The High Mountains of Portugal (31 page)

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.