The Seville Communion (29 page)

Life and the world are the dream of a drunken god, who steals away from the banquet of the gods and falls asleep on a solitary star, unaware that he creates what he dreams of. . . And the images of his dreams appear, at times with a motley extravagance, at others harmonious and rational . . . The
Iliad,
Plato, the battle of Marathon, the Venus de Medici, the French Revolution, Hegel, steamships, all arc thoughts that emerge from his long dream. But one day the god will wake, rubbing his sleepy eyes, he will smile, and our world will sink into oblivion and none of it will ever have existed . . .

There was a warm, gentle breeze. Muffled sounds reached the pigeon loft from the courtyards and streets below. Through the windows of a nearby school came a chorus of children's voices reciting a lesson or poem. Quart listened - something about nests and birds. Suddenly the recitation stopped and the chorus burst into cries of laughter.

Over towards the Reales Alcazares, a clock struck three times. It was a quarter to six. "Why the stars?" asked Quart.

Father Ferro took a small dented tin from his pocket, and from the tin he took a filterless cigarette. He moistened the end with his tongue and put it in his mouth.

"They're pure," he said.

He lit the cigarette in the hollow of his hand, inclining his head as he did so. His forehead and scarred face became even more creased. The smoke floated out through the arched windows while the smell, strong and acrid, reached Quart.

"I understand," Quart said, and Father Ferro turned to look at him with a flicker of interest. The man almost smiled. Unsure whether to regret this or congratulate himself, Quart realised that something had changed. The pigeon loft was a neutral space between heaven and earth where their mutual distrust seemed to diminish, as if, according to the old custom, they could both take sanctuary here. Quart felt the impulse towards comradeship that was often - although in his case not too often - established between one cleric and another. Solitary, lost soldiers encountering each other on the battlefield.

"How long did you spend up there?"

The old priest said, the cigarette smoking in his mouth, "Over twenty years." "It must have been a small parish."

"Very small. Forty-two people when I arrived. None by the time I left. They either died or moved. My last parishioner was over eighty -she didn't survive the snow that last winter."

A pigeon wandered up and down one of the ledges of the gallery, near the priest. He stared at it intently, as if it might have a message tied to its leg. But when it flew off with a flapping of wings, his gaze remained fixed on the same spot. His clumsy movements, his slovenliness still reminded Quart of the old priest he hated as a child, but now he could see significant differences between that priest and this. He had thought that Father Ferro's roughness sprang from a primitive state. That he was just a grey cleric who, like the priest from Quart's distant past, had not been able to rise above his own mediocrity and ignorance. But here in the pigeon loft Quart found a different kind of priest: consciously reactionary, fully aware that he was renouncing a brilliant career in the Church. It was quite clear that Father Ferro had once been - and in some ways continued to be, almost in secret - more than a coarse village priest, more than the surly, stubborn parish priest who ignored the reforms of the second Vatican Council by celebrating Mass in Latin at Our Lady of the Tears. It was not done from a lack of education or because of age; it was done out of firm conviction. In Quart's terms, Don Priamo Ferro had chosen his flag.

There was a notebook open on the desk, with pencil diagrams of a constellation. Quart thought of the old priest peering through his telescope at night, absorbed in the silence of the firmament revolving slowly beyond the lens, while Macarena Bruner sat reading
Anna Karenina
or the
Sonatas
in one of the old armchairs, moths fluttering around the lamp. He suddenly wanted to laugh at himself. It made him feel terribly jealous.

He saw that Father Ferro was watching him, as if the look on Quart's face had set him thinking.

"Orion," Father Ferro said, and Quart, disconcerted, took a moment to realise that the priest meant the diagram in the notebook. "At this time of year you can see only the topmost star of the Hunter's left shoulder. It's called Betelgeuse and appears over there." He pointed at a section of the sky, still light, on the horizon. "West by northwest." He still had the cigarette in his mouth, and ash dropped on to his cassock.

Quart turned the pages of the book, which were full of notes, diagrams, and figures. He could identify only the constellation of Leo, his own sign. According to legend, the javelins of Hercules had bounced off Leo's body of metal.

"Do you believe," Quart asked, "that everything is written in the stars?"

Father Ferro grimaced. "Three or four centuries ago," he said, "that kind of question would have cost a priest his life." "I've told you, I've come in peace."

Father Ferro's laughter was sarcastic. A harsh, grating sound. "You're referring to astrology," he said at last. "I'm interested in astronomy. I hope you'll underline the subtle difference in your report to Rome." He fell silent, but went on looking at Quart curiously, as if reappraising him. UI have no idea where things are written," he added after a while. "Although I can tell at a glance that you and I aren't even using the same alphabet." "Please explain."

"There's not much to explain. You work for a multinational organisation that is based on all the demagogy Christian humanism and the Enlightenment filled our heads with: that man evolves to higher states through suffering, that humanity is destined to reform itself, that goodwill begets more goodwill ..." He turned to the window, again dropping ash down his cassock. "Or that Truth with a capital T exists, and is enough in itself."

Quart was shaking his head.

"You don't know me," he said. "You don't know anything about me."

"I know who you work for. That's enough." He turned back to the telescope, checking again for dust. He put his hands in his pocket. "What do you or your bosses in Rome know, with your bureaucrats' mentality? All you know of love or hate are their theological definitions, or whispers in the confessional. ... I can tell at glance, just by the way you talk and move, that you're a man whose sins are those of omission. You're one of the TV preachers, pastors of a soulless church, who speak of the faithful the way companies speak of their customers."

"You're wrong about me, Father. My work ..."

The old priest again made the grating sound that was his laughter. "Your work!" He turned abruptly to Quart. "Now you're going to tell me that you get your hands dirty, aren't you? Even though you're always so well groomed. I'm sure you have plenty of justifications and alibis. You're young, strong, your superiors give you room and board, they think for you and throw you bones to gnaw. You're the perfect policeman working for a powerful corporation that serves God. You've probably never loved a woman, or hated a man, or felt sympathy for a miserable wretch. No poor have blessed you for their bread, no sick for their solace, no sinners for their hope of salvation. . . . You follow orders, nothing more."

"I follow the rules," said Quart, and instantly regretted it.

"Do you?" The old priest looked at him with intense irony. "Well, my congratulations. You'll save your soul. Those who follow the rules always go to heaven." His mouth twisted as he took a last drag on his cigarette. "To rejoice in God's presence." He threw the cigarette end out of the window and watched it fall.

"I wonder," said Quart, "if you still have faith."

These were strange words, coming from Quart, and Quart knew it. Quite apart from the fact that such questions - more appropriate to the hounds of the Holy Office - were not within the jurisdiction of his mission. As Spada would have said, at the IEA we deal not with people's hearts but with their actions. Let's stick to being good centurions and leave the dangerous task of probing the human soul to His Eminence Jerzy Iwaszkiewicz.

. And yet Quart waited for an answer in the long silence that followed his remark. As the old priest moved slowly round the telescope, his reflection slid along the polished brass tube.

"Still is an adverb of time," Father Ferro said at last, frowning, possibly reflecting on time, or adverbs. "But I forgive sins," he added. "I help people die in peace."

"It's not your office to forgive," Quart said. "Only God can do that."

The priest looked at him, as if he'd forgotten that Quart was there. "When I was young," he said suddenly, "I read all the philosophers of Antiquity, from Socrates to Saint Augustine. And I forgot them. The only thing that remained of them was bittersweet melancholy and disillusionment. Now I'm sixty-four, and all I know about people is that they remember, they're afraid, and they die."

Quart must have looked surprised and embarrassed, because Father Ferro nodded, his hard dark eyes fixing him for a moment. He looked up at the sky. The solitary cloud - maybe no longer the same one -had gone to meet the setting sun, and a reddish glow now spread over the distant buildings.

"I searched for Him up in the mountains for a long time," Father Ferro went on. "I wanted to have it out with Him, a kind of settling of scores, one to one. I'd seen so many people suffer and die . . . Forgotten by my bishop and his aides, I lived in atrocious solitude. I emerged only to say Mass every Sunday in a small, almost empty church, or to trudge through rain or snow to give extreme unction to a soul who waited for my arrival to die. For twenty-five years, sitting at the bedside of those who gripped my hands because I was their only comfort in the face of death, I prayed to Him. But I never received an answer."

He broke off. It was Quart who spoke now: "Either we live and die according to a plan, or merely by accident." It was neither a question nor an answer. He was just prompting Father Ferro to continue. For the first time, Quart had some understanding of the man before him; and he knew that Father Ferro could sense this.

The old priest's face softened. "How to preserve, then," he said, "the message of life in a world that bears the seal of death? Man dies, he knows he will die, and he also knows that, unlike kings, popes and generals, he'll leave no trace. He tells himself there must be something more. Otherwise, the universe is simply a joke in very poor taste; senseless chaos. So faith becomes a kind of hope, a solace. Maybe that's why not even the Holy Father believes in God anymore."

Quart burst out laughing, startling the pigeons. "That's why you're defending your church tooth and nail," he said.

"Of course." Father Ferro frowned. "What does it matter whether I have faith or not? Those who come to me have faith. That's justification enough for the existence of Our Lady of the Tears. And it's no coincidence that it's a church of the baroque, which was the art of the Counter-Reformation, which declared, 'Don't think. Leave that to the theologians. Admire the carvings, the gilding, the sumptuous altars, the passion plays that have been the essential means of entrancing the masses since the time of Aristotle ... Be dazzled by the glory of God. Too much analysis robs you of hope. See us as the solid rock on which to take refuge from the roaring torrent. The truth kills you before your time.'"

Quart raised a hand: "There's a moral objection to all this, Father. What you describe is alienation. Your church, presented like that, is the seventeenth-century equivalent of television."

"So what?" said Father Ferro with a shrug. "What was religious baroque art but an attempt to win the audience away from Luther and Calvin? Anyway, where would the modern papacy be without television? Naked faith can't be sustained. People need symbols to wrap around themselves, because it's cold outside. We're responsible for our last innocent faithful, those who followed us believing that we'd lead them to the sea, lead them home, as in the
Anabasis
.
At least my old stones, my altarpiece, and my Latin arc more dignified than all that amplified singing and the huge screens that have turned services into a spectacle for the masses, dazzling them with electronic gimmicks. The Church leaders think that's the way to keep their customers. But they're wrong, they only degrade us. The battle's been lost, and now the time has come for false prophets."

He shut his mouth and bowed his head, morose. The conversation was over. He leaned on the window ledge and looked out over the river. Quart didn't know what to do or say. After a moment he went and leaned on the ledge beside Father Ferro. He had never been so near the priest. Father Ferro's head came up to his shoulder. They stood like that, without speaking, until long after the clocks on the towers of Seville struck six. The solitary cloud had dissolved and the sun was sinking. To the west, the sky was slowly turning gold. Don Priamo Ferro spoke again.

"I know only one thing: when the seduction is over we'll be finished too. Logic and reason will mean the end. But as long as some poor woman needs to kneel in my small church in search of comfort, the church must remain standing." He took his dirty handkerchief from his pocket and noisily blew his nose. The light from the setting sun lit the white stubble on his chin. "Burdened as we are by our miserable condition, priests like me are still needed . . . We're the old, patched drum skin on which the glory of God still thunders. And only a madman would envy our secret. We know," said the old priest darkly, "the angel who holds the key to the abyss."

IX

It's a Small World

Worthy of being dark and Sevillian.
Campoamor,
The Express Train

The floodlights illuminating the cathedral created an area of unreal brightness in the night. Confused by the light, pigeons flew in all directions, suddenly appearing and then disappearing into the darkness among the huge mountain of cupolas, pinnacles and flying buttresses, on top of which perched the tower of La Giralda. It was almost fantastical, thought. Quart, a backdrop as extraordinary as old Hollywood movie sets made of canvas and papier-mache. The difference was that the Plaza Virgen de los Reyes was real, built of bricks over the centuries - the oldest part dated from the twelfth century -and no film studio could have reproduced such an incredible place, however much money and talent they threw at the project. It was unique, a perfect stage. Particularly when Macarena Bruner walked across it and stopped beneath the huge lamppost in the centre of the square. She stood against the golden glow of the floodlit stone facades, tall and slender, her dark eyes calmly fixed on Quart.