The High Mountains of Portugal (32 page)

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.”