When they were young, Maria tolerated for a while the amorous cooing of which he was so fond. Despite the surface brutality of his profession, he is soft of heart. When he met her the first time — it was in the cafeteria of the university — she was the most alluring creature he’d ever seen, a serious girl with a beauty that lit him up. At the sight of her, song filled his ears and the world glowed with colour. His heart thumped with gratitude. But quickly she rolled her eyes and told him to stop twittering. It became clear to him that his mission was to listen to her and respond appropriately and not to annoy her with oral frivolity. She was the rich earth and the sun and the rain; he was merely the farmer who got the crop going. He was an essential but bit player. Which was fine with him. He loved her then and he loves her now. She is everything to him. She is still the rich earth and the sun and the rain and he is still happy to be the farmer who gets the crop going.
Only tonight he had hoped to get some work done. Clearly that is not to be the case. The Conversation is upon him.
“Hello, my angel,” he says. “What a joyous surprise to see you! What’s in the bag? You can’t have been shopping. No shop would be open at this hour.” He leans forward and kisses his wife.
Maria ignores the question. “Death is a difficult door,” she says quietly. She steps into his office. “Eusebio, what’s happened?” she exclaims. “Your office is an unholy mess. This is indecent. Where are your visitors supposed to sit?”
He surveys his office. He sees embarrassing disorder everywhere. Pathologists at work don’t normally receive visitors who need to sit or who care for order. They usually lie flat and without complaint on a table across the hallway. He takes his workbench chair and places it in front of his desk. “I wasn’t expecting you tonight, my angel. Here, sit here,” he says.
“Thank you.” She sits down and places the bag she brought with her on the floor.
He gathers up papers from his desk, which he stuffs in the nearest folder, which he stacks on other folders, which he then drops to the floor. He pushes the pile under his desk with a foot, out of sight. He crunches up stray bits of paper, sweeps up shameful accumulations of dust with the edge of his hand, using his other hand as a dustpan, which he empties into the wastepaper basket beside his desk. There, that’s better. He sits down and looks across his desk at the woman sitting there. A man and his wife.
“I have found the solution at last, and I must tell you about it,” she says.
The solution? Was there a problem?
“Why don’t you do that, then,” he replies.
She nods. “I first tried through laughter, because you like to laugh,” she says without a trace of mirth. “You saw me, the books I was reading.”
He thinks. Yes, that would explain the selection of books she ordered from her favourite Coimbra bookseller these last several months. Some plays of Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Molière, Georges Feydeau, some weightier tomes of Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire. All of these she read wearing the grimmest expression. He himself is not such an accomplished reader. He was not sure why she was reading these books, but, as always, he let her be.
“Humour and religion do not mix well,” she goes on. “Humour may point out the many mistakes of religion — any number of vilely immoral priests, or monsters who shed blood in the name of Jesus — but humour sheds no light on true religion. It is just humour unto itself. Worse, humour misunderstands religion, since there is little place for levity in religion — and let us not make the mistake of thinking that levity is the same thing as joy. Religion abounds in joy. Religion is joy. To laugh at religion with levity, then, is to miss the point, which is fine if one is in the mood to laugh, but not if one is in the mood to understand. Do you follow me?”
“Though it’s late, I think I do,” he replies.
“Next I tried children’s books, Eusebio. Did Jesus not say that we must receive the Kingdom of God like a little child? So I reread the books we used to read to Renato, Luisa, and Antón.”
Images of their three children when they were small appear in his mind. Those little ones lived with their mother’s volubility like children live in a rainy climate: They just ran out to play in the puddles, shrieking and laughing, heedless of the downpour. She never took umbrage at these joyous interruptions. With difficulty, he returns his attention to his wife.
“These books brought back many happy memories — and some sadness that our children are all grown up — but they brought no religious illumination. I continued my search. Then the solution appeared right in front of me, with your favourite writer.”
“Really? How interesting. When I saw your nose in those Agatha Christies, I thought you were taking a break from your arduous studies.”
He and she are devoted to Agatha Christie. They have read all her books, starting with the very first, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Thanks to the good works of the Círculo Português de Mistério, they receive her every new murder mystery the moment it is translated, and translation is prompt because Portuguese readers are eager. Husband and wife know better than to bother the other when one of them is absorbed in the latest arrival. Once they’ve both finished it, they go over the case together, discussing the clues they should have caught, and the avenues to the solution they ran down only to find they were dead ends. Agatha Christie’s star detective is Hercule Poirot, a vain, odd-looking little Belgian man. But Poirot, inside his egg-shaped head, has the quickest, most observant mind. His “grey cells”—as he calls his brain — work with order and method, and these cells perceive what no one else does.
“Death on the Nile was such a marvel of ingenuity! Her next book must be due soon,” he says.
“It must.”
“And what solution did you find in Agatha Christie?”
“Let me first explain the path I have taken,” she replies. “This path twists and turns, so you must listen carefully. Let us start with the miracles of Jesus.”
The miracles of Jesus. One of her favourite topics. He glances at the clock next to his microscope. The night is going to be long.
“Is something the matter with your microscope?” his wife asks.
“Not at all.”
“Peering through it won’t help you understand the miracles of Jesus.”
“That is true.”
“And staring at the clock won’t save you from your future.”
“True again. Are you thirsty? Can I offer you water before we start?”
“Water from that glass?” She peers critically at the filthy glass on his desk.
“I propose to clean it.”
“That would be a good idea. I’m fine for the moment, though. But how appropriate that you should mention water — we shall come back to water. Now, pay attention. The miracles of Jesus — so many of them, are there not? And yet, if we look closely, we can see that they fall into two categories. Into one category fall those miracles that benefit the human body. There are many of these. Jesus makes the blind see, the deaf hear, the dumb speak, the lame walk. He cures fevers, treats epilepsy, exorcizes psychological maladies. He rids lepers of their disease. A woman suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years touches his cloak and her bleeding stops. And of course he raises the dead — Jairus’s daughter and the widow of Nain’s only son, both freshly dead, but also Lazarus, who has been dead for four days and whose body stinks of death. We might call these the medical miracles of Jesus, and they represent the overwhelming majority of his miraculous work.”