The Seville Communion

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Gris Marsala laughed. "I don't," she said. "But the rumours amuse me. Anyway, as I said, I work here. I'm the architect in charge of restoring the church." She looked round again and sighed. "Doesn't say much for my skills, docs it? But it's been one long sorry tale of estimates not being approved and money not coming through."

  "You're American, aren't you?"

  "Yes. I've been working here for two years. I was appointed by the Eurnekian Foundation. It put up a third of the money for the initial restoration project. At first there were three of us working here, two

  Spaniards and mc, but the others left . . . The work more or less ground to a halt some time ago." She looked at him to see what effect her next words would have. "And there were the two deaths, of course."

  Quart showed no reaction. "You mean the accidents?"

  "You could call them that, yes. Accidents." She was still watching him closely and seemed disappointed when he said nothing more. "Have you met the parish priest?"

  "Not yet. I arrived only last night. I haven't even seen the archbishop. I wanted to see the church first."

  "Well, here it is." She waved her hand, indicating the nave with the high altar at the end, barely visible in the gloom. "Seventeenth-century baroque, with an altarpiece by Duque Cornejo ... A small treasure that's falling to pieces."

  "And the headless Virgin at the door?"

  "Some citizens of the town chose to celebrate the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931 in their own special way." She said it kindly, as if deep down she forgave the vandals. Quart wondered how long she'd been in Seville. Definitely quite some time. Her Spanish was perfect and she seemed very much at ease.

  "How long have you lived here?"

  "Nearly four years. But I visited the city lots of times before I settled. I came on a scholarship and never really left." "Why not?"

  She shrugged. "I don't know. It happens to a lot of Americans, particularly young ones. They come here, and then they just can't leave. They stay and scrape a living somehow, playing the guitar or sketching in the squares." She looked thoughtfully at the patch of sunlight on the floor by the door. "There's something about the light here, the colour of the streets, that saps your will. It's almost like an illness."

  Quart took a few steps up the nave and stopped. On the left the pulpit with its spiral staircase was half-obscured by scaffolding. The confessional was on the right, in a small chapel that led to the vestry. He ran his hand over one of the wooden pews, blackened with age.

  "What do you think of the church?" she asked.

  Quart looked up. A barrel vault inset with lunettes rose above the single nave and the short-armed transept. The elliptical dome, surmounted by a blind lantern, was decorated with frescoes that had been almost completely obliterated by smoke from the candles and by fire. Around the edges of a large soot stain he could just make out a few angels, and some bearded prophets covered with patches of damp that made them look like lepers.

  "I don't know," he answered. "It's small. Very pretty. Old."

  "Three centuries old," she said. Their steps echoed as they walked past the pews towards the high altar. "Where I come from, a three-hundred-year-old building would be a historical jewel that no one could touch. But around here there are lots of places like this falling into ruin. And nobody lifts a finger."

  "Maybe there are just too many."

  "That sounds strange coming from a priest. Although you don't look much like one." Again she regarded him with amused interest, this time observing the impeccable cut of his lightweight black suit. "If it weren't for your collar and black shirt. . ."

  "I've worn a dog collar for twenty years," he interrupted coldly. Then, glancing over her shoulder, "You were telling me about the church and places like it."

  She tilted her head, disconcerted, obviously trying to make him out. Quart could tell that despite her self-assurance she was intimidated by the collar. All women were, he thought, young and old. Even the most determined ones lost their confidence when a word or gesture suddenly reminded them he was a priest.

  "The church, yes," said Gris Marsala at last. But her thoughts seemed elsewhere. "I don't agree that there are too many places like this. After all, they're part of our collective memory, aren't they?" She wrinkled her nose and tapped a foot on the worn flagstones, as if they were her witnesses. "I'm convinced that every ancient building, picture, or book that's lost or destroyed, leaves us bereft. Impoverished."

  Her tone was unexpectedly vehement, bitter. When she saw Quart's surprise, she smiled. "I'm American, it really has nothing to do with me," she said apologetically. "Or maybe it has. It's the heritage of all humanity. We have no right to let it fall into ruins."

  "Is that why you've stayed in Seville so long?"

  "Maybe. At any rate, that's why I'm here now, in this church." She glanced up at the window where she'd been working when Quart arrived. "Did you know, this was one of the last churches built in Spain under the Hapsburgs? The work was officially completed on the first of November, 1700, while Charles II, the last of his dynasty, lay dying. Next day, the first mass celebrated here was a requiem for the king."

  They stood before the high altar. The light fell diagonally from the windows and made the gilding high on the altarpiece gleam gently. Reliefs kept the rest in shadow. Through the scaffolding Quart could make out the central section with the Virgin beneath a wide baldachin, above the tabernacle. He bowed his head briefly before it. In the side sections, separated from the portico by carved columns, were niches containing figures of cherubs and saints.

  "It's magnificent," he said with feeling.

  "It's slightly more than that."

  Gris Marsala moved behind the altar to the foot of the altarpiece. She switched on a light to illuminate it. The gold leaf and gilded wood came to life, and a stream of light poured through exquisitely carved columns, medallions and garlands. Quart admired the way all the different elements blended so harmoniously.

  "Magnificent," he repeated, impressed, crossing himself. Then he saw that Gris Marsala was watching him intently, as if she thought it incongruous.

  "Haven't you seen a priest cross himself before?" He smiled coldly to hide his embarrassment. "I can't be the first to have done that before this altarpiece."

  "I suppose not. But they were a different kind of priest."

  "There's only one type of priest," he said quickly. "Are you Catholic?"

  "Partly. My great-grandfather was Italian." She looked at him mischievously. "I have a fairly precise understanding of sin, if that's what you mean. But at my age . . ." She-touched her grey hair.

  Quart thought he ought to change the subject. "We were discussing the altarpiece," he said. "I said it was magnificent. . ." He looked her in the eye, serious, courteous, distant. "How about starting again?"

  Gris Marsala tilted her head as before. An intelligent woman, he thought, but she made him uneasy. His instincts were well honed by his work for the IEA and he sensed a discordant note. Something about her didn't quite add up. He peered at her, hoping for a clue, but there was no way of getting any closer without being more open himself, something he was reluctant to do.

  "Please," he added.

  She seemed about to smile but didn't. "All right," she said at last. They both turned to the altarpiece. "The sculptor Pedro Duque Corncjo completed it in 1711. He was paid two thousand silver escudos. And as you say, it's magnificent. All the energy and imagination of the Sevillian baroque are there."

  The Virgin was a beautiful polychrome sculpture in wood, almost a metre tall. She wore a blue mantle and held her hands open, palms out. The pedestal was shaped like a crescent moon, and her right foot rested on a serpent.

  "She's very lovely," said Quart.

  "Sculpted by Juan Martinez Montanes almost a century before the altarpiece ... It belonged to the dukes of El Nuevo Extreme One of the dukes helped to construct the church, and his son donated the sculpture. The tears gave the church its name."

  Q
uart looked more closely. From below he could see tears glistening on the face, crown and mantle.

  "They are rather exaggerated."

  "Originally they were smaller and made of glass. But now they're pearls. Twenty perfect pearls, brought from America at the end of the last century. The rest of the story lies in the crypt."

  "There's a crypt?"

  "Yes. There's a concealed entrance over there, to the right of the high altar. It's a kind of private chapel. Several generations of the dukes of El Nuevo Extremo are buried inside. In 1687, one of the them, Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija, ceded land from his estate for the church, on condition that a Mass would be said for his soul once a week." She pointed to a niche to the right of the Virgin, containing a figure of a knight kneeling in prayer. "There he is: carved by Duque Cornejo, as was the figure on the left, of the duke's wife . . . He commissioned his favourite architect, Pedro* Romero, also the duke of Medina-Sidonia's favourite architect, to design the building. That's the origin of the family's link with this church. Gaspar Bruner's son Guzman had figures of his parents added, which completed the altar-piece, and the image of the Virgin brought here in 1711. The family still has links with the church today, although they're diminished. And this has a great deal to do with the conflict." "What conflict?"

  Gris Marsala gazed at the altarpiece as if she hadn't heard the question. Then she rubbed the back of her neck and sighed. "Well, call it what you like." She was trying to sound light-hearted. "The stalemate, you might say. With Macarena Bruner, her mother the old duchess, and all the rest of them."

  "I haven't yet met the Bruners, mother and daughter."

  When Gris Marsala turned to look at Quart, there was a malevolent gleam in her eyes. "Haven't you? Well, you certainly will."

  Quart heard her laugh as she switched off the light. The altarpiece was once again in shadow.

  "What's really going on here?" he asked.

  "In Seville?"

  "In this church."

  She took a few moments to answer. "It's up to you to decide," she said at last. "That's why you were sent."

  "But you work here. You must have some ideas on the subject."

  "Of course I have, but I'm keeping them to myself. All I know is that more people would like to have this church pulled down than to keep it standing."

  "Why?"

  "That I don't know." Her friendliness disappeared. Now it was her turn to become closed off and distant. "Maybe because a square metre of land in this part of Seville is worth a fortune ..." She shook her head as if to rid it of unpleasant thoughts. "You'll find plenty of people to tell you all about it."

  "You said you had some ideas."

  "I did?" Her smile looked forced. "Maybe. Anyway, it's none of my business. My job is to save as much as I can of the building as long as there's money for the work. Which there isn't."

  "So why are you staying on alone?"

  "I'm putting in some overtime. Anyway, since I began working on the church, I haven't found anything else to do, so I have a lot of spare time."

  "A lot of spare time," repeated Quart.

  "That's right." She sounded bitter again. "And I have nowhere eke to go."

  Intrigued, he was about to ask more when the sound of footsteps made him turn. A small, motionless figure dressed in black stood in the doorway. It cast its compact shadow on the flagstones.

  Gris Marsala, who had also turned, smiled strangely at Quart. "It's time for you to meet the parish priest, don't you think? Father Priamo Ferro."

  As soon as Celestino Peregil left the Casa Cuesta Bar, Don Ibrahim began discreetly counting the banknotes that Pencho Gavira's assistant had left them to cover initial expenses.

  "A hundred thousand," he said when he'd finished.

  El Potro del Mantelete and La Nina Punales nodded in silence. Don Ibrahim made three bundles of thirty-three thousand, put one bundle in the inside pocket of his jacket, and passed the others to his companions. He placed the remaining thousand-peseta note on the table.

  "What do you think?" he asked.

  Frowning, El Potro del Mantelete smoothed the banknote and peered at the figure of Hernan Cortes on the front. "Looks real to me," he ventured.

  "I mean the job, not the note."

  El Potro stared gloomily at the banknote and La Nina Punales shrugged.

  "It's money," she said, as if that summed it all up. "But the job looks dodgy, with all those priests."

  Don Ibrahim waved his hand dismissively, dropping ash on his trousers again. "We will proceed with the utmost tact," he said, leaning with effort over his paunch to brush off the ash.

  La Nina Punales said othu and El Potro nodded, still staring at the banknote. El Potro must have been about forty-five, and every one of his years showed in his face. In his younger days, between stints in the

  Spanish Legion, he'd been a luckless apprentice bullfighter. It had left him with the dust of failure in his eyes and throat, and a scar from a bull's horn under his right ear. And all he got from a brief, obscure career as a contender for the bantamweight championship of Andalusia was a broken nose, lumpy scarred eyebrows and a certain slowness in combining thought, speech and action. When he was conning tourists in the streets, he was very good at playing the innocent. His vacant stare was utterly convincing.

  "Very important to be tactful," he said slowly.

  He went on frowning, as he did whenever he was thinking. This was what he'd been doing - frowning and pondering a question deeply -when he came home one day to find his brother, who was in a wheelchair, with his trousers down to his knees and his wife - El Potro's wife - sitting on top of him panting eloquently. Unhurriedly and without raising his voice, nodding as his brother assured him that there was a misunderstanding and he could explain everything, El Potro del Mantelete pushed the wheelchair almost tenderly to the landing and tipped it and its occupant down the stairs. His brother bumped down the thirty-two steps and suffered a fractured skull that turned out to be fatal. El Potro's wife got off more lightly: he beat her methodically, gave her two black eyes and then knocked her out with a left hook. Half an hour later, she came to, packed her bags and left for good.

  The business with his brother didn't work out so well. It was only thanks to the skill of El Potro's lawyer that the judge was persuaded to change the charge from murder (with a possible thirty-year sentence) to involuntary manslaughter, resulting in an acquittal in dubio pro reo. The lawyer was Don Ibrahim. The Lawyers' Association of Seville didn't yet have doubts as to the authenticity of the diploma issued in Havana. But El Potro didn't care whether Don Ibrahim was a bona fide lawyer or not. The former bullfighter and boxer would never forget how Don Ibrahim had made an impassioned defence and won him his freedom. A home torn apart, Your Honour. A cheating brother, the heat of the moment, my client's intellect, the absence of animus necandi, the lack of brakes on the wheelchair. Since then, El Potro del Mantelete had been blindly, heroically, unfailingly loyal to his benefactor. And his devotion became even greater, if that was possible, after Don Ibrahim's ignominious expulsion from the legal profession. Faithful as a hound, silent and unswerving, El Potro would do anything for his master.

  "Still too many priests for my liking," said La Nina, her silver bracelets jangling as she twirled her empty glass.

  Don Ibrahim and El Potro exchanged glances. Then the bogus lawyer ordered three more fino sherries and some tapas of spicy pork sausage. As soon as the waiter put the sherries on the table, La Nina emptied her glass in a single gulp. Don Ibrahim and El Potro averted their eyes.

  Sour wine, so full of happiness,

  though I drink to drown my sorrows,

  I will never forget. . .

  She sang low and from the heart, licking her red-painted lips moist with sherry. El Potro whispered ole without looking at her, gently tapping the rhythm on the table. As she sang the folk song her eyes - dark, tragic, rimmed with too much eyeliner - showed enormous in a face once beautiful. When she had too much sherry, she would recall
how, as in the song, a dark man had once stabbed another to death over her. And she would search her handbag for a newspaper cutting she'd lost long ago. If it had ever really happened, it must have been when La Nina appeared on posters for shows in all her Gypsy glory, wild and beautiful, the young hope of Spanish song. The successor, they said, of Dona Concha Piquer.

  Now, three decades after her brief moment of fame, she worked in seedy clubs and bars on the tourist circuit - dinner and a show included, Seville by night - the tired stamp of her dancing shoes making the rickety stages splinter.

  "Where do we start?" she asked, looking at Don Ibrahim.

  EI Potro glanced up too at the man he most respected in the world after the late bullfighter Juan Belmonte. Aware of his responsibility, the bogus lawyer took a long drag on his cigar and twice read the list of tapas on a blackboard behind the bar. Croquettes. Tripe. Fried anchovies. Eggs in bechamel. Tongue in sauce. Stuffed tongue.

  "As Caius Julius Caesar said, and he put it well," Don Ibrahim said when he judged enough time had elapsed for his words to have greatest impact, u'Galia est omnia divisa in partibus infidelibus.' In other words, before taking any action, ocular reconnaissance is recommended.'' He looked round like a general before his staff officers. "Visualisation of the territory, if you see what I mean.*' He blinked doubtfully. "Do you see what I mean?''

  "Othu."

  "Yes."

  "Good." Don Ibrahim stroked his moustache, satisfied with troop morale. "What I mean is, we have to go and take a look at that church and all the rest of it." He glanced at La Nina, knowing she was devout. "With due attention to the fact that it is a sacred building, of course."

  "I know the church," she said in her gravelly voice. "It's old and always has the builders in. I go to Mass there sometimes."

  Like a good flamenco singer, she was highly religious. For his part, although he professed to be agnostic, Don Ibrahim respected freedom of worship. He leaned forward enquiringly. Rigorous research was mother to all victories, he'd read somewhere - Churchill, perhaps, or Frederick the Great.