The Court

The municipal court had moved twice since the earthquake. The first premises had been a requisitioned counting house on the edge of the Bairro Alto — two rooms partitioned by a curtain, the ceiling low, the queue for the filing clerk extending down the stairs and into the street on the mornings when the hearings were scheduled. The second premises had been better in terms of size and worse in terms of smell, having been, before the earthquake, a tannery whose drainage the reconstruction had not yet resolved. The third premises, where Diogo presented himself on the fourteenth of December, occupied the ground floor and partial mezzanine of a building on the Rua Nova do Carmo that was still technically under construction — the upper floors were uninhabitable, the staircase above the mezzanine incomplete, but the ground floor rooms were plastered and floored and served, in the temporary manner that had come to characterise all civic arrangements in Lisbon, as the city's nearest approach to functional administration.

He had been to this court three times in the previous eight months, each time to file survey depositions for disputed plot boundaries. The disputed plots were a predictable product of the survey — the old Baixa's organic boundaries had not always been written down, and where they had been written down, the records did not always agree with each other or with the physical evidence. The deposition for the Rua dos Fanqueiros boundary was the fourth: a straightforward discrepancy between two notary records dated 1748 and 1751, which he had resolved by measuring from the surviving stone gate pier that both records referenced and which had, remarkably, come through the earthquake at the precise angle from the street that each record, independently, specified.

The filing clerk was a man named Sousa whom Diogo had encountered at each of the previous three visits and who had, over the course of those visits, developed a method of receiving survey depositions that was approximately three times faster than the method used by the other clerk, whose name Diogo did not know because he had never been assigned to him. Sousa took the papers, read them with the focused speed of a man who has read enough similar documents to identify what he needs in the first fifteen lines, asked two questions, and wrote the reference. The process took seven minutes. Diogo had arranged his survey schedule to arrive on mornings when Sousa was present and the queue was short.

The queue this morning was not short. There were six people ahead of him — four men with rolls of documents, a woman in a dark coat who was arguing in a low, precise voice with a court official about something Diogo could not hear, and an elderly man who appeared to have fallen asleep against the wall with his papers in his lap. Diogo joined the queue and opened his survey notebook to the day's field notes.

The hearing room was to his left, separated from the filing corridor by a door that was currently closed. He could hear, without being able to distinguish words, the sounds of a formal proceeding: a single voice speaking at length, a pause, two shorter voices, another pause. The rhythm of it was the rhythm of all such proceedings — established positions offered, received, and deferred. He had been inside that room once, in October, to give technical evidence on a drainage survey, and had found it smaller than the rhythm suggested. Eight chairs, a table, a window facing a courtyard that was still, in October, occupied by a pile of demolition rubble that had not yet been cleared.

The woman ahead of him finished her argument with the court official, or rather reached a point at which the argument was suspended rather than resolved — both parties had the posture of people who would resume it at the next available occasion. The official retreated through a side door. The woman turned back toward the queue, and Diogo saw that she was carrying a document case — a heavy one, by the way she held it, one hand under and one at the handle — and that her attention was, for the moment, on something in the middle distance rather than on the room around her.

The hearing room door opened.

A woman came out. She was perhaps thirty, or somewhat less, in a coat that was good but not new, with a document case held against her with both hands in the manner of a person who carries it as a working habit rather than a precaution. Her posture was, Diogo noted without intention, the posture of a person who has just received news she was prepared for. Not disappointment; something more precise than that. A conclusion arrived at, confirmed, filed.

She spoke to the court official by the door — three sentences, his two. Then she moved to join the filing queue to submit something, and stood behind the elderly sleeping man.

He was aware of her the way he was aware of structural details that did not require immediate attention but that registered because his training had made registration automatic. The document case. The hands. The posture. He returned to his field notes.

Sousa's colleague called the woman in the dark coat to the counter. The queue moved.

The hearing room door opened again. The official came out and began looking down his list — the next name, the next case, the next adjournment. The elderly man woke himself with a snort and then looked with some surprise at the papers in his lap, as though he had not entirely expected to find them there.

The queue moved again. Diogo reached the counter.

He gave Sousa his name. Sousa took the survey deposition and began to read it. In the moment before he looked up with his first question, Diogo heard Sousa's colleague call a name: A senhora Vasconcelos. A quem devo a próxima assinatura. Madame Vasconcelos. The next signature required.

The woman from the hearing room moved to the counter beside him. She set her document case down on the counter edge and opened it, and took from it a sheet that she placed in front of the clerk with the efficiency of someone who has performed this action many times and finds it unremarkable.

Sousa asked Diogo his first question, which concerned the surveying date, and Diogo answered it, and Sousa made a note, and the deposition continued. Beside him, Sousa's colleague was completing the filing record for the woman — name, case reference, date of hearing, outcome of adjournment — in the manner of someone completing a form he has completed countless times, without looking up.

Deponent name, Sousa said. For the formal record.

Mendonça, Diogo said. Diogo Mendonça. Survey engineer, office of Eugénio dos Santos.

Sousa wrote it down. The clerk beside him, following his own procedure, said to the woman: Full name, for the record.

Teresa Vasconcelos, she said. Widow. Alfama.

He could have turned. He did not. Sousa had a second question, which concerned the stone pier and the measurement, and Diogo answered it, and Sousa wrote his reference.

When he had signed the deposition and Sousa had returned his copies, he gathered the papers and turned from the counter.

She was still at the counter beside him, reviewing something Sousa's colleague had written, making a correction in a hand he could see from this angle as small and precise. She did not look up. He was three paces from the door when she finished her correction and addressed it to the clerk, and the clerk accepted it, and he heard the case close.

He was outside on the Rua Nova do Carmo before he understood that he had heard her cross the room toward the exit behind him.

He did not stop.

He walked back to the works office by the longer route — through the Chiado, then north through the Alfama lanes before cutting back toward the Mouraria. He did not examine the choice; he had been making it more often lately, and had ceased to account for it. The lanes were quiet in mid-December. The demolition teams in the Baixa were audible even here as a low rhythmic percussion from the south, the sound of the old city being turned into the new one, steadily and without ceremony.

He was thinking about the fourth copy, which was still without a location. It had been without a location for eight months — since April, since Maia's corridor, since the night he had made the two additional copies and found that one of them had nowhere to go. He had tried three possibilities in that time, had found reasons against each of them, and had placed the sheet in the case lining alongside the second copy, which was where it did not belong and from which it would have to be moved. The problem had the quality of all structural problems he had failed to solve promptly: it was still there, unchanged, while the situation around it had changed.

He took out his survey notebook and opened it to the page he had begun that morning, before the court. The field notes from the Rua dos Fanqueiros boundary were there: measurements, reference citations, the angle of the pier in degrees from the street line. He had left two blank lines at the top of the page, his habit when a morning would include both fieldwork and administrative tasks.

He wrote in the first blank line: 14 Dezembro 1757. Depoimento arquivado — Rua dos Fanqueiros, ref. TL-1757-482. Deposition filed. Reference number.

Then he stopped. He looked at the second blank line.

He wrote in it: Vasconcelos, Teresa. Viúva. Alfama.

He looked at this for a moment. Then he turned the page and began the afternoon's field notes.