The Seville Communion

22

Knots

Range

1,800 miles at 10 knots

Armaments

2 of 47 (to stern)

1 of 75 (in the centre)

Crew

27 men (3x4 gunners)

Macarena handed him a folder tied with ribbon. "This dates from later on. My grandfather put it in the trunk after Carlota died. It's an epilogue to the story."

Quart opened the folder. It contained several cuttings from newspapers and illustrated magazines, all dealing with the end of the Spanish-American war and the naval defeat of July 3,1898. A front page from La Ilustracion showed an engraving of the destruction of Admiral Cervera's squadron. There was also a page with an account of the battle, a map of the coast of Santiago de Cuba, and pictures of the principal chiefs of staff and officers killed in the battle. Amongst them Quart found the one he was looking for. The engraving was of poor quality, and a note from the illustrator stated that it had been "drawn based on reliable accounts". It showed a good-looking man with sad eyes, his jacket buttoned to the neck. He had short hair, a large moustache and sideburns. He was the only officer dressed in civilian clothes, and it seemed as if the illustrator had tried to emphasise that this man wasn't a proper member of Cervera's squadron. Captain of the Merchant Navy Mr Manuel Xaloc Ortega, commander of the Manigua. Xaloc stared into space, as if indifferent to being listed among the heroes of Cuba. Below, on the same page, was the text:

The Infanta Maria Teresa, having withstood the concentrated fire of the American squadron for almost an hour, ran aground in flames on the coast. Meanwhile, the other Spanish ships set sail from the Port of Santiago, between the forts of El Morro and Socapa, and were immediately greeted by artillery fire from Sampson's battleships and cruisers, whose strength was overwhelming. The Oquendo, its entire port-side ablaze, guns unfixed, bridges and superstructure almost destroyed and with a large number of dead and wounded on board, passed before its flagship, which had run aground. Unable to continue, its commander (Commodore Lazaga) fallen, the Oquendo ran aground one mile to the west so as not to fall into enemy hands.

Pushing their engines to the limit, the Vizcaya and the Cristabal Colon sailed parallel to the coast, pressed against it by a barrage of North American fire. They passed their destroyed companions, whose survivors were trying to swim to shore. Being faster, the Colon moved ahead, while the unfortunate Vizcaya suffered the full force of the enemy fire. Its commander, Commodore Eulate, made futile attempts to ram the battleship Brooklyn, but the Vizcaya was in flames and ran aground under the intense fire of the Iowa and the Oregon. It was then the turn of the Colon (Commodore Diaz Moreu). At one in the afternoon, pursued by four American ships, defenceless, as it had no heavy artillery, it was forced against the coast and was scuttled by its crew. Meanwhile, without hope of surviving, the light units of the squadron, the destroyers Pluton and Furor, left port one after the other. They were joined in the last few hours by the armed cutter Manigua, whose commander, Captain of the Merchant Navy Xaloc, refused to remain in port. His ship would have remained unharmed and been captured with the town, which was about to fall. Aware that escape was impossible, the Pluton and the Furor headed straight for the American battleships and cruisers. The Pluton (Lieutenant Vazquez) ran aground after it was split in two by a heavy shell from the Indiana, and the Furor was sunk by fire from the Indiana and the Gloucester. As for the fast, light Manigua, it left the Port of Santiago last, when the coast was littered with Spanish ships run aground and in flames. It hoisted a black flag alongside the Spanish flag and, under enemy fire, headed straight for the nearest American ship, the cruiser Indiana. The Manigua sailed for three miles in a zigzag towards the cruiser, under intense fire, and sank at twenty past one in the afternoon, its deck devastated and in flames from bow to stern, still attempting to ram the enemy…

Quart put the cutting back in the folder and returned it to the trunk with the rest of the papers. Now he knew what Captain Xaloc was looking at in the picture: the cannons of the battleship Indiana. He pictured Xaloc on the bridge, surrounded by cannon fire and smoke, resolved to end his long journey to nowhere.

"Did Carlota ever find out about this?" Quart asked.

Macarena was leafing through an old photograph album. "I don't know," she said. "By July 1898 she had completely lost her mind, so we have no idea how she might have reacted to the news. Anyway, I think they kept it from her. She came up here to wait, until the day she died." She showed him a page of the album. There was an old photograph, with the stamp of the photographer's studio in a corner, of a young woman in light summer clothes, holding a parasol and wearing a wide-brimmed hat covered with flowers, a hat like those in the trunk. The photograph was very faded, but he could distinguish slender hands holding gloves and a fan, light-brown hair gathered in a bun, and a pale face with a sad smile and vacant eyes. She wasn't beautiful, but her face was pleasing: sweet, serene. She looked about twenty. "Maybe she had this taken for him," said Macarena.

A stronger breeze moved the curtains, and through them Quart once again saw the belfry of Our Lady of the Tears. To dispel his uneasiness, he went over to one of the arched windows. He took off his jacket and stood contemplating the outline of the church in the darkness. He felt bereft, as Manuel Xaloc must have felt when he left the Casa del Postigo for the last time and went to the church to leave Carlota's pearls there. "I'm sorry," he murmured, not quite knowing why. He remembered the cold against his hand of the entrance to the crypt, the hiss of burning candles during Father Ferro's Mass, the odour of a barren past rising from the trunk.

Macarena came and stood beside him, and she too looked out at the tower of Our Lady of the Tears. "Now you know all you need to know," she said.

She was right. Quart knew more than enough, and Vespers had achieved his futile purpose. But none of it could be translated into the official prose of a report for the IEA. Monsignor Spada, and His Eminence Jerzy Iwaszkiewicz, and His Holiness the Pope were concerned only with the identity of the hacker and the likelihood of

a scandal in a small Seville parish. The rest – the lives and stories contained within the walls of the church – was of no consequence. As Father Oscar had said, Our Lady of the Tears was too far from Rome. Like Captain Xaloc's doomed Manigua, it was just a small ship heading unsteadily towards the implacable steel mass of a destroyer.

Macarena placed her hand on his arm. He didn't pull away, but she must have felt him tense. "I'm leaving Seville," he said.

She said nothing for a moment, then turned to look at him. "Do you think they'll understand in Rome?" she asked.

"I don't know. But whether they do or not isn't important." He gestured at the trunk, the bell-tower, the city in darkness below. "They haven't been here. The hacker drew their attention for a moment, but to them this is just a tiny point on a map. My report will be filed the minute it's been read."

"It's not fair," said Macarena. "This is a special place."

"You're wrong. The world is full of places like this. With a Carlota waiting at the window, a stubborn old priest, a dilapidated church… The Pope isn't going to lose sleep over Our Lady of the Tears. You people aren't important enough."

"What about you?"

"It doesn't matter. I don't sleep that much anyway."

"I see." She moved her hand away. "You don't like to get involved, do you? You just have your orders." She pushed her hair back abrupdy and moved so that he had no choice but to look her in the face. "Aren't you going to ask me why I left my husband?"

"No, I'm not. That's not necessary for my report."

She laughed quietly, contemptuously. "Your report," she said. "You came here and asked questions. You can't leave without hearing all the answers. You've pried into everybody's lives, so here's the rest of mine." Her eyes were fixed on Quart. "I wanted to have a child, so there would be something between me and the abyss. I wanted a child, but Pencho didn't." Her voice became sarcastic. "You can imagine his objections – too soon, a bad time, a crucial period in our lives, we need to concentrate our efforts and energies, we can have one later… I ignored him and became pregnant. Why do you look away, Father Quart? Are you shocked? Pretend this is confession. Part of your job."

Quart shook his head, suddenly firm. His job was the one thing he was still clear about. "You're wrong again," he said gently. "It's not my job. I told you before that I didn't want to hear your confession."

"You can't get out of this, Father." Her voice was harsh. "Think of me as a soul in torment that can't be turned away. Anyway, I'm not asking for absolution."

He shrugged, as if that released him. But intent on the moon, she seemed not to notice. "I got pregnant," she went on, "and Pencho felt as if the bottom had fallen out of his world. He insisted it was too soon. He put pressure on me to get rid of the baby."

So that was it. Things were falling into place.

"So you did," Quart couldn't help saying.

She smiled with a bitterness he'd never seen in her before. "Yes. I'm – Catholic, and I refused for as long as I could. But I loved my husband. Against Don Priamo's advice, I checked into a clinic and got rid of the baby. There were complications – a perforation of the uterus, haemorrhaging, and I had to have an emergency hysterectomy. Do you know what that means? Now I can never be a mother." Her face was towards the moon. "Never."

"What did Father Ferro say?"

"Nothing. He's old, he's seen too much. He still gives me communion when I ask." "Does your mother know?" "No."

"And your husband?"

Her laugh was dry, brief. "He doesn't either." She slid her hand along the windowsill, towards Quart's arm, but didn't touch it this time. "Only Father Ferro and Gris know. And now you." She hesitated a moment, as if to add another name.

"Did Sister Marsala approve your decision to have an abortion?" asked Quart.

"On the contrary. It nearly cost me her friendship. But when I had the complications at the clinic, she came to see me. I didn't let Pencho come with me, so he thought everything went smoothly. I went home to convalesce, and seemed fine to him."

She turned to the priest. "There's a journalist," she said. "A man called Bonafe. The one who published some photographs last week…"

She paused, as if expecting him to say something, but Quart was silent. The photographs were the least of his worries, but he was concerned to hear Macarena mention Honorato Bonafe.

"An unpleasant little man," she went on. "You wouldn't want to shake his. hand. It would probably be clammy."

"I know who you mean," said Quart.

Macarena looked at him with curiosity. She lowered her head and her face was hidden by her hair. "He came to see me this morning," she said. "Actually, he stopped me at the door. I would never have asked him into the house. I told him to go away, but before he left, he hinted at something about the clinic. He had been there asking questions."

Dear God. Quart wished he'd been more forceful with Bonafe at their last meeting. He hoped he'd find the journalist in the hotel lobby again when he got back, so he could wipe the smile off his greasy face.

"I'm worried," Macarena admitted.

"It's no longer illegal to have an abortion in Spain," Quart said.

"Yes. But that man and his magazine feed on scandal." She crossed her arms, suddenly cold. "Do you know how an abortion is done, Father Quart? No, I don't imagine you do. Not the details. The bright light, the white ceiling, a woman's legs wide open. You feel you want to die. And the endless, cold, terrifying loneliness…" She moved away from the window. "Damn all men, including you. Damn every last one of them."

A deep sigh. The play of light and shadow on her face aged her; or perhaps it was the bitterness.

"I didn't let myself think about what had happened," she continued. "It was like a nightmare I desperately wanted to wake up from. One day, three months after I left the clinic, I went into the bathroom while Pencho was taking a shower. We'd just made love for the first time. I sat on the edge of the bath watching him. He smiled at me, and suddenly he wasn't the man I loved but a stranger. A man who'd made me lose my chance of having children. I felt then worse than I had at the clinic. I packed my things and came back here. Pencho didn't understand. He still doesn't."

Quart breathed in slowly. "That's why you're hurting him," he said.

"Nobody can hurt him. His selfishness and his obsessions are like armour. But I can make him pay: through that church I can strike at his prestige as a financier, and at his pride as a man. Seville can turn on you very quickly. My Seville, I mean. The Seville whose recognition Pencho wants."

"Your friend Gris claims you still love him."

"Sometimes she talks too much." She tried to laugh but couldn't. "Maybe that's the problem, that I love him. Anyway, it makes no difference."

"And me? Why are you telling me all this?"

"I don't know. You told me you're leaving, and suddenly that bothers me." She was now so near that when the breeze blew, her hair brushed Quart's face. "Maybe it's because by your side I don't feel so alone. As if, despite yourself, you embody the old ideal of a priest that so many women have always cherished: someone strong and wise to trust and confide in. Maybe it's your black suit and your collar, or the fact that you're also an attractive man. Perhaps your arrival from Rome and all that it represents has impressed me. Maybe I'm Vespers. Maybe I'm trying to win you over to my side, or simply trying in a twisted way to humiliate Pencho. It might be some of these things or all of them. In what my life has become, you and Father Ferro stand at opposite edges of reassuring terrain."

"That's why you're defending that church," said Quart. "You need it as much as the others do."

She gathered her hair and lifted it, exposing the lovely curve of her neck. "Maybe you too need it, and more than you think," she said. She let go of her hair, and it fell about her shoulders again. "As for me, I don't know what I need. Maybe the church, as you say. Maybe a handsome silent man who'll make me forget. Or at least stop the pain. And another man, old and wise, who absolves me of blame for seeking oblivion. Do you know something? A couple of centuries ago it was wonderful to be Catholic. It solved everything: you just told the priest the truth, and waited. Now even you priests don't believe. There's a film called Portrait of Jennie. Do you know it? At one point Joseph

Gotten, who's a painter, says to Jennifer Jones: 'Without you I'm lost.' And she answers, 'Don't say that, we can't both be lost.' Are you as lost as you appear, Father Quart?"

He turned to her, but he had no answer. He wondered how a woman's mouth could be both mocking and tender at the same time, so shameless and so timid, and so near. He was about to say something, though he didn't quite know what, when a nearby clock struck eleven. The Holy Spirit must have just ended his shift, thought Quart. He lifted his hand, the injured one, to the woman's face, but managed to stop himself halfway. Unsure if he was disappointed or relieved, he caught sight of Don Priamo standing in the doorway, watching them.

"The moon's too bright," said Father Ferro, a small dark figure by the telescope, looking up. "It's not a good night for watching the stars."

Macarena had gone downstairs, leaving the two priests in the pigeon loft. Quart was standing by Carlota's trunk, which he had just closed.

"Turn off the light," said Father Ferro.

Quart obeyed. The books, Carlota's trunk, the engraving of seventeenth-century Seville, all melted into the darkness. Now the man at the window looked more compact. "I wanted to speak to you," said Quart. "I'm leaving Seville."

"Berenice," Father Ferro said after a while. "I can see Berenice's hair."

Quart went to the window, the telescope between him and Father Ferro.

"Those thirteen stars there," said Father Ferro. "To the northwest. She sacrificed her hair to achieve victory for her armies."

Quart looked not at the sky but at the priest's dark profile. The lights illuminating La Giralda went out, and the tower vanished suddenly, but as Quart's eyes adjusted, he could again distinguish its shape in the moonlight.

"And there, further away," the old priest continued, "almost at the zenith, you can see the Hunting Dogs." He said the name with disdain: intruders invading beloved territory.

This time Quart looked up, and he could make out, in the north, two stars, one big, one smaller, that seemed to be travelling together through space. "You don't like them much," he said.

"No. I despise hunters. Even more so when they hunt on others' behalf. In this case, they're the dogs of adulation. The bigger of the two stars was named Cor Caroli by Halley, because it shone more brightly the day Charles II returned to London."

"So it's not the dogs' fault."

The older priest laughed his grating laugh. In the moonlight his untidy hair almost looked clean. "You're a very suspicious man, Father Quart. And I'm the one who's known for being suspicious. No, I was referring only to the stars." He reached into the pocket of his cassock and brought out his cigarettes. His wrinkled, scarred face and unshaven chin were visible as he lit one, cupping the flame in his hand. "Why are you leaving?" he asked. The ember of his cigarette was now a point of light in the darkness. "Have you found Vespers?"

"Vespers' identity is the least of it, Father. He could be any of you, all of you, or none of you. It makes no difference."

"I'd like to know what you're going to put in your report to Rome."

Quart told him: the two deaths had been regrettable accidents, and Quart's investigation supported police findings. As an entirely separate matter, an elderly priest was waging his own personal battle, with the support of several of his parishioners. It was a story as old as Saint Paul, so Quart didn't think anyone in the Curia would be shocked. If the hacker hadn't sent the message to His Holiness, the matter would have gone no further than the ordinary of Seville.

"What will happen to me?" asked Father Ferro.

"Oh, nothing special. Monsignor Corvo has already drawn up a document summarising the disciplinary proceedings against you, and it'll be attached to my report, so I should imagine you'll be discreetly pushed into early retirement. You may possibly be given the chaplaincy of a convent, but I think it more likely that you'll be sent to a rest home for elderly priests."

The ember of the cigarette moved in the darkness, "What about the church?"

"That's outside my jurisdiction," Quart said. "But as things stand,

I don't see much of a future for it. There are too many churches in Seville and not enough priests. Anyway, Corvo has already said a requiescat."

"For the church or for me?"

"Both."

The priest's grating laugh rang out again. "You have all the answers," he said.

"To tell you the truth, there's one I'm missing. About something in your file. I don't want to put it in my report without hearing your version. You had some trouble when you were a parish priest in Aragon. A certain Montegrifo, if you remember."

"I remember Mr Montegrifo perfecdy."

"He says he bought an altarpiece from your parish, from you."

"It was a small Romanesque church," Father Ferro said after a long silence. "The beams were rotting, the walls were cracked, and it was full of crows' nests and rats. The parish was very poor; sometimes I didn't even have the money to buy communion wine. My parishioners were spread out over several kilometres. Humble people – shepherds, peasants. They were old, sick, uneducated, without future. I said Mass every day beneath an altarpiece in danger of collapse from woodworm and damp. On weekdays the church was completely empty. There were places like that all over the country, with works of art that were stolen by dealers or that disappeared when the church roof caved in, or that just remained open to the elements. One day a man came to see me. I'd seen him before. He was with another, very well-dressed man; he said he was the head of an auction house in Madrid. They made an offer for the Christ and the small altarpiece."

"It was very valuable," said Quart. "Fifteenth-century."

"What does it matter?" snapped the old priest. "They were willing to pay. Not a great sum, but enough for a new roof and, above all, enough to help my parishioners."

"So you did sell it?"

"Of course I did. Without a moment's hesitation. I had the roof fixed, bought medicine for the sick, repaired some of the frost-damage, and saved some livestock. I helped people to live, and to die."

Quart gestured towards the church "But now you're defending this church. A contradiction."

"Why? The artistic worth of Our Lady of the Tears matters as little to me as it does to you and the archbishop. I leave all that to Sister Marsala. My parishioners, though few in number, are more important than any painting."

"So you don't believe…" began Quart.

"In what? In fifteenth-century altarpieces? In baroque churches? In the Supreme Watchmaker up there turning the cogs one by one?" The ember of Father Ferro's cigarette glowed more brightly as he took his last drag, then he threw it out of the window. "It doesn't matter," he said. "They believe."

"That business of the altarpiece left a black mark on your file," said Quart.

"I know." The old priest swivelled the telescope. "I had a very unpleasant meeting with my bishop. If somebody had done the same thing in Rome, I told him, it would have been a different matter. But here, we're all dancing to Saint Peter's tune. It's all tears and Quo Vadis Domine and crucify me. Meanwhile we stand outside, suppressing our conscience while the beatings go on in the hall of judgement."

"I sec you don't think much of Saint Peter either."

The old priest laughed. "No. He should have let himself be killed in Gethsemane, when he drew his sword to defend his Master."

It was Quart's turn to laugh. "If that had happened, we wouldn't have had our first pope."

"That's what you think." The old priest shook his head. "In this business there are plenty of popes. But none with balls." He looked through the eyepiece. He turned the wheels, and slowly the tube of the telescope moved up and left. "When you look at the sky," he said, "things occupy a different place in the universe. Did you know that our little Earth is only a hundred and fifty million kilometres from the Sun, whereas Pluto is almost six billion kilometres away? And that the Sun is a tiny dot compared to an average star like Arcturus? Not to mention Aldebaran, which is thirty-six million kilometres across, or Betelgeuse, which is ten times bigger than that." He moved the telescope to the right. He pointed out a star to Quart. "Look. That's Altair. At three hundred thousand kilometres per second, its light takes sixteen years to reach us. It might have exploded in the meantime, and we could be seeing light from a star that no longer exists.

Sometimes, when I look towards Rome, I feel as if I'm looking at Altair. Are you sure everything will still be there when you get back?"

At Father Ferro's invitation, Quart looked through the eyepiece. As he moved away from the brightness of the moon, between the stars appeared myriad points of light, clusters and nebulae that were red, blue, white, flickering or still. One of them gradually moved and then disappeared in the glare of another – a shooting star or maybe a man-made satellite. Quart looked for the Great Bear, following the line through Merak and Dubhe upwards, four times the distance, if he remembered correctly. There was the Pole Star, large, bright, confident.

"That's Polaris," said Father Ferro, who had followed the movement of the telescope. "The tip of the Little Bear, which always indicates the Earth's zero latitude. Always but not immutable." He told Quart to point the telescope to his left. "Five thousand years ago the Egyptians venerated another one, the Dragon, as the guardian of the north. It has a 25,800-year cycle, of which only three thousand have passed. So in another two hundred and twenty-eight centuries the Dragon will be the pole star again." He drummed his fingers on the brass tube. "I wonder if there will be anyone on Earth then to notice."

"It gives one vertigo," said Quart, taking his eye away from the lens.

The old priest clicked his tongue, nodding in agreement. He seemed to enjoy Quart's vertigo, like an experienced surgeon seeing medical students go white during an autopsy. "Funny, isn't it? The universe is amusing. Polaris, the star you were looking at a moment ago, is four hundred and seventy light-years away. That means we're orientating ourselves by light that comes from the beginning of the sixteenth century." He pointed at another spot. "And over there, in the Cat's Eye Nebula, concentric shells of gas are all that's left of a star that died a thousand years ago." He walked over to another window and his features were more visible in the moonlight. "What are we?" he asked. "What part do we play in this great scene spread out above our heads? What do our miserable little lives and desires mean? Your report to Rome, the church, the Holy Father, you and I, what does all this matter to those lights?" His grating laugh rang out again.

a world that guided itself by starlight five centuries old, the litde boy's shadow was cast on the wall that protected him from the bitter cold outside. His shadow moved closer to the other shadow waiting beneath bougainvilleas and orange trees, until he could breathe in her fragrance and her warmth, and her breath. But a second before he ran his fingers through her hair to escape loneliness for one night, the shadow, the boy, the man watching the naked body in the sunlight filtered through the blind, the exhausted Knight Templar, they all turned to look up at the dimly lit window of the pigeon loft, where an old priest, unsociable, sceptical and brave, deciphered the terrible secret of a cruel sky, in the company of a ghost searching the horizon for a white sail.