The Street That Never Was

Lisbon in the autumn of 1893 smelled of roasting chestnuts and the river, and Beatriz Coelho had been sent to catalogue a dead man's maps.

She was four-and-twenty, the youngest hand at the Torre do Tombo, and the work had fallen to her because no one senior wanted it: the cartographer Anselmo Vaz had died without heirs, willing his entire estate to the national archive, and an estate of maps is a tedious inheritance. For a fortnight she had worked alone in his shuttered house on the Calçada do Combro, among drawing tables and copper plates and the dry-paper smell of a thousand rolled charts, numbering each, noting its scale, tying it with linen tape. It was patient, dustless, lonely work, and she had grown almost fond of the dead man for the beauty of his hand.

Vaz had mapped the whole kingdom in his sixty years — the terraces of the Douro, the salt-pans of the Algarve, every twist of the Tagus — and his Lisbon was the finest she had ever seen, drawn street by street with a draughtsman's love. She knew the city by heart, had been born three streets from where she sat, and so she felt it at once when something was wrong: a map, near the bottom of his last chest, that showed a street she had never walked.

It ran off the Rua da Bica, where Beatriz knew there to be only a blank wall and the long public stair down to the river. On Vaz's map, between the wall and the stair, lay anarrow lane he had labelled in his careful capitals — RUA DAS HORAS PERDIDAS, the Street of Lost Hours — with a dozen houses, a small fountain, a chapel. It was drawn no differently from any true street: shaded, numbered, exact. Only it did not exist. She had stood on that wall as a child. There was no lane there. There never had been.

She might have set it aside as a draughtsman's fancy, a city he had wished into being, had the map not been folded around something. When she opened it fully on the table, a single sheet slid out and settled on the boards at her feet.

It was a death certificate. The municipal kind, with the seal of the parish of Santos and a registrar's flourish, entirely ordinary but for two things. The first was the name of the deceased — a girl, Mariana Vaz, surely the cartographer's own kin, though no kin had come forward. The second was the date.

Beatriz read it twice, and then a third time, and the chestnut-smelling afternoon went very quiet around her. The certificate recorded the death of Mariana Vaz on the third of November — in the year 1901. Eight years hence. A death not yet died, of a girl, so far as any register in Lisbon knew, not yet born.

She sat down slowly in the dead man's chair. The map of the street that was not there lay open before her, and the certificate for the death that had not happened lay in her lap, and somewhere below in the real city the true bells of Santos began, mildly, to ring the hour — a number Beatriz did not bother to count, because she had already understood that she would not rest now until she knew which of the two impossible things she ought to believe.