The High Mountains of Portugal Read Free Page A

that all appeared to be in Portuguese Angola. On June 2, 1633, there was a new place name: São Tomé, the small island colony in the Gulf of Guinea, “that fleck of dandruff off the head of Africa, long days north along the damp coast of this pestilential continent.” His eyes came upon a sentence written a few weeks later:
Isso é minha casa.
“This is home.” But it wasn’t written just once. The words covered the page. A whole page of the same short sentence, closely written, the repeated lines wavering up and down slightly: “This is home. This is home. This is home.” Then they stopped, replaced by prose that was more normally discursive, only to appear again some pages later, covering half a page: “This is home. This is home. This is home.” Then once more, further on, for a page and a quarter: “This is home. This is home. This is home.”
    What did it mean? Why the manic repetition? He eventually found a possible answer on a page where the reiteration was the same as in every other instance, covering nearly two pages this time, with one difference, a spillage at the end, a clue that the phrase on the page was an ellipsis that the author completed in his mind every time: “This is home. This is home. This is home where the Lord has put me until He takes me to His Breast.” Father Ulisses evidently had been racked by acute homesickness.
    On one page Tomás found a curious sketch, a drawing of a face. The features were hastily outlined except for the mournful eyes, which were meticulously drawn. He studied those eyes for many minutes. He plunged into their sadness. Memories of his recently lost son swirled in his mind. When he left the archives that day, he hid the diary among innocuous papers in his briefcase. He was honest to himself about his purpose. This was no informal loan—it was plain theft. The Episcopal archives of Lisbon, having neglected Father Ulisses’ diary for over two hundred and fifty years, would not miss it now, and he wanted the leisure to examine it properly.
    He began reading and transcribing the diary as soon as he found the time. He proceeded slowly. The penmanship went from the easily readable to skeins of calligraphy that required him to work out that this scribble represented that syllable, while that squiggle represented this syllable. What was striking was how the writing was poised in the early sections, then grew markedly worse. The final pages were barely decipherable. A number of words he could not make out, no matter how hard he tried.
    What Father Ulisses wrote when he was in Angola was no more than a dutiful account and of modest interest. He was merely another minion of the Bishop of Luanda, who “sat in the shade on the pier upon his marble throne” while he worked himself to a listless stupor, running around baptizing batches of slaves. But on São Tomé a desperate force took hold of him. He began to work on an object, the gift of the title. Its making consumed his mind and took all his energy. He mentioned seeking the “most perfect wood”
and “adequate tools” and recalled training in his uncle’s shop when he was young. He describes oiling his gift several times to help in its preservation, “my glistening hands artisans of devoted love.” Towards the end of the diary, Tomás found these odd words, extolling the imposing character of his creation:
It shines, it shrieks, it barks, it roars. Truly the Son of God giving a loud cry & breathing his last as the curtain of the temple is torn from top to bottom. It is finished.
    What did Father Ulisses train in, and what did his uncle’s shop produce? What did he oil with his hands? What was shining and shrieking, barking and roaring? Tomás could not find a clear answer in Father Ulisses’ diary, only hints. When did the Son of God give a loud cry and breathe his last? On the Cross. Could the object in question
be a crucifix, then, Tomás wondered. It was certainly a sculpture of some sort. But there was