The Seville Communion (28 page)

"Mother."

The duchess raised her hand. "Let me say what I have to say. Don Priamo never liked Pencho, but I did. And the fact that you're separated changes nothing." She fanned herself again, with unexpected vigour. "I admit that in this business over the church he's not behaving like a gentleman."

Macarena shrugged. "Pencho was never a gentleman," she said. She took a lump of sugar and sucked it thoughtfully. Quart watched her, until she suddenly looked up at him. "And he's never tried to pass himself off as one."

"No, of course not," said the old lady, suddenly sarcastic. "Your father, now he was a gentleman. A real Andalusian gentleman." Then she was lost in thought, touching the tiles around the fountain with her fingertips. The tiles, she explained to Quart, dated from the sixteenth century and had been laid throughout the house in strict accordance with the rules of heraldry. "An Andalusian gentleman," she repeated after a moment's silence. The line of lipstick on her thin, faded lips contorted - a bitter, private smile.

Macarena Bruner shook her head: "The church means nothing to Pencho." She seemed to address Quart rather than her mother. "He sees it only in terms of square metres ripe for development. We can't expect him to see things our way."

"Of course not," the duchess said. "Maybe someone from your own class would have."

"You married someone from your own class," replied Macarena, annoyed.

"You're right." The old lady smiled sadly. "At least your husband is a man. Courageous, with the insolence that comes from relying on oneself alone . . ." She looked quickly at Father Ferro. "Whether we like what he's doing to our church or not."

"He hasn't done it yet," said Macarena. "And he won't, not if I can help it."

Cruz Bruner frowned. "Well, you're making him pay, dear," she said.

They had strayed into an area that seemed to make the old lady uneasy. Her manner towards her daughter was discreetly reproving. Macarena stared into space beyond Quart's shoulder. "He hasn't finished paying," she said quietly.

"He'll always be your husband," said her mother, "whether you live with him or not. Isn't that so, Don Priamo?" The expression in her watery eyes was mischievous again when she turned to Quart.

"Father Priamo doesn't like my son-in-law, but he maintains that a marriage - any marriage - is indissoluble."

"That's true," said the priest. He had spilled more hot chocolate and was brushing it from his cassock angrily. "God Himself cannot undo what a priest has united on earth."

How difficult it was, thought Quart, to distinguish between pride and virtue. Between truth and error. Determined to remain on the sidelines, he lowered his eyes to the Roman mosaic at his feet, brought here by Macarena's ancestors: a ship surrounded by fish, and something that looked like an island with trees, and a woman on the shore carrying a jug or amphora. There was also a dog with the inscription
CAVE CANEM,
and a woman and a man touching each other. Some pieces were loose and he nudged them back into place with his foot.

"What does that banker, Octavio Machuca, have to say about all this?" he asked, and noticed the duchess's expression instantly soften.

"Octavio is a very old and dear friend. The best I ever had," she said.

"He's in love with the duchess," said Macarena.

"Don't be ridiculous." The old lady fanned herself, staring disapprovingly at her daughter. Laughing, Macarena insisted it was true. The duchess was forced to admit that Machuca, when he first arrived in Seville, had indeed wooed her for a time before she married. But such a marriage would have been inconceivable at the time. He never married, and never made any advances to her while her husband, his friend Rafael Guardiola, was alive. She sounded sorry, but Quart couldn't tell what she regretted.

"He asked you to marry him," said Macarena.

"That was later. I was a widow by then. But I thought it best to leave things as they were. Now we take a stroll in the park every Wednesday. We're very good, old friends."

"What do you talk about?" asked Quart, smiling to make his question seem less intrusive.

"Nothing," said Macarena. "I've spied on them, and all they do is flirt quietly."

"Ignore her. I take his arm, and we chat about our own things. Of times gone by. Of when he was a young adventurer, before he settled down."

"Don Octavio recites
The Express Train
by Campoamor to her." "How do you know?" "He told me."

Cruz Bruner straightened, touching her pearl necklace with a hint of past coquettishness. "Well, yes, it's true. He knows I like it. 'My letter, rejoicing as it goes to meet you, will tell you of my memory . . ."' Her smile was melancholy. "We also talk about Macarena. He loves her like a daughter and he gave her away at her wedding . . . Look at Father Ferro's face. He doesn't like Octavio."

The old priest scowled defiantly. It was almost as if he were jealous of their walks in the park. On Wednesdays he didn't take coffee with the duchess of El Nuevo Extremo and she recited the rosary without him.

"I neither like nor dislike him, madam," he said, uncomfortable. "But I find his attitude to the problem of Our Lady of the Tears highly reprehensible. Pencho Gavira is his subordinate. Don Octavio could stop Gavira from proceeding with this sacrilege." His anger made his face look hard. "In that respect he has not served you or your daughter well."

"Octavio has an extraordinarily pragmatic approach to life," said Cruz Bruner. "He couldn't care less about the church. He respects our deep affection for it, but he believes that my son-in-law has made the right decision." She gazed at the escutcheons carved in the spandrels above the courtyard arches. "Macarena's future, he'd say,*is not in clinging to the wreckage but in climbing aboard a brand-new yacht. Which my son-in-law can provide."

"It has to be said, Don Octavio isn't taking sides," agreed her daughter. "He's neutral."

Don Priamo raised an apocalyptic finger. "One cannot be neutral about the house of God."

"Please, Father," Macarena said to him with a tender smile, "try to stay calm. Have more chocolate."

The old priest refused a third cup and stared sullenly at the tips of his scuffed shoes. I know who he reminds me of, thought Quart. Jock, the grumpy, aggressive little fox terrier in
Lady and the Tramp
.
Except that Father Ferro was more truculent. Quart said to the old duchess,

"Earlier you mentioned your father the duke . . . Was he Carlota Bruner's brother?"

The old lady was taken aback. "You know the story?" She played for a moment with her fan, glancing at her daughter and then at Quart. "Carlota was my aunt, my father's older sister. A sad family tale . . . Macarena has been obsessed with the story since she was a child. She would spend hours with her trunk, reading those unhappy letters that never reached their destination and trying on old dresses at the window where they say Carlota sat waiting."

There was something new in the atmosphere. Father Ferro looked away, embarrassed. The subject seemed to make him uncomfortable.

"Father Quart," Macarena said, "has one of Carlota's cards."

"That's not possible," said the duchess. "They're in the trunk up in the pigeon loft."

"Well, he has. It's a picture of the church. Somebody put it in his hotel room."

"How ridiculous. Who would do such a thing?" The old lady looked suspiciously at Quart. "Has he returned it to you?" she asked her daughter.

Macarena shook her head slowly. "I've let him keep it. For the time being."

The duchess was confused. "I don't understand. Only you ever go up to the pigeon loft, or the servants."

"Yes," said Macarena, turning to the old priest, "and Don Priamo."

Father Ferro almost jumped out of his seat. "For the love of God, madam. You're surely not insinuating that I . . ."

"I was joking, Father," said Macarena. Although Quart couldn't tell from her expression whether she was or not. "But the fact is, the card got to the Dona Maria Hotel and it's a mystery how."

"What's the pigeon loft?" asked Quart.

"You can't see it from here, only from the garden," explained Cruz Bruner. "It's what we call the house's tower. There was once a pigeon loft up there. My grandfather Luis, Carlota's father, studied astronomy and set up an observatory. Eventually it became the room where my poor aunt spent her last years, as a recluse . . . Now Don Priamo uses it."

Quart looked at the old priest in evident surprise. This explained the books he'd found in his quarters. "I didn't know you were interested in astronomy,'' he said.

"Well, I am." The priest was uneasy. "There's no reason you should know. It's none of your business, or Rome's. The duchess is kind enough to let me use the observatory."

"That's right," said Cruz Bruner, pleased. "The instruments are all very old, but Father Ferro keeps them clean, and in use. And he tells me about what he sees. He won't make any discoveries with that equipment, but it's a pleasant pastime." She tapped her legs with her fan, smiling. "I don't have the strength to climb up there, but Macarena goes up sometimes."

One surprise after another, thought Quart. This was a strange little club that Father Ferro had here. An insubordinate astronomer priest.

"You didn't mention your interest in astronomy either," Quart said, looking into her dark eyes, wondering what other secrets were hidden there.

"I'm interested in tranquillity," said Macarena simply. "You can find it up there, among the stars. Father Ferro lets me stay while he works. I read or watch him."

Quart looked at the sky above their heads - a rectangle of blue framed by the eaves of the Andalusian courtyard. There was a single cloud, high up. Small, solitary and motionless, like Father Ferro. "In the past," he said, "astronomy was forbidden to clerics. It was considered too rational and therefore a threat to the soul." He smiled in a friendly way at the old priest. "The Inquisition would have imprisoned you for it."

Father Ferro looked down, bad-tempered, unyielding. "The Inquisition," he muttered, "would have imprisoned me for a lot of things, not just astronomy."

"But not anymore," said Quart, thinking of Cardinal Iwaszkiewicz. "Not that they wouldn't like to."

For the first time they all laughed, even Father Ferro, reluctantly at first, then with good humour. Talking of astronomy seemed to have narrowed a little the gulf between him and Quart. Macarena sensed it and looked pleased, glancing first at one and then the other. Bright glints once again shone in her eyes, and she laughed her frank, open laugh, like a boy's. She suggested that the old priest show Quart the pigeon loft.

The brass telescope gleamed beneath the mudejar arches open on all four sides of the tower. It looked out over the rooftops of Santa Cruz. In the distance, among television aerials and flocks of pigeons flying in all directions, were La Giralda, the Torre del Oro and a stretch of the Guadalquivir with jacarandas in flower like blue splashes along its banks. The rest of the landscape before which Carlota Bruner had languished a century earlier was now a mass of modern concrete, steel and glass buildings. There was not a single white sail in sight, nor boats bobbing on the current, and the four pinnacles of the Archivo de Indias looked like forgotten sentinels atop the Lonja building, guarding the paper, dust and memories of a time long past within it. "What a wonderful place," said Quart.

Father Ferro didn't answer. He took his dirty handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the tube of the telescope, breathing on it. It was an ancient model, almost two metres long, with an altazimuth mounting. The long brass tube and all the metal parts had been carefully polished. The telescope shone in the sunlight, and the sun was moving slowly towards the far bank, over Triana. There was little else in the pigeon loft: a couple of old torn leather armchairs, a desk with numerous drawers, a lamp, a print of seventeenth-century Seville on the wall, and a few leather-bound books: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Quevedo, Heine, Galdos, Blasco Ibanez, Valle-Inclan, together with some treatises on cosmography, celestial mechanics and astrophysics. Quart went to take a closer look at them: Ptolemy, Porta, Alfonso de Cordoba. Some were very old editions.

"I would never have imagined it," Quart said. "I mean, that you'd be interested in this sort of thing."

His tone was sincere, conciliatory. In the last few hours his view of Father Ferro had undergone considerable change. The old priest was rubbing the telescope, as if a genie with all the answers were asleep inside. He shrugged. His cassock was so stained and threadbare that it looked more grey than black. Strange contrast, thought Quart: the small, dingy priest beside the gleaming telescope.

"I like watching the sky at night," Father Ferro said at last. "The duchess and her daughter allow me to spend a couple of hours a day up here, after dinner. There's direct access from the courtyard, so I don't bother anyone."

Quart touched the spine of one of the books,
Delia celeste fisionomia
, 1616.
Next to it were some volumes he'd never heard of,
Tabulae Astronomicae.
A rough village priest, His Grace Aquilino Corvo had said. The thought made Quart smile to himself as he leafed through the astronomical tables.

"When did you become interested in all this?"

Apparently satisfied with the condition of the telescope, Father Ferro put the handkerchief away in his pocket, turned to Quart, took the book from him, and put it back in its place. "I spent many years living on a mountain," he said. "At night, when I sat outside the church, there was nothing to do but look at the sky."

He fell silent, as if he'd said more than he had needed to. It wasn't difficult to picture him sitting at nightfall beneath the stone portico of his village church, staring up at the vault of heaven, where no human light could disturb the harmony of the spheres revolving through the universe. Quart picked up a copy of Heine's
Travel Pictures
and opened it at a page marked by a red ribbon: