The Inheritance
of Silence
Delia at the Airport
Departure is not an ending. It is the beginning of the part where you figure out what you carry.
Delia || Departure || Reflection || Transition
The Lisbon airport on the morning of my departure had the quality of all airports in the early morning — the specific suspension of ordinary time that large transit spaces produce when they are occupied by people in the process of being between things. I had come to Lisbon the night before, at Ferreira’s invitation, for the formal signing of the preliminary estate documents that my testimony supported. The signing had taken two hours and had been conducted in the sober precision of a Lisbon legal office whose windows looked out over the Tagus and whose conference room contained, on this specific morning, the first formal acknowledgment that Augusto Bravo’s estate would be settled on terms that reflected what he had actually intended rather than what had been constructed in his name. I had signed where my signature was required, had answered the questions put to me under formal examination, and had confirmed the findings of my report in the language that formal proceedings required. Then I had gone to the hotel and had dinner alone and had slept well, which I noted with specific gratitude because sleeping well was not something I had managed with any consistency since the night before arriving at the estate. My body, apparently, had understood that the work was done. I woke at six and lay in the hotel bed for a while and thought about Portugal, which I was about to leave and which I had found, over ten days on its Atlantic coast, more complicated and more interesting and more honest-in-its-complexity than the place described by its tourist reputation or its post-revolutionary political narrative. I had found a country in the process of doing the genuinely difficult thing — accounting for its past in the light of its present while both were still in motion — and doing it with the imperfect, costly, necessary commitment of a society that had decided the accounting was worth the discomfort. Augusto’s archive going to the national historical authority. Graça Cabral’s records being examined by the same team. The PIDE’s victims’ names being cross-referenced with the movement records. The network’s full scope becoming part of the historical record. Not simple, not clean, not complete — but in progress, which was the only state in which anything real ever existed. I got up. I packed. I checked out. I got in the taxi to the airport with my briefcase and my bag and the photograph Filipa had given me, which I had wrapped carefully in my nightshirt to protect the print, and I sat in the back of the taxi and watched Lisbon be Lisbon in the early morning — the particular orange light on the white facades, the hills that the city moved between rather than across, the blue of the Tagus visible between buildings — and I felt the specific feeling of a place that has cost something to be in and that you are both glad to have been in and ready to leave.