His office is quiet, as is the hallway outside it. Bragança has a population of not thirty thousand people, but its Hospital São Francisco, in which he is head pathologist, is the largest in Alto Douro. Other parts of the hospital will be lit up and swollen with bustle and noise — the emergency wing, where people come in screaming and crying, the wards, where the patients ring bells and hold the nurses up in endless conversations — but the pathology wing, in the basement of the hospital, beneath all these lively floors, is typically hushed, like all pathology wings. He wishes it to stay that way.
With the adding of three words and the crossing out of one, he completes the paragraph. He reads it over one last time. It is his private opinion that pathologists are the only physicians who know how to write. All the other devotees of Hippocrates hold up as their triumph the restored patient, and the words they might write — a diagnosis, a prescription, instructions for a treatment — are of fleeting interest to them. These physicians of restoration, as soon as they see a patient standing on his or her feet, move on to a new case. And it is true that every day patients depart the hospital with quite a bounce to their step. Just an accident, or a little bout of this or that illness, they say to themselves. But Eusebio places greater store in those who were seriously sick. He notes in these patients leaving the hospital the tottering gait and the dishevelled hair, the desperately humbled look and the holy terror in their eyes. They know, with inescapable clarity, what is coming to them one day. There are many ways in which life’s little candle can be snuffed out. A cold wind pursues us all. And when a stub of a candle is brought in, the wick blackened, the sides streaked with dripped wax, the attending physician — at the Hospital São Francisco, in Bragança, Portugal, at least — is either he or his colleague, Dr. José Otavio.
Every dead body is a book with a story to tell, each organ a chapter, the chapters united by a common narrative. It is Eusebio’s professional duty to read these stories, turning every page with a scalpel, and at the end of each to write a book report. What he writes in a report must reflect exactly what he has read in the body. It makes for a hard-headed kind of poetry. Curiosity draws him on, like all readers. What happened to this body? How? Why? He searches for that crafty, enforced absence that overtakes us all. What is death? There is the corpse — but that is the result, not the thing itself. When he finds a grossly enlarged lymph node or tissue that is abnormally rugose, he knows that he’s hot on death’s trail. How curious, though: Death often comes disguised as life, a mass of exuberant, anomalous cells — or, like a murderer, it leaves a clue, a smoking gun, the sclerotic caking of an artery, before fleeing the scene. Always he comes upon death’s handiwork just as death itself has turned the corner, its hem disappearing with a quiet swish.
He leans back in his chair to stretch. The chair creaks, like old bones. He notices a file on his workbench, along the wall, where his microscope stands. What is it doing there? And what is that on the floor beneath the bench — another file? And the glass on his desk — it’s so dried out, it’s collecting dust. He strongly believes in the importance of proper hydration. Life is moist. He should clean the glass and fill it with fresh, cool water. He shakes his head. Enough of these scattered thoughts. He has much that needs preserving, not only in solutions and slides but in words. In each case he must bring together the patient’s clinical history, the findings from the autopsy, and the histological results into a smooth and coherent whole. He must apply himself. Focus, man, focus. Find the words. Besides, there are other reports that need finishing. There is the one he has been putting off. It has to be done tonight. A body that was crushed and left for several days half-exposed to the air, half-submerged in a river, inviting both rot and bloating.
A loud rap at the door startles him. He looks at his watch. It is half past ten at night.
“Come in,” he calls out, exasperation escaping from his voice like steam from a kettle.
No one enters. But he senses a brooding presence on the other side of the solid wood door.
“I said come in,” he calls out again.
Still no rattling of the doorknob. Pathology is not a medical art that is much subject to emergency. The sick, or rather their biopsied samples, can nearly always wait till the next morning, and the dead are even more patient, so it’s unlikely to be a clerk with an urgent case. And pathologists’ offices are not located so that the general public might find them easily. Who then, at such an hour, on New Year’s Eve at that, would wend their way through the basement of the hospital to look for him?
He gets up, upsetting both himself and a number of papers. He walks around his desk, takes hold of the doorknob, and opens the door.
A woman in her fifties, with lovely features and large brown eyes, stands before him. In one hand she is holding a bag. He is surprised to see her. She eyes him. In a warm, deep voice, she starts up: “Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but find no rest. I am poured out like water. My heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd. Oh my darling, come quickly to my help!”
While a small part of Eusebio sighs, a larger part smiles. The woman at the door is his wife. She comes to his office to see him on occasion, though not usually at such a late hour. Her name is Maria Luisa Motaal Lozora, and he is familiar with the words of her lament. They are taken mostly from Psalm 22, her favourite psalm. She in fact has no cause for conventional suffering. She is in good mental and physical health, she lives in a nice house, she has no desire to leave him or the town where they live, she has good friends, she is never truly bored, they have three grown children who are happy and healthy — in short, she has all the elements that make for a good life. Only his wife, his dear wife, is an amateur theologian, a priest manqué, and she takes the parameters of life, her mortal coildom, her Jobdom, very seriously.
She is fond of quoting from Psalm 22, especially its first line: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” His thought in response is that, nonetheless, there is “My God, my God” at the start of the plaint. It helps that there’s someone listening, if not doing.
He has much listening to do, he does, with his wife, and not much doing. Her mouth might be dried up like a potsherd, but she never quotes the line that follows in Psalm 22—“and my tongue sticks to my jaws”—because that would be an untruth. Her tongue is never stuck to her jaws. Maria ardently believes in the spoken word. To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken. And so she talks. She talks all the time. She talks to herself when she is alone at home and she talks to herself when she is alone in the street, and she has been talking to him incessantly since the day they met, thirty-eight years ago. His wife is an endlessly unfurling conversation, with never a true stop, only a pause. But she produces no drivel and has no patience for drivel. Sometimes she chafes at the inane talk she has to endure with her friends. She serves them coffee and cake, she listens to their prattle, and later she grouses, “Guinea pigs, I am surrounded by guinea pigs.”
He surmises that his wife read about guinea pigs and something about them aroused her resentment: their smallness, their utter harmlessness and defencelessness, their fearfulness, their contentedness simply to chew on a grain or two and expect no more from life. As a pathologist he quite likes the guinea pig. It is indeed small in every way, especially when set against the stark and random cruelty of life. Every corpse he opens up whispers to him, “I am a guinea pig. Will you warm me to your breast?” Drivel, his wife would call that. She has no patience for death.