eaten the two new sandwiches if Peter had not quickly grabbed one of them. As a chaser, he downs Peter’s cup of coffee, first dipping his finger into it to test the temperature. When he’s licked the cup clean, he dangles it from his mouth, playing with it with his tongue and lips, as if it were a large mint.

The villagers smile and laugh. The foreigner’s macaco is funny! Peter is pleased. Odo is winning them over.

At the height of the merriment, in an act that Peter senses is meant to show that he is fully participating in the general social relaxation, Odo takes the cup in his hand, stands high on his chair, shrieks, and throws the cup to the ground with terrific force. The cup shatters into small pieces.

The villagers freeze. Peter lifts a placating hand to the server. “Desculpe,” he says.

“Não há problema.”

And to a wider audience Peter adds, “Macaco amigável é feliz, muito feliz.”

Amigável and feliz—but with an edge. He pays, adding a handsome tip, and they take their leave, the crowd carefully parting before them.

When they return to the house on the edge of the village, it is transformed. The windows are fixed; the plumbing works; the gas stove has a new tank; every surface has been thoroughly cleaned; pots, pans, dishes, and cutlery — used, chipped, mismatched, but perfectly functional — are stacked on the shelves of the kitchen; the bed has a new mattress, with clean sheets, two wool blankets, and towels lying folded on it; and Dona Amélia is setting a vase bursting with bright flowers on the living room table.

Peter puts his hand over his heart. “Muito obrigado,” he says.

“De nada,” says Dona Amélia.

The mutual awkwardness of dealing with the cost of things is swiftly dispatched. He rubs his thumb and forefinger together, then points at the gas tank and the kitchenware and towards the bedroom. Next he looks up the word “rent”—it’s a strange one: aluguel. In each case Dona Amélia proposes a sum with evident nervousness, and in each case Peter is convinced she has made a mistake by a factor of three or four. He agrees right away. Dona Amélia makes him understand that she would be willing to do his laundry and come once a week to clean the house. He hesitates. There isn’t much to clean — and what else will he do with his time? But he thinks again. She will be his link to the rest of the village. More importantly, she will be Odo’s link, the ape’s ambassador. And it occurs to him that the villagers of Tuizelo are probably not a wealthy lot. By employing her, he will pump a little more money into the local economy.

“Sim, sim,” he says to her. “Quanto?”

“Amanhã, amanhã,” says Dona Amélia, smiling.

Now the next order of business. He needs to get himself and Odo organized. There is the question of formally opening his bank account and arranging for regular wire transfers from Canada, of getting a permanent licence plate for the car. Where is the closest bank?

“Bragança,” she replies.

“Telephone?” he asks her. “Aqui?”

“Café,” she replies. “Senhor Álvaro.”

She gives him the number.

Bragança is about an hour away. Which should he worry about more: bringing the ape to an urban centre or leaving him here alone? These administrative chores need doing. And either way, whether in the town or in the village, he has no real control over Odo. Whatever he does, he must rely on the ape’s cooperation. He can only hope that Odo will not stray far from the house or get into trouble.

Dona Amélia and her group of helpers leave.

“Stay, stay. I’ll be back soon,” he says to Odo, who at the moment is playing with a crack in the stone floor.

He leaves the house, closing the door, though he knows Odo can easily open it. He gets in the car and drives away. Looking in the rear-view mirror, he sees the ape climbing onto the roof.

In Bragança he buys supplies — candles, lanterns, kerosene; soap; groceries, including cartoned milk that doesn’t need refrigeration; sundry household and personal items — and does his business at the bank. The licence plate he will receive in the mail, at the café.

At the post office in Bragança, he makes two phone calls to Canada. Ben says he’s pleased that his father has arrived safely. “What’s your number?” he asks.

“There’s no phone,” Peter replies, “but I can give you the number of the café in the village. You can leave a message there and I’ll call you back.”

“What do you mean, there’s no phone?”

“I mean just that. There’s no phone in the house. But there’s one in the café. Take the number.”

“Do you have running water?”

“Yep. It’s cold, but it runs.”

“Great. Do you have electricity?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I don’t.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am.”

There’s a pause. He senses that Ben is waiting for explanations, justifications, defences. He offers none. His son therefore continues in the same vein. “How about the roads — are they paved?”

“Cobbled, actually. How’s work? How’s Rachel? How’s good ol’ Ottawa?”

“Why are you doing this, Dad? What are you doing there?”

“It’s a nice place. Your grandparents came from here.”

They end the call with the grace of people learning how to dance on stilts. They promise to talk again soon, a future conversation being a relief from the one they’re having.

He has a bubblier conversation with his sister, Teresa.

“What’s the village like?” she asks. “Does it feel like home?”

“No, not when I don’t speak the language. But it’s quiet, rural, old — pleasantly exotic.”

“Have you discovered the family home?”

“Nope. I’m just settling in. And I wasn’t even three years old when we left. I’m not sure it makes much difference to me whether I was born in this house or that house. It’s just a house.”

“Okay, Mr. Sentimentality — how about scores of long-lost cousins?”

“They’re still hiding, waiting to pounce on me.”

“I think it would help Ben if you built the place up a bit. You know, tell him you’re watering the genealogical tree and tending its roots. He’s totally perplexed by your sudden departure.”

“I’ll try harder.”

“How are you feeling about Clara?” she asks in a soft voice.

“I talk to her in my head. That’s where she lives now.”

“And are you taking care of yourself? How’s your ticker?”

“Ticking away.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

When he returns to Tuizelo, Odo is still on the roof. He hoots loudly upon seeing the car and cascades down. After many hoots of greeting, he drags bags of supplies into the house, walking erect with a side-to-side swaying gait. This helpful intent results in the bags splitting and their contents scattering. Peter gathers everything and brings it into the house.

He sets up the kitchen. He moves the table in the living room to a more pleasing spot, does the same with the bed in the bedroom. Odo watches him the whole time without making a sound. Peter feels slightly nervous. He still has to get used to this, to the ape’s gaze. It sweeps around like the beam from a lighthouse, dazzling him as he bobs in the waters. Odo’s gaze is a threshold beyond which he cannot see. He wonders what the ape is thinking and in what terms. Perhaps Odo has similar questions about him. Perhaps the ape sees him as a threshold too. But he doubts it. More likely, to Odo, he is a curio, an oddity of the natural world, a dressed-up ape that circles around this natural one, hypnotically attracted.

There. Everything is in its place. He looks about. Again he feels that he has come to the end of a sentence. He frets. He stares out the window. It’s late afternoon and the weather looks to be changing for the worse. No matter.

“Let’s go exploring,” he says to Odo. He grabs the backpack and they head out. He doesn’t want to deal with the villagers’ insistent attention, so they turn up the road, towards the plateau, until he finds a path that leads back down into the forest. Odo advances on all fours, his gait plodding but easy, his head slung so low that from behind he looks headless. Once they enter the forest, he becomes excited by the great oaks and chestnuts, the clusters of lindens, elms, and poplars, the pine trees, the many shrubs and bushes, the explosions of ferns. He races ahead.

Peter moves at a steady pace, often overtaking Odo as he dawdles. Then the ape canters up and hurtles past him. Each time he notes how Odo touches him as he goes by, a slap against the back of his leg, nothing hard or aggressive, more a verification. Good, good, you’re there. Then he lingers again and Peter gains the lead once more. In other words, Peter walks through the forest while Odo swings through it.

Odo is foraging. Bob from the IPR told him about this, how, given a chance, the ape would raid the larder of nature for shoots, flowers, wild fruit, insects, basically anything edible.

It starts to rain. Peter finds a large pine tree and takes refuge under it. Its protection is imperfect, but he doesn’t mind, as he has brought a waterproof poncho. He puts it on and sits on the layer of pine needles, his back against the trunk of the tree. He waits for Odo to catch up. When he sees the ape racing along the path, he calls out. Odo brakes and stares at him. The ape has never seen a poncho before, doesn’t understand where his body has gone. “Come, come,” he says. Odo settles on his haunches close-by. Though the ape doesn’t seem to mind the rain, Peter takes out a second poncho from his backpack. In doing so, he lifts his own. Odo grins. Oh, there’s the rest of you! He scoots next to him. Peter places the poncho over the ape’s head. They are now two disembodied faces looking out. Above them the tree rises in a cone shape, like a teepee, the space broken up and fractured by branches. The pine smell is strong. They sit and watch the falling rain and its many consequences: the drops of water that swell up at the end of pine needles before falling, as if thoughtfully; the forming of puddles, complete with connecting rivers; the dampening of all sound except the patter of the rain; the creation of a dim, damp world of green and brown. They are surprised when a solitary wild boar trots past. Mostly they just listen to the living, breathing silence of the forest.

They return to the house in the near darkness. Peter finds matches and lights a candle. Before going to bed he starts a fire in the woodstove. He sets it to a slow burn.

The next morning he wakes early. During the night Odo hovered around the now-occupied mattress in the bedroom before moving away; the ape prefers to sleep on his own, for which Peter is thankful. He goes looking for the ape and finds him atop the wardrobe, in the room next to his, soundly asleep in a nest made of a towel and some of Peter’s clothes, one hand between his legs, the other resting under his head.

Peter makes his way to the kitchen. He puts on a big pot of water to boil. He discovered the previous day a square metal basin about three feet square with low edges and a pattern of channels on the bottom. The key to proper hygiene in a house with no bathtub. Once the water is warm, he shaves, then stands in the basin and washes himself. Water splashes onto the stone floor. He will need a little practice to get it right, sponge-bathing in this basin. He dries himself, dresses, cleans up. Now for breakfast. Water for coffee. Perhaps Odo will like oatmeal porridge? He pours milk and rolled oats in a pot and sets it on the stovetop.

He turns to fetch the ground coffee and is startled to see Odo at the entrance of the kitchen. How long has he been squatting there, watching him? The ape’s movements are soundless. His bones don’t creak, and he doesn’t have claws or hooves that clatter. Peter will have to get used to this too, to Odo’s ubiquity in the house. Not that he minds it, he realizes. He much prefers Odo’s presence to his own privacy.

“Good morning,” he says.

The ape climbs onto the kitchen counter and sits right next to the stove, unafraid of the flame. The water for the coffee arouses no interest. The focus of his attention is the pot of porridge. When it starts to boil, Peter turns the heat down and stirs the mixture with a wooden spoon. The ape’s mouth tenses. He reaches and takes hold of the spoon. He begins to stir carefully, without spilling the porridge or tipping the pot. Round and round goes the spoon, the ingredients swirling and tumbling. Odo looks up at him. “You’re doing well,” Peter whispers, nodding. The oat flakes are large and uncooked. He and Odo spend the next fifteen minutes watching the porridge thicken, riveted by the workings of food chemistry. Actually, the next sixteen minutes. Being a plodding, uninspired cook, Peter follows instructions precisely and he times it. When he puts in chopped walnuts and raisins, Odo stares like an apprentice awed to see the wizard reveal the ingredients that go into the magic potion. Odo’s stirring continues, patient and unstinting. Only when Peter turns the burner off and covers the pot with its lid to allow the porridge to cool does the ape show signs of impatience. The laws of thermodynamics are a nuisance to him.

Peter sets the table. One banana for him, eight bananas for Odo. Two cups of milky coffee, one sugar each. Two bowls of oatmeal porridge. One spoon for him, five fingers for Odo.

The meal goes down exceedingly well. A lip-smacking, finger-licking, grunting feastorama. Odo eyes Peter’s bowl. Peter holds it tightly to his chest. Tomorrow he will measure out more oats in the pot. He washes up and puts the bowls and the pot away.

He fetches his watch from the bedroom. It’s not even eight o’clock in the morning. He looks at the table in the living room. There are no reports to be read, no letters to be written, no paperwork of any kind. There are no meetings to be organized or attended, no priorities to be set, no details to be worked out. There are no phone calls to make or receive, no people to see. There is no schedule, no program, no plan. There is — for a workingman — nothing at all.

Why then keep the time? He unstraps his watch. Already yesterday he noticed how the world is a timepiece. Birds announce dawn and dusk. Insects chime in further — the shrill cries of cicadas, like a dentist’s drill, the frog-like warbling of crickets, among others. The church’s bell also portions up the day helpfully. And finally the earth itself is a spinning clock, to each quadrant of hours a quality of light. The concordance of these many hour hands is approximate, but what does he gain from the censorious tick-tock tut-tut of a minute hand? Senhor Álvaro, in the café, can be the guardian of his minutes, if he needs them. Peter places his watch on the table.

He looks at Odo. The ape comes to him. Peter sits on the floor and begins to groom him. In response Odo plucks at his hair, at the fuzz balls on his cardigan, at his shirt buttons, at whatever is pluckable. He remembers Bob’s suggestion that he crush a dried leaf on his head to give the ape a grooming challenge.

Grooming confounds Peter. The ape is so proximately alien: in his image — but not. There’s also the living heat of him, felt so close up, the beating of the ape’s heart coming through to his fingertips. Peter is spellbound.

Nonetheless, as he picks seeds, burrs, dirt, specks of old skin off Odo’s coat, his mind wanders into the past. But quickly the past bores him. With the exception of Clara and Ben and Rachel, his past is settled, concluded, not worth the sifting. His life was always a happenstance. Not that he didn’t work hard at every lucky turn, but there was never any overarching goal. He was happy enough with his work as a lawyer in a legal firm, but jumped ship when presented with the opportunity of politics. He preferred people to paper. Electoral success was more accurately electoral luck, since he saw any number of good candidates fail and mediocre ones succeed, depending on the political winds of the day. His run was good — nineteen years in the House, eight election wins — and he attended well to the needs of his constituents. Then he was kicked upstairs to the Senate, where he worked in good faith on committees, unfazed by the headlines-driven turmoil of the lower chamber. When he was young, he never imagined that politics would be his life. But all that is swept away now. Now it doesn’t matter what he did yesterday — other than be bold enough to ask Clara on a date so many years ago. As for tomorrow, beyond certain modest hopes, he has no plans for the future.

Well, then, if the past and the future hold no appeal, why shouldn’t he sit on the floor and groom a chimpanzee and be groomed in return? His mind settles back into the present moment, to the task at hand, to the enigma at the tip of his fingers.

“So, yesterday at the café, why did you throw that cup to the ground?” he asks as he works on Odo’s shoulder.

“Aaaoouuhhhhh,” the ape replies, a rounded sound, the wide-open mouth closing slowly.

Now, what does aaaoouuhhhhh in the language spoken by a chimpanzee mean? Peter considers various possibilities:

I broke the cup to make the people laugh more.

I broke the cup to make the people stop laughing.

I broke the cup because I was happy and excited.

I broke the cup because I was anxious and unhappy.

I broke the cup because a man took his hat off.

I broke the cup because of the shape of a cloud in the sky.

I broke the cup because I wanted porridge.

I don’t know why I broke the cup.

I broke the cup because quaquaquaqua.

Curious. They both have brains and eyes. They both have language and culture. Yet the ape does something as simple as throw a cup to the ground, and the man is baffled. His tools of understanding — the yoking of evident cause to effect, a bank of knowledge, the use of language, intuition — shed little light on the ape’s behaviour. To explain why Odo does what he does, Peter can only rely on conjecture and speculation.

Does it bother him that the ape is essentially unknowable? No, it doesn’t. There’s reward in the mystery, an enduring amazement. Whether that’s the ape’s intent, that he be amazed, he doesn’t know — can’t know — but a reward is a reward. He accepts it with gratitude. These rewards come unexpectedly. A random selection:

Odo stares at him.

Odo lifts him off the ground.

Odo settles in the car seat.

Odo examines a green leaf.

Odo sits up from being asleep on top of the car.

Odo picks up a plate and places it on the table.

Odo turns the page of a magazine.

Odo rests against the courtyard wall, absolutely still.

Odo runs on all fours.

Odo cracks open a nut with a rock.

Odo turns his head.

Each time Peter’s mind goes click like a camera and an indelible picture is recorded in his memory. Odo’s motions are fluid and precise, of an amplitude and force exactly suited to his intentions. And these motions are done entirely unselfconsciously. Odo doesn’t appear to think when he’s doing, only to do, purely. How does that make sense? Why should thinking — that human hallmark — make us clumsy? But come to think of it, the ape’s movements do have a human parallel: that of a great actor giving a great performance. The same economy of means, the same formidable impact. But acting is the result of rigorous training, a strenuously achieved artifice on a human’s part. Meanwhile Odo does—is—easily and naturally.

I should imitate him, Peter muses.

Odo feels—that he knows for certain. On their first evening in the village, for instance, Peter was sitting outside on the landing. The ape was down in the courtyard, examining the stone wall. Peter went in to make himself a cup of coffee. It seems Odo missed his departure. Within seconds, he raced up the stairs and flew in through the door, eyes searching for Peter, an inquisitive hoo on his lips.

“I’m here, I’m here,” Peter said.

Odo grunted with satisfaction — an emotional wave that rippled over to Peter.

And the same yesterday, during their walk in the forest, the way Odo raced along the path, looking for him, clearly driven by the need to find him.

There is that, then, the ape’s emotional state. From this emotional state certain practical thoughts seem to follow: Where are you? Where have you gone? How can I find you?

Why Odo wants his presence, his in particular, he doesn’t know. It’s another of his mysteries.

I love your company because you make me laugh.

I love your company because you take me seriously.

I love your company because you make me happy.

I love your company because you relieve my anxiety.

I love your company because you don’t wear a hat.

I love your company because of the shape of a cloud in the sky.

I love your company because you give me porridge.

I don’t know why I love your company.

I love your company because quaquaquaqua.

Odo stirs, waking Peter from his grooming hypnosis. He shakes himself. How long have they been on the floor like this? Hard to tell, since he’s not wearing his watch.

“Let’s go see Senhor Álvaro.”

They walk to the café. He not only wants a coffee, he also wants to organize regular deliveries of food. They sit on the patio. When Senhor Álvaro steps out, Peter orders two coffees. When these are brought out, he stands up and says to Senhor Álvaro, “Posso…falar…com você um momento?”

Of course you can speak with me for a moment, the café owner signals with a nod. To Peter’s surprise, Senhor Álvaro pulls up a chair and sits at the table. Peter sits back down. There they are, the three of them. If Odo produced a deck of cards, they could play poker.

Though his language is halting, his message is easy to seize. He sets up with Senhor Álvaro weekly deliveries of oranges, nuts, raisins, and especially figs and bananas. The café owner makes him understand that, in season, he will have no problems getting apples, pears, cherries, berries, and chestnuts from fellow villagers, as well as all manner of vegetables. Eggs and chickens, if his macaco cares to eat these, are available year-round, as well as the local sausage. The small grocery store always has canned goods and salted cod, as well as bread, rice, potatoes, and cheeses, both regional and from farther south, and other dairy products.

“Vamos ver do que é que ele gosta,” says Senhor Álvaro. He gets up and returns from the café with a plate. It has a chunk of soft white cheese on it, drizzled with honey. He places it in front of the ape. A grunt, a quick grasp of the hairy hand — honeyed cheese all gone.

Next Senhor Álvaro brings out a large slice of rye bread on which he has dumped a can of tuna, oil and all.

Same thing. In an instant. With louder grunts.

Lastly Senhor Álvaro tries strawberry yoghurt on the ape. This takes a little longer to vanish, but only because of the gelatinous consistency of the delicacy and the hindrance of the plastic container. It is nonetheless scooped out, licked out, slurped up in no time.

“O seu macaco não vai morrer de fome,” Senhor Álvaro concludes.

Peter checks the dictionary. No, indeed, his ape won’t starve to death.

Voracious, then — but not selfish. He already knows this. The lovely cut flowers so graciously left on the table by Dona Amélia? Before devouring them, Odo extended a white lily to him.

They return home, but the day beckons. He stocks the backpack and they depart, for the plateau this time. Once they reach it, they turn off the road and strike out into the open. They enter an environment that is, technically, as wild as the jungles of the Amazon. But the soil is thin and impoverished and the air dry. Life treads carefully here. In the folds of the land that are too shallow to shelter forests, there is thicker, spinier vegetation — gorse, heather, and the like — and man and ape have to navigate the maze-like channels in the vegetation to cross it, but out on the savannah, amidst the High Mountains of Portugal proper, only a golden grass abounds, for miles and miles, and on this grass it is easy for them to walk.

It is a land more uniform than the sky. A land where the weather is met directly because it’s the only thing happening.

Standing out, both literally and in their effect on them, are the strange boulders they noticed on their way to Tuizelo. They stretch as far as the eye can see. Each boulder reaches three to five times the height of an average person. To walk around one takes a good forty paces. They rise, as elongated as obelisks, or sit, as squat as balls of geologic dough. Each is on its own, with no smaller rocks around it, no cast-off intermediaries. There are only big boulders and short, rough grass. Peter wonders about the origin of these boulders. The frozen ejecta of ancient volcanoes? But how strange the spread, as if a volcano flings chunks of lava like a farmer throws seeds on the ground, with a concern for an even distribution. These boulders are more likely the result of a grinding glacier, he surmises. Being rolled under a glacier might explain their rough surfaces.

He likes the plateau very much. Its openness is breathtaking, intoxicating, exciting. He thinks Clara would enjoy it. They would trek through it hardily. Many years ago, when Ben was small, they went camping in Algonquin Park every summer. The landscape there couldn’t be more different from this one, but the effect was similar, a bathing in light, silence, and solitude.

A flock of sheep appears out of the ether, timid, yet as forward-charging as an invading army. At the sight of him, and even more so of Odo, the ovine battalion splits into two around them, giving them a wide berth. For a few minutes the sheep become an amateur orchestra playing the one instrument they know: the bell. Their distracted conductor strides up, delighted to come upon company. He starts on a long conversation, entirely unbothered by the fact that Peter does not speak his language and is accompanied by a large chimpanzee. After a good chewing of the fat, he leaves them to catch up with his flock, which has disappeared as earnestly as it appeared. The silence and the solitude return.

Then they come upon a stream, a noisy fluvial baby swaddled in grass and granite. The stream babbles and bubbles as if it has just woken up. Once crossed and left behind, it vanishes from their senses. Once again the silence and the solitude return.

Odo is taken by the boulders. He sniffs at them with great interest, then often looks around sharply. Has his nose told his eyes something?

Peter’s preference is to walk between the boulders, midway, at a distance that allows for perspective. Such is not Odo’s impulse. The ape walks from boulder to boulder in a straight line, as if connecting dots in a greater design. A boulder is sniffed, walked around, contemplated, then left behind for the next one, dead ahead. This next boulder might be nearby or far away, at an angle of deflection that is acute or wide. The ape decides with assurance. Peter is not averse to this manner of rambling about the plateau. Each boulder presents its own artistic shapeliness, its own texture, its own civilization of lichen. He wonders only at the lack of variety to the approach. Why not strike out for the open seas, between the shoals? The captain does not brook the suggestion. Unlike in the forest, where each enjoys his liberty, on the plateau the ape inveighs Peter to stay close, grunting and snorting with displeasure if he wanders off. He obediently falls into step.

After one particularly intense sniff at a boulder, Odo decides to conquer it. He scales up its side without effort. Peter is mystified.

“Hey, why this one? What’s special about it?” he cries.

The boulder doesn’t look any different from any other, or, rather, it looks as mundanely different as they all do from each other. Odo looks down at him. He calls out quietly. Peter decides to give climbing the boulder a try. The feat is trickier for him. He doesn’t have the ape’s strength. And though the height does not seem great from the ground, as soon as he has climbed a few feet he becomes afraid that he’ll fall. But he doesn’t fall. The many pockmarks and cracks in the boulder ensure his safety. When he is within reach, Odo grabs him by the shoulder and helps him up.

He scrambles to the middle of the boulder’s crown. He sits and waits for his heart to stop knocking about his chest. Odo acts like a vigil on a ship, scanning the far horizon but also scrutinizing their closer surroundings. Peter can tell from his excited tension that he’s enjoying the activity. Is it the height, with nothing around to block his view? Has some childhood memory of Africa been evoked? Or is he looking for something specific, a signal from the land, from the distance? Peter doesn’t know. He settles down for the duration, remembering Odo’s tree-dwelling escapades in Kentucky. He takes in the view, looks at the clouds, feels the wind, studies the varying light. He attends to simple, domestic tasks, since he brought the camping stove — the making of coffee, the preparing of a meal of macaroni and cheese. They spend a pleasant hour or so on top of the boulder.

The climb down is more harrowing than the climb up for him. For Odo, backpack dangling from his mouth, it is a casual amble down.

When they get back home, Peter is exhausted. Odo makes his nest. Nest-building is a quick, casual affair, whether for a nap or for the night. It involves no greater effort than the spinning of a towel or a blanket into a spiral, with a few items thrown in when it is a nighttime nest. Tonight Odo adds one of Peter’s shirts and the boots he has worn all day. Odo also varies where he sleeps. So far he has slept on top of the wardrobe; on the floor next to Peter’s bed; on top of the chest of drawers; on the living room table; on two chairs brought together; on the kitchen counter. Now he builds his nest on the living room table.

They both go to sleep early.

At dawn the next day Peter tiptoes to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee. He settles with the steaming cup in front of Odo, watching him sleep, waiting.

Time passes, like clouds in the sky. Weeks and months go by as if they were a single day. Summer fades to fall, winter yields to spring, different minutes of the same hour.

Contact with Canada lessens. One morning Peter enters the café and Senhor Álvaro hands him a piece of paper. The message is never more than a name, usually Ben’s or Teresa’s. This time it’s the Whip’s. Peter goes to the phone at the end of the counter and dials Canada.

“Finally,” the Whip says. “I’ve left three messages in the past week.”

“Have you? I’m sorry, they didn’t get to me.”

“Don’t worry about it. How’s Portugal?” His voice crackles with distance. A far-off fire on a dark night.

“Good. April is a lovely time here.”

The line suddenly becomes terribly clear, like a hot, urgent whisper. “Well, as you know, we’re not doing well in the polls.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. Peter, I’ve got to be frank. A senator’s most fruitful work may very well take place away from the upper chamber, but a senator is nonetheless expected to sit, at least occasionally, in that chamber.”

“You’re right.”

“You haven’t been here for over nine months.”

“I haven’t.”

“And you haven’t been doing any Senate work.”

“Nope. Neither fruitful nor otherwise.”

“You just vanished. Except your name is still on the Senate roster. And”—the Whip clears his throat—“you’re living with — uh — a monkey.”

“An ape, actually.”

“The story’s made the rounds. It’s been in the papers. Listen, I know it was really hard with Clara. Believe me, I feel for what you went through. But at the same time, it’s hard to justify to Canadian taxpayers paying your salary as a senator to run a zoo in northern Portugal.”

“I completely agree. It’s outrageous.”

“It’s become somewhat of an issue. The party leadership is none too happy.”

“I formally resign from the Senate of Canada.”

“It’s the right thing to do — unless you want to come back, of course.”

“I don’t. And I’ll return my salary since the time I left Ottawa. I haven’t even touched it. Been living off my savings. And now I’ll have my pension.”

“Even better. Can I get all that in writing?”

Two days later there’s a new message at the café: Teresa.

“You’ve resigned. I read it in the papers. Why don’t you want to come back to Canada?” she asks him. “I miss you. Come back.” The tone of her voice is warm, sisterly. He misses her too, their regular phone calls that were not so long-distance, their dinners together when he lived in Toronto.

But he has not seriously entertained the idea of returning to Canada since he and Odo moved to Tuizelo. The members of his own species now bring on a feeling of weariness in him. They are too noisy, too fractious, too arrogant, too unreliable. He much prefers the intense silence of Odo’s presence, his pensive slowness in whatever he does, the profound simplicity of his means and aims. Even if that means that Peter’s humanity is thrown back in his face every time he’s with Odo, the thoughtless haste of his own actions, the convoluted mess of his own means and aims. And despite the fact that Odo, nearly every day, drags him out to meet fellow members of his species. Odo is insatiably sociable.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“I have a friend who’s single. She’s attractive and really nice. Have you thought about that, about giving love and family another try?”

He hasn’t. His heart is expended in that way, of loving the single, particular individual. He loved Clara with every fibre of his being, but now he has nothing left. Or rather, he has learned to live with her absence, and he has no wish to fill that absence; that would be like losing her a second time. Instead he would prefer to be kind to everyone, a less personal but broader love. As for physical desire, his libido no longer tempts him. He thinks of his erections as being the last of his adolescent pimples; after years of prodding and squeezing, they have finally gone away, and he is unblemished by carnal desire. He can remember the how of sex but not the why.

“Since Clara died, I just haven’t been in that space,” he says. “I can’t—”

“It’s your ape, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t say anything.

“What do you do with it all day long?” she asks.

“We go for walks. Sometimes we wrestle. Mostly we just hang out.”

“You wrestle with it? Like with a kid?”

“Oh, Ben was never that strong, thank goodness. I come out of it banged and bruised.”

“But what’s the point of it, Peter? Of the walking, the wrestling, and the hanging out?”

“I don’t know. It’s”—what is it? — “interesting.”

“Interesting?”

“Yes. Consuming, actually.”

“You’re in love with it,” his sister says. “You’re in love with your ape and it’s taken over your life.” She is not criticizing, she is not attacking — but there is a slight edge to the observation.

He considers what she’s just said. In love with Odo, is he? If love it is, it’s an exacting love, one that always demands that he pay attention, that he be alert. Does he mind? Not for one minute. So perhaps it is love. A curious love, if so. One that strips him of any privilege. He has language, he has cognition, he knows how to tie a shoelace — what of that? Mere tricks.

And a love tinged with fear, still and always. Because Odo is so much stronger. Because Odo is alien. Because Odo is unknowable. It’s a tiny, inexpungible parcel of fear, yet not incapacitating nor even a source of much worry. He never feels dread or anxiety with Odo, never anything so lingering. It rather goes like this: The ape appears without the least sound, seemingly out of nowhere, and among the emotions Peter feels — the surprise, the wonder, the pleasure, the joy — there is a pulse of fear. He can do nothing about it except wait for the pulse to go away. That is a lesson he has learned, to treat fear as a powerful but topical emotion. He is afraid only when he needs to be. And Odo, despite his capacity to overwhelm, has never given him real cause to be afraid.

And if it is love, then that implies some sort of meeting. What strikes him isn’t the blurring of the boundary between the animal and the human that this meeting implies. He long ago accepted that blurring. Nor is it the slight, limited movement up for Odo to his presumably superior status. That Odo learned to make porridge, that he enjoys going through a magazine, that he responds appropriately to something Peter says only confirms a well-known trope of the entertainment industry, that apes can ape — to our superficial amusement. No, what’s come as a surprise is his movement down to Odo’s so-called lower status. Because that’s what has happened. While Odo has mastered the simple human trick of making porridge, Peter has learned the difficult animal skill of doing nothing. He’s learned to unshackle himself from the race of time and contemplate time itself. As far as he can tell, that’s what Odo spends most of his time doing: being in time, like one sits by a river, watching the water go by. It’s a lesson hard learned, just to sit there and be. At first he yearned for distractions. He would absent himself in memories, replaying the same old movies in his head, fretting over regrets, yearning for lost happiness. But he’s getting better at being in a state of illuminated, sitting-by-a-river repose. So that’s the real surprise: not that Odo would seek to be like him but that he would seek to be like Odo.

Teresa is right. Odo has taken over his life. She means the cleaning up and the looking after. But it’s much more than that. He’s been touched by the grace of the ape, and there’s no going back to being a plain human being. That is love, then.

“Teresa, I think we all look for moments when things make sense. Here, cut off, I find these moments all the time, every day.”

“With your ape?”

“Yes. Sometimes I think Odo breathes time, in and out, in and out. I sit next to him and I watch him weave a blanket made of minutes and hours. And while we’re on top of a boulder watching a sunset, he’ll make a gesture with his hand, just something in the air, and I swear he’s working an angle or smoothing a surface of a sculpture whose shape I can’t see. But that doesn’t bother me. I’m in the presence of a weaver of time and a maker of space. That’s enough for me.”

At the other end of the phone line there’s a long silence. “I don’t know what to say, big brother,” Teresa says at last. “You’re a grown man who spends his days hanging out with an ape. Maybe it’s counselling you need, not a girlfriend.”

With Ben it’s not much easier. “When are you coming home?” he asks insistently.

Could it be that his son, beyond the annoyance, is expressing a need to have him home? “This is home,” he replies. “This is home. Why don’t you come and see me?”

“When I find the time.”

Peter never brings up Odo. When Ben found out about Odo, he threw an ice-cold tantrum. After that, it was as if his dad had turned out gay, and it was best not to ask questions lest unsavoury details be revealed.

His granddaughter, Rachel, surprisingly, turns out to be the sweetest. They do well, antipodally. The distance allows her to pour her teenage secrets into his ear. To her, he is her gay grandfather, and in the same tone in which she gushes about boys she asks him breathlessly about Odo and their cohabitation. She wants to visit him to meet the short, hairy boyfriend, but she has school and camp, and Portugal is so far away from Vancouver, and, not really mentioned, there is her unwilling mother.

Except for Odo, he is alone.

He subscribes to book clubs and various magazines. He gets his sister to mail him boxes of used paperbacks — colourful, plot-driven stuff — and old magazines. Odo is as big a reader as he is. The arrival of a new National Geographic is greeted with loud hoots and the slapping of the ground with hands. Odo leafs through the magazine slowly, considering each image. Foldouts and maps are a particular source of interest.

One of Odo’s favourite books, discovered early on, is the family photo album. Peter humours Odo and goes through his childhood and early adult years with the ape, recounting to him the story of the Tovy family in Canada, their growing and ageing members, the new additions, their friends, the special occasions remembered by a snapshot. When Peter reaches a certain age, Odo recognizes him with a pant of surprise. He taps on the photo emphatically with a black finger and looks up at him. When Peter turns the pages, going back in time, and points at younger and younger guises of himself, slimmer, darker-haired, taut-skinned, captured in colour and then, earlier, in black-and-white, Odo peers with great intensity. One leap at a time they come to the oldest photo of Peter, taken in Lisbon, before his family’s move to Canada, when he was a child of two. The portrait feels from another century to him. Odo stares at it with blinking incredulity.

The few other photos in those opening pages evoke people from his parents’ earlier years in Portugal. The largest one, filling a whole page, is a group shot, the people in it stiffly standing in front of an exterior whitewashed wall. Most of these relatives Peter can’t identify. His parents must have told him who they were, but he’s forgotten. They are from so long ago and so far away that he finds it hard to imagine they were ever truly alive. Odo seems to share his same sense of disbelief, but with a greater desire to believe.

A week later Odo opens the album again. Peter expects him to recognize the Lisbon photo, but the ape looks at it with a blank expression. Only by retracing the journey backwards in time, photo by photo, does he once again come to recognize Peter as a toddler. Which he forgets once more when they look at the album later. Odo is a being of the present moment, Peter realizes. Of the river of time, he worries about neither its spring nor its delta.

It is a bittersweet activity for Peter, to revisit his life. It mires him in nostalgia. Some photos evoke stabs of memory that overwhelm him. One evening, at a shot of young Clara holding baby Ben, he begins to weep. Ben is tiny, red, wrinkled. Clara looks exhausted but ecstatic. The tiniest hand is holding on to her little finger. Odo looks at him, nonplused but concerned. The ape puts the album down and embraces him. After a moment Peter shakes himself. What is this weeping for? What purpose does it serve? None. It only gets in the way of clarity. He opens the album again and stares hard at the photo of Clara and Ben. He resists the easy appeal of sadness. Instead he focuses on the fact, huge and simple, of his love for them.

He starts to keep a diary. In it he records his attempts at understanding Odo, the ape’s habits and quirks, the general mystery of the creature. He also notes new Portuguese phrases he’s learned. Then there are reflections about his life in the village, the life he’s led, the sum of it all.

He takes to sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, on one of the woolen blankets he buys. He reads on the floor, he writes, he grooms and is groomed, sometimes he naps, and sometimes he just sits there, doing nothing at all on the floor. Sitting down and getting up is tiresome, but he reminds himself that it’s good exercise for a man his age. Nearly always Odo is right next to him, lightly pressed against him, minding his own ape business — or meddling with his.

Odo rearranges the house. On the kitchen counter, the cutlery is lined up in the open, knives with knives, forks with forks, and so on. Cups and bowls are set on the counter, upside down and against the wall. The same with other objects in the house: They do not belong high up on shelves or hidden in drawers, but closer at hand, lined up against the foot of the wall, in the case of books and magazines, or set here or there on the floor.

Peter puts things back where they belong — he is a neat man — but straightaway Odo sets things right, simian-style. Peter mulls over the situation. He returns his shoes to where he normally has them, next to the door, and the case for his reading glasses back into a drawer, then he moves a few magazines to a different location along the wall. Right behind him, Odo takes the shoes and places them on the same stone tile he placed them on earlier, and he returns the glasses case to its designated tile and the magazines to his chosen spot along the wall. Aha, thinks Peter. It’s not a mess, then. It’s an order of a different kind. Well, it makes the floor interesting. He lets go of his sense of neatness. It’s all part of life at a crouch.

He regularly has to return items to the rooms on the ground floor. Ostensibly a space for the keeping and caring of animals and the storage of implements needed for living off the land, it is now filled to the ceiling with the junk of the ages, the villagers being pathological hoarders from one generation to the next. Odo loves the animal pen. It is a treasure trove that endlessly exercises his curiosity.

And beyond, there is the village, a place of a thousand points of interest for Odo. The cobblestones, for example. The flower boxes. The many stone walls, each easily climbable. The trees. The connecting roofs, of which Odo is particularly fond. Peter worries that the villagers will mind having an ape puttering atop their houses, but most don’t even notice, and those who do, stare and smile. And Odo moves with nimble sure-footedness — he doesn’t clatter about, displacing tiles. His favourite roof is that of the old church, from which he has a fine view. When he’s up there, Peter sometimes goes inside the church. It’s a humble place of worship, with bare walls, a plain altar, an awkward crucifix blackened by time, and, at the other end of the aisle, beyond the last pew, a shelf bookended by vases of flowers, the requisite shrine to some dusty saint of Christendom. He has no interest in organized religion. On his first visit, a two-minute once-over satisfied him. But the small church is a quiet spot, and it offers the same advantage as the café: a place to properly sit. He usually parks himself at a pew near a window from which he can see the downspout pipe Odo will take to descend from the roof. He’s never come into the church with Odo, not wanting to risk it.

Mostly, though, in the village, it is the people who interest Odo. They have lost their wariness. He is particularly well disposed towards women. Was the Peace Corps volunteer who brought him over from Africa a woman? Did a female lab technician make a positive impression on him in his early years? Or is it simple biology? Whatever the reason, he always reaches out to women. As a result, the village widows who at first shrank away from him, retreating into surliness, transform into the ones who are the most devoted to him. Odo responds amiably to all of them, making faces and sounds that comfort them and open them up further. It’s a good fit, the short, stooped women dressed in black and the short, stooped animal with the black coat. From a distance, one might be forgiven for mistaking one for the other.

Likely as not, the women — indeed, all the villagers — engage Odo in spirited conversation first. Then, when they turn to him, they speak in the simplest, most childish language, their voices raised, their expressions and gestures exaggerated, as if he were the village idiot. After all, he doesn’t fala Portuguese.

Dona Amélia becomes Odo’s closest female disciple. Soon there is no longer any need for them to leave the house when she comes to clean. In fact, it is the opposite: Her weekly visit is a time when Odo happily stays in and Peter can go out and run errands. From the moment she arrives, the ape remains at her side as she moves about the house doing her light duties, which lengthen in time while costing him no more in escudos. He has the most immaculate, nearly barren house in Tuizelo, though peculiarly ordered, since Dona Amélia respects the ape’s odd sense of tidiness. All the while she’s working, she chatters away to Odo in mellifluous Portuguese.

She tells Peter that Odo is “um verdadeiro presente para a aldeia”—a true gift to the village.

He makes his own observations about the village. The richest villager is Senhor Álvaro; as a shopkeeper, he has the most disposable income. Then come the villagers who own and cultivate land. Next come the shepherds, who own their flocks. Last come the workers, who own nothing except perhaps their own houses and who work for those who have work to give them. They are the poorest in the village and have the most freedom. Peopling every level of this hierarchy are family members young and old, all of whom work to some degree, according to their capacity. The priest, an amiable man named Father Eloi, stands apart, since he owns nothing but has business with everyone. He moves across all levels. Overall, the villagers of Tuizelo are monetarily poor, though this is not immediately apparent. In many ways they are autarkic, growing their own food, both animal and vegetable, and making and mending their own clothes and furniture. Barter — of goods and services — is still a common practice.

He observes an odd local tradition he has seen nowhere else. He first notices it at a funeral, as the procession makes its way through the village to the church: A number of the mourners are walking in reverse. It appears to be an expression of grief. Along the street, across the square, up the stairs, backwards they move, their grave faces tilted down as they dwell on their sorrow. Regularly they turn their heads to look over their shoulders to direct themselves, but others also assist them by reaching out with a hand. He is intrigued by the custom and inquires about it. Neither Dona Amélia nor anyone else seems to know where it comes from or why exactly it is done.

The ape’s preferred spot in the village is the café. The villagers become used to seeing them sitting at an outdoor table, enjoying cafés com muito leite.

One wet day he and Odo are standing in front of the café. They have just come back from a long walk. They’re both cold. The outdoor tables and chairs are puddled with rain. He hesitates. Senhor Álvaro is at the counter. He sees them and raises his hand and gestures that they should come in.

They settle in a corner of the room. The establishment is typical of its sort. There is a counter with the saucers piled up, each with its small spoon and package of sugar, ready to receive a cup of coffee. Behind the counter, the shelves are lined with bottles of wine and liqueur. In front of the counter are the round tables with their complement of metal chairs. Lording over the room is a television, which is always on but thankfully with the volume turned quite low.

To Peter’s surprise, Odo is not engrossed by the television. He watches the small men chasing after the tiny white ball or, preferably, the couples looking at each other with great intensity — the ape prefers soaps to sports — but only for a short time. Of greater interest is the warm room and the real live people in it. The television is dethroned while the patrons look at Odo and Odo looks at them. Meanwhile, Peter and Senhor Álvaro catch each other’s eyes. They smile. Peter lifts two fingers to place their usual order. Senhor Álvaro nods. After that, they become habitués at the café, even down to where they sit.

He and Odo often go on long hikes. Odo never again asks to be carried, as he did once in Oklahoma. Now the ape’s energy is unflagging. But he still regularly takes refuge in trees, perching himself high up on a branch. Peter can only wait patiently below. For being so quiet in the forest — except when they find clearings of spongy moss, perfect for merry tussles — they see badgers, otters, weasels, hedgehogs, genets, wild boar, hares and rabbits, partridges, owls, crows, ibis, jays, swallows, doves and pigeons, other birds, once a shy lynx, and another time a rare Iberian wolf. Each time Peter thinks that Odo will go after them, a crashing chase through the undergrowth, but instead he stands stock-still and stares. Despite the evident wealth of the forest, they both prefer to explore the open plateau.

One afternoon, returning from a walk, they come upon two dogs by a stream, just outside the village. The village is full of shy mutts. The two dogs are drinking. Odo observes them with keen interest, unafraid. The dogs do not look unhealthy, but they are lean. When they notice the man and the chimpanzee, they tense. Odo hoots quietly and approaches them. The dogs crouch and the hair goes up on their backs. Peter feels uneasy, but the dogs are not particularly big and he knows the ape’s strength. Still, a violent confrontation would be ugly. Before anything can happen, the dogs turn and bolt.

A few days later he is sitting on a chair on the landing at the top of the stairs when he sees two snouts poke through the gate. It is the same two dogs. Odo is next to him, propped on top of the landing wall. He sees the dogs too. Immediately Odo descends to the courtyard to open the gate. The dogs move away. He hoots quietly and crouches low. They eventually advance into the courtyard. Odo is delighted. By fits and starts, with hoos and whines, the space between a chimpanzee and two dogs begins to lessen until Odo dips a hand onto the back of the larger of the two dogs, a black mongrel. The ape starts to groom it. Peter suspects there is much to groom on these dogs that spend their entire lives outdoors. The black dog is fully crouched, nervous but submissive, and Odo works its fur gingerly, starting at the base of the tail.

Peter goes inside. A few minutes later, when he looks out again from the kitchen window, the dog has rolled over, exposing its belly. Odo stands half-risen over it, his hair standing on end, his teeth bared, his hand hovering claw-like over the dog’s belly. The dog is whimpering and its eyes are fixed on the hairy hand. Peter is alarmed. Odo looks terrifying. What’s happening? Just a moment ago the nervous canine was being reassured by Odo in a friendly and assiduous manner. Now it has rolled over, exposing its soft underside, in effect saying to the ape that it is so abjectly afraid that it will not defend its life. He moves to the living room window. What should I do? What should I do? He has visions of Odo gutting the howling dog. Aside from what the poor dog might feel, what about the villagers? It’s one thing shrieking on occasion and breaking the odd cup and vagabonding about roofs — but disembowelling a dog is another. The village dogs are not coddled the way North American pets are, but they nonetheless have owners who feed them scraps and casually care for them. As he crosses the second living room window, he sees that the dog’s raised rear legs are twitching and that the animal is convulsing on the ground. He reaches the door and leaps onto the landing, a cry in his throat. Something makes him look a moment longer. The picture changes. He lets his outstretched hand drop. Odo is tickling the dog. It is shaking with canine mirth while the ape laughs along.

After that, more dogs begin to show up. Finally, in all, a pack of about twelve. Peter never feeds them; still, every morning they creep into the courtyard and wait quietly, not a whine or a whimper coming from them. When Odo appears at a window or on the landing, they become both excited and settled, odd to say. Odo perhaps joins them, but he might also ignore them. Attention makes the dogs stay, lack of it eventually makes them go away, only to show up the next morning, with hopeful expressions on their faces.

The interactions between the ape and the dogs vary greatly. At times they bask on the warm courtyard stones, their eyes closed, the only motion the rise and fall of their breathing, the only sound the odd snuffle. Then Odo raises an arm and taps a dog, showing his lower teeth in a grin. Or stands up and puts on a display, swaggering about erect on his legs, slapping and stamping the ground, huffing, hooting, and grunting. Tap, grin, and display all signal the same thing: It’s time to play! Play involves either Odo chasing the dogs, or the dogs chasing Odo, or, more often than not, everyone chasing everyone. It’s a rough, joyous riot in which dogs run, turn, twist, roll, jump up, scamper off, while Odo dashes or dodges, pounces or brakes, bounces off walls or scrambles across them, the whole accompanied by a deafening uproar of canine barks and primate shrieks. The ape is exceptionally agile. There is no corner from which he can’t escape, no dog that he can’t knock off its feet. Watching him makes Peter realize how much Odo restrains himself when they wrestle together. If Odo played with him the way he plays with the dogs, Peter would be in the hospital. The fun lasts until Odo falls over, breathless. The dogs, panting and dripping slobber, do the same.

Peter notes with interest the arrangement of the animals when they are at rest. Every time it is a different pattern. Nearly always one dog lies asleep with its head on Odo, while the others are nearby, piled up on each other or laid out this way and that. Sometimes Odo looks up at him and funnels his lips in a soundless hoo shape, the way he did when they first met, to salute him without waking up the dogs.

But diversion though it is, this play with the dogs is at times hair-raising, literally. There is always a feel of edginess, of a disquiet easily summoned. Every dog’s scamper starts with a cower. Peter wonders why the dogs always come back.

One day the animals are lying about in the mild Portuguese sun, seemingly without a care in the world, when an uproar erupts, with much whining and barking. Odo is at the centre of the turmoil. He displays, but not for play this time. With a terrifying, teeth-baring wraaaa cry, he throws himself upon a dog who has mysteriously offended. The poor canine becomes the recipient of a full-on thrashing. The harsh slaps and blows that land on its body echo in the courtyard. The dog whines pitifully in a high pitch. These pleas for mercy are mostly drowned out by Odo’s roar and by the other dogs, who are watching in a fever of anxiety, whining and howling and twitching and jerking about in circles with their tails tightly coiled between their legs.

Peter watches from the landing, petrified. The thought occurs to him: What if one day Odo finds fault with him?

Then it passes. After one last terrific slap, Odo throws the dog aside and moves away, his back turned to the assaulted animal. The dog lies prostrate, visibly trembling. The other dogs fall silent, though they still stare with their hair standing straight up and their eyes bulging. Odo’s breathing slows, and the dog’s trembling becomes intermittent. Peter thinks the incident is over, that each animal will now move off to lick its real or imaginary wounds. But a curious thing happens. The offending dog painfully rights itself. Stomach resting flat against the ground, it crawls over to Odo and begins a very low whine. It does not let up until Odo, without turning his head, brings out a hand and touches it. When he takes his hand back, the dog resumes its whining. Odo returns his hand to the dog’s body. After a while, the ape turns and moves closer and starts to groom the dog. The dog rolls onto its side and whines in a quieter tone. Odo’s hands work across its body. When one side is done, he lifts the dog and gently turns it over to groom its other side. When he is done, he lies right next to it and they both fall asleep.

The next morning, that very dog, limping, looking frazzled and bedraggled, drags itself into the courtyard. Even more surprising, when Odo joins the dogs, he flops himself down beside it, as if nothing untoward had happened the previous day. And for the next ten days, they are together all the time, in play as well as in rest.

Peter realizes that every conflict between Odo and the dogs ends in this way, with all tensions revealed and expelled, after which nothing remains, nothing lingers. The animals live in a sort of emotional amnesia centered in the present moment. Turmoil and upheaval are like storm clouds, bursting dramatically but exhausting themselves quickly, then making way once more for the blue sky, the permanent blue sky.

The dogs cower yet come back every day. Is he any different? He’s no longer palpably frightened of Odo. All the same, the ape does fill a room. He can’t be ignored. Peter’s heart at times still quickens upon seeing him. But it’s not fear, that’s not what he would call it anymore. It’s more a kind of nerve-racking awareness that doesn’t make him want to flee the ape’s presence but, on the contrary, to address it, because Odo always addresses his presence. After all, as far as he can tell, Odo invariably appears in a room because Peter is in it to start with. And whatever he might be doing before Odo walks in does not fill his consciousness the way dealing with Odo does. Always there is that gaze that swallows him. Always, without diminishment, there is that sense of wonder.

There, has he not answered the question about why the dogs return every day? Is there anything else that so captivates their minds, their being? No, there isn’t. So every morning they make their way back to the house — and every morning he is glad to wake not far from Odo.

The dogs carry lice, which they pass on to Odo. Peter uses a fine comb to get the vermin and their eggs out. And Odo finally gets the grooming challenge he yearns for when Peter too gets lice.

A few weeks later they’re returning from a walk in the fields of boulders. The weather is lovely, the land discreetly exuberant in its springtime greening, but Peter is tired and he’s looking forward to resting. A coffee would be nice. They head for the café. He sits down wearily. When his coffee arrives, he nurses it. Odo sits quietly.

Peter gazes outside — and it’s as if a pane of frosted glass has shattered and he sees with clarity what is out there. He can’t believe his eyes. Ben, his son Ben, is standing in the square, having just stepped out of a car.

Emotions congest him. Astonishment, worry — is something wrong? — but mainly pure, simple parental delight. His son, his son has come! It’s been nearly two years since he’s seen him.

He gets up and rushes out. “Ben!” he calls.

Ben turns and sees his father. “Surprise!” he says, embracing him. He too is quite clearly glad. “I got two weeks off — decided to see what you’re up to in this godforsaken place.”

“I’ve missed you so much,” Peter says, smiling. His son looks so dazzlingly young and vigorous.

“Jesus Christ!” Ben pulls back, a look of panic on his face.

Peter turns. It is Odo, who is rapidly knuckle-walking up to them, his face alight with curiosity. Ben looks like he might turn and run.

“It’s all right. He won’t hurt you. He’s just coming to say hi. Odo, this is my son, Ben.”

Odo comes up and sniffs at Ben and pats his leg. Ben is evidently apprehensive.

“Welcome to Tuizelo,” Peter says.

“They bite your face off,” Ben says. “I read about it.”

“This one won’t,” Peter replies.

Over the next ten days, Peter shares his life with his son. They talk, they walk. They obliquely mend relations, atoning for previous distance by acts of attentive proximity. The whole time Ben worries about Odo, about being attacked by him. He catches Peter wrestling with Odo once, a vaulting, turbulent circus. Peter hopes his son will join in, but he doesn’t — he holds back, his expression tense.

One morning, as they are cleaning up after breakfast, Odo appears beside them in the kitchen holding a book.

“What have you got there?” Peter asks.

Odo hands it to him. It’s an old Portuguese hardcover of an Agatha Christie murder mystery, the cover garish, the pages limp and yellow. The title is Encontro com a morte.

“Would that be A Meeting with a Dead Man?” asks Ben.

“Or A Meeting with Death? I’m not sure,” Peter replies. He checks the copyright page, which gives the correct title in English. “Ah. It’s Appointment with Death. Maybe we should improve our Portuguese by reading it.”

“Why not?” Ben says. “You first.”

Peter fetches the dictionary and the three of them settle on the floor, the father and the ape easily and comfortably, the son less so, and more warily. Peter reads aloud the first paragraphs, practicing not only his comprehension but his pronunciation:

‘Compreendes que ela tem de ser morta, não compreendes?’

A pergunta flutuou no ar tranquilo da noite, parecendo pairar por um momento até se afastar na escuridão, na direção do Mar Morto.

Hercule Poirot deteve-se um minuto com a mão no fecho da janela. Franziu o sobrolho e fechou-a num gesto decidido, impedindo assim a entrada do nocivo ar noturno. Hercule Poirot crescera a acreditar que o melhor era deixar o ar exterior lá fora, e que o ar noturno era especialmente perigoso para a saúde.

Odo is enthralled. He stares at the page, at Peter’s lips. What is it that the ape likes? The sound of his strong accent? The novelty of extended speech pronounced in a modulated voice, rather than the monosyllables of regular talk? Whatever it is, while Peter reads aloud, Odo sits still, listening intently, tucked up against him. Peter senses that Ben is also intrigued, perhaps by the Portuguese too, but more likely by his father’s interaction with the ape.

Peter reads three pages before he gives up.

“So, how is it?” Ben asks.

“I understand it in the main, but it comes through a fog.” Peter turns to Odo. “Where did you find this book?” he asks.

Odo points to the window. Peering out, Peter sees an open suitcase in the courtyard. He guesses its provenance: the junk-filled animal pen. He and Ben walk down, Odo in tow. Odo has a special fondness for suitcases he has unearthed, the mystery of them, what they open to reveal — which, most often, is bedsheets and old clothes. This one, however, at a glance, proves to hold an odd mix of things. Peter and Ben return one by one the contents that Odo has strewn about: a square of red cloth, some old coins, a knife and a fork, a few tools, a wooden toy, a pocket mirror, two dice, a candle, three playing cards, a black dress, a flute, and an oyster shell. There is an envelope that is closed but not sealed. It seems empty, but Peter opens it, just to check. He is puzzled to find some coarse black hairs. He touches them — they are stiff and dry. He would swear they were Odo’s. “What game are you playing?” he asks the ape.

Peter is about to close the suitcase when Ben says, “Wait, you missed this.”

He hands him a single sheet of paper. The sheet is sparsely covered, only four lines of a squarish black handwriting:

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

as Altas Montanhas de Portugal

Peter stares. Memory is nudged, facts are tentatively recalled, connections made, until a remembrance bursts into focus: Rafael Miguel Santos Castro—Grandpa Batista’s brother? Above, to the right, appears a date. 1 Janeiro, 1939. That timeline seems about right, his death then at age eighty-three. The letterhead announces Departamento de Patologia, Hospital São Francisco, Bragança. He is chilled. After Clara, he wants nothing more to do with pathology ever again. Nonetheless, his eyes can’t help but read the two lines written beneath Rafael Castro’s basic information:

Encontrei nele, com meus próprios olhos,

um chimpanzé e um pequeno filhote de urso.

The words are unmistakable: I found in him, with my own eyes, a chimpanzee and a small bear cub. Beneath are a semi-legible signature and an official stamp that states the pathologist’s name clearly: Dr. Eusebio Lozora.

“What’s it say?” Ben asks.

“It says…” Peter’s voice trails off as he opens the envelope again and rubs the black hairs between his fingers. He glances at the contents of the suitcase. What story is this suitcase trying to tell? What is his maternal great-uncle Rafael’s pathology report — if that is what it is — doing in this house? He has made no inquiries about the family home. The discovery of his tenuous link to the village will generate noise and attention, which he doesn’t care for. He does not feel like a returning native. More pertinently, like Odo, he is happy to live in the present moment, and the present moment has no past address. But now he wonders: Could this be the house? Could that be the explanation for its dereliction and its availability?

“Well?” his son prompts.

“Sorry. It seems to be some sort of pathology report. This doctor claims — how shall I put it? — that he found a chimpanzee and a bear cub in a man’s body. It’s what it says. Look, it’s the same word: um chimpanzé.”

“What?” Ben shoots Odo an incredulous glance.

“Clearly, there is a metaphor here, a Portuguese idiom, that I’m not understanding.”

“Clearly.”

“What’s also strange is the name of the deceased. This is a puzzle for Dona Amélia perhaps. Here, let’s bring the suitcase upstairs.”

“I’ll do it. Don’t strain yourself.”

They head for Dona Amélia’s. Peter brings along the family photo album, which Odo is happy to carry. Dona Amélia is at home. She greets the two men with gracious calm, smiles at the ape.

“Minha casa — a casa de quem?” Peter asks her.

“Batista Reinaldo Santos Castro,” she answers. “Mas ele morreu há muito tempo. E a sua família”—she makes a sweeping motion with the back of her hand, accompanied by a quick blowing motion—“mudou-se para longe. As pessoas vão-se embora e nunca mais voltam.”

Batista Santos Castro — it is so, then. Unexpectedly, without any effort, the transient renter has found the house where he was born.

“What’d she say?” Ben whispers.

“She said that the man who lived in the house died a long time ago and his family — I didn’t understand her exact words, but her gesture was pretty clear — his family left, went away, abandoned the village, something like that. People leave and they never come back.” He turns to Dona Amélia again. “E seu irmão?” he adds. And his brother?

“O seu irmão?” Dona Amélia suddenly seems more interested. “O seu irmão Rafael Miguel era o pai do anjo na igreja. O papá! O papá!” she emphasizes. His brother is the father of the angel in the church. The daddy! The daddy!

The angel in the church? Peter hasn’t a notion what she’s talking about, but at the moment he’s interested only in the family connection. He takes the photo album from Odo and opens it, prepared to throw away his anonymity.

“Batista Santos Castro — sim?” he says, pointing at a man in the first photo in the album, the group shot.

Dona Amélia seems astounded that he should have a photo of Batista in his possession. “Sim!” she says, her eyes opening wide. She grabs the album and devours the photo with her eyes. “Rafael!” she exclaims, pointing at another man. She points again. “E sua esposa, Maria.” Then her breath is cut short. “É ele! A criança dourada! Outra foto dele!” she cries. It’s him! The Golden Child! Another photo of him! She is pointing at a small child, a mottled speck of sepia peeking from behind his mother. Peter has never seen Dona Amélia so excited.

“Batista — meu…avô,” he confesses. He points to Ben, but he doesn’t know the Portuguese word for “great-grandfather”.

“A criança dourada!” Dona Amélia practically shouts. She couldn’t care less that Batista was his grandfather and his son’s great-grandfather. She takes hold of his sleeve and drags him along. They head for the church. The angel in the church, she said. As they go, her excitement is contagious. Other villagers, mainly women, join them. They arrive at the church as a gaggle, in a flurry of rapid Portuguese. Odo seems pleased with the commotion, adds to it by hooting happily.

“What’s happening?” Ben asks.

“I’m not sure,” replies Peter.

They enter and take a left down the aisle, away from the altar. Dona Amélia stops them at the shrine set up at the back of the church, on the north wall. In front of the shelf bookended by its vases of flowers stands a long three-tiered flower box filled with sand. The sand is studded with thin candles, some burning, most burned out. Any neatness in the arrangement is disturbed by the dozens and dozens of bits of paper that cover the shelf and the floor, some rolled up into scrolls, others neatly folded into squares. Peter never came close enough on his previous visits to see this scattered litter. A framed photo is fixed to the wall just above the middle of the shelf, a black-and-white head shot of a little boy. A handsome little boy. Staring straight out with a serious expression. His eyes are unusual, of such a pallor that, amidst the chiaroscuro of the photo, they match the white wall that is the background. The photo looks very old. A young child from a long time ago.

Dona Amélia opens the photo album. “É ele! É ele!” she repeats. She points to the child on the wall and to the child in the album. Peter looks and examines, tallying eyes with eyes, chin with chin, expression with expression. Yes, she’s right; they are one and the same. “Sim,” he says, nodding, bemused. Mutters of amazement come from the crowd. The album is taken from his hands and is passed around, everyone seeking personal confirmation. Dona Amélia is aglow with rapture — while keeping a sharp eye on the photo album.

After a few minutes she takes firm hold of it again. “Pronto, já chega! Tenho que ir buscar o Padre Eloi.” Okay, that’s enough. I must get Father Eloi. She rushes off.

Peter squeezes between people to get closer to the photo on the wall. The Golden Child. Again his memory is stirred. Some story his parents told. He searches his mind, but it is like the last leaves of autumn, blown away, dispersed. There is nothing he can seize, only the vague memory of a lost memory.

He suddenly wonders: Where’s Odo? He sees his son on the edge of the group of villagers and the ape at the other end of the church. He extricates himself and he and his son make their way over to Odo. Odo is looking up and grunting. Peter follows with his eyes. Odo is staring at the wooden crucifix looming above and behind the altar. He appears to want to climb onto the altar, exactly the sort of scene Peter has feared would happen in the church. Mercifully, at that moment, Dona Amélia bustles back in with Father Eloi and hurries towards them. Her excitement distracts Odo.

The priest invites them to adjourn to the vestry. He places a thick folder on a round table and indicates that they should sit. Peter has had only cordial relations with the man, without ever feeling that the priest was trying to draw him into the flock. He takes a seat, as does Ben. Odo sets himself on a window ledge, watching them. He is silhouetted by daylight and Peter cannot read his expression.

Father Eloi opens the folder and spreads quantities of papers across the table — documents handwritten and typed, and a great number of letters. “Bragança, Lisboa, Roma,” the priest says, pointing to some of the letterheads. The explanations come patiently, as Peter’s consultations of the dictionary are frequent. Dona Amélia at times gets emotional, with tears brimming in her eyes, then she smiles and laughs. The priest is more steady in his intensity. Ben stays as still and silent as a statue.

When they leave the church, they go straight to the café.

“Gosh, and I thought Portuguese village life would be dull,” Ben says, nursing his espresso. “What was that all about?”

Peter is unsettled. “Well, for starters, we’ve found the family home.”

“You’re kidding? Where is it?”

“It happens to be the house I’m already living in.”

“Really?”

“They had to put me in an empty one, and the house has been empty since our family left. They never sold it.”

“Still, there are other empty houses. What an amazing coincidence.”

“But listen — Father Eloi and Dona Amélia also told me a story.”

“Something about a little boy a long time ago, I got that.”

“Yes, it happened in 1904. The boy was five years old and he was Grandpa Batista’s nephew, your great-grandfather’s nephew. He was away from the village with his father — my great-uncle Rafael — who was helping out on a friend’s farm. And then the next moment the boy was miles away, by the side of a road, dead. The villagers say his injuries matched exactly the injuries of Christ on the Cross: broken wrists, broken ankles, a deep gash in his side, bruises and lacerations. The story spread that an angel had plucked him from the field to bring him up to God, but the angel dropped him by accident, which explains his injuries.”

“You say he was found by the side of a road?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds to me like he was run over.”

“As a matter of fact, two days later a car appeared in Tuizelo, the first ever in the whole region.”

“There you go.”

“Some villagers right away believed there was a link between the car and the boy’s death. It quickly became such a story in the region that it was all documented. But there was no proof. And how did the boy, who was next to his father one moment, end up in front of a car miles away the next?”

“There must be some explanation.”

“Well, they took it as an act of God. Whether it was by God’s direct hand or by means of this strange new transportation device, God was behind it. And there’s more to the story. O que é dourado deve ser substituído pelo que é dourado.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a local saying. What is gilded should be replaced by what is gilded. They say God was sorry about the angel dropping the boy and so He gave him special powers. Apparently any number of infertile women have prayed to the boy and shortly afterwards become pregnant. Dona Amélia swears it happened to her. It’s a legend in these parts. More than that. There’s a process afoot to have him declared venerable by Rome, and because of all the fertility stories attributed to him, they say he has a good chance.”

“Is that so? We have an uncle who’s a saint and you live with an ape — that’s quite the extended-family situation we’ve got going.”

“No, venerable, two notches down.”

“Sorry, I can’t seem to tell my venerables from my saints.”

“Apparently, the little boy’s death turned the whole village upside down. Poverty is a native plant here. Everyone grows it, everyone eats it. Then this child appeared and he was like living wealth. Everyone loved him. They call him the Golden Child. When he died, Father Eloi told me, they say days turned to grey and all colour drained from the village.”

“Well, sure. It would be incredibly upsetting, a little boy’s death.”

“At the same time, they talk about him as if he’s still alive. He still makes them happy. You saw Dona Amélia — and she never even met him.”

“And how is this boy related to us again, exactly?”

“He was my mother’s cousin — and therefore my second cousin, or maybe my first cousin once removed, I’m not sure. At any rate, he’s family. Rafael and his wife, Maria, had their son very late, which means my mother was older than her cousin. She’d have been a teenager when he was born — as was Dad. So my parents both knew him. That’s what got Dona Amélia so excited. And I vaguely remember a story my parents told me when I was young, about the death of a child in the family. They would start it but never finish it — like a terrible war story. They always shut up at a particular point. I think they left the village before he was revived, so to speak. I suspect they never knew about that.”

“Or they didn’t care to believe it.”

“Could be that. Like the boy’s mother. It seems the boy’s father and mother stood on different sides of the story, the father believing in the boy’s powers, the mother not.”

“That’s a sad story,” Ben says. “And what was the deal about the chimpanzee in the body?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t bring that up.”

Odo is sitting on a chair next to them, holding a coffee in his hands, looking out the window.

“Well, there’s yours, sipping his cappuccino like a real European.”

When they return to the house, Peter goes from room to room, wondering if he feels differently about it. Will the walls now exude memories? Will he hear the pitter-patter of small bare feet on the floor? Will young parents appear, holding a small child in their arms, his future still shrouded in mystery?

No. This isn’t home. Home is his story with Odo.

That evening, over a simple meal, he and Ben go through the photo album again together and try to make sense of Dr. Lozora’s curious autopsy report on Rafael Miguel Santos Castro. Ben shakes his head in confusion.

The next afternoon they walk across the cobbled square to the little church. The day is as soft as a caress. They return to the candlelit shrine and the picture of the clear-eyed child. Ben mutters something about being related to “religious royalty”. They move to a pew near the front of the church to sit together.

Suddenly Ben looks startled. “Dad!” he says, pointing to the crucifix.

“What?”

“The cross there — it looks like a chimpanzee! I’m not kidding. Look at the face, the arms, the legs.”

Peter studies the crucifix. “You’re right. It does look like one.”

“This is crazy. What’s with all the apes?” Ben looks around nervously. “Where’s yours, by the way?”

“Over there,” Peter replies. “Stop fretting about him.”

As they leave the church Peter turns to his son. “Ben, you asked me a question. I don’t know what’s with all the apes. All I know is that Odo fills my life. He brings me joy.”

Odo grins and then lifts his hands and claps a few times, producing a muffled sound, as if quietly calling them to attention. Father and son both watch, transfixed.

“That’s a hell of a state of grace,” Ben says.

They wander home but right away Odo makes to strike out on a walk. Ben decides not to come. “I’ll wander around the village, continue reconnecting with my ancestors,” he says. It takes Peter a moment to realize that there is no irony in Ben’s statement. He would gladly join his son, but he is loyal to Odo, so he waves at Ben, grabs the backpack, and follows Odo out.

Odo sets off for the boulders. They walk silently, as usual, across the savannah. Peter trails behind without paying much attention. Abruptly Odo stops in his tracks. He rises on his legs and sniffs, his eyes trained on a boulder just ahead. A bird is standing on top of it, eyeing them. The hairs on Odo’s body rise till they are straight up on end. He sways from side to side. When he returns to all fours, he jerks himself up and down on his arms with great excitement, though he is strangely quiet. The next moment he takes off at a full run for the boulder. In the blink of an eye he has skipped to the top of it. The bird has long since fluttered away. Peter is perplexed. What was it about the bird that so excited him?

He thinks of staying put and letting Odo have his play on the boulder. He would like nothing more than to lie down and have a nap. But Odo turns and waves at him from his high perch. Clearly Peter is expected to follow. He makes his way to the boulder. At its base, he composes himself for the climb, taking a few deep breaths. When he feels ready, he looks up.

He is startled to see Odo directly above him, clinging to the rock fully upside down. Odo is staring at him furiously with his reddish-brown eyes while he beckons him with a hand, the long dark fingers curling and uncurling rhythmically in a manner that Peter finds mesmerizing. At the same time, Odo’s funnel-shaped lips are putting out a silent but urgent hoo, hoo, hoo. Odo has never done anything like this, neither in the boulder fields nor anywhere else. To be so imperatively summoned by the ape, and therefore so forcefully acknowledged — he is shocked. He feels as if he’s just been birthed out of nonexistence. He is an individual being, a unique being, one who has been asked to climb. Energized, he reaches for the first handhold. Though riddled with holes and bulges, the side of the boulder is quite vertical and he strains to pull his weary body up. As he climbs, the ape retreats. When they reach the top, Peter sits down heavily, panting and sweating. He doesn’t feel well. His heart is jumping about his chest.

He and Odo are side by side, their bodies touching. He looks at the way he has come. It is a sheer drop. He looks the other way, in the direction Odo is facing. The view is the same as always, though losing nothing for its familiarity: a great sweep of savannah all the way to the horizon, covered in golden-yellow grass, punctuated by dark boulders, a vista of spare beauty except for the sky, which is in full late-afternoon bloom. The volume of air above them is tremendous. Within it, the sun and the white clouds are playing off each other. The abundant light is unspeakably gorgeous.

He turns to Odo. The ape will be gazing up and away, he thinks. He is not. Odo is looking down and close-by. He is in a frenzy of excitement, but oddly contained, with no riotous pant-hooting or wild gestures, only a bobbing up and down of the head. Odo leans forward to look at the foot of the boulder. Peter cannot see what he is looking at. He nearly cannot be bothered to find out — he needs to rest. Nonetheless he lies on his front and inches forward, making sure his hands have a good grip. A fall from such a height would cause grievous injury. He peeks over the edge of the boulder’s summit to see what is drawing Odo’s attention down below.

What he sees does not make him gasp, because he doesn’t dare make a sound. But his eyes stay fixed and unblinking and his breath is stilled. He now understands Odo’s strategy in navigating the boulder fields, why the ape goes from boulder to boulder in a straight line rather than wandering in the open, why he climbs and observes, why he asks his clumsy human companion to stay close.

Odo has been seeking, and now Odo has found.

Peter stares at the Iberian rhinoceros standing at the foot of the boulder. He feels he is looking at a galleon from the air, the body massive and curved, the two horns rising like masts, the tail fluttering like a flag. The animal is not aware that it is being observed.

Peter and Odo look at each other. They acknowledge their mutual amazement, he with a stunned smile, Odo with a funnelling of the lips, then a wide grin of the lower teeth.

The rhinoceros flicks its tail and occasionally gives its head a little roll.

Peter tries to estimate its size. It is perhaps ten feet in length. A well-built, big-boned beast. The hide grey and tough-looking. The head large, with a long, sloping forehead. The horns as unmistakable as a shark’s fin. The moist eyes surprisingly delicate, with long eyelashes.

The rhinoceros scratches itself against the rock. It lowers its head and sniffs at the grass but does not eat. It twitches its ears. Then, with a grunt, it sets off. The ground shakes. Despite its heft, the animal moves swiftly, heading straight for another boulder, then another, then another, until it has disappeared.

Peter and Odo don’t move for the longest time, not for fear of the rhinoceros, but because they don’t want to lose anything of what they’ve just seen, and to move might bring on forgetfulness. The sky is a blaze of blues and reds and oranges. Peter finds himself weeping silently.

Finally he pushes himself back onto the top of the boulder. It is an effort to sit up. His heart is battering within him. He sits with his eyes closed, his head hung low, trying to breathe evenly. It’s the worst heartburn he’s ever had. He groans.

Odo, to his hazy surprise, turns and hugs him, one long arm wrapping around his back, supporting him, the other enveloping his raised knees, on which his arms are resting. It’s a firm full-circle embrace. Peter finds it comforting and relaxes into it. The ape’s body is warm. He places a trembling hand on Odo’s hairy forearm. He feels Odo’s breathing against the side of his face. He raises his head and opens his eyes to cast a sideways glance at his friend. Odo is looking straight at him. Puff, puff, puff, softly, go the ape’s breaths against his face. Peter struggles a little, but not to get away, more an involuntary action.

He stops moving, lifeless, his heart clogged to stillness. Odo does nothing for several minutes, then moves back, gently laying him flat on the boulder. Odo stares at Peter’s body and coughs mournfully. He stays next to him for a half hour or so.

The ape rises and drops off the rock, barely breaking his fall with his hands and feet. On the ground he moves out into the open. He stops and looks back at the boulder.

Then he turns and runs off in the direction of the Iberian rhinoceros.