Cipriano's grandfather receives the sigil paper

The Society of Jesus is not yet founded. Lisbon is not yet the city it will become under João III. The Inquisition has not yet been instituted in the Portuguese kingdom. The future will reshape almost everything that this morning takes for granted.

What does not change, on this morning, is the cipher.

A man whose name the Avellar line will never quite settle on — Cipriano’s grandfather, no first name preserved in the workshop’s account-book, a craftsman who teaches Cipriano’s father to file bronze — receives a square of paper, folded four times, the colour of old bread. The carrier is someone he does not name to his son. The paper is given without ceremony.

Inside the fold are two characters. They are not Roman; they are not Greek; they are not Arabic; they are not Hebrew. The grandfather does not know what they are. He does not have a way to ask.

He files the paper at the back of the workshop’s correspondence box. He does not tell his wife. He does not tell his apprentices. He tells his son.

The son tells Cipriano. Cipriano, in the late winter of 1568, will tell Almeida.

What Almeida will understand, in Cipriano’s workshop on Rua dos Fanqueiros, with the bronze fork on the bench between them and Joana de Avellar (3) asleep in her basket in the corner — what Almeida will understand, eighty years from this morning — is that the cipher he transcribed on the central stone of the upper Rio Negro plateau on 28 September 1567 was already in Lisbon.

He was not the first to carry it.

He was one of many.

The line, on the morning the Avellar grandfather files the paper at the back of the workshop’s correspondence box, is older than any of them. Older than the workshop. Older than the language they file the paper in. Older than the city. Older, the priest will eventually understand, than the writing the cipher imitates.

It is the audience that is being heard.