The Fourth Option

The presentation had been on the fourth of December.

He had not been intended to attend. Maia had asked him, the evening before, to come with the drawings — three copies of the pre-earthquake Baixa map, the topographic survey of the Tagus embankment, and two of the plan sketches that Eugénio dos Santos had produced in the weeks after the earthquake, working from memory and the fragments they had managed to retrieve from the archive. Maia had said: Bring them and stay. He had not elaborated. With Maia, elaboration was never given until it was needed.

The room was in the upper storeys of a building on the Rossio — borrowed administrative space, formally undistinguished, with four windows looking north onto the square and a fire that had been burning since morning. There were seven men present. Maia sat at the head of the table; the drawings were arranged before him in the order Diogo had placed them. The Secretary's representative — a man named Azevedo, whom Diogo did not know and had not seen before — sat to Maia's right. He was perhaps forty-five, dressed as a man of the court dresses when he wants to suggest that he is not making an effort. He had brought no papers. He had nothing in his hands.

Maia presented the options with the economy of a man who has said a thing enough times that the words are worn smooth.

The first: repair what can be repaired; rebuild the rest on the original foundations. The cheapest option. The fastest. The most legible to the population — the city they knew, largely restored. It was also, in his assessment, inadequate. The streets of the old Baixa were too narrow, the building stock too poor, the water infrastructure too compromised. To rebuild on the old plan was to rebuild the conditions that had made the damage worse.

Azevedo listened. He gave no indication of his response. His hands, Diogo noticed, were flat on the table.

The second option: relocate the centre of the city. Coimbra, or further north. The case was logical — the alluvial ground of the Baixa was unstable, the river a recurring risk. A clean site, a planned city, a fresh administration. The argument had real weight. It also had a political cost that Maia did not need to spell out.

The third: rebuild the Baixa on a partial grid — retain the broad lines of the existing street pattern but widen the principal arteries, clear the worst of the older stock, impose minimum standards on new construction. A compromise. Reasonable. Politically defensible.

The fourth: erase the Baixa entirely and rebuild on a new rational plan. Every street widened. Every block regularised. A grid connecting the Terreiro do Paço to the north, with streets wide enough to prevent the accumulation of fire and rubble wide enough that a collapsed facade would not seal the road. New building standards throughout. The most disruptive option. The most expensive. The most permanent.

Maia stopped and looked at Azevedo.

Azevedo said: The Secretary would wish to consider the fourth option in detail.

He said it in the manner of a man who has completed an errand, not a man who has made a decision. Diogo had been watching his face across the full duration of Maia's presentation — the twenty minutes or so it had taken, during which Maia had not hurried and had not been interrupted — and he had not seen it change. Not at the first option, not at the second, not at the third. A face that had come into the room already holding its position.

Maia said: There are matters of land acquisition to discuss. The grid requires a clear site. What is standing will need to come down; what is buried will need to come up. The ownership question across the affected plots is complex — some records survived, many did not. The survey work I have described to you separately.

Azevedo said: The land question is in hand.

Maia said: The expropriation process will require...

Azevedo said: It is in hand.

A pause. From somewhere below, the sound of the square: carts, voices, the irregular percussion of clearance work. The fire in the grate had settled into itself.

Maia said: Then the survey proceeds on the assumption of the fourth option. He looked at Diogo. Make a note of that.

Diogo wrote it down.

He had not thought about the exchange again — not directly. He had returned to his work: the survey, the plot by plot accumulation of the ruined district, the strongbox niche on the Rua dos Ourives filed as an anomaly and moved past. There was always more ground to cover.

It was in January, reviewing the survey notes from the first expedition at his desk in the borrowed office, that the exchange came back to him — not because he had been thinking about it, but because he had turned a page in his notebook and found himself reading the words third from north corner, east side and then supervisor with document, watching, and then the words not a labourer, waited for the work to proceed, and he had looked at these notes for a moment before writing, in the margin, in the smaller hand he used for questions and not yet conclusions: well advanced. He crossed this out and tried again: the site was known before the survey. He looked at this. He crossed it out also. He wrote: who knew, and when.

He looked at the question for a long time. Then he turned to the next page.