The Waiting Room

She had been preparing the submission since January.

The covering letter she had drafted four times — not because she was uncertain of its content but because the register required precision. Her father had written in this style all his working life: formal without servility, precise without aggression, each claim supported by a specific instrument and each instrument cited correctly. She had his letters to work from, in the notebooks, and she had her own memory of how he moved between the requirements of legal form and the requirements of the specific case. The fourth draft was right. She copied it clean.

The documents she organised in order of reference: the lease first, then the clause transcribed in her own hand with the original Latin and her translation set side by side, then the notarial commentary from her father's notebook identifying the instrument type and its legal implications, then a brief statement of her position — what the clause meant, when the landlord had known it, what she was claiming. At the end of the statement she wrote: The petitioner seeks access to the original expropriation order, believed to be held in the royal records or their surviving copies, in order to establish the date of issue and its relationship to the lease date of March 1753.

She read it through once. She did not find anything she wanted to change.

The municipal court had moved from its usual building, which was damaged, to a set of rooms in a convent on the eastern slope of the Bairro Alto. The convent had taken in displaced families in the weeks after the earthquake and still had them — she passed women and children in the corridor outside the court rooms, their effects stacked against the walls, the smell of communal cooking coming from somewhere deeper in the building. The clerk's office was at the end of the corridor, behind a door that had been fitted with a temporary handle where the original ironwork had been.

She knocked and went in.

The clerk was a man of about fifty, working at a desk that was too small for him — the court's usual furniture had presumably remained in the usual building. He had the look of someone who had been managing an impossible volume of work for three months and had arrived at a state beyond exhaustion, at the flat efficiency of a person who has stopped expecting the load to diminish. He looked up when she came in. He did not appear unwelcoming. He appeared occupied.

She said: I have a property claim to file. She set the documents on the edge of his desk.

He looked at them — at the thickness of the folder, the neat organisation of it. He said: Name of the petitioner.

She gave her name and Henrique's name and the address in Alfama. He wrote these down in a ledger that was already dense with entries.

He said: Nature of the claim.

She said: Lease fraud. The landlord let premises under a pre-existing crown expropriation order without disclosure to the tenant. I am claiming against the landlord's estate for the value of the lease and any improvements. I am also requesting access to the original expropriation order.

The clerk wrote. She waited.

He said: The queue is long. He said this without apology, as a statement of condition. There are approximately four hundred claims ahead of yours — some of them filed before the earthquake, claims that were already in process when the disaster occurred. Those take precedence. Behind them: death intestate, contested inheritances, property boundary disputes arising from the new plan. He looked at her. Behind those: lease fraud.

She said: I understand.

He said: It may be several months before the claim is heard. It may be longer. He paused and then said, with what appeared to be genuine effort toward accuracy: I cannot tell you when. Only that it is registered.

She said: I would like a receipt for the filing.

He wrote one out and gave it to her. She folded it and put it in her coat.

She went out and sat in the waiting room, which was a small room adjoining the clerk's office with four chairs against the wall and a window looking onto the convent's interior courtyard. Two of the chairs were occupied: a woman about Teresa's age, in plain dark dress, with a document case across her knees, and an older woman — sixty or more — who was sitting with her hands folded and her eyes on the courtyard window. Neither of them was speaking.

Teresa sat. She had no immediate reason to leave.

After a few minutes the woman with the document case looked at her and said: Lease claim?

Teresa said: Yes.

The woman said: Me also. She looked at the older woman. Inês too. Three of us today.

The older woman, Inês, turned from the window. She said: My husband's counting house on the Rua das Pedras Negras. Pre-earthquake expropriation. Landlord's name: Correia de Lacerda.

Teresa said: Sebastião Correia de Lacerda?

Inês said: Yes. You know him?

She said: He is the landlord on our lease also.

The room was quiet for a moment. The woman with the document case said her name was Beatriz Soares, her husband's premises had been on the Rua da Betesga, and her landlord was a man named Taveira — not Correia de Lacerda. But the clause was the same: salvo iure regio, in the smaller hand, on the fourth page. Her husband had not read Latin. She had found it herself, in January, working through the documents he had salvaged from the fire. Her father had been a pharmacist — she had some Latin but not much. She had taken the clause to a priest who confirmed what it meant.

Teresa asked: The date of your lease.

Beatriz said: October 1752.

Teresa asked Inês: And yours?

Inês said: February 1753.

Teresa did not say anything immediately. Her own lease was March 1753. Three leases, two landlords, five months apart, the same clause buried in the same position in each instrument. She looked at the document case on Beatriz's knees and at Inês's folded hands and thought: there are four hundred claims in the queue ahead of us, and behind those there are more, and we are three, and the pattern is already three wide.

She said: Have you spoken to anyone about this? A lawyer, or —

Beatriz said: A lawyer will not take it. I have tried two. The first said the claim was too small to be worth his time. The second said — she paused — he said it was not advisable to pursue a claim with expropriation implications at present.

Teresa said: What does that mean.

Beatriz said: I asked him the same thing. He did not elaborate.

Inês said: There is a priest. A Jesuit, Father Pereira — she pronounced the name carefully, as though it might be questioned. He has been helping some of the merchants' families navigate the courts. Someone in my parish mentioned him. I have not yet gone to him.

Teresa said: Where does he hear?

Inês named a church in the Alfama — not Teresa's parish but close. She said: On Tuesdays.

Teresa had no view of Father Pereira. She had no view of Jesuits generally, which was itself a kind of view — she had grown up in a household where her father's opinions on the regular clergy ran to brevity and neutrality, and she had inherited both qualities. But she noted the name, and the day, and the church.

She stood and said goodbye to them both. Inês said she hoped the queue moved quickly. Beatriz said nothing, which was more honest.

Teresa walked back through the convent corridor, past the families with their stacked effects, and out into the February cold. The Bairro Alto was passable here — the streets were narrow but clear, the buildings mostly standing. She could see, from the top of the street, the ruined district below: the flat grey expanse of it, broken by the occasional standing wall, the cleared paths running through it like channels in a dry riverbed. From here it looked orderly. From inside, she knew, it was not.

She had a receipt for her claim. She had two names to add to her list — Correia de Lacerda already there, Taveira new — and one she had not expected to find today. Two different landlords. The same clause. Five months, three leases.

She began to walk home. The receipt was in her coat pocket and she was aware of it there, its weight the weight of paper, which was not much.