The High Mountains of Portugal. Yann Martel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      The two drivers of the stagecoach come into view, his colleagues in a way, and he eases off the accelerator pedal. The stagecoach drivers and he will