The Inheritance
of Silence
Delia in the Dark
Darkness is not the absence of information. It is information in its most compressed form.
Delia || Crisis || Fear || Clarity
The power failed at six in the evening, which was not unusual in this part of the Alentejo coast during a serious Atlantic storm, and which the estate managed with the practised efficiency of a property that had experienced it many times: oil lamps appeared from their storage locations, the kitchen range switched to its gas supply, and Benedita — who was still in the house, still in the salon, under a supervision that was more advisory than constraining given the physical and legal ambiguity of her position in the case — began preparing a dinner that the circumstances suggested nobody was going to eat with normal appetite but that needed to exist regardless. I sat at my desk by lamplight and reviewed my notes for the fourth time, not because I expected to find something I had missed but because the review was the discipline that kept the darkness outside from being simply darkness. The oil lamp made my shadow enormous on the wall. The storm found every gap in the old house’s construction and used them for commentary. I was not frightened, precisely. I was aware of the risk in the specific professional way of someone who has identified the risk and is managing it through behaviour rather than through reassurance. The risk was that the person who had gone through the passage and toward the cliff had not, in fact, reached the cliff access. The storm made that route genuinely dangerous. The storm also made the cliff inaccessible, which meant that a person who had reached the cliff access and found it impassable had two options: attempt the route anyway, or turn back. If they turned back, they were in the passage. If they were in the passage, they were in the building. I had said as much to Duarte, who had stationed Carvalho at the wine cellar hatch. But the building was large and the power was out and Carvalho had a pistol and a lamp and was one person. I was at the far end of the first floor with a locked door and a chair under the handle and my notebook and my professionalism and fifteen years of document examination, none of which were a pistol. I sat with this assessment and did not find it comfortable and did not pretend to. I thought about the ocean, which I could hear even through the storm — hear as a constant beneath the storm’s louder noise, the deep percussion of a thing that was doing what it always did regardless of the weather above it. I thought about Augusto, who had sat in this building on a September night and had known what was coming and had left seven words behind the desk. They will say I did this myself. He had been right that they would. He had been wrong that it would last. I held that thought. The lamp held its flame. The storm held its opinion of the house. I held my chair under the door handle and waited for morning.