The Seville Communion

XI

Carlota Bruner's Trunk

All the wisdom in the world is in the eyes of those wax dolls.

Valery Larbaud, Poems

The English clock struck ten as they were finishing dessert, and Cruz Bruner suggested they take their coffee out into the cool courtyard. Quart gave the duchess his arm and they left the summer dining room, where they had dined among marble busts brought, together with the mosaic laid in the main courtyard, four centuries ago from the ruins of Italica. In the surrounding gallery with its coffered mudejar ceiling, ancestors in white ruffs and dark clothes stared gravely from their frames as Quart and the duchess passed. Leaning on his arm, the old lady, in a black silk dress with small white flowers at her neck and wrists, pointed them out: an admiral, a general, a governor of the Low Countries, a viceroy of the West Indies. As they passed the lamps from Cordoba, the slim shadow of the priest was visible beside the small, stooping shadow of the duchess, between the arches of the gallery. And behind them, in a black ankle-length dress and sandals and carrying a cushion for her mother, walked Macarena Bruner, smiling.

Quart sat between the two women, beside the tiled fountain. The courtyard, full of flowers, smelled of jasmine. Macarena dismissed the maid, after the maid put down the tray, and she served the coffee herself on the marquetry table. Black for Quart, with milk for her. Coca-Cola – not too cold – for her mother.

"It's my drug, as you know," said the old lady. "My doctors don't allow me coffee."

"My mother sleeps very little," Macarena told Quart, "if she goes to bed early, she wakes up at three or four in the morning. This keeps her awake. We all tell her it can't be good for her, but she takes no notice."

"Why should I?" asked Cruz Bruner. "This drink is the only thing from the USA I like." "You like Gris, mother."

"That's true," conceded the old lady between sips. "But she's from California: she's almost Spanish."

Macarena aimed to Quart. "The duchess thinks that in California the landowners still wear charro outfits covered with silver buttons, Brother Junipero's still preaching, and Zorro's still riding around fighting for the poor."

"You mean they aren't?" asked Quart, amused. Cruz Bruner nodded energetically. "That's how it should be," she said. "After all, Macarena, your great-great-great-grandfather Fernando was governor of California before they took it from us."

She spoke with all the assurance of her lineage – as if California had been snatched directly from her or her family. There was something singular in the mixture of familiarity and courteous if somewhat haughty tolerance with which the duchess addressed people. Quart looked at her wrinkled hands and face covered with liver spots, at her withered skin and the pale line of lipstick on her lips, at her white hair, pearl necklace and fan decorated by Romero de Torres. There were few women like her left. He had met some – lonely old ladies dragging their lost youth and nostalgia around the C6te d'Azur, matrons of the ancient Italian nobility, shrivelled central-European relics with Austro-Hungarian surnames, devout Spanish ladies. Cruz Bruner was one of the last. Their sons and daughters were either penniless layabouts, fodder for the tabloids, or else they worked from nine to five in offices and banks, or ran wineries, shops, and fashionable nightclubs, dealing with the financiers and politicians on whom their livelihoods depended. They studied in America, visited New York rather than Paris or Venice, couldn't speak French, and married divorces, or models, or parvenus. Cruz Bruner had spoken of this with a mocking smile during dinner. Like a whale or a seal, she said, I belong to an endangered species – the aristocracy.

"Some worlds don't end with an earthquake or a great crash," the old lady now said, looking doubtfully at Quart, wondering if he understood. "They expire quietly, with a discreet sigh." She adjusted the cushion behind her back and for a few moments listened to the crickets in the garden. A soft glow in the sky announced the moon's arrival. "Quietly," she repeated.

Quart looked at Macarena, who had her back to the light from the gallery, half her face in shadow. Her hair had slipped over her shoulder. Her legs were crossed, and her bare feet in sandals showed below her black dress. The ivory necklace gleamed at her neck. "Not Our Lady of the Tears," he said. "Her departure from this world is anything but quiet."

Macarena said nothing.

"Not all worlds disappear willingly," the old duchess whispered.

"You have no grandchildren," said Quart. He tried to sound neutral, casual, yet it came out sounding provocative, even rude.

"True. I don't," replied Cruz Bruner, and she turned to her daughter.

Macarena sat forward then, and in the moonlight Quart saw her anger. "It's none of your business," she said at last, evenly, to him.

"Maybe it's none of my business either," said the duchess, coming to her guest's aid. "But it's a pity."

"Why?" Macarena asked sharply. She addressed her mother but was looking at Quart. "Sometimes it's better not to leave anything behind." She pushed her hair back, exasperated. "Soldiers who go to war leaving nothing behind are lucky. They have no one to worry or suffer over."

"Like some priests," said Quart, his eyes fixed on her.

"Perhaps." Macarena laughed. It was bitter; nothing like her usual, open laugh. "It must be wonderful to have no responsibilities, to be so selfish. To choose a cause that you love or that suits you, as Gris has done. Or as you have. Instead of inheriting a cause or having one imposed upon you."

Cruz Bruner wrapped her fingers round her fan. "Nobody forced you to get involved with the church, my dear," she said. "Or to turn it into a personal battle."

"Please. You know better than anyone that sometimes a person has no choice. That if you open a trunk, you may have to pay for it… Some lives are ruled by ghosts."

The duchess snapped open her fan. "You heard her, Father. Who said romantic heroines have disappeared?" She fanned herself, looking absently at Quart's injured knuckles. "But only the young are troubled by ghosts. True, ghosts multiply over time, but they bother you less: the pain turns to melancholy. Mine just float about gently now." She gestured at the mudejar arches of the courtyard, the tiled fountain and the rising moon. "They don't cause me sadness any more." She looked at her daughter. "Only you do. A little."

The old lady tilted her head to one side, just as Macarena did, and Quart suddenly recognised her daughter's features in her face. He had a glimpse of what the beautiful woman beside him would look like in thirty or forty years. Everything comes to pass, thought Quart. And everything ends.

"For a time my daughter's marriage gave me hope," Cruz Bruner went on. "It consoled me, for sooner or later I would be leaving her. Octavio Machuca and I agreed that Pencho was ideal: clever, handsome, with a great future… He seemed very much in love with Macarena, and I'm sure he still is, despite all that's happened." She pursed her almost non-existent lips. "Suddenly everything changed. My daughter left the marital home and came back to live with me."

Quart finished his coffee and put his cup on the table. He felt he was continually brushing against the truth but not quite grasping it. "I don't dare ask why," he said.

"You don't." The duchess fanned herself, looking at him teasingly. "Nor do I. At any other time, I would have considered it a great misfortune, but I don't know what's best any more… I'm the last-but-one of my line, I'm almost three-quarters of a century old, and I have a gallery full of portraits of ancestors whom no one fears, respects or even remembers."

The moon was now centred in the rectangle of sky above their heads. Cruz Bruner asked for the lamps to be turned off. The light became silvery blue with accents of white – the patterns on the tiles, the chairs, and the mosaic on the floor standing out as clearly as if it were day.

"It's like crossing a line," she said. "The world looks different from the other side."

"And what's on the other side?" he asked.

The old lady looked at him with mock surprise. "That's a worrying question coming from a priest. Women of my generation always thought priests had the answer to everything. When I asked my old confessor how to deal with my husband's infidelities, he always told me to accept them, to pray and to offer my anguish to Jesus. According to him, Raphael's private life and my salvation were entirely separate matters. One had nothing to do with the other."

Quart wondered what advice Father Ferro had given Macarena about her marriage.

"As we approach the line," continued Cruz Bruner, "we feel a certain dispassionate curiosity. A tender tolerance towards those who will get here sooner or later, but don't know it."

"Such as your daughter?"

The old lady thought a moment. "For example," she agreed. She peered at Quart, interested. "Or you. You won't always be a handsome priest who attracts his female parishioners."

Quart ignored her last remark. The truth still seemed just out of reach. "And what's Father Ferro's view from the other side?" he asked.

The old lady shrugged. The conversation was starting to bore her. "You'll have to ask him. I don't think Don Priamo is either tender or tolerant. But he's an honest priest, and I believe in priests. I believe in the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, and I hope to save my soul for eternity." She tapped her chin with her closed fan. "I even believe in priests like you who don't conduct Mass or anything; or priests who wear jeans and trainers, like Father Oscar.. In the lost world I come from, a priest meant something." She smiled at her daughter. "Macarena is very fond of Don Priamo, and I believe in Macarena too. I like to see her fight her personal batdes, even though I don't always understand them. They are batdes that would have been impossible when I was her age."

It was the second time in two days that someone had proclaimed Father Ferro's honesty. But that contradicted the report about Cillas de Anso. Quart glanced at his watch. "Is Father Ferro up in the observatory?" he asked.

"It's too early," answered Cruz Bruner. "He usually arrives a bit later, around eleven. Would you like to wait?"

"Yes. There are a couple of things I want to talk to him about."

"Good. We can enjoy your company a little longer." The crickets were chirping again, and the old lady listened, her face towards the garden. "Have you found out who put our postcard in your room?"

Quart took the card from his pocket and placed it on the table. "No," he said, feeling Macarena's eyes on him. "But at least now I know what it means."

"Do you really?" Cruz Bruner opened and shut her fan, then tapped the postcard with it. "In that case, while you wait for Don Priamo, maybe it would be a good time for us to put the card back in Carlota's trunk."

Quart looked at the two women, undecided. Macarena stood up and waited, holding the card, with the moon behind her. He got to his feet and followed her through the courtyard and garden.

From the pigeon loft they could see clouds brushing the moon. The city below looked unreal. Like an old stage set, the roofs of Santa Cruz stretched away in terraces, with planes of shadow interrupted here and there by a light in a window, a distant street lamp, a terrace hung with washing – shrouds in the darkness. Illuminated, La Giralda rose up in the background as if painted on a dark backdrop. Seen through the long white net curtains billowing gently in the breeze, the belfry of Our Lady of the Tears appeared very near, almost within reach.

"The breeze doesn't come from the river but from the sea," said Macarena. "It comes up at night, from Sanlucar." She took the lighter from under her bra strap and lit a cigarette. The smoke floated out through the windows. Insects fluttered round the lamp. "This is all that's left of Carlota Bruner," she said, indicating the open trunk in the lamplight.

It was full of objects: lacquer boxes, beads of jet, a porcelain figurine, broken fans, a very old and threadbare lace mantilla, hatpins, whalebone stays, a fine silver-link handbag, opera glasses, faded fabric flowers from a hat, albums of photographs and postcards, old illustrated newspapers, boxes made of leather and cardboard, a strange pair of long red chamois gloves, tattered old books of poetry and school exercise books, wooden bobbins for lace-making, a very long braid of light chestnut hair, a catalogue for the Universal Exposition in Paris, a piece of coral, a model of a gondola, an old tourist guide to the ruins of Carthage, a tortoiseshell comb, a glass paperweight containing a little seahorse, Roman coins, and several other silver coins bearing the likenesses of Isabel II and Alfonso XIL And there were the letters – a thick packet tied with ribbon. Macarena untied the bow and handed them to Quart. There must have been about fifty: almost two-thirds were letters; the rest were postcards. The ink had faded on the brittle, yellow paper and in places was almost illegible. None bore a postmark. They were all written in Carlota's fine, sloping hand and addressed to Captain Manuel Xaloc, Port of Havana, Cuba. "There aren't any from him?''

"No." Kneeling by the trunk, Macarena took some of the letters and glanced over them, her cigarette between her fingers. "My greatgrandfather burned them when they arrived. It's a pity. We have her letters but not his."

Sitting in one of the old armchairs, with shelves of books behind him, Quart looked through the postcards. They were all popular views of Seville, like the one left in his hotel room: Triana Bridge, the port with the Torre del Oro and a schooner moored in front of it, a poster for the feria, a reproduction of a painting of the cathedral. I'm waiting for you, I'll always wait for you, with all my love, always yours, I wait to hear from you, all my love, Carlota. He took a letter from an envelope. It was dated the eleventh of April, 1896.

Dear Manuel,

I can't resign myself to not hearing from you. I am certain that my family is intercepting your letters as I know that you have not forgotten me. Something in my heart, like the quiet ticking of your watch, tells me that my letters and hopes do reach their destination. I will give this letter to a maid whom I believe to be trustworthy, and hope that my words will reach you. With them I repeat my message of love and my promise to wait for you always, until you return at last.

How long it seems since you left, my love! Time passes and I still wait for one of the ships sailing upriver to bring you to me. Life must, I'm sure, prove generous to those who suffer so much as a result of trusting in her.

At times my courage fails me and I weep in despair, sure that you will never return. That you have forgotten me, despite your promise. See how -unfair and silly I can be?

I wait for you always, each day, in the tower from which I watched you leave. At siesta time, when all are asleep and the house is silent, I come up here and sit in the rocking chair, and watch the river. It is very hot, and yesterday I thought I saw the galleons move in the paintings on the stairs. I dreamed, too, of children playing on a beach. I think these are good omens. Perhaps at this very moment you are on your way back to me.

Return soon, my love. I need to hear your laugh, to see your white teeth, and your strong, brown hands. And to see you look at me as you do. And to have you kiss me as you once did. Please return. I beg you. Return or I will die. I feel that I am already dying inside.

All my love, Carlota

"Manuel Xaloc never read this letter," said Macarena. "Or any of the others. She kept her sanity another six months, and then everything went dark. She wasn't exaggerating: she was dying inside. When at last he came to see her and sat in the courtyard in his blue uniform with gold buttons, Carlota was already dead. She didn't recognise him. She was just a shadow."

Quart put the letter back in its envelope. He felt embarrassment for having intruded on the intimacy of the letter's words of love that were never answered.

"Would you like to read more?" asked Macarena.

He shook his head. The curtains billowed still in the breeze that came up the Guadalquivir from Sanlucar, and through them he caught a glimpse of the church tower. Macarena sat on the floor, leaning against the trunk, rereading some of the letters. Her black hair shone in the lamplight. Quart admired the curve of her neck, her tanned skin, her bare feet in the leather sandals. She exuded such an intense warmth that he had to stop himself from reaching out and touching her neck.

"Look at this," she said.

She held out a piece of paper. It was a sketch of a ship beneath the words: ARMED CUTTER, THE MANIGUA. Below the sketch was a list of the specifications of the ship, obviously copied from a periodical of the time, all in Carlota's hand.