The High Mountains of Portugal. Yann Martel

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

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

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

      Some are wreathed in smiles and pepper him with questions.

      “Who are you?”

      “Why have you stopped?”

      “How does it work?”

      “What does it cost?”

      “Are you rich?”

      “Are you married?”

      A few glare and grumble.

      “Have you no pity for our ears?”

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

      Children shout silly questions.

      “What’s its name?”

      “What does it eat?”

      “Is the horse in the cabin?”

      “What does its caca look like?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      So the priest quotes an aggrieved trader. Tomás has studied the history that Father Ulisses is fated to live: The priest set foot on São Tomé between sugar and chocolate, between the island’s time as a leading exporter of sugar, in the late sixteenth century, and of the chocolate bean now, in the early twentieth century. He would live the rest of his short life at the start of a three-century-long trough of poverty, stagnation, despair, and decadence, a time when São Tomé was an island of half-abandoned plantations and feuding elites who made the better part of their meagre living off the living, that is, from the slave trade. The island supplied slave ships with provisions—water,