The green door on the rua da Senhora da Glória opened onto a four-meter corridor and a room six by three that smelled of vinegar and glass powder. On the workbench, forty shards of azulejo laid out on a cloth, and in the middle, under an architect's lamp, a square of modern faience that the man was busy aging. He explained the problem to me before he even asked who I was, because he is the sort of man nobody ever asks a question about his work. The blue of 1780 no longer exists. Cobalt doesn't have the same impurity anymore, the kiln doesn't reach the same temperature, and the crazing — that web of fine cracks in the glaze — takes two hundred years to happen on its own. He does it in four days, with India ink and patience.
"There's a panel on the rua da Voz do Operário that's been missing three tiles since an earthquake," he said. "Not the one in 1755. A truck."
Nuno Vaz was thirty-eight, with the forearms of a man who carries sacks, a coffee machine standing on a stool and a firemen's calendar pinned to the wall. I measured the room with my eyes while he worked, ceiling height two forty, one north window, because that is what I do in rooms where I don't yet know why I am. He let me. Then I said Inês's name.