The Confessor

The church was not the one she had attended before the earthquake. That church — Santa Luzia, at the top of the Alfama slope — had lost its nave to the fires, the roof sheeting first and then the timbers, and was now open to the sky above the altar, rain-stained and stripped of everything portable. The displaced parish had been absorbed into the Igreja de São Miguel, which was smaller and darker and smelled of the extra candles it had been burning since November to serve a congregation twice its intended size.

Father Pereira heard confession on Tuesdays. She arrived at the second hour of the afternoon, when the morning penitents had gone and the church was quiet. The confessional was in the north transept, screened from the nave by a curtain that had been moved from somewhere else — the fabric was heavier than confessional curtains usually were, and a different red.

She had thought carefully about what she would say. She had prepared it the way her father had taught her to prepare for any proceeding before a person with authority: know what you want, know what you will offer, decide in advance what you will not say. What she wanted was information. What she would offer was her situation, stated plainly, without inflation. What she would not say, at a first meeting, was the second landlord's name or the dates of the other leases, because those were what she had to trade with later.

She said that she had a property claim, a lease with an expropriation clause buried in it, a landlord who had known about the clause when he sold the lease. She had been advised by a lawyer that pursuing it was not advisable. She had a copy of the relevant instrument and had transcribed the clause in her own hand. The original expropriation order she did not have.

She said: I have been told you have assisted merchant families with claims of this kind. I was given your name by a woman at the court.

Pereira was on the other side of the screen. She could see the outline of him through the lattice — a lean man in his sixties, not inclined to lean toward the screen in the manner of confessors who perform attentiveness. His stillness was the stillness of a man accustomed to listening and equally accustomed to what listening cost.

He said: Which woman.

She said: Inês. I did not have her family name.

He said nothing for a moment. Then: And the landlord's name.

She had expected the question. She had not decided, until this moment, whether to answer it. She said: Correia de Lacerda. Sebastião.

He did not write it down. He did not need to. She had the impression — not of recognition precisely, but of something settling into a space already prepared for it, a key turning in a lock that had been waiting.

He said: And the date of the lease.

She said: March 1753.

He said: I cannot help you directly. She waited. He said: But I would be willing to speak again. The same day, a fortnight from today.

She said: Thank you, Father.

She came out of the confessional into the nave. A woman waiting her turn did not look up. The candles near the side altar were burning low; someone would need to replace them before evening prayers. She walked to the door without hurrying.

On the street she stood in the afternoon light and thought about the question he had asked first. Not: what is the clause. Not: what grounds do you have. Not: which lawyer gave you this advice. The first question had been the landlord's name.

She walked down through Alfama toward home, taking the longer route along the old wall, which gave her time. The street here was unchanged from before the earthquake — the houses in this part of the neighbourhood had held, most of them, the dense construction of the Moorish quarter having distributed the shock in ways the Baixa's narrower buildings had not — and for a stretch of perhaps two hundred paces the city looked entirely as it had in October. Then the lane turned and the view opened east toward the river, and the Baixa was visible below: cleared ground and rubble, the grid stakes in their rows, a dust cloud rising from the demolition work somewhere in the middle distance.

She had not expected him to know the name already.

She had said Correia de Lacerda and it had landed not as new information but as confirmation. He had been waiting for something to fit that space, and she had given it to him.

This meant one of three things. He knew the landlord personally, through the ordinary channels of Alfama parish life — the man attended mass, made donations, was known to the clergy. Or he knew the name in connection with something else she had not yet traced — a different transaction, a different set of documents, a different property. Or he had heard the name in a confessional, under terms he could not speak about directly, from a penitent who had told him something that Correia de Lacerda would not have wished told.

All three were possible. The third was the most useful and the most dangerous and the one she was least able to verify.

She wrote it down when she reached home: Pereira. Knows the name. First question, not last. Did not need to write it. Meet again in a fortnight.

She opened her father's notary notebook to the page where she had listed the things she needed to find and looked at the second item: the original expropriation order — date and authority. The order existed somewhere — documents of that kind were registered, copied, countersigned, archived in the normal processes of the administration, even when the administration was doing something it would prefer not to have documented. She had not found it because she did not know where to look. Pereira might know. Or might have already seen it, in circumstances she would need to understand before she could use whatever he told her.

She did not know yet whether he was a source or a complication. She suspected he was both.

She read the rest of the page. The third item on her list had always seemed the most remote: the chain of payment — who paid whom, and when. Without the strongbox Inês had mentioned, without whatever documents it had held, she had no way to establish that chain from the merchant end. She had the clause and the landlord and the dates, but not the money, and the money was what made the clause an instrument rather than a quirk of drafting.

She closed the notebook.

Outside, below the Alfama hill, the demolition work continued. She could hear it faintly through the window — a sound that had become, over the past months, as ordinary as weather. The old city being reduced to the rubble the new city required.

She replaced the notebook in the document case and buckled the case and set it on the shelf above the window. Then she went to prepare the evening meal, which was late, and which she had been thinking about with less of her mind than the matter deserved.