Padre Henrique brings the atlas

Three weeks earlier, on the first of December, Aurora had written six words in pencil in the margin of O Encoberto in her copy of Mensagem: Eu sou a audiência. I am the audience. She had read it three times that afternoon, in three sittings, and at the third sitting the sentence had arrived.

That evening, she had opened the 1887 paper.

She had not told Padre Henrique any of this. Padre Henrique had visited in October the previous year, on a priest’s pretext; she had not given him a reading of her own thinking. But Padre Henrique had read what was on her shelf and what was on her mantel and what was in the kitchen drawer, and he had filed his observation, and on a winter morning fourteen months later he had ridden up from Coimbra with a small leather case.

He sets the case on the kitchen table. He does not open it. He says only:

Padre Almeida bequeathed this. It has waited.

Mariana, who is six, is at the table cutting a sheet of newsprint into stars. She does not look up. Aurora’s hand pauses on the case for one breath. She opens it.

The atlas is small. Smaller than she has expected. It is bound in dark calf-leather; the spine has been rebound at least once; the corners are foxed. She opens it to the front endpaper.

On the endpaper she sees an oxblood anchor stamp, crossed by a monogram — J.A. — and a date in Arabic numerals: 1567. The hand that has written the 1567 is, she sees, not a hand practised in Arabic numerals. The hand has shaped a 5 the way a person who has only just learned that letter would shape a 5.

She compares the hand on the endpaper to her own hand in her missal.

They are identical.

She closes the atlas.

I will keep this.

What she has just understood — what she cannot yet say — is that the endpaper’s monogram is hers. That it was placed there sometime before 1567 by a person who shared her name. That the atlas she has just been given is not new to her in any sense, and that the line she has named herself the audience of has been quietly walking toward her, across four centuries, since before the date stamped in oxblood on its first page.

Padre Henrique drinks his coffee. Mariana cuts another star. The atlas sits in its case on the kitchen table.

Outside, the winter afternoon is still. The mantel — which has, for forty years, held the Ainda aqui plank that Acuti carved on the morning of 1 October 1567 — will, fourteen years from now, be empty for the first time in either woman’s lifetime. The plank will, on the twenty-fourth of July 1948, be delivered to a girl named Benedita Nogueira at the Buriti kitchen door.

But that is later. On this winter afternoon, the atlas sits in the kitchen drawer beside the 1887 paper and the seventeen letters Aurora’s husband has been writing in unsent stacks to a cousin in Porto.

She will open it again. She will compare her hand to her hand. She will find them identical, every time.

She will keep it.