"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:
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."