King Turn Two: The Inquisitor at the Quay

It is the afternoon of 22 December 1571. Two hours earlier, the São Mateus has cast off from the Cais do Sodré quay carrying Ximenes, the chest of operations, and the chip back across the Atlantic. Almeida has watched the ship clear the river-mouth. He is alone on the stone.

The Inquisitor is in his official cloak. He is not on official business. He has come from his own house on foot. He carries a leather wallet that Almeida, in three years and seven months of hearings and counter-hearings, has never seen him open in public.

Bartolomeu unties the wallet. Inside is a single sheet of paper. He hands it to Almeida.

Almeida recognises the paper. It is the page Bartolomeu removed from the bound copy during the second recess of the 1568 hearings — a removal Almeida had assumed at the time was tactical, perhaps procedural, certainly hostile. He has thought about that removal at least once a week for forty-three months. He has assumed the page is in the Inquisitor’s private file at Estaus Palace, awaiting a later prosecution, or in the Roman packet, awaiting a curial review.

It is in neither.

It is in Bartolomeu’s coat. It has been kept by hand.

The Inquisitor speaks before Almeida can ask. He says — quietly, in Latin, in a voice the late wind off the Tagus almost takes — I heard it too. Coimbra, fifty-nine. My sister’s kitchen, the night she died.

He has come to give Almeida the page. Not to surrender it to the tribunal; not to deliver it to Rome; not to use it. To give it to the man who was tried for it. The page will pass into Almeida’s hand, and from Almeida’s hand into Almeida’s cassock pocket beside the Ainda aqui plank, and from there into the inner pocket of the leather satchel that will hang on the same hook in Almeida’s Coimbra cell for the next eighty-one years.

What Almeida understands, on the quay, with the page in his hand and the river behind the Inquisitor’s shoulder grey under low December cloud, is that the procedural villain of his last four years is not a procedural villain.

The Inquisitor is in the line.

He has been since 1559. He has run an Inquisition in the Tagus district for nine years while in the line. He has voted to convict men whose evidence was thinner than Almeida’s. He has signed warrants. He has presided over conclusions he did not believe.

And on this winter afternoon, with the São Mateus clearing the harbour-mouth carrying the chip back across the Atlantic, he hands the page to its owner and asks nothing in return.

In four months Almeida will be on his way to Coimbra. He will begin the hourly count of refusals that will run for the next eighty-one years.

What he will count, from this day forward, is not just the refusals of the offer Pirá-tatá made him on the rainforest floor. He will count the hours during which Bartolomeu de Sousa Vieira ran an Inquisition while standing in the audience.

Almeida will outlive the Inquisitor by sixty-two years. He will never forget the bend in the Tagus where the page came back into his hand.