The Inheritance
of Silence
The Letter She Wrote on the Plane
Writing at altitude has a clarity that ground-level does not always produce.
Letter || Writing || Reflection || Delia
Iwrote a letter on the plane back to London. I wrote it on TAP stationery that the flight attendant produced from a small supply intended for passengers who had documents to complete — I had never used it for documents; I was using it now for a letter that was not, strictly, a professional document but that required the particular quality of attention that writing on a plane’s small tray table, with the clouds below and the English Channel ahead, produced. The letter was addressed to myself — not in the sense of a diary, which I did not keep, but in the specific sense of someone who has had an experience that requires articulation and who has no natural recipient for the articulation except the self that will be reading it at a later date when the experience has become past tense. I wrote what I had learned. Not the forensic findings, which were in the report. Not the facts of the case, which were in the documentation. What I had learned about the work. I had authenticated five hundred documents in fifteen years. This had been the five hundred and first, and it was the first in which the document was not the primary event but the indicator of the primary event — the first in which what the document said about something larger was more important than what the document said about itself. Every document is a window, my teacher had told me in my first year of training. The question is what the window shows. For fifteen years I had been looking at the glass. At the Quinta Bravo I had looked through it, and what was on the other side was not the comfortable drama of disputed deeds and contested signatures but the full, complicated, morally ambiguous, human reality of a family and a country in the process of reckoning with what they had done and what they had been done to. I had been the instrument of part of that reckoning. I had done it with the tools I had — language, attention, method, the refusal to stop at the surface when the surface was telling me there was more beneath. The tools had been adequate. I would be more careful, going forward, about the cases I took from anonymous commissioners. I would be more attentive to the quality of the paper. I would be readier to make the two phone calls simultaneously, the prosecutor and the police, without waiting for more evidence than I needed. I would carry Filipa’s photograph on my desk. I would not forget Benedita’s hands. I put the pen down. The clouds below the plane were very white and the light above them was very clear and the English Channel was ahead and London beyond it and the 1891 disputed deed of sale on my desk in Lincoln’s Inn, which I would finish this week, which was forty-third of its kind but which was also its own document, its own window, its own person’s written truth waiting for the right kind of attention. I folded the letter and put it in my briefcase and leaned back in the seat and looked at the sky, which was the sky above both Portugal and England simultaneously, the same sky, indifferent to the national boundaries beneath it, existing in the way large things existed — simply, continuously, with no particular interest in what happened below. I found this restful. I always found the sky restful. I closed my eyes for the remainder of the flight.