Simão shakes his head. With a struggle, as if his tongue has been lost deep inside his body, he speaks. “My reward is having been in this amazing carriage. It is I who thank you.”
“It’s nothing. I’m sorry I’ve taken you so far out of your way.”
“It’s not so far on foot.”
Simão reluctantly vacates the passenger seat, and Tomás prods the machine onward. “Thank you, thank you again,” he shouts.
Simão waves until he disappears from view in the side mirror.
Shortly thereafter, with a dragging to one side and a fluf-fluf-fluf-fluf sound, Tomás realizes that something is wrong. He presses on one pedal, then another.
It takes a few walkabouts around the vehicle before he sees that the front right tire is — he searches for the word—flat. The roundness of the wheel is no longer so round. There were some pages in the manual about this eventuality. He skipped them when it became apparent that the wheels, in their roundness, at least, did not require lubrication. He retrieves the manual and finds the appropriate section. He blanches. This is serious engineering work. He can see that even before he has translated the details from the French.
Understanding the nature and operation of the jack; assembling it; finding where it must be placed under the automobile; jacking the automobile up; unbolting and removing the wheel; replacing it with the spare wheel from the footboard; tightly bolting the fresh wheel into place; returning everything to its proper place — an experienced motorist might do it in half an hour. It takes him, with his raw hands, two hours.
At last, his hands sullied and throbbing, his body sweaty and aching, the task is done. He should be pleased that he can proceed again, but all he feels is mortal exhaustion. He retreats to the driving compartment and stares out in front of him. His head is prickly, as is the unwanted beard that is growing on his face. “Enough! Enough!” he whispers. What does suffering do to a man? Does it open him up? Does he understand any more as a result of his suffering? In the case of Father Ulisses, for the longest time it seems the answer to these questions was no. Tomás remembers a telling incident:
Today I saw a fight on a plantation. Two slaves clashed. Others stood about, with stupefied expressions. A female slave, the object of contention, looked on, impassive, indifferent. Whoever won, she would lose. Continually shouting in their native gibberish, the two fought, at first with words & gestures, then their fists, then their tools. The matter proceeded swiftly, from injured prides to injured bodies, from bruising & bleeding to frenzied hacking, till the end was reached: a dead slave with a torso cleft with deep cuts & a half-severed head. Whereupon the other slaves, the female included, turned & got back to their work lest the overseer arrive on the scene. The victor slave, his visage apathetic, threw some soil on the body, then returned to cutting cane. None of the slaves will come forward to acknowledge or explain, to accuse or defend. Just silence & the hoeing of sugar cane. The dead man’s decay will be rapid, started by insects & predatory birds & beasts & accelerated by the sun & rain. Soon nothing but a lump will be left of him. Only if the overseer directly steps onto this lump will its gashed blackness reveal white bones & decaying red flesh. Then the overseer will know the whereabouts of the slave who went missing.
Of this appalling scene, Father Ulisses has only one significant comment to make:
Such were the Lord’s wounds, like that dead slave’s injuries. His hands, his feet, his forehead where the crown of thorns pierced his skin & especially the wound on his side from the soldier’s spear — carmine red, very, very bright, a pull on the eyes.
Such was the suffering of Christ: “carmine red” and a “pull on the eyes”. But the suffering of the two men who fought to death before his very eyes? They are not worth a word. No more than the spectator slaves would Father Ulisses come forward to acknowledge or explain, to accuse or to defend. He seems to have been deaf and dumb to the suffering of the slaves. Or, to be more accurate, he seems to have seen nothing peculiar about it: They suffer, but so do I — so what of it?
The land begins to change as Tomás drives on. The Portugal that he knows is a land solemn in its beauty. A land that prizes the sound of work, both human and animal. A land devoted to duty. Now an element of wilderness begins to intrude. Great outcrops of round rocks. Dark green vegetation that is dry and scrubby. Wandering flocks of goats and sheep. He sees the High Mountains of Portugal foreshadowed in these extrusions of rocks, like the roots of a tree that break above ground, heralding the tree itself.
He is fretful. He is approaching Castelo Branco, which is a proper city, the largest on his deliberately rural route. An idea strikes him: He will drive through the city in the middle of the night. Thus will he avoid people, because it is people who are the problem. Streets, avenues, boulevards — these he can handle, if people aren’t staring and shouting and congregating. If he crosses Castelo Branco at, say, two in the morning in full-throttle third gear, he will likely meet only the odd nightshift worker or drunkard.
When Castelo Branco is near, he leaves the automobile behind and makes his way into the city on foot, backwards as always. He hitches a ride with a man driving a cart, which is fortunate, as the distance to the city turns out to be considerable. The man asks if he saw the strange carriage down the road. He says that he did, without mentioning that he is its driver. The man speaks of the machine in terms of wonder and worry. It’s the quantity of metal that surprises him, he says. It reminds him of a safe.
In Castelo Branco Tomás determines the route he should take. He is pleased to discover that the road continuing to the north of the country mostly avoids the city, circling it on its northwest side. Only the junction with the road is tricky.
He tells three apothecaries his horses-afflicted-with-lice story, which gets him ten bottles of moto-naphtha and, as an unfortunate corollary, three tins of horse lice powder. He carries these in two bags, evenly balanced. He decides to check in to a hotel for the day to wash himself and rest, but the two hotels he finds refuse to admit him, as does the restaurant he seeks to eat in. The proprietors look him up and down, study his singed face and burned hair — one pinches his nose — and they all point to the door. He is too tired to protest. He buys food from a grocer and eats on a bench in a park. He drinks water from a fountain, gulping it avidly, splashing it over his face and head, scrubbing at the soot plastered to his scalp. He wishes he’d remembered to bring the two wineskins, which he could have filled with water. Then he walks in reverse back to the automobile, watching Castelo Branco recede into the distance.
He waits in the cabin for night to fall, idly leafing through the diary to pass the time.
The provenance of the slaves on São Tomé was at first a matter of concern and interest to Father Ulisses — he named the newcomers’ origins in his diary: “from the Mbundu tribe” or “the Chokwe tribe.” But he was hazier on the origins of slaves who came from outside the Portuguese sphere of influence in Africa, and São Tomé, being usefully located, saw slave ships of every nationality — Dutch, English, French, Spanish — and soon he grew weary as a result of the slaves’ too-great numbers. They received his weakening blessing in a state of increasing anonymity. “Does it matter,” he wrote, “wherefrom a soul comes? The exiles of Eden are varied. A soul is a soul, to be blessed & brought to the love of God.”
But one day there was a change. Father Ulisses wrote with uncharacteristic excitement: