The Burning

Beatriz came in the morning, without sending word first, which was unusual. She was shown into the front room and Teresa came downstairs to find her standing at the window rather than sitting, which told her something had changed before Beatriz said anything at all.

Father Pereira had been arrested. The previous Thursday, at the Alfama church, in the afternoon. Not by the civil constables but by men from the Secretary's office — she had been told this by her neighbour, whose sister's husband was a clerk at the municipal court and who had heard it from a colleague who had passed the church on the Rua de São Miguel and seen three men and a carriage and recognised what he was seeing, having seen it before. This was the quality of intelligence Beatriz received: four removes, and still more specific than the official record, which contained nothing.

Teresa asked her to sit down. Beatriz did. Teresa poured water and considered, while she poured, what she knew and what she did not know.

She asked what Thursday. The eighth of June. She had been at the court on the seventh, filing a follow-up enquiry regarding the survey deposition that remained unsubmitted. She had walked home past the Alfama church without stopping. She did not tell Beatriz this.

Beatriz had heard: no formal charge as yet. The carriage had gone north, toward the Intendência. She said this was also at four removes. She asked Teresa what it meant.

Teresa said she did not know what it meant.

After Beatriz had gone she sat at the table with the notary notebook open in front of her and read through what she had written of the Pereira meetings from the beginning. There were eleven entries, from September 1756 to November of the same year, and then four more spread across the following winter, and then the sacristan's note in January 1758 and nothing after.

She did not read them for their content. She read them for what they were: paper with her handwriting on them, recording conversations with a man now arrested by the Secretary's office. They were testimony. A notary's notebook was not a sealed record; it was her own working document, with no standing in a court and no protection outside one. If anyone read these pages, they would find her handwriting beside his name, and a detailed account of what he had told her, and when, and in response to which question.

She read them through once more and then went to the kitchen.

She burned them a few pages at a time, feeding each sheaf into the brazier and holding it until it caught and then waiting for the ash to cool before adding the next. There was no drama in it. It took twenty minutes. The light in the kitchen was strong at this hour, coming in from the east, and she could see the ash clearly as each page went — the handwriting legible for a moment as the paper browned, and then not.

She had kept copies of nothing in those pages. She had not known, when she wrote them, that she would need to. She accepted this without reproach. What mattered now was what remained.

What remained: Henrique's payment entry, in his own hand, in his own notebook. The commercial registration for the holding company, transcribed from the city registry in her hand but citing the official registration number and date. Her father's notebooks, which were a notary's working record and had been in existence since before the earthquake. The court filings for the Soares and Cardoso claims, which were public documents. The copy of her own letter to the court, and the court's silence in reply.

These were instruments. Her father's notebooks were precise on the distinction: the instrument and the witness are different things. A witness can be discredited, recalled, silenced, arrested. An instrument requires a different kind of erasure — one that leaves evidence of its own absence, as the supplementary deed had left a cross-reference in the notarial log pointing to a document that was no longer there.

The meeting notes were a different thing. She had been clear about this before the first page caught. She waited for the last of the ash to cool and then went back upstairs.

She sat at the table for a time. The pile-driving had been running since seven and was audible through the closed shutters — the single deep strike, and then the repositioning pause, and then the next. Each trunk going in a fraction deeper than the last. She had learned the rhythm of it over months.

She had needed a fifth instrument. She had still not found one. Pereira had been the direction she could no longer follow — not his testimony, which she had understood as unavailable since his January silence, but his direction, the way he had pointed her toward the registry and the commercial registration and the court filings she would not otherwise have thought to examine. The direction was gone now. She would have to find the fifth instrument by a different route, or make do with what she had and be precise about what four instruments proved and what they did not yet prove.

She thought about the surveyor.

He had been at the court in December — Diogo Mendonça, Royal Survey Office, at the counter beside her, filing a boundary deposition for the Rua dos Fanqueiros, his name in the adjacent clerk's register. She had noted it in the way she noted small things that might accumulate toward something useful. She had found the address of the survey office two days later, from the court filing records, and entered it in the notebook under his name. She had not examined why she had done this at the time and did not examine it now.

She knew three things about him. His name, his office, and that he had written something in a notebook after he heard her name at the adjacent counter, and then turned the page and not looked back. These were not enough to draw a conclusion from. They were enough to justify a question.

She was a widow in a contested legal proceeding, with no institutional backing and a record of four instruments that was one instrument short of demonstrable practice. If he was surveying the Baixa reconstruction — which was what survey officers of the works office did — he had access to the pre-earthquake property records, or to whatever remained of them. He might have found nothing. He might have found something that did not yet look like what it was.

She considered this for long enough to reach the limits of what she could determine from a name and a filing record.

Then she went to find her coat.

The works office was on the Rua Nova do Almada, a building she had the address for but had not been to. It was a twenty-minute walk from the Alfama, mostly downhill and then west along the edge of the new grid, where the street had been widened and the facades on the south side were nearly complete — three storeys, window apertures regular, the stone courses level. She walked on the north side, where the old building line had not yet been demolished. The contrast was sharp: the rubble and provisional hoardings of the old alignment beside the finished symmetry of the new. In a year or two the north side would be cleared and the street would look like the plan. It did not look like the plan yet.

The pile-driving was louder here, in the Baixa, than it was from her window. She could feel the impact of each strike through the soles of her shoes — a faint percussion in the ground, the trunks going into the alluvial silt forty or fifty feet below. She had read that they were using thousands of them. Beneath the new city's stone floors, the old city's riverbed, and in it the trunks, and on them the foundations, and on the foundations the grid — everything built on top of everything that had been buried.

The clerk at the door of the works office took her name and her business. She said: I have documents I would like to discuss with Senhor Mendonça. Survey records relating to property on the Rua dos Ourives. The clerk wrote this down and went away.

She waited in the entrance. The room smelled of chalk dust and paper and, faintly, of the mortar that clung to everything in this district. From somewhere in the building she could hear the sound of a ruler being drawn across a drafting surface — the light scratch of it, repeated.

The clerk came back and said Senhor Mendonça would be a few minutes.

She said: I'll wait.